Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

The priest told him that some things must be left up to the Almighty, but he, too, spent several evenings in a row strolling around the village, calling to people from their gates and chatting with them about worldly matters. Had he invoked the otherworldly, the inscrutable, he might have done harm.

On Monday morning, the local vet drove through the village in his car, a Wartburg, with a big speaker on the roof. He drove slowly and called folks to a meeting at the community center hall, where there’d be talk of the situation in the village and about what “a sound mind in a sound body” meant. Only those who weren’t at work or out in the fields heard him. The farmers were still spreading fertilizer out there like crazy.

I was haunted by the presentiment that everybody in the village knew this was all my fault, but I didn’t seem to be attracting more attention in the classroom than I had before. The teacher told us to tell our parents or teachers right away if we noticed anybody acting strange or feeling down. The children made jokes; this had to do with older and weaker people, not us kids. Some said they might commit suicide if they were kicked off the soccer team, others if they were suddenly much poorer, and others if they were to hit their head and not be able to move anymore. When somebody missed a goal in our physical education class, Goran Brezovec mocked: “What now? Kill yourself?”

They all listened to him and thought he knew everything because he was the biggest and his dad was the head of the village. He said if you stare too long at the Mura, you’ll go crazy and kill yourself. You’ll lose your mind because the water keeps changing shape and never looks the way it did before. He said soldiers on guard duty kill themselves because they’re left all alone. A person starts talking to himself, and comes to find that he disagrees with his very own self.

The street felt a little empty that Monday evening when Mladen took just Franz in the trunk of his car. Now I started noticing all the other sounds around me, which Franz’s mumbling usually masked. The street had a hollow ring to it, probably because of all the centuries of unspoken words. I didn’t have anything to do, and I wasn’t drawn to my anger box, so I did push-ups and imagined I was pushing the entire planet away. It didn’t help much. I was soaked in sweat, but there was still too much rage in me. Late in the evening, when Mom and I were sitting in front of the TV watching Traumschiff and my sister was playing records in her room, somebody knocked at the door. I was terrified, I thought the police had come for me or, worse yet, that somebody else had died.

“Come over to the church. The priest has called us in. This awful evil has been visited upon us, and nothing is helping. We’ll be praying. The bell ringer’s there already,” said our neighbor Julika, her voice calm and quiet.

“What’s wrong? Somebody’s killed themselves again?” asked Mom.

“Nope, not yet. But Imbra Perčić is missing. He’s gone off somewheres, and nobody can find him.”

It was eleven thirty at night, and the streetlamps were already off. Phantoms were moving toward the church in the dark. The pews were full, people were praying the rosary. The chorused humming was broken only by Miška, who was dramatically late or rushing. Every time he came to the part “now and at the hour of our death,” he would practically shout. At the end, the priest said there’d be confession every day, and everybody should come: “With our purity, let us withstand the temptation of this unknown evil, which has spread through our community, brothers and sisters…”

He, too, wanted to know what was happening in the village, but he didn’t have his own Bacawk and Chickichee, so he had to rely on confession. We parted in silence at twelve thirty, and only Miška stayed behind to urge the priest to call us together every night to pray.

We walked behind two old women. One of them said softly, more to herself: “It’s like we’ve come to the blackest darkness. I never thought there’d be enough room in our little village for all of hell to fit.”

“Hell can fit inside one single person,” said the other, and they parted without a goodbye.

I wondered who hell would fit inside of next. I never would have guessed it would be Milica Horvat, Mladen’s wife.

They buried Trezika at four in the afternoon and Mladen Krajčić at five so folks didn’t have to go home in between. Instead they lingered by their garden gates. After the funerals, Mom sent me with a pail to fetch some milk. The street was still and empty at dusk, till Mladen Horvat’s car turned off the main street onto ours. I took a deep breath and mustered the courage to ask politely when I could join them again for training. For days now the thought of his sunny yard by the vineyard with its one wooden goal had been keeping me alive. Even grumpy Milica couldn’t ruin that beautiful picture for me. Franz wasn’t in the trunk this time, but in the back seat, and when Mladen let him out, he looked like a dog that hadn’t been let off its leash in a long time. He managed to bump into the front seat and the body of the car as he was climbing out. The streetlamps sometimes made things look different, but I felt sure his face was red, and he looked like he’d been crying.

“Now, now, wait a minute, what’s wrong?” Mladen called after him.

I wondered whether Mladen had been teasing him about the stuttering—Franz was touchy about that. You had to pretend you understood every word, and it was a fairly complicated business. But something else was going on. Franz had a chocolate bar behind his back and walked straight past as if he hadn’t seen me. I knew something bad must’ve happened, because he was completely silent—he made no sound at all. He stank as if he’d stepped in shit, and was walking strangely, knees pressed in. There was a black stain over his butt visible through the white soccer pants. I thought maybe he’d fallen on his ass or pooped his pants. I looked at Mladen, who was standing by his car grinning stupidly. He called to me loudly, now dead serious: “So would you like a Cockta soda and some wafer cookies again, eh, Dolenčec? Take care I don’t go telling people what you did to him. Just you watch out.”

He got in the car and drove away. I turned to Franz, but he was already gone. When I got to his house, I could hear they were beating him, and his mother was screaming something about what he’d done, but I couldn’t hear his voice at all. Something had silenced him.

The next morning I hung around waiting for him before school. Law enforcement vehicles and an ambulance shot past me. By the first recess, word got out that Milica had killed herself, that she’d slit both wrists. Apparently she slit them lengthwise, not crossways like they do on TV. She’d been at nursing school so knew there’d be no way to save her if she did it like that. Nothing made sense now. Could my rage have possibly ricocheted off one person and killed another? Because Mladen was the one I was angry at. I couldn’t have cared less about grumpy Milica.

“It’s not your fault,” I heard Chickichee whisper.

Mladen’s wife killed herself because, Bacawk said, she couldn’t bear life with Mladen anymore and couldn’t see any way out. She couldn’t have explained it to anyone, or said exactly what he’d been doing to her. They’d started dating when she was a senior in high school. Sundays she’d go with her friends to watch the Miners soccer games, and Mladen was the goalie. They all loved him in the village, almost as much as they loved Mario Brezovec, the drunk. He was polite and from a good family, and when Novi fosili gave a concert at the field, she noticed he had his eye on her. They married soon after she graduated. His father got a house ready for them. She was overjoyed, Bacawk explained, till she saw that behind Mladen’s kind exterior lay something dark and twisted.