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Excerpt

ANGEL OFFSIDES

1 Soccer Players

I was making an unforeseen visit to the island to mourn an unexpected death and
attend a child's funeral. I even bought a wreath-a futile effort to frame the emptiness
with flowers-and with it like a cross on my shoulder, I climbed the stone path to the
cemetery atop the hill. My friend's daughter had died. Her coffin was small and white,
no bigger than a kitchen water heater box, and on that little white coffin was a
wreath of white roses with a white sash and gold letters: TO MIRNA FROM MUMMY AND
DADDY. The white lace, in which the six-year-old had been wrapped as if at baptism,
was sticking out of the coffin. God loves irony. All this white was not accidental. Her
ather was a Hajduk fan.
In the homeland all our mortuary chapels look the same. Naked to the waist,
their Amazonian breasts protruding, four varnished oak Graces hold the coffin, while the
deceased rests on their arms. As if he's just scored a goal and is being carried to
centerfield, where instead of Agnus Dei everyone will cheer: Let's go, white!
The father's face was contorted in horrible pain, like in that distant '74 when the
club from Stara Plinara sustained a decisive upper left corner goal in the Champion's Cup.
The gods of the soccer field, which was next to the old gas plant, Jerkovic, Šurjak, Mužinic
and Žungul, front liners all, fell to their knees as if synchronized and buried their faces in
their hands, hiding them there for a long time. Somebody yelled from the stands, "Your
kid dying is better than whites losing!"
The kid was now an angel among angels. Even when she'd been alive, the color
of her eyes had reminded you of that bright blue that's used to frame notices of children's
deaths. It means heaven to children.
If they die before their first period," our teacher used to say, "girls go directly to
heaven, poor little things. They skip Purgatory." She'd been told this, supposedly, by her
villagepriest.
The coffin, meanwhile, had been pushed in front of the chapel, where a m
icrophone stood. It was then, I think, that something strange happened. A grizzled
gentleman, whom I'd had the honor of seeing on the ferry deck, en route to the island,
brought out a doormat and placed it discretely on the cart next to the coffin.
"That's Leichenbegleiter," a man standing next to me whispered in my ear."Excuse
me?"
"Leichenbegleiter," the fellow epeated, "Corpse chaperone. If you haven't heard
of him yet, you will."
I nodded, pretending to understand, nd looked toward the platform where the
coffin lay. From the side a bulky friar came waddling up. He turned toward the coffin,
crossed himself, leaned over the microphone and began his eulogy.
But nothing could be heard. Silence!
The friar was opening his mouth ike a goose fish in a crate, but there was no
sound. The priest's assistant came running in a panic and began to fumble around the
microphone. He tapped the membrane lightly and uttered one, one, one as if there were no
twos or threes in the world. And the friar clasped his hands together and prayed for
deliverance from such mechanical phenomena.
The devilish device finally howed mercy, setting the priest's words free. And his
voice thundered above our heads, the vineyards, and the parks.
"Brothers and sisters," it boomed, "at moments such as this we ask ourselves:
If God exists, why does he let little children die?"
An odd line for a priest to take. How would he exculpate himself on high when the
time came?
But the canny cleric managed t in the following sentence, his heavenly employers
in mind. "Even death, my brothers and sisters… is from God. Our sister, our little girl, our angel"
- just then, as though nobody would notice, he fished a little a crib sheet out of his gown,
glanced at it with his discrete Franciscan eyes, and went on - "our Mirna rests now among the
angels as one of them. When she was alive, she played on the streets and squares of our
town, her happy voice echoed through her home…."
While the hallowed speaker talked about her short life, baptism, hop scotch, and
various foolish things that children do, the audience wept in chorus. And there was no one
who did not shed a tear for the repose of our sister's soul, for Mirna, dead from leukemia at
the age of six. May she rest in peace.

