“Nope, not yet. But Imbra Perčić is missing. He’s gone off somewheres, and nobody can find him.”
It was eleven thirty at night, and the streetlamps were already off. Phantoms were moving toward the church in the dark. The pews were full, people were praying the rosary. The chorused humming was broken only by Miška, who was dramatically late or rushing. Every time he came to the part “now and at the hour of our death,” he would practically shout. At the end, the priest said there’d be confession every day, and everybody should come: “With our purity, let us withstand the temptation of this unknown evil, which has spread through our community, brothers and sisters…”
He, too, wanted to know what was happening in the village, but he didn’t have his own Bacawk and Chickichee, so he had to rely on confession. We parted in silence at twelve thirty, and only Miška stayed behind to urge the priest to call us together every night to pray.
We walked behind two old women. One of them said softly, more to herself: “It’s like we’ve come to the blackest darkness. I never thought there’d be enough room in our little village for all of hell to fit.”
“Hell can fit inside one single person,” said the other, and they parted without a goodbye.
I wondered who hell would fit inside of next. I never would have guessed it would be Milica Horvat, Mladen’s wife.
8.
They buried Trezika at four in the afternoon and Mladen Krajčić at five so folks didn’t have to go home in between. Instead they lingered by their garden gates. After the funerals, Mom sent me with a pail to fetch some milk. The street was still and empty at dusk, till Mladen Horvat’s car turned off the main street onto ours. I took a deep breath and mustered the courage to ask politely when I could join them again for training. For days now the thought of his sunny yard by the vineyard with its one wooden goal had been keeping me alive. Even grumpy Milica couldn’t ruin that beautiful picture for me. Franz wasn’t in the trunk this time, but in the back seat, and when Mladen let him out, he looked like a dog that hadn’t been let off its leash in a long time. He managed to bump into the front seat and the body of the car as he was climbing out. The streetlamps sometimes made things look different, but I felt sure his face was red, and he looked like he’d been crying.
“Now, now, wait a minute, what’s wrong?” Mladen called after him.
I wondered whether Mladen had been teasing him about the stuttering—Franz was touchy about that. You had to pretend you understood every word, and it was a fairly complicated business. But something else was going on. Franz had a chocolate bar behind his back and walked straight past as if he hadn’t seen me. I knew something bad must’ve happened, because he was completely silent—he made no sound at all. He stank as if he’d stepped in shit, and was walking strangely, knees pressed in. There was a black stain over his butt visible through the white soccer pants. I thought maybe he’d fallen on his ass or pooped his pants. I looked at Mladen, who was standing by his car grinning stupidly. He called to me loudly, now dead serious: “So would you like a Cockta soda and some wafer cookies again, eh, Dolenčec? Take care I don’t go telling people what you did to him. Just you watch out.”
He got in the car and drove away. I turned to Franz, but he was already gone. When I got to his house, I could hear they were beating him, and his mother was screaming something about what he’d done, but I couldn’t hear his voice at all. Something had silenced him.
The next morning I hung around waiting for him before school. Law enforcement vehicles and an ambulance shot past me. By the first recess, word got out that Milica had killed herself, that she’d slit both wrists. Apparently she slit them lengthwise, not crossways like they do on TV. She’d been at nursing school so knew there’d be no way to save her if she did it like that. Nothing made sense now. Could my rage have possibly ricocheted off one person and killed another? Because Mladen was the one I was angry at. I couldn’t have cared less about grumpy Milica.
“It’s not your fault,” I heard Chickichee whisper.
Mladen’s wife killed herself because, Bacawk said, she couldn’t bear life with Mladen anymore and couldn’t see any way out. She couldn’t have explained it to anyone, or said exactly what he’d been doing to her. They’d started dating when she was a senior in high school. Sundays she’d go with her friends to watch the Miners soccer games, and Mladen was the goalie. They all loved him in the village, almost as much as they loved Mario Brezovec, the drunk. He was polite and from a good family, and when Novi fosili gave a concert at the field, she noticed he had his eye on her. They married soon after she graduated. His father got a house ready for them. She was overjoyed, Bacawk explained, till she saw that behind Mladen’s kind exterior lay something dark and twisted.
“She saw how he looked at her and how he treated her. As if he wished she were a boy, not a woman. He made her dress like one.”
She lived in hope that he’d grow out of this over time. She tried to construct a happier image of her life in her head. Chickichee added that during her pregnancy she often dreamed that wild animals would come out of the forest and bow down to her child; she was like a forest princess, ruler of a world all her own, far from everything else. Sometimes she even retreated there when she was in public. But Mladen’s sick gaze penetrated it more and more.
She lived with her revulsion, comforted that at least nobody else knew what Mladen was like. But she came undone when she saw how Mladen eyed his nephews, nine-year-old twins. She watched how he touched them, how he wrestled with them and tickled them, how he took them into his arms when they were playing so that he could rub up against them for a minute. He went to the bathroom to pee with them. At weddings he danced with the little boys; he’d go with them to change into costumes and barge in after midnight, as if they were the uninvited guests that were customary in the village. People wept with laughter when Mladen, dressed up as a deep-sea diver, danced with little devils and altar boys. Milica quaked.
She never said a word to him because she didn’t know how. In an act of quiet protest, she stopped eating.
“She’d fix dinner and then watch him eat, waiting for him to ask her why she wasn’t eating, but he knew what she was after, so he said nothing.”
She couldn’t tell anyone what was troubling her, nobody would have believed her, she knew even her parents would turn against her. On the outside they looked like the perfect couple. They had a child, and spouses who barely exchanged even a glance in public were a normal sight in the village. Though he seemed absent, he took more and more control over her. He seemed to know everything she did when he wasn’t home—maybe he dug through the garbage just to laugh in her face when she lied to him about how many cigarettes she’d smoked. He seemed able to predict her every sentence and clearly relished this ability. Even when he went to the bathroom, he’d leave the door open a crack so he could hear what she was saying to their child. He came into the bathroom when she was showering or washing her feet.
“‘Did you think you could lock me out? You won’t lock me out in my own home.’ That’s how he spoke to her and laughed at her. Then he’d splash her with freezing cold water and leave. And she’d sit on the edge of the tub and cry,” said Bacawk.
He was so horrible that his presence was physically painful to her. She found a little relief when, alone with their child in the house, she’d smoke and stare into the distance, thinking about what life would be like if Mladen were killed in an accident on his way home from work, or if he came down with an incurable disease. She loved thinking about how a person with such a terrible secret had to carry some germ inside himself that would devour him from within, like rot. She only hoped this would happen while her child was still ignorant of the fact that Mladen wasn’t a human being.