Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

But instead of it pleasing the Colonel, he was suspicious when he returned in the evening to find his bed made. Who knows whom he suspected and of what and to whom he was indebted, but that was enough for him to change his plans. So instead of taking care of the case of Dijana Delavale and her lover in three days, he decided to do it immediately. It was past midnight when he found the door to Gabriel’s house. He banged on it resolutely like the police and yelled, “Open up! Police!”

Gabriel jumped out of bed, stopped in the doorway, and shook as if he were having an epileptic seizure. Thin as he was, weighing forty pounds less than he had when he went into prison — and even then he hadn’t been fat — he looked like a mental patient who was being taken away for electroshock treatment. This was too much for Dijana: she wasn’t going to let them take him away from her even if they killed her or sent both of them to do hard labor.

“Open up or we’ll knock down the door!” the Colonel bawled.

She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a rusty butcher’s knife that was hanging under the cupboard and probably hadn’t been touched since the time of the Munich Agreement.

“Dijana, don’t! Please!” Gabriel pleaded, shaking.

The Colonel slammed into the door, and pieces of plaster fell from above the doorframe. She stood by the door and raised the butcher’s knife, determined to split the head of whoever came through the doorway. It was probably that image, which promised something worse than the worst imaginable, that made Gabriel come to, clear his head, run up to the door, take the butcher’s knife away from Dijana, and open the door.

“Oh, you see a Winnetou! Yeah, and whatcha gonna do with that tomahawk? Come at the people’s police?” the Colonel said in Montenegrin, probably banking on the general opinion that the Montenegrin police were the craziest ever.

“What do you want from him?” Dijana yelled.

“So the girl is leading the dance, huh? Ain’t that right, mister hero? Get some clothes on! Look at him, in pajamas like an old woman!. .”

“You’re not taking him anywhere!” said Dijana and stood in front of Gabriel.

“Okay, fine. Then we can do it here,” said the Colonel and pulled out a Colt.

Dijana gaped in shock because this was the first time she’d seen a revolver; it seemed larger than in the movies, and it had never occurred to her that they might kill Gabriel. He dropped the butcher’s knife. Dijana began to cry, standing motionless half a yard away from the man with the cowboy pistol; she sobbed loudly and inconsolably, like Cinderella when she was left alone.

“That’s more like it; now you’re acting like a real girl. Move it!” he said, forcing them into the living room and setting them down on the couch beside one another. He stopped and looked through the window, lost in thought:

“What a pretty city; the man who’s seen it is lucky. Why would you want to bring down socialism in a town like this? If you tried to do it in Nikšić, I’d understand! Maybe I’d give you a hand, help you out like when one neighbor helps the other slaughter sheep. But trying to bring down socialism here?! Damn, that’s too much. In Nikšić you’d get a bullet in the forehead and that’s it, but in Bosnia the people are different. Soft. So they have to call me to finish the job with guys like you.”

Gabriel felt himself getting warm around his groin, and the warmth spread and went down, until he felt that where he was sitting was wet. Dijana sobbed and tried to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth.

“Want this tablet?” the Colonel asked, pulling a vial out of his pocket, “to take yourself? You won’t suffer. Ten minutes and your heart stops. Or I can shoot you. You got a toilet here, some kind of bathtub? It’s best there. I don’t like to soil people’s homes. I only shoot people in the head, and the brains and blood won’t come out even with a month of cleaning, and I can see that your girl isn’t much for work; she’d just wail and snivel. That’s why I like to do it in the tub. You sit down like you’re going to take a bath, close your eyes. and that’s it. It’s easier than getting circumcised when you’re a Muslim! Let’s get it over with, so I can get home for dinner! And your girl here surely has work to do, so let’s not hold her up,” he said, poking Gabriel in the shoulder with the Colt.

“You’re not the police,” said Dijana.

“As if it matters. You can check who I am when I’m finished,” the Colonel explained.

“Please don’t kill him,” she said, folding her hands; “he’s not what you think he is. .”

“Girl, I don’t think; I do. If I’d thought in my life, I’d never have achieved what I have.”

“Don’t kill him!”

“Why? Try and tell me why! You left your old mother to die from worry and sorrow and ran off with this enemy of the people. You see, girl, I’d kill him even if it weren’t my job. Because my stupid head can’t fathom how somebody can do what you’ve done to your mother.”

“I didn’t want to. .”

“Didn’t want to what, you harbor whore?!” the Colonel roared so loud that the house shook.

“Don’t kill him,” she begged.

“Now you listen to me,” the Colonel said softly, walking from one end of the room to another; “you’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of Sarajevo. Pack your crap and go back to where you came from. I can see whether there’s any chance of us sparing this guy’s life, but I won’t guarantee anything! But if you don’t do what I say and I find you here tomorrow, I’ll blow his brains out on the spot and you’ll go off to hard labor. And you’ll be older than your old lady when you get out. And don’t think of calling him on the phone because we’ll know about it! Or, God forbid, to try to meet him anywhere! Don’t come back to Sarajevo, and he won’t be going to the seaside soon. There you have it, girl; that’s what I can offer you now, and the Federal Secretariat will decide what to do with you, boy.”

It was noon, a cool day in May, when Dijana left for home from the same platform where she’d arrived nine months before, with the same suitcase and five bags. She left Gabriel without a kiss, convinced that this was all some kind of lie, that someone was dreaming all of this, and she was just a character in someone’s nightmare.

She never saw him again, nor did she ever ask anyone about him, and she passed through Sarajevo only once more, in a train that was headed for Belgrade. She knew that they hadn’t killed Gabriel, and with time she realized that that guy who’d separated them had done her a favor, no matter who he was or how crazy.

On the twenty-first of February in 1975 Dijana would hold the Belgrade daily Politika, waiting on a young man with whom she’d run away in the Vuk’s Inn restaurant. But she would skip the page with the obituaries because she was still young enough not to read the names of the dead. She’d flip through Politika and wouldn’t see a familiar face, which she would doubtless have recognized. The caption under his photograph read as follows: “On the nineteenth of February the heroic heart of Colonel Nikola Radonjić, a recipient of the Partisan 1941 and Heroes of Socialist Labor decorations, stopped beating. He tragically died on assignment, and his friends and colleagues wish to express their admiration and praise for the man.” Dijana’s Belgrade episode was less important than that obituary and everything that had preceded it.

Every year, when autumn arrived, she left home, leaving her mother a note saying that she’d found the love of her life and would never be returning home. But she came back in three days or three months; the duration of the escape wasn’t important because Regina knew that Dijana always came back and that there was no need to get the Colonel and sell olive groves and vineyards. Eternal love was a calendrical phenomenon and lasted no longer than a season. That was in the Delavale lineage, and it’s no different anywhere where there are men and women who fall fatally in love.