It still wasn’t totally dark out, so I urged her to tell me the blood-chilling story about the Mura maidens again. How odd that all her scariest stories somehow ended up in the Mura. I personally didn’t think of the river as threatening. I loved tossing pebbles and leaves into it, and running along the shore following my little boats. But none of the grown-ups liked the river. It flooded often, and chilly fogs rose off it in the fall and made the frail older folks sick so sometimes they died before Christmas. In summer, clouds of mosquitoes rose up from the bogs and gave off the peculiar, fusty stench of stagnant water, so choking that people couldn’t even talk on the street those evenings and had to retreat to their homes. And every so often, word got around that somebody had drowned in the river. The most recent was Milan, a Roma man out for a good time on a humid August afternoon. Before him, a fisherman had drowned. The only things that were found were the fisherman’s bicycle, earthworms, and a three-legged stool that looked as if it were peering into the water waiting for him to reemerge. People joked that maybe he’d gone swimming with the Mura maidens, as he was quite an old coot.
Granny and I talked till dark that night. Before Mom came to get me, I asked what happened to the young men who were dragged down by the Mura maidens to the river’s bottom. She said they were still waiting there, beneath the riverbed in total darkness, for someone living to be traded for them. Perhaps she shouldn’t have told me that.
5.
I didn’t really like kindergarten. I had only a few friends among my classmates. The rest, I could tell, didn’t bathe every Saturday, and some had grime under their fingernails, which I thought was disgusting because my mom and sister said it was. Some were boring, and some were rough and loud and laughed for no reason. And somebody who laughs for no reason is a dimwit. There weren’t enough toys. When our teacher opened the toy cupboard, we understood, briefly, what life would be like for a very poor child. The toys looked as if our teacher herself had played with them when she was little. The teacher had a big bosom, which I liked looking at, and crooked brown teeth. When she walked, she left a lingering scent of cigarettes, coffee, and vegetable stew, beans, green bean casserole, or goulash, depending on the day of the week. The tables and floors in the classroom were old and crumbling, and sometimes I’d inadvertently bring home a fragment of the classroom furniture or flooring in my hair, socks, or sweater, or under my fingernails. If I’d gone to school enough, I’d have ended up taking the whole place home with me. The teacher and her friends always wore the same clothes and stood in the room they called the teachers’ lounge and smoked cigarettes as if they had no idea what was fun. Or maybe they knew exactly what was fun, and had chosen to do everything else. Out of nowhere, these harlequins and clowns would show up, and they’d dance and sing about how the greatest riches lay in friendship and how our Yugoslav seacoast connected all the peoples and lands the world over. In my opinion, they were total nobodies. The teachers read us a story about a girl who was persnickety and headstrong. The teacher said she was flighty and capricious; the girl had red hair in braids that stuck out on either side, and she did weird things just because she felt like it. This made no sense to me. Why tell us a story about a girl like that? If she’d been in our class, nobody would’ve wanted to be friends with her, and the teacher would’ve punished her. If I’d been in charge, we’d have been singing songs about ninjas and their throwing stars and reading picture books with KITT and Simon Templar in them.
We learned we were supposed to say that nowhere is life better than in Yugoslavia, because everybody here is happy and free and equal. Still, none of us knew what our country had done that was so important after—all by ourselves—we sent the Krauts and that Napoleon guy packing (which was enough for me to be ashamed of my German pencil case and felt-tip markers). We learned two big words: socialism and camaraderie. Camaraderie was the most precious treasure, and socialism was when everybody helped everybody else and there was no one in charge to tell you to do anything. We learned to sing a song about camaraderie, and the teacher asked what we thought about it. I didn’t know what I thought, so I said that what mattered most was when everybody was friends, and it was best when we all played together and helped each other and had camaraderie. She praised me, so I relied on that principle to answer every question I was asked all the way—now that I think about it—through my university studies. I didn’t think any of my classmates actually thought camaraderie was such a big deal. Maybe only Silvija Jambrožić and Suzana Perčić, who always played at pretending they were teachers. Nobody wanted to be their students, so they took turns being teacher and student, and were very strict with each other. Camaraderie, the most precious treasure. I wanted to tell everybody that my dad was getting me remote-controlled cars from the Quelle catalog so they would fight over who could be my friend and have that dumb camaraderie thing with me.
I also didn’t like kindergarten because some kids were bullies. The worst was Goran Brezovec, who, on our first day at school, made up a ditty about Damir Noklec, who was fat. It didn’t even rhyme, but everybody repeated it and laughed, and it stuck. The main point was that Damir split his pants when he bent over, though as far as I knew, that had never happened. Goran Brezovec was the biggest kid in the class, his dad was village head, his mom worked at the post office, and everybody wanted to be in good with him. I, too, sang the ditty a few times. I was afraid if I didn’t he’d make up one about how a bird pooped in my mouth and that’s why I didn’t know how to sing.
There was a mean song about a girl when the teacher found lice in her hair. A quiet boy who wore glasses was nicknamed Kiss-Ass. I didn’t know what Kiss-Ass meant, but I imagined it might be a person who kissed his own, or maybe someone else’s, ass. Of course, I had no idea that when I grew up I’d kiss someone else’s ass, and it would be very, very nice.
Somebody made up a cruel song about Dejan Kunčec, who sat next to me in class and was my best friend. He pooped in his pants. We had just started drawing a forest and a river, when beneath the odor of the markers there was the smell of poop. The teacher was the last to notice, and she quickly sent Dejan home. He flushed red as a beet and lowered his head, and his tears fell directly in front of the light-brown stain that had dribbled down his pant leg and onto the floor. Goran Brezovec and a few others hooted with laughter, and the teacher opened the window, and then she asked us to raise our hand if we’d never peed or pooped in our pants. Nobody said a word except Goran Brezovec, who mumbled something about how he knew where the toilet was. That’s when I loved the teacher, because she stood up for my friend. She was fair-minded, and that was enough for me to believe that Yugoslavia, too, was fair-minded. At the end of the day, she told me to take Dejan his things. This was a few days before the long black car pulled into our yard, before the weird funeral performance happened. He told me he’d only barely felt something bad in his belly, and he’d had no idea this would happen. I knew just what he meant. To be at kindergarten meant constantly feeling bad things in your belly and having to go to the bathroom all the time.
“I felt this fart coming, and then everything was warm between my legs. And it was sliding down.”
“So why not say, ‘May I please be excused’ and run to the bathroom?”
Dejan gave a heavy child’s sigh.
“Once I pooped just a little at home, and nobody even noticed for two hours. I thought it wouldn’t be that long till the teacher let us out.”