Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Is she unconscious. .?”

“She’s conscious, but she’s not herself, in a manner of speaking. .”

“What do you mean. .?”

“I don’t know how to explain it to you. She’s not really here. They had to tie her down.”

Dijana began to cry again. She simply didn’t know what else to do. She cried from fear and excitement or from happiness because it seemed to her that her trick had worked.

“You can talk to Onofri, the chief physician; he’ll tell you more about it,” the young lady said. She was a little guarded, not like she had been in the morning, though she still felt sorry for Dijana, albeit with a faint feeling of disgust. But this was definitely much better than what Dijana had expected.

She led her into a tiny office, where behind a relatively oversized desk an enormous gray-haired man was sitting. He had a large nose and a protruding lower jaw, like a giant albino bulldog. She showed her to a chair and went out quickly. Dijana sat down before the chief physician said anything. He neither greeted her nor moved at all in his black chair, which was covered with cracked vinyl. He couldn’t even manage to get up. Who knows how he even gets in and out and sits down, she wondered at first, because she really couldn’t figure out how even the thinnest man could pass between the wall and the desk to get to the chair, and this man was very fat.

“So,” she said, more to get his attention than to break the silence.

“You must be Mrs. Delavale,” he said with one of those deep, loud voices that can be heard from hilltop to hilltop, even when they whisper.

“I’m not; actually I am, I’m Mrs. Delavale’s daughter,” Dijana said, bumbling.

“If it’s what we think it is, okay, but if it isn’t, we won’t be able to keep your mother in the hospital. If it’s a case of brain insult, this situation won’t last long, and she’ll leave us. If it’s something else, and you’re here to tell me whether it is or isn’t, then you shouldn’t have brought her to us because of a slit wrist. So, I’m asking you: how has your mother been acting in recent days?”

He watched her as would someone who could see through any lie. She didn’t know how to respond to him or how to gain some time.

“What is going on with her?” she asked in a fragile tone.

He looked at her, certain that this was all a lie, and said nothing for a few seconds, full as he was of experience with fraudulent patients and their families, perhaps to get her to break down, and then said, “Nothing special; I only had to evacuate half the ward, including all the nurses. You know, it’s a tradition for the Sisters of Mercy to work for us, pious nuns. Not even the communists have made an issue of this. The sacrifices these sisters make for the patients and all who suffer are boundless. I’ve had to have them removed from the ward as long as your mother is here. What she says and does isn’t for human eyes and ears. I guess you don’t know anything about that, do you? If that’s right, then we’re dealing with a brain stroke, but a very unusual one, the kind that there hasn’t been in this hospital for the thirty-five years that I’ve been here. I can remember that much! Otherwise such cases are known only from books. But people write all kinds of things in books, and I’m not inclined to believe every bizarre thing I read. So, to tell the truth — between you and me — I believe that your mother is in a state of chronic maniacal psychosis, or whatever psychiatrists call it, and I think it’s a disgrace for you to have brought her here! Of course, I can’t prove it, but even if I could, I couldn’t have you prosecuted according to any law. But I’m telling you, ma’am, that it’s dishonest, immoral, inhuman, both to us who work here and to the patients who are being treated in this ward and who because of your mother did not receive adequate care today. And I wonder how it was that you got her to sleep — what did you give her before you called the ambulance? Namely, this is where one could start talking about grave consequences for you. When you shot her full of sedatives, you risked killing your mother. There’s a very small difference between a dose that will put a ninety-seven-year-old lady into a deep sleep and a dose that’s lethal for her. Especially when dilettantes use such substances. And you, Mrs. Delavale, or whatever your name is, you’re a dilettante, aren’t you? But don’t think you’re going to get off just like that. I’m ready to testify that you attempted to murder your mother. Of course, in the event that my assumptions are correct, and something really tells me that they are, and in the event that your mother hasn’t suffered an extremely bizarre brain insult, which I’m firmly convinced that she hasn’t, you’re not going to take us in like that. A brain insult of this kind would be a greater miracle than a monk seal appearing in the Gruž harbor. Therefore, this moment is your last chance to confess and tell me what really happened!”

When he finished, he tapped the ballpoint on the desk, as if he were holding a judge’s gavel in his hand, and Dijana felt ashamed for the umpteenth time that day. All anyone cared about, so it seemed, was to humiliate her and kick her out of the way.

“You think now I’m going to get down on my knees and beg you? Is that what you think?” she said, watching him like a she-wolf about to jump on its plump and powerless prey, trapped between the wall and the black desk. Chief physician Onofri, however, didn’t back down. At that moment he was seething with the hatred that had accumulated in him since he’d come to this hospital as a young doctor in the belief that he would remain there two or three years, just to get some experience, complete his internship, and get recommendations for a good specialization. But he’d ended up staying there for almost his whole life, unable to specialize in what he wanted to, walking streets that became ever more cramped as his body became ever thicker and trying to reconcile himself to the truth that he hadn’t needed to study medicine to become what he was: someone who had wished in vain to get out of his hometown, to go off somewhere where he and his family were unknown and live with a view of one of the Swiss lakes. Since his wish had gone unfulfilled, he felt himself to be no different from the lowest city street sweeper. He hated his patients and their eternally concerned families, who cheated, lied, and stole and so believed they could cheat death. He hated interns, especially the young female interns who rushed through his ward (who knew how, sharing whose beds and working whose cocks) and got places where he wanted to be. He hated those who died and those who regained their health, and for a long time there hadn’t been an outcome that he could be happy about. He wrote both NAD and exitus letalis with the same bile and without any fury. And now he had a woman before him whom he’d caught in a lie, and still he could do nothing to her.

“You’re playing with me — you think you can get away with that?” he asked. “Answer me when I ask you a question!” he shouted, and Dijana tried to look him in the eye without wavering. As if a lion couldn’t do anything to an antelope as long as it didn’t lower its gaze. “You’re a. .,” he said, at a loss as to how to continue because no insult seemed adequate, and then said quietly, “a whore!”

“I think we’re finished here,” she responded calmly, then got up and went out.

“Get the hell out of here!” the chief physician shouted when she was already closing the door. His voice echoed down the hallway, which was painted in two oily shades of green, with a linoleum floor in a third shade of green.

“What did he say to you?” the young doctor asked.