The Game

 

Lately Jesus had been coming to Earth only in profanities. Soccer made the point. Tomo, Maskarin, Mungos and I were playing the first match of the 1^st County League’s Fall Championship against the Vultures from Cres, when Tomo suddenly yelled, “You fucking Jesus dick!”

Only half an hour before, at the Church of St. Euphemia, he’d melted a Franciscan wafer in his pious mouth, after Friar Marijan, now at goalie, had carefully placed it on his tongue. It was Sunday, 11 a.m., the sun was already scorching, and a light breeze was the only thing that cooled our sweaty faces. At the mention of Jesus’ genitals, the friar, who had replaced his brown habit with a black goalkeeper’s jersey, just crossed himself and rolled his eyes. He knew Tomo didn’t think that seriously, and Jesus in a soccer game and Jesus in church were two completely different divine persons. As if a third of our Lord had suddenly turned schizophrenic. Besides, Tomo had two good reasons for swearing: first, it wasn’t his daughter who’d died, and second, they’d just scored another goal in our lower left corner. That was three to one for the Vultures from Cres, whose team was in part sponsored by the Griffon Vulture Preservation Association. All this was on our home field, which for the occasion had been cleared of the few remaining cars—it served as a parking lot during the tourist season. The field usually passed through two unequal seasons: the tourist, boring and long, and the soccer, important but short. This match marked the beginning of the short season.

Unfortunately, we were two down because we were incomplete: Globus, whose daughter had been buried three days before, was missing. And he was our best striker. Nobody of course expected him to show up at the field that day because his house was still full of people expressing their condolences. They’d come, have a shot of brandy, sit silently on the patio and just once in a while say something like “It’s God’s will” or “Be strong.” Renata and his mother only cleared away the glasses for Lozovaca, washed them automatically like two machines with arms and legs, and then lined them upside down on the edge of the table covered with a colorful, fruity plastic tablecloth. On the first day Globus had said when the mourners came he’d just stare into the tablecloth, into the colors, because he couldn’t look at the black of those ties and scarves anymore. Renata, on the other hand, gazed somewhere into the distance, far away from this island and its shore, somewhere beyond the sea where she used to go shopping for summer jeans and sandals as a little girl. Their eyes had not met since the kid had been buried.

The referee whistled the end of the first half, and we went dispirited to our bench. Mungos, a former classmate, now captain at the island police station, said, “Did I ever tell you my father played against the Russians in Hungary during the war?”

We all knew he’d said it just to break the depressing silence in which we dragged our tired bodies toward the bench, where a disappointed coach awaited us. But we hadn’t heard the story. And he went on and on about how his father had been mobilized by the Partisans while he was in high school in Mitrovica and how they’d sent him together with some other units to Hungary to prepare for a breakthrough on the Srijem Front with the Russians. He was completely immersed in the story, as if we weren’t two goals down. He said one Sunday morning they’d played in some demolished Hungarian village against the Russians with a ball made of old army coats. It was the end of February 1944. Early morning. The ground was frozen, and they put a press on the Russians, who still hadn’t sobered up from the night before. They were playing for a case of horse dung brandy. Up to the end of the first half, when the first Russian flew into the air, they hadn’t realized they were playing in a mine field. But at half time, while the poor guy was taken away to have his leg amputated and arteries tied off, they began boozing it up on that shit-brandy along with the Russians, and they got so drunk that when some Russian captain blew his whistle they all ran onto the field again. Every last one of them. Besides, it was war. They were used to it. It warmed up, the ground softened, it could have exploded under one of them any second. Mungos’ old man supposedly felt as if it was all a dream, something surreal. Never in his life had he dribbled like he did that day. He’d passed through the Russian defense like they were made of wax. The end result was six to one. None of them had flown into the air. It seemed it had been some forgotten mine, or else God had been so impressed by their play he’d decided to spare their legs. It was magnificent. Every member of that Russian unit had perished in the spring, at Batina Skela, trying to break through on the Srijem front.

After Mungos finished there was silence. All of us stared at him suspiciously, trying to decide if he’d made it all up. Then he said, “What are you looking at! The message is clear. We have to play like it’s a matter of life and death!”

With those words in our heads, we ran onto the field. The Vultures grouped in front of their goal, it was obvious they were going to defend themselves, save the score. So we’d be attacking in waves, like in that mine field. We ran all over, passing, dribbling, shooting. No one was selfish. All of us suddenly felt united, as if anti-infantry mines were under us, or those anti-tank mines that only explode when you jump on them, not with just a tap. It was 1992. In nice weather, when the wind blew from the coast, the rumbling of the heavy artillery from the Velebit Mountains could be heard in the morning silence.

