“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Listen. You have two books behind you, and now you’re reassessing things. I mean, I don’t know much about writing, but I know you’ll snap out of this. Best to let sleeping dogs lie, like Granny would have said.”
“But I can’t remember.”
“There are first-rate writers who hadn’t even started at your age. And ones who only wrote crap for years. Fuck. It’s a waiting game.”
“I’m not one for patience. I’m just a smidge overbearing.”
“Then, brother dear, it’s time for you to focus on other things. I understand you like it, but you can’t live off writing, so it’s a hobby, right?”
“Yeah, just like collecting baseball cards or sticking pins in a world map.”
“Oh, come on, don’t start with some story about writers as precious jewels or whatever. I’ll lose it. Have you ever wondered why you need this anyway? Are you happy? I don’t think so.”
“No, but I can tolerate myself when I write. It’s only then I can see things clearly.”
“How sad.” His sister barked a laugh, clearly angry. “You’re just a pathetic version of yourself. Now, I’ll tell you something. I got test results for a kid who’s twenty-seven, younger than you. A brilliant chemist, came out of nowhere, central Bosnia, he doesn’t even know where his parents were killed in the war, works at the Ruđer Bošković Institute and volunteers, in his spare time, to tutor kids from poor families. And he came in this morning with a headache, turns out it’s a brain tumor, inoperable, and he’s got three months to live. Over the coming weeks, he’ll lose function after function as he slowly fades. On Monday he’s coming back, and I’ll have to break the news. And now I’m listening to you whining about your lost-cause writing. Who cares?”
“Hey, why ask if you don’t want to hear about it?”
“…”
“Look, I feel sorry for the guy. What’s his name?”
“Stjepan Hećimović. Fuck. The first time you see something like this, you think things just have to be that way, you’ll get used to it eventually. But that’s not how it works. You get to the point where you control your voice and the expression on your face. But the knot in your gut is still there.”
“So what will you tell him?”
“What else? Tell him there may be a new experimental treatment and trick him into taking aspirin. Send him home, lock myself in the bathroom, curse.”
“If he’s a chemist, he might see through the fake treatment.”
“Maybe not. People believe all kinds of shit when they’re scared.” She was angry and sad. Over time, she’d learned that only the first emotion was okay to show others. People stopped listening to the sad ones after a while. “But you should pull yourself together and be grateful for the gorgeous life you have.”
They both stopped and smiled weakly.
“Okay, so, what else is new? Other than getting drunk at dive bars? You seem as if you’re in a weird place.”
“‘Weird’ is putting it mildly.”
“So tell me. I won’t yell at you, I promise.”
“I don’t know. It’s just that there are these… things that weren’t there before. Maybe they don’t have anything to do with each other, but… I don’t know. It started while I was with Dina. It was as if I couldn’t tell her about anything that really happened in my past. And the further I think back, the worse it gets. I don’t know how to say this: I tell stories about things, they seem to be right there, but I don’t actually remember anything at all. Dina was furious about it. It turns out that… I’m lying all the time… I don’t know.”
His sister stared at him and said nothing, she didn’t even nod. Matija—busy trying to come up with some insight into his twisted life—didn’t notice she was having trouble breathing.
“I started feeling afraid and reacting strangely. Like, I’m walking, and a car passes behind me, and it sounds familiar somehow, and then I’m suddenly in a bad mood, and feel cold inside… I can’t sleep. My dreams are fucked up. And I feel like someone’s following me. Maybe I’m… seeing people others can’t see. You know, like in a B horror movie. Man, I’m saying all this out loud for the first time, and I sound crazy. I know it’s stupid…”
His sister said nothing, she just downed her last swig of coffee and sipped some water. After a time, Matija said, “And I don’t understand my own behavior. It’s as if I’m imitating something I can’t see. I don’t know. Well, it’s not all bad. Maybe I’m depressed, so this all comes up on its own. I’m not as bad around other people—at work and stuff, I do okay. I think it’s because I can’t write. When I started writing, in high school—”
His sister interrupted him. She spoke quietly, steadily, and deadly serious.
