Do you remember when we talked about how people sometimes catch their reflection in a store window and then adjust their expression, so they think they look just like the picture on their ID? They have no idea how much of their disappointment, disgust, and scorn they reveal on their face. They aren’t aware of little gestures, sighs, and tics that say everything they don’t in words. Our own collusion with the pretenses of others allows us to live in a more or less orderly world. But Imbra? Imbra now found himself trapped between a rock and hard place and saw no way out. He couldn’t ignore them, all those people he no longer mattered to, yet he felt as if he could read their thoughts. Now he found out what being mocked and despised felt like.
Bacawk and Chickichee were sure that he’d still be alive if this had been all he was struggling with. But then the suicides began. He feared he’d lose control when it hit him, and in a panic he began praying to be spared, hiding it all the while from his wife, with whom he hadn’t had a serious conversation in at least two decades. As is often the case with grown-ups who become religious when it suits them, so it was that Imbra the Collector began going to church. This was the only socially acceptable way of submerging his terror, at least briefly. He didn’t want to look pitiful like Miška, so he ridiculed Miška along with the others. Meanwhile he prayed in earnest and did his level best, but the fissure simply couldn’t be healed with prayer. He couldn’t hide; he was certain that this horrendous thing would grow inside him, too, and there’d be no saving him. He wanted the bodies of those who’d killed themselves to be exhumed and buried outside the graveyard, because otherwise the whole village would be doomed. He heard there were women with children who’d left the village to stay with relatives for a while. And he wanted to go, too. He found consolation in the thought that there really was somebody who was going around talking people into doing it, and he imagined how he’d beat the living daylights out of the monster, punch them bloody, knock out their teeth, and carry them out into the middle of the village for all to see, and then finally turn them over to the police. He never, of course, breathed a word of any of this to anybody. Sometimes, in the evening hours, he felt as if darkness were coursing into him like a swarm of ants, through every orifice and pore, and he thought he’d go mad at the sound of their antennae in his belly. He paced around the house, saying he had a few more things to see to; he moved tiles that had been piled on the roof since before Tito died, hammered a board onto the sagging old door of the chicken coop. One evening he had nothing left to repair so he called to his wife that he was going out for a stroll.
“When his old lady asked why he wanted to go traipsing around and what would folks be thinking when they saw him poking around the village in the dark, he told her he was going to take a look at some property he was considering buying, so she quieted down and muttered something about how a person can take as good a look in the light of day.”
He filled an empty Radenska mineral water bottle with water from the well and, sipping from it, he went out onto the street. Bacawk and Chickichee told me he hadn’t planned where he was going, at first he thought he’d just go to the chapel and back, but since he didn’t run into anyone, he decided to continue on to the parish hall. The whole way there, to his surprise, he was completely alone. This didn’t bother him. He thought the village wouldn’t be such a bad place if only it were completely empty one day a week. He didn’t mind the village, not at all—it was the people he couldn’t stand. He went by the soccer field and finally stopped at the Mura. He had nowhere to sit, so he climbed, naked except for his belt, up onto the first branch of a poplar. For a time as he sat there, he was happy, maybe for the first time in his life, because everything that had pressed him earthward, all of that, was down there below. He felt a chill and climbed onto another branch, scraping the soles of both feet against the bark as he went. He reckoned this was the last thing that would ever hurt him. He sat on a branch, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he fastened the belt around the branch he was sitting on and made a loop. He had to be careful not to fall as he leaned over to get his head through it. He looked once more across the river to the other bank, where the moon shone over the hamlet of Hotiza. He spread his arms wide and thrust himself free of his seat on the branch.
That’s what Bacawk and Chickichee told me, and, though I wondered at the time if they were lying, there couldn’t be any doubt when, several weeks later, Imbra Perčić the Collector was found. I heard about it from Mom long after we left the village behind. The only thing Bacawk and Chickichee got wrong was that he wasn’t on the second branch of the tree, but was hanging at least thirty feet off the ground at the very top of the only poplar tree growing by the Mura. He was found after Slovenian territorial forces and the Yugoslav People’s Army fought. The men from the village were combing the riverbanks for mines and biological weapons the army might have left behind. Pišta was the one who spotted Imbra’s body hanging up there in the treetop, and said: “Well I’ll be damned, a parachutist.” It didn’t strike them right away that there was no parachute. The body had already changed color, it looked like a half-rotten pear, and was, they said, buck naked. In the underbrush they found his clothes and the empty bottle of Radenska. Nobody could figure out how he’d climbed up there, he was no longer a young man. But so many strange things had been happening in our village that spring that nobody dared offer explanations by then.
Since they hadn’t been able to find Imbra, the council wound up asking Čanadi to do the lighting for the village games. When they asked how much he’d charge, he said, “What do you mean? A portion of bograč game stew and a wine spritzer,” so everybody had been calling Čanadi Mr. Decent, and Imbra Mr. Collector.
10.
The village games were oddly conceived. They weren’t held on the first of May, nor were they the finale of the soccer season. Instead they were held midweek, I think on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. People said it was to celebrate the declaration of Croatian independence, but that was a pretty shaky pretext. Beyond the village there were tectonic plates shifting, Earth’s pillars were rocking, but here we felt as if the last supports had long since fallen, and only by pure chance was the village still afloat.
Some fifteen mothers had left the village with their children, some to stay with relatives in nearby towns, others to Austria and Germany. Some of the wealthier retirees supposedly went off to a hot springs near Varaždin. The rest lived as best they could from one day to the next, relieved that the village wasn’t being mentioned in the news anymore. That would have been a real disgrace. As if it weren’t enough that folks from the neighboring villages used every opportunity to mock them. Not many people talked about Mario Brezovec and Zdravko Tenodi, but Trezika came up when one of the older women started acting strangely, and hardly anybody but me and his family remembered Mladen Krajčić. There was talk about Milica, who’d died the week before, but somebody said she had always been high-strung and that she’d stopped socializing after she had her baby, and maybe she’d started drinking too much when Mladen wasn’t home, and he had barely been able to handle her.
I didn’t feel like going to the village games, but Franz was finding it harder to bear the isolation. He was out on the street whenever possible, as if he couldn’t stand to listen to the hypnotic rhythm of his own breath. After Milica’s funeral, no one forced Franz to account for the supposed theft of the goalie’s gloves, and I hoped that story would just fade away and he wouldn’t have to go help Mladen around the house. If that bad thing happened only once, I hoped that maybe Franz could get past it. One day on our way to the soccer field, I told him about satellite antennas and how you could watch any TV show you liked; there were whole channels just for cartoons, and phones you could carry around with you that weren’t attached to the wall. He stared at me, incredulous, the same way he looked at me when I told him how I was really feeling. About Laddie and my dad, Bacawk and Chickichee, and everybody who was waiting for me in hell. I needed to tell him everything that day, and we needed to take an oath of eternal silence and friendship. When we reached the field, I immediately spotted Goran Brezovec, Dejan Kunčec, and a few other boys wearing the new green soccer jerseys of the Miners soccer team. Their last names were on the backs.