Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Her thoughts fled from the place where she was; she tried not to look over at Regina, who was standing alongside Vid’s mother, Aunt Nusreta, holding her by the arm, comforting her as she wept and sobbing as soon as she stopped. She treated her like her best friend, like a cousin in need, although she openly scorned her, both for her “Turkish” name and behavior, which with its gentleness and discretion rubbed Regina the wrong way, and for the fact that she’d given birth to seven sons and raised them, which offended Regina to her marrow and led her to spend hours analyzing Nusreta’s physical makeup and the organs through which so many children had passed. And if Vid were at home, she made subtle jibes concerning his mother, convinced that he didn’t understand them. Dijana made a horrible scene on several occasions when this had happened, trying to shame her or force her to shut up, but it was futile because Nusreta was one of Regina’s obsessive subjects, on account of which she developed a whole theory about Muslim child-bearing women, based on something that she’d read in the newspaper or seen on television, in which people with Muslim names and surnames usually appeared in the roles of brutal warriors and their primitive women made up for their defeats in wars by procreation. But during the burial ceremony she hugged Nusreta as if she were one of her own, in order to find a place for herself as well in that festival of sadness.

After the procession the column went to the Hotel Otrant, where Vid’s brothers had already reserved a long ceremonial table because going straight home from a cemetery brought bad luck.

Death should be left at some wayside place, best in a tavern, where, intoxicated with alcohol, it will approach someone else and leave the mourning family in peace for a while. They reserved the head of the table for Dijana, where she was again surrounded by Vid’s brothers, who addressed her exclusively as “our bride” and saw in her their eternal widow, whom they would honor and care for right until she remarried, whereupon she would become their greatest enemy — she who’d spat on the grave of her dearest and broken a vow that was measured only by her life. She felt that and wanted to run home as soon as she could, but she couldn’t because they were making posthumous toasts to her Vid, one after another. They would pour half a glass of stiff grape brandy onto the hotel’s green carpeting — the custom was to give the dead soul a drink — and they would down the other half in one draught, both the men and the women, the young and the old. Nusreta did the same and with her, of course, Regina, who after the fifth brandy was already so drunk that she got up, raised her arms to quiet the people, and said:

“I’ll tell you something that not even the deceased Vid knew but should have found out yesterday, poor child; God have mercy on his soul. The bride is with child. Dijana is carrying Vid’s child!”

She shouted out the last words and collapsed in her chair. The six brothers stared at their widow, and she lowered her eyes, hoping the earth under her would open up.

Petar Pardžik was buried a day later, on the Boulevard of Great Men in Belgrade, with twelve-gun salutes and a military orchestra and in the attendance of the Yugoslav cultural and public elite. There were few politicians, probably because they were saving themselves for Marshal Tito’s funeral two days later, but a high party delegation arrived from Sarajevo, headed by Comrade Fejzić, who said of the last and unfinished work of the great photographer and activist, “He was consumed in flames and gave his life for art and the ideals of the working class, and for generations to come no one should forget Petar Pardžik and all those named and unnamed men who gave their lives to lay the foundations of our socialist order at Sutjeska and the Neretva, Kozara, and Romanija.”

After Fejzić spoke, Pardžik’s friends, art critics, and professors each said a few words, and then his body was lowered into the grave accompanied by the sounds of the Internationale.

However, this death was hardly mentioned in the newspapers and on television because it was difficult to find space for any grief other than that greatest sorrow, and it might have even looked suspicious if Pardžik’s passing were met with an overly strong expression of grief. But the prize for a lifetime achievement in artistic photography was named after him and would bear his name after the fall of communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia. That was fair in a way because Pardžik had bestowed equal honor on all rulers, states, and political systems and would have shown the same respect for those whose time he did not have the fortune to live to see.

After the procession it was decided to give a monetary award to the widow of the master’s faithful and final assistant, in the amount of an average yearly Yugoslav salary.

On the day of Tito’s funeral, while sirens wailed outside and the sounds of Lenin’s March and television sets could be heard through open windows in the neighborhood, Regina and Dijana sat in front of a television that was sealed and wrapped in blue packing paper. Namely, her mother had called an official from the municipality and in spite of Dijana’s objections had had him seal the television during the period of mourning in the family, as was the local custom. She did this so there wouldn’t be any stories of Regina Delavale singing and dancing instead of mourning her son-in-law. No matter how attached she was to television and how little she was concerned about the gossip in the city and the neighborhood, Regina wanted in no way to be denied anything that brought grief to the household. Dressed strictly in black and with a kerchief around her head, she went out, she accepted condolences from friends and strangers alike and told for the hundredth time about the circumstances of the traffic accident in which Vid had died. “After they heard that Tito had died, they hurried home to see their loved ones, as would anyone else, and so you see, fate’s a tricky vixen; you never know which curve is hiding your grave,” she said and nodded, as big-butted women at the fish market clucked their tongues and offered her their fresh sepiolas, which had been pulled from the sea that very morning — she should take some home to her pregnant daughter, that unfortunate girl who was carrying the child of a dead man in her womb.

For some reason people were quite excited by the fact that the woman was going to give birth to a child for a man who no longer existed; it was something like a calf with two heads, a black man with an elephant’s head, or similar circus attractions. Giving birth to the child of a dead father seemed to the street to be more interesting than having a stillborn child. Although this was not the first time this had happened in the city (there’d been similar cases now and then over the last fifty years, as far as the streets could remember and revive old news) but it was evident that it would be just as strange even if it happened every year. The child in Dijana’s womb (and until the day of birth no one would have any idea that there were even two) was for the city something that was at the same time both a bastard child and an immaculately conceived little Jesus. That’s how it was, though there were no real reasons for it, nor had they ever existed.

Dijana wouldn’t forgive her mother for having told everyone about her pregnancy. At first she wouldn’t even talk to her, and then she would open her mouth only when she had to or when other noises became too much for her to take in their silence. She didn’t feel like leaving the house. She’d received seven days off from work due to a death in the family and had no one to whom she could tell the truth about Vid and about that seed of his that now kept growing in her. She felt dull and the only thing that kept her going was her fear of falling into depression and despair again or falling into some heretofore unknown form of despair. And so she sat in her armchair, listening to the sounds of the great funeral in Belgrade, which came with a breeze and the scent of the sea and pine trees, the distant barking of dogs, and cries of seagulls fighting somewhere down below over some fish innards and rotten animal parts that the sea had brought from who knows where. Regina sat beside her, furiously crocheting on some embroidery that would hem a ceremonial white tablecloth because her daughter was behaving like an ass, just pouting and trudging from the armchair to the toilet and back again. And Tito’s funeral was going on, without her seeing anything.