“Sure, let’s go,” he finally chirped.
The attic was tidy and clean. I spotted skis and goggles, a hockey stick, a miner’s helmet, plastic chairs, a Ping-Pong table, paintbrushes so hard they could have doubled as weapons. A few piles of magazines about cars. He showed me his collection of beer cans, which he stored in a huge trunk. He told me he had over seventy different cans, not just from Germany but from the Netherlands and Switzerland, too. I asked why he collected them, but all he said was that he’d give them to me if I wanted them. I picked one up and peered in through the hole. The attic was dark, but within it there were these seventy even darker nooks. And inside each one of them, it seemed to me, was a person who’d betrayed Zvonko “Democracy” Horvat. He’d found the perfect receptacle in the beer cans, which contained the musty odor of when somebody disappoints you. These cans were his anger boxes. I shivered, told him I didn’t want them, and lied that I had to go home. He said the pretzel sticks and cookies would be waiting for me, and he thought he had Haribo gummy bears somewhere. I wasn’t sure I wanted them.
“Okay, see you soon, Uncle Zvonko.”
“Listen, hang on. I could adjust my antenna. You’d have cartoons all day long. Should I adjust it? The satelitempfänger?”
I told him sure, and hurried off. It was still daylight, and I wasn’t in the mood to go home, so was excited when I saw Franz on the road. When he saw me, he went off without a word to get our tattered soccer ball. We kicked it back and forth, and Franz gestured it was easier to swallow now, but still had to spit pink phlegm out every few minutes. I told him about the men from the movie who were blood brothers. Franz couldn’t stop giggling, and pantomimed he must have at least ten thousand brothers among the mosquitos and horseflies.
Mladen Horvat drove by, stopped his red Yugo, and rolled down the window.
“What’s up, boys?”
“Just kicking the ball around,” I said, and stuttering Franz didn’t want to hide that we’d been waiting for Mladen to start training us, so he leaned right up against the car door, tense as a slingshot.
“Nice, nice, any day now you’ll be stars. How’s the tongue, Franz? Can you talk yet?” asked Mladen, and Franz shook his head sadly.
“Don’t you worry now, it’ll come with time. I’m on my way home from work, and was thinking of kicking a ball around a little myself. You like to join me?” asked Mladen, brightly. Then he added, “But maybe your folks wouldn’t like it. Matija, does your mother know where you are?”
“Don’t worry, she thinks I’m at Democracy’s place and expects me home in two hours or so.”
“All right, then off we go. And we’ll say you stopped by and we had wafer cookies and a little orange soda. If’n they ask. And if they don’t, nobody’s the wiser.”
He told us he had to go to the store and that we should wait for him at the bend in the road on the way out of town. He had us ride in the trunk of the car because he said it would be fun, and he’d always wanted to ride in the trunk when he was a kid. The house where Mladen and Milica lived was a five-minute drive toward the vineyards, on the village outskirts.
It was fun riding in the trunk, but by the end I was feeling queasy. Franz’s mouth smelled bad, and I couldn’t stop thinking about his half-dead tongue.
Milica was sitting on the terrace, smoking a cigarette. She was a gaunt woman with hollow cheeks. She barely greeted us. Mladen sent us to the garage to fetch a ball, and we could hear Milica asking him why he’d brought us. There was something angry and desperate in her voice. I thought Mladen was nice to agree to live with her, when she was so gangly and grumpy. When we came back from the garage, Mladen tossed Franz a pair of brand-new black-and-red goalie gloves, still in their package! Franz was nearly in tears, he was so happy, and didn’t dare try them on until Mladen put them on his hands for him. We kicked the ball back and forth, and then Mladen put Franz through a few stretching exercises, and he told me to run around a nearby stand of trees to get myself into shape. I sprinted like crazy and reckoned he’d be pleased with how fast I’d been, but while still stretching Franz’s legs, he said I ought to have gone slower, because now I was all tuckered out.
“I ain’t tuckered, Mladen, I can go again.”
“Naw, go indoors for a while—there are wafer cookies on the table—and tell Milica to mix you up some orange drink.”
I went in and got some wafer cookies from the table, then sat out on the terrace. I’d never seen Franz so focused. Mladen told him that being a goalie wasn’t just about standing in the goal, he’d have to follow the whole game, and run out to intercept the ball from the other team’s players. He showed him how to throw himself under their feet, and he and Franz tumbled around. I scarfed down cookie after cookie. If they’d invited me, I’d have liked to try that tumble, too. Getting ready to go back, Mladen opened the trunk again. I told him that riding in the trunk had made me sick to my stomach, but he insisted. He explained that next time Franz would come by himself, because they had to practice their goalie exercises, and I could come another time.
I saw things clearly then. I’d have to be as good as Franz if Mladen was going to train me. I also wasn’t consoled by the thought that he was maybe feeling sorry for Franz because of his tongue and the fact that his old man was a drunk, and because everybody in the village was mean to him. No one was particularly nice to me, either, but who cared about that. I needed my anger box, I could already hear the red velvet pillow crinkling.
“I’m home,” I called and raced straight up to the attic. It was already getting dark. The box wasn’t there. I flew into a panic.
“Where’s the box?” I hollered. We’d been living for two years in a hush, and suddenly my words resounded throughout the house. My mom and sister came to the door of the kitchen, my sister holding a half-eaten slice of bread with butter—a bite was still in her mouth. I repeated as calmly as I could: “Where’s the box?”
“What box? What’s going on?” said Mom. They didn’t realize the danger they were in.
“The box, the wood box with a red cushion inside. Where is it?”
“I just put my makeup in it, that’s all,” said my sister. The alarm from two years ago was back in her eyes.
“That’s my box!” I shrieked and flew by them into the bathroom.
It was on the shelf over the sink. In one flip I emptied it. Eyeliner pencils, cotton swabs, makeup, and nail scissors drummed on the bathroom floor tiles; the eye shadow completely fell apart. There was no pillow inside.
“I threw the pillow out,” I heard a voice say, unsure, from the hallway.
I ran out of the house and only partly heard Mom say to pull myself together or else.
I flung myself down onto my belly in the grass, and began yelling into the dirt, but too much of it escaped out the sides. They stared at me dumbly from the front stoop, I couldn’t make them go away. I clenched my fists and ground my teeth and sank slowly into despair. The fury inside me hadn’t waned, and the fear that they were going to die because of me ballooned. I stood up and punched our cherry tree with my bare hands. After the first two hits, gashes opened on my knuckles, so I kicked it. I don’t know how much time passed before I dropped to the ground, exhausted.
“What’s wrong, Matija?” asked Mom, softly. “Why are you hitting the tree?”
“I’m scared I’ll do something to you,” I said, and my sister turned around silently and went back into the house.
7.
There was no wake because they’d taken Trezika and Mladen to Čakovec for autopsies. Stankec and another officer stayed in the village until evening. The Krajčićes offered them homemade sausages and poppy-seed cake.