Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

“Mom, people in the village are saying it’s my fault that all those people killed themselves,” I said after waiting for a few minutes at the kitchen table for somebody to ask me what was wrong or why I wasn’t up in the attic.

“Well, what about it? Who?” She didn’t look up from her plate, so I knew this wasn’t news to her. “No point in paying any mind to what the people say in the village. Sometimes what they’re saying ain’t particularly swift.”

I wanted to tell her that maybe those people were right and that sometimes I wished I weren’t alive. Or at least that I were invisible. That wasn’t such a big request, and it didn’t involve anybody else. But I couldn’t say that to her. We never spoke of the things that happened that fall. That meant a good part of me was missing for her.

“I might get a job in Varaždin, and if I do, we’ll all move away from here. I used to work in Germany at a shoe and boot factory, and they’re needing leatherworkers to make army boots and belts. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Move away from the village and never come back. That thought so thrilled me that I forgot all about my anger box and went to my room.

I drew Trezika sitting alone in her basement. I drew the sheets of paper lying on her table, but when I tried to add details from my own drawings and messages, they looked like unrecognizable squiggles. I wasn’t satisfied. I picked up my notebook and wrote, I didn’t know Terezija Kunčec, and I never even spoke with Mladen. This has nothing to do with me. As soon as I wrote that, I felt better. But I was missing a real explanation. After a few minutes, it came up on me from behind, borne by the shrill, nasal voice of Bacawk.

Apparently they had spent a little time in every house in the village, because they knew all there was to know about Trezika. She was a woman, Bacawk said in a mournful tone, who’d been disappearing from her family’s life, and she felt useless. They didn’t answer her questions, sometimes walked right past her as if she weren’t there. The fear of invisibility began jangling in her head, and sometimes she dreamed she was disappearing bit by bit. Her children and grandchildren wouldn’t eat what she made for dinner. At first they were polite, and said they were planning to make French fries in their fryer. She’d bring five pounds of potatoes over, but through the window she’d see them opening up bags of presliced store-bought ones, the kind that came in clear plastic.

“Until, two days in a row, she threw green beans and tasty goulash to the hogs, and then she stopped cooking. Cooking just for herself was ridiculous.”

And besides, she wasn’t hungry; she’d eat her fill of cracklings and bread in the morning, drink milk in the afternoon, and that was enough. In the village, after the topic of death, the older women most often talked about what they were fixing for dinner, so Trezika started lying about that. The quieter the women she talked to became, the louder she was and the bigger the lies she told. Sometimes she felt as if she was starting to believe what she said, and she felt less embarrassed that nobody needed her. Later, in her basement, overcome by silence and loneliness, sometimes she’d even look for the fictive pot with beans in milk.

Aside from the invisibility, she was afraid her body would one day simply refuse to obey her, and instead do the opposite of what she wanted. Parts of her had already declared their independence, they’d fallen away from her. She’d get up in the morning, but half of Trezika would still be in bed. After several months, she stopped looking in the mirror altogether. Everybody she’d known had died, and it was as if she was seeing all of them in the mirror. The drawings and letters she found at the graveyard were her only solace.

“Because she saw she weren’t the only one nobody cared for.”

She wondered what her son would say when she did die, how her daughter-in-law would be sorry that Trezika was gone, how they’d all repent. Her grandchildren would cry and feel sorry they hadn’t listened to her stories about the chicken-plucking bees, the corn-husking bees, and how children used to love sleeping in the hay in the barn. Sometimes in those warm-cold moments, she’d unwrap the kerchief from around her head and loop it around her neck, imagining the expression on her son’s face when he found her dead. She’d tighten it like that, little by little testing her pain threshold, and only when her vision blurred would she look in the mirror. Nobody except Bacawk and Chickichee had noticed that in front of where she’d hanged herself in her bedroom stood a bureau with a large mirror. She hadn’t meant to kill herself that day; she’d been sobered by the horror of seeing the awful funerals for Mario and Zdravko. She watched Numbers and Letters and was in such fine spirits that she made a noodle dish sprinkled with ground walnuts for herself, and then dug into the roast pork she’d cured, layered with bacon in an earthenware pot, a dish called meso s tiblica . The salt made her thirsty, so she drank down a whole pitcherful of water. Only then did the darkness overwhelm her. She wanted to see, once more before she went to bed, what she’d look like if they found her hanging from the ceiling lamp.

On the dresser were my drawings, and they were the last things she saw before the light went out in her eyes, when the chair under her feet tipped over. When she realized she was hanging, her face yawned into a surprised grimace, said Bacawk, and her legs flailed. She grabbed at the noose made of the torn apron and gasped, and her saliva sprayed the entire room. Swinging, she spun around her own axis.

“While she was watching herself in the mirror… she went limp. For a time, she jerked,” explained Chickichee.

“When Mladen hanged himself, it didn’t take long. He went limp right away,” added Bacawk.

He said that when Mladen was in his mother’s belly, she fell asleep one autumn day out in the fields amid the cornstalks and dreamed of water lilies and frozen puddles, and children such as these are condemned, from their very conception and ever after, to die by their own hand. Chickichee protested that was nonsense, so the two of them argued for a few minutes. But they did agree that Mladen hadn’t been dwelling constantly on death. It was enough that several times in the course of his lifetime, just as every person does, he’d envisioned this scene quite clearly. The scene left him fearful and confused, but also gave him an odd sense of comfort and warmth at the prospect of an end to the desire and trouble a person embraces by living each new day. And then the moment came when the vision of his death took over… Usually people think a whole series of circumstances have to come together for a person to take their own life.

“But it’s so easy. All it takes is being alone for a few minutes,” mused Bacawk.

Chickichee said that when people die, first their sense of sight goes, then taste, then smell, and then touch. Hearing goes last. Mladen hanged himself with a rope noose in the barn, standing on the hog’s slop trough. The last thing he heard was his family calling him to come and eat a meal of new potatoes, and he felt as if he could sense with his nose the soft and slightly oily smell of the thin potato skins. He also had just enough time to worry that the Krajčićes weren’t particularly good masons, and that he might break the beam.

The hours ticked by while I wrote and drew, glancing once in a while out the window. After Bacawk and Chickichee had said everything they had to say, they asked me why I’d never drawn them or even mentioned them in my writing. I told them I’d never forgive them for what they did to me when I was small and I didn’t want to talk about them. To speak of them would give them greater access to reality than they now enjoyed.