Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

Mina liked her company, Regina’s daily lament, her litany of complaints and bellyaching filled with men’s names, spoken in such a way that one would think they weren’t real people but saints in whom no one believed any more. Though that was no reason not to blame them for all the sudden strong storms and squalls, for open shutters smashed against stone walls, for bedsheets torn furiously from clotheslines in a sudden northerly wind, when the only question was whether it would blow them out to sea or turn them into sails that would carry off that damned city and leave it lying in the wreckage of sunken sailboats.

Mina’s head teemed with such thoughts. They were ornate, numbered, and each had a hundred little images. If anyone who wasn’t Mina somehow (God forbid) entered her head, he would have gone crazy right away from all those little images. But for her they were ordinary, day-to-day occurrences.

Bedsheets and dragons; giant octopi once seen at the fish market, which Czech photographers took pictures of but the city forgot the very next day; an anthill in the unused chimney of a nobleman’s villa that had been turned into a museum; pots with marigolds on a window in Begovina and men in fezzes passing underneath the window; the roar of the River Buna and the summer drone coming from the dervish tekke; Mt. Velež in the sunlight on a calm summer day, when a storm has descended on its peak, striking it with thunder and lightning; Allah’s quarries; sardines that opened and closed their eyes as they waited for a quick knife to take the scales off their backs and the salt in which their last fishy thoughts reposed; the agonies of salted fish backs, their sinful souls; Christian saints caught in fishing nets; a crucifix made from a pine branch; pillows being aired in springtime in a window of someone who had died the day before; the sea as black as pitch and the smell of lavender in the pockets of men’s coats; a captain’s hat high on a dresser in a house where there were a lot of children; May Day bonfires; gendarmes with their swords drawn and Avram, a.k.a. Lenin, who flashed his penis at them in provocation; a condom in the palm of a Dutch sailor and his fingers, which smelled of rubber long after— which frightened her and she ran away; grains of sand under her toenails; motorboats that took foreigners to Lokrum; rowboats that took aging hunting dogs to an islet where there was no food or water; a thimble forgotten in a yard, half full of the first autumn rain; three rotten carob pods in the corner of a cellar— one winter at the turn of the century; little Gypsies with measles running after city kids to infect them; pustules full of lymph; festering sores on the flanks of an emaciated Bosnian horse loaded with baskets of Travnik cheese; an open umbrella, fallen into the sea and carried out into the offing. These were some of the images that passed through Mina’s mind at any moment. Whereas others thought in the words of the language they had learned first, she thought in images and was special in that regard. Women considered Mina to be foolish, but they didn’t dare say out loud that she was crazy. They said nothing about the images in her head in front of the men; it was better if they didn’t know about her and didn’t badmouth her. One simply couldn’t get by without Mina. Mina was the only one in town who darned stockings and pleated skirts— and the fashion of pleated skirts was at least ten years old, and who knew how long it was still going to be around? Maybe it would never pass: fashion had been invented by rich people with nothing better to do who couldn’t have cared less if it took a long time to iron pleated clothing— it was easier to iron five men’s shirts than one pleated skirt! But whoever thought highly of themselves and had a reason to go out in public would surrender to the dictates of Paris and praise God for having created Mina. Besides, she did that work well. True, they couldn’t compare her with anyone else because she was the only one who did it, but that said something in itself. If darning stockings were a simple task, women would darn them themselves. If anyone could pleat a skirt, there would certainly have been as many shops for pleating as there were barbershops and beauty salons, and the world wouldn’t have depended on that one of Mina’s.

“Oh, dearie, I know how it is,” Mina would say, closing up her shop as she did every afternoon and then going to the post office to get the fashion journals or little packages with special string that also arrived from Munich. Then she would continue on to the city aquarium, where deep-sea fish languished in watery dungeons. She’d felt a tenderness ever since she’d seen them for the first time some fifty years before. Since then she came to visit the fish every day, except for Sundays, when the aquarium was closed. She talked to them, listened to their grief, comforted them, and brought a little light and freedom into their meager lives. If she believed in anything, Mina believed that God had granted that she be the confessor of fish. She heard the confessions of their unhappiness but not their sins because fish never sin.

Regina accompanied her as far as the steps that went down toward the city.

“I know how it is,” said Mina for the third time that afternoon.

Regina went home to see whether Luka had come back from school. The same ritual repeated itself every workday, but today it would be fateful for the two women. As Mina waited in the post office for Vito the postal clerk to find her packages in gray burlap bags, a stranger wearing an expensive gray suit and carrying two leather suitcases in his hands appeared in the entryway. He held the door open with his shoulder, trying to push his way inside but kept getting caught on something on one side or the other. He would have probably managed by setting down the two suitcases and opening the heavy iron door all the way and going in, if everyone’s eyes hadn’t been glued to him.

For Mina, Vito, and two idle city ladies, Rudolph Valentino had just appeared! Five years before women had cried for him, and men had acted like they didn’t care or that a weight had fallen from their shoulders because he, the handsomest man in the world, ignited flames of outright jealousy in them from a distance of a few thousand kilometers. For the city’s parish priest, also a man, his full name, Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, amounted to unambiguous proof that he was the devil. Could a Christian soul really bear such a name? In his Sunday sermon, after the city had mourned Valentino for seven full days, he warned husbands to keep their eyes on their wives, sisters, and daughters because Satan had sowed his seeds in their hearts. From every tear they shed for the American imposter, the shoots of the devil sprouted. And just as shoots eat up the tubers from which they grow so that nothing is left of a potato, nothing would be left of their wicked female hearts. That was how it was and no other way, so the men should watch out! Thereupon the female side of the church got up from the pews out of protest, and all of them, except for a few old women, walked out. It was told that on that Sunday a horrible curse had rung out in the cathedral. It had been spoken by a voice that didn’t belong to any of those present.

For the believers that was unambiguous proof that the reverend father was right and that Rudolph Valentino was Satan. But Satan never died; rather, he changed the place and time of his appearance. He comes in various guises, usually contrary to his real nature. Goodness and innocence, like great physical beauty, are always a signal of danger for the faithful, so any foreigner is better off if he comes across to them as nefarious and ugly.

Seeing the stranger trying to make his way into the post office with the suitcases and recognizing in him the actor from a time when people watched films with their eyes only, whom they had mourned but never gotten over, all four of those present, even Vito the postal clerk, immediately thought it was Satan coming to their city instead of returning to America. It was hard to know who was glad about that if it were true, and whether Vito felt any of those female reasons for joy within himself, but it was a fact that they all watched him alike and that they all shared the same surprise, from one pair of eyes to the next. Mina collected herself the quickest, ran to the door, and opened it wide. The stranger thanked her with a nod and smiled. He walked up to the counter (the two unemployed women stepped a couple of meters back from him, each in a different direction), stopped in front of Vito, sighed deeply, and the postal clerk watched him and waited to see which language the foreigner would speak.