Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

She was desperate and distraught for days. Whenever she threw potato peels and fish bones into the trash, she would see the box with the laughing black woman. Then it would hit her that her Ivo was dead, and she was overcome with sorrow in an instant. Five minutes later she would already be remembering Milo Milidrag and his dull face: that wasn’t what a herald of misfortune looked like. Whoever brought such news had to be different or at least be wearing a solemn uniform. It’s hard to believe that the lives of your loved ones can be taken away by bums, ne’er-do-wells, and cheats. And Milo Milidrag was all three — even a blind man could see that. Though she didn’t believe in God, Regina felt that souls were nevertheless aligned in the universe according to some sort of logic that had no place for Montenegrin sailors from the Bay of Kotor and tin boxes.

She’d heard that in the Bay of Kotor relatives would get married and no one paid any attention to whether a husband and wife had the same uncles and grandfathers, so that they gave birth to children with two heads, and that there were many adult men with the brains of three-year-olds. She remembered everything she’d ever heard about people from the Bay of Kotor and was more and more certain that Milo Milidrag had made up the death of her Ivo in the hope that he would get some reward for passing on the bad news. If the sailor had been from Korčula, Hvar, or Split or was a Herzegovinian, Regina would have grabbed for other tales and legends because there is no shortage of them for anyone from anywhere, but since he was from the Bay of Kotor and nowhere else, she began to hate all people from that bay. She needed that to keep from believing that the love of her life was resting in that coffee can.

On the twelfth Friday the man on the radio announced that news had arrived from America about the sailor Ivo Delavale and asked his family to call the radio station’s number in Zagreb, Belgrade, or Sarajevo, where they could receive more detailed information. Regina was beside herself with joy; what she’d barely been able to hope for had happened because in the three months that she’d been listening to the broadcast, only twice had anyone learned anything about someone who was missing. And more than that: the announcer had not said “the deceased Ivo Delavale” but only “Ivo Delavale.” From this she concluded that he was alive and forgot that the word “deceased” was never used on that program. It was almost prohibited, as it were, because so many people were sitting next to their radios in the hope that they would never hear it. If they heard that one of those whose names they’d memorized was deceased, they might lose all hope and give up, and after such a big war no one should presume to give up until every one of the missing had received a plot in a cemetery. She ran through the house as if she were crazy, turning the lights on and off, hugging Dijana, saying, “Daddy’s called us! Our daddy!” and the child would squeal briefly, rejecting all her mother’s offers and invitations to something that wasn’t sleep.

As soon as the sun came up, she took Dijana in her arms and went off to the post office, sat down on a low stone wall, and waited for it to open. Her child was sleeping on her shoulder and was as heavy as a corpse; by six o’clock her arms and legs were already numb, and she thought that it might have been better to leave Dijana at home. But who would have taken care that the little girl wouldn’t suffocate in a pillow, fall out of bed, or wake unexpectedly and wander the empty house in terror? If she hadn’t given birth to her so late in life, maybe she would have left her at home more easily and worried about her less. But at forty a mother’s instincts probably start to wane; women no longer know what’s natural, what you can and can’t do with a child.

“Old mothers don’t have good milk,” Zajka Mujić had told her when she’d come to help her with the childbirth, “so go ahead and find yourself a young nursemaid so your child won’t be scrofulous.” Afterward she looked at her breasts as at buckets full of cow’s milk that had either been forgotten or as if someone had abducted the milkmaid, cut her throat, and thrown her into a ditch in the woods. Black images in a black time: it was 1944, Italy was in ruins, the Ustashas were raging, the Chetniks had descended on the city, there were all kinds of terrible tales about the partisans, and Regina was giving birth at the last possible moment in the worst time in which one could have brought a new life into the world. And everything turned out all right; the child was lucky enough to make it through the war. But then Bepo had gone crazy, and Milo Milidrag had knocked on her door, as if he’d come straight out of Bepo’s head.

It seemed that there was a clear connection between those two tragedies and that fifteen months hadn’t passed from the time of the first piece of bad news to that of the second. The first was true; the second was a lie. But it was one of those lies that can’t make anything better and continues to exist even after it has been exposed. She couldn’t forget her sleepless nights, and at times she bade farewell to her husband and mourned his every tenderness but at others raged at the bearer of the news. And then her rage would spill over against Ivo, who hadn’t sent word of himself for more than two years.

She knew: connections were bad, stamps were expensive, letters didn’t arrive, and ships carrying the mail sank in naval battles and storms.

But other women’s husbands got in touch with them while at sea. If he’d sent word to her just once, she would have known that the Montenegrin was lying and would have crammed that tin box down over his ears because her Ivo had written that he was alive and well, and it couldn’t be that he’d just up and died.

And maybe Ivo had written her ten times, sent packages and messages with people, but as chance had it nothing had arrived? Maybe he was now worrying about her just like she was worrying about him, anxious about whether she was alive and well? And if not her, then the child. Every father wondered at least ten times a day how his children were. If terrible images flashed before a mother’s eyes and she ran into the room to see whether her child was sleeping or dead, what must it have been like for a father who hadn’t seen his child for so long? It was much harder for Ivo than for her.

Nausea rose up from her stomach. Sorrow would overcome her, and she would cry, wonder what had happened to him, believe in the truth of the tin box under the sink, and bid farewell to her love, without whom life had no meaning. Nights passed like this, and that was the reason, when the head of the post office came up to her, why it seemed that time wouldn’t wash away the Montenegrin sailor’s lie.

Vito, a postal clerk, tried at first to get through to Radio Zagreb. He dialed the number on the black office telephone (which had been there ever since Habsburg times) at least twenty times, but all he heard in the receiver was silence or noise and static in which it was impossible to make out a human voice. Then he tried to call Sarajevo, but no one in the radio station picked up. “Fucking Bosnia,” he mumbled and tried once more. Then he called Radio Belgrade. “You’ve got a connection,” he said and held out the receiver to Regina.

“Hello, hello, hello,” she shouted, though she could hear the female voice on the other end of the line clearly. But she didn’t know how to begin or what to say.

“My husband Ivo Delavale. .,” she tried to put a question together.

“According to information that we’ve received from Chicago, Comrade Ivo Delavale, formerly a sailor of the merchant marine of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, passed away on the first of January in that city. His body was cremated, and the ashes were released to an American citizen, Diana Vichedemonni, who paid for all expenses,” the female voice recited. “Please accept our condolences. Goodbye!” the voice said, and the connection went dead.