“Because she saw she weren’t the only one nobody cared for.”
She wondered what her son would say when she did die, how her daughter-in-law would be sorry that Trezika was gone, how they’d all repent. Her grandchildren would cry and feel sorry they hadn’t listened to her stories about the chicken-plucking bees, the corn-husking bees, and how children used to love sleeping in the hay in the barn. Sometimes in those warm-cold moments, she’d unwrap the kerchief from around her head and loop it around her neck, imagining the expression on her son’s face when he found her dead. She’d tighten it like that, little by little testing her pain threshold, and only when her vision blurred would she look in the mirror. Nobody except Bacawk and Chickichee had noticed that in front of where she’d hanged herself in her bedroom stood a bureau with a large mirror. She hadn’t meant to kill herself that day; she’d been sobered by the horror of seeing the awful funerals for Mario and Zdravko. She watched Numbers and Letters and was in such fine spirits that she made a noodle dish sprinkled with ground walnuts for herself, and then dug into the roast pork she’d cured, layered with bacon in an earthenware pot, a dish called meso s tiblica. The salt made her thirsty, so she drank down a whole pitcherful of water. Only then did the darkness overwhelm her. She wanted to see, once more before she went to bed, what she’d look like if they found her hanging from the ceiling lamp.
On the dresser were my drawings, and they were the last things she saw before the light went out in her eyes, when the chair under her feet tipped over. When she realized she was hanging, her face yawned into a surprised grimace, said Bacawk, and her legs flailed. She grabbed at the noose made of the torn apron and gasped, and her saliva sprayed the entire room. Swinging, she spun around her own axis.
“While she was watching herself in the mirror… she went limp. For a time, she jerked,” explained Chickichee.
“When Mladen hanged himself, it didn’t take long. He went limp right away,” added Bacawk.
He said that when Mladen was in his mother’s belly, she fell asleep one autumn day out in the fields amid the cornstalks and dreamed of water lilies and frozen puddles, and children such as these are condemned, from their very conception and ever after, to die by their own hand. Chickichee protested that was nonsense, so the two of them argued for a few minutes. But they did agree that Mladen hadn’t been dwelling constantly on death. It was enough that several times in the course of his lifetime, just as every person does, he’d envisioned this scene quite clearly. The scene left him fearful and confused, but also gave him an odd sense of comfort and warmth at the prospect of an end to the desire and trouble a person embraces by living each new day. And then the moment came when the vision of his death took over… Usually people think a whole series of circumstances have to come together for a person to take their own life.
“But it’s so easy. All it takes is being alone for a few minutes,” mused Bacawk.
Chickichee said that when people die, first their sense of sight goes, then taste, then smell, and then touch. Hearing goes last. Mladen hanged himself with a rope noose in the barn, standing on the hog’s slop trough. The last thing he heard was his family calling him to come and eat a meal of new potatoes, and he felt as if he could sense with his nose the soft and slightly oily smell of the thin potato skins. He also had just enough time to worry that the Krajčićes weren’t particularly good masons, and that he might break the beam.
6.
The hours ticked by while I wrote and drew, glancing once in a while out the window. After Bacawk and Chickichee had said everything they had to say, they asked me why I’d never drawn them or even mentioned them in my writing. I told them I’d never forgive them for what they did to me when I was small and I didn’t want to talk about them. To speak of them would give them greater access to reality than they now enjoyed.
Mom came into the room and asked why I was being so quiet and if I had done my homework. I said I had and quickly shut my notebook. She told me that if I had, I could go over to Zvonko “Democracy” Horvat’s house. I didn’t want to because he was always asking me things I didn’t know how to respond to. She explained that he was lonely and maybe very sick, and he wanted to have company close by. Again she told me he’d buy me a tracksuit if I helped him out a little with his attic.
Democracy had made a bundle working in the mines. His wife, a little younger, had stayed in Germany, and he didn’t often speak of her. There were rumors that he’d never gone out or spent anything while living there. Rumor had it that he left a huge amount of money in a German bank because he thought somebody would take it from him in Yugoslavia, but he was happier living in the village where he was born—alongside all the other poor people—than he would have been living in Germany as a wealthy man. Once he retired, he devoted himself to spending time with people, going to soccer games, and following a daily routine. Every morning he went to the store for fresh bread and a newspaper, and on the way back he’d stop and chat with whoever he ran into near the road; he’d lean on a gate, leaf through the newspaper, and make his observations, with special attention to reports about how somebody was oppressing somebody else.
“My oh my, will you look at that now, this Joža fella… poor people…”
And my mom was a receptive audience. She had a soft heart for the old man, a sort of tacit loyalty to all those who’d gone abroad to work. But in one respect, they were very different: Mom felt she’d made her peace with the way things were in Croatia, but Zvonko had not. Maybe he should have, because word got around the village that he had cancer. And it did look as if his complexion was a little sallow and he was hunched over.
Every house has its own particular odor, a mixture of the metabolisms of everything living inside it. At Zvonko’s I smelled freshly mown grass, baked beans and smoked meat, the overheated TV, and a host of colder smells, which were, I think, from his memories. Like the sad smell of your favorite dish the next day in the fridge. He greeted me with a smile and invited me in. Something about it, like many of the homes of people who worked abroad, evoked a Bavarian mountain chalet. The carved wooden table and benches with red, white, and gold hues, the reproductions of landscapes framed as if they were originals. Needlepoints of little bunnies drinking water, and a metal plaque bearing the name of a minor German city. We sat on the sofa in the huge half-empty living room. There were Tops cookies, pretzel sticks, and Tok Cola on the table, and Zvonko poured me a soda. I felt a sudden sadness at the thought that this was the closest to a child’s birthday party I’d been to since the night I tried to throw Dejan into the river. A Western film about two friends was playing on the vast TV screen.
“Those are Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. I always watched those movies when I was in Germany. They’re blood brothers. They cut their hands with a knife, pressed them together, and mixed their blood. You and your friends probably play cowboys all the time.”
“Actually, nope.”
For a while we watched the movie. I could hear his breathing, labored, jagged. The Native Americans tied a man to a tree and left him to be eaten by ants. I understood this was interesting for Zvonko the way ninjas were for me, but ninjas were agile and stealthy and threw shurikens, while the cowboys were boring. Some of the Native Americans wore feathers and were bare to the waist, and the cowboys didn’t have a single automatic weapon. I told Zvonko I’d like to see the attic. His blank look confirmed that the idea of cleaning the attic was just an excuse to get me there.