Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Just stay calm,” she said, “and don’t put too much stock in anything anybody says.” Dijana turned to get her purse and said, “You’ve helped me; you should know that you have!” And she really believed it. Marija got up and her sleeve caught the coffee cup, just enough to cause the porcelain to rattle fleetingly.

“I’m glad we met,” she said and extended her hand.

“We’ll surely meet again,” Dijana responded, searching for something she’d forgotten on the table and underneath it. She left satisfied, though she hadn’t achieved anything that she’d intended to when she’d come to the police station. She hadn’t even told the story of what had happened in the municipal hospital, on account of which all charges against Dr. Vlahović should be dropped and the ongoing campaign against him in the newspapers and on the city squares should be stopped. She was satisfied that she’d gotten someone to listen to her for half an hour, no matter what she’d been saying, because that could be a new beginning for her, after which she could forget the past months, a time that at one moment had seemed to be a complete and utter catastrophe, when she’d stopped remembering what her mother had once looked like and that she’d had a mother at all.

Marija went back to waiting. She turned the hourglass over twenty more times, and one more day was over. As she started for home and took the coffee cups to put them on the radiator in front of her office, where the boy in the black-and-white outfit would pick them up, she remembered her guest once more, probably for the last time. Someone else would be interested in that story, she thought. People were too curious; that was why so many tragedies occurred in their lives. If you (and your loved ones, if you had any) didn’t stick your nose where it didn’t belong and only knew what you had to, many of those bad things would steer clear of you. Content with herself, she locked her office and disappeared.

The morning after crazy Manda broke the thick, milky glass on the kitchen door with her fist in one of her nightly rampages, Dijana found her lying pale in a pool of blood and excrement as if all the life in her had already drained out, and she called an ambulance. The lies and deception were over; she could no longer hide from the city what it in fact already knew — that her mother had lost her mind in her ninety-seventh year. But what a way to lose your mind: swearing and cursing the most hideous oaths and in the worst ways, wrenching the guts of those closest to her, and showing parts of herself that one doesn’t even show when one’s young. She would strip naked, thin as a ghost, grab herself by the nipple, and shout: “Want some milk, harbor slut? Want me to breast-feed all your bastards?” Or she would grab herself between the legs and, releasing a stream of urine, say, “Look, you dry cunt, at what a woman has!” Dijana tried to shield her children from this and even worse things as best she could. But what was worse than what was happening to their souls was that someone else might hear crazy Manda —as Darijan had called his grandma Regina one night. And the three of them called her that from then on, probably trying to convince themselves that she had nothing to do with the woman with whom they’d used to live. Two and a half months earlier, a little after the worst had started, Dijana had tried to get her mother committed to the municipal psychiatric ward, but that was no place for sane people, let alone the insane. Ten or so chronic cases that had been abandoned by their families had been taking up a half of the ward for years, while the other half fell to shell-shocked veterans of the war and a few sons and daughters of better houses who’d already passed through the ninth circle of drugs and had no hope of recovery and whose parents wanted to keep them out of sight. No space could be found for an aggressive, berserk old woman. There might have been in other wards, and Regina suffered from a hundred conditions anyway, but if Dijana could reconcile herself to letting psychiatrists see what her mother had turned into, letting other doctors see this had been out of the question, until that morning.

The ambulance arrived an hour after she made the call.

“What’s this, does a herd of wild pigs live here?” asked a fat medic with a shaven head, unable to keep his mouth shut. Dijana tried frantically to think up some lie; she’d been busy at this since she’d called the ambulance, but she couldn’t think of anything that might explain an apartment that had been completely torn apart and soiled with excrement, urine, and blood. She told Mirna and Darijan to stay in the bedroom and not to come out until crazy Manda had been taken away. It was better for the medics not to see them.

“C’mon, granny, let’s go,” said the bald medic and tried to pick her up by her underarms while his partner, a weedy, older man with glasses, went for her legs. But crazy Manda spun around like lightning and bit his arm. “Sweet Mother of Jesus!” he exclaimed, jumping back a couple of meters, and then yelled at Dijana, “Why don’t you say something? Goddammit, get her to calm down!” Dijana was standing against a wall that was soiled with traces of filth that the old woman had smeared on it on one of the previous nights; she said nothing and looked down at the floor.

“She’s not right in the head,” she said finally.

“Oh really?! And we thought you just keep her here to guard the house and bite mailmen!” said the one with the gray hair. The bald one started toward crazy Manda again, approaching her this time more directly from behind, but she slipped away like a cat and flashed her teeth.

“This ain’t our job; let’s go!” said the one with gray hair.

“Wait, please don’t go!” Dijana cried.

“Signorina, we’re here to save you from a stroke or pneumonia; if you need help with that, call us, but for this you need to call someone else,” said the one with the gray hair. The bald one was standing over crazy Manda and looking down at her and thinking: I’d love to kick you in the head!

She grinned at him furiously, flashing her thin, sharp yellow teeth, waiting for a chance to grab him by the balls.

Here Dijana realized whom she should be playing, resolved as she was to finish what she’d started at any price. “Take her away, please!” she said, folding her hands before the bald one.

“Where should we take her when we can’t even figure out how to get a hold of her?”

“To the hospital. She’ll bleed to death.”

“If she hasn’t already, she won’t now,” the gray-haired one interjected again. “Let’s go, Damir, before the old bag gets you by the ass. You know there’s no anti-tetanus serum in the hospital,” he joked, making every effort to humiliate Dijana in any way he could. “No one will believe this when we tell them. .”

“Would you do it for a hundred marks?” she begged the bald one.

“Not even for five hundred!” the gray-haired one said, peering back at her over his shoulder.

“Have some compassion, for God’s sake!” she begged.

“C’mon, granny’ll give you a piece of pussy!” said crazy Manda, suddenly enthusiastic about the idea of them taking her somewhere.

“Okay, give us each a hundred marks,” said the bald one, taking pity.

“Not me, dammit!” the gray-haired one said, resisting.

“Oh yes you will, Tripun,” the bald one said. “And don’t you watch this!” he said to Dijana and seized the old woman by the neck with his middle finger and thumb. She wheezed.

“It hurts, doesn’t it, you old hag? Well, if you bite me, I won’t let go the next time,” he said and grabbed her under the arm. Crazy Manda was probably too surprised to respond quickly, but since Tripun hadn’t gotten her by the legs, she started stomping furiously on the parquet floor.