2 Tomo's Tears; or, We are All Water

After the priest's cathartic "Amen" at the end of the sermon, a certain commotion
within the masses at the funeral could be felt, a moment of relaxation, like what happens at
political rallies when the next speaker hasn't yet taken the stage. One name streamed
through the audience in a whisper: Tomo, Tomo, Tomooooo… But Tomo could not be found
anywhere.
"He's taking a whiz," some oul mate of Tomo's explained. "He'll be here soon. Here
he comes!"
And here was Tomo, making his way through the crowd and wiping the sweat from
his forehead. Tomo the man, who used to be the most handsome of us all, irresistible to
women. They said he had "fucked half Europe" and would go far. But he became a fisherman,
took up Christ's work, feeding sardines to the people. He married his first cousin and had a
mongoloid daughter. He was our next speaker.
Tomo positioned himself in ront of the microphone, his stature broken, dark Ray Bans
on his face to hide the tears, a black tie on a sweaty shirt. Noble water from the eyes. Smelly
water from the armpits. The sea in the distance.
"Human life is like a river," he began, his voice quivering with fright because the whole
town was listening. The flies were buzzing, the crickets singing from the cemetery park, and he,
Tomo, a common fisherman, was speaking before his whole Renaissance town, which had once,
a long time ago, even given birth to two renowned poets.
"From its source to its mouth," he went on, "it flies by in the blink of an eye! When we
bury a man, we bury dust in dust. When we bury a sailor, we bury him in the sea: water in
water. When we bury a soccer player: we bury him under the green!"
The audience was silent and uneasy. Something was wrong.
"Tomo! Left pocket. Left pocket!" somebody volunteered.
In a panic Tomo felt for the left pocket of his black tuxedo, which he had borrowed from
his waiter brother-in-law, and took out another piece of paper. He looked at it, terror-stricken,
as if he could not believe his eyes.
The man next to me said, "That was for the deceased Mrkela, a fisherman and a local
goalie. His funeral's tomorrow. Both speeches were written by Pipo, the teacher."
Tomo awkwardly muttered several ords of excuse and directed his attention to the
other paper. And the town, the home of two poets, was quiet. Only the blowflies buzzed, flying
down on the faces of the people and drinking their sweat.
Then he righted himself, wiped his eyes under the dark glasses, and began his r
ecitation:

 			Your face was never met  by darkness
			Nor will death disturb  its memory,
			You have always been and  will always be
			In our hearts and in our souls.

After the word souls, all the people in chapel began singing their favorite song: Moj galebe. Tomo, 
standing still before his town, took off his glasses and cried openly.
							The scene was moving because  we all knew he was crying for himself. People at the 
local taverns had long  been saying he and his wife were lighting candles for St. Anthony that he     
should take that little girl of theirs, the Down Syndrome kid, as soon as  possible. They'd put her 
dead grandfather's earring, a present from before  her birth, on her ear. The poor little thing can't 
even eat by herself, though her appetite is so big she could eat a cow. And then she soils herself 
in bed. They have to put diapers on her even though she's already seven. Severe  retardation. 
And here somebody else's daughter had died. The injustice!

3 The Tiniest Cock in Europe

In those bright days at the end of May, when the tourist season was just beginning, we
exhibited Muki's dick to the German women for a pack of Opatijas. The moron's lower echelon was
distinguished by one deformity: his testicles did not come down from his abdomen, and his penis
itself was not longer than three or four centimeters. Ulriche from Mainz, with whom I later fell in
love, though others fucked her, pronounced an epochal sentence: "Das ist der kleineste Schwantz
im Europe!"
After Tomo, Mukela, whom we alled Muki for short-a local fool and boat farer, who'd been
unsuccessfully going to Rijeka for the past ten years to take the test that would have allowed him
to operate the boat he'd been operating for the past fifteen without the test-climbed onto the
platform. Even Muki, who yodeled in the local port and so impressed the German tourists, even he
had a deep inner urge to say goodbye to little Mirna. His obese dough-like body in shorts and
rubber Jugoplastika flip-flops facing the microphone made everybody in the audience laugh. His face
with its several double chins, and his handlebar moustaches were reminiscent of drawings of
Balzac. He even began in a Balzacian manner, by unrolling a piece of paper as if it were a
parchment scroll and reading: "This unfortunate little girl reminded one of a plant with its leaves
turned yellow, one just planted in barren soil. Had she been lucky and turned twenty, she would
have been magical. Fortune is the poetry of women, as dresses are their ornaments…"
Then Mirna's mother, moved y the dull-witted kindness, began crying and almost collapsed
to the ground, while two old hags, like caryatides, supported her left and right.
"His dick may be small, but he's got balls!" commented somebody, respect in his voice.
Muki's yodeler speech prompted admiring silence. Many hands patted his sweaty
shoulders when he came down to the crowd like a hero, a Cicero among the morons and a
message to the people: kindness requires no brains.

