The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  Only once did she tell him to forget the nails; she would take care of that when she finished her other chores. He looked at her, and a moment— no longer than it took for a swallow to dart through the house— was enough for the thought of offering to help him not to cross her mind ever again. What did she see in those eyes? Certainly not anger. Not even fear. And it couldn’t even be called sorrow. What she saw in the blue eyes of her husband was the same man who would sink when the last nail was in the right box. The man in his eyes was hardly treading water, and the one in the eye of the one in his eye even less, right down to the smallest man one could see, in whose eyes there were at least a thousand more nail collectors, all tinier than particles of flour but marked by the same horror.

  Kata felt a chill around her heart, and she knew that it would never go away. He would keep going off to work at the harbor at dawn, come back home at the same time, hurry to finish lunch as quickly as possible, and sit down on the stool and sort his nails and sigh until evening. At night his trembling would wake her up, she would put her hands on his shoulders to get him to calm down, and she would change the feathers in his pillow at least three times a year because his tears made them rot and smell. She wondered why he was like that, tried to fathom his unhappiness, tried to get him to talk, and when that didn’t work, she wouldn’t say a word for months. If only something would happen sometime. But nothing ever did! He did the same things every day and every night, and it wasn’t granted to Kata by God to get through to what he was thinking.

  And how else could she love him, other than to keep up appearances and because she didn’t know anything else? Kata’s heart was pure but emptier and emptier so that in the end doubt crept into it. That happened a few months before Luka was born. Drop by drop, she was filling with a poison that didn’t differ from the poison in those women whose husbands vanished every Friday. She began to spy on him; she would jump out of bed whenever he would go off to the toilet at night, but she couldn’t catch him doing anything wrong. She didn’t find out that he was secretly throwing the wrong nails in the wrong boxes so he could sort them out again the next day. Her hunch that he was deceiving her first brought rage, but when she thought that maybe he wasn’t deceiving her and that there was always a fair amount of nails in the wrong box, Kata felt bad. She pitied her husband and was disgusted with herself. How could she have come up with something so wicked?! If the conscience was an organ for measuring a man’s sins, then Kata’s sin was terrible. The heavens were alarmed by it, and it was a miracle that in those days a thunderbolt didn’t strike her in the forehead.

  That was how it seemed from Kata’s perspective, but from the perspective of those who would never learn of her sin or understand it if they were told about it, it was a very small one. As small as the motivations of a man’s conscience relative to the whole world. It didn’t matter when there was or wasn’t a God above him.

  Kata’s other sins also involved her husband. She would blow up at him and would even shout, and once she even swore at him, standing in his face. She wanted him to hit her; she needed a slap like that more than someone under the surface of the sea needs air. Life could begin with a slap in the face. But he didn’t hit her, nor did he answer her. He only mumbled something that sounded like an apology or a plea to leave him with his nails.

  And so in Kata’s soul the curse she’d uttered changed from its original meaning and became something inappropriate and unbearably shameful. She didn’t swear any more, not even out of habit, not even in those circumstances when swearwords replaced happy and innocent words that didn’t exist in the language. In this Kata was alone in a city in which it would happen that even the most timid lamb of God, the wife of a missing seaman, or a nun would let spicy words slip from their tongues at the drop of a hat. The sin of swearing was for her as hard to bear as a homecoming is for a defeated army.

  In the midst of a rainy autumn, an army of desperate men covered with wounds, bitter and weary of their fate, was returning to homes that the enemy had thoroughly destroyed, to loved ones who in their own agonies had lost compassion for the agony of others. These were soldiers with no decorations for bravery and without any opportunity to substitute the heroism of the past for the life they were living.

  So that was what Kata felt after she’d sworn in vain, but whether she had a vision of those defeated men who returned from captivity in the years after 1918, as late as the late ’20s, it is impossible to know. Maybe she did because she saw them with her own eyes as they made their way south toward Trebinje, passing through the city and continuing over the Arslanagić Bridge, without a single one of several hundred saying a word or lifting his gaze from the dirt. With their soldiers’ caps pulled down over their ears, with fezzes that seemed completely out of place (as when Emperor and King Franz Joseph II had tried to portray himself as the father of his Muslim children), with officers’ epaulettes from which the gold insignias of the glorious monarchy had fallen. They walked homeward barefoot or in tattered boots, men who’d done everything to try to keep everything from being the way it was and to prevent the destruction of a state that they might not have loved but to which they were indebted, the way a wife is indebted to her husband. They owed their lives to it, and it was only that chance hadn’t wanted to lay them down in the middle of Galicia, on the River Soča, Mt. Meletta, or somewhere amid nameless Albanian gorges.

