Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

After threats and insults, only some of which were returned, chief physician Onofri left the room to order the head nurse to untie Mrs. Regina Delavale because no one was to be tied up in his ward, where there were no dangerous psychiatric cases. After he did this and threatened to take the harshest disciplinary measures against the head nurse, whom he considered responsible from this moment on if the woman were tied up again, chief physician Onofri went home.

That night Dr. Vlahović four times ordered the head nurse to give Mrs. Regina Delavale an intramuscular injection with tranquilizers. Each time the ninety-seven-year-old woman had to be held down by three male nurses, two of which had to be called over from the traumatology ward. He ordered the dose to be doubled each time, but after a short respite of calm, the old woman got out of the bed and went off on another rampage. In doing so, she displayed amazing physical strength and vitality, completely inconsistent not only with her age but also her gender. When Dr. Vlahović ordered the head nurse to double the dose for the fourth time, she warned him — though as a first-rate anesthesiologist he had to know (as would any first-year medical student) — that the dose was lethal. That is, it would cause death even to a young, stout male. To that Dr. Vlahović only repeated his order. Forty-five minutes later Regina Delavale was pronounced dead.

In the morning Dr. Onofri reported the incident to the police, after he’d reached the conclusion that a murder had taken place from the patient’s file. He most likely also informed journalists, who went on to write about the Dr. Mengele of our hospital, and the affair, the worst since the end of the war, shook the city overnight.

The myth of the brilliant young anesthesiologist was shattered by the very people who had created it, mostly with the same arguments, the only difference being that what had yesterday been accepted as a reason for praise today was the source of the harshest rebuke. He had excelled so much in his studies because even at that time he had planned a perfect murder with medications. Calm and composure actually confirmed his callous nature, characteristic of psychopaths in white coats, of which, as we know, there have been many in history. His handsome and clean face revealed that the greatest criminals don’t look like criminals at all.

Of course, no one considered the fact that Dr. Vlahović had left behind a paper trail. The patient’s file had recorded the precise dosage of the sedatives, and by virtue of this the crime could not be perfect, nor should the story of his cold callousness ever been told. This and other details that contradicted the fabrications of the press and the street were hushed up and dismissed as if this were a screenplay and not life and there was no room for anything that might unduly complicate the story or violate the conventions of its genre.

For love, the unfortunate Ares had run into difficulties from which he would have a hard time extricating himself. In particular, Dr. Onofri’s crass comment concerning the affair with Dr. Fočić had a basis in reality: Vlahović would never have returned to the city if she hadn’t been there. Nor, had he not been in love, would he have let himself get mixed up in the lives of people who were of no concern to him and thus condemn Regina Delavale to death, a woman whom he did not know but who was the mother of another woman whose fate had aroused such pity in his lover. It was a lie that she’d persuaded him to double the dosage to a lethal level; Dr. Fočić had left the hospital in tears long before that happened, but Ares knew what she expected of him and what she would have done if she’d found herself in the same situation. Just as she saw her own grandmother in the sleeping old woman, so she saw in crazy Manda something that had no reason for its existence other than to make the surrounding world miserable. Both the one and the other were completely understandable, made sense emotionally, and testified to the nobility of the soul with which Ares had fallen in love more than with her physical beauty. However, nothing of this could serve as an argument, either before people or before prosecutors and judges, because then law books would fill more volumes than there are in the Library of Congress, and no one except maybe God would know them so thoroughly as to be able to pass judgments in complete concord with the nature of the human soul.

All of this was clear to Dijana after she signed for receipt of the death certificate of Regina Delavale, and the tears that she cried at the cemetery, which surprised her children and satisfied her family and friends, were meant for the handsome Ares and the young doctor. The earth thudding on the black veneer of the coffin wasn’t burying Dijana’s mother because she’d long been dead, but it was burying those two young people who — it was no exaggeration to say — had caught her eye and with whom she’d fallen in love in a way that was not without its erotic nuances. Perhaps more than the moral act and the obligation that Ares had created with his sacrifice, what attracted Dijana to him and his young companion was their pure beauty, intensified by the meaning of their white overcoats and their babylike details, such as the orange sock with the little soccer balls on it.

She felt the murder charges against Ares to be crazy Manda’s final revenge, which lent her three-month bout of insanity its ultimate criminal aspect. She departed from this world on her own account and pressing her seal on the lives of those who saw her off. In this way her ninety-seven years were continuing and would last as long as there were those whose paths she’d changed. Three people, two women and one man, would remember her as long as they lived and carry her evil inside their souls only to pass it on to others if they completely lost hope, thus making the curse of crazy Manda immortal.

After the funeral Dijana sat on the bed in her bedroom and looked at her children, confused and upset as they were, not knowing what to do or where to go now that what had filled their lives with fear and torment no longer existed. And now that it was gone, she was unable to feel any happiness.

“Well, now that’s over,” said Mirna and grabbed her left breast mechanically. Darijan gave a laugh; she shuddered, realizing what she’d done, and started laughing like crazy.

“Come on, stop it already!” Dijana said trying to be stern, but it didn’t sound that way, nor was there actually any reason for sternness. Then she started laughing herself, uncontrollably and inconsolably, and the more she laughed, the more joy and sadness mixed within her, as seawater and fresh water mix, creating deep, powerful whirlpools in which foreigners and suicides drown and into which punctured balls, beer bottles, and plastic toy boats sink forever, the victims of neglect, indifference, or simply old age.

Mirna grabbed her left breast once more, this time deliberately, thinking that in this way she would keep up the reason for their laughter, but in fact she put an end to it.

Mirna had turned ten when her left breast grew large over the course of two months. The right one was still completely flat, like on boys of her age, but the left one was big, robust, and firm, almost like a half melon, with the nipple of a real mature woman, which protruded when it touched the cold side of the bathtub. Darijan said it was like a little prick, and so she no longer allowed him in the bathroom while she was showering. The nipple on her right breast was hardly there; it was small, light, and invisible and did not react to either warmth or coldness. She would test it every day, uncertain which side she feared more or which one confirmed in a disgusting way that something was not right with her. She knew nothing about her femininity because Dijana was convinced that the time had not come for her to be told about that. Moreover, at the time when Mirna’s breast had started to grow, Dijana had just left on a trip to Cairo and would spend four crazy months crisscrossing Africa with Marko Radica, a captain on long voyages with whom she’d been head over heels in love and who’d accepted her children as his own, or so she believed. She’d left them in the care of her eighty-five-year-old mother, which scandalized the whole neighborhood, and the talk around town was that Dijana, widow of the late Vid Kraljev, had abandoned her children and run off with a black man whose member, so it was claimed by widows in headscarves, was so large that he could shake mulberries off a tree without climbing it.