Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

As soon as I got home, I took down the box of photographs my sister had filed and labeled. I took them out and studied them carefully, but I didn’t recognize anybody. In each photograph I saw a different man, never the same from one picture to the next. I held one closer and closer to my eyes to see it better. When my nose was touching it, everything blurred, and only then did I feel as if I were seeing him clearly. More and more the traces of his presence were disappearing in my mind.

Mom yelled at me that my pants were filthy and my jacket was torn, and Granny said I’d never stopped in to pick up the seashells. She was about to spank me, but then she noticed the scab on my face running from ear to mouth. I told her she’d have to go with me to kindergarten the next day, the teacher wanted to talk with her. She sighed and said I should go lock the door to the workshop, and then she’d make me some yogurt and an egg. I got up and looked out the window. It was already getting dark, but I could clearly see Bacawk and Chickichee waiting for me out there. Chickichee waved, and Bacawk was holding what looked like a rolled-up sock in each hand. Two little kittens. He held them by the paws, and when he was sure I was looking, he swung them around. Both kittens went limp. He tossed them into the garden that belonged to our neighbor Tonči. A shriek escaped me, and Mom glanced over, but they ducked behind the walnut tree. Mom said she would lock up, but I remembered they’d told me they’d kill her, so I mustered my courage and raced outside, locked the workshop, and came back into the house. That evening Mom didn’t lower the blinds in my room all the way, and I woke up at one point and could see two shadows standing outside the window. I didn’t see their eyes, but I knew they were watching me. I didn’t dare get up to lower the blinds, so I prayed to the guardian angel more times than I could count, until I fell asleep, completely exhausted.

The teacher tugged her dark-red sweater nervously, and with a lot of hemming and hawing and clearing her throat, she spoke with Mom about how I was a nice boy, but I’d been confused and disturbed lately. They talked as if I weren’t there. All the other kids had already gone into the classroom, and from the hallway I could hear they were running riot, but this wasn’t why she was so tense.

“Ma’am, I know this is a difficult time for you after… after you’ve been left alone with the children… I don’t know what I’d do in your place… Really, it can’t be easy—”

“A person grows accustomed,” Mom interrupted her. Since the night I tried to throw Dejan into the river, she’d become much calmer. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she also never laughed, even when saying something funny, and she didn’t justify herself to anybody. “You can tell me, I see there’s a problem with Matija.”

“Well, you see, he’s… I know he and Dejan Kunčec wandered off a few weeks ago…”

“They ran away from home. No point in beating around the bush. Everybody knows it by now.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter—they’re children after all, as I always say. The problem’s this: Matija is not socializing with the other kids anymore. He’s alone most of the time.”

“So what? Other kids keep to themselves. Might just be their stinky feet.”

The teacher was thrown by this.

“Well… yesterday he came in all smeared with mud, bloody, in tears. Did you know that?”

“I did. On his way to school, he stopped by his granny’s and slipped and fell into the mud by the pigsty. He was scared of coming home like that, so he went on to school instead. That’s what I know.”

“Something’s going on with your boy. I’ve heard it said in the village that he threw a rock at an elderly gentleman, that he’s been crying and yelling for no reason, that he talks to himself… Somebody just this morning said two little kittens were killed and thrown into your neighbor’s garden… and then what happened with Dejan… Have you talked with him about his… dad?”

When I heard this I thought the teacher was going to ask Mom whether she’d confessed to me that they’d lied, that Dad would be back soon, that I hadn’t killed him after all.

“Yep… but I figure he… he ain’t made peace with that as of yet… He told me… Matija, why don’t you be off to the classroom?”

“Yes, Matija, time to join the class…”

I didn’t hear what else they said. The classroom was a terrible mess, which was a relief because nobody even looked at me.

I told Krunek that Dad and I had flown a plane. I told him Dad had been a helicopter pilot, but in Germany his friends at the airport let him fly a plane. I reckoned that adding “in Germany” was smart, because none of the kids had ever been there but me. That day Krunek began speaking again after a full two weeks of silence, and his first words were to Goran Brezovec and the others that I was lying because I’d said my father could carry a whole tree on his back, and then everybody laughed at me.

That evening we were eating our bread spread with pork lard for supper, and Mom said I’d be spending more time with my uncle now—he was probably the strongest person in the world after my dad. He’d take me to the soccer game on Sunday. And, she said, a man and a lady would be coming from Čakovec to ask me how school was going and if there was anything I was scared of. As soon as she said that, I knew exactly what I couldn’t tell them. Whenever I said what I was really thinking, people looked as if they were frightened or angry. I decided to pretend that everything was fine.

From then on, I asked Mom to lower the blinds all the way to the windowsill at night, so I didn’t see Bacawk and Chickichee, but I could hear them breathing and leaning against the glass clear as a bell.

The Miners played a good game, I could tell because the ref wasn’t a jerk quite as often. The men and their sons stood on the embankment because it was too wet to sit in the grass. And I was there among them with my uncle, he with his beer, me with my soda. Dejan said hi, but nothing more. The men talked about the prospect of a water pipeline for the village, artificial fertilizer, and paving the roads, and they cussed a lot. They talked about a man whose name was Natz. From what I heard I gathered that Natz drank a lot, never shaved, lived with his old mother, and fought a lot—and well. One of Uncle’s neighbors said a few days ago he and Natz had gotten drunk at a bar in the next village over and caused a ruckus.

“We sure did tie one on, like we never done before,” he boasted. Their harmless banter with three Slovenes from across the Mura who happened to be sitting at the next table turned into shoving and fighting, and knives were even drawn. The fight turned into a proper pounding—bottles, chairs, and bodies flying—and at one point Natz pulled a knife from the shoulder of one of the Slovenes, examined it, and then put it right back in, as if into a human ikebana. An ambulance had to come from Čakovec. When they asked him why he’d done that, he answered, dead serious, that it wasn’t his knife, so he put it back where he’d found it.

“Well, it weren’t my knife,” the men chorused, then laughed, clapped, and cussed. Uncle’s neighbor said how Natz had been lurching out of the bar, drunk as a skunk, at the very moment the police pulled up. Staggering, he barely managed to find his old rust bucket Fićo and struggled, in vain, to unlock the door. The police came over, slowly, and one said he mustn’t drive drunk. In his deep, sodden voice, Natz replied, intending to reassure them, “You just help me open her up, I’ll do the rest myself.” And they all laughed again, pounding their knees. I could see Uncle admired Natz. Having a friend like that would be nice, nobody would dare touch me. He’d be able to take on Bacawk and Chickichee with his knife and turn them into ikebanas. I sank into myself imagining this, and everything around me died away. When I heard “Honest t’ God, honest t’ God, damn-blasted old Natz,” and right after that, “That ornery old son of a bitch!” I turned to see where this Natz fellow was. I thought I saw a fat man with a beard and curly hair walking slowly, arms loose and swinging, along the dirt road toward the grassy embankment. Somebody scored a goal, which I missed, and the ref was a vile old jerk. As the game wound down, the men cussed more, and the burning in my belly got worse because I knew I’d have to go home where the darkness of my horror was waiting for me. When we were passing the graveyard, we saw my mom and sister by Dad’s grave. Uncle stopped the car, and Mom called to him to leave me at home and said she’d be back soon.