She got up and bent over her mother’s face. Kata’s skin was white as the stone on Stradun and grayish-blue like the sea before a storm. She bent closer and closer to her, with her hands behind her back, bending like a branch on which children have been hanging, until she nearly brushed her nose with the tip of her own. There she stopped. Her face broke into a phony smile; she grimaced, furrowed her brow, and stuck out her tongue, taking care not to touch Kata’s lips. When her spine could no longer take the weight, Regina straightened up, got to thinking for a moment, then strained and released a long, staccato fart. “There,” she whispered, and sniffed the air for a few seconds, but she could still only smell starch, wormwood, and the distant traces of rose oil. She was disappointed. She turned and went out of the room. She never saw her mother again.
III
The last thing that Rafo Sikirić saw were two swollen breasts, each one bouncing in a different direction. When the left one was up, the right one was down; when one went to the right as if it were going to tear away, the other went in its own direction, and then they went back and collided, and the sweaty skin smacked. He had to strain to make out that sound among the screams and sighs, words spoken out loud, the popping of the boards of the bed, the creaking of rusty springs, a buzzing in his ears . . . That went on for years, him trying to hear the slapping of her breasts clearly, to register the moment when they both flew in the same direction, to recognize the sign that things were finally starting to work according to some logic. And then all of a sudden his eyes went dark, the tension vanished, every muscle slackened, and he felt like he was turning into a pancake.
His wife would bounce about on the pancake that was spreading out between her knees. Soon she would stop and with a deep sigh plop down onto the other side of the bed. A few seconds later she began to breathe normally, and Rafo knew that she had dropped off.
He rubbed his eyes for a long time until his sight came back. He slowly got off the bed, taking care not to wake her up, unlocked the door, and went barefoot out of the room. Regina was sleeping in the same bed as Luka. The boy had snuggled up to her as a baby chimp does to its mother. Bepo was snoring; Đuzepe was twitching in his sleep; Đovani was sleeping on the floor by the stove. There was always one child too many, and someone had to sleep on the floor. This was one more element of Rafo’s unease, proof that harmony wasn’t possible, and everything he set his eyes on confirmed that it was true.
There was one too much or one too little of everything. Nothing was just right. Everything was an odd number, and nothing allowed itself to be divided into two equal parts. And if there was an even number of something, then it couldn’t be divided three ways . . . He closed his eyes at lunch so he wouldn’t have to count the grains of rice on his plate. He only looked up at the sky on cloudy nights.
He closed the doors behind him: first one, then another, and then a third— those that led outside. He slipped on his old shoes and started down the steps in his underwear and a shirt. It was three in the morning, mid-February, a cold year. If he met someone, that would be one more sign; then he would go back home, slip back into bed beside Kata, and take care not to touch her with his icy feet. That might wake her up and remind her what she hadn’t finished that night. If he’d been filling a barrel with his male seed instead of releasing it into her, the barrel would have to be full after all those years. Where did it go in her? How was it emptied? And she’d conceived only six times. That could have happened to her three times as often. One child had died, so the number would be odd. He didn’t meet anyone as far as the bottom of the steps. That was a good sign. He wouldn’t go back.
It took two hours for him to reach Miladin’s Cliffs on foot. If he’d put on his good shoes, it wouldn’t have taken as long. But half an hour more or less didn’t matter anyway. If he’d put those shoes on, he would probably have changed his mind and waited for the morning, the trip to the square, the sound of sections of railway track clanging, the maddening sensation when fingernails scratch rusted metal, and then the return home, to the boxes of nails and an attempt to calm down for once. So that’s what would have happened if he’d put on his new shoes. Not only that, but he would have also had to put on pants and a clean white shirt and would have woken up half the house. She would have asked him where he had been going at that time, and what could he have said?— “To Miladin’s Cliffs!”
“And what are you going to do on Miladin’s Cliffs?”
“I’m going to jump from up there, that’s what. I’m not going to throw out a long line!”
“You’re going to jump?— I should have known right away!”
That’s how the story would have ended, Rafo thought, if he’d gone in his new shoes. He would have arrived half an hour earlier and wouldn’t be freezing like this. He was shaking like an aspen leaf. His teeth were chattering, his jaw wouldn’t keep still; he couldn’t even stop it with his hands. It was stronger than his arms, which could lift sections of railway track. He tried to press it shut with his hands and break it with his fists to no avail. It would still be convulsing after he jumped down. And down below there were reefs as sharp as the spears of aborigines; they would pierce his bowels and come out through his back. That’s how they would find him, with his teeth still chattering.
