The Colonel sent a courier from Nikšić for the down payment, and all Regina had to do was wait, worry, and seek new reasons why her daughter had run away from home. But every one of them nevertheless got back to the sick Delavale lineage, which should have been eradicated long ago, in any case before she’d taken up with Ivo, thus sparing the world from an incurable human defect that only increased with each generation. She tried in vain to salvage what Dijana had inherited from her and taken from the Sikirić family, but there was no chance of that happening. She took after her father in every way because filth is always stronger than men, evil stronger than good, upside-down stronger than right-side-up, and the world will collapse the day when every good lineage is wiped out by some Delavales and there’s no longer a single mother who hasn’t given birth to a wicked child.
The Colonel was counting the money and getting ready for the search when Gabriel succeeded in persuading Dijana to go with him to the theater. He didn’t want to leave her alone at home because she was afraid of anything and everything and said that there was maybe a decomposing corpse underneath a pile of his uncle’s books, which blocked the way into one of the rooms, since there was such a stench; she took the crucifix down from the wall, demanded that the light be on in the hallway all night long, and looked into rooms into which he’d never entered. And she didn’t know what to do in the city and acted more like a rude foreigner than all the Krauts and Austrians whom he’d shown around. Today he would have left her in the care of Musa and Goga, but they’d tricked him and gone off to a birthday party on Mt. Jahorina. That was better than showing a little Dalmatian girl around Sarajevo when they had no idea what to show her.
He left Dijana to wait for him in the theater café while he finished arranging the props, and at half past seven he was going to take her into the performance. She drank an orange soda called Oro, which was bottled in the Tališ plant in Maribor, which was the domestic competition for Coca-Cola, that dark American miracle that had been spreading throughout Yugoslavia (the first communist country to drink Coca-Cola) since the previous year. That fact filled people with pride, and so anyone who thought much of himself didn’t drink Oro or Cocta. Dijana, however, didn’t care. She sat alone at a table, and in the corner of the café a group of people, probably students from down south, were singing I’m Going Away, My Fay . . . in parts.
Gabriel carried risers from one end of the stage to another and panted as if he were about to give up the ghost, until Meho Pezer lost his cool and started shouting at him: “Listen, you horse’s ass, if you keep breathing like that, I’m going home, and you can fucking go explain everything to the manager and the director! I’m supposed to be on sick leave and instead of saying thanks for coming, you keep making an ass of yourself. What do you want? To act? Is that maybe what you’d like? That’s okay, pal, you just act and let me live my life.”
Gabriel put down his end of the riser. “Wait, let me explain!” he said trying to get him to calm down.
“Well out with it; whaddya got to tell me?!” Meho said and slammed his end of the riser down so that the sound echoed through the theater.
“It looks like I’m married. I didn’t want it, but it looks like that’s what’s happened,” he answered.
“What was that?” Meho Pezer asked in surprise. He’d been married for fifty some-odd years, and two of his nine children were already retired. But he wasn’t yet seventy.
“That’s what’s happened. This girl moved in with me.”
“What girl?”
“A girl from the coast.”
“I didn’t know about her. But why did you let her move in?”
“Well, you see, that’s the problem. I didn’t let her; I invited her.”
“Great, and what do you want now? You invited her, she came; nothing better! Now you can have kids.”
“It’s not quite like that.”
“Well, how is it, for God’s sake?”
“I didn’t really think she’d move in.”
“Oh, I didn’t think my Fazila would get married to a Pezer when I asked her, but you see—she did, and now I put up with it!” Meho said and laughed. He was already in a better mood, although he acted like he didn’t understand anything.
“Meho, I can’t get married,” Gabriel said, his voice quivering.
“Why not? You like men? If that’s the reason, get away from me. And now lift that thing; Hamlet won’t have anywhere to fuck with Ophelia.”
Gabriel’s confession ended here, but the next day half the theater would know about his unhappy romance. Meho, of course, knew very well what was going on, understood everything, and told whoever needed to hear it, pitying the unhappy young man. This only secured Gabriel respect among the acting community, which took open pleasure in its tragic love stories, failing marriages, fictitious nervous breakdowns, and other emotional occasions for the consumption of large quantities of alcohol.
It was the fact that as a stagehand and assistant decorator Gabriel had acquired something that was considered to be the mark of a high caste that led Viktor Barilla, the director of Hamlet, to give him a minor role as the second herald after the old Jozef Černi ended up in the hospital due to a stroke. Thus Gabriel became one of the actors, which from his point of view was the only good thing in connection with his nine-month common-law marriage to Dijana Delavale.
They went to the seventh row of the orchestra and sat down in seats ten and eleven, which were permanently reserved for members of the party or state delegations from non-aligned countries that arrived in the city on a daily basis to conclude trade agreements for arms and petroleum, in case one of them wished to see a stage performance outside of protocol. Since this had never happened, the two best seats in the seventh row were always given to stagehands, but they didn’t use them either, unless one of the younger ones had found a girl who was open to being charmed with courtship in a theater.
