It all merged for me into a single communal village voice, a dull baritone speaking in the monotonous drone of prayer. Mom was standing by our gate, pickax in hand, talking to Zvonko “Democracy” Horvat. He reported to my mother on a daily basis about world events, kicking off with “Why’re they so crazy?” and “Poor folks,” before rattling through his review of the newspaper articles he’d read about the cockeyed world. I figured she listened to him because he was lonely and old, or maybe because he reminded her of Dad. I pretended to listen to Franz and watched as he showed me how they sewed his tongue back on, but I was actually listening to Zvonko and Mom. Zvonko said maybe Zdravko’s wife cheated on him, because she worked at the meat-processing plant in Čakovec and wore nail polish and makeup. And maybe Zdravko and Mario were “warm brothers,” whatever that meant. They’d go to Zdravko’s cottage and drink till morning, or so people said.
When we went inside, Mom told me I’d go every other day to Zvonko’s to help him clean out his attic, and he’d give me some pocket money so I could buy one of those bright, slippery tracksuits. I asked Mom if he couldn’t do it himself, without my help. She said sure he could, but he wanted to be kind to me, and didn’t want it to look like he was giving us charity.
I tried to draw Zdravko, but I didn’t know how he died (some said he hanged himself, others he drowned in the tub), so I drew him as a kid on his way to school. Over his head was a black cloud, and in it was a bike. I imagined him dragging the cloud along his whole life, and then one day the cloud finally came down and sucked him in. I put the bicycle in there so he could ride it to where he is now.
“You’re right, he was a decent guy. He wasn’t always mean to folks.”
“And you know this because… ,” I asked Bacawk.
He didn’t answer, but went on to say there’d been something eating at Zdravko for a long time that pushed him to be cruel and make fun. When he was young, back in the old days, there was a house by the road leading out into the hills, near the graveyard. A widow lived there, and boys were taken to her so she could show them how to make children, how men do it with women.
“They put their wiener in her hole,” explained Bacawk. “The two of us, we were there and we saw.”
The story goes that Zdravko was nervous when his dad, a grim, taciturn man, brought him to the woman. An older boy was the first to go in, and then she called for Zdravko. He went in but came right out again to leave his shoes and socks outside. His father said: “I thought you was already done. No surprise that you ain’t even able to do this right.”
She told him to get undressed and sit on the bed. She checked to see if he’d trimmed his nails and if he had head lice, hummed a melody he didn’t catch, took a warm wet washcloth and wiped his face, body, and balls. She took off her top, threw a leg across him, and straddled him:
“Well, let’s see, how your little one jumps.”
Zdravko froze the moment her breast brushed his shoulder and… sprayed out his milk.
I knew what Bacawk meant because the older boys talked about how stuff came out of your wiener when you squeezed it. She brought Zdravko back out, visibly ashamed. His father, without even looking at him, sent him to fetch a pound of sugar and some pork lard and told him to tell his mom it was for the village head. When Zdravko came back to the widow’s house with the sugar and lard, he could hear his father yelling inside the bedroom. She was sighing and asking him to hush. After that, Zdravko Tenodi was cruel to anyone smaller and younger than him, and he steered clear of those who were bigger and stronger.
“And when he killed himself, what he was facing… was both stronger and much, much bigger than him. But he couldn’t run away from it because this time it was inside.”
The three of us pored over my failure of a drawing of Zdravko as a kid. This was the longest I’d seen them in two years. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d been through because of them, but what they said was comforting. I couldn’t understand why they were doing it, but I didn’t care. They saw things I couldn’t see. They were filling in the blanks. And proving that this wasn’t my fault. But I wasn’t certain whether they were helping me or deepening my despair.
“Whenever I get mad at somebody—really, really angry—that person dies,” I said.
“No. Mario ventured off into his own darkness, and Zdravko was gobbled up by his. We were there and we saw,” said Bacawk.
The night he died, Zdravko couldn’t sleep because his wife was out late again. He went out into the yard a few times for a drink of cold water from the well, and because he didn’t want his son—who was lying on the sofa watching TV—to see his impatience. After the lights went out in the house, a car pulled up and his wife got out. She slipped her shoes off at the threshold, softly unlocked the door, and went in on tiptoe. She didn’t turn on the light, she knew her way around in the dark; this was not the first time she’d snuck into the house in the middle of the night. She paused for a moment, trying to hear if her husband and son were sleeping. She went into the bathroom and washed up in the dark.
“She sat down and cleaned both her holes. She’d been poked all over.”
She’d just put on her nightgown when she heard something… as if a pile of books in the living room had fallen down. She clenched her teeth, froze. Finally she let out her breath; after all she’d washed off the evidence. When she snuck back through the hallway, her shoulder brushed something—maybe a coat her husband was airing out. She lay in bed. She couldn’t hear her husband breathing; he seemed quieter than usual. The next morning her son’s scream from the hallway woke her. It had not been a coat but Zdravko brushing up against her. His eyes stared open at the ceiling, and there was a big stain, still wet, on the leg of his pajamas. He left her a note in his shoe: No point in sneaking around in secret anymore. I’ll be watching. She stuffed it into her pocket and ran out to find a neighbor to take Zdravko’s body down.
“He knew by her smell she’d been with another man. He couldn’t stand it, after so many years. So that’s the reason he did it.”
At the second quiet funeral that week, there was no mention of flowers or lanterns. The men talked about how Mesić and Kostić were breaking up Yugoslavia right before their very eyes and how Mario and Zdravko were decent fellows, and the women talked about how they were faring with their tomatoes and lettuce. The loudest was Trezika Kunčec, an elderly woman who had recently begun declaring in a big, pushy voice what she was cooking and doing all day.
Zdravko’s wife was dressed in black, leaning on her son, wiping away tears, and blowing her nose. She wasn’t wearing makeup or nail polish. A week later (after a few more strange things happened), she came to see my mother and brought sugar and some coffee wrapped in white paper. The two completely different widows smoked cigarettes, drank coffee, and talked softly for a long time. The next year, she moved to Čakovec.
I added an explanation to my failed drawing and took it to the graveyard. My sister had asked me a few times to give her my drawings, saying she wanted to leave them at the big church in Čakovec. I declined; someone seemed to be collecting them after I left them on the grave, and that was enough for me. In a few days I learned where they were going: with that strange old lady, Trezika Kunčec.
Bacawk and Chickichee told me it wasn’t my fault, but I found this hard to accept. Nothing had changed, other than my hatred coming back and people dying. I couldn’t tell exactly when I crossed the line with my anger. I was having trouble spending time with Franz, he was leery of soccer balls now, and his stuttering, ugly tongue made me feel sick to my stomach. So when I came home from school, I’d disappear into the attic, where I tried to pour all my anger into an old carved dark wood box about the size of a woman’s makeup case; inside it was a red velvet pillow. I thought I’d be less of a danger to my mother and sister once I’d poured everything I had into the box. The little pillow was just the right size to muffle my shouting, and it was dusty enough that my throat quickly went dry and raspy, and I had to stop. I yelled that I hoped everybody would die, that I pooped on everything, and that I was full of hatred. I figured if even a little part of me felt like that—even a part I couldn’t control—it would be enough to kill somebody, so it had to be shut up inside the box. After that, I’d mash the pillow into the box with every ounce of my strength, using both hands; I’d mash it in until my hands began to shake something terrible, and until I had only enough strength left to slam the box shut fast. The anger would drain out into the black earth overnight, or at least that’s how I imagined it in my mind. That was the rightful place for the anger, in a box and in the earth, not in people.