Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

That was exactly what Kamenko Katić, the preeminent weather expert, said as pictures of empty Adriatic beaches drifted across the screen, showing only a few swimmers sporting looks typical of the 1960s.

One male swimmer, whose long hair came down over his eyes and whose sideburns were shaped like little battleaxes, looked like a cross between a guest worker and a street revolutionary. With eyebrows plucked in the shape of thin crescent moons and a rubber swim cap to protect her cold perm from seawater, a female swimmer looked like Brigitte Bardot’s East European sister. Watching them smile into the camera, full of optimism and faith in a better future, Dijana couldn’t but believe Kamenko’s words.

As the bus passed through Hadžići and Tarčin and slipped into a pall of lead-gray Sarajevo fog, Dijana shivered in nothing but a light shirt because all her sweaters and her only winter coat were in the luggage compartment below. What she could see through the window frightened her: shadows of high-rises; a long row of military barracks, conscripts standing guard; streets along which fathers pulled their children on sleds; tall, slim minarets likely to puzzle those who saw them the first time and didn’t know what to do when passing by them — whether they should do anything other than what they did or didn’t do when standing under a church tower.

Such thoughts probably wouldn’t have bothered her if the weather forecast hadn’t been so completely wrong and if she hadn’t felt that she was outside the region mentioned by Kamenko Katić, far away from the country where she felt secure. There was none of Yugoslavia in Sarajevo, though the television and the newspapers always said that the city was a “Yugoslavia in miniature.”

Dijana didn’t understand the point of this ideological trick, which might not have seemed like a trick by those who weren’t arriving there in the late summer from the sunny south, and the way in which she thought about it was pretty much in line with the spirit of the time. If Sarajevo was indeed a “Yugoslavia in miniature” and if the whole of Bosnia was given the same label whenever needed, then why did Yugoslavia never — not even in the boldest party metaphors — become a “big Sarajevo” or a “big Bosnia”? Was it because ideological metaphors don’t obey the principles of formal logic or because a metaphor in the opposite direction wouldn’t have had enough appeal?

The real reason doesn’t matter here. If a story about the great in the small could have been recast into a story about the small in the great, the history of our country would look very different, and we would seem more normal to those who will one day study it. But Dijana didn’t spend even five minutes of her life thinking about it.

Outside the bus she was greeted by a winter like she had never experienced and the heavy smell of burning coal, which she would never get used to but would stay with her for all her life as the dominant sensory memory of her months in Sarajevo. That smell would also bring her thoughts back to the city and the first time she left home, as an unmistakable harbinger or a symptom of a bad mood. She kept trying to push through the crowd to the conductor handing out the luggage so she could slip on her coat as quickly as possible, but other passengers were stronger or quicker on their feet, so she ended up being one of the last ones in line.

“You’re almost naked, girl!” said a man with a mustache wearing a blue Centrotrans smock. “And look how many bags you have, you crazy woman,” he added in disbelief as he handed her bag number four and she pointed to yet another large suitcase.

She was barely able to move all her luggage off the platform and carry it into the grimy bar at the station while fighting off a bunch of Gypsy children demanding money. When she finally sank down into a squeaky wooden chair and opened her suitcase, which was crammed full, its contents sprang out on the muddy floor. She somehow managed to get a hold of her coat, so she tried to put everything else back into the suitcase and shut it again. From a corner the bloodshot eyes of the station drunkards watched her mutely. They were clearly not used to seeing female passengers like her. With her hair disheveled and wearing only a summer dress under a heavy winter coat, she climbed onto the suitcase and began jumping on it until a waitress came up to her and said “Hold on, girl! What do you think you’re doing?”

The waitress then pushed down on the suitcase with her big, fat hands, the locks clicked and everything was as it should be again. The waitress flashed her a big smile and said, “Everything will be all right.” Dijana wondered what in the hell she must look like if a woman she didn’t know was telling her that.

She ordered a glass of juice and waited for Gabriel to come get her. Although her bus had arrived forty minutes after schedule, he wasn’t there.

Meanwhile, Regina became frantic when she returned home. After reading Dijana’s note, she ran over to Bartol Čurlin’s house, who at that time, in 1969, was the only person in the neighborhood who owned a telephone because he worked for the municipality. He was a bachelor, good-natured and quiet, so people came to his house as if it were a public telephone booth.

“The slut’s run off! Call the police!” Regina yelled all the way from the yard. Bartol grabbed her by the hands and tried to calm her down so that she could explain what had happened, but Regina struggled against him as if possessed by the devil or as if he were trying to hurt her. “She’ll piss away all the milk she sucked from my tits!” Regina screamed, at which point Bartol simply gave up. “There’s the phone,” he said and stood by the door as if ready to run out of his own house at the first sign of danger.

Regina called the police, told them that her daughter had run away from home or had perhaps been kidnapped by someone, and when the voice on the other end of the line asked how old the child was, she said — seventeen! They told her to wait three days and call again because if her daughter didn’t appear within that time — and she most probably would — it was only then that a search warrant for her could be issued. On hearing this, her mother sobbed a little, swore a little, but in the end promised to call again in three days.

As Bartol listened to the conversation, he rolled his eyes and raised his eyebrows in disbelief. When Regina hung up, he only asked, “Since when is Dijana seventeen years old?!” Regina didn’t even look at him and instead ran out of the house, yelling, “How should the police know how old the slut is?!”

She spent the whole day searching the house for any clues Dijana might have left, rummaging through drawers and closets, furious because she knew with whom she was and where she’d gone. At first she thought her daughter was hiding somewhere in the city, in the house of one of her lovers, who in Regina’s imagination numbered into the hundreds.

Some she knew by name; others she remembered only because they would turn around and make catcalls when Dijana passed them on the street, while she responded with a lascivious shake of her tail and words that convinced her mother that she’d slept with all of them. In her head Regina kept a whole catalogue of bastards, losers, and blockheads; sailors with the clap; whoremongers, robbers, and taciturn Turks who had descended into the city from Gacko and Trebinje; sons of the houses of washed-up Dubrovnik gentry where syphilis was passed down from generation to generation; muddy workers whose members were thicker than the telephone cable they had been laying in a ditch in front of her house for more than six months, peeking under Dijana’s skirt the whole time; harbor pimps and bisexuals who forced themselves upon men and women in rusty train cars in switching yards; students with nervous disorders and young widowers; priests with translucent skin who pressed the locks of seven-year-old angels between their pink, sweaty fingers; Turkish truck drivers who would pay a hundred dinars to shove their circumcised members into the mouth of any woman who was willing; math teachers with reading glasses; aging mongoloids with cucumbers protruding from their rear ends; insatiable old men who, if there were such a thing as divine justice, would have been dead ages ago. .