Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Regina got distracted thinking about what exactly champion of its cause was supposed to mean.

Bepo was buried in the same tomb in which Ivo Delavale had already been lying for two years. These two men, who hadn’t had anything in common, so absolutely nothing that they couldn’t even be one another’s enemies, ended up next to one another on two concrete slabs. Bepo lay in a massive coffin of oak, with a communist star carved at the top, and Ivo in a rusted tin can with a picture of a laughing black woman with big breasts.

The news that Alphonse Capone, the greatest gangster in journalistic history and one of the main stars of the newsreels, had died on his estate in Florida was announced in Yugoslavia with a three-month delay and only in the Belgrade Politika, above the Mickey Mouse comic strip. Capone died in late January, when Ivo Delavale was just starting out on his last voyage, traveling in an old tin Brazilian Santos coffee can, which had been packed into the bottom of the sailor’s trunk of one Milo Milidrag. As the ship sailed out of the harbor, a great Italian family was mourning its godfather, and the morning that it sailed into Gruž harbor in Dubrovnik, the Belgrade newspaper would publish the news of Capone’s death.

That coincidence confirmed how far away America was from Yugoslavia in the year 1947. If America had been closer, Regina would have learned of her husband’s death earlier, right after the New Year, when he didn’t get up off the floor in a Chicago bar. Everyone thought he was dead drunk, but he was in fact just dead. Not even Milo Milidrag could tell Regina who’d paid for his cremation or who’d put his ashes inside a coffee can. He hadn’t known Ivo Delavale and had only heard the story of his death from the man who’d given him the can and the address and passed on the request that upon his return he deliver the ashes to the deceased man’s wife. Milidrag had forgotten what the man’s name was, and Regina’s attempts to learn anything else from the man were futile. Either this Montenegrin sailor was acting more stupid than he was because he wanted to hide something, or he really was completely oblivious. But the way that she learned of Ivo’s death and the fact that the ashes in the box could be anyone’s, or simply ash from someone’s stove, aroused her suspicion. It could hardly have been any different. No one had provided her with a death certificate, Milo Milidrag hadn’t given her Ivo’s personal effects, and there wasn’t really anything that would indicate the authenticity of the can with a laughing black woman on it. She put it under the sink, next to the waste basket, and decided not to say anything to anyone before she learned the whole truth. If it turned out that Ivo was alive and that a sailor had duped her, the tale would spread through the city like wildfire, and she wouldn’t be able to shake it until the day she died. A woman puts on a black mourning dress, arranges for a funeral, calls in the priests and buries a box of Brazilian coffee, and then her husband comes home alive and well!

Things would have been different if Ivo Delavale hadn’t had ten dollars in his wallet at the moment he died. Or if Milo Milidrag had been more honest — if there’d been any fear of God in him and he’d believed that whoever stole from the dead ended up in hell. In that case Regina’s life and the life of her daughter, who was three years old at the time of her father’s death, would have taken a different turn, and most of what happened would never have come to pass. One could say that a single ten-dollar bill determined the course of fate.

The man whose name Milidrag had forgotten was Petar Pognar. He was a block leader in some Croatian association in Chicago that mostly took care of arrangements for the deceased. Besides the tin box with the ashes, he’d given the sailor the dead man’s wallet, in which there was in addition to the ten dollars a photograph of Dijana at three months, a Yugoslav military service booklet, and registrations of six or seven places of residence in the name of Ivo Delavale. He had also given him a worker’s visor cap and two handkerchiefs, which Pognar’s wife had washed so that there would be no shame for the deceased, and a small brass crucifix on a chain, of no monetary value at all.

Regina knew all those objects: she’d bought the handkerchiefs in Čapljina; he’d worn the visor cap instead of a sailor’s hat; and the cross had belonged to Ivo’s brother Radovan, who had been killed fighting for the Austrians on the River Soča in the summer of 1915. Had any of these objects reached Regina, she would have known that her Ivo was dead. She would have mourned and wept for him for a long time, sincerely, and would never have tried to see if any of the story checked out. But Milidrag threw those objects into the Atlantic after he found the ten dollars, convinced that it was the only way to cover up his crime. He would have thrown the tin box with the ashes overboard as well, but he was hoping for some token of gratitude after he turned it over to the widow. When she failed to show any such gratitude and got him off her doorstep more quickly than she would the postman, he regretted not having scattered the ashes into the sea. He didn’t have a guilty conscience about having stolen a dead man’s money.

Regina wrote the shipping company for which Ivo had been working but received no answer. Then she reported her husband’s disappearance to the police, sent a letter to the Yugoslav embassy in Washington, made inquiries to émigré societies, and put notices in newspapers and on the radio. The announcer read the name Ivo Delavale every Friday on the nighttime broadcast, intended for the families of those who’d disappeared in the war. Among the thousands who hadn’t returned and whose bodies hadn’t been located and who’d served in various armies and were last seen in the oddest places — Dachau, Stalingrad, Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, Steinbrück, Železno, Trieste, Udin, Blagoevgrad, Bucharest, Sutjeska, Foča, Zvonimirova Street in Zagreb, Blagaj, Vis, Biokovo, and El Shatt — there was also Ivo Delavale, a ship’s engineer who, according to the last reliable information, had sailed from the port of Bari in the autumn of 1944 on the American warship Iron Star. He’d been one of a team of sailors that would on an order from the free Yugoslav government take over the remnants of the royal merchant fleet, which had lain anchored off American harbors for three years.

Every Friday Regina listened to the radio program and waited for someone to contact her. She remembered the names of the missing and soon knew around two hundred of them, which were repeated constantly because news about them never came. Their relatives had probably memorized Ivo’s name, and now it seemed like they were familiar and close, though they’d never met. Just as children remembered the names of soccer players and could recite from memory the eleven team members who would go to next year’s Olympics, so the wives and daughters of missing soldiers and sailors could recite the names they heard every Friday on the radio and would read them for years, as long as there was anyone alive who didn’t know the fate of their loved ones.

“I know Ivo’s alive; he’s boozing with blacks and chasing whores. What the hell does he care about our communism?!” Luka said to comfort her. Regina grabbed a bottle from the table that would have hit him in the head if he’d been slower in shutting the door. Dijana started wailing like a ship’s siren, and creamed spinach dribbled down her chin. Her eyes were almost bulging out of their sockets, and she looked like a very strange creature — an African monkey that had been bitten by a rabid fox in the zoo. Regina took her daughter in her arms and hugged her firmly, less out of motherly concern than so she wouldn’t see her like that. The green slime smeared on her white blouse, and broken glass crunched under her feet at every step. She tried to recall the words to some lullaby but couldn’t from all the shouting and racket. She started singing Sweet Little Marijana and tried to sing louder than Dijana was crying. Since she wasn’t very musical and the child wailed louder the more she sang, anyone who heard them might have concluded that Regina’s mind was starting to go from grief for her husband. The windows were open, and people listened to what came out of their neighbors’ windows more attentively than they listened to Radio London.