Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

“Hold her, Tripun!” said the bald one, which Tripun tried to do when he figured that he’d probably stalled long enough. But since the old woman had suddenly gained strength again, he had a hard time of it, and every so often she got him in the chin or the nose.

“You’re done, you old whore!” he shouted after he had finally managed to get a hold of her scrawny knees. His thumbs could feel her kneecaps scraping against the worn ends of her bones. He shuddered as if he had scratched a blackboard with his fingernails.

As they carried her down the stairs, crazy Manda howled, “Help me, people; they’ll shoot me, they’ll cut my throat!” But nothing could be seen except the covers of the peepholes moving; the neighbors were peering out and remembering what they saw. Dijana went a few steps behind them, in her house slippers, with a black lacquered purse over her shoulder and two hundred marks in her sweaty hand.

In the ambulance the bald one took out a syringe, and while Dijana and Tripun barely managed to hold the old woman down on the stretcher, he thrust the needle into her buttock right through her house robe: “Hey, granny, now you’ll relax!” Five minutes later Regina Delavale lay motionless, like a mummified body, with a faint smile on her calm, still face, in which Dijana then saw something of her mother for the last time. When she’s asleep, she’s just like she used to be, she thought, certain that she would rather spend the rest of her life by the side of that sleeping body and caring for it than for crazy Manda to awaken in it once more, even for only five minutes.

Just before they arrived at the hospital, the bald one gave her one more injection. “Look, I could lose my job because of what I’m doing right now,” he said. “At the reception desk you’ll say you found her unconscious from blood loss. Don’t you dare tell them what I did to her because I’ll find you no matter where you are and rip your tongue out, got it?”

Dijana nodded.

“You must be crazy. How can you believe her?!” Tripun said and sighed. “Now let’s see the money!”

Dijana held out two hundred marks for the bald one. He took only one of the notes. “Give the other one to him!” he said, pointing with his index finger as if forcing her. “Hey, I never thought I’d see the day when a woman pays me!” joked Tripun, extending his empty palm.

At the reception desk Dijana presented Regina’s health record booklet and told all the necessary lies to the young female doctor, probably an intern, a beauty with big brown eyes who was equally beautiful whether she was smiling or fretting.

“Don’t worry at all; everything will be all right,” the doctor said, caressing her upper arm with her palm. “I’ll look after her like my own grandmother!” Without warning Dijana’s eyes filled with tears. She wept bitterly on the full bosom of an unfamiliar young woman who saw her own grandmother in the unconscious crazy Manda and whom Dijana had deceived like no one in her life. She wept and couldn’t stop, for herself and that girl and what would happen when crazy Manda woke up and the girl realized what horror is and what a pretty, touching story can turn into.

“Forgive me, please,” she sobbed, and the young doctor had no idea why she should forgive her; nor had anyone prepared her for such cases. When she’d begun working, they’d surely given her a hundred pieces of advice about how to conduct herself with patients and their families, when to lie and when to tell the truth, but they hadn’t said what to do when you’re holding a woman in your arms who could be your mother, whose hot tears are the strangest thing you’ve ever felt on your skin. Perhaps most similar to the paraffin that had run down a candle long ago on a winter night in Koločep, and she had grabbed it with her bare palm.

As she returned home with a list of things that the young doctor had written out for her to bring for crazy Manda in the afternoon — pajamas, a house robe, soap, hairpins, and a toothbrush — Dijana knew that before she set foot in the apartment, the old woman would already be awake and the shameful scheme would unravel. The whole hospital would learn the truth, that Regina Delavale hadn’t fallen into a coma from blood loss but had been sedated with something so they could slip a crazy woman into the hands of the doctors. Nothing like this had ever happened before, at least she’d never heard of it, so the story would be all the more interesting and spread like wildfire until it reached the last fishwife. And then people would start spouting her name, and this would go on for years and till the end of time, outliving crazy Manda and Dijana and becoming a permanent addition to the family name, harder than the city walls and stronger than the power of a patron saint. In these parts it takes centuries for people to forget the lunatics in a family. Memories of half-witted children who died before their seventh birthday pass from generation to generation, just as generation after generation remembers whose brother raped a fourteen-year-old girl and threw her in a crevasse above Popovo Polje, or whose great-grandmother ran off with a Turk and dropped her drawers in the alleys of Izmir to put out for French traders and travelogue writers. People remember each and every bastard child born way back when this city was only a heap of rocks overlooking the sea. They’ve scribbled down news of events in far eastern ports, every case of gonorrhea, clap, and drip. There’s no family that’s been in the city for more than a generation without being accompanied by at least ten such shameful stories, against which you can defend yourself only by cultivating blights in the gardens and family trees of others and preserving the memory of their abominations and monstrosities. She knew she had to reconcile herself to that, but she wasn’t ready for reconciliation. She was gripped by terror at the thought of having to respond in the same manner to anyone who might reproach her or about whom she heard that they had passed on the story and relished it. The children weren’t home when she got there. They’d run out as they were wont to do, as they had been doing for months. And what would they do inside in rooms in which there was nothing to sit down on and in which you couldn’t pick anything up for fear of it being soiled with filth? She stood in the middle of what had been the living room, powerless to do anything at all. A broom and a scrubbing brush couldn’t clean what would have been too much for a municipal garbage truck and a pest control team: filth that you can clean only if it is someone else’s. It would have been best to lock and seal that terrible place, never return there, and keep everyone out forever. Crazy Manda had succeeded in destroying everything in the house that might be considered a souvenir and that people miss when their houses burn. This apartment no longer meant anything to Dijana; it was no longer hers, only a place where she spent the night.

She was resolved not to let them send crazy Manda back to her. She would fight like a lion, walk over corpses, risk herself and her whole family, but she wasn’t going to take her back, even if she had to flee the city with Mirna and Darijan and live as a subtenant and clean stairways in apartment buildings. She’d done that before and knew she could survive like that too, and the children were grown; they could fend for themselves. Anything was better than that lunatic coming back and everything starting all over again. But she had no hope of ever getting rid of her while she was alive. She found some old pajamas, grabbed Mirna’s old pink kimono, which she had gotten from that Swede two years before but never wore or wanted to see; she threw some trifles into a vanity case for the beach and stuffed everything into a nylon bag. She knew that crazy Manda wouldn’t need any of these things in the hospital, but that wasn’t important. Dijana was doing this for herself, to convince the doctors that she wasn’t a monster and cared for her mother.