Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

Stjepan Hećimović was an unusually tall, gaunt young man with a boyish air. His stubble, the shaggy hair that hung over his ears, a few zits, and his well-worn jeans made him look even younger. There was hardly anything to suggest this was a person who was deathly ill—only the dark circles under his eyes, which reminded Matija of slices of bologna kept too long in the fridge. But it was there in the way he moved. First Hećimović couldn’t decide whether to place his materials on the desk or the lectern, so he put some on the desk and the rest on the lectern. Then he realized he’d rather stand and switched the piles. He started, “Today we’ll…” and then realized the room was a little too dark, so he went back to the door to turn on the lights. He spoke quickly, but would often stop midsentence to take a labored breath, and then enunciate the rest of the sentence slowly, speaking clearly. He started listing chemical compounds, with six in mind. When he’d twice listed only five, he stopped, turned to the board, and counted, whispering, on his fingers. After a long moment, he turned back to his class with a triumphant grin and gave them the sixth. The students’ anxiety could be cut with a knife. They didn’t laugh, Matija noticed. He was really looking at a person struggling with disease, his complexion sallow, his ears red. He’d try to draw a straight line, and against his will his hand would trace a curve, but this was not, for Matija, enough proof of the tumor. It would have been much more gratifying if Hećimović had, for instance, clutched his head and moaned in pain, if he’d vomited, if white foam had bubbled from his mouth, if he’d lost his balance, or, say, gone suddenly blind. Nothing like that happened, and Matija began feeling impatient. He sat in the last row and doodled in a notebook he’d bought at the bookstore. He thought about how Hećimović would spend his last three months. Matija should go up to him today, while the man didn’t know how sick he was, while he was still unaware. Štef, can I call you Štef? You may be wondering what that odd feeling is, that tension in your temples? Well, my friend, you’ve got this lump in your head, and it’s inoperable! It might be time to set up one of those Facebook support groups, reach out, raise money… and maybe… maybe he’d offer to write a book about Hećimović’s farewell to this beautiful world! Matija would follow Hećimović to the bitter end as his ghostwriter, registering every deep thought he had about death and life and all that shit. He’d follow him while the young scientist slowly faded. It would be the most intense near the end. His sister said Hećimović would lose cognitive functions. He’d start saying things, babble nonsense, lose his memories, not recognize members of his family. Hey, now that would be bringing harsh reality to writing, something no one has ever done before! I can already see myself shedding a tear on Oprah.

He was woken from his mental masturbation by a sentence that seemed totally random.

Hećimović was trying to speak from memory and read at the same time, so he interspersed definitions among his stutters:

“…and other compounds, such as… um… butanediol… and… well… um, well… ahem… are used industrially for manufacturing certain kinds of plastics, elastic fibers, and… um… plastic fibers and so on… not um… and polyurethane! And besides… heh heh… for kids like you… um… well… I’m not so old myself… heh heh… may result in disorders in the neurotransmitters, changes in mood like depression and anxiety… so people who work with chemicals like butanediol have to take precautions… the problem is probably because the compound is… um… soluble in water, so it can easily permeate groundwater in greater quantities, but usually factories have built containment systems… and so on. So, as I said 1,4-butanediol, also referred to as BD, um…”

Butanediol rang in Matija’s head a few more times. Loidenatub .

He started so intensely he lifted the desk in front of him with his knees. He was on the verge of blacking out, he could see little more than the outlines of the world around him, so out of the lecture hall he staggered.

He crouched over the first bench he saw and began scribbling in the notebook, then went sprinting toward home. Whenever he ran out of breath, he’d lean for a moment against a wall. It was freezing cold, the sky went dark, and rain began to fall. It would have been reasonable to expect everyone to lean forward and hurry along. But they all seemed hopelessly slow to Matija.

In the center of town, he jumped into a cab and alternated between urging the driver to go faster and scribbling like mad. Sobbing and laughing, hunched over behind the passenger seat. The tidal wave of information surging from this one word he hadn’t heard in over twenty years was unbearable. He wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve.

A little under an hour later, back in his apartment, he finally sat down, shut the notebook, and switched on his computer.

It was easy to find two or three reliable sources to confirm that butanediol had indeed been and still was being produced in Lendava, not far from the northern Croatia-Slovenia border, at an artificial fertilizer plant. This substance—this very 1,4-butanediol—had psychotropic properties; it could exacerbate depression and hallucinations and contaminate the groundwater. He quickly changed into dry clothes and then drove—forcing himself to focus on the traffic—to the state agency where he worked. He said hello to the doorman and headed to his office. He reached into a drawer and, after fumbling around, pulled out a sealed document, which he ripped open.

Two weeks earlier, he’d been leafing absently through a report about a research project studying an unusual series of suicides in the early nineties. The report had lingered at the margins of his consciousness, nothing more than a curious footnote. Which was strange because the study was conducted in the very village where he’d grown up, in northern Međimurje, and the conclusion specifically mentioned local people linking the deaths to a boy, a seven-year-old, whose initials were M. D. But Matija had been obsessing over what Gita would say about the novel, so none of this had raised a red flag. He’d skimmed through the report, taking breaks to surf the internet. He jotted down that the project had had an equal number of male and female subjects (within a 12 percent deviation, as required by EU regulations) and stuffed the report in a drawer he cleared out every three months. For the rest of the day, he’d felt dismal, loathing everything around him, but that was nothing unusual.

Now he devoured sentence after sentence and began cursing under his breath while scribbling, already on the seventh page of the notebook.

When he left the office, it was evening. The street was quiet. Nothing particularly remarkable had happened that day in Croatia, bad news had been taking a long weekend. The only item of interest was of an unusual blue-and-red flash of light that appeared in the sky between 7:30 and 8:15 p.m., which could be seen from almost all of northwestern Croatian and a part of Slovenia. Several photographs of it circulated across social media that evening, and several people who’d seen it described it for the late news. One of them said it was incredible that the aurora borealis could be seen this far south, others wondered what the hell it was. The next day the papers ran a few of the pictures and a brief commentary.

The scientific fact of the butanediol freed him of the blame he’d been carrying.

He walked calmly, as if actually seeing the city around him for the first time. He was all tied in knots. It’s not that he felt relief—that would have been too strong a word. He felt clear. What he’d written and what he’d write over the next three days, only stopping to sleep when he had to, when he nodded off inadvertently, was all addressed to Dina Gajski.