Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

It was nice to live with a secret. Someone might say she realized that too late, but this wasn’t a problem for her. It was better like this, living in love when love was something you no longer had to seek or declare. And when you didn’t expect anything from it, least of all for it to be reciprocated. She was happy that Regina and he loved one another and believed it would always be that way. She was only afraid that they would leave her, go off to America or Australia, it didn’t matter where, and leave her behind. Regina was surprised when Mina told her that the idea of leaving wasn’t a good one, that there was no happiness to be found in an alien world. That was the first time that she was commenting on something and found a defect in an idea that Regina had come up with. Earlier she would have agreed, even if Regina had taken it into her head to attach swan’s wings to herself and fly from the top of Srđ Hill. And she had to say that, though it stung her in her heart, because she couldn’t take the idea of the two of them leaving, for Aris to take his little terrible objects away and for the pillow to stop smelling of his hair. Back home, she drifted off to sleep as the sounds of a mattress creaking came from Petka’s apartment, distant cries that she would never recognize in their daytime voices. But now she knew them, and it seemed as if they were hers. She didn’t want to lose them at all.

A month before Aris ran off, Mina realized what was going to happen. And she also knew why it would happen. Blind with love and passion, Regina clung to him ever more tightly. And she was blind and deaf to all the obvious signs of Aris’s calling it quits.

“Oh, dearie, if you knew how happy you are, you’d really watch your step,” Mina said, once she’d come up with what to say and seized an opportunity to tell her.

Instead of comprehending, or at least suspecting something, Regina just laughed. She laughed from sweetness, at everything people told her, or she kept quiet. She was in love in a way that was excessively rare in human beings. Like a male praying mantis. It goes off to die with full faith and a pure heart, convinced that nothing better exists. When love like that befalls them, people as a rule do survive, but something in them still dies. Every future love is filled with doubt, and every future defeat— if it is even possible in doubt— is harder for them to bear. They emerge from defeat different, worse and more unhappy in any case than they were. They start liking other colors, start hating dishes that they used to like; they become wicked in everything in which they were good; they become skilled at planning unhappiness. They become criminals.

Mina no longer visited Aris’s rooms and tried in vain to reconcile herself with what was coming. She watched him leave the house upset, without saying hello to anyone, and felt relieved when he did come back. She had a harder and harder time enduring Regina’s visits. Her continual babbling started to get on Mina’s nerves. She missed runs in stockings; her needle pricked the tips of her fingers and underneath her fingernails.

“He’s going to leave you,” she yelled one Saturday in late September, “and he won’t come back because you’re a goat. Just so you know: you’re a stupid goat. You’re a goat.”

She repeated it because she couldn’t come up with any other insult, and all she wanted was to tell Regina the most hateful words in the world. For the first time, she was jealous of Regina’s youth. No matter how much it would hurt her, Aris wouldn’t be her last man. But he was the first and the last in Mina’s life, though she’d never laid a hand on him.

The first time Regina fell silent, froze, and looked agape at that woman acting crazy again. That was how it began, and that was how it had to end. She’d brought him, and she would take Rudolph Valentino away. Regina ran out of the shop as soon as strength returned to her legs and heard Mina calling after her:

“Goat! Goat! Goat. .!”

She shoved past Luka, who was about to say something, and locked herself in her room with both locks. Fear consumed the whole real world, and when she woke up a few hours later, her first thought was that she was gravely ill and couldn’t get up out of bed. Nor could she say a word or call for someone to help her. And she remembered that she’d locked the door and had to get up if she didn’t want to die all alone.

She no longer managed to think about Mina’s fit because his letter was waiting for her on the kitchen table. She opened and read it. With every sentence she forgot the previous one. And the letter was long, ten pages of small handwriting. Evidently he’d been getting it ready for a long time. It hadn’t come to him suddenly, and he certainly wouldn’t be coming back. In every line he wrote that he loved her, and in every line there was one “but” that explained why he was leaving. Regina read the first part of each sentence twice and the second part only once and then forgot everything. When she read the last line of the tenth page, all she understood was that she was alone.

Aris was strolling along the promenade in Split and watching a Czech circus performer, a woman juggling bowling pins, right as Regina was hurling the last plates she found in the china closet through the window. He was traveling with that woman, whose name was Jana, as Regina theatrically tried to hang herself with a clothesline from which she’d removed wet pillowcases and thrown them into the dirt. She was running to claw out Mina’s eyes with the whole neighborhood running after her when Aris kissed Jana for the first time. Regina spat before the door of Mina’s shop and looked her in the eye through the display window, and that was how their acquaintance and friendship ended, while he was telling another woman that he loved her, and she was laughing at him like a tourist laughing at someone selling wooden donkeys. She was promising herself that she would never lay eyes on another man again at the moment when he thought that Jana might be the woman with whom he wanted to spend his life. She shut herself in her room and didn’t go out for a month, and he woke up every morning in a different city. Trieste, Bolzano, Bologna, Milan, Turin, Florence, Rome, Naples. He bought postcards but didn’t have anyone to send them to, and she was waiting for a letter of repentance— she would forgive him everything and would be his slave until the end of her life. On the day before Easter in 1932 Aris spent a crazy night with Jana and her friend Karolina, a sword swallower, and realized that his flame kissed other women as well, and not just him, but it didn’t bother him for a single moment. Regina was kneading dough for walnut bread and crying bitterly when the priest Stevan Bojanić came into the house and said:

“Christ has arisen. Today or in two weeks. Don’t be sad, child; you have no reason.”

Before New Year’s in 1933 Aris and Jana had their first fight, without even knowing what it was about. A plainclothes policeman knocked on the kitchen window, and Regina shrugged her shoulders when he told her that Mina was dead and they weren’t sure whether she’d killed herself or someone had murdered her— she lay with her throat cut on the bed, whose pillow no longer smelled of lavender.

“I’m not going to that old slut’s funeral!” she shouted and slammed the door, and blood started flowing from Luka’s nose.

“Look at him; he could kill a lion with his fist,” Jana said, admiring Mussolini, who was bawling about workers’ rights from a balcony in Rome. Aris couldn’t hide his jealousy.

“Fascist faggot!” he said.

That same day Luka told Regina that Adolf Hitler had become the German chancellor, and she said that it would be smarter for him to study for school than to sit listening to the radio all day long at Svetinović’s, that customs guard.