Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Do you really want to know? If you do, ask him. I think he’ll be happy to tell you,” said Dijana, and no matter how insulted she was, she felt a lot better. She was sure that they wouldn’t send crazy Manda back to her. They had no way of doing it, if they didn’t send her through the mail.

“His nerves are gone. Otherwise, he’s a good physician, probably the best in the city. You know, that’s old age for you,” the young woman said, embarrassed.

“Fine, and tell me now, where’s my mother?” Dijana asked coldly.

“They just brought her back to the ward. .”

“Can I see her. .?”

“If you wish. .”

“Yes, I do; why wouldn’t I? Do you think anything could surprise me?”

“We had to tie her up,” the young doctor said to prepare her, but the words sounded more terrible than what they were supposed to communicate.

“That’s completely fine,” Dijana responded.

“It’s not a brain hemorrhage; her encephalogram was perfect, as with a completely healthy person.”

Dijana laughed and said, “I don’t doubt that a bit!”

They stood over a bed on which crazy Manda was lying on her back, without a pillow under her head, covered with a gray army blanket. Leather belts were fastened across her. She couldn’t look anywhere except up at the ceiling or at a battered dresser next to the bed. She was silent, which surprised Dijana, because in the last months she would swear and shout as soon as she woke up after an afternoon nap of an hour or two.

“Hey, grandma,” the young doctor called out, “look who’s come to see you.” But the old woman didn’t move or give any sign that she could hear her. From the rhythmic and regular blinking of her eyes one could see that she was awake and completely calm. Dijana didn’t know what to do. She would have liked most to turn around and leave, but that would be rude, maybe even dishonest toward the young woman who’d believed her and maybe still did. There was even a very small possibility that crazy Manda had miraculously disappeared just as she had miraculously appeared and that the bound old lady was that Regina Delavale that had disappeared one November morning, when some other woman in her body began cursing and breaking things. Dijana didn’t seriously believe this, but she didn’t dare do anything that she might later regret.

“Can she hear us?” she asked after ten minutes or so.

“I don’t know,” the doctor said and passed her palm in front of the old woman’s eyes. Crazy Manda blinked.

“Maybe we should untie her,” the young woman suggested. Dijana didn’t want to say “yes” or “no.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about this. .”

“Do you think I do? You’re her daughter; you decide,” she said, and it sounded malicious.

“I can’t take any more,” Dijana said and went out.

She stood leaning on a wall of the hallway, her hands behind her back, and didn’t know what to do. She remembered that she had forgotten the bag with things for crazy Manda somewhere, probably in the chief physician’s office. And then there was a scream in the room. She ran inside and found that crazy Manda had grabbed the young doctor by the throat. Dijana grabbed her hands and tried to break her old fingers. She shouted, and then two men in white overcoats ran in. One pushed Dijana away so hard that she fell and knocked over a lamp on the nightstand. She remained lying there even though she was fully conscious and composed because she thought that if she got up, she would be blamed for the fracas, the noise that sounded like two boards hitting each other; she saw the young doctor’s foot in a white wooden clog, dressed in what seemed like an orange child’s sock with images of soccer balls on it.

“Are you all right?” asked one of the men in the white overcoats, helping Dijana to get up while the other tried to shove a needle in crazy Manda’s behind. The young doctor was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed. Her hands lay still, and she was gasping for air.

“I’m fine,” Dijana answered, “it’s not my fault.”

They gave her a glass of water and took her to Dr. Vlahović, a young anesthesiologist who’d returned from his studies in Zagreb like some kind of medical celebrity, though he’d received offers from all over since he was one of the best students in the history of the school of medicine and was just as excellent in his specialization. They took him on though the hospital had no need for an anesthesiologist. The other three didn’t even really have work because the surgery wards were hardly in operation, partly due to the shortage of surgeons and partly due to completely unusable equipment, so the operable patients were sent to other hospitals and cities. But they took on Dr. Vlahović readily (just as a rural soccer club would accept a young Maradona), in the belief that with him they would have an easier time procuring money for the renovation of the hospital. In the ward he did work on general or internal medicine, did nothing at all, or when the south wind would blow and Onofri was particularly impatient, he would talk with the patients and their families.

He extended his hand to Dijana and said, “Ares,” but at first she didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean. Only later, when she read Dr. Ares Vlahović, Anesthesiologist on the door to his office, would she realize that he had told her his name, something that physicians never do and that would confirm for Dijana his impeccable finesse, which she would use to explain Ares’s tragic demise.

“The unfortunate woman is completely psychotic. The folksy phrase doesn’t sound nice, but it’s true: she’s a nut! You don’t need to say anything because I already know. It’s clear to me that this didn’t start today, and I can imagine what you’ve endured with her. I also know why you brought her to us. The psychiatric ward wouldn’t take her, right? The problem is that no matter how much we want to — and I do, and so does Dr. Fočić, whom you met — we can’t do anything for your mother in this ward. I know that this must be terrible for you, but it’s a fact that the whole system will collapse because of one such case. We’re no longer caring for those whom we could care for,” he said in a calm and quiet tone, in which there was both understanding and cold reason.

“But I can’t take her back home!” she cried out.

“Believe me, I understand that and would never try to force you to do that or try to persuade you to. We’ll try to keep her here on account of the injuries on her hands as long as we can. But that won’t be long. No more than two or three days. In the meantime we’ll have to come up with some other solution.”

That evening saw the occurrence of everything that would lead to the death of Regina Delavale, or crazy Manda. First off, a little after Dijana left for home, chief physician Onofri would burst into Dr. Vlahović’s office like a fury and accost him with the question of who had authorized him to keep the psychotic old woman in the ward. Was he aware of all the regulations he was violating and how he was endangering the lives of the patients and risking the human dignity of the staff? Ares told him that for him the Hippocratic Oath was above all that, whereupon Onofri laughed cynically and pointed out that for his young colleague it was pussy that was above all else and that was the only reason he’d come back from Zagreb. He could hide the way he treated the pretty Dr. Fočić from others, but not from him. That was when Ares blew up.

“I won’t stand for this!” he shouted, which Onofri understood as a challenge to a fight. He overturned the desk with his computer and lunged at his junior colleague. At that moment, to compound the tragedy, the young doctor walked in, which prevented a fist fight but served as new evidence for the chief physician’s claim. What was she doing here if she wasn’t on duty? And she should have left the hospital four hours ago.