Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

At the swimming pool by the bus station the first bathers exposed their pale winter skin to the sun. In Sarajevo, as soon as spring arrives women bring their carpets outside, spread them out on the asphalt, kneel, and scrub the accumulated filth. If a car comes along, they run onto the sidewalk and curse the driver who ruined their efforts. Dijana saw no difference between those women and the people at the swimming pool. All of them laid out what was most valuable to them when the sun warmed up, and the cycles of nature began anew. Hers consisted in returning to what she couldn’t escape from, no matter how far and long she ran. In her first attempt there had still been faith and hope, or she still simply hadn’t known what she would feel up to the time her mother died. A power stronger than love was needed to tear out the roots that held her to Regina. And she didn’t have that strength within her, nor did she know where to find it beyond her.

Regina met her daughter’s return feigning complete indifference. She helped Dijana carry her things inside; babbled about how everything in the house had broken, burst, and fallen apart since she’d left; showed her the new washing machine, which, unlike the old one, did everything itself and you didn’t have to start it again every half hour. Naturally, she didn’t tell her that she’d bought it because the Colonel had lowered the price of his investigation by two hundred thousand dinars. She didn’t mention that she’d sold the Delavale villa. But not because she wanted to hide it. The washing machine was more important. In this Regina didn’t differ from the majority of Yugoslav women who thought that the change from semi-automatic washing machines to those that had a built-in programmer was the greatest social advance since the Second World War.

Dijana would discover on her own that there was no longer a Delavale villa, two months later, when she was traveling with Vid around Pelješac, where he was negotiating the purchase of the autumn harvest for a vintner in Cavtat, and when in the evening they went to spend the night in the family vacation home and saw that the lock had been changed and the stone inscription had been chiseled away.

Regina didn’t ask her daughter a single question about what she’d done or where she’d been for nine months, nor did Dijana want to talk about it. It seemed suspicious to her that her mother knew that Sarajevo was involved. She spoke of the time before and after her return from Sarajevo. But since her suspicion didn’t manage to lead anywhere and Dijana didn’t know how to act on it, it was never a flash point between them. Even if she suspected that Regina had played a role in the story, which was really hard to believe, she had no reason to occupy herself with that, especially in the first two or three days after she returned, while her mother was still quite discreet and, counter to her nature, didn’t poke her nose into her life or make comments when a man greeted her on the street.

Regina’s behavior would change suddenly and return to its old ways after the death of Uncle Luka, her youngest and last living brother, who had come back from Trieste a week after Dijana, where he’d lived for the last sixteen years, to die in his country and home city. They carried him on a stretcher from the ambulance and into the house. A nurse came with him, an Italian named Patricia. They laid him down in the guest room, on a bed on which no one had slept in years and which had never seen a guest and was only called the guest bed by habit. Luka laughed and joked about his illness. Regina hugged him and skipped all around, younger and prettier than Dijana could remember her.

For the first time in a long time she didn’t hide from her mother in the house but sat by the side of Uncle Luka’s bed and enjoyed herself. This was how she was on that Saturday evening. Had the sourest grumps and the most miserable wretch alive found themselves in the Delavale house, they would have split their sides laughing with that mother, daughter, and Trieste nurse by the side of a man who’d seemingly lived his whole life only for his final day, when he would make the whole world laugh. Regina and Dijana went to bed at about midnight, and with the first light Uncle Luka was dead.

“All the city’s whores came to his funeral,” said Regina, “as if he too were a Delavale! And maybe he was; the devil knows who sent the lot of you out into the world.”

It was then that Dijana knew that peace in the house had come to an end. All it took was for something else to happen that was more important than her return. That happened to be Luka’s death. Though it was true that whores had come to his funeral and that they’d wept and covered the grave of his cheerful soul with flowers. That didn’t surprise anyone, not even the priest who conducted the service saw anything that would disturb the solemn moment when Luka passed from earthly to eternal life:

“The Lord has a scale with which he weighs all the sins of the deceased, and we can only send our brother Luka Sikirić to him. He made our time in this valley of sorrow more cheerful, and there isn’t a one among us whom he didn’t make laugh at least once, by pure cheer and without malice.”

On the fifth of March, 1953, the strongest bora of that winter began to blow. Sometime around ten in the morning it came out of nowhere and caught everyone off guard. It blew away sheets that were hung to dry in front of houses, carried them over rooftops, down streets, and through squares. It cast them far out over the sea, spun them high into the air, as if it weren’t a bora but some unknown weather coming from the north and east that had never blown there before to uproot and smash everything in its path. Women came out of their houses and ran through the city like lunatics, trying to catch their sheets, but they hardly got a one. And if they did, the bora tore it out of the woman’s hands, carried it upward to the sky, and hurled it out over the sea. Had any of the women stubbornly held on to their sheets, it would have carried them up into the sky as well. It was fortunate that this wasn’t a city like those in eastern Poland or Russia and that the people, no matter how crazy, still clung to the land because otherwise the March bora would have hurled them into the sky in all directions so that not even God would have been able to sort them out according to their faith or lack of it or the gravity of their sins. They ran into their houses and waited between stone walls for the storm to pass.

Regina was home alone. She’d packed Dijana off to school early that morning, when no one knew yet what kind of storm was approaching. Dijana went off in light clothing, dressed for the way the weather had been the day before. Regina told her to take her raincoat just in case, but she didn’t want to. The other kids laughed at her, told her that her raincoat had been her dead father’s, which was true, but Regina had worked her hands raw patching and shortening it. It was true that it was a little wide for her and she had to turn the sleeves up three times, but Regina didn’t want to take it in any more or shorten the sleeves, as if it weren’t a raincoat but a ball dress and as if it weren’t for a child but a bride! But no! Dijana said the raincoat was too wide! Other kids laughed at her! As if it mattered that they laughed. You laugh at them, her mother told her a hundred times, whereupon the little girl would start pounding the table with her hands, shouting, and pulling out her hair.

“Don’t pull out your hair,” she said. “Don’t pull out your hair,” she said again. “Don’t pull out your hair; I’m telling you for the last time,” she told Dijana after she had stubbornly refused to wear the raincoat all winter. She wouldn’t put it on even when it was raining, or she would take it off as soon as she went outside and throw it over the wall into the garden. And Regina would spank her when she came home from school with a cold and a fever. One day she’d get pneumonia. Who would take her to the doctor then, fret over her at night because there was no medicine in the city and people died from pneumonia more than from anything else?