“So, where did your daddy play?”
“Payern.”
“Where?” Zdravko got even louder, attracting everybody’s attention. “Palermo, was it?”
“No, Payern.”
“Bayern, I s’pose. And when was it he played with them?”
“Before,” I said, softer and softer.
“Before! Well, I’ll be damned! Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall him playing.” Zdravko winked at somebody. “And you say he scored goals?”
“Yeah… a whole mess of ’em.”
“My, my, a whole mess of goals, well, I’ll be damned.”
“He hit volleys. And bicycle kicks. And those goals to the top corner.”
“Well, well, and who did he play with?”
“Rummenigge.”
Now everybody was listening. With each answer, waves of laughter rolled through the group. My face was getting hot, and I started seeing red and yellow.
“Hey, Matija, let’s go,” said Franz, but I couldn’t move.
“And what kind of car did he drive?” said Zdravko.
“It went over a hundred miles an hour.”
“Whooeee, that’s fast. So where’s your daddy now?”
My throat tightened; I tasted metal and felt a tingling in my hands. I knew I couldn’t wipe my eyes, because then they’d see I was crying. Somebody closer to me saw it anyway, and said: “Don’t. See, he’s getting a bit misty there around the eyes.”
Somebody else quipped, “I’d like to know where his mom is,” and they burst out in guffaws.
“Maybe somewhere having herself a little rub,” said a third, jerking his hands bellyward twice. They laughed wildly and all started talking at once. I couldn’t for the life of me see what my mother would be rubbing, or what that had to do with anything.
I wished they’d just go away, especially Zdravko Tenodi. Mladen Horvat, a slender younger man married to a woman named Milica, stepped out from the crowd. Until recently he’d been a first-string player for the Miners, and now he ran the bar at the team clubhouse and trained the goalies. All I knew about him was that he never drank, he didn’t malign women or anyone else, and he was always kind to everybody. He stood behind me and Franz, rested his hands on our shoulders, and said: “Guys, you’re outta line.”
Most of them stopped, but somebody gibed: “Hey, Mladen, none of your beeswax, and besides, why shouldn’t we be having a little fun? I’d sure like to take his mama for a roll in the hay, come to think of it… When’ll she be stopping by to watch him play?”
Mladen took us to the clubhouse and retrieved two Cockta sodas from a crate behind the bar. He tried to cheer us up; he put his arms around our shoulders like we were friends, and said that grown-ups can sometimes be cruel to kids but we shouldn’t take it personal, we’d see how they were when their wives were around. Through the window we saw Bogdan gathering the kids. I told Franz to go and that I’d wait for him. I gave him the cleats my uncle had given me, because Franz only had old cloth sneakers. Usually he talked a blue streak, but that day he was much quieter. All he said was: “If you ain’t going, I ain’t going.”
I knew he wanted to be a goalie more than anything in the world. He was being more loyal to me than to himself. We watched the other kids practice for a while in silence, and then Pišta came into the bar.
“Honest t’ God, the spuds’ll be big as squashes this year.”
“I ain’t wild about how people are fertilizing. Is it a good idea to lay it on so thick?” said Mladen.
“Who cares? I haven’t much farmland to speak of, just a couple of klafters. But I like how we fucked with the over-the-Mura folks: the damn-blasted Slovenes.”
“But, Pišta, what’s the point? I hear each farmer was given 30 percent more fertilizer for the same money. But it’s too late in the season to fertilize the crops.”
“Heh heh, just imagine how gorgeous the spuds’ll be. It’s all thanks to Miška Čurinof. He’s heard he’ll be losing his job over in Lendava next month…”
“Him, too? What’ll they all do with no work? Drink all day?”
“We’ll be farmers, I guess. And so what? We’ll be off to war in no time anyway. It was Miška who made the fertilizer deal. He works at the warehouse. When they left him to his own devices, he decided to mix the artificial fertilizer with this other chemical—butanol, or whatever it’s called. The foreman couldn’t figure how it happened, exactly, but everything’s piled on top of everything else there. So they couldn’t sell it at full price. Damaged goods. Miška let Đura Brezovec know, and the village bought a huge load of the stuff. You must have seen it when they brought it in here.”
Pišta snickered, finished his beer, and went home. Mladen told Franz he’d show him some goalie moves if he wanted. He gave us each another Cockta and asked whether we needed to pee. Franz nodded, and I was ready, too, so the three of us went out to the bushes behind the locker room. Mladen didn’t watch where he was peeing; instead he watched me and Franz. Mladen’s wiener was big and fat and stuck out of this little forest of hairs, while Franz’s and mine were wimpy little pink things. He told us he had to go but that we could always let him know if somebody messed with us, and he’d be glad have us over to his house to practice our soccer skills sometime.
The practice wound down out on the field, Bogdan lit a cigarette and sat in the car, the kids and dads headed slowly home, and I asked Franz to wait a little longer. I didn’t want to walk home with everybody else. We went along the road in the opposite direction for a bit, toward the river, where we sat on the embankment and watched the water. It wasn’t dark yet, but some stars were already coming out.
I asked Franz what he thought stars would sound like if we could hear them and also what ants would sound like. The ants and the stars were both small to us, and just as far away. We agreed pretty quick about the ants, that they are always rushing—sweet Jesus, will you look at them scurry—all hurrying each other along with no time for explanations. They’re far too busy to be sitting in libraries or on a terrace with a cup of coffee, but on rainy days they stay in their little houses underground and clean and do whatever they didn’t have time for on the sunny days. When night falls, some of them try to see what’s above the clouds using diamond periscopes, hoping to catch sight of their distant relatives, the flying ants, about whom legends abound. Meanwhile they say that camaraderie is what matters most, and they don’t go to church, because they’re communists. For the stars, Franz said, it seemed to him they look shyly down on Earth, hoping somebody will send up a kaleidoscope because they’re bored staring at the same universe all the time where things change only when trucks loaded with candy pass on their way to another galaxy. The stars laugh only when they see a bird on a distant planet flying so high that it soars up beyond the breathable air and loses consciousness, then plummets like a pear down to the ground. Then they die laughing. The stars believe in God and go to church at least once a week. Or maybe, Franz said, the stars are silent. They don’t say anything, or they talk so slowly that one word lasts thousands of years, and what we call silence is not truly silence but actually the sound they use to say the word for the time we live in. I asked him what the astral word was for the time we were living in, but Franz didn’t answer. We stared into the water, and from the water Ajitam and Znarf stared back. I asked Franz if he thought there were two boys like us on the other side of the reflection looking at us and wondering the same things we were wondering. He thought about it and said he’d like it better if they were looking at this side without him in it. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that exactly.