Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Kata felt a chill around her heart, and she knew that it would never go away. He would keep going off to work at the harbor at dawn, come back home at the same time, hurry to finish lunch as quickly as possible, and sit down on the stool and sort his nails and sigh until evening. At night his trembling would wake her up, she would put her hands on his shoulders to get him to calm down, and she would change the feathers in his pillow at least three times a year because his tears made them rot and smell. She wondered why he was like that, tried to fathom his unhappiness, tried to get him to talk, and when that didn’t work, she wouldn’t say a word for months. If only something would happen sometime. But nothing ever did! He did the same things every day and every night, and it wasn’t granted to Kata by God to get through to what he was thinking.

And how else could she love him, other than to keep up appearances and because she didn’t know anything else? Kata’s heart was pure but emptier and emptier so that in the end doubt crept into it. That happened a few months before Luka was born. Drop by drop, she was filling with a poison that didn’t differ from the poison in those women whose husbands vanished every Friday. She began to spy on him; she would jump out of bed whenever he would go off to the toilet at night, but she couldn’t catch him doing anything wrong. She didn’t find out that he was secretly throwing the wrong nails in the wrong boxes so he could sort them out again the next day. Her hunch that he was deceiving her first brought rage, but when she thought that maybe he wasn’t deceiving her and that there was always a fair amount of nails in the wrong box, Kata felt bad. She pitied her husband and was disgusted with herself. How could she have come up with something so wicked?! If the conscience was an organ for measuring a man’s sins, then Kata’s sin was terrible. The heavens were alarmed by it, and it was a miracle that in those days a thunderbolt didn’t strike her in the forehead.

That was how it seemed from Kata’s perspective, but from the perspective of those who would never learn of her sin or understand it if they were told about it, it was a very small one. As small as the motivations of a man’s conscience relative to the whole world. It didn’t matter when there was or wasn’t a God above him.

Kata’s other sins also involved her husband. She would blow up at him and would even shout, and once she even swore at him, standing in his face. She wanted him to hit her; she needed a slap like that more than someone under the surface of the sea needs air. Life could begin with a slap in the face. But he didn’t hit her, nor did he answer her. He only mumbled something that sounded like an apology or a plea to leave him with his nails.

And so in Kata’s soul the curse she’d uttered changed from its original meaning and became something inappropriate and unbearably shameful. She didn’t swear any more, not even out of habit, not even in those circumstances when swearwords replaced happy and innocent words that didn’t exist in the language. In this Kata was alone in a city in which it would happen that even the most timid lamb of God, the wife of a missing seaman, or a nun would let spicy words slip from their tongues at the drop of a hat. The sin of swearing was for her as hard to bear as a homecoming is for a defeated army.

In the midst of a rainy autumn, an army of desperate men covered with wounds, bitter and weary of their fate, was returning to homes that the enemy had thoroughly destroyed, to loved ones who in their own agonies had lost compassion for the agony of others. These were soldiers with no decorations for bravery and without any opportunity to substitute the heroism of the past for the life they were living.

So that was what Kata felt after she’d sworn in vain, but whether she had a vision of those defeated men who returned from captivity in the years after 1918, as late as the late ’20s, it is impossible to know. Maybe she did because she saw them with her own eyes as they made their way south toward Trebinje, passing through the city and continuing over the Arslanagić Bridge, without a single one of several hundred saying a word or lifting his gaze from the dirt. With their soldiers’ caps pulled down over their ears, with fezzes that seemed completely out of place (as when Emperor and King Franz Joseph II had tried to portray himself as the father of his Muslim children), with officers’ epaulettes from which the gold insignias of the glorious monarchy had fallen. They walked homeward barefoot or in tattered boots, men who’d done everything to try to keep everything from being the way it was and to prevent the destruction of a state that they might not have loved but to which they were indebted, the way a wife is indebted to her husband. They owed their lives to it, and it was only that chance hadn’t wanted to lay them down in the middle of Galicia, on the River Soča, Mt. Meletta, or somewhere amid nameless Albanian gorges.

It, the state, had already been very old and tired, without interest in its subjects, obsessed only with its wish to meet its end as painlessly as possible. It would have been futile to fight for it and try to rouse it from its dead slumber, but what else could those wretched soldiers do? Only what Kata kept trying to do with her own man. They couldn’t understand how the empire had fallen into a stupor and how one soul had broken up into several, into as many souls as the monarchy had peoples and tribes. But they sensed that there was a diabolical plan behind it all, an insanity that would consume anyone to whom God didn’t give the luxury of playing silly games in rhythm and harmony with the way states do it. Nor could Kata figure out what was wrong with her husband, why he was as he was on the inside, when on the outside everything seemed normal and according to regulations, in accordance with stories that told how the life of each of God’s creatures would pass.

“Allah the Good created woman to take precautions for himself. If it weren’t for her, the devil would have cast a spell on man. But He, the Great One, planned ahead for that and created woman in the image of the devil. The difference was only in the fact that He replaced the sea of the devil’s wickedness with a drop of His own goodness. And now it is on each of us to charm our husbands because if we don’t do it, the devil will cast his spell on them. That’s the way it is, daughter, and think about how you’ll do it. But remember that you don’t have a lot of time. The devil is as quick as a rabbit, and you can only beat him with what you’ve got between your legs.”

That was what a sorceress named Halima said one year in Blagaj when Kata went to her to inquire about herbs and compresses, spells and amulets, anything that might bring her man back to life. At that time she’d already given birth to two children and might have known that for him the spell of her loins was smaller than a grain of sand and slower than a turtle, but Halima was persistent and everyone said that she knew her work.

“If once isn’t enough for him, then give it to him twice, give it to him a hundred times each night, until you finally wake him up. It can’t be any different, and the problem isn’t in him. If he’s a man, and he is, and if you’re a woman, and you are, then mount him, and don’t stop until the devil gives up. It’s a war between you and the devil. And remember: your man can’t help you in this. Don’t blame him, and don’t curse him because God will curse you!”

Kata returned from Blagaj afraid. She knew that there was nothing to do except what the sorceress had said, even if she didn’t believe a word of it. And not even the Almighty could have been sure whether she believed her or not, not even if he’d been keeping track of Kata and her sins and virtues. She herself didn’t know what to do. There was no one to tell her, nor had she ever heard of a case similar to hers. So she did what was most logical.