Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Regina stood with the receiver in her hand and nodded, repeating, “Yes, yes, yes. .” long after the woman on the other end had hung up. “Thank you and goodbye,” she said when there was no longer any doubt in her mind.

Vito, the post office clerk, waited, curious to see what would happen — when Ivo’s widow would start crying and wailing, because that was what happened whenever a wife called to inquire about her husband. The times were such that all people received were telegrams of death. However, she smiled, so Ivo must not have been dead.

“How much do I owe?” she asked.

“Good news is on me,” he said and pushed the money back across the counter. “If there were more such news, I’d pay for all of it out of my pocket,” he said, refusing to give in when she still tried to pay.

“Oh, how lucky you are,” he thought as she went out. “You have no idea how lucky you are. It’s only in misfortune that a man knows how good or bad he’s got it and never any time else.” Vito Anaf looked at his telephone, and he was glad for that woman.

But she’d done everything in her power to hold back her tears and keep her face from betraying any burden or anguish, convinced as she was that the postal clerk would take pleasure from the truth: that Ivo was dead and that the Belgrade woman had hung up before she’d managed to ask anything. . Everyone enjoys things like that, even when they pretend they’re sorry, even if they’re ready to help you.

When she got outside, her mind focused on something that had overshadowed all her reasons for sorrow and despair in a split second: who was that woman who had “paid all expenses”? It was hardly possible that she was a good soul, a rich woman who saw those who had no one of their own in America into the other world. But she might have believed that, more from a desire for belief and love that was more important than truth, if only that woman’s name hadn’t been Diana! If the Belgrade lady had given some other name, if the stenographer in Radio Belgrade had made a mistake, or if the connection had been worse and if Regina had heard something else instead of Diana, her life would again have taken a different course. She would have worn black for Ivo her whole life; she would have kept the photograph of him in his royal sailor’s uniform on her nightstand. She wouldn’t have lived to ninety-seven but would have died when her time came, reconciled with her world and her fate. No great rage at life would have been born inside her that wouldn’t let her heart stop beating. All her tenderness and fear turned into rage like wine turning into vinegar.

As she was walking home, she was trying to think up a way to get to Diana Vichedemonni and to answer the question of what that woman was to Ivo. Although she was already sure she knew the answer. When Ivo had burst into their house that night a month before she gave birth, she had been terrified to see him because the city was covered in wanted posters with his name on them. And she thought he was safe and secure on Vis, in England, or wherever Tito’s sailors were.

“Are you thinking about this child at all?” she asked, rebuking him as the sleep left her eyes.

“We won’t see each other for a long time,” he said and lay down next to her though he was fully dressed; he hugged her from behind and caressed her belly with the palm of his hand.

“They’ll hammer nails under your fingernails if they catch you,” she said, nestling into his embrace.

“Stay like that,” he said, stopping her when she wanted to turn around to face him, “just this one more time,” he said, and she laughed.

He always said that same thing—“just this one more time, just this one more time”—regardless of whether they’d been together every night or he’d just come to her bed after having been away for months or years. Ivo liked being behind her, for her to snuggle against his body and to sleep like that or do what they did. Regina thought it strange, though she didn’t know how others embraced and slept. But it seemed to her that this was a little unbecoming and that women didn’t agree to do it even when their men wanted them to. And men thought up all sorts of things. Men were children and demons at the same time. A woman’s mind couldn’t imagine the things they would do in bed. Ivo had it easy with her, but others weren’t like that. Especially if they went to church every Sunday. No ass that rubbed against a male member and mounted it would sit down on a pew, just as knees that knelt before a man didn’t go down onto a prie-dieu . She didn’t like it the first time he had pushed her head down and told her to kneel down in front of the bed and kiss what lips were not supposed to kiss. Did women who went to Mass every Sunday do that?! Regina didn’t think so. And it bothered her because she knew where Ivo had learned what some women were ready to do and what kinds of depravities they could commit in bed. When he told her which harbors his ship had docked in, Regina’s eyes filled with a parade of all those cross-eyed, long-haired blondes and brunettes, women who looked like monkeys and had flat noses and big mouths and you didn’t know how men could find them attractive. She was sure that they spread their legs for Ivo, kneeled in front of him; that they wiggled their dark asses, invited him into them, and took him in as the ground takes in a mole. And what else would sailors do in a harbor besides go to the prostitutes? He never mentioned them, but did any man talk to his wife about such things? She wouldn’t have felt jealous, nor would she have been afraid of catching diseases that came into the city from distant shores and about which people spoke in low tones because every woman on the coast was afraid of her husband bringing her gonorrhea from Singapore or the clap from black Africa. So they didn’t dare relish the misfortune of those sad women whose husbands, it was told, had brought them, as a gift from warm seas, the drip, which no doctor in Zagreb or Belgrade could cure. It was something else that tormented Regina: whenever Ivo came home from the sea, she was afraid of the first night that she would spend with him in bed. She was also afraid of the third and fourth because who knew when it would occur to him, or how long it would take him, to get the courage to ask her to do to him what the harbor prostitutes had taught him. Would she be able to bring herself to do it? Would she know, and would she even be able to understand what she was supposed to do? Those women studied day and night what sailors’ wives were supposed to know as soon as their husbands returned home from the sea. They had accumulated knowledge about everything a man could desire. Every desire of every last man in the world. And just as people are different, so their desires are also different. Black men don’t want the same thing as our men, Regina thought, just as there were certainly differences between Japanese and American men. Just as their eyes and faces were different, so they differed in those parts of their bodies that only prostitutes saw. She didn’t know anything about that; they knew everything. They also knew that men were insatiable children and wanted what wasn’t meant for them but for others. And then prostitutes gave it to them. Whatever they gave to them, the sailors expected it from their wives later.

No matter how much she scorned them or at least tried to think about them as the whole city did, she felt respect for the prostitutes. The respect one has for doctors, lawyers, and magicians, people who possess knowledge without which the world wouldn’t come to an end, but on which the world was based. And she was afraid whenever Ivo returned from the sea, wondering whether she would be able to do what they could.

When she first took him into her mouth and tasted the salty taste of what, as she believed, the majority of women didn’t know, she believed it to have been sent from Africa or Singapore. She tasted cinnamon and nutmeg, spices of decadence that had no place in any food.