Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

He spoke and swigged brandy from the bottle until he started drifting off to sleep. “I’ll stay here; you can go into the room. You can find a duvet and pillow in there. Sorry, Dijana.”

She turned out the light, grabbed her suitcase in the hallway, and opened doors one after another until she finally came to the bedroom. On the wall above the bare double bed hung a large wooden crucifix with a contorted Christ that had two semiprecious stones instead of eyes and looked so awful that she had to take it down from the wall. She shoved it under the bed and was going to put it back up in the morning before Gabriel woke up. A black, dusty outline of the cross was left on the wall, and it seemed to Dijana that no one had moved that crucifix for at least twenty years. In a huge oak cabinet she found hundreds of sheets, pillowcases, and duvet covers piled in several neat rows. She was surprised by their firmness. The linens had been starched so much that they seemed to be made of cardboard. They smelled of dampness, naphthalene, and dust. She somehow drew a sheet over the bed, put covers on a pillow and a duvet, took her nightgown from her suitcase, and went off in search of the bathroom. She found it at the end of the hallway, behind the sixth door. In the darkness she couldn’t guess what was in the other five rooms, and she didn’t want to turn on the light because she was afraid of seeing something like the contorted Jesus.

Her shock was probably not only due to the fact that the Savior in Gabriel’s bedroom had a face from horror movies, but also because when she had imagined Sarajevo and tried in advance to get used to the idea of life in that city, she had expected the Turks Regina spoke of, Muslims who were completely unknown to her, saccharine looks and greetings from Vid’s mother Nusreta, whom at first she believed wanted her for a daughter-in-law, only to realize later that Auntie Nusreta greeted everyone like that and believed that a caring smile for everyone and everything was a sign of decency and a good upbringing. With such smiles you ease in others what you want them to ease in you. Nusreta didn’t stop doing that, though she’d lived for a long time among people who never returned the favor because it wasn’t their custom. But in its soul the Orient doesn’t envisage life from one day to the next. The fanaticism of Islam consists of doing your own thing without hoping for a reward and all for some distant future (which perhaps is not located concretely in time) when someone will finally answer you.

To Dijana it really seemed that even Gabriel, despite his name and regardless of the fact that he’d crossed himself and kneeled when she’d taken him into the cathedral, was like someone of that world of mosques, baklava, and shades of Lawrence of Arabia, which, apart from those television shows with Zaim Imamović, Nada Mamula, and Rejhan Demirdžić, was her first vision of that imagined Sarajevo.

The crucifix with the terrible Christ contrasted with the oriental world but also differed from the Christian bliss and gold to which she was accustomed in her city and smashed her first illusion of the attraction of this adventure in the unknown. The grimacing Christ with the glassy blue eyes would remain a deep memory of Sarajevo, second only to the stench of coal smoke.

The bathroom was a large, cold room, with an antique bathtub and a toilet bowl decorated with blue and pink climbing roses. Oily, yellowish paint was peeling from the walls, and there was no warm water in the boiler. And the cold water was so icy that Dijana jerked her palm away because she thought it was hot water. She stood in the middle of the bathroom, saw her own breath as if she were on the street and not in a house, and didn’t know what to do. She’d never gone to bed more dirty in her life.

She shot up from her sleep as if she’d been torn out of it by a garbage truck, her heart pounding, and at the first moment she didn’t know where she was. When she collected herself, she pulled on her damp shoes and went to get the rest of her luggage. She opened up the suitcase and each bag in the middle of the room and tried on the things that she was going to wear. She returned the crucifix to its place (Christ didn’t look any more docile in the daylight), started for the bathroom, and then changed her mind. There was certainly still no hot water; she dressed herself as warmly as she could and went to find Gabriel. However, he wasn’t there, and as his shoes and jacket were missing, she realized that he’d gone out. She again looked out through the window at the snow-covered city, and it seemed smaller to her than it had the day before. It was a sunny day, with no fog or clouds. One could hear noise in the gutters. The snow would melt quickly. This was probably the order of things at this time of year, she thought crossly. Before she managed to sit down, she heard a key in the door.

“Dijanaaa, look who’s hoooome!” Gabriel said with the voice of a child; “look what I brought youuuuuuu!” He put a canvas bag full of hot flatbreads down on the table and took two yogurts out of his jacket pocket.

If thirty years later someone had asked Dijana when she’d had the best meal in her life, she would have remembered that day and her first flatbread. There are certainly differences between one kind of bread and another, but they aren’t big enough for different kinds of bread to be known by their names instead of just their color and the kind of flour. This flatbread was also bread, but it had earned its different name.

Dijana would know everything in this city that she came to love by its taste. Her other senses would be shocked and disgusted, but her palate would remember those nine months in Sarajevo with nostalgia.

After she had almost perished because she had lied to the police about Dijana’s age, and after she hadn’t learned anything from Vid, Regina left by bus to Nikšić, to the place of one Nikola Radonjić. He was a former partisan colonel who’d done hard labor for fifteen years because he’d murdered his father-and mother-in-law. A rumor spread along the Adriatic coast and in Montenegro to the effect that he solved cases that the police weren’t in a position to solve. He could find stolen family gold, chased fleeing debtors around Italy, caught and if necessary liquidated known and unknown murderers and rapists. Legends of the Colonel reached the ears of the secret police and the police, but in that year of 1969 they hadn’t yet gotten mixed up in his life. Either they had an arrangement with him, or he was doing dirty jobs for the government.

In fact, the Colonel was the first and only private investigator in Yugoslavia. Only he didn’t have the name of a firm on his door, nor did he give interviews for the newspapers or television.

Regina had gotten his telephone number from Ivka Karabogdanuša, a café singer (and some said a prostitute as well). An Albanian had thrown acid in her face out of revenge because the café owner had cheated him at cards. The Colonel found the Albanian in Milan and brought his passport and both ears packed in a jewelry box to Ivka.

“Here, take a look if you don’t believe me,” she said and opened it before Regina’s eyes. “I didn’t even ask what else he did to him. This is enough for me,” Ivka Karabogdanuša said, hiding the burned half of her face with curls of her enormous blond wig. Two shriveled ears, which stank of an altar suffused with incense, were enough to calm Regina and convince her that the Colonel would solve her case successfully too.

When she called him, a female voice came on the phone and told her that Comrade Radonjić’s first available appointment that day was at ten in the evening, and the next one was in fourteen days. It would turn out that this was a lie and that the Colonel’s secretary always said the same thing, on account of which people from all over hurried to catch buses and trains, fascinated by him even before they saw him. People always want to see people who don’t have time.