  It, the state, had already been very old and tired, without interest in its subjects, obsessed only with its wish to meet its end as painlessly as possible. It would have been futile to fight for it and try to rouse it from its dead slumber, but what else could those wretched soldiers do? Only what Kata kept trying to do with her own man. They couldn’t understand how the empire had fallen into a stupor and how one soul had broken up into several, into as many souls as the monarchy had peoples and tribes. But they sensed that there was a diabolical plan behind it all, an insanity that would consume anyone to whom God didn’t give the luxury of playing silly games in rhythm and harmony with the way states do it. Nor could Kata figure out what was wrong with her husband, why he was as he was on the inside, when on the outside everything seemed normal and according to regulations, in accordance with stories that told how the life of each of God’s creatures would pass.

  “Allah the Good created woman to take precautions for himself. If it weren’t for her, the devil would have cast a spell on man. But He, the Great One, planned ahead for that and created woman in the image of the devil. The difference was only in the fact that He replaced the sea of the devil’s wickedness with a drop of His own goodness. And now it is on each of us to charm our husbands because if we don’t do it, the devil will cast his spell on them. That’s the way it is, daughter, and think about how you’ll do it. But remember that you don’t have a lot of time. The devil is as quick as a rabbit, and you can only beat him with what you’ve got between your legs.”

  That was what a sorceress named Halima said one year in Blagaj when Kata went to her to inquire about herbs and compresses, spells and amulets, anything that might bring her man back to life. At that time she’d already given birth to two children and might have known that for him the spell of her loins was smaller than a grain of sand and slower than a turtle, but Halima was persistent and everyone said that she knew her work.

  “If once isn’t enough for him, then give it to him twice, give it to him a hundred times each night, until you finally wake him up. It can’t be any different, and the problem isn’t in him. If he’s a man, and he is, and if you’re a woman, and you are, then mount him, and don’t stop until the devil gives up. It’s a war between you and the devil. And remember: your man can’t help you in this. Don’t blame him, and don’t curse him because God will curse you!”

  Kata returned from Blagaj afraid. She knew that there was nothing to do except what the sorceress had said, even if she didn’t believe a word of it. And not even the Almighty could have been sure whether she believed her or not, not even if he’d been keeping t
rack of Kata and her sins and virtues. She herself didn’t know what to do. There was no one to tell her, nor had she ever heard of a case similar to hers. So she did what was most logical.

  If she’d been born a few hundred years earlier, she would have turned to her confessor; if her life had been in the time in which her great grandchildren were to live, she’d have written a letter to a women’s magazine or— what was least likely given the topography of Kata’s soul— gone to a psychiatrist.

  As it was, she went to the most renowned sorceress in the area, one of a handful whose reputations had spread to all the cities and villages of the kingdom, among subjects whose fates needed to be redirected and who needed someone to offer them a sense of happiness and a modicum of human harmony.

  At the same time she stuck to the rule that it was better to go to a sorceress of a different faith because her judgments would be more reliable and accurate. If a woman oppressed by troubles was already consenting to the sin of superstition, which was forbidden under pain of hellfire in all four faiths in the kingdom, then she’d better do it up right. No matter how sinful the sorceress was herself— much more sinful than the wretched women who sought help— it was better if both of them weren’t guilty before the same temple. Because of that and for reasons of a metaphysical nature, sorceresses and prophetesses had the highest value in the predominantly Christian kingdom, and it even happened that occasionally a less popular sorceress would assume a phony Turkish name.

