The Reaper

Mirjana is a city girl. It’s obvious: her heels click-clack on the rough Croatian farmland. Climbing on a tractor is quite a challenge for her. But what can you do: her car is stuck on the side of the road with an empty gas tank, and the only person around who can help her is stoic farmer Ivo, who was still harvesting in the middle of the night.

“Did Ivo bring you?”, asks the boy at the gas station. Mirjana has apparently landed in the kind of village where everyone knows everything about each other. Including each other’s darkest secrets, as becomes apparent when the boy worriedly tells her that Ivo raped a woman twenty years ago. What do you do? Any other person would probably stick with the attentive gas station attendant, get back to the car and get out of there, but Mirjana climbs back on Ivo’s tractor, which is throwing a jagged silhouette against night-time Croatia.

Is she acting out of pity or politeness? Does she perhaps see something in Ivo that others around him can’t see? Either way: her decision triggers a chain of dramatic events in Zvonimir Juric’s The Reaper. The boy at the gas station calls in the help of friends, family and police, while Mirjana drinks the most uncomfortable cup of tea of her life with a man who may be about to rape her. The sentence “it’s better without sugar” has never sounded so dangerous.

Hugo Emmerzael

Translation: Marjan Westbroek

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