Hamlet was mind-numbingly boring. It dragged on and on in complete harmony with the fact that it was directed by a man who’d done the same job in the same theater twenty-five years before when he was young, brave, and full of potential, under the Ustashas and the German occupation. And this performance in 1969 was supposed to be a kind of quiet rehabilitation for him, after his having been forbidden to work in Sarajevo for a quarter of a century.
As with every other rehabilitation in those years, this too presupposed an act of repentance, humility, and complete discretion, to which Barilla kept so successfully that this performance was completely unwatchable for anyone, which again wasn’t a reason for him not to win the praise of newspaper critics or to be invited to participate in several Yugoslav and foreign festivals. No one, apart from the secret police and the comrades in the Committee for Work with Ideas in the Central Committee, remembered Barilla’s wartime productions and his errant youth before packed auditoriums whose applause at the premieres was orchestrated by Mile Budak, the minister of religion of the Independent State of Croatia. Nor was there an actor in the 1969 staging of Hamlet who knew why the maestro was so indisposed, why he didn’t say a word at the rehearsals, and gave only one instruction to the actors: “Tone it down a little; you’re not at a demonstration!”
The problem that came between a theater director and the government was solved at the expense of the audience, who understood nothing, least of all why it was suddenly supposed to be bored to tears at a performance directed by someone who’d received acclaim in Zagreb and Belgrade and who bore the honorary title of the “Nestor” of Yugoslav theater. The audiences didn’t know—not because they didn’t want to but because they weren’t told—that the great Viktor Barilla was in Sarajevo to remedy something that couldn’t be remedied, his own past and the past of that city. But worst of all was that he wasn’t the only one involved in this project.
People came to Sarajevo from Zagreb and Belgrade mainly to atone for their sins. While a few were punished for a lack of talent and—after being rejected in the theaters of the eastern and wester
n metropolises—went to Bosnia, others, such as Barilla—as the greatest names of Yugoslav arts—went to Sarajevo to atone for sins that had been bequeathed to them by Ante Pavelić, Milan Nedić, or Stalin. Few of those who atoned for such sins with an awareness of their own creative dignity and name would be remembered. In Sarajevo they usually directed and acted blindly, as if before a morgue or a commemorative grave full of the frightening skulls of murdered victims. And the audience was left equally confused and more and more convinced that it was the city itself that oozed boredom and not the motives of those who came there.
But that’s no reason to be too hard on Viktor Barilla! In contrast to others, he didn’t go to Sarajevo because of some humiliation in Zagreb or Belgrade. He’d been celebrated in those cities, and avant-garde theatrical styles had been named after him. He taught in theater departments and was the aspiration of the finest intellectuals, and people from party committees bowed down to the black earth before him. However, in his twilight years he decided to try to resolve his misunderstanding with a city to which he didn’t need to go because apart from two stints of directing during the Independent State of Croatia, nothing tied him to Sarajevo. He wanted to die reconciled with that city, which is perhaps worthy of some respect. No matter how futile his effort was . . .
They both dozed on and off for three and a half hours, touching each other in rhythm to the king’s long monologues.
“Hey, look, that’s the head of Piro Trola,” he said and poked Dijana with his elbow during Hamlet’s chat with the skull.
“Whose head?” she asked, not understanding what he was trying to show her.
“Piro Trola, the city fool. He didn’t have any family, and when he died, they didn’t bury him but cut him up for use by the School of Medicine. The theater loaned the head. I suggested that we put Piro Trola on the poster, among the names of the cast, but they didn’t listen to me. I don’t know why; his head has been on the stage longer than those of the people whose names are on the posters.”
For the rest of the scene Dijana stared at that skull, which looked like every other skull but was more terrible than any better-looking, anonymous, decomposing corpse because it had a first and last name. Her stomach turned at the thought that it had been a living person, that Gabriel had known him and was now happy to see him up on the stage, and it didn’t occur to him that he had a similar such skull, which someone might skin tomorrow and declare to be for the stage props.
“You’re really weird,” she said and left to go pee. In the darkness she tripped over the feet of high school students who’d been brought to the performance.
That evening they had their first fight. Actually, Dijana had never before quarreled so seriously and bitterly with anyone other than her mother. She told him she couldn’t believe that such Neanderthals existed.
“What would you do if you knew they were going to carry your head into the theater?”
“I wouldn’t give a shit. That’s what I’d do . . .”
“Can you say a single sentence without a shit or a fuck?”
“Can you shut up, or do you want me to slap your face so you can hear some music?”
“Gabriel!”
“Yes, dear?! Please, please dear!” he shouted, stepping into her face and swinging his huge hands.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she continued in a softer tone. “You’re mistaken if you think I’m afraid of you. Only cowards shout like that. You’re a coward. You shit your pants because I came. Ain’t that true, Gabriel?—You shit your pants? But why did you invite me? Because it sounded nice, huh?! You hoped you could play a knight in shining armor, but mostly, you know, from afar. You’re such a shit. Let me tell you, you’re such a shit.”
