Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

After Stjepo there came at least thirty or so neighbors to the Sikirić house— women and widowers, old ladies, unmarried girls, those who were doing penitence for having enjoyed the image of dead Kata, and those who, like Stjepo, came out of the goodness of their hearts. Each one brought a pot, pan, plate, or skillet. . On the kitchen table were dishes of cod alla bianco and cod stews, cod alla rosso, marinated sprats, all kinds of seafood stews, shellfish, crabs, conger eels, salted sardine cakes, marinated mackerel, one monkfish stew and one bean stew, corn stew from some poor devil, and fried sardines dried in packing paper. When the holiday delights no longer fit on the table, Regina started lining them up on a festive white tablecloth that she’d spread out on the floor under a window. Here there was walnut bread and fruitcake, carob cakes and dried fig cakes, and a whole pile of fried dough and dark-flour fritters. People brought the dishes, and each one would say two or three words and leave. Outside it was dark; it was going on nine o’clock when they began to get ready for the midnight Mass, and the bustle continued.

The family members were confused, and then they were seized with a strange kind of hysterical exhilaration. Only Aunt Angelina nodded reluctantly, kept saying the Our Father and the Hail Mary halfway through, and broke off in the middle of the prayer, which no longer made sense because the spirit of mourning had been stifled in a way that was incomprehensible to her.

“I’m off to my sister,” she said indignantly and went into the bedroom. Luka started after her, but Đuzepe grabbed him and pulled him up into his arms. The child’s chin started to quiver, and a second later his eyes were full of tears.

“Now your brother will show you how airplane pilots fly,” Đuzepe said and threw him up in the air one more time and then over and over again.

“Do it again! Do it again!” the boy cried, spread his arms, and waited for the moment when he wouldn’t fall back down but would stay suspended in the air like a seagull and fly through the kitchen on his own. And he knew that it would happen sooner or later, which was why he asked his brother to throw him up every day but only when they were alone because Regina and Bepo got mad when Đuzepe did it.

When Luka was a baby, he’d thrown him up in the air like that, and once he threw him up too hard and Luka stuck to the ceiling like a pancake. Luka didn’t remember that, but everyone said that was what had happened. Except Đuzepe. Đuzepe said it hadn’t happened like that and would throw him up in the air whenever they were by themselves. But now they weren’t alone, and no one was getting angry about it anyway. That was because their mother had died and was no longer moving. It was good when Christmastime came and mother died and everyone was in a good mood and no one thought anything bad would happen, that hot milk would spill all over the floor, that Luka would play with a knife and cut his finger, that his big brother would make him stick to the ceiling like a pancake, or that his sister would cry because that time of the month had come again. Which time of the month? Luka didn’t know, but everyone always said that and giggled as if they’d farted softly and it really stank. Everyone plugged their noses except the one who did it. That one giggled, and that was how you knew that he’d farted. Most often it was Đovani who farted and giggled, and Regina never farted. Women didn’t fart; Luka was sure of that.

Đuzepe threw him up in the air and caught him in his arms for a long time, up until the boy got dizzy and asked him to put him down. The floor swayed under his feet; he stumbled twice among the plates and pots. The chairs that Bepo, Đovani, and Regina were sitting on, each in a corner, rocked back and forth. Bepo laughed briefly and stopped as if he’d remembered something; Đovani slapped his knees: “Ha, ha, ha!” And then his sister started laughing like crazy.

“He shouldn’t do this,” Đuzepe said, laughing. “He shouldn’t do this at all,” he kept saying when he caught his breath. Regina couldn’t get up, her eyes were tearing up, and she was already completely wet; a feeling of the coming disaster spread throughout her body. If the end of the world came, those who knew what had happened would laugh just like this.

In the bedroom lay Kata, ready for the grave. Aunt Angelina had lain down beside her and immediately fallen asleep. One could hear the murmur of thousands of people who, on the only night when the living stay up, were going to churches, calling out to one another across inlets or standing alone in the harbor, looking into the black seawater between the boats and feeling sorry for themselves. The living Sikirićes saw one more Christmas.

That night they ate and drank like never before. They talked over one another, praised the food, told each other everything they would otherwise have kept silent, everything that got lost in the dead silence of brotherly and sisterly antipathy. It was strange to be one of five children of the same father and mother and for almost nothing to tie you to the others. And then there comes a time to reassemble a disassembled world, for shared words to gush forth, and for little wonders to multiply, which give people the strength to live on long afterward.

Christmas Eve in that year of 1927 was a moment of the closest bonding— and in a strange way happiness too— in the lives of Kata’s children. If history were measured in the lives of last survivors, then in the history that ended on the day Regina Delavale née Sikirić died in a delirium, there was no greater holiday. Unfortunately, no one would ever write down or tell what they said to one another, what little bits of tenderness they exchanged, or how much anguish and distrust they erased with their laughter. All five of them would fall asleep on the kitchen floor, with crusts of bread in their hands and eels’ heads in their laps, and wake up hung over and with headaches, without the lesson that sudden happiness brings to the heroes of fairy tales. Nothing of that experience remained with them. The kitchen was full of trash, their dead mother lay in the other room, and Aunt Angelina stood like a statue, pressing her face with her fists, her eyes bulging, sure that she’d lost her mind and that what she was seeing couldn’t be true. She couldn’t remember falling asleep, but what she saw said that in the meantime something horrible had happened.

Christmas passed in silence, fear, and headaches. Đovani was kneeling in front of the toilet bowl and vomiting. That was the first time he had been drunk, and for the next fifteen years, until the apparitions of Orthodox saints and his intoxication with revenge, it would remain the only time. Đuzepe didn’t dare look his aunt in the eye. He emptied pots of half-eaten codfish, and she took them and washed them without a word. Luka slept with his head on Regina’s lap. She stroked his hair and thought about the time that would pass before that little boy became a man and began taking care of himself and left. When kittens lose their mothers, they totter about in yards and streets, tumble head over heels down stairways, and their meows won’t let people sleep. The moment you hear them, you know that tonight or one of the following nights some sleepy man will run out of his house and break the back of the first kitten he finds. In the morning worried women will catch the other little animals, wring their necks like chickens, or drown them in shallow pools of seawater. One kitten nevertheless survives. The one that’s the strongest or the luckiest. He continues the species and prolongs the suffering of the cat world. And its happiness, too, if animals know what that is. And so that’s why cats have so many young. Not all of them ever survive. But children are born one by one, and someone has to care for them when they lose their mothers. She was fated to care for Luka. She would do that the best she could, as long as she had the strength, until she was overcome with despair and the boy got up on his own two feet.