Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Marija Kablar looked at this woman who wouldn’t stop shouting and couldn’t figure out how she’d ended up in her office, who had sent her or for what purpose. Marija Kablar was simply a police archivist and was three months away from retiring. She’d been sitting in room 407 for two and a half years, ever since the files had all been digitized, doing nothing and waiting for her time to be up. She would drink coffee and turn over a miniature hourglass. From eight in the morning to four in the afternoon she would turn it over exactly seven hundred and twelve times; she had counted on several occasions, and the number of times always came out to be seven hundred and twelve. She rarely read the newspaper or turned on the small Japanese transistor radio, so one could say that apart from coffee and the little hourglass her workday was devoid of content. In two and a half years someone had knocked on her door only about a dozen times, always by mistake, except for once when they came to check the fire extinguishers. At first she was afraid that she would be fired, but she calmed down when she realized that they had forgotten her and would have a hard time finding her among the two hundred or so employees before her sixty-fifth birthday, which was when she would go to the personnel department and announce that she was retiring. That’s how it goes; if she didn’t remember to do it herself, they wouldn’t either and would probably let her stay on for another twenty years. After she had divorced her husband six years earlier (when he’d run off with a woman thirty years younger), and after all her friends and those she might meet at the City Café had died off or moved away, all Marija Kablar was waiting for was her pension so that she could return to Glamoč, a town she’d left a half a century before but was still the place where she would have her peace in life, or so she imagined. The arrival of this unknown woman upset her; she worried that it wasn’t a coincidence because the woman addressed her by name immediately; okay, her name was there on the door, but below it also said “senior archivist,” so it was unlikely that there was a mistake. It was more likely that someone had remembered her and decided to give her some trouble — if nothing else, to remind her how she was sitting there doing nothing and still getting paid. And just when she had only three months left to go.

“I think you’ve made a mistake; I don’t work on cases,” she said cautiously, looking at the teary-eyed woman over her glasses. She always looked over her glasses when she wanted to look really serious and self-confident.

“I’m not mistaken. I’ve been trying to say that the whole time, but nobody will listen to me. I’m really not mistaken. I’m trying to save an innocent man. And that’s not a mistake. It’s no sin. Tell me, has that really become a sin too?” the guest asked, pressing her. She made the impression of a fairly sincere but at the same time unbearably theatrical woman. She was either crazy or under the spell of having found herself in a police station.

“Ma’am, I’m only an archivist. Nothing else.”

“Really? Where’s your archive? Show me where the archive is!”

“Did you read what it says on my door?”

“No, why would I?” the woman said, lying, and Marija Kablar began to panic. So someone had sent her. That much was certain.

“Whoever sent you here to me made a mistake. Believe me. .!”

“Pardon, do you believe in God. .?”

“Who do you think you are asking questions like that?!” Marija said angrily. Now they would hang atheism around her neck, too. She couldn’t figure out what the reason was. What did they care whether she went to church or not when they knew full well that she didn’t?

“I’m nobody, that’s who. And I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that what goes around comes around, every wicked thing. .”

“Fine. So what?”

“Why won’t you help me?” the woman asked. She sat there, squeezing a small glossy purse in her lap, the kind people carry to a funeral or the theater. That little detail saddened Marija somewhat. Rubber boots on an old man waiting in a line at the bank, a University of Los Angeles T-shirt on a Gypsy child begging in front of a church, a necktie on a dying man, a run in the stocking of a former British prime minister, a black glossy purse in the hands of a woman in a police station: details that moved her more than scenes of real misfortune.

“I’d help you, but it’s simply not my job. .”

“It’s not anyone’s job. How terrible it is that helping someone has become a job. .”

“But, ma’am, I can’t help you. It’s simply not in my power. .”

“My name is Dijana. You probably read about me in the newspapers. .”

“I’m sorry, but I hardly ever read the newspapers. .”

“You must have heard people talking about it. The whole town is talking about it. Some ‘Dr. Mengele’ in our hospital took the life of a ninety-seven-year-old lady. That’s what they say.”

“Believe me, I haven’t heard a thing about it. Nothing at all. I try to hear as little as possible. And she was your mother? I’m sorry, missus. . missus. .”

“Dijana — don’t you remember? You’re not sorry. If you were sorry, you’d have listened to what I was saying. .”

“But I did! You were talking and I was listening. .”

“And did you understand anything?”

“No. .”

“See, you didn’t. You’re just waiting for me to get out of here. You’re putting up with me because you’re polite, and unlike the others, you can’t bring yourself to throw me out. . ”

“I’m really sorry. You’re right — it’s wrong. Everybody needs to have people listen to them. .”

“You’re just saying that because it sounds like the thing to say.”

Marija truly believed that the police should have someone whose work was simply to hear people out. Then fewer people would murder out of desperation or revenge. There should be someone, say, a psychiatrist or a priest, whose job would be to calm people down and convince them that things would get better.

“Who’s the young man?” asked Marija.

“Which young man. .?”

“The one you were talking about. The guy who isn’t guilty. .”

“Dr. Ares Vlahović,” Dijana answered, as if that name should mean something to her. Marija nodded her head mechanically, as if it did.

“And what was your relationship to him. .?”

“Nothing; what would it be?!” Dijana said, upset at what she seemed to be hinting at. The neighbors hadn’t started gossiping yet, but they would, and she knew they would, and knew that the first thing they’d say would be that she’d been sleeping with the young doctor and was now ready to betray her own mother just to save him.

“Why do you have to be like that? Why did you think of that right off. .?”

“I didn’t think anything. I was just asking. .”

“Do you believe that someone’s own mother, their own flesh and blood, can turn into a monster, into someone completely unrecognizable?”

“I suppose so. All kinds of things happen to people when they get old. .”

“Well, why are you asking me about him then. .?”

“Do you think. .?”

“No, but I know what you were thinking of. .”

“I wasn’t, I’m really sorry, but I wasn’t. I’m embarrassed — see how I’m blushing? I really wasn’t thinking anything like that.”

Marija looked at this woman and wondered whether she was crazy or whether she’d really said something she wasn’t supposed to or didn’t mean. It would have never occurred to her to hint at something like that. She realized that she wasn’t going to be able to get Dijana off her back just like that. If Dijana walked out of the room now, Marija would retire and return to Glamoč to spend her days in a place that should be a paradise for her, but she would be continually tormented by the thought that she’d maybe insulted and turned away a woman who’d come into her office with a real problem. The first one in her thirty years of work in the police. Right after she had started working for the archives and received her official ID card and pistol (in those days there were so many pistols that they were even issued to police archivists), she expected everything to be as it was in the movies. Inspectors would come with unsolved cases from twenty years before, and she would search through registries late into the night to unlock the mysteries of murders in apparently unimportant lists, living an exciting life full of the pursuit of justice. Nothing remotely similar ever happened. Her work for the police didn’t differ from work in a communal enterprise; she filed away papers that no one needed any more, and it was hardly six months before they took her pistol away. The years of cutbacks had probably begun. She didn’t crave a life like those in the movies; she didn’t believe she deserved it. She only had a passing thought that she might have a life like that. Afterward, she thought herself silly. She was thirty-five then and shouldn’t have been girlish enough to get carried away by such things.