The Walnut Mansion

by Miljenko Jergovic

  They got married just before New Year’s in 1979, whereupon Vid tried in every way to persuade her to have children. It was getting late for her, and she would soon be sorry if she didn’t take this last chance. But in fact he didn’t have his heart set on being a father. Rather, he needed something that would forever solidify their union and awaken true love in Dijana. As he would reflect on his fatherhood, he always imagined her looking at him. He saw Dijana watching him from the side as he taught his son how to walk; she was there as he changed his daughter’s diapers; she watched father and son on their first fishing trip from a rock, then how he taught the little boy to row a boat, the little girl to braid her hair, and when he took her to school by the hand . . . None of Vid’s images of fatherhood were without her, nor was there anything that he imagined about his unborn children that remained only between him and them. All he really thought about in 1979 and 1980 was his obsessive vision of a son and daughter, which he intended to use to buy Dijana’s love. He was unable to do this with subtlety, charming his wife and winning her over with small deceits, but hit her over the head with it, always with the same words and arguments, whereby he actually lost her good will and Dijana started avoiding him again, in a smaller space to be sure, just as she had been running away from him for the last twenty years. She gave a sigh of relief when he would go off on a trip and was gone for a long time.

  He dialed her number a dozen times but didn’t get a connection. Only when he began nervously hitting the telephone did the fat woman at the reception desk, who’d been there the whole time and stared at him while he was trying to make the call, hiss through her teeth:

  “The lines are down. Can’t you see that? They’ve been down all morning.”

  He went to the television lounge; retirees were watching Allow Us a Word. The winner of the Exemplary Soldier Karlo Papec pin said that he only had one wish—for the speedy recovery of Comrade Tito. The retirees nodded to that, and lieutenant Musadik Borović added that Karlo was a good comrade, “always ready to help those who don’t catch on quickly, and that’s why he received the most prized military award.”

  “You see?!” said an old man with thick glasses who was sitting closest to the television, almost touching the screen with his nose, whereupon an old man wearing a wool cap and a Salonika mustache remarked:

  “I can’t see anything with your head in the way!”

  Vid took a newspaper that was on a little table behind the television, sat down in an armchair in the corner, and opened the sports section. In Split there had been a championship match between the Hajduk and Red Star teams. He read the announced lineups, trying to calm his nerves, but it didn’t work. Soccer can prevent a nervous breakdown, but only if things haven’t gotten way out of hand. And this time they really had. It seemed to him that Petar Pardžik was rapidly losing his mind; the thing with the egg was completely new, something that hadn’t happened on their trips before.

  Vid was terrified that this would continue, that the old man would go completely crazy before the project was finished, and Comrade Fejzić would lay all the blame on him or force him to finish Pardžik’s work on his own, after which he would also take over the title of court photographer according to the dynastic laws. He would constantly be away from home, Dijana would find a lover if she hadn’t already, or the idiocy of old age would produce other problems that he couldn’t even suspect now, but of which there wouldn’t be fewer than those that were now on his mind. Then he read once more the names of the players for Hajduk and Red Star who would run out on the Poljud field, folded the newspaper, and started reading the headlines. Comrade Tito’s condition continued to be critical, the Ljubljana council reported. Vid Kraljev was probably one of the very few Yugoslavs who had bigger and more important problems than that.

  As Pardžik didn’t appear and Vid’s nervousness only increased, at lunchtime he decided to go look for him and suggest that he go ahead and take those twenty photographs of the spa himself, if the master was indisposed or had no inspiration, so they could leave before dark. He found him snoring in his room, probably exhausted from salting the egg. He roused him, ready for an argument even if it cost him his career as an artistic photographer. However, Pardžik jumped right out of bed.

  “You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” he repeated in answer to Vid’s complaints. “Here, I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” he said and started fumbling about in his room, completely forgetting about his rheumatism, gout, and age. After his afternoon nap his unease due to the fact that he had put the young man in a difficult position was now suddenly more important than any illness. Vid furiously grabbed the equipment and loaded himself up with a whole museum of antique technology because Pardžik had stubbornly refused to replace his thirty-and fifty-year-old cameras with new, technically up-to-date ones that were also easier to carry, maintaining that they weren’t any better but in fact worse and less reliable, serving only to enable any idiot to do photography.

  Vid hurried three paces ahead of him, and the old man hurried after him and tried to get into his good graces. “I’m really sorry. But you know what an old man’s brain is like. What you excrete from your bowels every morning, that’s what I’ve got in my head! Out in the country around Negotin they’re right when they take an old man out into the woods, lean a flatbread on his head, and—bam!—hit it with the butt of an axe. ‘I didn’t kill you, the bread did!’ Well, they should have done that to me a long time ago. Believe me. Oh, God, I feel so bad about having gotten this man into a situation like this. Just wait a bit; I’ll have everything finished in half an hour. You just put all the equipment on that rise over there, and I’ll do everything else. Go to the hotel, get some rest; I know you’re tired of me. Do you have any more money? If you don’t, I do. Just go have a cup of coffee and calm down. Oh, Petar, black Petar, what have you done, where’s your shame . . . ?”

