Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Bepo went to Father Ivan to see when the funeral would be, but the priest had left for somewhere in Herzegovina to conduct a Christmas Mass. Fat Adžem, a lay friar and the priest’s assistant in all affairs secular and religious, had been dead drunk since the early morning, slurred his words, and offered Bepo herbed brandy. He almost fell down the stairs when he accompanied Bepo out of his office. Antonijo the usher was spending the holiday in contemplation, somewhere on the Elaphite Islands, so there was no one to take care of funerals. The municipal building was locked; people were celebrating, some in church, others at table, still others with a bottle in their hands, each in his own way and in accordance with his own sense of God. People went from church to church, and as the Masses began at different times, their morning passed at divine services.

That evening everyone would discuss how things had been in which church and which priest had had the best Christmas sermon. They would gossip about Father Ivan because he had, as always, left his parish for the holiday and left the church to two young priests from the Bay of Kotor whose dreams of celebrating Christmas Mass in the city had come true, and he had gone off to some one-horse village near Gacko, where there were maybe twenty Catholics in all. It was there that some Andro a.k.a. Kismet had built a church all made of marble so that he might atone for his sins, which he, as was told, had racked up while working as a mine supervisor in Australia. Andro a.k.a. Kismet had killed and raped, the God-fearing people whispered, though they’d never seen Andro. And what they heard about him was so unreliable that it would have been no wonder if it turned out that no one by that name and nickname had ever existed. The story about him was important only in one respect: at the end people said that Father Ivan received a handsome sum of money for his trips to hold Christmas Mass there, and he put it all in his own pocket.

After kissing the gate to the municipal building and inquiring in vain about what to do with his dead mother, Bepo came home with the job unfinished. Aunt Angelina had washed all the dishes, Regina had swept the kitchen, and it seemed that everything was again in the best order. Indeed, just as it had been until the previous day, before Kata had stuck her fingers into the dough and couldn’t get them out again alive. But no one, not even Aunt Angelina, was glad that noon had already passed and the deceased hadn’t been taken away. And what was worst, Bepo couldn’t say when the medical examiners would come. Luka played by rushing off toward the other room. Regina would catch him in her arms and slap his hands, but the boy wouldn’t quit. He knew that his mother lay inside, that she was no longer moving, and that this was the reason why no one was letting him into the room. He didn’t know what his dead mother might do, but why should he be afraid of it? He could tell that Regina was afraid, which was enough for fun. It was easy to play with adults when they were worried about you and weren’t playing at all. It was harder when they wanted to play and didn’t know how to do it.

“God help us, she’s starting to smell!” Aunt Angelina said and crossed herself.

“It can’t be; it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours,” Bepo said and shook his head.

“Oh, yes she has; can’t you smell it? It’s the south wind, damn her!” Aunt Angelina insisted.

Nothing stank of course, and least of all Kata’s corpse, but the mere thought of that was enough for one’s nostrils to sniff the sweetish smell of flesh through which blood no longer flowed, the smell of a slaughterhouse, an open grave, a stuffy cemetery chapel, a cave with animal remains, everything that occurs to people who have ever smelled the stench of a human corpse and imagine it to be a compound of all known unpleasant odors. Regina tried to no avail to change the subject, and it didn’t even help that neighbors were coming every so often again and asking if they needed anything and taking away their plates and pots.

“The deceased is starting to smell, God forgive me, my sister!” Aunt Angelina would squeal, and any neighbors there made sure to get out as soon as possible. Thus noon passed and evening fell on Christmas Day. No one turned on the light; they each sat in their corners; Luka fell asleep in his sister’s lap, and one could hear Aunt Angelina sniffing the air and announcing a catastrophe like a blind, deaf dachshund. On that night of horror everyone except for the little brother would experience moments when they hated their mother Kata with a hatred greater than any love. Kata would luckily never learn that each of her children, except the youngest and the one who’d died, had hidden her on Christmas Eve. That would have horrified her. She would have gone crazy. She would have died four times in a row, or her soul would have moved in between the covers of the holy books, where holy women, saints, and prophets endured their eternal torments together with the Son of God, who in a spectacular way had ended the history of the suffering of holy men, whereupon the history of sinners began.

By the standards of the time in which she lived, Kata Sikirić was in every respect sinful, and it wasn’t unusual for her own children to renounce her when they smelled the false smell of her death in their nostrils.

Just as every whole human story starts from the end, it would be better to examine the list of Kata’s sins from the last to the first. A month before her death she complained that she hadn’t grown snobbish in time, that she’d fallen for the first man who looked at her, that she hadn’t finished school and run far away but had instead borne him children one after another and built a tower to heaven and created six times what the Lord created only once when He created Adam and Eve. She scorned the Lord— if He even existed! But everything she thought and felt was put together and imagined as if He existed. Kata could imagine that there was no God; as more misfortunes accumulated in her life, that possibility seemed more and more probable. But she couldn’t imagine that there was anything under the vault of heaven that wouldn’t be in accord with the holy teachings. In short: maybe God hadn’t created Adam and Eve, but there was no doubt at all that Eve had eaten the apple.

And what happened to make Kata complain about her lack of haughtiness? One morning while she was waiting for the bread dough to rise, she took Regina’s magazines from the window. She liked to flip through them; they were full of the wonders of the world, photographs of big cities and famous men and women whose biographies were likewise wonders of the world. No less than saints’ lives. However, these miracles weren’t made of goodness and suffering but something else. Kata didn’t know what, nor did she feel like thinking about that kind of thing.

Well, that morning she read about the death of a woman named Isadora Duncan in World magazine. She’d been a dancer, the widow of a Russian poet who’d committed suicide, and the whole world was at her feet. It’s too bad that you only learn about people like that when they die, she thought, midway through the article, and by the time she’d finished it, Kata was desperate and was convinced that she herself could have saved Isadora Duncan’s life. And who was the cow that had woven Isadora such a long shawl? Because if her shawl hadn’t been so long, it wouldn’t have gotten wound around that car tire, and she would still be alive. Why was the shawl so long? It must have dragged in the dirt before she died. Isadora must have had to take care not to step on it when she was hurrying to the theater and make sure the ends didn’t end up in the mud as soon as it started raining. Otherwise she would have had to wash it all the time. And when you wash shawls like that too often, the colors fade. Maybe it would have been better for the unfortunate woman to have thrown it away after three washings; then this wouldn’t have happened. Or if she’d thought twice about the witch who wove such long shawls before buying anything from her. That woman must have charged for their length. The longer the shawl, the more expensive it was. In faraway places more lace certainly cost more than less lace. That’s how it was in other countries: everything came with a price and nothing was done out of love.