The Villa Rosa Bella was the largest and most beautiful construction at the eastern edge of the city. It had been built in 1771 as an exact copy of a house in Perast in which a woman named Ruža had lived, a local beauty and the failed love of Petka’s great-grandfather. As a young man, he would go on foot to Boka, sing under Ruža’s windows, and in vain seek her heart, which had been promised to an old Venetian merchant. As soon as his wife died and a year of mourning had passed, the Venetian was going to come for Ruža and take her away. Petka’s great-grandfather did everything to change what had been fixed in writing, and it seemed that, at least as far as Ruža and her desires were concerned, he had some success. However, as fate could not be cheated, Ruža fell ill and in a single summer month went from the most beautiful girl in Boka to dead in a cold grave. The Venetian merchant lost his money and the woman who would care for him in his old age, and the young man from Dubrovnik was left without the love of his life. He swore that he would never marry and went to sea. He was wildly courageous, worked as a captain on both merchant and navy ships— in the service of several navies and countries— resolved to leave his bones on the floor of some sea, and to be remembered in a heroic legend and not for his unfortunate love. Death, however, didn’t want him, and he returned home. In his old age he was extremely wealthy, but just as faithful to Ruža’s memory. He had a house built for himself that was identical to hers in every detail. He sent designers and builders to Perast and spent large sums of money to get Ruža’s relatives to let him inside so he could copy and measure the inside of the house. That was how the Villa Rosa Bella was born, a perfect architectural souvenir, and he spent his final years in melancholy visits to the rooms in which Ruža had lived. He built the house so he could cross the threshold that had been forbidden to him. He sat and smoked pipes by the window under which he’d serenaded Ruža.
He violated his own vow and before his death married a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Konavle. She wasn’t particularly beautiful and even less hardworking and smart, but her name was Ruža. That girl from Konavle was Granny Petka’s great-grandmother and the first owner of the Villa Rosa Bella.
On the outside the stone building had preserved its original beauty, but whoever went inside— and no one had done that for at least fifteen years before Rafo did— found something that more resembled the lower chambers of hell— where haughty French sinner women bathed not in perfume but in their own shit— than it did the house of an old family’s glory and unhappy love. Granny Petka had probably never taken out any trash, nor did she recognize the value of any single thing that she couldn’t sell. Expensive dresses rotted on the floor; worms laid their eggs in rolls of unused silk; ceremonial captain’s uniforms disintegrated in an orgy of moths. And in that largely formless mass of everything and anything, the most terrible effect was made by scraps of food that were years old. Rafo saw a whole untouched loaf of bread, probably from a time when Granny Petka summoned pity in others, which was green like an old church bell, on which unknown creatures had spun a fine weblike fleece, in the middle of which colonies of all manner of vermin lived in Old Testament fellowship. Since they hadn’t been destroyed and had no natural enemies in the Villa Rosa Bella, worms, moths, wood lice, ants, cockroaches, worms, wasps, butterflies, hornets, roly polies, ladybugs, and earwigs took on something of the habits of dignified creatures. A cockroach the size of a quail’s egg lay like a lion on the top of a broken candlestick, its legs crossed and its gaze dim, and looked Rafo right in the eye. It would have asked him something, but it was too lazy.
He brought a shovel and a wheelbarrow and hauled the trash out of his room. He whitewashed the walls and poured lime in holes that teemed with living creatures and scrubbed the floor on which he spread his mattress. Along with a large military chest, that mattress would be the only thing in the room. He suggested cleaning the whole house like that to Granny Petka.
“Remember one thing— I’m the lord and master in this house,” she answered indignantly and didn’t speak to him for two days. “Here there’s no Granny Stinky, and the Villa Rosa Bella isn’t the Gruž harbor,” she continued, and Rafo realized that he wasn’t allowed to interfere in her life. She was no longer of this world. But if you weren’t sensitive to dirt, if you didn’t fear disease, and if you weren’t terribly superstitious, you could live with her. In the house she was quiet and spoke only if he wanted her to. She warmed herself by the kitchen stove for days at a time, drank brandy, and chewed on a bulb of onion. Rafo didn’t see her eating anything but onion. Two or three times he brought her cheese and salt pork, but the old woman refused with a look of disgust:
“I’m not a girl any more; fatty food is hard on my gut.” She spent her days with onion and brandy and no longer went to the harbor.
“You can’t forget the evil they do to you,” she said once. “You can’t be a lady among beasts.”
Rafo bought brandy for the rent wherever he managed. At first he took care not to buy either the most expensive or the cheapest, but he saw that the old woman didn’t care. She just wanted it to be strong and harsh; whether it was made from grapes, plums, carobs, or dung (namely, people said that the Montenegrins made brandy from sheep and goat pellets)— that didn’t matter to Granny Petka. And when he brought her a bottle of wine or prosecco too, she was the happiest child in the world. Her eyes would tear up, and when she smiled, Rafo thought he could smell a field of lavender. He would sit down beside her and listen for the umpteenth time to the story of the Villa Rosa Bella and how the old woman’s great-grandfather had walked on foot to Perast to sing ballads to the beautiful Ruža. Only when she was telling that story and only with the help of brandy did Petka seem to have a clear head.
