Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

That time, no matter how hard it was and no matter how ugly those few people she’d met, including Goga and Musa, showed themselves to be, was the time of the greatest love in Dijana’s life. The greatest up until the tragically late appearance of Marko Radica. She loved Gabriel because he was suffering, and she considered that suffering to be some kind of emotional debt, and she loved him because he wasn’t there next to her and she could imagine him as he’d never been, like Joan of Arc in that silent movie, her head shaved and her eyes full of suffering, stripped of all masculinity.

She tried to call Goga and Musa for days on end, thinking that she might find some work through them, because there was no money in the house, and in the theater they wouldn’t hear of giving Gabriel’s pay to her. Goga and Musa didn’t answer the phone, nor did they open the door when she would ring. She knew that they were home and didn’t want to let her in. The light was on the fifth story of the building on King Tomislav Street, and one could hear Bob Dylan’s voice all the way out on the street. She didn’t give up because she simply didn’t know whom else to approach to get help. After a week of passing by their place trying to get a hold of them and after she’d borrowed money from Katarina for the third time, she sat down on a bench across the street from their entrance. Sooner or later one of them would go outside. Not ten minutes had passed before Goga appeared.

But before Dijana managed to open her mouth, the girl opened fire: “I don’t know what you want from us! Leave us alone from now on, goddammit! I don’t know who you are or what the hell he thought he was doing getting thrown in jail! He didn’t ask us when he did what he did, and don’t go dragging us into your stories. And I’d advise you as a comrade not to mess around our house any more. You’re just lucky I found you. Musa would rip out your cunt if he saw you! Beware of him! The Chetniks cut the skin off his grandfather’s back while he was still alive, and he doesn’t like all your stunts with the singing. Now you know, and you can get the hell out of here, and don’t greet me on the street if you see me.”

Without saying a thing, Dijana turned on a dime, like a soldier in Chaplin’s movie, and left, eased of one worry in life.

She kept taking the crucifix down in the evening and putting it up again in the morning. Gabriel told her a hundred times not to put it back up. If she didn’t like it, then it didn’t need to be on the wall because in this house everything was in some accidental order and arrangement anyway, and he didn’t feel like starting a job that would never end, and this was why he lived in the disorder that he’d inherited from his deceased aunt. But she hadn’t listened to him and stubbornly returned the crucifix to the wall. That was a kind of ritual that she clung to, and it made life easier. If on the first day she’d moved the bucket with coal somewhere else, she would have repeated that every day, but since she’d been tired from the trip and frightened of the contorted Christ, she moved it. And so, while she prepared the crucifix for sleep, sure that there was no one left who might help her find work, it occurred to Dijana to go to church the following day, to tell everything to a priest and ask him to find her some work. She didn’t really know why people in the church would be more compassionate about Gabriel’s agony. And how could she when she’d grown up among nothing but atheists and pagans, because in the whole neighborhood barely two old women went to mass. But when there had been reason to really make someone’s life hell, usually some uncle would be found who’d been a priest and had fled to Argentina with the Ustashas, and Dijana had a hunch that it might be possible to find room in the church for the avuncular sins of Gabriel’s soul.

Father Antun was a tall and thin young man, maybe younger than Dijana. He met her in the parish palace, dressed in a black suit with a collar that squeezed his neck, and he continually pulled on it with his index finger, as do people who are unused to neckties.

“You’ve been here for half a year, yet you haven’t come to church and waited for your problems to bring you here. It’s fine this way too. Many have turned to the church because troubles forced them to. But there’s a long way from turning to the church to converting! No matter; the majority crosses it and returns to belief in the Lord. And your poor victim, with whom you live outside of marriage, did he go to church? You don’t know?! Of course, if you didn’t go yourself, how could you know about him? It doesn’t matter. The largest church that exists is the human heart. Faith is in the heart and not in walls. Walls come and go. You’d like for the church to help you out with some everyday things, right? One has to live on something, that’s clear. But how can the church help you if it can’t help itself? People say, ‘The Lord will provide!’ The Lord provides, but he can’t provide more than the people take. That’s how it is, you poor woman. I can’t chase you from the doorstep, but to tell the truth, I don’t know how I could help you. Here, you can have the leftovers from lunch. You can eat just as we do! No more, no less. But I’m afraid that even that won’t be enough. You have to help that unfortunate friend of yours. He’s yours, although you live together, God forgive me, like animals. Go at least to the city hall and get married, if you won’t do it before the Lord. Look, maybe you could clean stairs at the seminary. I can ask, if you don’t consider it beneath you to do that. But no work should be beneath a child of God. You didn’t tell me: have you received any of the holy sacraments? Oh, Mary in Heaven, what kind of world do we live in? Okay, I’ll ask around about work.”

Father Antun asked around, which Dijana would never forget. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that she remembered him with gratitude. She cleaned stairs every other day, until the end of her stay in Sarajevo. They paid her little, much less than they’d have paid a full-time cleaning lady, but at least they paid her on time; every other Friday at five in the afternoon she would knock on the door of the office of the lay priest Branko Zidarić, the business manager and director of the seminary, and he would give her an envelope with money in it, always sending her off with the same words: “May the Lord help you, and don’t spend too much!”

Maybe finding help in a church when there was none else around would have awakened faith in some people, but in Dijana’s case something like that wasn’t possible. She passed by crucifixes, religious paintings and chapels, young seminary students with fervent eyes, and professors in habits who watched her go with fatherly smiles with the same indifference with which she’d listened to Father Antun’s words of condescension and scorn.

She was only grateful to the contorted Christ with the blue eyes, which had given her the idea that had saved her and which would be the main character in her nightmares after she left the city. She would dream of it taking her back to Sarajevo without her being able to resist.

What it was that Colonel Nikola Radonjić actually investigated, with whom he spoke, and who told him that Dijana had fled to Sarajevo would remain a secret of his detective work (Vid certainly hadn’t because he didn’t even go to his place), but the day after Gabriel was released from prison the Colonel appeared in Sarajevo. He rented a room in the Hotel Europe, told the receptionist that he was staying for three days and not to tell anyone who tried to phone him or otherwise get a hold of him that he’d stayed there. The receptionist, Halid Lizdo, thought these demands to be suspicious, of course. He called whomever he was supposed to call, but they told him, probably after checking, to do what the Colonel ordered. Lizdo concluded that some bigwig was in room 112 and told the cleaning ladies to be doubly careful around that guest. If in other rooms there were two towels each, in room 112 there should be four; if they replaced bars of soap every two days, in that room they were to do it every day; and if they cleaned other rooms only in the morning, this one needed to be cleaned in the morning and in the evening. Just as they did for guests sent by the Central Committee and the presidency.