Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Wanted— an honest man for an apartment, no whores, no filth!”

The harbor workers called her Granny Stinky and started chasing her away. Every time they told her to get lost, she would mope off and shrink a little more. And then one noticed that she had the pleading look of a dog that was convinced that people are beings that don’t go out without bones in their pockets. She would shuffle off to the next ship at the unloading dock and would be just as surprised when they chased her off too. No matter how many times she heard a dirty word, Granny Petka never got used to it. When the workers would break for a snack around noon and decide to mess with someone for dessert, one of them would take a bottle that still had a little wine in it and shout:

“Hey, Stinky, are you still drunk?”

Granny Petka would light up like Eve when she first saw the sunrise and start for the bottle. She ran, if one could call it running, stumbled, and fell, and just as she shambled up to them, the bottle would fly off into the sea. Everyone would laugh hysterically, and the main prankster would say:

“C’mon, Stinky, jump in after the wine so you won’t stink anymore!”

The same scene was repeated day in, day out, without anything changing at all. Every time the old woman raced off toward the bottle, the bottle always flew into the sea, and the workers laughed with the same enthusiasm.

Rafo refused Granny Petka when she offered him the apartment for the same reasons the others did but didn’t participate in the jokes they played on her, nor did he snack with the group. However, his attempts to get away so he wouldn’t see or hear anything were futile. Wherever he found a spot to break his bread and cut some salt pork, in any corner of the harbor and a hundred meters out, one could hear the laughter. And one knew that they were tormenting Granny Stinky again. That started to drive him crazy, disturbed his daily peace of mind. The daily hardship of his soul turned into a wild tension, into something that resembled the echoes of the hallways of the Sarajevo prep school. He tensely awaited the laughter, and when he heard it, he felt like beating his head on the low stone walls of the harbor. He could choose: either to flee Dubrovnik or to take up residence with Granny Stinky and buy her brandy.

The Villa Rosa Bella was the largest and most beautiful construction at the eastern edge of the city. It had been built in 1771 as an exact copy of a house in Perast in which a woman named Ruža had lived, a local beauty and the failed love of Petka’s great-grandfather. As a young man, he would go on foot to Boka, sing under Ruža’s windows, and in vain seek her heart, which had been promised to an old Venetian merchant. As soon as his wife died and a year of mourning had passed, the Venetian was going to come for Ruža and take her away. Petka’s great-grandfather did everything to change what had been fixed in writing, and it seemed that, at least as far as Ruža and her desires were concerned, he had some success. However, as fate could not be cheated, Ruža fell ill and in a single summer month went from the most beautiful girl in Boka to dead in a cold grave. The Venetian merchant lost his money and the woman who would care for him in his old age, and the young man from Dubrovnik was left without the love of his life. He swore that he would never marry and went to sea. He was wildly courageous, worked as a captain on both merchant and navy ships— in the service of several navies and countries— resolved to leave his bones on the floor of some sea, and to be remembered in a heroic legend and not for his unfortunate love. Death, however, didn’t want him, and he returned home. In his old age he was extremely wealthy, but just as faithful to Ruža’s memory. He had a house built for himself that was identical to hers in every detail. He sent designers and builders to Perast and spent large sums of money to get Ruža’s relatives to let him inside so he could copy and measure the inside of the house. That was how the Villa Rosa Bella was born, a perfect architectural souvenir, and he spent his final years in melancholy visits to the rooms in which Ruža had lived. He built the house so he could cross the threshold that had been forbidden to him. He sat and smoked pipes by the window under which he’d serenaded Ruža.

He violated his own vow and before his death married a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Konavle. She wasn’t particularly beautiful and even less hardworking and smart, but her name was Ruža. That girl from Konavle was Granny Petka’s great-grandmother and the first owner of the Villa Rosa Bella.

On the outside the stone building had preserved its original beauty, but whoever went inside— and no one had done that for at least fifteen years before Rafo did— found something that more resembled the lower chambers of hell— where haughty French sinner women bathed not in perfume but in their own shit— than it did the house of an old family’s glory and unhappy love. Granny Petka had probably never taken out any trash, nor did she recognize the value of any single thing that she couldn’t sell. Expensive dresses rotted on the floor; worms laid their eggs in rolls of unused silk; ceremonial captain’s uniforms disintegrated in an orgy of moths. And in that largely formless mass of everything and anything, the most terrible effect was made by scraps of food that were years old. Rafo saw a whole untouched loaf of bread, probably from a time when Granny Petka summoned pity in others, which was green like an old church bell, on which unknown creatures had spun a fine weblike fleece, in the middle of which colonies of all manner of vermin lived in Old Testament fellowship. Since they hadn’t been destroyed and had no natural enemies in the Villa Rosa Bella, worms, moths, wood lice, ants, cockroaches, worms, wasps, butterflies, hornets, roly polies, ladybugs, and earwigs took on something of the habits of dignified creatures. A cockroach the size of a quail’s egg lay like a lion on the top of a broken candlestick, its legs crossed and its gaze dim, and looked Rafo right in the eye. It would have asked him something, but it was too lazy.

He brought a shovel and a wheelbarrow and hauled the trash out of his room. He whitewashed the walls and poured lime in holes that teemed with living creatures and scrubbed the floor on which he spread his mattress. Along with a large military chest, that mattress would be the only thing in the room. He suggested cleaning the whole house like that to Granny Petka.

“Remember one thing— I’m the lord and master in this house,” she answered indignantly and didn’t speak to him for two days. “Here there’s no Granny Stinky, and the Villa Rosa Bella isn’t the Gruž harbor,” she continued, and Rafo realized that he wasn’t allowed to interfere in her life. She was no longer of this world. But if you weren’t sensitive to dirt, if you didn’t fear disease, and if you weren’t terribly superstitious, you could live with her. In the house she was quiet and spoke only if he wanted her to. She warmed herself by the kitchen stove for days at a time, drank brandy, and chewed on a bulb of onion. Rafo didn’t see her eating anything but onion. Two or three times he brought her cheese and salt pork, but the old woman refused with a look of disgust:

“I’m not a girl any more; fatty food is hard on my gut.” She spent her days with onion and brandy and no longer went to the harbor.

“You can’t forget the evil they do to you,” she said once. “You can’t be a lady among beasts.”

Rafo bought brandy for the rent wherever he managed. At first he took care not to buy either the most expensive or the cheapest, but he saw that the old woman didn’t care. She just wanted it to be strong and harsh; whether it was made from grapes, plums, carobs, or dung (namely, people said that the Montenegrins made brandy from sheep and goat pellets)— that didn’t matter to Granny Petka. And when he brought her a bottle of wine or prosecco too, she was the happiest child in the world. Her eyes would tear up, and when she smiled, Rafo thought he could smell a field of lavender. He would sit down beside her and listen for the umpteenth time to the story of the Villa Rosa Bella and how the old woman’s great-grandfather had walked on foot to Perast to sing ballads to the beautiful Ruža. Only when she was telling that story and only with the help of brandy did Petka seem to have a clear head.