The waitress then pushed down on the suitcase with her big, fat hands, the locks clicked and everything was as it should be again. The waitress flashed her a big smile and said, “Everything will be all right.” Dijana wondered what in the hell she must look like if a woman she didn’t know was telling her that.
She ordered a glass of juice and waited for Gabriel to come get her. Although her bus had arrived forty minutes after schedule, he wasn’t there.
Meanwhile, Regina became frantic when she returned home. After reading Dijana’s note, she ran over to Bartol Čurlin’s house, who at that time, in 1969, was the only person in the neighborhood who owned a telephone because he worked for the municipality. He was a bachelor, good-natured and quiet, so people came to his house as if it were a public telephone booth.
“The slut’s run off! Call the police!” Regina yelled all the way from the yard. Bartol grabbed her by the hands and tried to calm her down so that she could explain what had happened, but Regina struggled against him as if possessed by the devil or as if he were trying to hurt her. “She’ll piss away all the milk she sucked from my tits!” Regina screamed, at which point Bartol simply gave up. “There’s the phone,” he said and stood by the door as if ready to run out of his own house at the first sign of danger.
Regina called the police, told them that her daughter had run away from home or had perhaps been kidnapped by someone, and when the voice on the other end of the line asked how old the child was, she said—seventeen! They told her to wait three days and call again because if her daughter didn’t appear within that time—and she most probably would—it was only then that a search warrant for her could be issued. On hearing this, her mother sobbed a little, swore a little, but in the end promised to call again in three days.
As Bartol listened to the conversation, he rolled his eyes and raised his eyebrows in disbelief. When Regina hung up, he only asked, “Since when is Dijana seventeen years old?!” Regina didn’t even look at him and instead ran out of the house, yelling, “How should the police know how old the slut is?!”
She spent the whole day searching the house for any clues Dijana might have left, rummaging through drawers and closets, furious because she knew with whom she was and where she’d gone. At first she thought her daughter was hiding somewhere in the city, in the house of one of her lovers, who in Regina’s imagination numbered into the hundreds.
Some she knew by name; others she remembered only because they would turn around and make catcalls when Dijana passed them on the street, while she responded with a lascivious shake of her tail and words that convinced her mother that she’d slept with all of them. In her head Regina kept a whole catalogue of bastards, losers, and blockheads; sailors with the clap; whoremongers, robbers, and taciturn Turks who had descended into the city from Gacko and Trebinje; sons of the houses of washed-up Dubrovnik gentry where syphilis was passed down from generation to generation; muddy workers whose members were thicker than the telephone cable they had been laying in a ditch in front of her house for more than six months, peeking under Dijana’s skirt the whole time; harbor pimps and bisexuals who forced themselves upon men and women in rusty train cars in switching yards; students with nervous disorders and young widowers; priests with translucent skin who pressed the locks of seven-year-old angels between their pink, sweaty fingers; Turkish truck drivers who would pay a hundred dinars to shove their circumcised members into the mouth of any woman who was willing; math teachers with reading glasses; aging mongoloids with cucumbers protruding from their rear ends; insatiable old men who, if there were such a thing as divine justice, would have been dead ages ago . . .
There was an entire male world in Regina’s head, picturesque as Godard’s Paris, in which every man’s ultimate goal was to spray his semen wherever he went, and, if possible, inside her child. She hated them with every bit of strength in her big heart. However, if someone told her she’d gone too far because it wasn’t normal to call one’s own daughter a slut or anyone who eyed her a maniac, she acted like her hatred was the highest and holiest form of motherly love. When it came to sex, she felt extremely protective, although her feelings toward the one she was protecting didn’t differ very much from her attitude toward Dijana’s real and imaginary men. The girl reminded her of the tragedy of her own life and therefore had to be punished. In her dreams, at least.
She dreamed of finding her in the parks and by the harbor cranes with males panting on top of her. Once in a while she recognized them in her dreams, but they were also often unknown, imaginary men, monsters with the faces and bodies of various animals, freaks with eight pairs of hands or feet, hairy werewolves, and giant lobsters pinching Dijana’s thighs and leaving behind marks that did not bleed but oozed something yellow and slimy.
Regina threw them off of her child with such fury that they would fly directly into the sea or even farther. They slammed against the rocks of distant islands or went straight up into the sky with a scream. And then, as in every one of her dreams, she would start beating Dijana. She would punch and kick her, but Dijana wouldn’t make a sound. The blows would glance off her body as if Regina were hitting an inflatable mattress. Completely exhausted from this, Regina became so desperate that she would break out in tears and wake up covered in sweat.
Regina soon realized that her daughter wasn’t hiding in the city because it wouldn’t make any sense; she must have run somewhere far away. But how far? To another city or to another country? Or had she boarded a ship with one of the sailors so that now no one could know on which corner of the earth she would set foot on land again? Regina ran into the living room, and, of course, Dijana’s passport was missing from the drawer under the television. In three days, the time needed by the police to start a search and launch an investigation, Dijana’s ship would have long sailed through the Strait of Otranto and disappeared amid pirates and sharks.
