Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“If you stay, I know she’ll curse you, but you’ll have me until I die,” he told her on their last night in Cairo. She lay with her head on his breast, wept bitterly, and in fits of rage worthy of an American movie actress, she plucked hair from his chest. By morning she hadn’t responded to his offer; nor did he repeat it. He knew that something like that was impossible because she wouldn’t leave her children and go with him, just as he wasn’t going to return to his city. They’d met ten years too late, and that couldn’t be helped. She would live far from him, waiting for postcards from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Liverpool, until one day they stopped coming and the fire in her died out.

Six months after that month of war, Mirna’s right breast grew to the size of her left one. But that, like her first day of menstruation, wasn’t of interest to anyone.

“I thought you were smarter than that,” Dijana’s mother told her the day it became definitively clear that her period wasn’t late and that Vid had sowed his unwanted seed, which was now swelling and from which in all likelihood a life would be born. And from that, love between a man and a woman.

“That’s all you have to say?” she asked Regina.

“Everything will be all right,” the old woman answered laconically, with no intention of going into the problems that were developing in Dijana’s head in any detail.

“Mother, what should I do?”

“Nothing, child; everything will happen naturally since it began like that. .”

“Mother, I don’t have much time to decide,” she wrung her hands, expecting to receive some kind of approval or for Regina to take responsibility for the decision that she couldn’t make herself.

“And what are you talking about, please? Killing what’s growing inside your tummy? You can; no one’s keeping you from doing it. But you won’t feel better then. I’m telling you you won’t,” Regina said, with no desire to encourage or comfort her because no one had comforted her when at thirty-eight she had given birth to Dijana.

“I don’t know whether I love him,” her daughter said, trying once again.

“As if one can know that,” her mother responded. She put on her slippers and went out into the garden to see how the seeds she had planted were coming up.

It was late April 1980, and the city was quieter than usual. All one could hear on the square was the clicking of cameras and the clamor of German, English, and Italian kids. The locals kept quiet in accordance with a long, public ceremony that had begun around New Year’s, when the leg of their state’s president for life, and the most beloved person in the meager and bloody history of romance among the Balkan peoples and nations, had been amputated in a hospital in Ljubljana. Every day an unnamed medical advisory council issued brief reports containing upbeat and encouraging news about his imminent recovery, which in fact sent word of his impending death. No one dared mention it out loud or even in a whisper because such an outcome was socially unacceptable. It wasn’t only political reasons that forbade the country’s eldest son from dying, but something else that was planted much more deeply in the collective and in each of its members. The life that was fading in Ljubljana was an archetype that had been handed down to the people regardless of whether they belonged to the majority, who were blindly in love with the state and all its written rules and customs, or to the barely visible minority, who hated that same state, who responded to it in kind or with worse measures. That man was something much larger than a father or a king and more real than God. He was irreplaceable, both on the throne and in the minds of his subjects. The fact that he’d been elected as president for life a few years earlier wasn’t so much a sign of his absolutism as it was of the sincerest wish and desire of the majority of the citizens. Limiting the mandate of such a man was just as unimaginable as putting one’s aging parents in an old folks’ home. Yes, people did do that, but not in good homes and not in Yugoslavia.

In all the churches of the city people said heartfelt prayers for his recovery, urging the Almighty to make allowances for one atheist, and God was already supposed to know why he should act on their request. In creating man, God had also created competition for himself. If he didn’t listen to the prayers for Tito’s recovery, he would soon see for himself what kind of monsters his most perfect creations could turn into.

Dijana’s pregnancy had thus come at a time when no decision that men could make about themselves and their lives could seem more important than what was happening in the Ljubljana medical center. Even then someone probably knew that this was all an illusion and that everyone wouldn’t die with the eighty-eight-year-old patient, but in the reports of his critical condition Dijana found a good reason not to decide anything concerning the life that was growing inside of her. She had neither accepted it as her own nor rejected it but was simply waiting: the nightly news on television, the morning paper, months of pregnancy and months of illness, and the moment when it would be too late for any decision and the new life would have to be accepted as a gift from providence.

The May Day briefing of the medical council quit hiding the truth. The captains of the ship admitted it was sinking, and they made that admission to everyone in the form of a terse, lucid sentence that did not mention death but that, in contrast to the sentences of the previous statements, which had all been stylistically eloquent, was devoid of hope. Instead of a comma — the punctuation mark dearest to the heart that relativizes the meaning of every misfortune — there came a period, the finality of which was beyond doubt due to the very structure of the obituary from the president’s physicians. It was just a matter of when, on which day, and at what time of the day the life support monitors would be turned off in the Ljubljana hospital and how the news would be announced that the man whose undoubted immortality had been sung in hundreds of thousands of verses — more than had been any other subject in their language — was dead.

On that Thursday, all day long, Dijana sat in front of the television. Behind her an old Avala radio set was also turned on. A newspaper was spread out on the table, and she was crying and couldn’t stop even when Regina came in the room and went out again, comforting, scolding, and hugging her and then giving up. Regina kept telling her how beautiful it was to give birth to a child and that it was her last chance to do it because her biological clock was ticking. And she told her that she could also abort it. There was no shame in that, and life without children had its advantages. Then she offered to raise her children for her — she would probably live a while longer; people in her family lived to a ripe old age. Then she suggested that they go to the hospital, to pay the doctors for an abortion under full anesthesia. .

She offered Dijana everything that otherwise she wasn’t ready to offer and didn’t even occur to her as a possibility, only to get her to stop crying and calm down. She did this because she was afraid that her daughter might be getting one of those hysterias of pregnancy that would grow and develop until it completely dimmed Dijana’s consciousness and extinguished all her senses. And then she would be beyond the point of no return. She sensed how difficult it was to come back from a state of mental confusion full of hallucinated images and voices, when there’s no longer any space in your heart or mind, where you are what you really are, because everything you see and feel is a warped perception or an alien thought. Most terrible is the fact that that world is incomparably more convincing than any reality. Reality is pale and ambiguous, but insanity is powerful and true. There’s no greater truth than insanity.