Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

That last night, while he embraced her and monitored the life of his child with his palm, Ivo didn’t ask for any of what the world had taught him. He lay there dressed, but she felt him through the silk and cotton. She would have felt him if there had been a stone wall between them and felt a powerful urge to take off her clothes and do whatever he wanted. Even what no whore could have showed him, and what a woman’s body wasn’t made for, and what would have killed her. Regina could have done everything and wanted everything, in love as she was that night with a love greater than the city and its walls, greater than its patron saint, greater than the war and all armies combined, greater than those who would have strung up her Ivo had they known he was there. She was so proud and felt herself to be the most fulfilled woman since the beginning of time because her husband had risked his life only to come to her and slip into her bed. If she’d doubted Ivo and if she’d thought what all women thought, that she wasn’t anything important in his life and that she was just there by accident — just as some other woman could have been there — now she was sure of the fact that she’d been chosen, sure of the fact that she’d been created for him and that he would never exchange her for another woman. She moved in his embrace, snuggled and wiggled like a whore, and grabbed at his hard member and was then ashamed because he asked:

“It’s going to be a girl, right?”

“That’s what the Gypsy women said,” she said and withdrew her hand quickly, hoping that she’d done it in time.

“Dijana,” he said, “That’s a nice name, Dijana.”

She didn’t answer him but was later deathly afraid that she would have a boy. That would have been a betrayal. Fortunately, she gave birth to none other than Dijana.

Every moment of that last night went through her mind as she returned home from the post office with the child in her arms. Shame and rage mingled, and she was disgusted by everything that she’d done for him in life. Everything that he had tricked her into doing. She felt his masculinity burning and blazing and wanting to make her as miserable as possible. She had a painful sore on the tip of her tongue. As if she’d stuffed herself eating green figs. Ivo’s taste was so near that it seemed to her that all she needed to do was hurry a little or shout his name and he would appear here before her, naked, sticky, and hairy. Ivo Delavale! She would ask him who Diana Vichedemonni was, and no matter what he answered, she would do the same thing: cut him up in pieces, burn his wounds with glowing hot pine logs, and drip hot sap down his scrotum and pour it into his anus, that February almond blossom that one was forbidden to touch. He hadn’t let her. And now she knew why! So she wouldn’t think that he’d been doing things not only with the prostitutes but also with his comrades on the ship!

He wouldn’t have been able to bear such suspicion. He would have fallen apart like an old marine engine, stopped being a man. If only once she’d recognized in him Geza Mađar, whose ear the local men had cut off, marking him so the whole city knew that it shouldn’t get close to him because someone had seen him under the big windlass in the shipyard while a black man, an American sailor, was thrusting his cock into his ass. They’d beaten the black man all morning until all that was left of him was a bloody mass and one wasn’t sure whether that was a man or someone had tossed a rotting bull’s carcass next to the rusted shipyard dumpsters in the mud, grease, and petroleum. But they didn’t beat Geza Mađar; rather they sent little Đivo, the five-year-old son of the barber Karlo Karakuna, to get his dad’s razor. The little boy didn’t know what they wanted the razor for, but he brought it.

“Uncle Mate asked for it,” he told his father, and he, foolish as he was, didn’t think at all about what a child might do with a razor but gave it to him and said, “tell Uncle Mate to bring it right back.” The boy was happy that he could be of use and believed that he was entering the world of adults then and there. He was a little confused when he saw Uncle Mate holding Uncle Geza Mađar by the legs and Ale Pjevač squeezing his head in a headlock.

“Hand it over, boy!” Ivanko said, who was a student in Zagreb and the best swimmer in the city; he took the razor, grabbed Geza’s ear, and cut it off in one stroke. Mađar started yelling, but Ivanko shoved the ear in his mouth:

“Eat it, you fucking faggot, eat it! If you don’t eat it, I’ll cut off your cock! You don’t need it anyway!”

And so Geza Mađar ate his own ear. Đivo watched all that and didn’t say a thing; he was frozen stiff with horror and watched what happens to people who aren’t like other people and what one was supposed to do to a man whose dreams and desires differed from those who were holding him.

He’d known that Geza Mađar wasn’t like other people in the city, but he wasn’t sure how he was different. Because he was fat and limp, because he laughed as he greeted everyone, because he talked with the women who sold fish at the market and walked across the square as if the stones were going to move out from under his feet and he had to watch how he was going to step on each one, or was he different from others only because he was all alone and there were so many of them?

Đivo wasn’t sure what was going on, but he asked Ivanko to give him the razor back. His dad would kill him if he didn’t bring it back.

“Spit on him, and I’ll give it to you!” the student said to him.

And so little Đivo spat on Geza Mađar while blood was gushing from his head.

“Tell him, ‘Fuck your shitty ass!’” the student said.

And Đivo said that too, just to get the razor back. It was bloody, and so he wiped it off on his underwear on the way, and then he remembered that his mother would bawl him out because of that and he wanted to wipe away the blood, but how can you wipe away a stain? In the end he cut his finger. A thin, bloody cut opened. It didn’t hurt, but as soon as he clenched his fist the cut widened, and the blood flowed out and it hurt. He would have cried, but he didn’t dare and didn’t have anyone to cry to. All that was important for him was to get the razor back.

Well, Ivo was afraid of Regina seeing in him something that was in Geza Mađar, and that was why he would jump away on the bed whenever she accidentally touched his almond blossom.

“What’s wrong? I didn’t mean to!” she would tell him, ashamed, so he wouldn’t think that she’d intentionally gone there with her fingers. And it wasn’t easy to tell where a man’s desire — one that the prostitutes had taught him — ended and where the forbidden parts of his body began. The parts that distinguished ordinary men from the one-eared freaks one finds in every Dalmatian town.

However, her almond blossom, as he called it when on one of those nights, all smooth, erect, and purple, he’d wanted to enter her there, wasn’t a forbidden spot. He decided that it wouldn’t be. But how could it be that one of those body parts that men and women shared was for him a bastion of his honor but for her was an almond blossom that was to be deflowered?

Everything that ran through Regina’s head, increasing her hatred with every step, had only to do with the nights that she’d spent with Ivo. The whole world fit into her bed, so she didn’t think about what happened between them during the day and outside the bedroom. Her reasons for revenge, which would become greater than any of the other reasons she had to live, originated in her sense that Ivo hadn’t been sleeping with her but with some other woman in his head, on account of whom he didn’t want for her to be facing him in bed. He paid money to prostitutes but just lied to her. Everything else was the same, and he didn’t see any difference between her and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of women whom he’d come to know in the harbors of the world. He’d loved only one and so had wanted to give his daughter her name.