Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

The council in the kitchen went on for hours. Some of their neighbors believed that the devil had taken possession of the little girl, and if they drove him out, the shameful breast would shrink all on its own.

For an exorcist they suggested some Mljet hermit and defrocked priest, or some monk from Sinj, and one other man who’d done twenty years of hard labor in Zenica because he had remotely exorcized a demon from Boris Kidrič, which resulted in Kidrič’s sudden death. And so the communists, as the eldest of the old women claimed while feverishly continuing her crocheting, convicted the exorcist, who was otherwise a Dominican monk and a white friar, for that voodoo magic.

But maybe it would be worth calling that hodja from Trebinje, regardless of the difference in faith and all the dangers that stemmed from that, because he’d freed more possessed children from spells in eastern Herzegovina and Podrinje than all Catholic priests together.

Regina didn’t like the idea of exorcizing a demon from her granddaughter, although she’d recently begun to discover God and the church for the first time in her life. But she still didn’t understand the point of exorcisms, nor could she believe that the devil slipped into people like a drunkard into his coat. She was inclined to believe that this was some inherited disorder. There was a lot of talk about such things on television, and it overlapped perfectly with what she thought about Vid Kraljev, Dijana’s dead husband. She wasn’t opposed to the idea that it was something inherited from Ivo Delavale, her departed husband and Mirna’s grandfather. It even seemed logical that female curses were carried on the father’s side of the family. There could never be as much evil in a woman as there was in her husband’s or father’s legacy to her.

One neighbor woman claimed that this was a medical problem and that the child should be taken to the doctor as soon as possible; there were hormone tablets, injections, and various miracles of medicine. Because that tit could kill the little girl or disfigure her for life. The doctors had to stop it from growing so the other one could catch up to its size when the time came. But she was quickly shut up, both by the other women and by Regina. It was unlikely that this was a known illness because someone would have already heard of such cases. Such girls would be seen on the street and on the beach. It was even less likely that there was a cure for such a huge tit in the hospital. And if they did take the girl to the hospital, then inside of three days the whole city would know about the deformity of the little Kraljev girl, and shame would erode the stone walls of the Delavale house.

Of course, all nine women swore not to say a word about what they’d seen. They agreed that it would be a sin against the child before God if they said anything. But in not three but only two days the whole city was already abuzz about the oddity on Old Mulberry Street. In no time the breast on the body of the ten-year-old girl grew beyond its real size and became the biggest in the long and glorious history of the city. Milk was already streaming out of it, and three long, thick black hairs grew out around the nipple. Rumor had it that doctors were coming from America to see this wonder, and the owners of an Italian circus would soon arrive as well — maybe the little girl would grow a beard too. The story of the breast was a source of entertainment for primitive and semiliterate salesgirls at the farmer’s market and the fish market, just as it was for the intellectual elite — teachers and journalists as well as directors and actors in the local theater, who would gather in the City Café on Saturdays to tell jokes about the little Amazon girl and the reasons why she had appeared here of all places and now of all times, when the country’s political situation was becoming ever more complicated and the threat of war was in the air.

“Maybe she’ll call us to arms and lead us in the defense of these city walls?” wondered a local poet and layabout, who in the absence of talent and inspiration found all his artistic life on a corner of a table in the City Café. His quip was followed by expressions of disgust on the faces of those at the table. It was neither a good joke nor a particularly clever comment. Was there a third possibility?

Mirna was unable to pull herself together before evening. Darijan found her on the bed, shaking all over, and between sobs she gave incoherent answers to his questions. He ran to grandma and asked her what had happened.

“It’s nothing for boys to worry about,” she told him.

“You’ll see who’ll worry about what when our mother gets back,” he retorted and went to his sister.

He sat at her side all night long and tried to find out what had happened, but at first she couldn’t tell him, and later she didn’t want to. God only knows what was going through his mind then, but her brother never found out the reason for Mirna’s distress. Before he knew anything about men and women, he would ask every so often, but after he began to learn and comprehend their differences, more instinctively than consciously, he would stop mentioning that day.

One evening when Darijan was twelve years old, he saw Bergman’s Virgin Spring and learned what the word “rape” meant. He convinced himself that on that day, while he was in school and then went out looking for doves’ nests, his sister had been raped. He would believe that up until they lowered crazy Manda into her grave, and the feeling of guilt that was born while watching Bergman’s scene of the father of a raped daughter thrashing himself with birch branches would never leave him. It didn’t occur to him that Mirna’s breakdown might have had something to do with her breast, nor did the fact that the whole city was talking about it tell him anything.

Being the only one who saw nothing monstrous in her giant breast, he had no idea that it was the source of the whole problem, which depressed him and weighed down on him for quite some time.

After that sleepless night, brother and sister slept the whole morning. Regina didn’t want to wake them up because sleep was more important than school. She even took care to make as little noise as possible; she didn’t take pots from the cabinet, didn’t call out to her neighbors from window to window. She knew that they hadn’t slept the night before. She loved those children more than her own daughter because children are guilty of nothing, but her love for them was meager, harsh, and inconstant. And that love made its appearance only when they were afflicted with some evil, when they were sick, crying, or sleeping.

Those little sparrows, death’s little brother and sister, one could hardly see them breathing.

She liked to sleep a lot herself but never had enough time for sleep and felt pity for the both of them and their dreams, letting all the tenderness of her heart flood through that morning thought of her grandchildren. This happened whenever she recognized something of herself in Mirna and Darijan, the same feelings, desires, and especially fears. She would hug and shield them fervently, which always amazed Dijana. She attributed Regina’s fits of affection for the grandchildren to her years, her senility or insanity, which she’d always noticed in small doses in her mother. She didn’t figure out that Regina loved in her grandchildren only what she felt and knew in herself. And she couldn’t have figured this out because Regina’s bursts of tenderness and sweetness occurred very rarely, whereas she otherwise seemed indifferent and uninterested. Sometimes she was even unbelievably cold in situations involving her grandchildren that would have touched every other grandmother on this planet.

Living in her imploded world, Regina Delavale shared with others only what they emitted from their intact, untouched souls, as random signs of recognition. She was obsessed with what was going on inside herself, and had someone been able to enter into her heart, they would have found a woman who hadn’t gotten over insults, disappointments, and years stolen in deceit. That is to say, a woman who was pushing fifty without a husband and not an old lady who was already eighty-five. This misunderstanding between body and soul, in which the former endured in conformity with its years and the latter was young in misfortune, was likely the cause of the long life of Regina Delavale. There are two natural ways to depart from this world: either you leave like most people reconciled with a lost life, or you lose your mind because the soul cannot endure the lack of reconciliation. The intensity of one’s insanity in the end always determines the length of one’s life.