That idea terrified him. The dead don’t move after they die, but his teeth would chatter, bite the crumbled cliffs, create a sensation worse than the touch of a fingernail to steel. Was that possible? In his case it was. If Kata’s tits never went the same direction at the same time, if one child always slept on the floor, if in the box with the big nails there were always a few small ones, if everything in the house had an odd number— and that was the rule, he’d checked it a hundred times in each case— then would his teeth chatter as they did now? And if he wasn’t afraid to jump, why was he thinking about this now? He wasn’t— why would he?! But if maybe he still was?
He stood on Miladin’s Cliffs for about ten more minutes and then started back. In his underwear, in his nightshirt, and old shoes that clattered after him, pulled only halfway on his feet. In the city it was getting light out. The fishermen were going out to sea; Konavle women were hurrying to the square with baskets on their backs and pitchers on their heads; somewhere a donkey brayed; workers were gathering at the shipyard; milking girls were clanking tin vessels. Half the city met Rafo Sikirić and thought, “Thank God and the Blessed Virgin that he’s gone ahead and gone crazy!” No one felt like watching him walk a tightrope from one side to another without falling. They admired him at first, prayed for him, and then they realized that he would never get down, that there was no saving him and that for everyone, even his poor wife, it was better for him to go ahead and go completely crazy.
“What happened?” she asked, as he lay on the bed in her lap.
“What happened, dear?” she asked, and his teeth kept chattering, and every time he wanted to answer, he bit his tongue.
“What’s wrong, honey?” he asked, trying desperately to be calm.
“What is it, my sunshine?”
It would have been easier if he could have started crying, to answer her in that way. But no tears would come; there weren’t any.
“Do you want me to bring you your nails, my dark angel?” she asked; he rolled his eyes and thought his heart would burst.
She thought that the nails would do him good, that they were the balm of his soul. She would have brought them to him.
That thought brought him to the verge of wishing fervently for a little more life, only half an hour, a year, or a hundred years, to tell her how sorry he was. He couldn’t have done anything differently, even if he’d wanted to. Now he knew that he had to, and he wanted to; he would live, even if every day were hell. He would live for her because she’d wanted to bring him his nails. She knew about them . . .
Rafo Sikirić didn’t regain his composure. He shivered until evening and couldn’t say a single word. Around midnight he came down with a fever and didn’t wake up again. The r
oom smelled of vinegar and brandy. Kata ran around confusedly and changed his compresses; the children stood around and didn’t realize what had happened with their papa. No one did because no one actually knew what Rafo had done the previous night and that morning. Some thought he’d gone crazy. His wife and children didn’t know what to think, and in the morning Dr. Focht said that he had severe pneumonia— he must have been dragging it around for weeks— and the patient wouldn’t live to see the evening.
Before dawn on the next day Rafo Sikirić died without waking. He inhaled, exhaled, and turned into a dead object, one more odd number.
That was the twelfth of February, 1924, the same day when George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman’s orchestra performed “Rhapsody in Blue” for the first time. Regina read the story of “Rhapsody in Blue” three years later in the same magazine in which the story about Isadora Duncan’s death appeared.
“Oh, dear papa,” she whispered as her throat filled with tears. She wanted to hear the music that someone had played for the first time on the other end of the world as her father was dying.
She didn’t forget her wish for ten full years, up until the day when Ivo Delavale brought home a gramophone and a single record album. “Rhapsody in Blue” was like the crackling, cold howling of wolves in the distance, random plinking on piano keys, a ghastly clattering that a stranger used to mock the death of her father. Sounds without harmony or melody, irregular like nails falling one on top of another. But Ivo had carried this music across the sea, in a wooden chest that was lined with straw so the gramophone and the record album wouldn’t break, and that fact touched Regina’s heart more than reason would dictate.
The Gershwin episode was unique in her life because there was a balance between two contrary feelings: love and repulsion. The gramophone occupied a place of honor in their room for a few years, but she listened to “Rhapsody in Blue” only once. That was the only gramophone record in Regina’s life.
If “Rhapsody in Blue” was a mistake, an enchantment with its title or the coincidence of their dates, what kind of music had she imagined for her papa? She certainly imagined some kind of music, as he hadn’t been a real father, one who sat at the head of the table, sweated as he pruned the vineyard, touched the tip of his finger to the edge of his worker’s hat when a priest came along, chased children around the yard when he caught them stealing apples, called to a friend on the other side of an inlet, steered clear of underwater crags, squinted at islands in the distance to size them up, untangled long lines, and hummed Zagreb hit songs . . .
