Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

She went out of the house though it was too early to go back to the hospital. She wanted a few hours to pass, for them to get a little used to crazy Manda, for her to cuss them all out and bite them all over, maybe they would find a straightjacket somewhere, because if she arrived too early, it could happen that she might have some explaining to do or — God forbid — catch the old woman while she was still sleeping. For this reason she made her way to the hospital slowly, putting one foot in front of the other and taking detours. She calculated that like this it would take her at least forty-five minutes. She stopped at every display window, looked at the colorful summer dresses, went inside shops with pots and dishes (they no longer had any in the house), smiled at the salesgirls, and constantly had the impression that she was doing this for the last time because rumors about crazy Manda would soon spread and no one would look at Dijana any more the way they did now.

“Missus, look at these; they’re real royal dishes; Mrs. Simpson probably ate from them!” said a short shop assistant with a fat belly and the wrinkled face of a circus clown. She seemed as if she’d read every last romance novel ever published and had every story with a tremendously meaningful, sad ending living inside her. Here was someone who wouldn’t be interested in the lunacy of Regina Delavale, Dijana thought and felt close to the midget girl, on account of which she should have said something pretty and memorable to her:

“She swam in Trsteno once, completely naked, Edward and her. My uncle saw her with his own eyes. He was a child.”

The little midget girl was surprised and even thought for a moment that the woman was pulling her leg: “Do you mean Mrs. Simpson, who couldn’t be queen, and so then he didn’t want to be king either?”

Dijana laughed; she would have patted the midget girl on the head if only there hadn’t been anyone there to see it. Her little eyes widened so sweetly, surrounded by nets of deep, Indian wrinkles. “Yes, her,” Dijana said; “didn’t you know that one summer — it might have been in ’35, they came down here and bathed in the nude on the beach. .?”

“Naked?!” the midget girl exclaimed, folding her hands in astonishment.

“Yes, yes,” Dijana confirmed, as if speaking of relatives they both shared.

She left the shop happy to have made someone’s life better. The little salesgirl of kitchen porcelain now had something to preoccupy herself with for months. Maybe she would go to Trsteno, skip along the cliffs by the sea, and run her hands along the rocks, hoping that Wallis Simpson’s fingers had touched the same pebbles, the same fossil crab, as she bent down to kiss Edward, and one could see the red marks made by pine needles, shells, and sharp rocks on her white bottom. The less love you have in your life, Dijana thought, the more susceptible you are to such stories. As if everyone in the city except the midget girl with Mrs. Simpson’s dishes had spent three quarters of their lives in love and had become completely insensitive to everyone else in this part of town.

She managed to drag her trip to the hospital out for two hours. At the entrance she inhaled deeply, as if diving into the sea in pursuit of a terrible moray eel, and went firmly forward. If the midget girl could live with herself for a whole lifetime, she could deal with this little bit of life, she thought, encouraging herself, but she had only made five marching steps when the porter stopped her.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he shouted from his booth.

“I’m here to see Regina Delavale,” she said, leaving out “my mother,” in case word had already gotten around.

“I don’t care if you’re coming to see my old man; you’re not getting through!”

She looked at him in surprise. Maybe there was a flu epidemic, and they weren’t letting anyone in to see the patients; maybe something else was going on. .?

“What are you staring at?! You don’t get into a hospital just like that! Yes, a hospital! You don’t even get into a bar like that. First you say, ‘Good day, I’m so-and-so, here’s my identity card, I’m here to do such-and-such,’ and then I decide whether to let you in or not. Damnation, there’s got to be some order,” he said, and as he spoke, he leaned first in one direction and then in the other, as if he were addressing an unseen audience or giving a public lecture about the rights and obligations of someone who’s come before a porter.

“Isn’t it visiting hours?” she asked.

“It most certainly isn’t,” he answered, giving her to understand that this very question was an insult to his office.

“When are visiting hours?”

“You can get an answer to that at the information desk,” he said, making every effort to sound very official.

“Where’s the information desk?”

The porter pointed behind his back. “But you can’t get there unless I let you in!”

“Well, are you going to let me in?”

“We will if you are polite and ask nicely. .”

“Excuse me? What’s wrong with you?” she asked, looking at him scornfully. She had already stopped caring whether she would get in or not. If he didn’t let her in, it would be better in a way for everyone concerned. Both for Dijana, who would put off her encounter with crazy Manda until tomorrow, and for the doctors because by then the doctors would have already figured out what to do with the crazy old woman.

“C’mon then, get in there!” he said, waving with his hand like a policeman motioning a malfunctioning truck on by.

“How dare you talk to me like that?!” she said, furious.

“Beg pardon, whaddya mean?” he said, acting like he didn’t know what she was talking about.

“I didn’t herd sheep with you; you can’t talk to me like that, you vulgar jerk. .!”

“Excuse me, what was that. .?”

“What you heard, you filthy peasant; not only you but whoever let you down from the hills. .!”

“Listen, I might change my mind,” he retorted, trying to threaten her.

Instead of getting him to keep her out, she’d succeeded in intimidating the porter.

“But this is my job,” he said after she passed, as if apologizing.

She didn’t know where she might find crazy Manda. She went from ward to ward, down the hospital hallways that at times seemed like catacombs, so that she had to duck down to pass through the low entry into the radiology ward, where the walls were ironbound and resembled the inside of a submarine; at others they changed into labyrinths that went in circles, past glass walls behind which goggle-eyed old men were dying with tubes in their throats. She thought she’d stepped into another world or at least into another state, where the habits and rules were different than in the outside world, and that was just as hard for a living person to emerge from as it was for them to enter. A cold sweat covered her, her heart beat like crazy, and she was certain that the first cardiological patrol that came along would take her captive and stuff her into green pajamas with the hospital’s emblem on suspicion of her having had a major heart attack.

After a good twenty minutes of walking, she happened upon the emergency surgery ward and in it the same young doctor as yesterday. “How is she?” she asked about crazy Manda before the young lady managed to say anything.

“I don’t know what to tell you. .”

“Did she bleed to death?”

“No, but. .”

“Tell me what happened!” Dijana said. She was trying to appear as concerned as possible, interrupting the doctor and getting in close to her face, fearing the attack she expected from her.

“It looks like a stroke; she’s been transferred to neurology. .”