Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

However, all Regina’s attempts were in vain. Not even slaps and threats to throw herself under a bus if Dijana didn’t stop could help. Dijana wept for Tito and was impervious to any thought that didn’t have to do with him. Nothing Regina could say on that May Day could compete with him.

Later she would remember her mother’s words and offers — not without a guilty conscience — as one of Regina’s rare acts of motherly heroism, and in any case her last. She would wonder how that heroism vanished and where it had come from in the first place. But she wouldn’t find the answer, although it was clear and could be found in stories from Regina’s past, which were not unknown to her. She would likewise wonder about the real reasons for her May Day despair and conclude that she’d been more sensitive than others because of her pregnancy, which was why she’d wept bitterly, enough for the whole town and half the country. In any case, she rejected the idea — which would surface in the first years of Mirna’s and Darijan’s lives — that the birth of her children (or rather her failure to make the other decision) had been determined by the death of Josip Broz Tito.

Finally, around ten o’clock, sleep swallowed Dijana’s tears, and the next morning she awoke with a painful case of pinkeye and in a state of depression. Her first thought was that her life, just like the life that was growing in her womb, brought nothing but suffering and that fear was the only real reason why she hadn’t killed herself ages ago. The next thing she realized was that on that morning she felt none of that fear. When a person is truly miserable, he ceases being afraid, and according to her own assessment Dijana was truly miserable on that second of May in 1980 and concluded that this was something to be exploited.

She went into the bathroom, filled the bathtub with warm water, and took Vid’s razor blades from the shelves behind the mirror. She lay down in the tub and decided to wait for her body to get used to the temperature of the water. In some movie she’d seen that this was how it was done. Not long after, her knees began to hurt. She’d dreamed for years of buying a large bathtub in which she would be able to stretch out and relax.

And then all at once she had to pee. In the last few weeks she’d been peeing every half hour. She didn’t know whether this was somehow connected to being pregnant or whether she had an infected bladder. She thought about getting up and going over to the toilet bowl, but she got cold at the mere thought of getting out of the water and stepping on the cold tiles with her bare feet. She realized that it didn’t matter at all whether she peed in the bathtub if she was only going to slit her wrists afterward anyway. She let water mix with water and took a little pleasure in her empty bladder and the mild shudder that comes when one finally pees after a long wait. She stretched her legs out over the edge of the tub, and the pain in her knees gave way to a new feeling of comfort.

When enough time had passed for the tips of her fingers to shrivel, she remembered the razor blades. She grabbed the little packet, began to open it up, and all of a sudden she felt sorry about interrupting all of this. Why should she cut short the moments of her pleasure on account of a life that had no meaning? Everything was good now, and she could end the suffering easily when it appeared again. And she knew that it would, but that didn’t make her unhappy. How could she be unhappy when everything she saw and heard now was so nice? Except her legs, which were before her eyes. They too would have been pretty if it weren’t for the hairs all over them. They had grown since last autumn and now resembled those ugly and greasy hanks of hair that bald men comb across their heads. If she put her legs down in the tub, she wouldn’t see them, but then the pain in her knees would come back. She stretched up and took Vid’s razor out from behind the mirror. She unwrapped a razor blade and put it into the razor. She stopped, hesitated a little, and took Vid’s shaving cream. On this occasion that seemed more elegant than ordinary soap. She sprayed her left shin. The thick foam looked like snow and smelled like pine trees. Men shave every day and that thought never occurs to them. Too bad, because it’s nice. Snow that smells like pine in a can of shaving cream. She spread the shaving cream along her legs and drew the razor from her foot toward her knee. White and clean skin was exposed, without a single blemish or any blood. She sincerely admired her left leg, as if it belonged to someone else or as if it weren’t a leg at all but, like the snow with the scent of pine, the work of a good magician. She carefully passed the razor along her leg and watched it become younger and younger. Then she began shaving her right leg, which became just as beautiful, but Dijana was still disappointed. People get used to things quickly, and there’s no beauty that won’t disappoint you a little the second time you see it.

