Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

The women on the street spoke in hushed tones about how terrible it was that somebody so young would take his own life, and some of them, even more hushed, asked why the family put out chrysanthemums, not carnations—after all, this was our Mario who died, and Mario’s godfather had a German pension, so they didn’t need to be so cheap. The men talked about Tuđman, the Serbs, the referendum, the potatoes, and the water pipeline. Somebody also said that he didn’t know how they could possibly have put a red lantern on the grave instead of the white one they used for innocents. That’s all wrong, and fuck it.

Aside from Mario’s mother, who spoke and gestured as if she were very sleepy, the person most shaken by the suicide was Zdravko Tenodi. He was the only one of the men to talk about Mario, about how he and Mario had been drinking buddies. He became strangely considerate and friendly. When he noticed me, he winked and asked me when I’d be coming to soccer. Whatever he meant by that, it made me furious because he was why I wasn’t playing. I wanted to spit in his winking eye. I didn’t know then, of course, that a few days later they’d be lowering him into the ground during a funeral with no rites, awkward for everybody.

A few days later, Franz and I, as we’d done so many times before, were sitting across from each other at lunchtime. I can’t remember what was more disgusting, my lunch of grits mixed with big chunks of gristle or Franz’s tongue, which occasionally slipped out between his lips. It was bluish and bulgy, like my foot when they took off my toes. They’d given him strained tomatoes to suck up through a straw, and this wasn’t going well because he had trouble breathing and kept trying to tell me something. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. He spluttered red globs of tomato into my white grits. For days there’d been rumors at school that Franz had to have leeches put in his mouth every day and that he might never speak right again. I was really sorry we had lost the world champion of backward talk. On the other hand, now maybe I could tell him about my astonishing deadly weapon. I told him what happened with Mario, that there was talk it had something to do with somebody’s wife and that he killed himself for love.

Just as the last piece of grits slid down my throat, I heard a ruckus over where the cleaning staff and teachers were smoking by the open door. They looked upset, and the janitor kept shaking his head, saying he and Zdravko Tenodi went to school together and he couldn’t understand how that man, so full of life, could kill himself. They said he worked at the ironworks in Mursko Središće and had a wife who worked in Čakovec and two kids. His daughter had married somebody from the next village over, and his son was in training to work in ceramics.

Two hours later, spluttery Franz and I walked home from school, and I managed to piece together bits of Zdravko Tenodi’s life from the people leaning on their fences talking. He loved a party, was a little brusque, and was strict with his kids. He sometimes mocked other kids, they said, like the Dolenčec boy the other day at the soccer field, but that was just him having a bit of fun. He wore nicely tailored pants and was always clean-shaven. And how, how could a person like that take his life? He didn’t owe nobody so much as a penny.

“He was behaving peculiar-like at Mario’s funeral…”

“He and Mario were so close, though he was much older…”

“So they were friends, does that mean he’d…”

“And his family, and…”

It all merged for me into a single communal village voice, a dull baritone speaking in the monotonous drone of prayer. Mom was standing by our gate, pickax in hand, talking to Zvonko “Democracy” Horvat. He reported to my mother on a daily basis about world events, kicking off with “Why’re they so crazy?” and “Poor folks,” before rattling through his review of the newspaper articles he’d read about the cockeyed world. I figured she listened to him because he was lonely and old, or maybe because he reminded her of Dad. I pretended to listen to Franz and watched as he showed me how they sewed his tongue back on, but I was actually listening to Zvonko and Mom. Zvonko said maybe Zdravko’s wife cheated on him, because she worked at the meat-processing plant in Čakovec and wore nail polish and makeup. And maybe Zdravko and Mario were “warm brothers,” whatever that meant. They’d go to Zdravko’s cottage and drink till morning, or so people said.

When we went inside, Mom told me I’d go every other day to Zvonko’s to help him clean out his attic, and he’d give me some pocket money so I could buy one of those bright, slippery tracksuits. I asked Mom if he couldn’t do it himself, without my help. She said sure he could, but he wanted to be kind to me, and didn’t want it to look like he was giving us charity.

I tried to draw Zdravko, but I didn’t know how he died (some said he hanged himself, others he drowned in the tub), so I drew him as a kid on his way to school. Over his head was a black cloud, and in it was a bike. I imagined him dragging the cloud along his whole life, and then one day the cloud finally came down and sucked him in. I put the bicycle in there so he could ride it to where he is now.

“You’re right, he was a decent guy. He wasn’t always mean to folks.”

“And you know this because… ,” I asked Bacawk.

He didn’t answer, but went on to say there’d been something eating at Zdravko for a long time that pushed him to be cruel and make fun. When he was young, back in the old days, there was a house by the road leading out into the hills, near the graveyard. A widow lived there, and boys were taken to her so she could show them how to make children, how men do it with women.

“They put their wiener in her hole,” explained Bacawk. “The two of us, we were there and we saw.”

The story goes that Zdravko was nervous when his dad, a grim, taciturn man, brought him to the woman. An older boy was the first to go in, and then she called for Zdravko. He went in but came right out again to leave his shoes and socks outside. His father said: “I thought you was already done. No surprise that you ain’t even able to do this right.”

She told him to get undressed and sit on the bed. She checked to see if he’d trimmed his nails and if he had head lice, hummed a melody he didn’t catch, took a warm wet washcloth and wiped his face, body, and balls. She took off her top, threw a leg across him, and straddled him:

“Well, let’s see, how your little one jumps.”

Zdravko froze the moment her breast brushed his shoulder and… sprayed out his milk.

I knew what Bacawk meant because the older boys talked about how stuff came out of your wiener when you squeezed it. She brought Zdravko back out, visibly ashamed. His father, without even looking at him, sent him to fetch a pound of sugar and some pork lard and told him to tell his mom it was for the village head. When Zdravko came back to the widow’s house with the sugar and lard, he could hear his father yelling inside the bedroom. She was sighing and asking him to hush. After that, Zdravko Tenodi was cruel to anyone smaller and younger than him, and he steered clear of those who were bigger and stronger.

“And when he killed himself, what he was facing… was both stronger and much, much bigger than him. But he couldn’t run away from it because this time it was inside.”

The three of us pored over my failure of a drawing of Zdravko as a kid. This was the longest I’d seen them in two years. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d been through because of them, but what they said was comforting. I couldn’t understand why they were doing it, but I didn’t care. They saw things I couldn’t see. They were filling in the blanks. And proving that this wasn’t my fault. But I wasn’t certain whether they were helping me or deepening my despair.