So Regina decided to call the police again. But Bartol wasn’t at home or didn’t want to open the door, and she ran straight to the station.
“My child has been kidnapped!” she yelled at the officer on duty.
“Your grandson or granddaughter?” asked the dark-skinned policeman with a low forehead and knitted eyebrows.
“What do you mean my grandson?—my own child! She plopped right out of me!” Regina answered, making a downward motion in front of her abdomen as if a child had actually plopped out of her without her noticing while she was strangling conger eels and mullets at the fishmonger’s and someone had run off with her.
“What’re you talking about, old woman; how old is the child?” the policeman frowned. “I’m not an old woman, you ass!” Regina said, bringing her face closer to his.
He stepped back and reached down to his hip as if to pull out his baton. “You’d better watch your language when speaking to an officer!”
At this Regina withdrew a little and then asked him, “Is this the way to treat a mother? What would your mother say if she heard you now?”
The policeman scratched his forehead with the nail of his pinky; that was obviously what he did when he didn’t know what to say. Perhaps the old woman actually did have a small child; you never know for sure with women; some look like they are thirty while in fact they are seventy; this one looked like she was over sixty but might have been only forty.
He took a notepad from a drawer, opened it in the middle, and spat on the tip of his pen: “Name, sex, and date of birth of the child, date and hour of her disappearance, persons suspected of participating in the criminal act,” he recited in one breath. So Regina sat down and began to tell every lie that she believed would sound good in a policeman’s ear. That she’d already received anonymous letters and warnings, that her daughter had been followed by suspicious-looking men who were clearly not locals, that she’d heard about a man who had arrived from Australia whose pops had been an Ustasha butcher in Popovo Polje and who might have come back to seek revenge. And could anyone think of a better act of revenge than kidnapping
children to be exchanged later for criminals who were rotting in prisons somewhere, maybe even for that Miljenko Hrkač, who’d planted a bomb at a cinema in Belgrade the year before and was currently on trial . . .
The officer on duty carefully wrote down everything Regina told him. “All right, miss, we’ll look into it!” he interrupted her at one point. Regina wanted to add a few other things, but the officer was already hurrying down the hallway and she couldn’t catch up.
She went home thinking that nothing would come of it because the people’s police force didn’t take care of simple folk like her, only of party members and their children. However, after less than an hour, two men wearing civilian clothes knocked on her door.
“Comrade Regina Delavale?” the older one asked after flashing his wallet with his police ID in front of her nose. “We have orders to take you into custody!” Regina tried to close the door, but the other one had already wedged his foot in the doorway and grabbed her by the collar. There was a clinking sound made by a button that fell on the tiles in the hallway.
“It’s better for you, old woman, not to resist!” the one in charge told her, but by then things had reached a boiling point inside her. She could feel bile rising in her mouth, except that she didn’t know what to tell them or what one could say to people who, instead of finding runaway children, arrest their mothers. So she simply spat into the face of the man holding her.
The next thing she felt was a flash of light in her eyes and head, as if the tip of her nose had been struck by lightning, and her hands were already in handcuffs.
As one could have expected, the entire neighborhood was assembled at the windows and under the awnings when Regina Delavale was led down the stairs in handcuffs and with a bloody nose and was put into a Fiat 1300 with police markings.
Before hearing her version of the story next day, Regina’s neighbors were firmly convinced that she’d crossed some political line. Either that or she’d cursed Josip Broz Tito or the Communist Party at the marketplace; maybe they’d found some papers in her house, or that Ustasha brother of hers was still alive and she’d been hiding him up in the attic while he was planning sabotage operations. They went to see old Tere Kalabrežova, the widow of an Austro-Hungarian colonel who was deaf and blind and would soon turn one hundred but who had the most complete and fairly reliable data on every family living in the city. Some fifteen of them, both women and men, gathered around Tere’s bed to find out about all the Ustashas of the Delavale and Sikirić families—the latter being Regina’s maiden name. But Tere couldn’t remember any living traitors to the country among all of Regina’s relatives. She had no living cousins or uncles, her brothers were dead except for the one who lived in Trieste, and he wasn’t suspected of anything. There were two or three suspicious members of the late Ivo Delavale’s family, all distant relatives, but none of them were said to have survived the war.
“It seems she’s losing it,” said Mile Milun, disappointed like the rest of them because they hadn’t learned the real reason why they’d come for Regina. The story about Ustashas and saboteurs had been a favorite for several years, and despite the fact that no one had seen a living Ustasha or any of those who harbored them, everyone awaited a possible encounter with nervous excitement.
Two inspectors questioned Regina in turns. While the first one comforted her, telling her he also had a caring mother like her, the other threatened her with eight years in prison, the exact number of years she had subtracted from her daughter’s age.
“Who talked you into it and why? Who did you talk to before you arrived at the police station? Who all knows that your daughter has left home?”
They repeated the same questions over and over again, and she answered one thing one time and another thing another time; she would tell a little of the truth before returning to her lies, which, at least in the eyes of the police, made no sense whatsoever.
