Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“We could do something today,” he told Vid over breakfast in Banja Vrućica, early in the morning on Sunday, the fourth of May, 1980.

“It’s not that we could — we have to,” Vid answered nervously.

“And why would anyone, if you’ll excuse me, have to do anything but die?” Pardžik asked, taking a pinch of salt and entertaining himself as he imagined a Siberian snowstorm hitting the top of his hardboiled egg. He was salting it for the third time, and the scene was magnificent.

“You’ll die if you salt things so much,” Vid said caustically, already on the verge of losing his temper because they were traveling that day and Pardžik still hadn’t photographed anything.

“Who says I’m going to eat this egg? Ha, I’m not! Pera Pardžik doesn’t eat what he admires. You know, I admire this egg here. Not just any egg, but this one. That means I’m an artist. Artists can tell one egg from another. You, if you’re nervous, can go ahead and take a walk and look at the women. Maybe a young one will catch your eye. Leave me alone. When I’m ready, I’ll find you. If I’m ready. The little time I have left I want to spend as I see fit, and I advise you to do the same. There’s nowhere to hurry off to. Believe me. Nowhere.”

He spoke with his head lowered all the way down to the tabletop, so he could get the best view possible of the salt falling onto the egg and the patterns the crystals were forming. He wasn’t quite satisfied because his thumb, index finger, and middle finger hadn’t completely mastered the technique of a salt blizzard, and it all resembled somewhat the way artificial snow fell in American movies of the ’40s. But he was certain that he would succeed in the end and get the egg perfectly salted that day. Rage and pity mingled within Vid. Without caring if everyone in the dining hall was gazing at him, the old man, his cheek propped on the table and his right hand raised high to release the salt, reminded one of a child at play, unaware that if he continued what he was doing, he might get a slap.

“Okay, so we still don’t know when we’re going to take the photos?” Vid asked.

“Bull’s-eye! You got it, my young colleague. We still don’t know anything,” Pardžik said, trying to spread drifts and accumulations of salt on the egg.

“Fine; I’m going to go read the newspaper,” Vid said, rose from the table, and started toward the television lounge. Then he changed his mind and decided at first to go to the reception desk, to call Dijana and tell her that he had no idea when they were going to leave Banja Vrućica but that it wasn’t likely that they would arrive before the next day. These last days she’d sounded strange when they talked on the phone. And he couldn’t get that out of his head. He wasn’t sure about whether she really loved him in the first place, and these Bosnian trips, he thought, were only helping to cool what in Dijana had never been as hot as what was in him. He’d been crawling after her for almost twenty years, and each spring and fall he proposed to her. He was her friend and someone whom she didn’t call on the phone and avoided in the city. He’d changed jobs and professions for Dijana, and in the end stayed with photography. Either because she really liked artists or because she was already slowly entering that phase of life when it didn’t matter what her men did.

She’d rushed into his arms in the late summer of 1978, after a season she’d spent bedridden with pneumonia and that low-grade fever that they say is in some cases a symptom of insanity but in three months will drive even the most normal woman insane. She was dead tired. He took her out for a first stroll. She was continually sweating and her every muscle ached. Half an hour later she begged Vid to take her back home, grabbed him under the arm and clung to him, and realized that there were no real reasons for having rejected him all those years because in any case the most important thing in life was to have someone who will take you and put you in bed when you’re ill and you can’t do it on your own.

They got married just before New Year’s in 1979, whereupon Vid tried in every way to persuade her to have children. It was getting late for her, and she would soon be sorry if she didn’t take this last chance. But in fact he didn’t have his heart set on being a father. Rather, he needed something that would forever solidify their union and awaken true love in Dijana. As he would reflect on his fatherhood, he always imagined her looking at him. He saw Dijana watching him from the side as he taught his son how to walk; she was there as he changed his daughter’s diapers; she watched father and son on their first fishing trip from a rock, then how he taught the little boy to row a boat, the little girl to braid her hair, and when he took her to school by the hand. . None of Vid’s images of fatherhood were without her, nor was there anything that he imagined about his unborn children that remained only between him and them. All he really thought about in 1979 and 1980 was his obsessive vision of a son and daughter, which he intended to use to buy Dijana’s love. He was unable to do this with subtlety, charming his wife and winning her over with small deceits, but hit her over the head with it, always with the same words and arguments, whereby he actually lost her good will and Dijana started avoiding him again, in a smaller space to be sure, just as she had been running away from him for the last twenty years. She gave a sigh of relief when he would go off on a trip and was gone for a long time.

He dialed her number a dozen times but didn’t get a connection. Only when he began nervously hitting the telephone did the fat woman at the reception desk, who’d been there the whole time and stared at him while he was trying to make the call, hiss through her teeth:

“The lines are down. Can’t you see that? They’ve been down all morning.”

He went to the television lounge; retirees were watching Allow Us a Word. The winner of the Exemplary Soldier Karlo Papec pin said that he only had one wish — for the speedy recovery of Comrade Tito. The retirees nodded to that, and lieutenant Musadik Borović added that Karlo was a good comrade, “always ready to help those who don’t catch on quickly, and that’s why he received the most prized military award.”

“You see?!” said an old man with thick glasses who was sitting closest to the television, almost touching the screen with his nose, whereupon an old man wearing a wool cap and a Salonika mustache remarked:

“I can’t see anything with your head in the way!”

Vid took a newspaper that was on a little table behind the television, sat down in an armchair in the corner, and opened the sports section. In Split there had been a championship match between the Hajduk and Red Star teams. He read the announced lineups, trying to calm his nerves, but it didn’t work. Soccer can prevent a nervous breakdown, but only if things haven’t gotten way out of hand. And this time they really had. It seemed to him that Petar Pardžik was rapidly losing his mind; the thing with the egg was completely new, something that hadn’t happened on their trips before.

Vid was terrified that this would continue, that the old man would go completely crazy before the project was finished, and Comrade Fejzić would lay all the blame on him or force him to finish Pardžik’s work on his own, after which he would also take over the title of court photographer according to the dynastic laws. He would constantly be away from home, Dijana would find a lover if she hadn’t already, or the idiocy of old age would produce other problems that he couldn’t even suspect now, but of which there wouldn’t be fewer than those that were now on his mind. Then he read once more the names of the players for Hajduk and Red Star who would run out on the Poljud field, folded the newspaper, and started reading the headlines. Comrade Tito’s condition continued to be critical, the Ljubljana council reported. Vid Kraljev was probably one of the very few Yugoslavs who had bigger and more important problems than that.