In an indescribably brief instant, the roiling chaos dissolved into perfect silence. And I felt as if the air temperature had dropped several degrees. They had stopped staring at me and turned their attention to the boy, who, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable, got down off his bike and spit a few times.
There are people who, when they leave this world, don’t leave a big void behind them. That’s just the way it is, whether we want to admit it or not. As far as Mladen Krajčić was concerned, I’m pretty sure nobody would have cried for him had his not been the fourth suicide. Many folks in the Kunčec yard couldn’t even place him.
“The fella across the street from the Bartols?”
“Naw, that would be Mladen Cucek. This guy was one of the Krajčićes. The fat one.”
“Oh, Porky Mladen?”
“Naw, he ain’t that fat.”
The white ambulance, a police car, and Stankec’s white Golf rolled off in the direction of the Krajčićes, and after them trekked all the others, everybody but Trezika’s son and two grandsons. It was as if a wedding party had swung by to pick up the bride-to-be and was heading off to fetch the groom. I didn’t follow, because I definitely had nothing whatsoever to do with Mladen Krajčić’s death and I didn’t want to be nearby, what with people already looking at me weird. I was sure I had nothing to do with it because anyone who looked at him could see Mladen was the perfect candidate for an early death. He was dull inside, in a constant state of disarray, and gave the sense he’d been dead his whole life but out of decency they’d held off burying him. He was a bachelor, around forty, short and on the heavy side, his figure built of three blockish chunks that looked as if they’d been piled one on top of the other without any particular skill. But aside from his odd shape, which he shared with everybody in his family, there was nothing remarkable about him. He was quiet and indifferent to things, nothing much excited or upset him. He might be noticed around the village. Might, but needn’t be. His was the most absent kind of presence.
I remember he worked at a nearby gas station, that he occasionally had a wine spritzer with Boris Brezovec and a few school friends, but not much else. He never fixed a pot of bograč game stew on his birthday, nor roasted a suckling pig at New Year’s. The other young men got asked if they were fucking anybody these days and when they’d be getting married, but not him.
I wouldn’t have remembered him myself, especially considering what a good job I’ve done forgetting, but I remember how, out of the corner of my eye, I once saw a tic run across his otherwise expressionless face. I was sure it came from maybe the only thing he genuinely felt—that he was ashamed of himself. Maybe ashamed of his family. All the Krajčićes, men and women, old and young, were equally squat and square-headed, as if built when the creator was drunk. They had equally bland facial features, and only details, like the length of a person’s hair or stubble, allowed others to tell them apart. They went everywhere together like a pack of domesticated animals. At every gathering, there they were, the squat Krajčićes, a footstool-shaped group in a community of humanoids. The only thing that set Mladen apart was that he wasn’t always as damned cheerful as the rest of his clan. My uncle worked with Mladen’s older brother, Pavel, and said everybody in that family was always laughing and ate vast amounts of food. Hunger, for them, was not a sensation but a lifestyle. Everything was arranged around meals; they knew of no other way to organize their everyday life. Food was the standard by which they lived, the occasion for, and topic of, most conversations. And being full meant being sleepy, which was a good enough reason to do nothing at all. They were a happy bunch because, despite their excessive appetite and the fact that most of them were diagnosed with high blood pressure by the age of thirty-five, they all lived to a ripe old age. They had their own theories about a healthy diet. After they gorged on sweets, they’d slice up salami and sprinkle salt over bread and butter. They believed the salt balanced out the sugar.
“Mom, people in the village are saying it’s my fault that all those people killed themselves,” I said after waiting for a few minutes at the kitchen table for somebody to ask me what was wrong or why I wasn’t up in the attic.
“Well, what about it? Who?” She didn’t look up from her plate, so I knew this wasn’t news to her. “No point in paying any mind to what the people say in the village. Sometimes what they’re saying ain’t particularly swift.”
I wanted to tell her that maybe those people were right and that sometimes I wished I weren’t alive. Or at least that I were invisible. That wasn’t such a big request, and it didn’t involve anybody else. But I couldn’t say that to her. We never spoke of the things that happened that fall. That meant a good part of me was missing for her.
“I might get a job in Varaždin, and if I do, we’ll all move away from here. I used to work in Germany at a shoe and boot factory, and they’re needing leatherworkers to make army boots and belts. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
Move away from the village and never come back. That thought so thrilled me that I forgot all about my anger box and went to my room.
I drew Trezika sitting alone in her basement. I drew the sheets of paper lying on her table, but when I tried to add details from my own drawings and messages, they looked like unrecognizable squiggles. I wasn’t satisfied. I picked up my notebook and wrote, I didn’t know Terezija Kunčec, and I never even spoke with Mladen. This has nothing to do with me. As soon as I wrote that, I felt better. But I was missing a real explanation. After a few minutes, it came up on me from behind, borne by the shrill, nasal voice of Bacawk.
Apparently they had spent a little time in every house in the village, because they knew all there was to know about Trezika. She was a woman, Bacawk said in a mournful tone, who’d been disappearing from her family’s life, and she felt useless. They didn’t answer her questions, sometimes walked right past her as if she weren’t there. The fear of invisibility began jangling in her head, and sometimes she dreamed she was disappearing bit by bit. Her children and grandchildren wouldn’t eat what she made for dinner. At first they were polite, and said they were planning to make French fries in their fryer. She’d bring five pounds of potatoes over, but through the window she’d see them opening up bags of presliced store-bought ones, the kind that came in clear plastic.
“Until, two days in a row, she threw green beans and tasty goulash to the hogs, and then she stopped cooking. Cooking just for herself was ridiculous.”
And besides, she wasn’t hungry; she’d eat her fill of cracklings and bread in the morning, drink milk in the afternoon, and that was enough. In the village, after the topic of death, the older women most often talked about what they were fixing for dinner, so Trezika started lying about that. The quieter the women she talked to became, the louder she was and the bigger the lies she told. Sometimes she felt as if she was starting to believe what she said, and she felt less embarrassed that nobody needed her. Later, in her basement, overcome by silence and loneliness, sometimes she’d even look for the fictive pot with beans in milk.
Aside from the invisibility, she was afraid her body would one day simply refuse to obey her, and instead do the opposite of what she wanted. Parts of her had already declared their independence, they’d fallen away from her. She’d get up in the morning, but half of Trezika would still be in bed. After several months, she stopped looking in the mirror altogether. Everybody she’d known had died, and it was as if she was seeing all of them in the mirror. The drawings and letters she found at the graveyard were her only solace.