4 Renata

The tragic figure of the crying mother with the old hags as supporting pillars suddenly
vanished from our sight. People looked around in surprise. Obviously they were not used to child
funerals from which the mother unexpectedly disappeared.
"Poor woman must have gotten sick," said the old lady next to me.
"You're a doctor, aren't you?" said the Leichenbegleiter expert and pulled me by the
sleeve."Weshould go check what's happened to her."
We made our way around the grieving crowd and found ourselves behind a small stone
chapel. A strange sight: Mirna's mother squatting and those women shielding her with their bodies.
Her black skirt was pulled up and we could see her white underwear distinctly. One woman held her
hand, probably for balance, while the other passed her the tissues.
"You never know how your bowels will react," my guide said. He made it sound like an
apology.
The old women tried their best o hide her, but my eyes met hers. There was no shame in
them. She looked at me with those watery blue eyes I knew so well. They'd looked at me like that
more than fifteen years before in the park behind Villa Marijan when we were still in love. That
summer she'd just finished middle school and I my sophomore year. I'd experienced magical,
childish love with Renata, and my first French kiss on the terrace of the asthma clinic.
Disaster came with the first September rains, when I'd returned to Zagreb. My mother
died. Renata was the only bright light in that tremendously long year, and her letters gave me a
reason to go on. The thought of the summer, the strange shape of the island on the map, the smell
of tanning oil, all that would come to me suddenly like a chest spasm during those gray, utterly
identical days. And then summer came and I saw my love again.
She was now a head taller than me. She had stretched immensely during that year, and I
somehow had stayed the same. The tricky charms of puberty. It surprised us both. We said hello,
chatted a little, but my love was conserved and unrealized as if for a dead person.

5 Leichenbegleiter

"This man," I asked my neighbor and guide through the local fauna, "this Leichenbegleiter,
did he bring back Mirna's body from the hospital in Rijeka?"
"Oh, no," said the fellow. "He's a doctor. They call him Leichenbegleiter for fun. He was the
kid's doctor. People say many of his patients have died. That's why they call him that."
"But who came with the coffin then?"
"The parents. They came with her, poor little thing. They were told the coffin couldn't go on
the ferry unaccompanied, without a live escort."
"So what's he doing here?"
"He came to say goodbye to Mirna because he was once in love with her mother. From back
when she was in college in Rijeka."
"And the doormat?"
"His name is Jungwirth. He's from a well-known family of doctors. He had the highest death
rate in Rijeka hospital. Now everybody calls him Leichenbegleiter because he breaks bad diagnoses
to patients. All his colleagues from the hospital in Rijeka and even from Susak send him their
terminally ill patients so he can break the news."
"That's gruesome."
"My niece works there as a nurse so she knows all about Jungwirth. This conveying of
diagnoses to patients became so routine to him with the years that he started having fun with it. He
bought a doormat from some Gypsies, a regular woven doormat, my niece says, and put it inside his
office door. When he tells someone he's got cancer or eukemia, he watches carefully to see if the
person, who's been confused by the news, wipes his shoes when leaving the office. People say he
keeps a very precise record of this: first name, last name, type and stage of illness, possible
prognosis, and on the bottom of every file: "wiped" or "didn't wipe." My niece says they usually wipe,
particularly those with metastases. It's some kind of cleansing for them."
"If you listen to him, you're a bigger nut than he is," said the old lady next to my neighbor.
"He starts in with the lies the moment he opens his mouth."
"Don't listen to the old hag," whispered the neighbor. "She's jealous because she doesn't
know this stuff. There's more. He was in love with Renata, Mirna's mother, and he was greatly struck
when he saw her in his office. He had to give her the terrible diagnosis about the child: Alzheimer's
leukemia. There was nothing to be done. She had six months at most. And then he let her, too, all
in tears, wipe her shoes. She wiped for quite a while, rubbed her shoes against the jute surface. That
hurt: to watch the woman he once loved say goodbye. And it was all the doormat's fault. So now he
wants to bury it together with the kid, as if it was some mean part of himself."