Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Her soul will start to smell; they won’t let her into heaven like that,” wailed Aunt Angelina.

Regina looked at her aunt, then at Đovani. She took Luka off her lap and stealthily started to go to her mother’s room before something terrible happened.

“Don’t open that door!” Đovani yelled.

Regina went in, took a blanket out of the closet, and folded it up by the door. Like that the smell wouldn’t spread out of the room. Then she sat down by Kata’s legs, gave a deep sigh, and put her hands down into her lap. She could feel Luka’s weight in them. The tingling of a child to whom she hadn’t given birth but who was hers as much as one human being can belong to another. Her little brother was the biggest worry of her life. And now he’d been left an orphan, she thought, and almost reflexively sniffled. She could smell the scent of fresh starch, which reminded her of spring and children’s illnesses. Her mother had changed all their sheets once a week, and when someone would fall ill in the middle of the week, she would change their sheets once more. It was nice to be sick when you were a child, she continued thinking, and sniffled quickly once more. Or she was just sniffing the air in the room. What could one smell apart from starch? The stench of wormwood from the side panels of the bed and the distant hint of rose oil. Was that the smell of death? It probably was because there hadn’t ever been any rose oil in their house. But no matter what was smelling of roses, that was the most distant smell that Regina could detect. Her mother, of course, hadn’t started smelling. She knew that the whole time, but she couldn’t tell them. And she didn’t have anyone to tell. No one could tell Aunt Angelina anything. She was crazy, crazed by who she was and not by anything loopy in her head. She was completely clear in her head, which was why her insanity was so stubborn. She would open a fashion magazine, yell, and fall into a trance as if she’d seen Jesus walking on water. She couldn’t believe that such a beautiful dress existed! She couldn’t believe that there were such beautiful women, like the one wearing that dress! She couldn’t believe that technology had advanced so much that a photograph looked like it had a living woman in it! Here, she was going to walk right out of that fashion magazine, that most beautiful of women in that stunning dress; she would stroll right through their kitchen and run away because we’re so ugly! That was what crazy Aunt Angelina would think as soon as she opened a fashion magazine. For this reason they had to hide all the fashion magazines from her. She was unbearable. She was crazy. As she was now, while she was shouting that her sister wouldn’t get into heaven because she had started stinking while waiting for them to take her away. And unfortunately it was impossible to hide their mother from Aunt Angelina. It was too late to shove her under the bed. Although maybe that was what needed to be done, Regina thought. There wouldn’t be anything wicked in that. If they’d known what would happen and that over Christmas there wouldn’t be a funeral, they would have shoved her under the bed and shut up about it. No one, not even their aunt, would have known that Kata had died. And it would have been easier to get through all of this. As it was, they could only wait. It wasn’t easy for them, but it was nevertheless hardest for her, Regina. She alone was sure that her mother hadn’t started to smell. She was the only one who hadn’t been infected with her aunt’s insanity. She would have gladly opened the window, jumped out, run away, and wouldn’t have ever come back. It was simple to disappear in a world this big. It would have been futile to look for her. It was so easy when you were gone, she thought, when you were not where everything was yours and everything was crazy.

She got up and bent over her mother’s face. Kata’s skin was white as the stone on Stradun and grayish-blue like the sea before a storm. She bent closer and closer to her, with her hands behind her back, bending like a branch on which children have been hanging, until she nearly brushed her nose with the tip of her own. There she stopped. Her face broke into a phony smile; she grimaced, furrowed her brow, and stuck out her tongue, taking care not to touch Kata’s lips. When her spine could no longer take the weight, Regina straightened up, got to thinking for a moment, then strained and released a long, staccato fart. “There,” she whispered, and sniffed the air for a few seconds, but she could still only smell starch, wormwood, and the distant traces of rose oil. She was disappointed. She turned and went out of the room. She never saw her mother again.

The last thing that Rafo Sikirić saw were two swollen breasts, each one bouncing in a different direction. When the left one was up, the right one was down; when one went to the right as if it were going to tear away, the other went in its own direction, and then they went back and collided, and the sweaty skin smacked. He had to strain to make out that sound among the screams and sighs, words spoken out loud, the popping of the boards of the bed, the creaking of rusty springs, a buzzing in his ears. . That went on for years, him trying to hear the slapping of her breasts clearly, to register the moment when they both flew in the same direction, to recognize the sign that things were finally starting to work according to some logic. And then all of a sudden his eyes went dark, the tension vanished, every muscle slackened, and he felt like he was turning into a pancake.

His wife would bounce about on the pancake that was spreading out between her knees. Soon she would stop and with a deep sigh plop down onto the other side of the bed. A few seconds later she began to breathe normally, and Rafo knew that she had dropped off.

He rubbed his eyes for a long time until his sight came back. He slowly got off the bed, taking care not to wake her up, unlocked the door, and went barefoot out of the room. Regina was sleeping in the same bed as Luka. The boy had snuggled up to her as a baby chimp does to its mother. Bepo was snoring; Đuzepe was twitching in his sleep; Đovani was sleeping on the floor by the stove. There was always one child too many, and someone had to sleep on the floor. This was one more element of Rafo’s unease, proof that harmony wasn’t possible, and everything he set his eyes on confirmed that it was true.

There was one too much or one too little of everything. Nothing was just right. Everything was an odd number, and nothing allowed itself to be divided into two equal parts. And if there was an even number of something, then it couldn’t be divided three ways. . He closed his eyes at lunch so he wouldn’t have to count the grains of rice on his plate. He only looked up at the sky on cloudy nights.

He closed the doors behind him: first one, then another, and then a third— those that led outside. He slipped on his old shoes and started down the steps in his underwear and a shirt. It was three in the morning, mid-February, a cold year. If he met someone, that would be one more sign; then he would go back home, slip back into bed beside Kata, and take care not to touch her with his icy feet. That might wake her up and remind her what she hadn’t finished that night. If he’d been filling a barrel with his male seed instead of releasing it into her, the barrel would have to be full after all those years. Where did it go in her? How was it emptied? And she’d conceived only six times. That could have happened to her three times as often. One child had died, so the number would be odd. He didn’t meet anyone as far as the bottom of the steps. That was a good sign. He wouldn’t go back.

It took two hours for him to reach Miladin’s Cliffs on foot. If he’d put on his good shoes, it wouldn’t have taken as long. But half an hour more or less didn’t matter anyway. If he’d put those shoes on, he would probably have changed his mind and waited for the morning, the trip to the square, the sound of sections of railway track clanging, the maddening sensation when fingernails scratch rusted metal, and then the return home, to the boxes of nails and an attempt to calm down for once. So that’s what would have happened if he’d put on his new shoes. Not only that, but he would have also had to put on pants and a clean white shirt and would have woken up half the house. She would have asked him where he had been going at that time, and what could he have said? — “To Miladin’s Cliffs!”