Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

He looked at the old woman and knew that she couldn’t stand the sight of him. She hated the other men who hung around her daughter and hated and scorned him too, as heartless women don’t pity and scorn men who’ve been rejected. He could tell her where Dijana was now; he assumed she was in Sarajevo and that her love for the long-haired bus driver hadn’t left her. Another reason why he knew this was because she’d driven him away and avoided him all these months, as she always did when she was in love. He might even manage to keep Dijana from ever finding out that he was the one who’d given her away: by not telling Regina what he thought, but indirectly by reminding her in a way of that day when the bus had gotten stuck in front of their house and Dijana had stayed out until sunrise keeping the Bosnian guy company on the steps.

But the thought that in doing so he’d help the old woman, whose imagination was more disgusting than a table full of mackerel, made him just shrug his shoulders, nod, and say a few comforting and soothing words of the aged.

“I’m sure she’ll come back,” he said; “I can feel it, believe me.”

Regina, naturally, didn’t believe him, but she didn’t show it. Instead she patted him on the cheek.

“Someday you’ll be my son-in-law!” she said. Vid blushed and lowered his eyes and then suddenly raised his head because he thought the old woman would think he wanted to cry. Of course he didn’t feel like crying. Rather, his stomach was turning, and he could hardly wait for her to go away.

She waved to him as she went down through the garden in the darkness, in which no crickets were chirping though the night was hot, worse than any summer night. Nature had been turned upside down, and the seasons had started to change places as in a game of musical chairs. Would eternal summer take hold or would it be winter forever? — No one knew yet. But lately people had begun talking about why the seasons weren’t as they’d been before. Almond trees bloomed in December, and frost would kill them during Christmas; the hills above the sea were white with snow in May, and then two days later a Saharan heat-wave hit. . Older people saw Lucifer’s hand in this — when he came down to earth everything would burn or freeze — whereas the younger ones and those with schooling believed that everything was the fault of nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll and in the Nevada desert. But everyone agreed that it couldn’t last long. Either the world would come to its senses or judgment day was coming.

In the Belgrade newspaper Politika a Soviet meteorologist announced that “if the Americans continue detonating bombs, planet Earth will cease to exist in its present form by the year two thousand.” Instead of being frightened, judging from the letters to the editor, the readership was comforted.

“By the beginning of the twenty-first century there will be colonies of humans on the planet Venus. Those who survive the explosion will abandon Earth as a great garbage dump,” wrote Aleksej Navadin, an amateur futurologist from Sombor.

It was already past midnight when Dijana woke up, in the middle of Sarajevo, with her head in Gabriel’s lap. He wasn’t moving because he didn’t want to wake her up. Since Goga and Musa had gone, he’d been sitting in the dark, smoking and wondering whether he wanted this of all things: for his seaside girl to move in with him and move his life from one phase to another. That was in any case better than its getting off track but not so good that he wouldn’t be afraid now. It was true that for months he had been inviting Dijana to come to Sarajevo. But he’d done that because she wouldn’t stop complaining about her mother and telling him about monstrous daily episodes that he didn’t quite believe — what mother would behave like that toward her own child, especially a daughter? And after she told him about her day on the telephone, it was normal for him to invite her to come to him. He’d invited others like that and knew that they wouldn’t come. This kind of invitation doesn’t have its own name, but everyone knows about such invitations and understands that they serve to ease the spirit of the person you invite. Who would think that such an invitation is really an invitation?

Dijana didn’t think that either up until three weeks before, when she said, “Fine; I’m coming; we’ll live together and be happy!” It sounded as if it were copied out of a romance novel.

It didn’t occur to Gabriel to think about what he’d said or to ask himself whether or not he wanted what he had suggested. He simply didn’t know what to do with her, and all of a sudden everything having to do with Dijana had become a problem. From the fact that she would live there and he wouldn’t be alone in his house or be able to keep his habits, including pissing in the kitchen sink, which he’d suddenly become so fond of, to the problem of her walking the streets of this city, which wasn’t anything like what he had told her and in which she couldn’t lead the life to which she was accustomed. He felt so stupid, and all that occurred to him were stupidities. He was afraid.

“You woke up,” he said in the darkness when he thought she’d opened her eyes.

“Everything hurts,” she moaned, “and I think I’ve got a fever.”

“You have a what?”

“A temperature. I’ve gotten sick.”

“C’mon. How could you’ve gotten sick? You were asleep, and you woke up. You want me to turn on the light?” he asked and put her head down on the divan. Dijana covered her eyes with her palms, expecting a flash of light.

“Everything will be all right, believe me,” he said as she squinted at him through her fingers. He didn’t sound convincing. She sat up and put her palm on her forehead.

“I’m burning up,” she said. He grabbed her by the forearm and touched his lips to her cheek: she was shivering like a freshly awakened bat. Nothing more than that. At least that could be considered comforting.

By sunrise Gabriel had told Dijana everything that he hadn’t said a word about since they’d met. Not once did he mention his father Mijo, or Žućo the farter, but as if afflicted by a strange mental disorder, he said all the worst things about himself that he could remember. At first she dismissed this and tried to get a word in, but then she just played with an empty brandy glass and used the wet bottom of the glass to trap grains of coal dust on the veneer of the tabletop. She listened to him and wondered what had happened to Gabriel’s cheer and whether there had even been that night when she’d kissed him in the ear while he imagined funeral services for the passengers who perished in his motor-coach Titanic, pondering out loud the words that relatives and priests would use in speaking about them in the cemetery. She now had someone else before her who only looked like that guy but whose every facial feature said the opposite and was a different sign. With such a big nose and long hair, with a goatlike beard in which every whisker grew in a different direction, he’d looked like Don Quixote at the time. But now he was nothing other than the black bird that medieval plague doctors would disguise themselves as.

“I’m just a shit of a man; I’m constantly saying that things are fine and dandy when they’re fucked up. When you know me better, you see how bad they are. I just try to figure out how to get away. No matter what I’ve done or where I’ve been, it’s always been the same. As long as there’s something to eat and drink, I’m good, but as soon as it’s about something more, I’m useless. Kill me, but I can’t! Do you have any idea what all I’ve done in my life, I mean, what jobs I’ve done? We met when I was a tour guide, and that was my best job. When I was little, I learned German because my grandma was a Kraut, so I led the old folks around, and thank God no one thought twice about what I was telling them. This mosque is older than the pyramids in Egypt, Hitler stayed in this hotel when he was in Kladanj, and according to local tradition this water heals members of your family. You drink your fill, and your uncle in Hanover or your aunt in Chicago is well again. And it’s true: I enjoyed that job because the little old ladies gaped at me as if they expected Soyuz 5 to fly into their mouths and believed everything I said, and I didn’t give a shit. I could bullshit them as much as I wanted and think — wow, look at all those old apes, fuck them; they should be buried while they can still walk so the gravediggers won’t have to bother carrying their coffins around. You understand, Dijana? That’s me, and not what you think I am. Now I’m working in the National Theater as a joiner. I hammer in nails, and that’s my whole job. You know when a nail comes out on the other side and a carpenter hammers it into the wood so nobody will cut themselves on it? Well, I can’t be bothered. I don’t give a shit if the third herald in Hamlet bloodies himself on a nail in the middle of the performance. Or maybe I relish the thought of him hurting himself; I dunno. I should have told you all this before, but I fucked you over too, like I fuck over everybody. And now I’m sorry. Now it’s all there for you to see, to hell with it.”