Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

But nothing helped — neither gentle words nor spankings, not even pointing out that she’d spent half the school year sick in bed. She could have still somehow dealt with that, but whenever the girl started pulling out her hair and whole tufts flew around the kitchen, Regina felt she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The child was doing what grown women did when they got into swearing matches with their husbands, who then threw them out of the house and they ran around their yards like lunatics, pulling out their hair. What they really wanted to do was kill themselves, but they didn’t know how or what to do it with, and their fear exceeded their hysteria. Or what prostitutes did when sailors ran off without having paid — they pulled their hair out in front of the whole world, as if everyone should rise up because prostitutes hadn’t been paid for fucking, as if their cunts were a public good that everyone should be concerned about like highways, factories, or municipal buildings. As if the party had expropriated and nationalized their cunts and everyone who wasn’t an enemy of communism had to care whether English sailors had paid for fucking our prostitutes! That’s exactly how Dijana would pull out her hair when her mother ordered her to put on the raincoat and told her that if someone laughed at her she should laugh back at them.

“Don’t pull out your hair; I’m telling you for the last time!” she said after the girl looked her directly in the eye, grabbed a lock with her right hand, and tore it out with one pull, as if Lucifer himself were giving her strength.

Fine; Regina responded calmly and went down to the cellar. Among Ivo’s tools that lay strewn about, tangled long lines and large fishing rods for scabbard fish, she found a tin of American glue. Ivo had brought it from one of his last prewar sea voyages. That glue was amazing; they’d never seen anything like it. You didn’t need pegs and jugs because that glue glued everything. She opened the tin with a mason’s trowel and took out a glob of the syrupy yellow substance with it. It dribbled down after her as she went through the house, but Regina couldn’t have cared less. She’d decided to teach that child a lesson, no matter what the price. If she wasn’t going to live honestly, better not live at all.

In the meantime Dijana had already calmed down; she was rummaging through her school bag, thinking that her mother had given up and gone about her business and that she was now free to go to school without the raincoat.

At the last moment she saw Regina cocking her arm back and tried to move away and was surprised when it wasn’t her hand that hit her head but something soft and moist.

“Now pull your hair, you animal!” her mother yelled.

Dijana grabbed her head, and her hand stuck to it. In a moment she was seized by a terrible fear and reflexively reached up with her other hand, which also got stuck.

Regina led her down the street with her hands on her head like a prisoner of war. Actually she carried her by the collar more than Dijana walked by herself. Her daughter didn’t know what she’d done and screamed in a voice that was more animal than human. She felt her palms fusing to her head. She was turning into a powerless monster with no will or strength of its own, left completely to Regina’s mercy. It seemed her hands weren’t glued to her head but had grown out of it and into her shoulders. Everything had been inverted, changed into a horror worse than any nightmare, and she didn’t know how or why or what power there was in her mother that could reshape her and turn her into something no one had ever seen before.

“Oh, Mary, Mother of God, what’s this?!” šime the barber asked and folded his hands when Regina carried Dijana into his shop.

“She stuck her head where it doesn’t belong, that’s what,” answered her mother calmly. The barber approached Dijana cautiously, as if he were afraid she would bite him, and looked at her from all sides, taking care not to touch her.

“And now you’ve brought her to me, huh? This isn’t my line. I cut people’s hair and shave them; I don’t know what to do about this,” he said, stalling and assuming an affectation.

From one of the chairs the school principal, Kosta Najdanović, whose face was soaped for shaving, watched in amazement. He was one of those people whom years of experience with children in the city had taught not to be surprised at anything. Had people started walking on the surface of the sea, had soldiers and policemen grown wings on their backs, and had children started riding to school on hogs, Principal Najdanović wouldn’t have been surprised in the least. Or at least he would have pretended he weren’t, in the belief that it was the only way to preserve his authority among the schoolchildren and their parents. But when he saw Dijana with her hands on her head, crying and anguished, not even he could pretend that he was witnessing something that perhaps didn’t fit in with a healthy upbringing and good behavior but wasn’t unknown to him. At first he didn’t recognize the pupil from his school.

“šime, for God’s sake, help the child. I’ll shave myself,” said Kosta Najdanović, pulling himself together. He picked up the razor and began shaving himself. He was in a hurry to get to the school because there was going to be a session of the teacher’s council on the occasion of the departure of the school’s relay team, which as a part of the Youth Relay would present a baton to Tito on his birthday. Kosta, like any old man, didn’t like to be late and was a little afraid that he might get the blame if the relay didn’t go as planned. He’d moved to the city from Nevesinje and was rather suspect, like every newcomer.

And while he shaved quickly, passing around his nose and ears, and while he ran out of the shop not forgetting to pay, if only for the soaping since he’d done the shaving himself, the barber tried to unstick Dijana’s hands with rubbing alcohol. But not only did it not work, but the skin on her head began to burn, and she droned like a ship’s horn when it goes into a harbor. She was already hoarse, but her wailing could be heard through the walls, and people from outside started coming inside the shop to see what was going on. When someone came in, they would say, “Goodness gracious!” or “Poor child; what do you think you’re doing to her?!” Then they would turn around and walk out.

This frustrated Regina so much that she tried to get šime to close and lock the shop, which was the furthest thing from his mind. Because how can you close a city barbershop in the middle of the day without its causing a scene or making people angry so that they go off to your competition? He’d already been having big problems since that ass-kissing Hurem from Trebinje had opened up a third barber shop in the city, even though šime’s and Andrija’s shops were more than plenty, and the city had never had three barber shops in the thousand years of its history.

And so people went in and out, until Roko Ronson appeared, a mechanic and ship’s engineer who lived above the shop and had probably been drawn down by Dijana’s racket.

“Hold on; I’ll bring something that’ll remove any glue or cement,” Ronson said and came back with a bottle of thinner or something similar.

Half an hour later, after much anguish and waiting, Dijana had her hands again, but instead of hair all she saw in the mirror was a disgusting, dirty clump of a hairball, like the clump of hemp fiber that Uncle Luka used to wipe his boat motor.

“What do we do now?” šime asked. “Well, girl, I’m afraid you’re going to be bald a while like me!” Roko Ronson said and laughed.

Dijana lost her will and the power to resist; she yielded to fate and the barber’s hands. At first he took a pair of the large scissors barbers have and cut off the clump of hair and glue and then took a pair of clippers and slowly removed the hair that remained. Every so often he would oil the teeth of the clippers, study his work in the mirror, and continue working, satisfied because he could finally again do what he was trained to do and what all barbers usually did. šime was indeed convinced that he was the only one people came to with such crazy problems and that he’d spent half of his career dealing with people’s idiocy and not haircuts. And that career had been going on for a long time because he’d been in this barbershop since 1925, at first as an apprentice to the deceased Karlo Karakuna, and then as his employee. When the master barber became feeble, he left the shop and everything in it to him on condition that he take care of him until he died. And he had taken better care of the barber than his own father and wept more at his funeral than he had at his father’s.