“Oh, the father of my grandfather, how foolish he was, God forgive his soul,” she always said after she sweetly mocked his crazy mind and how the old man sat at the window and imagined himself as a young man calling to the only love of his life.
“I’ve got a young daughter, and you, I see, are young,” Niko Azinović said one day to Rafo as he was paying for brandy. Rafo had been buying brandy from him for months.
“Her name is Kata. My daughter. She’s pretty as a picture,” he told him when he came the next time.
“It’s your time. Time for both you and her,” Niko added two days later.
“Will you at least take a look at her?” he asked him the next time.
Rafo didn’t respond to him. He acted as if he hadn’t heard or wasn’t interested in what he was telling him, but when he came for the brandy again, Niko wasn’t there to meet him. A nervous girl was there, her hands trembling as she poured out the brandy; she looked at him askance, frowned a little, but didn’t say anything.
“She likes you!” Niko said the next time. Rafo didn’t answer, but her father was no longer waiting for an answer. Everything was proceeding toward its logical conclusion, and he was content.
What made Niko Azinović, a poor but respected widower, want to give his daughter to a man who wasn’t from that town, didn’t have roots or family there, no house, no reputation, no place under the sun? The surrounding neighborhood would wrestle with this question until that whole generation ended under stone slabs in the Boninovo cemetery. Not until they’d all died off did their wonder come to an end, and the answer— though it was simple and understandable as soon as you thought with your heart and not your head— would never occur to them. Niko sought just that kind of son-in-law because he didn’t want to be left all alone. He loved Kata with the kind of love that hadn’t been able to get over her deceased mother, and he was horrified at the possibility that he would have to let her go off into someone else’s house. He would let his other daughter, Angelina, go, and he would also be glad if she went, but Kata was something different and had remained close to her father’s heart. How was it that people couldn’t understand that, and where did they get the idea that a parent treasured all his children equally? Maybe some parents did, but Niko didn’t. He found a son-in-law to f
it his own emotions and— or so he believed— to fit a domestic mindset: Rafo seemed to him to be a stable young man and a model pauper whom trouble had forced to live with Granny Petka (because what else would have?). He didn’t have anyone of his own and gave the impression of a man who as a husband would care for his wife. What man would care more than one whose property began and ended in his marriage? That was what Niko Azinović thought and was sure that he hadn’t been mistaken.
From Rafo’s perspective, things looked a little different. He believed that Kata liked him, and she did, just as he would soon believe that she loved him. He wasn’t exactly clear about what that attraction and love were supposed to mean to him, but why would he object? Kata tolerated his silence well. Kata’s father didn’t expect for the questions he asked to be answered. Neither the one nor the other disturbed his peace of mind. He couldn’t have found better kin. He nodded, and that was his consent.
In the uninterrupted history of Rafo Sikirić’s solitude the only exception was his daughter Regina. On the day of his death, on the twelfth of February, 1924, she was the only one who really lost anything because only Regina liked him as he was. Everyone else had washed their hands of Rafo at one time or another; they saw him differently than he was or tried to change him. And no one other than she had a bad conscience about the way that he departed.
And the conscience is a good witness to death. Better than tears and all spoken and unspoken words of mourning. The survivors feel guilt before the dead, and that guilt is the only thing that ties their children to the world of shadows. Guilt is what dead parents leave to their children and what makes them turn into adults. If there was no guilt, then there was neither father nor mother. Actually, then they weren’t parents to their own children. Thus, Regina was Rafo’s child, and it was with her that his lineage was continued. On the day of his death she still hadn’t turned nineteen, but she accepted into her soul a great anguish that was hard to bear and by which a pure and genuine misfortune can be recognized. The nobility of misfortune depends, however, on the way it is borne through one’s life.
II
It had already been raining for twenty-seven days. Rowboats that no longer had anyone to look after them were sinking one after the other in the harbor. Women in black peered from behind their curtains and hid as soon as people appeared on the street. It was better not to see soldiers because you never knew what they were looking for. And everyone else who might come along was worse than the army. For some time, starving people had been coming down from Herzegovina every so often. Hordes of crazed savages arrived from Bosnia and Montenegro, stealing everything in their path and continuing on along the coast toward Trsteno and farther in the direction of Zaostrog and Makarska. It was hard for anyone to know what was really going on at the front. Austrian propaganda spread news that Serbia was about to fall and that the army and people were fleeing toward Albania. Italian ships were allegedly on the approaches to Dubrovnik. There was no trace of the French or English. It could be said that the Austrian emperor had already won the war. But there was less and less food. The villagers had raised the prices of potatoes and grain sky high, and the government seemed to have hunkered down. Its officials sat freezing in their offices, as if they were waiting to see in which direction the wet, metal roosters on the roofs of the observation towers would turn.
