Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“What are you doing with my mother?!” the oldest thundered, and in the blink of an eye the kitchen and house began to empty. Their neighbors, ashamed, their eyes fixed on the floor, hurried out. Chairs scraped the floor and rattled; the door slammed against the wall; one heard a muffled groan from a squashed corn; they ran like children when someone smashes a window at a school. Maybe not even two minutes had passed and they were alone, the four of them, along with Kata’s clenched fists. Bepo closed her eyes, Đuzepe started quietly crying, and Đovani turned pale and started trembling. The boy had never seen a corpse before.

A little later Aunt Angelina, Kata’s sister, came running, carrying Luka in her arms. She started wailing as soon as she reached the door. The little one said nothing and waited for his aunt to put him on the floor, and she didn’t do it for too long. Instead she carried him around the table as she lamented, “My sister, my dear heart, these poor orphans were born of your flesh and blood. .”

Then she bent down over dead Kata still holding Luka in her arms, but the child was heavy and nearly caused her to lose her balance. When she realized what she was doing and that it made no sense, Angelina tried to extricate herself:

“Okay, dearest, kiss your mother one last time!”

Almost upside down, Luka kissed Kata on the cheek. He did that calmly and without any fear. He knew that his mother was dead by the fact that she wasn’t moving. That’s not so bad, he thought; you just stop moving and that’s it. He wouldn’t remember that happening. He would forget it so completely that he laughed when Regina tried to remind him of it much later. She also mentioned his hysterical Aunt Angelina and the kiss on Kata’s cheek on that crazy and joyful night when he returned forty years later from Trieste and was himself bidding farewell to life. But Luka only laughed and waved his hands, as if driving away the annoying specters of invented nightmares.

“And what’ll we do now?” Đuzepe asked stupidly.

“We’ll wait and everything will happen by itself,” Bepo said calmly and straightened out his mother’s legs and put her hands together across her breast. Aunt Angelina sat by the stove and mumbled the two prayers that she knew at all, the Our Father and the Hail Mary. Đovani’s blood returned to his head; he grinned sarcastically at his aunt and tried to get her to notice.

But Kata’s sister didn’t see anything any more, nor did she hear what was going on around her. She fell into that special metaphysical trance that seizes non-religious women and those free of the Holy Spirit who are inclined to fashionable shouts and submissive in the face of all folk traditions. She devotedly recited her mantra and swayed like an eastern mystic, actually enjoying everything that was happening and what was yet to happen. It would have been unfair to say that she didn’t pity her sister; she loved her purely and devotedly, as do people with simple hearts and souls without a great deal of intelligence. But that was no reason at all not to give herself over to a long, attractive series of post-mortem rituals and customs. Soon everyone would come to her to express their condolences. She would buy a black hat and veil, faint behind her sister’s corpse, and firm male hands would take her under the arms and lead her all the way to the grave. She would speak words of her greatest sorrow, yield to a poetic delirium, and — what was most important— everyone would listen to her. Her mourning would make their skin crawl. It would be a long time before they forgot the moment Kata Sikirić was committed to the earth, that poor woman who was the mother of five living children and a sixth that had died in her arms. Angelina would make it so that all the other funerals would be forgotten after that one greatest, most mournful, and most beautiful funeral of all. She would spill her tears before them like pearls, humiliate them with her talent for sorrow, and elevate the deceased woman to a place that she should have had while she was alive but that wasn’t granted to her by these heartless people.

But Aunt Angelina was wretched in fact. She was as good as gold and dull as an ax used for chopping beechwood. Wicked Đovani was practicing his first pubescent ironies on her. Bepo was too ashamed to look at her. The simpleminded Đuzepe tried to comfort her. He put his hands on her shoulders and brushed the tears from her cheeks, as if the death of his mother were a trifle compared to the tragedy of Angelina, whose sister had died. In fact, he could have been her son because he resembled his aunt more than anyone in the family, and it was no wonder that he loved her most. She was closer to him than his mother Kata because she didn’t expect anything from him, nor did she compare him to other children but let him be what he was: the odd one in the family, a kind of timid mountain creature to which civilization only caused torment and for whom school was the source of the greatest fear in his life. After the news arrived that Đuzepe had been murdered in cold blood in a Chetnik reprisal, only his Aunt Angelina would light a candle for him, shed a tear, and say a hundred Our Fathers and Hail Marys. No one else cared, or they felt relieved that he would no longer show up in the family house and remind the world that it was composed of countless oddities but that most of them cause people awkwardness and shame. The Sikirićes felt shame on their own account but also for Angelina and Đuzepe, which is also the reason they didn’t like them very much.

Regina said nothing; almost all the feelings a living being can bear deep in its heart were mixing and blurring in her head. She wasn’t sure whether she mourned that woman, whether it hurt her that her mother would forever be under the ground she walked on, or whether she was happy that the one according to whose standards her world also had to be tailored was gone. Kata hadn’t forced her to do anything, nor did she mention marriage, though from her perspective twenty-two years was the final deadline for a woman to lie under a man and start bearing his children. But just the fact that she was as she was, that she breathed next to her and worked around the house from dawn to dusk, created awkwardness for Regina. Now that she was gone, there wouldn’t be any awkwardness either. Her little fists covered with dough would never move again. Those little fists that protruded from oversized sleeves covered with countless images of camomile flowers that had faded from washing. She’d watched those sleeves and flowers from the day she was born, and they’d been getting tinier and tinier, paler and paler. She didn’t remember ever having seen her in another blouse. And now she was looking at those flowers for the last time. They wouldn’t fade any more; they wouldn’t exist any more. They were a grievous source of sadness for Regina, a grief the size of the universe with which we see off holy women when they leave this world. Women who during their lives don’t do anything to call into question the pure innocence of the sleeve of their only blouse.

The silence and calm surrounding the dead Kata lasted less than an hour. Then Father Ivan knocked on the door, a black raven that had already somehow learned about the latest deceased in his parish. Bepo let him in without a word, and Angelina readily jumped up from her chair to join the ritual, while the others pretended the priest didn’t exist. Đovani cleaned his fingernails, Regina didn’t take her eyes off the field of chamomile, and Đuzepe ran outside. He was afraid of priests because he didn’t know what to do in their presence— when to cross himself, when to mumble something, and when to fold his hands piously. He did, however, remember that he’d gotten more thrashings from catechism instructors than from all other teachers combined. And they beat him like a rented mule because he endured it and never cried. They thought that Đuzepe was spiting them and kept to the age-old pedagogical principle according to which one should thrash a boy until his tear glands dry up.