“Hush now, Democracy.”
“What? What did you say?”
“Can it.”
The fact that a reporter from Međimurje, the local paper, was at the funeral prevented the quarrel from spilling over into a knock-down, drag-out fistfight. And then somebody said that Franz Klanz had stolen Mladen’s goalie gloves and a few other things, so the boy would be going to help him around the garden now that his wife was gone. Somebody suggested it was only right and proper for the boy to learn discipline, especially since his parents were such bums. Mladen would probably end up buying him school supplies, he was such a nice guy. I began feeling faint, and I told Mom I needed to go home.
I walked past Đura Brezovec, the village head, who was telling the reporter she mustn’t write anything bad about the village, despite the five suicides in two weeks. He said there were decent, hardworking people living here. He was upset, clasping his hands, forcing a smile, and shaking his head as if trying to wriggle out of his shirt collar.
“See, people who aren’t from these parts won’t get it. They’ll think we’re all lunatics or something. See, people are afraid they’ll lose their jobs, the ones who work over in Slovenia. But you could write, for instance, that municipal funds have been used to buy the very finest fertilizer on the market today. The economy and farming are our highest priorities. And we are in the midst of preparing for village games, so do come to those; we’ll fix a big pot of bograč game stew, and the firemen’ll perform their exercises. Bring along your camera then, you’ll have plenty to take pictures of.”
Nobody could make much sense of what the village games were about, but I reckoned they wanted to bring people together in one place and distract them from what was going on around us. They’d been looking for Imbra Perčić, the electrician, to set up the lighting for the event, but nobody knew where he’d gone. Bacawk and Chickichee told me that evening that Imbra was hanging from a branch only three hundred feet away from us, by the river, high up in a tree.
9.
The next morning I left the house fifteen minutes earlier, to be sure not to miss Franz. He wouldn’t look at me, he just stared at the ground and tried to walk past. I blocked his way, he tried to go around, and I moved to block him again, and so it was several times until he shoved me away and mumbled something that sounded like “Evael em enola.”
“I know you ain’t stole no goalie gloves, Franz, I saw him give ’em to you.”
He shrugged. That was the least painful part of it.
“You ain’t going to Mladen’s no more, Franz. We’ll tell, we’ll tell that policeman, Stankec, he’s my friend, or the priest, we’ll tell him what that jerk did to you.”
Franz responded to each statement with silence and by spitting to the side.
“I’ll help, Franz. You ain’t alone.” I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t pull him out of this, though I didn’t know how to do that. I needed to figure out how to heal people, now that I was so adept at killing.
“We’ll run away. We’ll go to France. I have an aunt there, she’s waiting for us. We’ll go to a school for soccer players, where you do a little schoolwork and then play soccer all day.”
He was touched by my sad lie, because he looked stiffly to the side, hoping the air would dry his eyes. We parted ways at school without him making a sound. I thought I’d never be able to penetrate his silence, till behind my back I heard him mumble, still clear enough, “Hey!” I turned, and Franz pointed at me and mimed a quick kick, as if passing me the ball. I could see on his face that he didn’t believe we’d be able to run away. But he had a friend. Maybe that was enough.
At school the only thing the kids talked about was who’d seen the law enforcement officers and who’d heard our village was cursed. I was the only one who knew there was a new victim. His death was even less connected to me than Milica’s, but I found a way to feel responsible for it.
Imbra Perčić was respected as an electrician, but he was known for giving people cruel nicknames and being rude to his customers. His whole life he’d managed to be domineering. He wasn’t a member of the Communist Party, but he was the only electrician in the village, and in those last years of Yugoslavia, as I recall, this was a big deal. With something akin to joy, he’d leave people waiting for him for hours. Then he’d waltz into the house with his tools and adopt a tone of aggressive glee. After a few insulting jokes, mainly about the men of the household not being up to the task, he’d suddenly become serious and bend over the TV set or washing machine. That’s when he’d stop answering questions. Oh, how he loved leaving them hanging, bouncing off the walls, and ricocheting back to smack the person who’d asked. After an uncomfortable pause, he’d respond with the sadism of a misunderstood master when anyone dared interrupt his spell.
“Might be the cathode needs replacing,” the head of the household would say.
“The cathode? Oh, really. Cat-toad?” Imbra would look up, shooting a conspiratorial glance at the man’s wife. “And where is this cathode? Show me, why don’t you.”
The head of the household would fall silent and long to be anywhere else. Imbra would then say in a conciliatory tone: “Oh, it ain’t the cathode. We’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.”
He was infinitely sure of himself, so much so that it bordered on arrogance. “You must be joking,” he seemed to say. “How could you possibly be so dense?” The whole village rang with his inner song. At soccer games it wasn’t so much that he was loud, but that he’d time his gibe, no matter how stale, for that moment that everything got quiet, so he’d receive bursts of laughter for it.
“What’s up, ref? Having a bad day, are we?”
“Goalie! In from Switzerland? You’re as full of holes as Swiss cheese.”
He had a turn of phrase for anyone who happened not to be around just then, and with the phrases he maneuvered through a world ruled by asymmetry, turning it all to his benefit. For those who were a bit taller than him, he’d add Long to their name, Dry to those skinnier than him, and Porky for the ones who were fatter. He was a man of perfect proportions, and nobody seemed willing to dispute this.
Once, a few months before the suicides, he came to our house to fix the TV set. He brought me and my sister chocolate bars, a Braco one for me and a Seka one for her, and I didn’t like the way he talked to my mom. He spoke to me as if I were slow and chided me for not knowing what a voltage tester and a Phillips screwdriver were. He said I’d never be a real man if I didn’t learn how to fix things. I told him I was very good at breaking them, and he shot back that I should hold my tongue if I didn’t have something more clever to say. By then I had better self-control, and I didn’t hate him or wish him dead. But when Bacawk and Chickichee told me he’d hanged himself down by the river, I was no longer quite so confident. How much hatred did it take?
Bacawk and Chickichee said a huge fissure opened up inside Imbra when he began doubting his own worth some time back. And this oddly coincided with news that there was a young electrician named Čanadi living in a nearby village. Čanadi was cheaper, and we heard he was polite and didn’t bullshit everybody the way Imbra did. Imbra’s heart broke when he heard a few people in our village had called Čanadi and he did the job twice as fast while charging less than Imbra would have. And, as if fate had a sense of humor, now Imbra, the person responsible for cooking up all those nicknames, was christened with one himself. Folks began to refer to him as Imbra the Collector, because somebody said that they’d be setting aside the whole of their salary for Imbra to collect, even if there was nothing for him to repair, and that made everybody laugh.