But despite our unity, the ball just didn’t want to go into the Vultures’ net. It hit the posts or deflected off the goalkeepers’ hands, like in a pinball game. Clearly luck was not on our side. At the very moment I thought this the game somehow came to a standstill. I saw our players stop and stare at something by our bench. Even Tomo, who had the ball, stopped at the edge of their penalty box. As if the anthem had sounded suddenly in the middle of our attack.

In front of the bench, completely alone, in Adidas shorts and a T-shirt with the earth printed on it, Globus was standing. Ready to come onto the field. He hopped a little, warming up, and the rest of us stood there. The Cres team didn’t move either, everybody at ten hut, like an honor guard. After three days the bereaved had been resurrected, though not the deceased. He’d chosen the most important match for his rebirth. A sharp whistle sounded, and Globus ran onto the field. Slowly, with dignity. As he ran by me he said, “I couldn’t look at that fruit anymore!”

We played on with unearthly optimism. Suddenly, we could do whatever we wanted. In the first ten minutes we scored two goals. And luck suddenly came our way. The score was tied, Globus organized our attacks. All of us looked for signs of grief in his play, but there were none. He handled and stopped the ball like in the old days. Perhaps someone could have detected a little sadness in his headshots. I don’t know, but when he ran bent forward with his head down, I thought I made out something like grief in his strides. Otherwise, he stopped the ball on his chest, passed it to the tip of his foot with enviable skill, transforming the stop into a deadly shot within a tenth of a second.

That morning Globus demonstrated his true human greatness, like some ancient king or general. He led the island team across the imaginary minefield to a magnificent 4-3 victory. As we went toward the locker room, we heard shots coming from town. Somebody was firing a heckler in honor of our victory. Just then a thunderous boom responded like an echo from the Velebit.

In the locker room, while we took our showers, all of us finally realized we couldn’t escape the sadness. Standing in the showers, dripping wet and naked, Globus began to cry. All of a sudden we all got quiet, the murmur of conversation stopped. Only the hum of the showers could be heard. We all pretended to be doing something. We soaped ourselves, plucked hair, gathered our clothes. We didn’t want to look at the huge man with the shaved head whining like a little baby.

Mungos suddenly whispered to me, “Look! No hair.”

Globus was completely shaved down there. It was weird looking at the genitals of a crying man, even weirder that he hadn’t a single hair in his private parts, as if he’d been exposed to radiation. Even his legs were shaved. Clean shaven above and below, with a crying face somewhere in the middle. He had no hair on his chest either. Why did a man whose daughter had died a few days before scrape himself so thoroughly? I couldn’t decide if it was sad or just bizarre.

 

Animals

 

The town with four church towers has as many noons as sides of the world: the bells are not synchronized. St. Andrew always begins first in the dignified baritone of the massive Venetian bronze, which even through five wars was never melted down into cannon balls. A minute later a second noon is sounded by the apple-shaped tower of St. Justine, and later still the third and fourth noons are heard from the cathedral and St. John the Evangelist’s. If you were to set up a duel in this town, you wouldn’t even get killed on time.

Right after that fourth noon we climbed the shady stairs to the terrace of the Hotel Imperijal, the victors just out from their shower, our sports bags on our shoulders. In the hotel bar window our eyes landed on the posters that, as in the old days, announced the visits of traveling entertainers. One advertised a performance by Marcus the magician. There was also a photograph of a woman in a long wooden box being cut in two by a man in a tuxedo. The woman was smiling, but she had already been split, which created a shocking effect. At the bottom of the poster, under the photograph, there was a sign:

 

I cut women in two pieces

belly, legs and white tights,

I cut bodies with a sharp saw,

in the end they come out nice.

 

The atmosphere around the Tanzplatz and in the shade of the century-old pines was solemn, as if we’d just come down from a funeral, not up from an important victory. In silence the guys took a table next to a white stone balustrade that was a perfect fit for this old Habsburg hotel built under Empress Maria Theresa.

“And the dead people’s doctor will sit here!” Muki said patting my shoulder energetically. Somebody had set up a chair there—at the corner of the imperial table—and it seemed it’d been waiting for me for years.

“Pathologist,” I said. “That’s pathologist!” I tried even though I knew there was no point.

I saw that Maskarin, who seated himself next to me, was trying to tell me something. He leaned conspiratorially toward me and was just waiting for the server who’d come to get our orders to leave before beginning his confession.

