A man I saw for the first time that day attended the dedication ceremony. He was fat—the buttons on his suit strained to close—and he combed his hair over his bald spot. He struggled to breathe and kept wiping the sweat off his upper lip with a handkerchief even though it was cold outside. Shouting as if he were angry, he spoke in an uninterrupted stream, which seemed to entrance everybody. He talked about how Međimurje was the Croatianest part of Croatia, how the people of Međimurje had stood up to the Hungarians, how Saint Jerome had invented the Croatian Glagolitic alphabet and been born right there in Štrigova. At this point Mr. Martijanec, the history and geography teacher, began to fidget and shake his head. He looked as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know who to say it to. When the fat, sweaty man talked about how Međimurje lay at the heart of Croatia because only Catholics—like the Zrinjskis and other Croatian noble families—lived there, Martijanec winced again and said to Pišta that the Zrinjskis had been Protestants. Without taking his eyes off the fat man, Pišta replied indifferently: “So what? The Serbs are Orthodox.”
At the end everybody applauded, sang again with their hands on their hearts, and then went to Imbra Perčić the electrician’s vineyard to taste his wine. They sang there, and evidently somebody’s aunt taught them to say, “All Serbs are motherfuckers.” They got so drunk by midnight that Imbra declared them all full of shit and “fine with eating the hard work of others and guzzling human sweat,” so they dispersed.
After that day, all over the village there was talk of things that didn’t have to do directly with the villagers. We were being expected to read our own history backward, like reading a book from the last page to the first.
We were instructed in what to think about everything that had, supposedly, been going on under the communists. Apparently they’d stolen from and tortured us, and we’d always had to keep our mouths shut. We were also told how we were supposed to remember. Some of the memories, which had seemed genuine as recently as the day before, had to pack up and take the bus—like Dejan and me did that time—and leave our little village forever. The most vociferous of the people speaking up at the time said that we, the people of Međimurje, were yokels and didn’t care nearly enough about our country or our people.
The villagers’ mouths were full of democracy, though mostly with their tongue firmly in cheek. When the teacher said we had to write two essays over vacation, she said, “Now there’s democracy for you,” and Mom said the same thing when we had to watch Das Traumschiff instead of Dirty Harry on TV. Anything might suddenly be democracy, and at one point even Zvonko Horvat became known as Democracy.
Zvonko Horvat was an older man who lived down the street, near Granny’s. He was one of those people who was always talking about how the folks of Međimurje were yokels and ought to try to make their homeland proud. He’d worked his whole life in Germany. Somehow he gave the impression of having seen the world, knowing about everything, but all he’d really done was work in a mine, and it wasn’t clear what he could have seen a few hundred feet below soggy German dirt. With an air of desperation, he called on the local people to muster the will to get things started. He was all for us producing wine in Međimurje and exporting it to Germany. As nobody contradicted him, I made it to adulthood assuming Germans had only lousy wine and were waiting eagerly for ours to arrive. Zvonko reminded everybody around him of their place, and didn’t hide his great admiration for the people of Dalmatia and Slavonia—whom he’d served with in the Yugoslav People’s Army—or his regret that we weren’t more like them. He seemed to perceive their bluntness as charming honesty.
“A man from Dalmatia, now he’ll tell you how he’s doing, but not a fellow from Međimurje—polite to your face, maybe, but behind your back he’ll be smearing you with mud.”
Zvonko was rarely interrupted, not just because he talked without pausing for breath, but because sometimes he offered such bizarre comparisons that nobody could follow them.
“This Mesić fella, and Kostić, or whatever his name is. Each of them is out to be better than the other guy. See? That’s how things was in the US of A. They flat-out refused to go to the Olympics when the games were held in Moscow. These things is all of a piece.”
Or he’d get his hands on somebody at a soccer game and yell so everybody could hear: “What manner of people live here? See, Pišta? Are you all crazy? We were in Zagreb, see. A hundred thousand of us were in the square from all over Croatia, see, and they sang till the shivers went up and down my back! But aside from us, not a soul was there from Međimurje. Why’re we so crazy? Tuđman, he said this is our time to show what real live patriotism is, but what do our contrary old geezers here do? Nothing. And hey, we drive one place, we drive another, we wave our Croatian flag out the car window. And when we did that in Zagreb and in Zagorje, the folks—they clapped! People on the streets, see, they clapped. Then you cross the Drava, and not a peep. People turn their heads and look away. They turn their backs on you!”
“Enough already with all that talk,” someone grumbled about him. “He spent a good twenty-five years in Krautland while things here were the worst they’ve ever been, and now here he comes preaching at us to say how we’re supposed to conduct ourselves. Damn-blast Zvonko and his democracy. If’n he don’t want to be here, why didn’t he stay up there with the Krauts?”
Once, at a soccer game, after his third beer, he started really grating on people’s nerves, even more than the jerk ref did. Imbra Perčić, downing his fourth drink, finally said: “I ain’t partial to your behavior, Zvonko. Off you went to Germany to work, you earned your pension up there, sure enough, but we’re hardworking folks, too. And now you come out here like you have the wisdom of the world. Go easy, why dontcha, put on the brakes.”
Zvonko, not used to being criticized, was caught off guard. The best thing he could come up with was: “Then why dontcha go to Serbia, Imbra, if you think things are so great there?”
“Well, well, got your goat, did I, Zvonko? Will you look at him all upset. What an asshole,” Imbra remarked, also visibly agitated, to the person standing next to him, “and he says this to me, who’s never so much as set foot in Serbia. It was Tetovo, y’know, Macedonia, where I served in the army.”
Zvonko, for his part, complained to an indifferent Pišta: “Folks around these parts won’t even think about lending a hand, know what I mean. Now, I’ve done me a thing or two in my lifetime, know what I mean. Seen the world. In Germany when you work, you work. Know what I mean, Pišta?”
Imbra shot back: “Cut the crap. I care about my folks, too, which is exactly why we need to keep an eye out so those Krauts of yours don’t screw us over like everybody else—the Hungarians, the Serbs—always have.”
Zvonko lunged at Imbra to throttle him—he could no longer bear being contradicted—but he slipped and fell flat on his back. He winced with pain, and the whole thing might have turned out pretty badly if somebody hadn’t laughed and said: “Now there’s democracy for you.”
The next day while walking down the street, Imbra said, “Well, lookee here, there goes Democracy,” and everybody laughed again, and from that day till his death by hanging, Zvonko Horvat was known as Democracy.