The ogres traversed the plain of fields and orchards where the humble people lived, and settled in the forested hills near the village. For they shied from the sun and the light of day, while the local folks loved it and lived near the river. At first the folks were afraid of the newcomers, whose language they didn’t understand, but they welcomed their guests because their good Father had taught them to be generous with every living creature. They gathered what they had and greeted the newcomers at the forest’s edge with wine and honey. The newcomers took what was offered, but gave nothing back.
The ogres didn’t wait for the villagers to come again, but came out of the forest and took whatever they desired. Every household offered up something, they shared freely what God and the fertile fields had given them. An old woman even gave them candles she’d made herself. The people of Međimurje had learned how to make candles from the first Christians, who used them to bring light to the underworld so souls wouldn’t be cast adrift in the dark. One of the ogres grabbed a candle and bit down on it, and saw this was not something to be eaten, so the grandmother showed him how to use it. The ogres were pleased—now they could come down at night from the hills and easily take from the orchards and farmyards. After that, lights could be seen flickering in the darkness among the distant trees in the place where the ogres camped, and the local people watched the forests with growing apprehension.
The village’s oldest grandfather showed the ogres how to bake bricks and build walls of mud. Soon their wild forest encampment grew into a fortress, a grim fortress, and at night the screams of the ogres reached the village as they worshipped their cruel gods.
One day the most beautiful girl from the village, seeking respite from her work in the field, went into the forest to find a cool, shady spot. The older villagers had warned her not to go near the trees, but she believed no living creature would harm another without a reason. Seven ogres found her and ran her through with spears. They juggled her head all the way from the forest to the village and dropped it at her mother’s feet. For three days and three nights, her mother wept bitter tears. The third night she died of grief, and they buried her by the river, just downstream from where the women scrubbed their laundry. The old people say that even her dead eyes wept, and when the next morning dawned, a new branch of the river had sprung from her tears, which has been known ever since as Grieving Mother Mura.
The sorrow and fury of the peaceful folks mounted, and they gathered their kin from the neighboring villages and set out after the ogres. As they had no weapons, the men took with them hoes, pitchforks, and picks—anything they could lay their hands on. The women and children listened to the screams, tramping, and blows echoing all night from the forest, and many good men lost their lives.
At dawn the ogres slew young Janko, a decent, God-fearing boy, a lad beloved far and wide. He was the son of the old woman who’d fetched the ogres the candle, and the very child who, many years before, had said, “Dear Father, dear God, how will you reward us for our loyal service?”
This sparked the wrath of God the Father, and he sent three angels, who cut the ogres down to their very toes. The angels towered over the ogres and lopped off their heads. Their headless bodies were buried there in a vast pit in the forest, where the feet of three hills meet, and this place is still called Angels’ Slaughter. A few of the ogres escaped to the river, but they drowned in the depths they themselves had dredged with the hooves of their giant horses.
Some say the forest was cursed that night. The people, especially older folks, say that even today when the fog rises from the Mura riverbanks on autumn evenings, one can see lights flickering at the edges of the forest. They say these flickering lights are the will-o’-the-wisps, lit by headless bodies rising from their unmarked grave. The ghouls silently pace the forest, candles in hand, waiting for their day of revenge. Perhaps they’re waiting to pounce on stray villagers. Each Međimurje village claims that the great battle took place right where it now stands.
In one village, the one closest to Grieving Mother Mura and Angels’ Slaughter, they say the courageous lad Janko was buried beneath old linden trees at the place where two paths converged at an angle, one leading up from the riverbank into the hills and the other leading to the other Mura villages. The lindens are long gone, but this is the place where all villagers are buried when they die.
2.
Many years later, at that same burial ground, I swear there must have been eight hundred people gathered to pay their respects to a man everybody thought of as a fine fellow, and whom they remembered as always flashing his warm smile. He was scarcely forty when he succumbed to his illness and left behind his wife, his fourteen-year-old daughter, and me, his five-year-old son.
Looking at the crowd, I felt there was something frozen about the scene, something eternal that justified the disquiet that, though I didn’t know it then, would haunt me to this day. It was this feeling that everything I was seeing was staged. The whole thing made me queasy. A sour taste kept rising to my mouth from the bologna in the sandwich I’d wolfed down that morning as people gathered in our yard with black umbrellas and white handkerchiefs. I felt all collywobbles and remembered Dad saying on the way to the coast one time to think about something else, at least until the next rest stop where we could pull over. I didn’t know what else there was for me to fix my mind on, so I threw up all over the car window, my sister, and the rest of the back seat in an effort to spare my mother—sitting in front of me—the contents of my stomach. I didn’t want to puke all over the grave, so I watched people and tried to remember their names to fix my mind on them. I was surprised to learn one of the mourners was named Vajnč, even though everybody called him Poison because he’d had to go to the emergency room one Easter after drinking rat poison by mistake. There were also men who, if you asked me, looked as if their name ought to be Miška (they had these bushy whiskers, drove lawn mowers, and in the summer came to the front gate in just an undershirt), and others I imagined just had to be named Joža (they had big earlobes, didn’t shave often, and sometimes even dared to say “honest t’ God”), but their names, of course, were totally different.
I was still small and didn’t know much about how things appear and disappear in this world, but I did understand how you could get stuck with a nickname if you showed off, or kept saying the same thing over and over, or were different. Somebody comes up with it, says it, and everybody laughs. The nickname sticks like tar to the person who’s marked by it, and to those who use it. And it wasn’t just anybody who came up with nicknames. Some of the nastiest ones (Serf, Stinker, Corpse and his entire family—the big and little Corpses) were cooked up by Imbra Perčić, who probably enjoyed the privilege because he was our only electrician and so we had to put up with his ornery ways. Because they feared acquiring a nickname, people seemed to watch what they did, what they bought, how they dressed, and what they said. If they’d seen me picking my nose, they might’ve dubbed my whole family the Boogies. Somebody might crow, “Lookee, lookee, here come the Boogies.” Everybody would laugh, and the name would stick forever. Then again, they might name me after a soccer player from Germany or Italy if I scored a goal for the Miners, the local soccer team.