Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Get lost, you old cactus; you’ve ruined my life. My every day is bitter because of you.”

And so, while shells were falling around in the city, the two of them argued and scuffled, and for the first time they showed no mercy to each other, nor was there anything that they remembered about each other and didn’t say as soon as it occurred to them. That fight wouldn’t be forgotten. They were each a millstone around the other’s neck in life, like two uninvited guests in the same house that suddenly didn’t belong to anyone. They preyed on one another even when they spent days together in complete silence because at any moment it was clear who was thinking what.

“You sure got your fill sucking black cock, you Gruž slut!” the old woman said just when Darijan came into the kitchen.

“The siren is sounding. That means we have to get down into the shelter,” he said calmly and went out.

The following month, which was as long as the war lasted in Dubrovnik, would be the most difficult in Dijana’s life, worse than the three months she spent with crazy Manda. Her son and especially her daughter rejected her and treated her like a stranger. They didn’t forgive her for being away, but she didn’t know why because no one had told her what had been going on with Mirna’s left breast, nor would she ever learn about the gathering of the old crows in the kitchen, which culminated in something that was almost like a rape. She was unable to bear the scorn in her children’s eyes or their sudden cruelty, which was even greater for Regina than for her.

Their relations would improve a little only on the twenty-third day of the fighting. While they were in the shelter an incendiary shell hit their house and it burned to the ground, leaving nothing to serve as a remembrance of their previous life. When the fighting suddenly ended, just as suddenly as it had begun for her, Dijana would feel naked and barefoot, with the three of them to worry about. Then it was duty and not love that tied her to her mother and children, which she knew herself because not a day would pass without her thinking that if it weren’t for them, she would go off to Cairo and board an ocean liner with Marko, the only person who had made her happy, work as a cook or maid, and finally find what she was looking for in life.

Years would pass before she would feel something for Mirna and Darijan that she could confess to others. In the meantime she would experience them as a widow’s inheritance, something that resembled most the black dress that wives of seafarers and fishermen would put on and never take off again.

Apart from that blaze in which the family memorabilia burned up, none of the four of them felt the war. The topic that would set the tone of life of the city for years to come didn’t concern them because it was smaller and less tempestuous than the episodes of their familial discord, which would continue to the end of Regina’s life, when Dijana was already slowly entering the beginnings of old age. After the gathering of the neighbor women to see her granddaughter’s breast, Regina would behave like a murderer who was hiding from the police and simultaneously trying to think of an alibi, a new one every day. She would find people to blame for what she had done all over the place, most often in Dijana, who was incapable of being a real mother because her female organ was stronger than her soul. Then she found the culprit in Mirna, who had struck the same roots and at ten was already a little slut, on account of which she had to be physically marked as well. She also found a culprit in Klara, whose eccentricity rubbed off on her pupils. And she also blamed all who could have been connected to the monstrous appearances in the Delavale family. For example, after a few months she remembered that right before the swelling of her breast, the little girl had been vaccinated against tetanus. There must have been something in that vaccine. Someone was conducting experiments on the children, and that was the reason for her granddaughter’s suffering. This discovery didn’t put her in a rage but put her in a state of deep depression. And the depression would last until the next alibi was found. In that experiment, Regina Delavale saw something that created a bond between two fates and tragedies of life, that of her and that of the girl, realizing for the umpteenth time that in this world one is condemned to suffering, misery, and shame once one is born a girl.

Mirna’s maturation occurred out of order and beyond the rules according to which children had been entering the world of adults since there had been people. At first she was continually hateful toward her mother, indirectly blaming her for what had happened to her; this was followed by a long period of indifference, until they both grew accustomed to that as some kind of natural relationship, which obligated neither of them to anything. Thus a wide space of freedom opened up before her, which she would use as long as there was anything to use.

It wasn’t three days after her first cigarette and she was already smoking in front of Dijana; she would go through boyfriends as if they were on a conveyor belt, especially in the summertime, and scandalize the city with licentious behavior on beaches and in parks. Right until the day when she would have a two-month sailing adventure around the Kornati Islands with a Swede named Max, a forty-year-old sailing enthusiast and owner of a huge yacht who was spending his immense family fortune sailing warm seas the year round. Max’s love would be expressed in tens of thousands of dollars that he managed to spend in Adriatic restaurants, nightclubs, casinos, and other places where one can spend as much money as it takes to spend one’s way into becoming everything one couldn’t be in life.

That went on until the morning they were sitting in a café on the šibenik waterfront and Mirna told him that she was pregnant. He jumped up with joy, poured champagne down the throats of all the guests on the café terrace, bought drinks for the whole waterfront, ran off somewhere, and returned with a beautiful pink kimono, told Mirna to wait for him for ten more minutes so he could just go to the bank for money, and then set sail, never to show his face again, probably feverishly wondering whether he had maybe already given that girl his address and telephone number in Malmo because if he had, problems would arise that he would be unable to solve. Mirna waited for Max until nightfall, and then without a kuna in her pocket she went out on the highway and waited for someone to stop and drive her in the direction of Dubrovnik. With the pink kimono and her identity card in her pocket, without anything that would remind her of what had been happening to her in the last two months except what she was carrying in her belly, she felt like those refugees whom someone kicked out of their beds at three in the morning and thrust thousands of miles from their homes. The abortion was performed in the same hospital in which crazy Manda would meet her end.

After Dijana returned from Africa, Darijan withdrew into himself. He hid from his mother’s and his grandmother’s quarrels, fled from Mirna, to whom his debt grew from day to day, until in the end he was ready to leave and never come back to the charred remains of the family house. Up to the time of Regina’s death he wouldn’t do this for the simple reason that there hadn’t yet been a good occasion for him to go off somewhere.

Klara the teacher had on several occasions during the last year she was the homeroom teacher for the twins attempted to tell Dijana something about what had happened during her journey to Africa, but she gave up in the end, as she was rebuffed in the most vulgar way, with open allusions to her sexual preferences. In a surfeit of rage that she could not express in her own home, Dijana used fragments of Regina’s insane fantasies about the teacher’s stay in Mirna’s room and thus calmed her conscience and preserved a pure remembrance of Marko Radica, who was nevertheless most important to her.