  Thus one Persida, formerly a prostitute from the Belgrade area, was known in her new job as Fatima, but soon she had to flee before the furious people of her village. No one ever heard of her again, but it seems likely that she continued to deal in fortune-telling and spells somewhere where no one knew about who she really was. Maybe in Romania or Hungary, and it wasn’t impossible that Persida or Fatima made it to the West, to Vienna, Paris, or Berlin, where sorceresses from the Balkans were already making good money. They passed themselves off as Gypsies and usually opened their studios near Jewish quarters, along promenades where prostitutes walked, or attached themselves to circuses and amusement parks. Fortune-telling, tarot cards, and exorcisms of spells became so important in the ’20s that it seemed that the European continent was being seized by a kind of metaphysical panic sparked by technological progress and the consequences of the war and that the true faith and religious institutions could be saved only by a great inquisitional project or an ideological insanity that would vanquish superstition and restore religious models again. When ten years later Hitler took complete control of the German spirit and the biggest part of Europe, this assumption would be proved correct. The Nazis didn’t persecute sorceresses and witches because there was no need for that. Their work had lost all its meaning. The people’s fear of fate had disappeared, so they could close their studios and move to parts of Europe where the majority of people were not sympathetic to the Führer’s earthly mission.

  Kata’s fear of what she had to do was of course unwarranted. She mounted her man as French ladies mount a horse and barely got off him until the end of their life together. He had no less stamina than a horse, and it seemed that his male member was a person in and of itself, completely different from the one that lived in his head and heart. That other one of him was somehow serene and always ready, free from somber moods, but unable to get its little head to influence the bigger one. Her man consented to nightly fucks that would have completely drained anyone else, but he would also have consented to anything else, except for her to take his boxes of nails away. Kata’s tenacity didn’t make him happier or unhappier, but that endless intercourse did her good. She imagined she was driving the devil out of him, played, tried to kill that devil, fell from heavenly heights into soft feathery abysses, smashed into a thousand crystals and at the next moment became whole again, wept like a flock of widows, and fell off his cock crazed with laughter as if the devil had just moved from his soul to hers.

  If in the daytime life with that man was like touching her tongue to a rusty anchor, the minutes and hours spent with him at night intoxicated her with a morphinic insanity. If she had been different and inclined to drunkenness and continually taking leave of her own soul, Kata might have been able to be happy with him. As it was, she didn’t know how to exchange her life for the moments of pleasure in life.

  She took herself off him only in the days right before she gave birth, and her sexual desire for him would return to her as early as a week or two afterward. She would hurt awfully, cramp up, and howl when she was pierced by his white hot sword, but she didn’t give up. She wanted him to ask something at least once, to tell her they shouldn’t really be doing that if she’d just given birth, to show himself to be living and feel that she was living too and that she hurt. Maybe that wasn’t Kata’s most difficult trial or the worst agony that she’d endured in her attempts to awaken her man from his eternal slumber. But it was the greatest pain, greater than any of her six childbirths. When you give birth, you can’t quit, so by virtue of that it’s easier, whereas at any moment in her torment with him she could have and wanted to slip his cock out of her. Stubbornness or something else on account of which she didn’t want to quit either having sex with him or living with him wouldn’t let her do it. Maybe that made Kata greater and braver than we acknowledged at the start, greater and braver than any of her children would ever imagine.

  They didn’t actually know her, nor did she know them. She raised them calmly and without passion. She would rarely grow worried, and they didn’t plague her with what mothers fear. It never occurred to her that one of her children could die in a fever. She prepared compresses with vinegar, put socks soaked in brandy on their feet, watched over their nightmares and frights, but she wasn’t afraid.

  When three-year-old Lino died in 1915 from the Spanish flu, she sat down at the head of his bed, caressed his hair, cried softly, and grieved it down just as softly. Neither a dead child nor five living ones could tear her away from her obsession with her attempts to make a normal man of her husband.

  After the children all fell asleep, she would slip into the bedroom, lock the door, shut the windows and plug every opening with rags, and climb onto him without checking whether he was awake and begin her struggle with the devil. It didn’t matter that the war was already long lost; she continued what she was doing and didn’t know about anything else.

  The children probably didn’t wake up at night and didn’t come looking for her, and if they did, the noise didn’t reach Kata. How could it have when the shame felt by children is so great, greater than everything that will happen in the future, greater than the cosmos and the little histories of the people in it? If any of them heard their mother howling and crying, saying words like “cunt” and “cock,” repeating “fuck me, fuck me, fuck me . . .” in the dead of the night, and at the next moment when she went crazy and everything in the room— walls, the closet, the light fixture— had a soul and the soul of everything was wet and hot, if any of them heard their mother howl “split my big fat ass, stab my cunt, devil, flood into this whore, you beast”— if any of Kata’s children had heard that (and the unfortunate thing was that Regina did hear it), then Kata’s futile struggle and suffering would have continued even after she was no longer among the living. And it lasted until Regina breathed her last breath.

