Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Such gossip didn’t bother Regina Delavale. She had already put so much behind her and had herself already badmouthed half the city, so it was okay in a way if it came back around to her. Besides, she even derived a certain amount of pleasure from the role that she’d been cast in. It was rare that women of that age became martyrs again, if only in the talk of the town, who singlehandedly cared for two small children. That seemed like another shot at youth, a third set of teeth, a miraculous rebirth, something in which every torment was sweet. She knew that her newly acquired prestige would not last long because Dijana would come back, and in the eyes of the town she would again be an old woman worth only a little more than dogs that sun themselves on the main square. But for now everyone greeted her with respect, inquired about her health and whether she needed anything, all in hopes that she would complain to them and thereby add new details to the story of the whore that had run off with the well-hung black man. But she told them that she was doing well and couldn’t figure out why everyone was whining about the south wind when she didn’t feel a thing.

“An old lady doesn’t complain if her bones ache only if she can’t get a piece of a man!” she said to the horror of those who would pass on what she said and add that there was something to it because blood was thicker than water, and it was clear who the Negro-loving whore took after.

“There are women whose pussies are so deep that none of us can fill them! And then they go looking for black men,” was the expert remark of Mijo Alavanja, who was Regina’s age and had been a local stud since the late ’20s. His nose had fallen off after an affair with some German woman in his youth, which was the end of one career and the beginning of another. He changed from a great lover to a local wise man and expert on all things erotic and on reproduction in man and animal. He would shut himself in a stable and talk each steed, bull, and boar into jumping on a female. No one knew how he managed to accomplish this, and he jealously guarded the secret of his skill to earn large sums of money. It was also told that Mijo Alavanja even cured men of impotence in a similar way; legend has it that he managed to make some Ahma, a major in the partisans from Gacko who had lost both testicles in the Battle of the Neretva, capable of fathering children. So Mijo was a reliable source of information, and people believed what he said about some women needing a black cock for anatomical reasons. Husbands could only hope that their wives didn’t number among them.

Regina didn’t want to let anyone get the better of her, nor did she worry about the tale of black sexual prowess, and she was just as resolute in this as she was in her intention of exploiting the opportunity that she would never have had if Dijana hadn’t gone crazy over that Marko Radica. Moreover, the children weren’t a lot of work. She had to wash and iron their things, make sure that they were well dressed when they went out into the cold, and that they had something to eat. In any case there was no need to cook for them because they never even tried her chicken but naughtily wrinkled their noses and made disgusting grimaces while it was cooking in their biggest, green pot. Instead they ate their Eurocream spreads and patés, which didn’t bother Regina all that much, though she couldn’t understand how someone could turn down boiled chicken, when she would eat one up in two days and would still be licking her fingers, just as everyone in her family would. New customs came with new generations, and it wouldn’t have surprised her if a time came when no one cooked chicken in a pot any more and everyone retched at the sight of three-toed, plucked legs sticking up out of boiling water, just as her granddaughter retched. It could be said that there was gastronomic pleasure in the fact that Dijana had left her alone with the children. She could cook chicken whenever she wanted, without her daughter’s complaining that she’d forgotten that they had eaten it the day before and was cooking the same thing today.

Mirna tried to conceal from her grandmother the wonder that had grown out of her. She would call Darijan, who would wrap her upper body tightly in a wide military bandage. She wore wide shirts and fled from Regina’s sight. It wasn’t as bad at school as it was at home, even after the kids had started to notice that her left side was thicker than her right side and the boys were tripping over themselves to check it out with their own hands, to see if she was maybe abnormal, and she would whack them with whatever was within reach. But somehow it seemed to her that her deformation wasn’t so abnormal in those surroundings. She comforted herself with the idea that that breast was still less of a stigma than faces full of fibrous acne scars, the hump on orphan Ana’s back, and the water on the brain of Nazif in the first row, but when after three months of growth the melon-like bulge neared its peak, Mirna realized that it was more terrible than all pimples or any hump because it was unstoppable, fatal, and shameful. In the end that breast would grow too large and kill her like a cancer. Maybe it was cancer. She didn’t know, just as she didn’t know why she was overcome with shame when the bathroom mirror showed her only half of what she’d seen on the bodies of grown women on the beaches of Mljet and Korčula (on account of which her mother covered her eyes) and what she suspected was underneath her grandmother’s black sweater. When she was eleven, she’d believed that women grew breasts only after childbirth and that they were the only way that one could tell whether a woman had had children or not. She imagined them to be like milk cartons that remained on the body for the rest of one’s life, and as she peered at the naked women swimming on Mljet, she was certain that she would never give birth because she was disgusted at the thought of spoiled milk underneath the skin of elderly women’s bodies. And now, you see, she’d grown a breast, but only one, which easily led to the conclusion that she was abnormal, a freak. And it was only a question of time when everyone, and not just Darijan, would become aware of her freakishness.

He didn’t think the change in his sister was such a big deal because he’d never thought about the meaning of breasts on a woman’s body. Mirna had been different from him her whole life in one detail, the one between her legs, and he thought of her enormous breast, which seemed to have been stolen from the cover of a magazine in the display of a newspaper kiosk, as an extension of that difference, something that certainly wasn’t his problem, and he wasn’t surprised at all by the asymmetry on her body. He even thought that it was more normal for her to grow one and not two. He would have probably become jealous of a second one because it wouldn’t have meant a difference in sex but in age, and he surely would no longer have wanted to take a bath with his sister after his mother came back from Africa. Namely, Dijana would stick both of them in the tub and scrub them clean in one go, paying no heed to Regina’s comments that such big children needed to take a bath alone and wash themselves. She didn’t want to have to worry about whether they’d washed their ears, feet, and backs well and feel ashamed before people who would say that she didn’t take care of her children. Instead, she would wash them in twenty minutes and then let them splash around in the tub, so small and naked, unaware of the difference between them and its meaning and without a single hair on their bodies. Dijana stuck to the view that her twins were the same sex until they grew pubic hair. Only then would she separate them and teach them the shame that divides the sexes. She couldn’t imagine (nor had she heard of something like that happening) that her daughter would first grow one breast, far outgrowing both of Dijana’s, before everything else came along.