He held us tight and set off for his house. He must’ve heard Dejan sneaking out and followed him. I knew what it must have looked like to him, as if I actually intended to kill his son.
Strangely, I felt warm in his sturdy grip. He carried us through the dark village all the way to their house, stopping only a few times to catch his breath, never letting us out of his arms. When he opened the front door, Dejan’s mother was in the hallway, gaping aghast at her husband, then her son, then me. Someone had woken her, and she couldn’t tell whether the world she’d woken up to was the same one she’d gone to sleep in hours earlier. Dejan’s dad put me down, but he didn’t let go of Dejan. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket. We looked at each other in the hush of the hallway, in the middle of the night. Dejan’s mom fetched two blankets, one for Dejan, one for me.
“Where were they?” she asked.
“By the Mura, at the old mill,” said his dad. His eyes were open very wide; they were red with rage and relief.
“Mother o’ God.” Dejan’s mother covered her mouth with both hands. She said she’d put Dejan right to bed and they’d take me home, but his father said he wasn’t leaving Dejan alone and we’d all go together. I stopped shivering. As we left the house, I glanced at the wall clock. It was two o’clock in the morning. I’d never been awake this late, not even when we celebrated New Year’s.
Dejan’s father had to ring and ring our bell before a light came on. My mother called to my sister, and after a while there was a voice behind the locked door.
“Who is it?”
“Don’t worry, it’s just Đura Kunčec here. Open up, everything’s okay!”
My mother and sister peered out with the same expression of terror on their faces.
“What’s going on?! Where were you?!” yelled Mom when she saw me.
I walked past her into the house, and the Kunčeces came in after me, silent. We sat in the kitchen.
“I found them by the Mura, at the old mill.”
“The Mura? When?”
“A half hour ago. Your boy and mine.”
“He made me do it!” hollered Dejan with a voice that rang through our cold, empty house. He sobbed, and his father hugged him and quieted him.
Mom turned to me.
“Matija, tell me what you were doing there. This minute.”
I said nothing and stared at the floor. They wouldn’t understand anyway.
“Have you lost your mind? What’s wrong with you? What am I supposed to do with this child?” Her voice gave way to sobs.
Dejan’s mother said: “But that’s not all. There’s something else you need to know…”
They sent Dejan to the car, though it was freezing cold outside, and I was told to go to my room. Our eyes met as he was leaving, and I could see he was done with me.
I got out of my wet clothes, lay down, and pulled up the covers. I could hear what they were saying in the kitchen. Dejan’s dad tried to speak softly, but his voice was so deep that he couldn’t keep it in check. He said that I’d tried to talk Dejan into jumping into the water, and that I was going to push him in when he refused. Dejan’s mother interrupted, agitated and loud. She cried wildly that she was afraid for her boy, that he was her only child. Her husband tried to interrupt, but she couldn’t stop until she’d said she was sorry, but Dejan and I couldn’t spend time together after this.
Mom kept asking them to forgive her, saying how ashamed she was. They left without saying goodbye. I quickly switched off my light and pretended to be asleep. My mother and sister came into the room anyway, turned on the light, and sat me up.
“Don’t hate me,” I repeated, but Mom didn’t reply.
“Tell me what you were doing there. You are not going to sleep till you tell me what you were doing,” she said, furious.
I looked her in the eyes and said nothing. The first slap didn’t surprise me as much as the second one, from my sister. Then the third, and more, came from my own hand. Mom grabbed my wrist and spat, “You’re gonna tell me what was going on out there, or I’ll beat you into the dark, dark earth.”
“We was out looking for Daddy.”
My mother and sister, shocked, stared off in opposite directions. Something might’ve snapped in them if their gazes had met.
“We went looking for him because I think they’re holding him in the land of the dead. So I was going to trade Dejan for him. But I was going to come back for Dejan, and…”
“Listen up, now.” She held me tighter. “You won’t find him. He’s dead and he’s gone. There’s no place on Earth you’ll find him, so stop looking. You’ve got me, and you’ve got your sister, and he’s looking down on you from heaven, and looking after you, but he can’t help you if you don’t help yourself! Act like a normal boy, otherwise… Otherwise they’ll take you… They’ll think I ain’t looking after you like I should, and they’ll take you away, understand? Stop looking for him!”
For a moment, I wanted to believe her. If I believed, everybody would be nice to me, and they’d forget what I’d done. If only I could believe. The next morning at school, it was clear I was on my own. Dejan walked right by me, saying nothing, and sat on the last bench at the back of the room with the boy we’d called Kiss-Ass. That was when the loneliness started.
8.
Those days I barely spoke to anyone at school. Silvija Jambrožić and Suzana Perčić spoke to me a few times; they thought if they wanted to be teachers, they should practice talking to the kids everybody else hated. The others eyed me strangely, I thought, though I didn’t believe Dejan told anyone about that night. Granny, Mom, my sister, my uncle, and his wife treated me like they always had, and I made an effort to be especially good and to do everything they told me without complaint. I made two drawings around then, one of the river showing Dejan and me, and my dad’s face watching us from the water, and in the other I’m sitting on a bench while other children are playing. I went with Mom to the cemetery and left my drawings there under the graveside lantern, or in the little trough behind the headstone. The next day the drawings were always gone, and that was enough to convince me he was getting them. Traces of Dad’s presence disappeared bit by bit from our house. Reminders of him appeared now and then in unexpected places. Mom put his deodorant by the toilet for us to spray after pooping. My sister found an old note in a drawer saying he’d gone off to our neighbor Tonči’s to pick up tires. I was finding it harder and harder to wipe the painful grimace from my face, and several nights I dreamed I was vanishing. In my dream people came to see the vanishing boy. They tried to grab parts of me, but I always slipped through their fingers.
A few days after the night by the river with Dejan, when Mom and I were at the store, I thought I saw the two women at the end of the aisle talking in hushed tones with the saleslady, who was pointing at us. When we got closer all three said hello loudly, oozing friendliness, and talked brightly with Mom about how the harvest wasn’t great this year, and how the community ought to get a better fertilizer for the people who were farming. This was the topic on everybody’s lips in the village. The only ones against it were those who worked in Slovenia, because they wanted the money to be used for paving the dirt roads going into the hills. In the winter they found it hard to get there through the snow. People were even more insistent about laying a pipeline for running water. In the village we still drank the water from our wells. Emotions were running high that autumn; people flashed duplicitous smiles, and dismissed anyone who disagreed as clueless. The women listened and committed to memory who said what, and then rehashed it all whenever they ran into one another, like those ladies with my mom.