Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Mina, you’re frightening me. Just so you know— you’re frightening me. So later you won’t say that you didn’t know what was happening to me,” she threatened, turning serious.

“You know when Rudolph Valentino kisses the desert rose, extends it to that girl with the small mouth, but the rose slips away from her and falls into the sea, and he looks at her and it’s the end? And we don’t know what happened further. Well, dearie, he’s upstairs now— I don’t mean in heaven but right there in dead Petka’s apartment. This morning I went to the post office; Vito was just looking for my packages when he appeared. He was carrying two suitcases and said he needed an apartment. And I don’t know what got into me. I said I had an empty apartment. I’m not crazy. Go up and take a look.”

Regina got up angrily; the chair scraped along the stone floor of the workshop. She started down the stairs, resolved not to show her face in Mina’s shop for at least five days after she saw that upstairs there wasn’t anyone or anything. But midway up the stairs she was seized with fear. What if there was someone up there after all? It couldn’t be! Mina was toying with her nerves and knew that Regina was sensitive to this kind of thing in particular. She would forgive anything but expected others to be serious when talking to her or at least be serious and silent. She reached out for the doorknob with her left, her weaker hand. The door of Petka’s apartment was unlocked. Mina had really lost her mind if she’d unlocked it after two years. There was no one in the living room. It smelled of dust. A graveyard of bees, ants, and other household pests. The armchairs were covered with white sheets; the carpet was half eaten by moths; they were the only thing to survive in graves. In the bedroom, above the double beds hung a photograph of her father and mother. The wooden floor creaked. In the kitchen there was dry, desert air; no one had turned on the faucet for a long time. So there wasn’t anyone; there was only one more door left. Just like in the tale about Bluebeard! Was it the seventh or ninth door? Here it was only the fourth or fifth, depending on where you started counting.

Regina grabbed the doorknob and gave the door a powerful push. She was angry and needed to show it— the door could slam against the wall for all she cared. And it did. And a completely naked man appeared in front of her. She didn’t see his face, only his eyes. And his eyes were huge and full of darkness.

She lowered her gaze in a flash, as if fearing that those eyes might cast a spell on her. And down below his thing hung, and then shot up twice. She’d only seen one in pictures, but in real life it looked different. Like a rubber children’s toy that moved and twisted all on its own. Like white blood sausage made from pig’s blood, fat and greasy, with dark blue, knotted veins and a big head.

She yelled, “Mina-a-a-a! Mina-a-a-a! Mary Mother of God!” and raced down the stairs.

Either by some miracle or because it’s normal, she didn’t tumble down the stairs as Mina had done when her sister had died, though she wasn’t any less frantic. Her heart was pounding like crazy, fear had completely consumed her, and she wished she could just hide in the cap of an acorn. It seemed to her that she couldn’t move her arms, though she was waving them like a windmill. It seemed to her that her legs wouldn’t move, though she ran downstairs faster than the world record holders in the long history of sprinting.

She stood in front of Mina, panting to catch her breath, and was unable to say anything. What she wanted to say was swallowed by her next thought and sentence, and those by the next ones, and on and on, so she stuttered and breathed and shook like a sparrow in the corner of a room from which it’s been trying to escape all morning, and when it’s finally let out, it doesn’t know to fly away.

“I told you!” Mina said and grabbed the first stocking of the day. “Dearie, a spitting image of Rudolph Valentino. Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. He wanted to give her a rose, and the girl let the rose fall into the sea. Hah, damned woman. And all that just to kiss her!”

Regina really didn’t go to Mina’s for the next five days. Not only that, she didn’t even poke her nose out of the house. She was afraid of meeting them. Him or her, it didn’t matter. She probably wouldn’t recognize him with his clothes on, but he would recognize her! Maybe he would come up to her, apologize for being naked, or ask her what she thought she was doing going into someone else’s bathroom without knocking. Or he would begin with one of those vulgar, dirty male stories, proud that she’d seen him at his largest. Men like it when that happens— she didn’t know how she knew they did, but they certainly did. And what on earth was he even thinking about and what had he told Mina and what did Mina answer him? She certainly didn’t say “dearie” to him.

The moment she realized that she didn’t know how Mina addressed men, or what she said to them instead of “dearie” (and she certainly said something to them because it couldn’t be that she said even less to them or didn’t need any crutch words and phrases), Regina was overcome with jealousy. For starters, it wasn’t what she meant to him that bothered her but what he meant to her— that was what really bothered her. She and Mina were the best of friends; not a day had passed without their seeing one another, and now, you see, it was the fifth day since she hadn’t seen her, and she probably hadn’t crossed her mind. Why would she when Mina was probably holding that thick, greasy thing in her hand and didn’t know where to stick it, the old bag?!

“Has it occurred to her that I might be sick?” she thought. “Or that I might be dead? That I climbed up in the attic, threw a rope over a beam, and have a noose around my neck, weighing whether to stay in this world or not? Or maybe a wasp stung me and I’m all swollen, and there’s no one at home to bring me ice to reduce the swelling? In the end, I might have fallen down the stairs like Petka because things repeat in life. If you’ve ever done something really wrong, you’ll do it again. If you’ve ever brought great misfortune on yourself, you’ll do it again,” Regina thought, standing at the top of the steps that went down to the city, and tried to figure out how she might get her foot to catch on something, break her neck, and fall to the account of her disloyal friend. She didn’t do it. She probably would have if there had only been someone there to push her. So much rage and despair had accumulated in her because Mina had remained alone with Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, whose enormous member, like a divine scourge in the eyes of a sinner, grew bigger and bigger and turned into an obelisk that, instead of rising out of the ground, fell down toward her and almost touched that tiny crawling female being that kneeled alongside Calvary. Later, Regina would think this ridiculous. Her own torments would seem silly to her, and she would miss them because they would never come again in the same form.

On the sixth day, she opened a drawer and took out two pairs of old torn stockings that should have been thrown out and not darned, resolved to humiliate Mina. She wouldn’t ask her anything; she would just throw the stockings in front of her. Mend them, girl! Mend them, you miserable dry cunt! That was what she came up with, and that’s what she would say to her, so she would know what her place was or at least would realize for a moment what she’d lost when she took up with that young devil and threw her out of her house and tore apart a friendship more important than life.

She went into the shop. Mina was pleating a black skirt, one of twenty for a girls’ choir that was traveling to Belgrade for the celebration of the king’s birthday.