Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Where have you been all these days, my poor girl? We got worried about you. He got worried!”

Regina took a look around to see what there was to smash. Should she punch the windowpane with her fist? No, that would be too much! So she kicked an old crock with all her might. It was an imitation of a Chinese vase, bought once long ago in Trieste, and her rare male customers put their canes and umbrellas in it. The crock flew over to the other end of the shop and broke into little pieces.

“You damned dry cunt!” she yelled, and the skirt fell out of Mina’s hands.

That would have indeed been an effective end to a friendship and the beginning of a great lifelong jealousy if Regina hadn’t overdone it a bit or the crock hadn’t been such bad workmanship, made of heavy baked clay, massive like the pots holding African palms in front of the Hotel Astoria. When she tried to run out of the shop, her leg started hurting with a pain like she’d never felt, and in an instant she was aware that she wouldn’t be leaving that place. She was flushed with shame because she was losing everything she’d gained over the past five days; she tried to stand on her foot again, and she got foggy in the head. She felt as if she were sinking into big bales of cotton that had been unloaded from an English ship long ago, in the first month of the Great War; the ship had left Egypt and couldn’t continue its course. Regina thought she might be dying and felt a little better.

The last thing she saw were Mina’s legs, white like spoiled sheep’s cheese, with bluish-pink veins that had burst one after the other. When the last one burst, that woman would be dead. She thought of a bas-relief of healthy blue veins and sank into darkness.

And then she saw his face over herself. In fact, she felt his hand brushing her hair from her face. He did it carefully, so as not to touch her skin. She opened her eyes and then immediately closed them, pretending to sleep, pretending that she wasn’t there. She was dead but by some miracle was breathing. That couldn’t last very long because as soon as that handsome man began to slap her cheeks, which he’d certainly seen in movies about Russian counts, she could definitely see; she shot through him with eyes as wild as Hiawatha’s and tried to think up a curse that would put him in the same place she’d already put her friend. But of all the ugly words, only one came to Regina’s mind, the one she couldn’t say because she would have died of shame. Between her lips was the word that on that day in dear departed Petka’s bathroom had gone from being a swearword to a living torment.

It was Sunday when Aris Berberijan carried Regina Sikirić in his arms all the way to the city hospital. She had her arms around his neck. Mina walked beside them and every so often held up her hurt leg, as if that would help, and he heroically held up the heaviest burden he’d ever lifted in his life. Not once did he put her down to rest, not once did he open his mouth and say anything, nor did his hands start to shake. They went down the steps and toward the city center, and everyone who was supposed to see them did.

That afternoon women became particularly hateful toward their husbands; young women shut themselves up in their rooms, threw their quilts over their heads, and wept bitterly in the hope that they would suffocate. That evening not one husband in the houses along the way that led from the Sikirić house to the hospital got dinner. That night not a single child was conceived. The menfolk found themselves completely baffled. And only those who hid the shameful seeds of pederasty within themselves knew what was going on. And the womenfolk found in themselves the shared and unspoken reason for jealousy and hatred, which would accompany Regina’s shadow from that day until the day she died.

Never again would the thighs of living women yearn from windows and verandahs for Aris Berberijan to carry them like that, but their jealousy and hatred would live on unabated.

“There are cracks in three bones,” said Dr. Mikulić. “In all likelihood you’ll always have a limp.”

Regina shrugged her shoulders and turned her head away. She didn’t know that doctors always said things like that. Aris put his hand down on her hair again, this time to touch her and comfort her. He still didn’t feel anything definite for her. As often happens with men of great beauty, those small-time Apollos, he too lacked the talent or skill to see himself with the eyes of the other sex and sense when his aura met another aura.

But in that same hospital only three days later Aris would pass through Regina’s hidden lips and be where no man had been before. It happened on Sunday evening, while the doctor on call, the old Gjulio Devera, was sleeping according to his habit in the laundry room, and Hamza Begaja, the nurse, was counting the dinars that he’d received from Aris and listening in on the voices that he heard from the other side of the wall. It seemed to him that he was hearing the yelps of a bird dog that had gotten caught in a fox trap or the crying of the young Ms. Rizvanbegovica after she had miscarried her child and lost her mind. Hamza, who didn’t know about the birds and the bees, was frightened by what he heard. He felt guilty and was sure that he’d lose his job on account of this if he didn’t end up in prison. He was the only one who felt bad that night.

Regina didn’t end up with a limp. In only three weeks she was walking normally, and the doctors again thought it had to be a miracle. Little bones heal the slowest and fuse crookedly more often than not. But, you see, her bones fused quickly, with everything in its place and in the order that God had determined. The crock that she’d smashed with her foot brought her first real love. Then she strolled through the town holding hands with the stranger and thereby confirmed what everyone already knew. Though not every woman who held hands with an unmarried man was considered an easy woman, Regina immediately became a whore. The reason lay in Aris’s beauty. The old women remembered the parish priest’s words on the death of Rudolph Valentino. The women who’d unleashed a scandal when they left the Mass that day had grown old full of dissatisfaction and hatred for themselves and were even harsher toward Regina. In all that she saw only a game in which she felt victorious beforehand. She wasn’t bothered by the reproachful clicking of their tongues, which could be heard from the darkness of people’s cellars, nor did she give a damn when women would conspicuously cross over to the other side of the street when they came across them.

“The bitch has really gotten full of herself,” said Brother Dominko Miljuš, crossed himself three times, and smeared garlic on the knob on the door to the monastery. Just in case someone grabbed it whose hand had touched Regina, if only accidentally and in passing. Brother Dominko had a metaphysical hunch that the devil was soon coming to collect— crosses would be stuck in the ground upside down, people’s mouths would turn inward, and the whites of their eyes would be full of blood and darkness. Generally speaking, he was right. Millions of Europeans felt the same thing, but just as Abraham’s sons didn’t know where the threat to them was coming from, neither was he able to recognize the face of the Evil One. Historians would later be of the view that his face was visible at every step, but Brother Dominko, a product of his time, saw it in the love of a pretty city girl and a painfully handsome stranger. He smeared garlic on the doorknob and recited the prayers that were close to his heart. Against hunger, the plague and the Evil One; against those who didn’t understand anything; against baptized and unbaptized souls that consciously or subconsciously found themselves on the path to the devil. He always prayed against something, in the firm belief that the Almighty Himself knew on whom to bestow his mercy, but maybe he forgot whom all he had to send to the deepest chambers of hell in order for the world to be saved.