Her father Rafo was none of that, nor was there any of that in any man or father figure that she could summon from memory. He’d hardly spoken to her ten times in his life, had never asked for anything or given her any orders, but when she would come to him or called to him from the opposite side of the square, he smiled and showed that he was glad and did it in a manner that made him different from other fathers. He smiled like that only to her because she alone was his child. He barely noticed his sons at all. That was easier for him since they didn’t treat him like their papa. They knew that they shouldn’t bother him while he was sorting his nails, but otherwise it was as if he weren’t there. If they did something wrong, they were afraid of their mother. If they wanted to get on someone’s good side, again they went to her. Regina felt that that had to have hurt him and knew that he didn’t dare show it. Nothing in this matter could change, except that she could show constantly that she was his child. He accepted that, her mother didn’t even notice, and the brothers didn’t care.
And then he died. Such an injustice couldn’t have happened by chance. Someone had to be blamed for it. Who? Regina’s brothers— because they didn’t love him? Or her mother— because she pestered him to be like others? Or was the whole world to blame since it wasn’t made according to his measure? And that measure was more honest and beautiful than any other. Still, Regina was to blame most of all: since she’d gone from being a child to a young woman (she was going on nineteen when he died), she had gone to him less and tried less to catch his attention and get him to smile. Had she done that only once or twice a day (often she would lure a smile out of him ten times in a day), maybe he wouldn’t have left that night, fallen ill and died. She was the last but also the first good thing to happen in his life. So when that stopped, papa had to slip away. Whenever she was thinking like that, she would hear his music: silence produced by the fingers of a drowned man when he grabbed for a branch that wasn’t there, in the middle of a sea that wasn’t there. She heard a choir of island laborers on the barren ground behind a church, where illegitimate children, vagrants, and drowned men washed up by the sea were buried, the singing of sailors on a sunken galley, the poorest of the poor, drowned in a battle with the Turks. Male voices sang in harmony together, one next to another. They raised their red hats on axes, looked up at the sky, and blasphemed so terribly that the blood of the pious froze in their veins. Shallowly buried bones protruded from the ground. It was hard to tell the difference between the top of a crag that had been washed a thousand times by rain and the smooth, completely round skulls of suicides and orphans.
Rafo Sikirić was the youngest of twelve living children of his mother Matija and his father Josip. He was born far too late in the lives of his parents, a miracle about which the Viennese press reported. Namely, Matija Sikirić, née Valjan, had brought a live and healthy child into the world one month before her sixty-second birthday. Doctors from all corners of the Habsburg empire went to Trebinje, and Emperor Franz Joseph— the idolized monarch who, after occupying Bosnia the year before, was at the height of his power— sent a letter to Josip and Matija in which he communicated to them how moved he was by the birth of their child and that he wanted to be its godparent. A special emissary from the Sarajevo military administration, Colonel Steiner, arrived with imperial gifts and explained to the father, Josip, and the mother, Matija, exactly what the emperor’s godparenthood meant. Until the child’s eighteenth birthday monetary support would be paid to the name of his guardians, to the amount of the salary of a second-class government official, and after the boy finished high school, he would be offered the possibility to continue his education in accordance with his talents and wishes at the emperor’s expense, in Vienna, Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, or Bratislava . . .
While the Colonel listed off the cities where Rafo could study, the two elderly parents huddled together and didn’t really understand anything. Josip had already reached eighty and hadn’t been doing anything for a long time but was now a burden to his children. His mind was already slipping away, and he still hadn’t entirely gotten used to the fact that the Turkish sultan had been replaced by the Austrian emperor. The only thing that kept him alive was his sexual desire, which had almost cost him his head. Namely, when Josip’s sons had realized that their mother was pregnant in the twilight of her life and that she was going to give birth to a sister or brother of theirs, at a time when they already had children themselves, they went crazy. Mostly because of the shame they assumed would come when all of Herzegovina and half of Dalmatia heard that an old woman— their mother!— had had a baby. If it weren’t for the imperial godparenthood, this would have been a great shame and an occasion for the kind of gossip that went on for more than one summer and was often a source of family nicknames. But since the emperor had intervened, it turned out that it wasn’t a shame but a great, if completely incomprehensible, honor.
The Walnut Mansion Page 50