  Vid stopped, dropped what he was carrying in his hands, and said, “Stop it already! What, do you think this is my life or something? Well, it’s not, and I’m not interested in what you’ve got to say. I couldn’t care less whether you feel bad, and I’d ask you to be quiet. You know, I’d just like to hear birds chirping or a bear, anything but you.”

  The eighty-five-year-old court photographer looked sadly at Vid, and his eyes filled with tears: “Whatever you say; just don’t be angry at me.”

  After this Petar Pardžik wouldn’t utter a word, up until four o’clock, when he snapped the last photograph. All the while Vid was sitting on a tree stump, ten or so meters from the old man, smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying without success to calm down. Nothing was going right for him, and in fact the pranks that the old man had been playing that morning were the least of the worries that had put him in that state. He was thinking about Dijana, her stubborn refusal to give him a child, and his own misery, which had begun the day he fell head over heels in love with that eighteen-year-old prep school student and decided never to stop loving her. He couldn’t have loved her all twenty of those years. It’s more likely that his irrational hardheadedness had kept him from listening to his own heart, unless it too was stubborn and stupid, creating feelings from all manner of things that had nothing to do with them. He’d sat for months on the toilet with the lid closed and poked holes in packages of condoms in the belief that his love would pass through the hole in the rubber membrane. And while doing this, he’d always felt just as wretched, but at least he thought that he was doing it for some high and noble reasons. And now he was just miserable and nothing else. That misery was the kind on account of which he might kill someone since he didn’t have the courage to kill himself. It was twenty to five when Pardžik and Kraljev got into the white Golf that the Bosnian Central Committee had put at their disposal until the project A Healthy Guest Is a Rested Guest was finished.

  “I’m sorry again,” said the old man.

  “It’s all right,” Vid answered; “you’re not to blame for all the stuff that’s been getting bottled
up in me.”

  As they drove out of the parking lot, a woman ran out of the spa with her head in her hands, and her face showed that she had been sobbing hysterically.

  “It seems we’ve got a fatality in therapy,” Vid commented.

  “It’s good we left in time,” the old man responded and then thought how he’d said something stupid again—because what could they have to do with someone who’d expired trying to use medicinal baths to treat something untreatable, a heart that had reached the end of the line and should have been cared for when that person had been young and healthy? He imagined an old man lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, whose gaze was locked onto the blue ceiling tiles while between his cyanotic, bluish-purple lips there was only bonaccia, that unnatural peace that sows panic among the living, on account of which they had invented God and the conviction that under the heavens there exists something more precious than a sigh passing between one’s lips. Soon that’ll be me, he thought and wanted to say it aloud, but then he changed his mind because he had already tortured the young man enough today.

  The road to Zenica was eerily empty. Apart from police cars and an occasional military truck there was almost no one out on the road, which was strange, especially at the end of a long weekend that had begun with May Day and lasted for four days. One would have expected for people to be returning from their vacations, for students to be on their way to Zenica and Sarajevo, because the next day they all had to go to work or classes. Darkness was falling, televisions were glowing through the windows of the houses along the road, the afterglow of the sun was sinking behind the mountains, and Petar Pardžik was drifting off to sleep. Vid would glance at him from the corner of his eye; the master photographer was sliding and pitching back and forth in the car as they drove down the curves on the road. He’s so old, he thought, but since there was no continuation of that thought and Petar’s age didn’t touch Vid the way anything living or precious did that was near its beginning or end, Vid moved on to something else, a topic that would occupy his thoughts more and more during the drive.

  When someone is driving at night, if he’s alone or the only one awake in the car, it’s important to find something to think about. Then the drive becomes a pleasure, and he sinks into melancholy and mild sorrow, which he later remembers as a time free from care. People who don’t like to drive or hate being alone in a car are actually not in a condition to let one thought travel through their mind freely, without interruption. Vid had started from the Hajduk– Red Star match, which was already long over, but he didn’t know who’d won. If the old man hadn’t been sleeping beside him, he would have switched on the radio, but he couldn’t do that now because Pardžik would have thought that he was paying him back and would have probably again given him that look of an abandoned salamander, which had made him feel sorry in spite of all of his anger at him. At that moment he knew that Pardžik would die, in a year or two or five, and that when he read the news in the morning paper, he would remember that look of his as they’d climbed up the hill and would feel guilty. He wanted to do something nice, to cheer up the old man, whenever the time came, of course.

