Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

If she’d been born a few hundred years earlier, she would have turned to her confessor; if her life had been in the time in which her great grandchildren were to live, she’d have written a letter to a women’s magazine or— what was least likely given the topography of Kata’s soul— gone to a psychiatrist.

As it was, she went to the most renowned sorceress in the area, one of a handful whose reputations had spread to all the cities and villages of the kingdom, among subjects whose fates needed to be redirected and who needed someone to offer them a sense of happiness and a modicum of human harmony.

At the same time she stuck to the rule that it was better to go to a sorceress of a different faith because her judgments would be more reliable and accurate. If a woman oppressed by troubles was already consenting to the sin of superstition, which was forbidden under pain of hellfire in all four faiths in the kingdom, then she’d better do it up right. No matter how sinful the sorceress was herself— much more sinful than the wretched women who sought help— it was better if both of them weren’t guilty before the same temple. Because of that and for reasons of a metaphysical nature, sorceresses and prophetesses had the highest value in the predominantly Christian kingdom, and it even happened that occasionally a less popular sorceress would assume a phony Turkish name.

Thus one Persida, formerly a prostitute from the Belgrade area, was known in her new job as Fatima, but soon she had to flee before the furious people of her village. No one ever heard of her again, but it seems likely that she continued to deal in fortune-telling and spells somewhere where no one knew about who she really was. Maybe in Romania or Hungary, and it wasn’t impossible that Persida or Fatima made it to the West, to Vienna, Paris, or Berlin, where sorceresses from the Balkans were already making good money. They passed themselves off as Gypsies and usually opened their studios near Jewish quarters, along promenades where prostitutes walked, or attached themselves to circuses and amusement parks. Fortune-telling, tarot cards, and exorcisms of spells became so important in the ’20s that it seemed that the European continent was being seized by a kind of metaphysical panic sparked by technological progress and the consequences of the war and that the true faith and religious institutions could be saved only by a great inquisitional project or an ideological insanity that would vanquish superstition and restore religious models again. When ten years later Hitler took complete control of the German spirit and the biggest part of Europe, this assumption would be proved correct. The Nazis didn’t persecute sorceresses and witches because there was no need for that. Their work had lost all its meaning. The people’s fear of fate had disappeared, so they could close their studios and move to parts of Europe where the majority of people were not sympathetic to the Führer’s earthly mission.

Kata’s fear of what she had to do was of course unwarranted. She mounted her man as French ladies mount a horse and barely got off him until the end of their life together. He had no less stamina than a horse, and it seemed that his male member was a person in and of itself, completely different from the one that lived in his head and heart. That other one of him was somehow serene and always ready, free from somber moods, but unable to get its little head to influence the bigger one. Her man consented to nightly fucks that would have completely drained anyone else, but he would also have consented to anything else, except for her to take his boxes of nails away. Kata’s tenacity didn’t make him happier or unhappier, but that endless intercourse did her good. She imagined she was driving the devil out of him, played, tried to kill that devil, fell from heavenly heights into soft feathery abysses, smashed into a thousand crystals and at the next moment became whole again, wept like a flock of widows, and fell off his cock crazed with laughter as if the devil had just moved from his soul to hers.

If in the daytime life with that man was like touching her tongue to a rusty anchor, the minutes and hours spent with him at night intoxicated her with a morphinic insanity. If she had been different and inclined to drunkenness and continually taking leave of her own soul, Kata might have been able to be happy with him. As it was, she didn’t know how to exchange her life for the moments of pleasure in life.

She took herself off him only in the days right before she gave birth, and her sexual desire for him would return to her as early as a week or two afterward. She would hurt awfully, cramp up, and howl when she was pierced by his white hot sword, but she didn’t give up. She wanted him to ask something at least once, to tell her they shouldn’t really be doing that if she’d just given birth, to show himself to be living and feel that she was living too and that she hurt. Maybe that wasn’t Kata’s most difficult trial or the worst agony that she’d endured in her attempts to awaken her man from his eternal slumber. But it was the greatest pain, greater than any of her six childbirths. When you give birth, you can’t quit, so by virtue of that it’s easier, whereas at any moment in her torment with him she could have and wanted to slip his cock out of her. Stubbornness or something else on account of which she didn’t want to quit either having sex with him or living with him wouldn’t let her do it. Maybe that made Kata greater and braver than we acknowledged at the start, greater and braver than any of her children would ever imagine.

They didn’t actually know her, nor did she know them. She raised them calmly and without passion. She would rarely grow worried, and they didn’t plague her with what mothers fear. It never occurred to her that one of her children could die in a fever. She prepared compresses with vinegar, put socks soaked in brandy on their feet, watched over their nightmares and frights, but she wasn’t afraid.

When three-year-old Lino died in 1915 from the Spanish flu, she sat down at the head of his bed, caressed his hair, cried softly, and grieved it down just as softly. Neither a dead child nor five living ones could tear her away from her obsession with her attempts to make a normal man of her husband.

After the children all fell asleep, she would slip into the bedroom, lock the door, shut the windows and plug every opening with rags, and climb onto him without checking whether he was awake and begin her struggle with the devil. It didn’t matter that the war was already long lost; she continued what she was doing and didn’t know about anything else.

The children probably didn’t wake up at night and didn’t come looking for her, and if they did, the noise didn’t reach Kata. How could it have when the shame felt by children is so great, greater than everything that will happen in the future, greater than the cosmos and the little histories of the people in it? If any of them heard their mother howling and crying, saying words like “cunt” and “cock,” repeating “fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. .” in the dead of the night, and at the next moment when she went crazy and everything in the room— walls, the closet, the light fixture— had a soul and the soul of everything was wet and hot, if any of them heard their mother howl “split my big fat ass, stab my cunt, devil, flood into this whore, you beast”— if any of Kata’s children had heard that (and the unfortunate thing was that Regina did hear it), then Kata’s futile struggle and suffering would have continued even after she was no longer among the living. And it lasted until Regina breathed her last breath.

On the morning of St. Stephen’s Day in 1927 Kata lay dead on the same marriage bed, her hands folded on her breast— there was just enough space for a candle to fit between her fingers, if her family wanted that— without a pillow under her head and long since cold and stiff. Outside the sirocco was blowing; Aunt Angelina was raising a panic because her sister was starting to smell and so her soul wouldn’t be able to find peace. Why? She didn’t know the answer, but she sensed that there must be something written about it in the holy scriptures. Little Luka was vomiting for the third time already; something had spoiled his stomach. Đuzepe was running around after his aunt like a chicken with its head cut off, assuring her that it was the cod that smelled and not his dead mother. Bepo kept quiet and sat on a stool by the stove, smoking one cigarette after another. Đovani was passing from his stage of cynicism to a higher stage of nervous disorder and looking on and off at his older brother, wanting to whack his muzzle with the cutting board and jam his cigarette down his throat. To kill him because he wasn’t doing anything. He sat and waited for something to happen, for someone to come for their mother and take her out of the house, just the way people take crocks of rotten sauerkraut out of their cellars.