Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Regina told the driver of the green Moskvić taxi to drive to number eleven Sava Kovačević St.

“And you, lady, you’re going straight to the Colonel!” he said immediately. “What trouble brings you to him?” he asked.

“It’s not important,” she responded sharply.

“Hah, you know whether it’s important or not, but it’s better for you if it’s important. You can count on a look from him costing you a million. If you were a young woman, it would cost less, and it might be possible to pay in other ways too, but as it is, I don’t know at all,” the taxi driver joked, evidently unhappy because she didn’t want to tell him what kind of trouble had brought her there.

She rang at the gate of a stone house with small windows that looked like a bunker. Two furious dogs with curly hair ran up and began foaming through the bars, and then he appeared. Tall and upright, he went toward the gate with an old military coat thrown over his shoulder, wide trousers tucked into high officer’s boots, and an unbuttoned white shirt. Regina didn’t think that she’d ever seen a more handsome man in all her life. He shooed the dogs away and let her into the yard. She introduced herself immediately. “The Colonel,” he said, without extending his hand. They passed through a dark hallway to a room with a large office desk and a high, wooden armchair with two eagles carved at the top. He sat down and pointed to a round piano stool on the other side of the desk. The only light in the room was a small night lamp with a forty-watt bulb, facing away from him, so that throughout the conversation the Colonel’s face was in complete darkness.

She told him about her case, mostly telling the truth.

“And you have no trace of her at all, and you don’t know who might know more?” he asked and then wrote down the names of all of Dijana’s male and female friends, everyone whom she’d seen and gone off to see and Regina could remember.

“The fact that you yourself haven’t found anything makes this more expensive,” he said. “Besides, you haven’t said what you want from me. I don’t know what else I could do, except find out your daughter’s whereabouts. .”

“But couldn’t you get her to come back?”

“How? I’m not God. You don’t even know who she’s with now. I might be able to give him a scare, and if he’s some robber turn him into the authorities or something like that, but what can we do if he’s not?”

“Well, you investigate. .”

“So, you want me to find out where your daughter is, who her man is, and whether he’s wanted for something and if so, whether to do anything about it? If that’s what you want, the whole thing’ll cost you around a million and a half dinars, calculated in old dinars, while only finding out where the girl is would come to a hundred and fifty thousand. And if you decide on that, you’ll have to keep working on your own because I only take on finalized jobs. You need to tell me now what you want, and that’s what I’ll do. There can’t be any additional requests later.”

“Fine; I’ll pay for everything.”

“But I don’t guarantee that the girl will come back. I only guarantee that you’ll know everything about him and her. And there’ll only be more if I get anything on him. And one more thing! You give me half the money in seven days and the other half when the work is done,” the Colonel finished.

He rose, and that was a signal that the meeting was over and that he was done asking questions.

The very next day Regina put out word that she needed urgently to sell a house with an olive grove in Kuna on the island of Pelješac for a million and a half dinars. Since the offer was incredibly good because the house was worth at least three million, a buyer with cash turned up immediately, and so because of Dijana’s first attempt to run away from home the Delavale vacation home, which had been passed down in the family for seven generations, was lost, though it had never occurred to any of them to sell it even in the hardest of times.

The Colonel sent a courier from Nikšić for the down payment, and all Regina had to do was wait, worry, and seek new reasons why her daughter had run away from home. But every one of them nevertheless got back to the sick Delavale lineage, which should have been eradicated long ago, in any case before she’d taken up with Ivo, thus sparing the world from an incurable human defect that only increased with each generation. She tried in vain to salvage what Dijana had inherited from her and taken from the Sikirić family, but there was no chance of that happening. She took after her father in every way because filth is always stronger than men, evil stronger than good, upside-down stronger than right-side-up, and the world will collapse the day when every good lineage is wiped out by some Delavales and there’s no longer a single mother who hasn’t given birth to a wicked child.

The Colonel was counting the money and getting ready for the search when Gabriel succeeded in persuading Dijana to go with him to the theater. He didn’t want to leave her alone at home because she was afraid of anything and everything and said that there was maybe a decomposing corpse underneath a pile of his uncle’s books, which blocked the way into one of the rooms, since there was such a stench; she took the crucifix down from the wall, demanded that the light be on in the hallway all night long, and looked into rooms into which he’d never entered. And she didn’t know what to do in the city and acted more like a rude foreigner than all the Krauts and Austrians whom he’d shown around. Today he would have left her in the care of Musa and Goga, but they’d tricked him and gone off to a birthday party on Mt. Jahorina. That was better than showing a little Dalmatian girl around Sarajevo when they had no idea what to show her.

He left Dijana to wait for him in the theater café while he finished arranging the props, and at half past seven he was going to take her into the performance. She drank an orange soda called Oro, which was bottled in the Tališ plant in Maribor, which was the domestic competition for Coca-Cola, that dark American miracle that had been spreading throughout Yugoslavia (the first communist country to drink Coca-Cola) since the previous year. That fact filled people with pride, and so anyone who thought much of himself didn’t drink Oro or Cocta. Dijana, however, didn’t care. She sat alone at a table, and in the corner of the café a group of people, probably students from down south, were singing I’m Going Away, My Fay. . in parts.

Gabriel carried risers from one end of the stage to another and panted as if he were about to give up the ghost, until Meho Pezer lost his cool and started shouting at him: “Listen, you horse’s ass, if you keep breathing like that, I’m going home, and you can fucking go explain everything to the manager and the director! I’m supposed to be on sick leave and instead of saying thanks for coming, you keep making an ass of yourself. What do you want? To act? Is that maybe what you’d like? That’s okay, pal, you just act and let me live my life.”

Gabriel put down his end of the riser. “Wait, let me explain!” he said trying to get him to calm down.

“Well out with it; whaddya got to tell me?!” Meho said and slammed his end of the riser down so that the sound echoed through the theater.

“It looks like I’m married. I didn’t want it, but it looks like that’s what’s happened,” he answered.

“What was that?” Meho Pezer asked in surprise. He’d been married for fifty some-odd years, and two of his nine children were already retired. But he wasn’t yet seventy.

“That’s what’s happened. This girl moved in with me.”

“What girl?”