Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Then he told about Hurem, another friend of his father’s, whose nickname was Cathead. Why Cathead? Because when he had an erection his glans was the size of a cat’s head, so big it couldn’t fit into a jam jar. When women saw that, they fled as fast as their legs could carry them.

Dijana’s head spun from such stories, which would have been disgusting if she’d heard them from anyone else or if they’d been told in a different way. However, they attracted her to Gabriel instead of making her repulsed by him.

When dawn came, Dijana was already prepared to follow that man to the ends of the earth, certain that whatever might happen to her with him would be different from everything else she’d experienced with men. Men had come like princes and gone like villains; at first they were head over heels in love, and then they would tell her that they were leaving her because she was too good for them and they didn’t deserve her. Never did it happen that a man left her saying that she was a stupid cow; rather, they all left claiming they were jerks and would regret it for the rest of their lives. But this man sitting beside her and telling her how the prostitutes in some Doboj brothel had beaten up his father because he discovered that he’d forgotten his wallet only after being serviced — he was surely no prince and wouldn’t exit her life like a deserter.

For his part, Gabriel was happy that he’d met a woman who could listen to the story about Žućo farting without feeling obligated to react with expressions of disgust but laughed like any normal person should. He didn’t like the fact that most women acted as if they had never pooted in their lives but only blew on dandelions and spread the scent of roses around themselves. If they couldn’t tell the truth about that, they’d lie about everything else too.

In the morning a rescue team from the city’s traffic department arrived with a special vehicle that towed the Bosnatours bus out of its predicament with a winch and steel cables. The tourists were freed and flew that very day back to Vienna and never even considered going back to Yugoslavia. Meho Obučina, director of the Sarajevo branch of Bosnatours, told Gabriel to keep out of his sight and to forget about ever getting another job in a Yugoslav tourist agency; he’d better get a job in the city garbage service because he didn’t have a future in any other profession! Gabriel told Meho to go get fucked and slammed down the telephone receiver.

“Calm down, Gabriel, please,” Dijana said, hugging him. “How can I calm down, damn his eyes? — I’ll tear him apart when I get a hold of him!” Gabriel shouted, and everyone in the post office looked to see what kind of maniac Mrs. Delavale’s daughter was mixed up with.

They spent the next ten days frolicking in hidden inlets and Vid’s house. Namely, Dijana had asked Vid to rent out a room to a guy from Sarajevo who was down on his luck; he had no money now, but she vouched for the fact that he would send him the money as soon as he got home.

“And what’s he to you?” Vid asked.

“Nothing, what would he be? He’s someone in need of help, and in this town there’s no one to expect that from,” she answered reproachfully.

Those first days they tried to keep Vid from noticing what had begun between them, but then one Friday he returned home from work earlier than usual and found them fucking in the middle of the kitchen. She was bent over the table on which she’d just been cleaning mackerels that were now knocked all over it; she still had the knife in her hand and fish scales in the corner of her mouth, and he was slamming into her raised white behind, covered in sweat and with the look of a tiger.

Vid stopped in his tracks and didn’t know whether he should say or do anything before he got out of there.

“Those are mackerel, right?” he asked idiotically. Dijana stared at him with a foggy gaze and gripped the knife, and he thought she looked like a cow that was going to slaughter itself. The man behind her kept on thrusting into her, his eyes closed; he hadn’t heard Vid and was unaware that someone had come in.

“Mackerel, huh?” he asked again, but she didn’t answer. But she surely had heard him. She must have.

That was without doubt the moment when Vid was closest to forgetting her forever and giving up on what would last for eleven more years before Dijana finally became his. Maybe then he would have left her if he’d had the strength to kick the guy from Sarajevo out of his house. But he didn’t know how to do that, and he wouldn’t have known how in a less delicate situation, all the more so because at that moment he found justification for him. The guy was nice and witty; he hadn’t arrived on false pretenses; he hadn’t lied about anything and most likely had no idea what he was getting himself into. It would have been stupid to tell him now that he couldn’t stay here any longer. Why should he kick him out? Because on the middle of Vid’s kitchen table he was screwing a girl that he evidently liked? It would have been petty to tell him to go.

For the next two days Gabriel tried to find a way to talk to him one-on-one and explain everything to him, but Vid stubbornly avoided him, more and more ashamed.

“I’m so embarrassed I could kill myself, but I love her!” the guy from Sarajevo told him when they were alone together for a minute.

“No doubt,” Vid answered, and the words came out of his constricted throat like grains of rice from the windpipe of a child that has swallowed the wrong way.

It was only because she hadn’t let herself be seen too much on the square with her new lover that Dijana managed to hide Gabriel from Regina. Her mother, of course, suspected that something had happened between her and that Bosnian, but this was just one of several dozen suspicions of the same or greater intensity, and so it never occurred to her that Dijana had fled to Sarajevo and that Vid’s house had been the scene of an incident that, if such things could be measured in cubic meters and register tons, surpassed her previous affairs. But Regina would nevertheless go to Vid, for she knew that he might, for obvious reasons, know the most about the disappearance of her daughter and believed that he would tell her everything so he might shorten his path to Dijana’s heart.

“I know what she means to you,” Regina began. “And you know how a mother’s heart is; nothing can deceive it. Dijana is my child, my bones, my veins,” she continued, grabbing herself by her left tit, so he could see what a heart was. “And I’d like her to be with you; I know how good you’d be to her. You wouldn’t even look at her crossways, right? Oh, you see how a mother knows! But a devil has gotten into her, and she doesn’t know what’s good for her. That’s what women are like, my dear. Like those moths that fly up to a light bulb and burn their wings, and afterward everyone says, ‘Look at the slut!’ But my Dijana’s no slut. She’s something else; she has a heart this big, but she doesn’t know how to get to it. That’s the hardest thing for her. Women, Vid, aren’t made of one gut. A woman has many different guts. And Dijana’s a woman. She’s not a child; I do know that. And her heart, woe to me her mother, isn’t of just one gut either. It’s got more, Vid; only those other guts lead to depravity and search out depravity. Her guts have an itch because they’re looking for a man, looking for depravity, and she now feels like doing depraved things. But she doesn’t know it! I’ll split in two; my head will explode like a melon if I don’t help her now. And how can I, poor me? A widow without anyone to help me and lend me a hand. It would be different if her father were alive. Daughters need fathers, my dear Vid! Only a man’s hand can put every gut in its place, so that she thinks with her head and feels with her heart instead of — God forgive me — both with her ass! There’s no other way to put it. So I’m asking you now, my dear Vid, my child, mother’s little angel, to help me and tell me if you know anything. And I know that you know and that your heart is leading you to my Dijana. Where is she now? Tell me, Vid.”