Niko Azinović was sitting in the darkness of his cellar, debating with three men not unlike himself about when a child acquires a human soul. It would soon be a year since his grandson had died, and Father Ivan had refused to conduct the funeral service and didn’t want to hold the Requiem Mass. The boy’s name had been Angelino. They’d given him that name to protect him because he was born prematurely and was smaller than a loaf of pauper’s bread. His little sister had named him Lino. He wasn’t baptized on time, but not because Kata and Rafo hadn’t done their part. They had; they’d gone to the rectory three times, but that same Father Ivan hadn’t had time. It’s true that in those days a lot of people were dying. It was true that the priest had more urgent business and that it made more sense to baptize the children of those who could feed him better, but if it was already like that and if Father Ivan’s mistake was that Lino had died as an unbaptized soul, did he really dare return him to the earth like a dog?
“That’s not right,” the first voice in the darkness said.
“Damn right it’s not,” the other confirmed.
“What do priests know?! They share the same plane with both God and the devil,” a third said. No one inhaled any smoke.
In a moment there was the glow of a cigarette rolled from a mixture of mint and a little wad of tobacco, and it briefly illuminated the faces of the men. One was obese, his head was planted on a body that looked like a wrecking ball for old ships, and his small, close-set eyes kept blinking. The face of the other looked abnormally elongated, with an equine jaw and an expression of surprise that was in all likelihood more a feature of his physiognomy than it was the result of his being surprised. The third face was small and barely visible under a large French hat. A ten-year-old girl sat on a three-legged stool in front of the barrel. She was pretty. Her face belonged to someone who wasn’t afraid and who wanted more than anything to show that she wasn’t afraid.
“If it’s not baptized, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t without a soul but that its soul wasn’t baptized,” Fatso said.
“Turks are unbaptized, but people say that they have a soul,” Horse Face confirmed.
“It’s not that people say that, but they have souls like anyone else,” objected the third.
Niko took a drag, and it could be seen that the first two were frowning and the third bristled.
“Whose side are the Turks on?” asked Fatso sarcastically.
“They’re neutral, like shit from a new bride!” said Horse Face. The one in the French hat didn’t say anything. A few minutes of anticipation followed in which Fatso wheezed loudly, Horse Face clicked his tongue hoping to provoke a response, and Grandpa Niko breathed. The girl would recognize his sighs among hundreds of them. She pricked up her hears to hear whether the third one was breathing, but no sound came from where he was sitting. She was amused by the fact that he wasn’t there any more. And then she thought that maybe he really wasn’t there. Maybe he’d died like Lino. Simply stopped breathing. It could happen to anyone. It was wartime. Grandpa Niko took a drag, but she wasn’t quick enough. She didn’t manage to see the head in the French hat.
“I couldn’t care less about Turkey. I have no peace because I don’t know what happened to that child. And where its soul has been put. That’s my blood, and you’re thinking about Turkey because this didn’t concern your blood,” said Grandpa Niko.
“Of course it did . . .” Horse Face interjected, wanting to say something.
“No it didn’t. If it had, you wouldn’t be thinking about Turkey,” Grandpa Niko interrupted him. If he said another word, he would throw him out, and he could think and fend for himself. And outside it was raining, now as it would forever. Or at least until the war ended.
Grandpa Niko had said a few days before that it was good that it was raining and that they should pray that it was also raining on the western front. When it rained only bombs and bullets killed, but poison gas didn’t. Every raindrop saved a human life. If it rained long enough, all of them would survive. As soon as you could smell the mustard gas, soldiers died, said Admiral Sterk. He wasn’t a real admiral but a common clockmaker, but since the war had broken out, his mind had gone to seed, and he told people that he was an admiral. If you believed him, he would repair your watch and pass on secret information to you from the western front. If you laughed, if you said “Jozo, you’re an admiral as much as I’m St. Peter!,” as Antiša Bakunin had told him, then nothing would happen to your watch and you wouldn’t get any news from the front. The news didn’t matter, but how could you get along if you didn’t know what time it was? After Andrijica Ćurlin and Beko Albi had gone off to war and since Albi Abinun
had fled to America before the war, Admiral Sterk was the only clockmaker left in town. Bakunin apologized to him, bowed down to the ground, and swore that he would personally promote him to a field marshal, but it was no use— Admiral Sterk wouldn’t repair his wall clock! And now Bakunin didn’t know what time it was, no matter whether it was day or night!
“He would pave over all the churches, kill anyone who wore a braid— from the emperor down to office heads; he would abolish the police, and he doesn’t even know what time it is,” Grandpa Niko said, mocking Bakunin, and added that he didn’t know who was the bigger nutcase of the two, Admiral Sterk or Antiša Bakunin. But he listened carefully to the news from the front, believed it, and remembered even what he didn’t understand. So, for instance, the fact that when one could smell the mustard gas, soldiers were dying. The girl didn’t know what mustard gas was and didn’t ask because she thought that this was something you were supposed to know. If you didn’t, it was better not to say so. She sniffed the air and thought she would be able to recognize the smell of mustard gas if it ever stopped raining. She would be the first to know when soldiers started dying.
“There’s no power greater than Russia,” Fatso said to break the awkward silence.
“Like we didn’t know that,” the one in the French hat said, coming to life.
“In Russia the sun rises twice,” Fatso persisted, “once in the west and once in the east.”
The Walnut Mansion Page 57