He ordered cold wine with water for himself and me, and said, “You know, Fero, I think my wife pees on my food!”

He went on, answering the unstated question in my eyes. “Every lunch smacks of pee: the kale and chard and the chicken stew. It all smells of pee. Not a lot. As if she went in some bigger pot and then just took two or three teaspoons of it out.”

Mungos indicated Maskarin with his head and said, “Fero, is he bothering you with his pee stories?”

“I’m not bothering him,” said Maskarin nervously, as if Mungos had interrupted a plan. “I thought Fero might take what’s left of that potato salad I had for lunch today and have it analyzed.”

“Piranha on his mind, not pee,” said Tomo. “He’s screwing that kid from the store, so he’s waiting on his wife’s revenge.”

“We should console him,” said the coach, an expert at soccer and a layman in psychology. “That one would spill a pot of boiling water on you while you’re sleeping before she’d pee in your soup.”

“So Fero,” said Mungos, adding wine to the mix in my glass to strengthen it, “How long has it been?”

I counted on my fingers but couldn’t come up with the number. One hand wasn’t enough, two were probably too many. Loud laughter suddenly came over from the small group at the next table, unseasonable tourists in heated discussion.

“Journalists,” said Tomo, noticing the surprise on my face. “They write about the war in Lika. And they come here because of that bastard.”

“Fero doesn’t know,” said Maskarin. “We’re getting famous. An unidentified animal was seen in Dundo. Some kind of a big lizard. There’s even a picture in the Bild Zeitung.”

“I really want to know, why the photos of those bastards are always blurry?” Tomo said suspiciously.

“Because they’re not real,” said Maskarin. “Flying saucers either.”

But Mungos was quiet and you could tell that something about the animal bothered him. Muki mentioned his grandma, who’d supposedly seen the huge bastard swallow a lamb. Even I remembered those stories about the biggest island forest and sheep disappearing mysteriously.

Meanwhile, one by one the soccer players left, making way for the tourists who took their places at the tables on the terrace. I was surprised to see they were mostly quite fat. I couldn’t remember ever seeing such a concentration of fat in one place. A fat symposium. I blurted it out in front of the waiter, who brought me another glass of Babic. This one was free, on the house, for little Mirna in the heavenly soccer fields.

“It’s health tourism, sir,” said the waiter, indicating the fat people. “Their diet is proscribed, but everything comes down to the fact that we don’t give them much.”

“Whatcha gonna do, Fero buddy, these last few years, we’ve sunk low indeed,” said Maskarin. “No more normal tourists, just faggots or fatties. If they’re neither, they’re Czechs.”

“They drink mineral water,” added Tomo angrily, “and eat French fries, and I throw the fish away, back into the sea, and look at this prick, this magician.” Tomo pointed at the poster with a woman cut in half angrily and went on. “Kico and Tereza used to sing here before, and now this jerk is cutting a chick on the terrace, and he cuts the same chick every evening and she’s so drunk she hardly makes it into the box.”

“Not even the lizard can help us,” added the coach, resigned.

“I need you!” whispered Mungos suddenly. He was serious, which was unexpected. “I want you too see something.”

He stood up just then and gave my shoulder a discrete tap, which I guess meant I was supposed to follow. We said goodbye to the soccer players and tourist analysts, who would soon be moving on to politics and the detonations audible from the Velebit.

On the stairs Mungos hugged me like an old friend, and we started toward town, his arm around my shoulder. His behavior was rather mysterious. The ornaments on the tiles we walked on resembled some children’s drawings from Auschwitz that I’d had the opportunity of seeing in one of the synagogues in Prague. They were completely new and bright, like hard snow. And they screeched under our feet.

“This is new, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” said Mungos. “It’s from Goli Otok. Old stock. When they closed down the penitentiary, they found this in the warehouses. They forced the inmates to break stone and make tiles.”

“That’s why they cry!” I said. As if that explained anything.

When we reached the Hotel Istria, we turned right toward the old wine cellar. In the lobby, which used to be a tourist agency, the reception desk was torn down and everything smelled of urine. The parquet tiles had been removed from the concrete floor and placed in the corner next to sacks of sand. It was obvious that work had stopped suddenly, in the middle of remodeling. An obese rat ran in front of us and disappeared somewhere behind the piled up construction material. It was the size of a small cat. I tried to figure how many times you would have to spit on meeting such a big ass rat to keep bad luck away.

