Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

Franz spoke of Mario with admiration ten days or so after we didn’t sign up for soccer. Every day we dribbled a beat-up leather ball around and talked about how Mladen Horvat was going to show us goalie moves, and then we’d play for the neighboring village’s team and trounce the Miners the first chance we got.

“Mario said, ‘Come on, Franz, come on, you’ll play for us’—Mario said that, really, he came right over and invited me…” Franz kept repeating this, making it sound like Mario himself had invited Franz, and I kicked our ball harder and with greater and greater anger. I’d be alone again, now that Franz was playing with the older boys. It was going to be me and dumb old Bacawk and Chickichee for the rest of my life. Fantastic. He said they told him he was terrific at defense, and they weren’t even playing games anymore, just shooting penalty kicks. Franz never lied, I knew that. He didn’t understand that others couldn’t tell when you were lying. They told him he could come every day, and Mario especially had praised him. The happier damned Franz was, the angrier I got.

“Matija, come down there with me today, hey, Matija, will you come? Come watch how I defend, hey, Matija…”

“I’ll come, but just shut up,” I said sourly.

“Maybe they’ll ask you, too, maybe Mario will say how good you play, maybe he’ll tell you to come…”

“Sure, sure, fine.” This didn’t sound likely to me.

As soon as I got to the field and sat on a damp tree stump, I regretted my anger and envy. Franz stood in the goal, and the guys kicked balls at him brutally hard, laughing and shouting about what a terrific job he was doing defending and that not a single ball could get past him. He glanced over at me with a proud smile that even his pain-filled eyes couldn’t spoil. The blows followed one after another, and during every time-out he’d rub his ribs. When Franz started to lose steam, Mario piped up and reminded him he’d never seen a finer goalie in all his days.

I looked up to those guys. They were between eighteen and twenty, and we little kids hung on their every word with reverence. We listened when they gathered around a fence in the evening and talked about women, soccer, and which was better for wine: the local fox grapes or the imported varieties. We thought they knew what they were talking about because they smoked cigarettes, said, “Honest t’ God,” and swore, spitting to the side, ignoring us, talking shit about women, and laughing.

“What about Jadranka? I heard she’s up for it.”

“At first she held back, but I…”

“Smacked her?”

“Naw, just said, ‘Bitch, why won’t you, why won’t you. Gimme head!’ Y’shoulda seen how glad she was to go for it, how sweet she moaned.”

When I listened to them talking, I wanted to be just like them when I grew up, but now all I wanted was for them to be gone. My legs shook with how fiercely I hated them, most of all Mario Brezovec. He went to the well of a nearby house now and then to slurp down big gulps of water from the bucket, and as time passed he went more and more, as if he couldn’t get enough. I wanted him to die because he didn’t feel bad about hurting my dumbass friend. After Franz was hit twice really hard in the head, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t dare say anything to the older boys, but I hollered to Franz: “Franz, let’s go home!”

He replied, still happily taking the blows: “You go, I’ll play a little longer with the guys.”

Mićo, Goran Brezovec’s older brother and Mario’s cousin, spat to the side and called to me, “Hey, Dolenčec, you go home and tell that sister of yours to come to the field,” at which point they all burst out laughing, except Mario Brezovec. He climbed groggily onto his bike and called over his shoulder to say he was going home.

I sat back down. Why my sister, I wondered. I was pulled away from my thoughts when a ball—I don’t know who kicked it—hit Franz’s head really hard, much harder than before. They all froze, silent, and Franz’s hands flew to his mouth, and he fell to his knees. At first I thought the ball had knocked out his teeth, but I froze on the spot when I saw thick blood seeping from his mouth. As if a piece of him had fallen to the ground. Franz groaned softly, probably so he wouldn’t bother anyone, and with one hand he picked up the piece of him from off the ground, putting the other hand into his bloody mouth as if groping to see whether something was missing in there. What was missing was a chunk of his tongue.

I didn’t dare go over to him. It’s hard to put into words, but at that moment I envied every single person in the whole world who wasn’t there. The guys swarmed around him. Somebody told Franz to lie down, but he started gurgling and choking on the blood so they had him sit up. Mićo jumped onto his bicycle and went to find a car. After a few minutes—while Franz sat on the ground and bled like a pig, jamming somebody’s sweaty shirt into his mouth, holding his tongue in his other hand—Tonči, my neighbor, showed up with his Fiat 101. He’d brought a plastic bag with ice in it, and they put Franz’s tongue inside and gave it to him to hold until the ambulance came. Because of that scene, I nearly faint to this day—though I’d completely forgotten why—every time I see American kids in movies carrying goldfish in water in plastic bags.

More people from the village gathered on the grass. The boys who’d been kicking the ball at Franz said they’d kindly let the moron kid play soccer with them, and no good deed went unpunished. As they were packing up to go home, Mićo came flying back on his bike, white as a sheet, and said: “Mario’s hanged himself.”

“All right already, cut the crap. Come on, come on, come on,” somebody snarled from the crowd.

“Mario’s hanged himself. I was just at his house. Boris found him. He hanged himself in the bathroom. He’s dead. The police’ve already come.”

They headed for the village, but I stayed behind. I heard somebody say maybe Mario killed himself after he saw how Franz got hurt, what with Mario having such a soft heart and all, but then somebody else chimed in to say Mario had left before it happened.

When I got home, Mom had already heard about Mario but not that Franz was in the hospital. When I told her what’d happened, she didn’t believe me. I asked my sister why people killed themselves, and she said they did it when they were really sad, when they had nothing to look forward to, and when they felt there was no way out. I sat down and drew Franz, bleeding from his mouth, and the guys standing around him, looking away. I started to draw Mario hanging himself. I drew the bathroom, and then I realized I wasn’t so sure how people hanged themselves, by the hands or feet, so I didn’t finish. All I could think was that I’d begun hating Mario that day, and then he died. I closed the door so nobody would hear me sobbing. For almost two years, I’d managed to keep myself in check.

“It ain’t you who killed him,” said Bacawk. “They only saw him around the village when he was happy. Nobody knew how bad he felt sometimes… The terrible sadness he felt, you can’t even imagine. He’d be feeling real low, and all he could do was lie or sit there and stare into the darkness and long to go into the dark. Nobody knew it but his brother. He’s the only one Mario told—that he wished he could die. And his brother never wanted to tell a soul about it, because he wanted Mario to be gone.”

There was talk about how Mario would be buried. The priest was perplexed, he had to inquire at the bishopric. They told him no funeral for suicides, no rites. The older folks remembered they’d buried people who killed themselves by the graveyard wall in the olden days, or even just outside it, with no headstone. The thought of an unmarked grave was so awful that hardly anybody killed themselves. They first took Mario to Čakovec for an autopsy, or so we heard, to establish whether he really killed himself, if it was accidental, or if somebody forced him to do it. The next day he was laid out in the mortuary. I didn’t go, but I heard they dressed him in a turtleneck so the wound from the noose wouldn’t show. People, evidently, hanged themselves by the neck. I didn’t understand how a person could die from that. It seemed to me I could hang like that for hours. The white coffin was carried by the boys who’d been kicking the ball at Franz. They did bury him in the graveyard, in the end, at the Brezovec family site. There were no rites, but after the burial the priest came and prayed for him.