Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

As Pardžik didn’t appear and Vid’s nervousness only increased, at lunchtime he decided to go look for him and suggest that he go ahead and take those twenty photographs of the spa himself, if the master was indisposed or had no inspiration, so they could leave before dark. He found him snoring in his room, probably exhausted from salting the egg. He roused him, ready for an argument even if it cost him his career as an artistic photographer. However, Pardžik jumped right out of bed.

“You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” he repeated in answer to Vid’s complaints. “Here, I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” he said and started fumbling about in his room, completely forgetting about his rheumatism, gout, and age. After his afternoon nap his unease due to the fact that he had put the young man in a difficult position was now suddenly more important than any illness. Vid furiously grabbed the equipment and loaded himself up with a whole museum of antique technology because Pardžik had stubbornly refused to replace his thirty-and fifty-year-old cameras with new, technically up-to-date ones that were also easier to carry, maintaining that they weren’t any better but in fact worse and less reliable, serving only to enable any idiot to do photography.

Vid hurried three paces ahead of him, and the old man hurried after him and tried to get into his good graces. “I’m really sorry. But you know what an old man’s brain is like. What you excrete from your bowels every morning, that’s what I’ve got in my head! Out in the country around Negotin they’re right when they take an old man out into the woods, lean a flatbread on his head, and — bam! — hit it with the butt of an axe. ‘I didn’t kill you, the bread did!’ Well, they should have done that to me a long time ago. Believe me. Oh, God, I feel so bad about having gotten this man into a situation like this. Just wait a bit; I’ll have everything finished in half an hour. You just put all the equipment on that rise over there, and I’ll do everything else. Go to the hotel, get some rest; I know you’re tired of me. Do you have any more money? If you don’t, I do. Just go have a cup of coffee and calm down. Oh, Petar, black Petar, what have you done, where’s your shame. .?”

Vid stopped, dropped what he was carrying in his hands, and said, “Stop it already! What, do you think this is my life or something? Well, it’s not, and I’m not interested in what you’ve got to say. I couldn’t care less whether you feel bad, and I’d ask you to be quiet. You know, I’d just like to hear birds chirping or a bear, anything but you.”

The eighty-five-year-old court photographer looked sadly at Vid, and his eyes filled with tears: “Whatever you say; just don’t be angry at me.”

After this Petar Pardžik wouldn’t utter a word, up until four o’clock, when he snapped the last photograph. All the while Vid was sitting on a tree stump, ten or so meters from the old man, smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying without success to calm down. Nothing was going right for him, and in fact the pranks that the old man had been playing that morning were the least of the worries that had put him in that state. He was thinking about Dijana, her stubborn refusal to give him a child, and his own misery, which had begun the day he fell head over heels in love with that eighteen-year-old prep school student and decided never to stop loving her. He couldn’t have loved her all twenty of those years. It’s more likely that his irrational hardheadedness had kept him from listening to his own heart, unless it too was stubborn and stupid, creating feelings from all manner of things that had nothing to do with them. He’d sat for months on the toilet with the lid closed and poked holes in packages of condoms in the belief that his love would pass through the hole in the rubber membrane. And while doing this, he’d always felt just as wretched, but at least he thought that he was doing it for some high and noble reasons. And now he was just miserable and nothing else. That misery was the kind on account of which he might kill someone since he didn’t have the courage to kill himself. It was twenty to five when Pardžik and Kraljev got into the white Golf that the Bosnian Central Committee had put at their disposal until the project A Healthy Guest Is a Rested Guest was finished.

“I’m sorry again,” said the old man.

“It’s all right,” Vid answered; “you’re not to blame for all the stuff that’s been getting bottled up in me.”

As they drove out of the parking lot, a woman ran out of the spa with her head in her hands, and her face showed that she had been sobbing hysterically.

“It seems we’ve got a fatality in therapy,” Vid commented.

“It’s good we left in time,” the old man responded and then thought how he’d said something stupid again — because what could they have to do with someone who’d expired trying to use medicinal baths to treat something untreatable, a heart that had reached the end of the line and should have been cared for when that person had been young and healthy? He imagined an old man lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, whose gaze was locked onto the blue ceiling tiles while between his cyanotic, bluish-purple lips there was only bonaccia, that unnatural peace that sows panic among the living, on account of which they had invented God and the conviction that under the heavens there exists something more precious than a sigh passing between one’s lips. Soon that’ll be me, he thought and wanted to say it aloud, but then he changed his mind because he had already tortured the young man enough today.

The road to Zenica was eerily empty. Apart from police cars and an occasional military truck there was almost no one out on the road, which was strange, especially at the end of a long weekend that had begun with May Day and lasted for four days. One would have expected for people to be returning from their vacations, for students to be on their way to Zenica and Sarajevo, because the next day they all had to go to work or classes. Darkness was falling, televisions were glowing through the windows of the houses along the road, the afterglow of the sun was sinking behind the mountains, and Petar Pardžik was drifting off to sleep. Vid would glance at him from the corner of his eye; the master photographer was sliding and pitching back and forth in the car as they drove down the curves on the road. He’s so old, he thought, but since there was no continuation of that thought and Petar’s age didn’t touch Vid the way anything living or precious did that was near its beginning or end, Vid moved on to something else, a topic that would occupy his thoughts more and more during the drive.

When someone is driving at night, if he’s alone or the only one awake in the car, it’s important to find something to think about. Then the drive becomes a pleasure, and he sinks into melancholy and mild sorrow, which he later remembers as a time free from care. People who don’t like to drive or hate being alone in a car are actually not in a condition to let one thought travel through their mind freely, without interruption. Vid had started from the Hajduk— Red Star match, which was already long over, but he didn’t know who’d won. If the old man hadn’t been sleeping beside him, he would have switched on the radio, but he couldn’t do that now because Pardžik would have thought that he was paying him back and would have probably again given him that look of an abandoned salamander, which had made him feel sorry in spite of all of his anger at him. At that moment he knew that Pardžik would die, in a year or two or five, and that when he read the news in the morning paper, he would remember that look of his as they’d climbed up the hill and would feel guilty. He wanted to do something nice, to cheer up the old man, whenever the time came, of course.