Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

And the unfortunate Luis Carlos Prestes deceived himself. The uprising failed, and the Brazilian government extradited his Olga to Germany. She died in a concentration camp, and the date of her death, and the deaths of the majority of the camp inmates, was every date of every year for her loved ones. Olga Benario is worth remembering not only because she was guided by hope like Regina, but because one of the first bougainvilleas in the Adriatic was planted in the garden in back of the Sikirić house.

It was brought there by a Dr. Elsner, from a meeting of botanists in Padua, and he planted it there because he had no garden of his own. Elsner also died in a camp but not because of hopes and ideals but because he was a Jew. The bougainvillea grew and flourished, and its flowers were always violet. It survived the Second World War and all the misery that followed. It was still there after the bombardment in 1991, when the house burned, and lived to the end of the century, as big as the biggest pine and as old as the oldest olive tree. It outlived everyone who remembered it. It was the only constant in this story.

Regina fell asleep right before dawn, inconsolable like the country of Poland and furious at a world that felt no sympathy for what had happened in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

When she woke up, the sun was already in an afternoon hour, and she was waiting for her sailor. That was how her romance with Ivo Delavale began, which no one opposed and could have ended differently if at one moment the fates that were mutually involved hadn’t crossed. Regina’s, about which we know most everything, and the fate of Diana Vichedemonni, about which we won’t learn anything. Such is, to be sure, the logic of life. Those who pass judgment usually don’t know that they’ve passed judgment on someone. Just as those who are condemned don’t learn anything about those passing judgment either, no matter how hard they try and no matter how sweet revenge seems. No one succeeds in taking revenge on anyone in this short life. We would have to live a thousand years, as in the Old Testament, and know more than any one person can ever know if we were going to be able to take revenge.

On Christmas Eve in 1927 Kata Sikirić cursed God. Her hands clenched into fists in the black bread dough she was kneading, and she couldn’t unclench them. At first a sharp pain shot through her left hand, and immediately thereafter she lost all feeling in it. She could still move the fingers on her right hand, though she couldn’t free them from the dough, whereas the fingers on her left hand felt as if they’d been fused with the hard stone of the Revelin fortress. Kata wasn’t overcome with fear, only with confusion perhaps. In the few seconds that the whole episode lasted, she wavered between two thoughts, two conflicting feelings: the thought about the yeast that had stopped working in the dough and, instead of making the Christmas bread rise, turned it into something sad and yeastless, a cake of pious Jews, and the thought of the curse she’d uttered aloud right before she felt the sharp pain. Rage came with the first thought and wonder with the second. Either God was taking revenge on her for the curse, which would mean that He existed after all, or she would have to take revenge on him because he was so powerless that he couldn’t even give yeast any power.

Kata waited for a resolution of her dilemma: it was the longest wait in her forty-two years, and soon there was nothing left but the waiting. No hands clenched in the dough, no eyes about to pop out of their orbits, no thoughts, neither the first nor the second, no feet, and no wood floor underneath them. A moment later when Regina let out a scream, waiting was the only thing left of Kata Sikirić.

Ten minutes later the entire neighborhood was already there, even one-hundred-year-old blind Slava Tutin. The old woman’s grandson, Captain Bariša, held her by the arm as she whispered, “Where’s the deceased, where’s she lying, are all the windows shut. .?”

Young people were pushing in from all sides. The women smelled of salt cod that had already been soaking in water for three days, and the men pursed their lips while their cheeks puffed out like those of forest dormice. They wheezed through their noses and turned red, careful not to let the smell of brandy escape through their mouths on a fasting day like this. The stronger and more agile ones pushed their way to the kitchen table, beyond which Kata was lying. Those behind them stood on their tiptoes trying to see something. Some were even eyeing the table, wondering whether to climb up on it and — as impolite as that may be— take a look at their deceased neighbor one last time from the best vantage in the room. True, they would see her once more at the chapel before the funeral. The casket would be open because that was the custom, and the deceased’s face had not been disfigured by illness or an accident so the family would have to hide it. But that wasn’t the same. People saw dead people who’d been tidied up, bathed, and dressed in good clothes at least once a week because people they knew died about that often, people whose graves one visits at the cemetery, whereas something like this only happened once in so many years. Her eyes hadn’t even been closed yet; they stared up at a chandelier where a spider was busy spinning his web, and it seemed as if Kata was angry at him for doing that. She looked just like that, no different. This must have been a sign; the older women would have to know what it meant when a dead person saw a spider spinning a web. Did it mean that Kata had worked hard in her life and would now go to heaven to rest, or did it mean something else? And perhaps the sign had nothing to do with the deceased but had something to do with her home? Had fate spun a web of misfortune over this home, and was the worst yet to come? Some recoiled a little at this thought, and two women crossed themselves.

“Poor Kata, and she gave birth to five children,” one said.

“Not five but six; one of them died from the Spanish flu,” another corrected her.

“That wasn’t her child; it was her sister’s,” the first retorted.

“What’re you talking about? Her sister gave birth to three, and all of them are still alive,” her neighbor said, ready for a fight.

“Are you both crazy, what sister? She doesn’t have any sisters besides Angelina. Those are her uncle’s children,” a third woman said.

“Shut up, goddammit,” a large man hissed at them. He was most likely the first woman’s husband, and he jerked her by the arm and pushed her behind his back. There she kept grumbling for a while but eventually fell silent.

“Look, the dough on her hands still hasn’t dried. .”

“She’s clenching those fists so hard they would crush a rock if she were holding one. .”

“It was her heart, her heart, I’m telling you.”

“Or a blood vessel in her brain burst.”

“No, no, when a vessel bursts in the brain, the face is disfigured, and look at Kata: everything is just like it was.”

“Even better than it was! All her worries have disappeared.”

“Lord, she looks so beautiful.”

“And young, the poor woman.”

Gentle voices filled the room; one compliment and admiring remark came after another. Kata hadn’t heard this much praise lavished on her in all her life. Regina stood hard as a stone to one side; she wanted to shout and chase the vermin away, but her voice wouldn’t do it, and her joints were as soft as cotton. The crowd of people soon stopped noticing her; they kept coming and pushing in front of her, and soon she found herself leaning against a wall in a corner of the kitchen, all alone and far away from her dead mother. She would have remained like that until evening while the audience kept changing if her brothers Đuzepe, Bepo, and Đovani hadn’t arrived within five minutes of one another.