“What do you think it’s like on the other side? Over on the other side, what’s the world like there? What do you think, what kind of world is it, Matija?”
“You mean over on the other bank of the river?”
“Nope, on the other side of… that mirror. Of the river. The mirror of the river. Like we see ourselves in it, like on the other side of that,” said Franz.
“I believe it’s a world where everybody’s good. They’re kind to us there, Franz. You’re the goalie, and I’m—”
“I heard there’s a way through the Mura to an underground place where everybody’s dead, and they walk around in the dark, looking for a way out.”
“Naw, Franz. I thought my dad was down there… I was sure of it. But he ain’t. I wish I’d never thought it. Ever since then, nothing’s been like it was before.”
“I figure it can be fixed, Matija, I think it can, it can for sure…” Every once in a while Franz said comforting things that surprised me and made me glad. Because through this crack I could see how, behind his walls, behind the curly hair and jaw, behind everything, there was a marvelous land with puffy white clouds, little houses with round windows, and horses cantering free. Because of this, I knew he’d be fine.
When I came home, I tossed my cleats in the corner. Mom asked me whether I’d signed up for soccer, and I said I hadn’t and that they’d said bad things about Dad so I’d kicked the soccer ball at the coach’s head.
I was the only kid in my class who didn’t sign up.
Before I went to bed, Chickichee was waiting for me in the bathroom and insisted on telling me about how a long, long time ago, five centuries or more, our village had played a game with a neighboring village, and the goal was to leave the rotting corpse of a dog smack in the middle of the other village.
“Sweet Jesus, how they played—the game went all summer long. The carcass was already crawling with maggots. A boy named Miklauš from the next village wanted to put the carcass on our street, so he rode over on his horse, but our boys heard him. This kid by the name of Vajnč hit him in the spine with a hoe, and the horse spooked and galloped home. The next morning they found Miklauš dead on the horse’s back, in the middle of their village, holding the dog’s carcass. The mood soured for a spell, what with the boy being killed and all, but in time it settled down. And now when somebody teases somebody at school, others might say to the teaser: ‘Watch out so’s you don’t get smacked with a hoe in the back,’ and everybody laughs.’”
I pretended not to listen. I left the bathroom and shut the door behind me, leaving him with the stink.
The next day in gym class, the boys played soccer and the girls played dodgeball, as usual. Nobody would pass me the ball, so I got angry and took it, shoving Dejan. He fell and scraped his elbow. I reached to help him up, but he wouldn’t take my hand. The teacher called me and asked why I’d done that. I didn’t say anything, so for the rest of the hour I sat on a wooden bench and watched the others play. At one point, Goran called everybody over and they whispered. Nobody looked at me, but I could tell they were talking about me.
Later, when I was changing out of my school slippers and getting ready to put on my outdoor shoes, I found a clump of mud in one sneaker and something that smelled a lot like dogshit in the other. The teacher noticed, came over, and said: “Did you do this?”
I said nothing, but from my look she could tell I wasn’t that crazy.
Although some kids had already put on their shoes and were leaving, she called us all back and said that this was no way to treat anybody, let alone a classmate. She asked several times who did it, but there was total silence. Everybody looked sheepish. She asked whether we thought this was acceptable.
Goran Brezovec spoke up, carefully picking and choosing his words to sound like somebody from the big city. “I do not feel this was acceptable, ma’am; friends don’t do such things to each other. This is downright discourteous. I think if anyone saw something, they should say so. Today it was Matija, but tomorrow it might be someone else.”
There was more talk about how we must be kind to one another, but I just wished no one could see me. In the washroom, cleaning shit and mud from my sneakers, I thought about how I’d like to be a ninja and throw shurikens at my enemies.
I was so angry that I started seeing red and yellow and realized this was a familiar place I’d nearly forgotten because I was scared I might hurt somebody. A mingling of sourness and heat, an ugly restlessness, the warm odor of my own body in my nostrils. I was afraid of this mood because I knew it could become huge, much vaster and darker than me. It was hatred. Twelve days later, people began dying.
There was already an aura of a death among us. Nobody’d died in a while, maybe even months. In the village, death was everybody’s business. The most frequent question was not “How ya doing?” but “What’d he die of?” But the times were changing as far as death was concerned. It used to be that people died at home, in their beds, surrounded by family and a priest. My father, apparently, died alone in a white-and-green hospital, far from everybody. That was nobody’s business but mine. After all, I killed him.
3.
The first to die was Mario Brezovec, only days after the Croatian referendum was held on the vote for independence. I remember there was something so damned warm about the young man. Folks in the village had never been particularly warm to each other, they were always bickering about something. If not about what they’d done, then about what they were going to do. With Mario, things were different. He was a socially acceptable object of adoration. He was incurably reckless but considerate of others, so he was forgiven every brash act. He was loved equally by young and old, and his escapades, when he was lousy and selfish and contrary and drunk, were told and retold as if he could do no wrong. His life was a public spectacle, and everybody approached him with a grin of approval and incredulity. Was there anyone else as charming? And when older women said Mario was an “unparalleled good-for-nothing,” there was a tinge of Eros in their sentiment. Everybody knew he fucked girls whose boyfriends were off serving in the army; word was he’d gotten a married woman from Vratišinec pregnant and then beat up her husband. He was said to be a wily thief, though he never stole anything in the village.
“That Mario, if he don’t slip a thing or two in his pocket while he’s out at the Čakovec industrial farm, he’ll reckon he’s forgotten something. Honest t’ God, what a scamp, that Mario.”
With remarkable ease, he found himself caught up in the weirdest stories. Like the time, one Saturday morning, he’d gone in clogs and shorts to fetch a loaf of bread from the store, and they’d had to wheel him home Sunday night, drunk as dirt, with half a loaf of bread in his bag and all his money still in his pocket. The bread had been nibbled by the folks who’d treated him to drinks at the bar. Afterward he heard he’d ridden on a tractor with Pišta to go for a swim in Lendava. Pišta drove, and Mario stood on the hydraulic shaft holding on to the cab while clamping the bag of bread between his knees. They somehow borrowed swimming trunks along the way and were allowed onto the beach for free because the people in charge couldn’t disguise their delight at the sight of a tractor parked alongside the sixty other cars in the parking lot.
The morning after Milica and Mladen Horvat’s wedding, Mario woke up barefoot, still in his dress pants and an unbuttoned white shirt. He lifted his big, heavy head from the shoe that had served as his pillow. He coughed with his wheezy, smoke-filled lungs, rolled over, and saw he was lying in the middle of the soccer field. People walking by on their way to Sunday Mass grinned from the paved village path. Somebody called out: “Hey, Mario, how ya doing?”