She was trying to provoke him, just as she would do if she knew it were the end. She wanted to do everything to make sure she would never again hear some guy telling her he didn’t deserve her. But instead of completely blowing his top, Gabriel stopped, muttered something, and burst into tears like an actor in a bad Indian film a little before the girls’ choir starts singing an ode to the Brahmaputra. And no matter how furious she was and ready to run out of the house without a dinar in her pocket or anywhere to go, Dijana didn’t know what to do. She stood in the middle of the room, her fists clenched and her feet apart, and panted like a bull when the toreador runs out of the arena.
Such fights would be repeated at least once a week, with slight variations in the insults and the particular bone of contention, and they were always about something that had to do with both Gabriel and the city to which she’d come. It seemed to Dijana that everything bad and ugly that she’d experienced in Sarajevo lived in his person, as if he were infected with all the illnesses one could catch out on the street. She raged because he’d deceived her and won her over with pretty words and a charm that lasted until she settled into his world and then disappeared like the glittering on lake water on a sunny morning. She attacked him and tried to chase Sarajevo out of Gabriel since she still wasn’t ready to chase herself out of Sarajevo.
In the end he would burst into tears or run out of the house, leaving her on her own all night long to wander among the rooms full of heaped furniture and rolled carpets, piles of German books, and prewar newspapers, nothing but posthumous remains that, like Piro Trola’s skull, were crassly put on public display.
She didn’t learn very much about the life of that house or Gabriel’s Uncle Bruno Ekert and Aunt Fanika because that was one of the few things—actually the only one—about which Gabriel didn’t talk at length. Instead, he would slip out of that topic and hurry into tales that were often more painful and terrible than that of his uncle could have been, at least in Dijana’s opinion.
Basically, she knew that in 1945 Bruno Ekert had been sentenced to death for collaborating with the occupier—what kind of collaboration he wouldn’t tell her. Then his sentence was commuted to twenty years of hard labor and the confiscation of his entire property, which, due to an administrative error, was never carried out but also not retracted, so that this was and wasn’t Gabriel’s house. His Aunt Fanika committed suicide five years later by drinking essence, so from 1951 until six years earlier, when Gabriel had moved in, no one had lived in the house, nor had anyone entered it. Bruno Ekert hung himself in the Zenica prison on the twenty-eighth of May, 1966, two days before his sentence ended and he was to be released.
That was all that she managed to get out of Gabriel. He shut up and blushed when it came to the other part of the story, as if he were awkwardly hiding some incurable family disease. Leaving her in the middle of the night alone in the dead house of two suicides, Gabriel punished Dijana in the worst way.
If they weren’t at home arguing and fighting or at Goga’s and Musa’s parties, which lasted all night long, complete with the music of Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan and Afghan hashish, Gabriel and Dijana spent their time in the national theater. In four and a half months they saw all the plays, operas, and ballets several times. They even saw Branislav Nušić’s A Suspicious Person seven times. The only thing they avoided was Barilla’s Hamlet, which, however, was performed twice weekly, though the audience grew smaller and smaller after all the elementary and high school kids had come, as well as those on school excursions from Tuzla and Zenica, who on an instruction from the republican secretary of science, education, and culture were required to see precisely this performance. When Gabriel began to play the second herald instead of the ill Černi, Dijana would wait for him in the Theater Café.
The trips to the theater were for both him and her the best way to kill time in the evening. She didn’t have to go hopping from one Sarajevo café to another and listen to everyone who noticed that she wasn’t a local tell her that there was nowhere in the world where one could have a better time than in Sarajevo because nowhere were there people like those in Sarajevo, and he didn’t have to sit in fear of her looks and comments that tore his city apart.
Apart from this, as soon as he went out somewhere with her
, all kinds of crap would happen that he’d never experienced before. Either out of the clear blue sky people would knife each other before Dijana’s eyes, or the waiter in the Morića Inn would trip in a doorway and spill a bowl of hot stew on Dijana’s head, or it would happen, as in a legend that everyone had heard but no one had ever seen in real life, that in the middle of the market square some bumpkin with a shaved head would come up to them and force Gabriel to buy a brick for five hundred dinars. With each new day reality would bear out Dijana’s newly acquired biases, and there was no help but to take refuge in the theater.
If Sarajevo were the city that she saw and experienced every day, no one would have lived there, Gabriel thought, reconciled to the fact that there was no place in the world that he could share with Dijana that would be the same for both of them.
And then there was that tragic Friday and the premiere of Nikola šubić Zrinski. It was never clear whose idea it was or why the national opera of the Croats, in which the protagonist dies fighting the Turks, would be performed in Sarajevo, that bastion of “brotherhood and unity” and communist orthodoxy, but rumor had it that this was done on a directive from the supreme leadership of the party, as part of a broader effort to win over the Croats in western Herzegovina, an area that had lived under a kind of martial law for twenty some-odd years, under a stigma because of its mass collaboration with the Ustashas in the Second World War. Children can’t be guilty for what their fathers and grandfathers did—this was the new party slogan. But people also pointed out that then that opera should be performed in Lištica or Ljubuški, because what did Sarajevo have to do with the Ustashas and why would those injustices be corrected by the story of a Croatian lord who fought the Turks?
The Walnut Mansion Page 17