They kept up the pressure on her in the same manner until the morning, when the station chief appeared and ordered them to let the old woman go: “Can’t you see she’s crazy?!” Regina went back home, broken and helpless. After she pulled herself together somewhat, she realized what her choice was. She could give up on herself and her life or find Dijana no matter what it took. She’d already shamed herself too much in front of everyone in the city to give up now.
Gabriel showed up three hours after her bus had arrived, when Dijana had already begun to lose hope, finishing her fourth glass of juice in the bar of the bus station in a city where she didn’t know a single address or telephone number except his. She tried calling from a phone booth a few times, but he didn’t answer.
“Oh, my dear, that’s men for you!” the waitress said with pity, while the four drunks with the purplish faces giggled at the end of the bar. Dijana’s shoes had soaked through as soon as she stepped onto the platform. At first her feet were cold, but then her toes started to itch unbearably. When she rubbed them against each other, the itching turned to pain, and then the pain itself would start to itch. She’d never felt this before; had she maybe picked up an infection, a fungus, some hideous skin disease? She tried to imagine what her toes looked like, what color they were, and whether the skin on them was peeling off. Then she couldn’t take it any more and took off her shoes and stockings; her toes seemed normal, just a little bluish, with black dirt around the nails, equally itchy and tender.
And just when she was scratching them and smelling the palms of her hands—carefully, so the waitress and the drunks wouldn’t notice—Gabriel came in. A young man and woman were behind him, grinning broadly. She quickly pulled on her wet stockings and shoes and jumped up into his arms.
“Hey, Dijana, what’s up, girl?” he asked, as if he weren’t late at all. There had in fact been a misunderstanding: he’d thought that she was arriving on the bus from Budva, which always arrived two hours later and was just now pulling into the station. They started to panic when Dijana didn’t come out of the bus, but here she was, waiting for them in the station’s bar!
“This is my friend Musa and his girlfriend Goga,” he said. Musa seemed to be much younger than Gabriel. He had long, blond hair and a nice-looking bare face that had never been touched by a razor. He looked like a high school student from those prewar wanted posters for communists. She was an unattractive, plump girl who was obviously trying to look like Janis Joplin. And she was fairly successful at it, no joke. In striped bell-bottom jeans that dragged in the snow and made it impossible to tell whether she had any shoes on, Goga was a marvel for Sarajevo. They hadn’t gone a hundred meters from the station when people started harassing her. A taxi driver shouted, “Take a bath, girl!” from a gray Opel Rekord, probably unhappy that they didn’t want him to drive them into the city.
“Man, look at her!” said one Gypsy to another.
“Get a load of this; the American pussy is finally here!” said a balding man with a mustache, absently but still fairly loudly, from the entrance to the Tripoli Grill.
But since the three of them didn’t show at all that they’d heard any of this, Dijana realized that it was a common occurrence and that these catcalls differed from those in Mediterranean cities only in the degree of candor and kind of insult. At first she thought she wouldn’t have a problem with this manner of communication.
The trolley took them to the old central market district, and then, dragging all of Dijana’s luggage behind them, they began an uphill ascent along steep lanes and alleys that went on for more than half an hour. Every few meters she would slip and fall. Bags flew in all directions, and Gabriel would lift her up with a smile. Sweat was streaming down her face, and Dijana couldn’t figure out how the three of them could be so cheerful and laid back. It was as if something else were happening to them, as if they enjoyed climbing uphill like this. She hadn’t spoken ten sentences since she’d arrived in the city, but she already realized that nothing she might say would express a feeling that she could share with them. She was wet, dirty, and exhausted when s
he entered Gabriel’s house. The first thing she did was take off her shoes.
“Come here for a minute,” he said, calling her over to the window. “Take a look; this is why I climb up here every day!” Somewhere far below—farther than Dubrovnik looks from atop the Srđ fortress—there was a city, buried in snow and smog. Lights blinked in the windows of buildings and high-rises; on top of one of them was the blue neon sign of a Slovenian TV station. Lombardy poplars rose up, their top halves white with snow, their bottom halves still green; on all sides the horizon seemed to be at the same level as the window where she was standing.
“It’s really pretty,” she lied, realizing at the same time that this might be the most beautiful and important view in the world for someone if they’d seen it every day since birth and then suddenly lost it.
“A little brandy to warm us up,” said Musa, bringing a bottle from the kitchen. A fire was burning hot and bright in a coal stove in the corner. It produced the same odor that permeated the entire city. So this was the price that Sarajevans had to pay to fight off the cold and warm their homes. Dijana was sitting on a divan; she’d folded her legs beneath her, the way she had seen it done. She thought the brandy smelled like medicinal alcohol; her head was getting foggy, and she could feel herself sinking. She leaned on Gabriel’s shoulder and then sank onto his lap.
She fell asleep. She didn’t hear anything else, except the occasional sounds of a quiet and distant conversation in which familiar words were pronounced in a strange way, creating the impression that they were spoken by people who never stopped joking. Vowels were rare in that conversation, remaining mostly in the throat of the speaker. However, the vowels that could be heard were long and drawn out, almost endless. They were an expression of intimacy but might seem to be mockery to anyone outside the closed circle.
The Walnut Mansion Page 14