We made our way downstairs. I felt cold air coming from somewhere. We descended for quite a while down the semicircular metal stairs, at the bottom of which stretched the largest wine cellar on the island—a couple of large underground rooms. Only the first room we entered was lit by a weak lamp hanging down from the ceiling. The brick arches and sour, heavy air reminded me of when I used to buy wine here as a kid, before Christmas and Easter, and then take the heavy demijohns home tied on my scooter. All around were shelves with dusty bottles without labels. The puffs of air that came from the dark rooms made the cobwebs on the half-vaulted ceiling quiver.

Mungos stopped, listening, and then yelled into the dark, “Thief! You’re drinking again!”

First we heard the sound of rubber soles on the old ceramic floor, like the squeaking of the door in a horror movie. Then a man in a police uniform appeared carrying an open bottle in his hand.

“The glasses are there,” he said, pointing at a barrel that was tipped flat.

Mungos introduced me, and I shook hands with the policeman. “Fero’s one of the Pipici family.” His hand was cold and moist. We each had a glass of Rizvanac, swirling it in our mouths like experts.

Then Mungos said, “Bring her in now! For Fero to see!”

The policeman disappeared into one of the dark rooms. When he came back he was pushing a gurney with a body covered with a white sheet in front of him. There was blood on the fabric around the head in irregular stains that reminded me of modern art. At that moment the policeman’s Motorola crackled and his hand went to his waist. Somebody needed to talk to Mungos, and they retreated into the next room. The conversation was obviously confidential and about the corpse on the gurney. I watched the gurney and the dead body on it in the semi-darkness, aware that it would need to be pushed right under the lamp for me to really see anything.

But then the thing on the stretcher moved. I saw the sheet rising around the stomach and then slowly lower. I had a very bad feeling about this. I was used to dead bodies from my job, but I wasn’t too pleased about corpses that moved.

“Your body’s moving,” I muttered when the policeman and Mungos came back. Something in my throat prevented me from saying it more distinctly.

“Eh! Bullshit,” said Mungos, writing down something he had evidently been told over the radio. “You’d better take a look.”

The policeman removed the sheet at last. He did it routinely and theatrically like magicians when they take sheets from the women they’ve just sawed in half or stabbed with their swords. The movement made a small rat, which had been crawling over the body under the sheet, run away. The body, I had to admit, wasn’t moving. It showed clear signs of stiffness. It was naked and female, with huge breasts that had sagged down and moved apart and then stiffened. There was a nasty open wound on her neck, full of deep bruises and curdled blood, but it was clear she’d been pretty and quite young. The problem appeared lower, below the stomach. It was a medium sized male penis and testicles along with it.

“Dick’s bigger than Muki’s,” said the policeman. “And she’s a woman?”

“Let me introduce you,” said Mungos. “This is the Little Match Girl. They called her that because she’d been spreading the drip around. The sting must have reminded them of that. Matches.”

I confess it was the most beautiful specimen of a transsexual I’d ever met on the autopsy table. Or rather, on a facsimile of an autopsy table.

“Why here,” I asked, “when you have a mortuary and fridges up there? I remember when it was built, from the referendum.”

Mungos looked at me as if the question surprised him. “You know the people around here and still ask that? Rumors started spreading right off when we found her. People collected in front of the mortuary and refused to let the girl with the dick be put in with their dead. Probably afraid she might contaminate them.”

“The council president told us to put her somewhere cool, just not in the mortuary,” added the policeman, the whole time looking with disgust at that prick.

“Her name’s Marillena,” said Mungos. “She worked at the strip club on Palit. At Stipe’s. I wanted to show you before we send her on to Rijeka for the autopsy.”

“Where did you find her? Or him?” I felt compelled to make the point.

“Near the campground,” said the policeman. “This morning around nine.”

Her neck was literally all chewed up.

“What could have caused such a wound?”

“I don’t know,” I said and stared at the roll of flesh and curdled blood. At first sight, the wound was strange—deep tooth cuts in combination with relatively shallow bites.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said. “The tissue needs to be analyzed, and everything else.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Mungos. “Could a saw have done this?”

“Theoretically, yes, but not likely. It looks like teeth to me.”

“There’s no animal around here that could do that,” the policeman said. “Except for a shark, but that’s in water.”

“We’re fucked,” said Mungos.

After we’d put the corpse away, Mungos and I went to the town quay. A breeze was gently rocking the boats. Some twenty years before we’d used to meet here, in front of the Hotel Istria, as soon as the town had been plunged into dark. Then Mungos would say, “Hey, guys! Let’s go beat up some faggots!”

What a pleasant memory to have.