“Not high school. You started writing when you learned the alphabet. Why are you looking at me like that? Jesus, you really did totally lock away everything before we moved to Zagreb. That was probably good, you switched channels and survived, but now it’s time to find your way back. I’ve got something for you.”
She stood up, slipped on her clogs, and left the apartment. She came back a few minutes later carrying a cardboard box. There was a smudge on her sleeve from a brush with dust, so Matija figured she’d been down in the storage locker. She took out a pile of children’s drawings on yellowed paper and several sheets covered in an awkward scrawl and tossed them down in front of him without a word.
“Are these yours? Mine? What?”
Matija glanced over at the drawings, and after an initial numbness, he felt a growing chill. They were a child’s sketches of brutal scenes of mutilation, abuse, maybe even death, but definitely agony and pain. In one, a child knelt in the middle, with big black eyes, one hand covering his mouth, from which red blood was dripping, and the other holding a red lump. Matija thought it was a heart. Around the child stood five or six figures, their heads turned away. Either that or they had no eyes. The drawings were done with crayon, mainly in black and red. The strokes were quick, and the surface of the paper was almost scored, the crayons had been pressed so hard. The circles weren’t closed. The skies were, as a rule, filled with black-and-red streaks; there was no sun in any of the drawings.
In the second pile were sheets of paper, and on them were messages, half of which were in the local Međimurje dialect, and most of which he couldn’t read due to the illegible handwriting or perhaps a sudden spell of dizziness. One sheet read:
Too many strange things are happening around me, and I’m scared I’ll be lost in our house or garden because the things and furniture and trees and animals aren’t acting like they used to. Each thing is fixing to tell me something. They’re always talking, all at once. I can’t stand listening anymore, I’ll go crazy.
In a flash Matija was at the toilet, where he vomited until all that was left to expel was yellow-brown liquid. When he came back, he was at a loss. The drawings didn’t look familiar, but they resonated totally with his terror.
“You left those on Dad’s grave,” whispered his sister while he stared at the table. “I took them because I was afraid of what people would think. I didn’t want them to be afraid of you, though you were strange with me and Mom after Dad died. A weird little kid, no two ways about it. I was scared of you, and I was scared for you. You were how old? Six? And you’d ask us out of the blue if we’d still love you if you’d done something really bad. Or you’d ask me softly, so Mom couldn’t hear, whether I’d go with you to dig up graves. A boy of six. You talked to yourself. Once I found you standing in the middle of your room, staring into the corner of the ceiling and talking, half in some strange language I couldn’t understand. I remember you said some words… undal, brokesto, safuntteo… and then you nodded and smiled. When you realized I was watching, you said to the ceiling that I was your sister and they should ‘leave me alone.’ And then things started getting even harder. You stopped eating, everything disgusted you, you were afraid to stay home alone, you were afraid to go out in the yard, you wouldn’t tell us what was scaring you so bad. You wet your bed at home, and you wet your pants at school. Once I woke up in the middle of the night because I sensed someone in my room, and it was you. You were in your PJs, shivering, crying, and whispering, ‘They’re here, they’ve found me.’ You’d get better for a few days, and then Mom would find bruises and scratches on your ribs and back, as if someone had beaten you, but you wouldn’t say who. You threw stones at the neighbor, spat at people, set fire to things, hid stuff. You’d always swear that it hadn’t been you. That you didn’t know who it was, but it wasn’t you. Once I saw you throwing rocks at the cherry tree in our yard and punching it until your hands bled. I asked you what the fuck you were doing, and you finally said you were mad because Mom had thrown this wooden box away, and it was better to hit the tree because you were afraid you’d do something bad to Mom. You ran away from home, don’t you remember? In the middle of winter, someone found you on the banks of the Mura, nearly frozen. You were in your pajamas and a jacket. And then later you ran off into the forest. That was when they had to amputate your toes. You must remember that. When you were in the hospital for two weeks and got pneumonia?”