Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

She would crochet like that until the late afternoon, when she would leave the house without a word, knock on the window of her neighbor Tereza, and tell her that she couldn’t take it and that she needed someone. And then on Tereza’s television she would see the Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda standing over the white marble grave and wiping tears from his eyes with a large kerchief on the end of his little finger. That enormous black man with a kerchief the size of a café tablecloth awoke a sudden television sadness in these neighbors. They looked at the screen as if it happened to be showing a series about a family tragedy in the American south. They turned to one another when Kaunda plunged his face into the kerchief. His shoulders shook as if a herd of antelope were galloping across them. They looked each other in the eyes and still deeper, into their pupils, and at the same moment they burst into tears.

“Oh, the poor man; he made such a journey to find his friend dead.”

Dijana would sit a while longer in front of the sealed television set, and then everything boiled up inside of her. She took the scissors, cut the seals away, cut up the blue paper, turned on the Niš Electronics Ambassador, and came in at the moment when a Kakanj miner came out of a shaft and told how the Marshal was for him a light, the earth, water, and the air he breathed, and two tears left pure white trails down his sooty face. She nestled herself in the armchair, curled up her legs under herself, and was happy because she was returning to the community of the sad, which was in any case more pleasant than the confused loneliness that issued from everything she could think of. She pitied Vid as we pity mutts we pass by on rainy days, with full awareness that we could make them happy for life if we only took them home. She could have been his Madonna, and everything would have been nice and simple for both of them; they would have stayed together to the end, without Vid ever betraying her. Because if he’d waited on her for twenty years, he would have lived out the remaining twenty or forty as a reward and providence, the finger of divine fate that confirms that persistence in desires makes sense. He would have solved all her future problems, she thought, because each of them was simpler than what had begun it all, and that one was that she didn’t love him and never could have. She could have done what she wanted, cheated on him, acted viciously and haughtily, lived her own life, and left him to worry about everything that was both of theirs or was the price for such a life. He would have done everything and wouldn’t ever have rebuked her. So it seemed to her now that Vid was no longer there, and she felt relieved because of this.

The general secretary of the Communist Party of Italy said that the world workers’ movement had lost one of its greatest leaders and visionaries: “Today nothing can fill our devastated souls!” The bit about devastated souls particularly touched Dijana. She pulled a wadded tissue out of her sleeve and wiped her nose with it.

When in the latter months of her term, when the time for an abortion had long since passed, she thought about the moment when she’d conceived; images of the two funerals kept coming back to her, one live and one televised. She was unable to begin the tale of her child in any other way, a child with whom she would spend the rest of her life and never be free again. The time when the doctor had told her that she was pregnant seemed so murky, and the act between her and Vid, when the biological causes of what she would attribute to later events had come into existence, was in her memory completely unbelievable. She remembered Vid turning his back to her as he put on the condom; he always did that, as if it were the most shameful part of sex; she clearly saw his vertebrae catching the dim light. She saw the moment before he entered her, when she grabbed him by the cock as she always did. Then he gave a deep sigh, and she actually checked whether he had put on the condom well or was trying to trick her so his semen would, as if by accident, pour into her. The condom was always on right, so how did what happened happen? This was a mystery to Dijana, something that would remain unanswered. And so twenty years later, when Mirna asked her where she and her brother had been conceived, she would stutter trying to think up some lie because the actual truth, or so it seemed to Dijana, didn’t even exist.

That summer the Olympics were held in Moscow, and she sat in front of the television for days on end, gobbled down unbelievable amounts of potato chips, and watched every last bit of live coverage and reports from the strangest competitions, including the steeplechases and lawn hockey. She vainly cheered for the Indian hockey team, in which all the players were surnamed Singh, so Dijana imagined that they all belonged to some big, happy family in which there were so many brothers and relatives that they didn’t even know each other that well — they met each other on the street and passed each other by like strangers, and no one could pester any of the others with his personal problems. That was the only way, she thought, that you could have a happy family. Hundreds of them under the same roof, and all they had in common was that they all played lawn hockey. Her palms sweated as the Singh family tried to break through the granite defense of the Pakistani team and almost didn’t notice her belly growing bigger with each day, and in the folds of her first wrinkles there were now little pockets of fat, which would soon change Dijana’s physiognomy and in a matter of months change her from a young and pretty woman into a middle-aged postal official whom the perennial tourists would no longer recognize. What she blamed on her pregnancy and hormonal imbalance had more to do with the potato chips and the Olympics, which postponed Dijana’s fits of depression and beat back any thought of the fact that she should do something with her life.

In the swimming competitions she took notice of Darjan Petrič, a sixteen-year-old Slovene with the face of a boy and the body of a man from one’s dreams, and she decided that if she had a boy, she’d name him Darijan. Years later she realized that she hadn’t even done that right and had thrown in an extra i that had appeared in his name in Cyrillic at the top of the television screen because someone in the Soviet television service had erroneously transcribed Petrič’s name.

Seeing what her daughter was turning into, Regina washed her hands of trying to tear her away from the television. Here and there she would gripe about what was going to happen when the municipal inspection discovered that she’d broken the official seal on the television set and crushed the wax red star, thereby dishonoring both the state and her deceased husband. Dijana said nothing in response but continued munching on potato chips and watching the quarterfinals of the handball tournament, and so her mom would go off into the kitchen or to the neighbors, whom she told that her daughter was already half-mad for lack of a man and that she was afraid of something terrible happening to her. But of course she wasn’t afraid but needed something that would make her the center of attention, which was greater and more important than the ills of old age and the problems of meager pensions, the only things her women friends talked about.

But it seems that her imagination summoned the devil. Two days after the Olympics were over, Dijana got in a tub of hot water and tried to slit her wrists. She ran into the kitchen completely naked, firmly gripping her left wrist, which was flowing with dark, red blood. Regina nearly fainted because of the blood and because she didn’t see a thick fleece under her daughter’s round belly. Her freshly shaved mons veneris with its pinkish canyon gleamed like the city’s towers in the August sun. That was Dijana’s last attack of nerves that was properly hushed up because Regina didn’t say anything even to their immediate neighbors. The laceration was sewed up in the emergency room, where Dijana received a referral for a psychiatrist. She didn’t go since she had no idea what she would say to anyone, let alone a stranger, about herself.