Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

She put Dijana down on the ottoman, grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, and wrote: “It is with sorrow in our hearts that we announce that Ivo (Etorea) Delavale has died in America. He will be buried tomorrow, on Tuesday, in the family plot of Lovre Sikirić. He is mourned by his wife Regina and his daughter Dijana.”

Then she thought a little and first crossed out the bit about sorrow in their hearts, and in place of the words about mourning she wrote, “He will be returned to the earth.” And then she deleted the name of her daughter. She took the piece of paper and the box with the laughing black woman and went off to a funeral home.

Only when she’d left the house did she remember that she’d left Dijana. She stopped for a moment and then continued going down the stairs. That was the first time she had left Dijana alone at home. At first the undertakers didn’t want to accept the metal box, but she threatened to open it and spread the ashes on the floor and they could deal with that. She refused the idea of finding a nice urn in town, for example, one of those in an apothecary’s shop that contain ingredients for medicines.

“No, I’ll bury him just like they sent him!” she said, rebuffing them, and the men in black didn’t think of giving her any more problems.

The funeral didn’t last long; there were no eulogies or priests. Luka brought a wreath; the neighbor ladies peered into the open vault, trying to check the condition of great-grandfather Lovro, who had died in eighteen hundred something, and the other dead relatives that had followed him, but they couldn’t have seen much because it was dark inside the vault and there was no particular smell. It stank of stone and dampness, like the flooded cellars of houses destroyed in the war. The undertaker, dressed in black, brought the box of Ivo’s ashes covered with a black kerchief.

“Get that goddamned kerchief out of here!” his widow shouted; “take it off, dammit!” She walked up and jerked the kerchief away, as in that magic trick with the rabbit and the hat. There were sighs of shock. Even Luka felt awkward, though he didn’t stand on graveside formalities and hated the kind of people who went to funerals. But it had never happened that someone had been buried in a coffee can.

“She’s gone wacko!” said the old women in their headscarves as they left the cemetery. “Isn’t she afraid of God?” they said out loud when Regina could no longer hear them.

“You picked a fine time to wet yourself, you little devil!” Regina yelled at Dijana and slapped her on the cheek. The child squealed, and she slapped her again.

“What’s wrong with you, woman?” Luka asked. He ran up and tore the girl out of Regina’s arms. Finding herself in safe hands, Dijana began to wail at full throttle. Her uncle picked her up in his arms and said, “Your uncle will give you some sugar,” trying to comfort the girl and to catch up with Regina, who was hastening furiously onward. He hustled after her all the way home, and the more he quickened his pace, the more she hurried on, keeping three or four meters ahead of him.

She never told Luka the whole truth about why she’d acted as she did, and Luka didn’t ask too many questions. His sister was seventeen years older than he was. She’d behaved as a mother figure toward little Luka since he’d been young; in fact she’d largely replaced his mother after she died of heart trouble in 1927. She rarely shouted at him and didn’t get upset at his whims but would defend him in front of his older brothers, who’d already wanted to kick him out of the house when he was thirteen because he’d caused a scandal with the British consul at the Pile gates, on account of which the police had been called to their house.

Luka thought it strange that Regina lost her temper, that she hit her child for no reason and didn’t shed a tear for Ivo. He thought there must be something behind this, that she would explain it to him and tell him what he ought to know.

“He had some whore in Chicago,” she said that same evening.

“Are you sure?” he asked instead of saying that every or almost every sailor had a woman somewhere and that she shouldn’t get upset about it.

Regina just looked at him and didn’t answer. Dijana was sitting on the potty next to the sink and didn’t dare say that she didn’t need to pee or poop. She didn’t say anything and looked a little at her mother and a little at her uncle, until Luka finally realized that she’d been sitting on the potty for more than an hour and hadn’t let out a peep. He clapped his hands and asked:

“Are we done, Brother Socrates?” He grabbed Dijana and turned her upside down to inspect the situation. There was a completely regular and clear red circle on her bottom, the imprint of the edge of the potty.

“Nothing happened?” he asked, acting strict, smelling her bottom. She laughed like crazy and was never afraid again.

Luka asked, “Are we done, Brother Socrates?” five or six times a day. He wiped Dijana’s bottom, changed her diaper when she got to playing and wet herself, and took her along into town, from café to café. And she would sit peacefully for hours while her uncle played cards. That was the rule. When uncle played cards, you had to be quiet and calm. So that no other uncles would chase them away.

“Sit still and think about me getting the best cards. If you think about it hard enough, I’ll get them,” he told her, and she would think as hard as she could. Although uncle hadn’t said exactly how it worked, she worked out the best combinations of aunts, kings, and cops. And she always kept an ace in her heart because that was the card that her uncle liked best.

Although the image in Dijana’s head didn’t correspond to what Luka had in his hands (because if it had, Luka would have lost money), he began a long winning streak that would last until Dijana started going to school.

At first he thought it was luck, but he soon came to believe in Dijana’s supernatural abilities. Or he believed that the child belonged to him and that he belonged to her according to some higher law of the universe. Luka wasn’t just Dijana’s uncle, nor was she just some little niece of his. Their being together logically produced his success at gambling. While she sat in the corner, crossed her fingers, frowned, and thought hard, he won. And whenever she stayed at home because she’d caught a cold or her mother objected to his taking her out all the time, his card game went nowhere and he would start losing.

Soon others linked her presence with his luck, and they told him not to bring the girl any more. Who ever heard of someone bringing a child to a card game?! He asked them what kind of men and gamblers were afraid of a four-year-old girl. If she could beat them, then they should forget cards and grab their hoes. In the end it was decided that Dijana could be present but not always. She could come only during the week; on the weekends they would play alone.

Thus, just like a real working man, Luka earned money on the weekdays, and on the weekends he spent what he’d earned or didn’t go play cards at all but would go out on adventures with his niece. They would get into a rowboat and row — instead of an oar, she would slap the water with a big cooking spoon — to one of the little islands and play Robinson Crusoe all day long. He would catch fish on a line, light a fire by striking flint on the rocks, and they would cook the fish they’d caught and imagine how many years they’d been there and when it was that they’d seen a ship in the distance the last time. They’d usually been there for more than twenty years and seen a ship seven years before. Dijana was thrilled that in this game there was no one else in the world except them, and Luka wasn’t unhappy to pretend that he was left alone with that child and no longer had to deal with people, who’d been savages for too long already.