I felt the grip of a huge fist that had been clenching my back and constraining my every movement for the last two years gradually release. Everything that had controlled me, the world I’d been living in, the liminal world of the silent brothers Sleep and Death, the one that nobody else could see except as a speck in their peripheral vision at moments when a child’s heart burns for no obvious reason up the throat and into the mind—it had all vanished, and I didn’t care what would happen next.
“When I was small, I thought there was this man in a black coat who walked around the village and stole kids. I saw him so many times, and I was terrified of him, though I didn’t know what he did with the kids or where he’d come from. Everybody told me he wasn’t there and I’d just made him up. But two years later, they found the man in the black coat somewhere in Zagorje in the forest, and around his wine cellar were kids buried without their heads. He’d chopped off their heads with an ax and dried them in his attic. Matjaž, my friend, I’m dead certain you seen those things, but you gotta know they ain’t your fault. You ain’t to blame, because otherwise the kids in your class who put shit in your sneaker would be dead, right? Yet they’re alive and well. Or our policewoman, Milena, woulda keeled over, because I remember like it was yesterday how you glared at her. It’s hard to see it, but promise me you’ll at least think about how this can’t be the whole truth. Promise?”
“Okay,” I said, with a genuine rush of relief. “I promise. But will you promise me something, too? Will you help Franz? Please, Stankec.”
“I’ll take a look into that, don’t you worry. But I don’t think Mladen would… Maybe you were upset that he played more with Franz than with you? Do you think?”
“Maybe so,” I said.
“Let’s go down to the soccer field. I have an idea. I have to find out where those medics have gotten to anyways.”
Stankec told Mom we’d be back soon. He told his colleague he should go back to the station and write up the report, and that he’d hurry the medics and coroner along. They’d already loaded the body into the ambulance, dropped in at the village games, and were drinking wine spritzers.
When we returned to the soccer field, it was night, and the whole village looked as if it would be swallowed by darkness if someone ever switched off the lights. They all knew Zvonko killed himself, because his body was in the ambulance parked by the locker room. Still, nobody called a halt to the festivities. Or maybe that’s why they kept going. Hot Ice was calling out the winners of the tombola raffle. The hill people were stretched out one on top of the other on the embankment, only one of them was on his feet, and he was dragging his half-dead wife along behind him, kicking her from time to time.
“Democracy hanged himself,” Đura Brezovec kept saying, drunk and clearly dismayed. “This is definitely going to be in the papers, honest t’ God. We’ll be the laughingstock.”
Stankec parked his car by the field while small dark-green shadows chased the ball. He left the car’s headlights on and told me to come out in front of them. From the trunk he took a black cap with a brim and the Croatian coat of arms, the kind worn by the Special Police, and a big camouflage vest that reeked of motor oil and reached almost down to my knees. Goran Brezovec, Dejan Kunčec, and another five boys came running over. With quiet admiration, they watched Stankec and me. Acting like he didn’t even notice them, he took his pistol from the holster, shook out five real bullets, and put them into my hand. When he was quite sure everybody was listening, when the Hot Ice guitar player stopped singing for a few seconds, he said: “Thanks for your help. You’re our man in the field. I’ll be calling on you again when we need you.”
He whispered that I mustn’t throw the bullets into a fire or smash them with a hammer, then turned off the headlights and went over to the bar to find the medics.
Suddenly it didn’t matter anymore that I was the weirdest kid in the village. They all came up to me. I gave a few of them bullets, repeating Stankec’s warnings about fire and hammers, and answered their questions. I said this was an ongoing investigation and I wasn’t supposed to say much about it, but it had to do with a fella from across the Mura on the Slovenian side. I let Goran Brezovec try on the vest, but I didn’t give the cap to anyone. They asked me if I wanted to play soccer. At first I said no, but the second time I gave in. They all wanted to pass to me. When I missed the goal, they thumped me on the shoulder anyway—the kids from my team and the ones from the other team. Everything was “Matija, look at this” and “Matija, did you hear how Zdenko’s toenails were ripped off” and “Matija, come practice with us tomorrow.” It seemed like they’d all forgotten who I was, and I truly believed that everything that had hurt me could just disappear. Maybe I could be a kid on the outside and a monster only on the inside. They wanted me to tell them what I’d drawn on the sheets of paper that had been at Trezika’s, and what it was like when Franz bit off his tongue, and, finally, what Zvonko “Democracy” Horvat looked like when he hanged himself. I grimaced, stuck out my tongue, and bugged out my eyes. They were satisfied. Then somebody said, “Well, well, here comes Franz Klanz,” and somebody else laughed. “Yep, I noticed something smelled bad.”
I turned and saw him standing there quietly. The light was behind him so I couldn’t see his face. He looked like a silhouette cut from black cardboard, as if his only purpose was to cast a shadow. Although he was my only friend, I wasn’t happy to see him then. I wanted him gone just for that night, so I could be a part of something, even just a little. I’d thought for so long that this chance had been lost to me forever. Go someplace else. I’ll be along in a bit, I thought. If only he’d allowed me that evening of that day, after I’d cried what I hoped were my last tears, I know I would’ve come back for him, I’d have done everything I could to keep him from being cast out—his apparent destiny from birth. But he showed up like that, in front of the kids in the green jerseys; he seemed to represent everything that was shameful and dirty in my life, though none of it was because of Franz himself. My memory of him is of utter pureness, and that’s why it’s so painful. I turned, shouted something about the game to the other kids, and then glanced back at him. He stood there, motionless. I went over and said he should go be with his dad, that I’d come over later, or we’d see each other the next day—I don’t remember what. I didn’t want anybody to see me talking to him, because, I thought, none of the cool stuff—the bullets, the cap, or the vest—would have sustained me after that. I saw his face, completely serious: this was a boy at his limit, his brow furrowed, his lips drawn downward. Franz didn’t buy it. He began yelling in garbled fury. He leaned toward me, so close I felt his breath. He screamed—angry, wretched. I’m ashamed to confess that I pushed him away and probably said something like, “Come on, get lost” that only minutes before the other kids would have said to me. I turned my back on him. He fell silent. I couldn’t see him, but I knew his mouth was agape and he was staring at me. And then I heard a loud gasp and a deep, burning growl, a sound that tore from the boy’s throat, defying control, a wrenching bray to freeze the heart, but only if a person let it. Ever since, it seems to me, my hearing has been impaired. Now everybody was looking at him, and nobody was laughing. He kneeled on the ground, and, staring straight at me, scooped dirt with both hands into his mouth. Black earth full of the dark; only a very few know what that dirt was like. Once he’d filled his mouth so that his throat could make no sound, he got up, turned, and strode off into the darkness. I turned to the others and said something like, “What now? Kill yourself?” because that’s what Goran was always saying during gym class, so I thought it was probably funny. And sure enough, everybody laughed, so I added, “Crazy Franz.”