  Instead of turning on the radio, he began to turn over in his mind all the matches that he could remember between Hajduk and Red Star over a long period of thirty or so years, during which there had been a dozen generations of soccer players. They came and went; talented players were born only to collapse in the face of their initial success; the greatest players wore the number 9 or 10 on their jerseys, Jurica Jerković for Hajduk and Jovan Aćimović for Red Star. Then there were farewell matches, bouquets of roses, crystal and silver cups, tears and chants. Džajić, who was good at moving up along the left wing and the greatest player that Vid had seen in his life. The Hajduk goalie Mešković, who suffered from night-blindness and played poorly in nighttime matches. The finale of the Tito Cup, with the president’s emissaries in the VIP seats, tears of joy, the oldest player kissing the cup, the speaker repeating his words ten times—the most precious trophy, the second-string players who went into the game from the bench in the last ten minutes of the game—Mijač, Matković, Dramičanin, Boško Kajganić . . .

  Athletic careers are like human lives, with births and deaths, only they don’t last as long as life, so that a whole century fits into thirty years, and one can think about it while he’s driving like this through the night, on the empty roads alongside the Bosna and Vrbas Rivers, past little Bosnian villages, none of which have more than twenty or so houses and a mosque at the base of a hill. When he drove, he always had the same feeling, no matter what he was thinking about: the people who lived behind those windows built their houses at a safe distance from one another, so that they could breathe the same air and be friends to one another, and not as on the coast, where houses are piled up on top of one another, anyone can peer into his neighbors’ bedroom, and there’s no place except the sea where you can escape others’ eyes. This was why the Dalmatians were seafarers and it wasn’t hard for them to leave their towns and cities for years, leaving for Australia and New Zealand and never returning. Whereas the Bosnians stayed where they were; they didn’t change for centuries and provoked mild disdain in the eyes of others, sometimes even open hatred, because they were stupid and backward people who never saw the world and going twenty kilometers from their homes was too far—that is, going far enough to where they couldn’t see the roofs of their houses. They didn’t care whether they were in another district or on the other end of the world; all they ever wanted was to return home. They were happy because they were far enough away from one another.

  Even in soccer stadiums they didn’t all cheer together but shouted out jeers to the opposing players individually, told jokes, mocked bowlegged forwards and a center half with a low forehead, but you always knew who said what, and for every word said a hundred years and a thousand matches ago, you knew whose it was and who’d said it first.

  If he’d lived there, he wouldn’t have photographed crabs but hundreds of old slippers and worn-out shoes arranged on concrete landings in front of Bosnian houses. One would think that there are as many Bosnians as Chinese, but this is only because old shoes are never thrown out but are left out in front of the front door so they’ll be easy to find when one goes out into the yard or to the store across the street.

  As his thoughts strayed from soccer players to Bosnians and the bluish lights in their windows, Vid Kraljev saw a policeman holding up an illuminated stop sign. He slowed down and pulled off onto the gravel shoulder of the road. Pardžik opened his eyes and didn’t know where he was. Vid rolled down the window, and the swarthy, mustached policeman bent down toward him, opened his mouth to say something, and then swallowed it.

  “What happened?” Vid asked.

  “Nothing, just please drive carefully,” the policeman said through his teeth as tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “Yes, of course, it’s dark,” he answered confusedly, and they drove on.

  “Everyone’s gone crazy today,” he said and looked at Pardžik, who gave a melancholy smile.

  “He thought we know, but you see, we don’t know a thing . . .”

  “What are you talking about . . . ?”

  “I’m not completely sure, my boy, but I think my last king and emperor has died.”

  Only then did it hit Vid, and something shot through his knees. All these months he hadn’t had time to think about what would happen if Tito died, but he must have sensed, the way one does the night before a sirocco, that everyone was thinking about it.

  “Oh, no, it can’t be!” he exclaimed with the sincerity of a housewife at market.

  “You think it’s impossible? Of course, I thought the same when they killed King Aleksandar. I photographed the arrival of his dead body at the Split quay. And you know what I captured in my photographs? Fear! Nothing else. Only fear. People were crying but were actually only afraid, just as this policeman is afraid. He wanted us to help him; that’s what he really wanted. You should
have gotten out of the car, hugged him, and said, ‘Hey, whiskers, everything’ll be okay!’ And then he’d tell you that he has a wife and three kids but that Tito means more to him than they do. And do you know what the strangest thing is? He really thinks that. He’d let his kids perish just so Tito would live. Only later would he realize that he hadn’t done it out of love but out of fear, and then he’d lose his mind. You see, that’s the way it is. And don’t say now, ‘Forget old Petar; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ because I really do know about this. It’s been verified many times. People are strange and become savages easily. Yes, my young colleague, Tito has died, my last king! I’m not afraid; I’m just sad. And that’s because he’s my last. It’s an accident that he’s died and not me. That’s about the size of it, and it’s up to you to find your way. You’re young and you’ll live to see more such nights.”

  Vid wanted to believe that what Pardžik said was just a continuation of the idiocy he’d displayed that morning, but it didn’t help. He turned on the radio. There was some somber music playing, filled with dark strings and the distant echoes of large theater drums. He changed the channel, but each was playing the same requiem. Only on one, through the crackling ebb and flow of electromagnetic waves that bounded across the mountains of Bosnia, did he hear a distant female voice babbling something in Italian.