6. Nineteen of the subjects say that after the second suicide, people wondered if there had been a homosexual relationship between the two deceased men and if they had made some sort of suicide pact. There is no indication of such a relationship between the first and second victims, Mario Brezovec and Zdravko Tenodi.
The next three explanatory models refer to supernatural elements.
1. The suicides were the work of ogres and fiends believed by older members of the community to dwell in the forests above the village. There is a legend about the undead bodies of forest dwellers who were killed by the villagers in an ancient mythical battle. These ogres are condemned to languish in the woods until the end of time, and in return they curse the village. Seven of the subjects say this same explanation had been given for every major problem to beset the village, such as epidemics among livestock, a 1970s outbreak of downy mildew on the grapevines, and the great floods of 1962, 1983, and 1985.
2. Only Mario Brezovec, the first victim, had a “tangible” reason for suicide (nine subjects mention an unhappy love affair with a married woman as a possible motive), while the other suicides were caused by a spell Brezovec cast from the realm of the dead. There was a belief in the village that when someone takes their life they are relegated to a special part of hell, and from there they are able to compel the living to follow them. The only remedy is the burial of the suicide victims outside the graveyard or at a crossroads, as dictated by centuries-old custom. All eight victims were buried at the graveyard but without funeral rites, per the Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church.
3. Eighty-six subjects mention a supposition that all eight suicides were caused, mysteriously, by M. D., a boy who was seven years old at the time. This belief sprang from the odd coincidence that the boy was associated with each of the eight victims in some way shortly before they took their lives. All subjects who offer this explanation say that the boy had begun manifesting troublesome behavior several years earlier, after the death of his father, and even attracted the attention of local people and social services. Most of the subjects remark that even being in the presence of the boy made many villagers uneasy. After the last suicide, the boy’s mother decided to move with her two children to Zagreb.
In early June 2011, a sizable manuscript arrived at the workplace of Dr. Dubravka Perković, signed by M. D. himself, describing the events that happened during his childhood. How he learned of the research project is not known, because, as he himself put it, he had severed all contact with his native village.
In the manuscript, he described in detail his state after his father’s death, particularly that he held the conviction—common among children who lose a member of their immediate family—that he was to blame for his parent’s passing. In his case, however, this belief assumed pathological proportions. He became certain that one can cause the death of a person merely by thought or in a momentary fit of rage. He was convinced of this while the suicides were occurring and believed he could not control his thoughts about some of the victims.
I was comforted by the thought that we all have wished death on someone…. This is the stuff we’re made of, our blood. It happens to everyone that somebody threatens, dominates, humiliates, or takes advantage with no remorse or concern. For an instant, we wish they’d simply be gone. We feel the world would be better without them. When I was a child, I believed I truly could kill a person at whom I was very angry. I tried to quell these thoughts but wasn’t always able to.
He says that after his family moved to Zagreb, he was able to forget everything that happened, or rather he “masked” his real memories with fabricated ones, and only recently, as an adult, had he been able to retrieve the real ones.
People are capable of going to great lengths to survive. Eat shit, steal, beg, lie, kill, betray a friend. When we moved away from the village, the terrifying images began to fade from my memory day by day. At first I felt threatened by this and thought I’d lose myself, and I clung childishly to things and people, everything that was slipping away from me. When I saw I was missing a piece, I’d take from what was there, what still hadn’t vanished, from the stories of others. I lied more and more about who I was and gradually began believing my own lies.
The trigger that made him start remembering was, as he wrote, a random insight into the actual cause of the serious Međimurje cases of depression and suicide. He offers a new explanation, one that was not raised by any of the study subjects, releasing himself from all guilt, though no one attributed real culpability to the child, nor could any responsibility be legally proven. M. D. did, however, take full responsibility, explicitly, for the death of the last victim, the boy, Franjo Klanz.
COLLECTORS OF SECONDARY WASTE
1.
“Come on, cut the crap. You’re so full of shit lately. Why would the mall drive you crazy all of a sudden?”
Matija Dolenčec looked away and rolled his eyes.
“A year ago you were ranting about how social media distances people from each other. And anyway, dressed up like that, you look just like an eager consumer.”
Gita knew she was being harsh, so after a pause she reminded him how great the book he’d already written was. As far as he was concerned, she may as well have unscrewed his head and spat down his gullet. He didn’t listen, pretending to study each window display they passed. Arrogantly, as if he could afford everything. The mall didn’t put him off as much as he liked to pretend, as it ought to do to someone who was almost thirty and a writer. The big-city malls looked as if someone had designed them to be exactly like a major European airport, like Frankfurt or Charles de Gaulle. They were a cocktail of perfume, disinfectant, feces, sweat-soaked fabric, fresh newspapers, fast food, uncomfortable chairs that made spending money more appealing, identical spaces with tropical ferns and glass surfaces, corporate art, designer ideals of happiness, and a foreign life. Matija liked malls more than airports because there was no removing of shoes, no patting of his jacket pocket to make sure his passport and boarding pass were still there, and no flight waiting for him, while he pretended the whole time he wasn’t scared of turbulence. On the other hand, only important-looking people walked around airports. Running into someone at a major European airport, sharing a latte macchiato, and chatting about the project he was working on supercharged Matija Dolenčec’s ego, while meeting someone at the new mall in Savica was merely awkward.
It was late afternoon on one of the first days of January 2011. The media was reporting on what people were eating and the slippers worn by the former prime minister while he was in an Austrian jail, and there were frantic attempts to persuade the nation that a skiing competition in the Zagreb hills was a fabulous notion, not an overblown project to bring a flood of tourists to the metropolis, capitalizing on the idea that Croats are admired everywhere for their famously superior sports gene. There were eight girls pregnant at the Bjelovar commerce high school, and a grandmother in Gorski Kotar had been reimbursed by a bankrupt funeral parlor after they’d forced her to take possession of her prepurchased coffin, which she put in the only place she had room: the middle of her bedroom. She covered it with a tablecloth, a vase with flowers, and a plate of cookies, hoping she’d stop thinking of how she’d have to lie in it someday.