Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Two inspectors questioned Regina in turns. While the first one comforted her, telling her he also had a caring mother like her, the other threatened her with eight years in prison, the exact number of years she had subtracted from her daughter’s age.

“Who talked you into it and why? Who did you talk to before you arrived at the police station? Who all knows that your daughter has left home?”

They repeated the same questions over and over again, and she answered one thing one time and another thing another time; she would tell a little of the truth before returning to her lies, which, at least in the eyes of the police, made no sense whatsoever.

They kept up the pressure on her in the same manner until the morning, when the station chief appeared and ordered them to let the old woman go: “Can’t you see she’s crazy?!” Regina went back home, broken and helpless. After she pulled herself together somewhat, she realized what her choice was. She could give up on herself and her life or find Dijana no matter what it took. She’d already shamed herself too much in front of everyone in the city to give up now.

Gabriel showed up three hours after her bus had arrived, when Dijana had already begun to lose hope, finishing her fourth glass of juice in the bar of the bus station in a city where she didn’t know a single address or telephone number except his. She tried calling from a phone booth a few times, but he didn’t answer.

“Oh, my dear, that’s men for you!” the waitress said with pity, while the four drunks with the purplish faces giggled at the end of the bar. Dijana’s shoes had soaked through as soon as she stepped onto the platform. At first her feet were cold, but then her toes started to itch unbearably. When she rubbed them against each other, the itching turned to pain, and then the pain itself would start to itch. She’d never felt this before; had she maybe picked up an infection, a fungus, some hideous skin disease? She tried to imagine what her toes looked like, what color they were, and whether the skin on them was peeling off. Then she couldn’t take it any more and took off her shoes and stockings; her toes seemed normal, just a little bluish, with black dirt around the nails, equally itchy and tender.

And just when she was scratching them and smelling the palms of her hands — carefully, so the waitress and the drunks wouldn’t notice — Gabriel came in. A young man and woman were behind him, grinning broadly. She quickly pulled on her wet stockings and shoes and jumped up into his arms.

“Hey, Dijana, what’s up, girl?” he asked, as if he weren’t late at all. There had in fact been a misunderstanding: he’d thought that she was arriving on the bus from Budva, which always arrived two hours later and was just now pulling into the station. They started to panic when Dijana didn’t come out of the bus, but here she was, waiting for them in the station’s bar!

“This is my friend Musa and his girlfriend Goga,” he said. Musa seemed to be much younger than Gabriel. He had long, blond hair and a nice-looking bare face that had never been touched by a razor. He looked like a high school student from those prewar wanted posters for communists. She was an unattractive, plump girl who was obviously trying to look like Janis Joplin. And she was fairly successful at it, no joke. In striped bell-bottom jeans that dragged in the snow and made it impossible to tell whether she had any shoes on, Goga was a marvel for Sarajevo. They hadn’t gone a hundred meters from the station when people started harassing her. A taxi driver shouted, “Take a bath, girl!” from a gray Opel Rekord, probably unhappy that they didn’t want him to drive them into the city.

“Man, look at her!” said one Gypsy to another.

“Get a load of this; the American pussy is finally here!” said a balding man with a mustache, absently but still fairly loudly, from the entrance to the Tripoli Grill.

But since the three of them didn’t show at all that they’d heard any of this, Dijana realized that it was a common occurrence and that these catcalls differed from those in Mediterranean cities only in the degree of candor and kind of insult. At first she thought she wouldn’t have a problem with this manner of communication.

The trolley took them to the old central market district, and then, dragging all of Dijana’s luggage behind them, they began an uphill ascent along steep lanes and alleys that went on for more than half an hour. Every few meters she would slip and fall. Bags flew in all directions, and Gabriel would lift her up with a smile. Sweat was streaming down her face, and Dijana couldn’t figure out how the three of them could be so cheerful and laid back. It was as if something else were happening to them, as if they enjoyed climbing uphill like this. She hadn’t spoken ten sentences since she’d arrived in the city, but she already realized that nothing she might say would express a feeling that she could share with them. She was wet, dirty, and exhausted when she entered Gabriel’s house. The first thing she did was take off her shoes.

“Come here for a minute,” he said, calling her over to the window. “Take a look; this is why I climb up here every day!” Somewhere far below — farther than Dubrovnik looks from atop the Srđ fortress — there was a city, buried in snow and smog. Lights blinked in the windows of buildings and high-rises; on top of one of them was the blue neon sign of a Slovenian TV station. Lombardy poplars rose up, their top halves white with snow, their bottom halves still green; on all sides the horizon seemed to be at the same level as the window where she was standing.

“It’s really pretty,” she lied, realizing at the same time that this might be the most beautiful and important view in the world for someone if they’d seen it every day since birth and then suddenly lost it.

“A little brandy to warm us up,” said Musa, bringing a bottle from the kitchen. A fire was burning hot and bright in a coal stove in the corner. It produced the same odor that permeated the entire city. So this was the price that Sarajevans had to pay to fight off the cold and warm their homes. Dijana was sitting on a divan; she’d folded her legs beneath her, the way she had seen it done. She thought the brandy smelled like medicinal alcohol; her head was getting foggy, and she could feel herself sinking. She leaned on Gabriel’s shoulder and then sank onto his lap.

She fell asleep. She didn’t hear anything else, except the occasional sounds of a quiet and distant conversation in which familiar words were pronounced in a strange way, creating the impression that they were spoken by people who never stopped joking. Vowels were rare in that conversation, remaining mostly in the throat of the speaker. However, the vowels that could be heard were long and drawn out, almost endless. They were an expression of intimacy but might seem to be mockery to anyone outside the closed circle.

Dijana had met Gabriel the previous autumn. He’d come to the city as a tour guide for a group of Austrian pensioners who wanted first to see where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated and then the cultural and historical sights of the most beautiful city on the Yugoslav coast of the Adriatic. But as a perforated appendix had sent the driver of the Bosnatours bus to the hospital, Gabriel had to be both their guide and driver. This was his first time driving a bus since the army and the first time ever on such a long route. Everything went fine except that for some reason he missed the turn for Dubrovnik. Instead of returning to the main road, he tried to find a shortcut by maneuvering the bus through the narrow streets, eventually getting stuck right in front of the entrance to Dijana’s house, at the end of a street ending in a flight of stairs.