After she finished shaving her right lower leg, she took a look at her arms. Little black hairs had also grown on them, it was true, not like on her legs, but these were also worth some effort and pleasure. She shaved her left forearm and then cut herself a little on her right. But it wasn’t anything terrible. The pleasure was stronger than the blood.

Then she gave a deep sigh; would this be the end of an adventure that had brought only happiness? She wanted to prolong the journey through the newly discovered white spaces at any price. With the tip of her big toe she pulled out the plug. The water drained out of the tub, quietly at first, and then with a gurgling sound. When half of it had drained out, Dijana again reached toward the mirror and took the little nail scissors. She sat in the empty tub and for the first time in her life cut her pubic hair, which, as they say, covers one’s shame.

Her heart beat from excitement, and she felt as if she weren’t yet fifteen years old. Too bad you can’t remember many things you might do for the first time in your life and that aren’t suicide, she thought. She shook the can of shaving cream, sighed deeply again, closed her eyes, and pressed the lever. Although the foam was soft and light and she would hardly have felt it on her arms and legs, the very touch of it shocked Dijana. The hairs evidently protected the delicate sense of touch of that part of the body. Slowly, with a great deal of attention, pleasure, and caution, she drew the razor across her mons veneris and the neighboring depressions, hillocks, and volcanoes, trying to take as long as possible and, when the end came, to know well that she had thought about the end long enough not to yearn for it.

With virginal fear she lowered her fingers and then her palm onto her mons veneris. That was the sweetest touch of a body that she’d ever felt because it was simultaneously hers and someone else’s. Then, without much worry, she remembered Vid and the fact that she would somehow have to explain this change to him when he returned from his trip through Bosnia. He’d departed ten days before, at a time when the briefings by the medical council had been full of optimism, and she still hadn’t known that she was pregnant. Thinking of that meant a return to life outside the bathtub, a return that had ceased to be chronically depressing and had become healthily malicious.

Vid was supposed to come back late Sunday night with finished photographs of Banja Vrućica near Teslić, which together with pictures and texts on ten or so other spas for rheumatic diseases in Bosnia were to be part of a guidebook for the Adriatic. It would be published in ten European languages and would be used to attract aging, gouty, and tubercular tourists (especially rich ones) to special two-part packages: first, two weeks of therapy in one of the Bosnian spas, whereupon they would leave for a week of sea adventures. Banja Vrućica was the sixth or seventh place in which over the last year Vid Kraljev had stayed for three weeks as an assistant photographer to Petar Pardžik, the famed Belgrade artistic and personal photographer of all Yugoslav rulers from Petar I Karađorđević the Unifier to Marshal Tito. He’d taken on this project at a request and on an order from the highest leaders of the Bosnian Communist Party, who were convinced that Pardžik was the only one who could photograph those spas and hospitals so that they would look attractive to Krauts. And maybe he would lend them some of the old Habsburg imperial and royal charm and produce portraits of the buildings that made them look almost like marshals and field marshals. Kraljev had been assigned to him as the most promising young Yugoslav photographer, the winner of federal photography competitions, to which he had submitted some enlarged photographs of sea crabs whose legs and pincers looked like menacing science fiction abstractions or towers and giant fossils. But special significance, which was probably even crucial for Kraljev’s fame, was lent to all this by the fact that he titled all his photographs with names and key places from the war of national liberation and the socialist revolution, such as The Battle for the Wounded or Shots from Ljubo’s Grave. But Pardžik didn’t need an assistant, and Vid Kraljev couldn’t ever be one to anybody. The old man spent whole days complaining of his illnesses and going through brightly colored pills on his palm, rearranging them and dividing them up, lining them up into colorful rows, and developing a theory according to which it wasn’t good for heart pills to be blue and bladder and prostate pills to be green.