  On the morning of St. Stephen’s Day in 1927 Kata lay dead on the same marriage bed, her hands folded on her breast— there was just enough space for a candle to fit between her fingers, if her family wanted that— without a pillow under her head and long since cold and stiff. Outside the sirocco was blowing; Aunt Angelina was raising a panic because her sister was starting to smell and so her soul wouldn’t be able to find peace. Why? She didn’t know the answer, but she sensed that there must be something written about it in the holy scriptures. Little Luka was vomiting for the third time already; something had spoiled his stomach. Đuzepe was running around after his aunt like a chicken with its head cut off, assuring her that
it was the cod that smelled and not his dead mother. Bepo kept quiet and sat on a stool by the stove, smoking one cigarette after another. Đovani was passing from his stage of cynicism to a higher stage of nervous disorder and looking on and off at his older brother, wanting to whack his muzzle with the cutting board and jam his cigarette down his throat. To kill him because he wasn’t doing anything. He sat and waited for something to happen, for someone to come for their mother and take her out of the house, just the way people take crocks of rotten sauerkraut out of their cellars.

  “Her soul will start to smell; they won’t let her into heaven like that,” wailed Aunt Angelina.

  Regina looked at her aunt, then at Đovani. She took Luka off her lap and stealthily started to go to her mother’s room before something terrible happened.

  “Don’t open that door!” Đovani yelled.

  Regina went in, took a blanket out of the closet, and folded it up by the door. Like that the smell wouldn’t spread out of the room. Then she sat down by Kata’s legs, gave a deep sigh, and put her hands down into her lap. She could feel Luka’s weight in them. The tingling of a child to whom she hadn’t given birth but who was hers as much as one human being can belong to another. Her little brother was the biggest worry of her life. And now he’d been left an orphan, she thought, and almost reflexively sniffled. She could smell the scent of fresh starch, which reminded her of spring and children’s illnesses. Her mother had changed all their sheets once a week, and when someone would fall ill in the middle of the week, she would change their sheets once more. It was nice to be sick when you were a child, she continued thinking, and sniffled quickly once more. Or she was just sniffing the air in the room. What could one smell apart from starch? The stench of wormwood from the side panels of the bed and the distant hint of rose oil. Was that the smell of death? It probably was because there hadn’t ever been any rose oil in their house. But no matter what was smelling of roses, that was the most distant smell that Regina could detect. Her mother, of course, hadn’t started smelling. She knew that the whole time, but she couldn’t tell them. And she didn’t have anyone to tell. No one could tell Aunt Angelina anything. She was crazy, crazed by who she was and not by anything loopy in her head. She was completely clear in her head, which was why her insanity was so stubborn. She would open a fashion magazine, yell, and fall into a trance as if she’d seen Jesus walking on water. She couldn’t believe that such a beautiful dress existed! She couldn’t believe that there were such beautiful women, like the one wearing that dress! She couldn’t believe that technology had advanced so much that a photograph looked like it had a living woman in it! Here, she was going to walk right out of that fashion magazine, that most beautiful of women in that stunning dress; she would stroll right through their kitchen and run away because we’re so ugly! That was what crazy Aunt Angelina would think as soon as she opened a fashion magazine. For this reason they had to hide all the fashion magazines from her. She was unbearable. She was crazy. As she was now, while she was shouting that her sister wouldn’t get into heaven because she had started stinking while waiting for them to take her away. And unfortunately it was impossible to hide their mother from Aunt Angelina. It was too late to shove her under the bed. Although maybe that was what needed to be done, Regina thought. There wouldn’t be anything wicked in that. If they’d known what would happen and that over Christmas there wouldn’t be a funeral, they would have shoved her under the bed and shut up about it. No one, not even their aunt, would have known that Kata had died. And it would have been easier to get through all of this. As it was, they could only wait. It wasn’t easy for them, but it was nevertheless hardest for her, Regina. She alone was sure that her mother hadn’t started to smell. She was the only one who hadn’t been infected with her aunt’s insanity. She would have gladly opened the window, jumped out, run away, and wouldn’t have ever come back. It was simple to disappear in a world this big. It would have been futile to look for her. It was so easy when you were gone, she thought, when you were not where everything was yours and everything was crazy.