Events unfolding beyond the village had begun to accelerate and intensify, but very little news of what was going on in Eastern Slavonia and the rest of Yugoslavia made it to our village. Only the occasional snippet about shootings and barricades found its way into our small enclave of horror. There was no need to import fear—we had plenty of it to go around, and we submitted to it. We didn’t know what to think about the people who had taken their own lives. It was mysterious because they were close to us, but they’d seen something we couldn’t see. Now we were all watching each other, weighing every word, seeking the seeds of death. And we could sense other people watching us, which produced a false brightness and zest for life. We concealed, each in our own way, our suspicions and fears. When one person took their life, the disease was theirs alone. When four people took their lives, the whole village was afflicted. It looked as if the suicides would continue, though nobody could be certain there’d be more. I least of all.
I knew people were sad after Mario died, but after Zdravko, there was an awkward sense of relief that all this was somebody else’s problem. After Trezika and Mladen, it became clear that “somebody else” was a slippery concept that could, in fact, apply to any of us. The only ones who expressed their worry, though, were the older women; they were primed to lament all the droughts, wars, poverty, and illnesses. They started saying somebody had cursed the village. Might somebody, perhaps, be walking around at night from house to house, talking folks into killing themselves? The younger ones laughed at this, pretending scorn. I heard someone say that Mladen Krajčić had taken himself hostage, but nobody would pay the ransom. I heard someone else say that the parish priest would go bankrupt soon if people kept dying like this, because he wasn’t paid if there were no funeral rites. They laughed sourly, and feigned goodwill covered the village like a blanket full of moth holes. Each unusual gesture only widened these spaces. One day, out of the blue, Rega Popičova bought twenty Animal Kingdom chocolate bars and handed them out to kids on their way home from school. Mom and I watched her from the window of the grocery store with the salesladies.
“What’s this now?”
“She’s giving out chocolates.”
“Is she in her right mind? Sure, her son works up Germany-way, but I don’t reckon they’re rich. And those guest workers are tight with money after their years of working abroad.”
“I should ask her if she’s doing okay. It’s not right for a person to go around doling out chocolates to other folks’ kids.”
“Don’t you be doing that in front of the children.”
There was talk that Miška Janek, a fifty-five-year-old man who’d recently lost his job at the Mercator superstore in Slovenia, had been behaving oddly. Zvonko “Democracy” Horvat was the first to notice.
“Something snapped in Miška when he saw people being buried with no funeral rites. He keeps saying that’s how animals are buried, not people. Margeta says he ain’t sleeping nights, he goes out and paces the yard. And then one morning there he is at Mass. And I wouldn’t say he’s particularly God-fearing—only ever used to be at Mass for Christmas and Easter.”
Every day—morning and night—he went to Mass. He prayed loudly, unevenly, coming in late and then speeding up for the next phrase. He wasn’t of a mind to blend in with the monotonous, unified praying of everybody else, he wanted to show both himself and them that he felt each word deeply. He thought God would hear his prayers and spare him. He was more and more fearful that he, too, would… succumb. Though he led a full life with his wife, Margeta, and his little girls, he became painfully aware of every second of loneliness and every possible instrument of death. His time on the toilet had become a prayer because he was terrified that madness might overcome him while he was sitting there and, before the rational part of him had the chance to call for help, he might stab himself in the neck with scissors. When afflicted by the ailment he so fiercely feared, though, people didn’t call for help, but sank to their death in silence. On the Sunday after they buried Trezika and Mladen, Miška tried to convince everybody after Mass that the whole village should move to the parish hall so we could all tell the priest what we needed to. The whole village could sleep together, cook together like in the old days, maybe even go to the bathroom and shower together—then nobody’d be left alone, and nobody could kill themselves. It was pitiful to see a grown man so fearful that even his friends laughed at him, though it was clear they were mocking him so they could free themselves of doubt. Although he tried to hide his anxiety and speak calmly, he couldn’t pull it off. His despair leached out of him, and he was convinced that only he grasped the vastness of the peril facing us all.
The priest told him that some things must be left up to the Almighty, but he, too, spent several evenings in a row strolling around the village, calling to people from their gates and chatting with them about worldly matters. Had he invoked the otherworldly, the inscrutable, he might have done harm.
On Monday morning, the local vet drove through the village in his car, a Wartburg, with a big speaker on the roof. He drove slowly and called folks to a meeting at the community center hall, where there’d be talk of the situation in the village and about what “a sound mind in a sound body” meant. Only those who weren’t at work or out in the fields heard him. The farmers were still spreading fertilizer out there like crazy.
I was haunted by the presentiment that everybody in the village knew this was all my fault, but I didn’t seem to be attracting more attention in the classroom than I had before. The teacher told us to tell our parents or teachers right away if we noticed anybody acting strange or feeling down. The children made jokes; this had to do with older and weaker people, not us kids. Some said they might commit suicide if they were kicked off the soccer team, others if they were suddenly much poorer, and others if they were to hit their head and not be able to move anymore. When somebody missed a goal in our physical education class, Goran Brezovec mocked: “What now? Kill yourself?”
They all listened to him and thought he knew everything because he was the biggest and his dad was the head of the village. He said if you stare too long at the Mura, you’ll go crazy and kill yourself. You’ll lose your mind because the water keeps changing shape and never looks the way it did before. He said soldiers on guard duty kill themselves because they’re left all alone. A person starts talking to himself, and comes to find that he disagrees with his very own self.
The street felt a little empty that Monday evening when Mladen took just Franz in the trunk of his car. Now I started noticing all the other sounds around me, which Franz’s mumbling usually masked. The street had a hollow ring to it, probably because of all the centuries of unspoken words. I didn’t have anything to do, and I wasn’t drawn to my anger box, so I did push-ups and imagined I was pushing the entire planet away. It didn’t help much. I was soaked in sweat, but there was still too much rage in me. Late in the evening, when Mom and I were sitting in front of the TV watching Traumschiff and my sister was playing records in her room, somebody knocked at the door. I was terrified, I thought the police had come for me or, worse yet, that somebody else had died.
“Come over to the church. The priest has called us in. This awful evil has been visited upon us, and nothing is helping. We’ll be praying. The bell ringer’s there already,” said our neighbor Julika, her voice calm and quiet.
“What’s wrong? Somebody’s killed themselves again?” asked Mom.