I didn’t dare go over to him. It’s hard to put into words, but at that moment I envied every single person in the whole world who wasn’t there. The guys swarmed around him. Somebody told Franz to lie down, but he started gurgling and choking on the blood so they had him sit up. Mićo jumped onto his bicycle and went to find a car. After a few minutes—while Franz sat on the ground and bled like a pig, jamming somebody’s sweaty shirt into his mouth, holding his tongue in his other hand—Tonči, my neighbor, showed up with his Fiat 101. He’d brought a plastic bag with ice in it, and they put Franz’s tongue inside and gave it to him to hold until the ambulance came. Because of that scene, I nearly faint to this day—though I’d completely forgotten why—every time I see American kids in movies carrying goldfish in water in plastic bags.
More people from the village gathered on the grass. The boys who’d been kicking the ball at Franz said they’d kindly let the moron kid play soccer with them, and no good deed went unpunished. As they were packing up to go home, Mićo came flying back on his bike, white as a sheet, and said: “Mario’s hanged himself.”
“All right already, cut the crap. Come on, come on, come on,” somebody snarled from the crowd.
“Mario’s hanged himself. I was just at his house. Boris found him. He hanged himself in the bathroom. He’s dead. The police’ve already come.”
They headed for the village, but I stayed behind. I heard somebody say maybe Mario killed himself after he saw how Franz got hurt, what with Mario having such a soft heart and all, but then somebody else chimed in to say Mario had left before it happened.
When I got home, Mom had already heard about Mario but not that Franz was in the hospital. When I told her what’d happened, she didn’t believe me. I asked my sister why people killed themselves, and she said they did it when they were really sad, when they had nothing to look forward to, and when they felt there was no way out. I sat down and drew Franz, bleeding from his mouth, and the guys standing around him, looking away. I started to draw Mario hanging himself. I drew the bathroom, and then I realized I wasn’t so sure how people hanged themselves, by the hands or feet, so I didn’t finish. All I could think was that I’d begun hating Mario that day, and then he died. I closed the door so nobody would hear me sobbing. For almost two years, I’d managed to keep myself in check.
“It ain’t you who killed him,” said Bacawk. “They only saw him around the village when he was happy. Nobody knew how bad he felt sometimes… The terrible sadness he felt, you can’t even imagine. He’d be feeling real low, and all he could do was lie or sit there and stare into the darkness and long to go into the dark. Nobody knew it but his brother. He’s the only one Mario told—that he wished he could die. And his brother never wanted to tell a soul about it, because he wanted Mario to be gone.”
There was talk about how Mario would be buried. The priest was perplexed, he had to inquire at the bishopric. They told him no funeral for suicides, no rites. The older folks remembered they’d buried people who killed themselves by the graveyard wall in the olden days, or even just outside it, with no headstone. The thought of an unmarked grave was so awful that hardly anybody killed themselves. They first took Mario to Čakovec for an autopsy, or so we heard, to establish whether he really killed himself, if it was accidental, or if somebody forced him to do it. The next day he was laid out in the mortuary. I didn’t go, but I heard they dressed him in a turtleneck so the wound from the noose wouldn’t show. People, evidently, hanged themselves by the neck. I didn’t understand how a person could die from that. It seemed to me I could hang like that for hours. The white coffin was carried by the boys who’d been kicking the ball at Franz. They did bury him in the graveyard, in the end, at the Brezovec family site. There were no rites, but after the burial the priest came and prayed for him.
The women on the street spoke in hushed tones about how terrible it was that somebody so young would take his own life, and some of them, even more hushed, asked why the family put out chrysanthemums, not carnations—after all, this was our Mario who died, and Mario’s godfather had a German pension, so they didn’t need to be so cheap. The men talked about Tuđman, the Serbs, the referendum, the potatoes, and the water pipeline. Somebody also said that he didn’t know how they could possibly have put a red lantern on the grave instead of the white one they used for innocents. That’s all wrong, and fuck it.
Aside from Mario’s mother, who spoke and gestured as if she were very sleepy, the person most shaken by the suicide was Zdravko Tenodi. He was the only one of the men to talk about Mario, about how he and Mario had been drinking buddies. He became strangely considerate and friendly. When he noticed me, he winked and asked me when I’d be coming to soccer. Whatever he meant by that, it made me furious because he was why I wasn’t playing. I wanted to spit in his winking eye. I didn’t know then, of course, that a few days later they’d be lowering him into the ground during a funeral with no rites, awkward for everybody.
4.
A few days later, Franz and I, as we’d done so many times before, were sitting across from each other at lunchtime. I can’t remember what was more disgusting, my lunch of grits mixed with big chunks of gristle or Franz’s tongue, which occasionally slipped out between his lips. It was bluish and bulgy, like my foot when they took off my toes. They’d given him strained tomatoes to suck up through a straw, and this wasn’t going well because he had trouble breathing and kept trying to tell me something. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. He spluttered red globs of tomato into my white grits. For days there’d been rumors at school that Franz had to have leeches put in his mouth every day and that he might never speak right again. I was really sorry we had lost the world champion of backward talk. On the other hand, now maybe I could tell him about my astonishing deadly weapon. I told him what happened with Mario, that there was talk it had something to do with somebody’s wife and that he killed himself for love.
Just as the last piece of grits slid down my throat, I heard a ruckus over where the cleaning staff and teachers were smoking by the open door. They looked upset, and the janitor kept shaking his head, saying he and Zdravko Tenodi went to school together and he couldn’t understand how that man, so full of life, could kill himself. They said he worked at the ironworks in Mursko Središće and had a wife who worked in Čakovec and two kids. His daughter had married somebody from the next village over, and his son was in training to work in ceramics.
Two hours later, spluttery Franz and I walked home from school, and I managed to piece together bits of Zdravko Tenodi’s life from the people leaning on their fences talking. He loved a party, was a little brusque, and was strict with his kids. He sometimes mocked other kids, they said, like the Dolenčec boy the other day at the soccer field, but that was just him having a bit of fun. He wore nicely tailored pants and was always clean-shaven. And how, how could a person like that take his life? He didn’t owe nobody so much as a penny.
“He was behaving peculiar-like at Mario’s funeral…”
“He and Mario were so close, though he was much older…”
“So they were friends, does that mean he’d…”
“And his family, and…”