Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

After her breast visibly increased in size over the course of a weekend, on Monday morning Mirna told Darijan that he didn’t have to bring the bandage because she wasn’t going to school. She was going to stay in bed, and he should tell her teacher that she was sick. He didn’t care. He packed his schoolbag, put on his shoes, and went out.

“Where’s your sister?” their grandmother asked as he was leaving the apartment.

“She’s off in her room; she says she’s sick,” he shouted to her and vanished. Regina panicked, thinking that the child really wasn’t feeling well because the little star student never played hooky, and she didn’t want to have to find a doctor right then. So she rushed into her room, where there was something to see. Underneath the translucent sleeping gown of her little granddaughter she could see the contour of something that made her think for a moment that she had lost her mind.

She couldn’t believe her eyes! One big tit, with a nipple at the tip, stuck out as if it was mocking her age.

“Whoa, girl, what’s that?” she asked.

Mirna burst into tears, seeing that her small, negligible, but nevertheless bright hope that she was carrying something quite ordinary on her had evaporated. This hope was the reason why she’d even decided to show grandma her breast, clutching herself as someone condemned to death would cling to his last possible salvation. There was no longer any way to hide what she had hidden for three months, and now, she realized that that phantasmagorical breast was more terrible than she had thought. Grandma put her hand over her mouth, which she had done only one other time in front of her: when Admiral Boško Alać had jumped from his apartment on the tenth floor and hit the ground right in front of them. The breast was something just as terrifying as the smashed head of the admiral, which had oozed a grayish-yellow substance similar to the feces that fishermen fling over the beach when they remove it from a large tuna.

“Grandma, what’s wrong with me?” she asked, following her into the kitchen and wringing her hands.

“Damn you, how should I know?! But there’s certainly someone who does,” the old woman answered.

“Go and ask, please; ask somebody,” Mirna begged her desperately.

“How can I ask?! You think I should go and say that my child has grown a tit like a cantaloupe, but only one, and ask what that might be? They’d put me in the nuthouse. No, somebody’s got to come see.”

The wheels started turning in Mirna’s head: she’ll bring people to look at her; oh no, no way. She’d rather die, as she very well might. But when? How much time did she have left until the gigantic breast pulled her down to the ground? Seven more days or seven more years? Would she stay forever locked up at home to hide her shameful deformity, until the very day the gravediggers carried her out or her growth was given its place in a jar of formaldehyde, on the morning television program, among unborn children, smokers’ lungs, and the last specimens of extinct animals? She didn’t think that grandma meant her any harm, but maybe there was just a little malice in her plan. Not only was she old, but an elderly something had grown on her granddaughter, and now she wanted to show it off so she might become a little younger and justify the fact that she was still alive, although every morning for years already she had called out to the black earth, and more recently to God as well, to take her and put an end to her suffering.

Who knew what Regina Delavale actually thought, but that very afternoon she called all the older women in the neighborhood to the kitchen — there were nine of them — and sat them down around the table and beside the wood stove.

“Now you’ll see something,” she said and went to get Mirna. They didn’t say a word. The younger ones looked at each other, signaled something with frowns, and were struck with fear in the face of the strange spectacle that Regina hadn’t told them anything about, though they knew that it would be something very strange, while the two oldest, wearing the perennial black headscarves of widows and eyeglasses that were always about to fall off their noses, tirelessly crocheted their white lace ornaments, as if they knew that they had little time left to live and would go straight to hell if they didn’t finish their decorative tablecloths or television doilies.

“Let’s go to the kitchen,” said grandma.

“Please, don’t,” Mirna said, pulling a sheet over her shame.

“It’s too late now. You have to. The women have come. They know about this,” she said and pulled her out of the bed. “It’s better for you to go downstairs than for me to bring them up here.”

Mirna didn’t resist any more, thinking that it was true and that it was all over and that her body was no longer exclusively her property because they would look at her dead body and turn her over however they each wished. She wouldn’t care when she was dead, so she might as well get used to it.

Regina pushed her granddaughter ahead of her out into the kitchen. When she saw all those women, Mirna reflexively took a step back, but there was no way to leave now.

“Lift up your T-shirt,” grandma ordered her, but the child couldn’t move a muscle. The old woman lifted up the T-shirt with a quick movement from behind; her arms went up all by themselves, and the white fabric covered her eyes. She saw black silhouettes. The voices of her neighbors mingled with each other: “Christ almighty, the poor girl; she’s half woman, half man. As if one half of her was made on one day and the other half on the next. Like this, when you cover the other half, and her face — you shouldn’t look her in the face. It’s good like this when you can see half her body and her head is covered. And has anything grown between her legs? Does she have any curls? How did it start? Overnight, you say? Yesterday she was the same on both sides. No she wasn’t. What’s wrong with you? Oh, let me feel it. Oh, it’s so soft. Poor child. .”

Mirna listened to them without moving; it seemed to her that all this was the same voice, which was sometimes deep, sometimes shrill, hoarse, and childlike, and she could have stood like that for hours, as long as they didn’t lower the shirt from her face.

“Can I feel it too?” she heard someone say and immediately felt their cold fingers on her breast, squeezing it as if it weren’t alive, the way they would grab a head of cabbage in the garden or snap a pod of green beans. No one had ever touched her arms, face, and body so roughly, which was proof that the strange and hateful growth wasn’t something vital and precious but a torment and misery, like stones that have to be cleared from the ground where grapevines are to be planted, like heavy showers that wash away all the soil, carrying it to the sea and leaving instead of grapevines only bare rock. Breasts were a curse, whether they came in a pair or only singly, she realized.

“Cover yourself; what are you standing there for like a wooden Virgin Mary?” Regina shouted, a little afraid that her granddaughter was enjoying having people look at her naked. Only then did Mirna awaken from her daze, in which the women could do with her what they wanted — cut her with kitchen knives and sprinkle hot ashes on her chest — she wouldn’t have cried out. Terror seized her, and she ran into her room shouting like a lunatic. She threw herself onto the bed and started shaking as if electrical wires were connected to her every nerve. She didn’t think anything, didn’t feel anything, nor could she tell the difference between life and death. She was free of pain and only wished for everything to be over as soon as possible, no matter what it was and what the outcome would be. Only from time to time in her dull trembling would it seem to her that she felt icy, rough fingers on her breast, and she would throw herself onto the other end of the bed, trying to flee from what there was no longer any running away from because it’d happened and would thus remain.