Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

From the kitchen, the mother and daughter heard an engine raging right on the other side of the wall. Then they heard panicked male and female voices, German vowels and Bosnian curses. They’d come out of the house right when the bus scraped the stone wall of their house. Regina stopped in her tracks, staring with her mouth agape at the metal monstrosity that had never before appeared on this street, which was rarely used by anyone on foot, let alone in a small car. After starting forward and backward several times, scraping the wall even more, Gabriel turned off the engine and got out of the bus. Thin as he was, he barely managed to slip between the wall and the door. Paying no attention to the two women standing just a few steps away, of which the older one was already clasping her hands together as if in prayer, he walked back and forth nervously like a hamster in a cage, trying to come up with a solution.

Dijana thought he looked funny, with his beard and long hair, wearing an ugly suit with a Bosnatours emblem on the breast pocket. But he would have looked just as strange if she’d seen him in normal circumstances. Then he peeked back into the bus and said something, after which the old men and women all hurried toward the exit. Three thin ones managed to pull through somehow, but then it was the turn of a slightly overweight lady who couldn’t get through no matter what. She became frightened and tried as hard as she could until she got completely stuck, unable to move either way. She began to cry for help and shout, and by that time all of the neighbors had gathered around. As shocked as Regina, they simply stood there, watching this wonder of a bus. Only when Gabriel began to push the overweight lady back into the vehicle because he couldn’t get her out did Bartol speak: “Young man, young man, push a little to the left, to the left, yes, that’s right, yeah. .”

He got the old woman back in the bus, but this only increased the panicked rush of the passengers to be evacuated. Everyone, male and female alike, headed for the door. Some did so probably because they thought themselves thinner than others, the rest because fear had robbed them of their sense and they thought this bus would be their Titanic then and there, in the middle of Yugoslavia, the land of communists and partisans and those who’d killed their archduke. So they trampled each other, elbows and knees gouging the bodies of those next to them, the ladies clawing at the windows with their fingernails. It was up to the onlookers to decide whether they were watching a tragedy or a comedy and whether to laugh or offer help. Gabriel was trying to soothe the distraught elderly tourists, begging them to calm down and kicking all those who were trying to push their fat bellies out, only to explode in the end: “Why don’t you all go fuck yourselves?!”

He waved his hand angrily and walked away from the bus. It was obvious that he didn’t know what to do — he started down the stairs, then came back and stopped again.

Dijana believed that she’d never seen a stranger and more endearing man in her life. Soon neither she nor the other onlookers cared about what happened to the Austrian pensioners. They didn’t seem like real people but were more like characters in a movie or a circus that had ended up putting on a performance in front of their houses. They watched them silently pushing, shouting and weeping, falling on the seats, and tussling with one another. They could have even died like that, suffocated from poison gas and decomposed from chemical weapons; it wouldn’t have mattered.

Before Bartol called in the police to try to control the situation, seven of the Austrians managed to get out of the bus. The locals gave them water and wine to drink, brought chairs out into the yard, and revived German vocabulary from their school years, until the foreigners finally turned their gazes from their trapped countrymen and took their smiling place in the free world. When they remembered their comrades, they did it without a great deal of understanding for the situation in which they had found themselves a little earlier and tried to calm them with words of comfort that they obviously didn’t mean.

Gabriel kept pacing back and forth and swearing, certain that his career as a tour guide was over, and figured that he’d be lucky if he didn’t have to pay for the damage to the bus out of his own pocket. He passed by Dijana, who followed him back and forth with her eyes, enchanted by the appearance of this stranger. He was like Tarzan in New York, completely out of place anywhere but in passageways hidden deep in the jungle. Regina, of course, noticed the look she gave him and was not at all happy about it.

The police first registered the case, and then there began a long consultation about what to do from there. They managed to get two more of the thinner old women out of the bus. An ambulance also arrived because one of them had also suffered a heart attack. People from all over that part of town gathered around. The police tried unsuccessfully to clear the area, and people pushed their way to wherever they could get the best view of what was going on inside the bus. Some children climbed onto the surrounding rooftops. Bartol warned them to get down because they might break the roof tiles, and then a tow truck arrived. The driver squeezed back into the bus to ovations from the crowd and tried to back it out of the jam, but he couldn’t do anything except smash the left headlight and further scrape the side of the bus against the wall of Regina’s house. Whenever the metal started scraping against the rock, Gabriel would grimace as if someone were running a razor over his fingernails.

“Do you want me to bring you a brandy?” Dijana asked him.

“How about a pistol so I can shoot myself?” he responded without taking his eyes off the bus. He himself was slowly turning into a battered and rusted wreck.

“Wouldn’t a little brandy still be better?” she insisted. And then Gabriel finally took a good look at her. She wasn’t that pretty, but there was something intimate in the way she spoke to him and looked at him, something he usually attained with women only after months of laboring and waiting on them, if at all.

“Hey, girl, you saved my life,” he said when he took a slurp of brandy from the glass, and Dijana laughed as if he’d said something very witty and took him by the hand. That touch was somehow excessive.

The bus with the captive Austrian pensioners remained there overnight. The people went home, the nine rescued tourists were put up in a hotel, and Gabriel, like a real sea captain, decided to wait out the morning on the steps, so that the unfortunate elderly tourists would see that he hadn’t abandoned them. Around nine, after Regina had already fallen asleep, Dijana sneaked out of the house with a plate of beans and a piece of bread and spent the night out on the steps with Gabriel. There wasn’t much space, their sides touched, and so words flowed more quickly and closely than they usually do between a man and a woman who’ve just met. They chatted about anything and everything, only not about themselves.

He told stories about his father Mijo and his card partner Žućo, who had a strange ability: an hour after eating two plates of beans, he could fart the song When I Left for Bentbaša from start to finish.

Gabriel spoke of breaking wind cheerfully and without any shame or the usual excuses, as if that were something one obviously had to tell a girl when he met her. What girl wouldn’t be fascinated by explanations of how one gets the low notes and what one had to do to get the large intestine to produce a high C, which, as Gabriel said, came out of that instrument in a much more pure form than from a clarinet or saxophone. It was also very important for the beans not to have too much roux in them and that they be cooked with dried and not raw meat. Roux and raw meat decreased the melodiousness and increased the odor of farts.