Julika, known as Stockings, breathed through tightly clenched teeth at the funeral. Her late brother had worked as a mason somewhere near Klagenfurt and died there when he fell, drunk, off the scaffolding. He’d always worn his pants tucked into his socks because he said he didn’t want to catch his toe in the cuff, stumble, and, God forbid, fall and smash himself to pieces. A little farther from the grave, by the cypresses near the mortuary, a man we called Samanta—because he was always talking about the singer Samantha Fox at the bar—wiped away his tears. He was good at painting, and he painted portraits of Samantha Fox from pictures he’d cut out of magazines. He did a fine job painting her face and torso, but not her arms, so Samantha always had them behind her back, as if she were being arrested. Next to Samanta stood a widow who was known as John Deere because she drove a little tractor.
Next to her stood Đura, head of the village. He had clasped his hands in front of him, but his face was so twisted from holding back his sobs that his chin and nose nearly met. His wife, Mirica, pressed her purse to her chest and bowed her head so nobody could see her face. They were communists, and they didn’t cross themselves or say prayers. My granny told me the commies didn’t believe in God and didn’t think good people went to heaven, and she said all the baddies (including, according to her, the commies, anyone who stole, and those who worked on Sundays) went to hell. Đura and Mirica were the only ones who played their part well, I thought. If the believers actually believed my dad had been a good man, they should be happy now that he was better off than us in heaven. Granny told me you don’t have to do anything in heaven, nobody makes you eat or go to bed, and you get whatever you want.
Next to Đura and Mirica, who, as village heads and commies, probably didn’t need nicknames, stood the Ciphers. We called them that because a long time ago they’d had this cow everybody adored named Cipher. According to Granny, the cow was almost noble, with her stately gait and her hide, which was covered with beautiful brown spots, but she was most remarkable for her humanlike gaze. She’d look you straight in the eye and snort as if saying howdy. When Cipher died, Granny said, sadness settled over the village. The teachers at school assigned the children to draw a “cow or another domestic animal during the National Liberation Movement,” and several people wanted to hold a requiem Mass for her, but the parish priest wouldn’t have it. He explained that an animal couldn’t have a soul. “We don’t have to call it a requiem Mass, let the Father call it what he wants!” said somebody, but the priest did not oblige. Still, in his heart of hearts, he knew what sort of animal she’d been. At Mass the next Sunday, he spoke so movingly about the animals that kept baby Jesus warm that people were dabbing their eyes during Communion. The cow’s owner had been called Cipher long before the cow died, but he didn’t mind the nickname. They called his wife and kids the Ciphers, and later they even bestowed this nickname on his son-in-law, who’d come from Slovenia, just over the river from Prekmurje, and who’d had nothing whatsoever to do with that particular cow.
No one standing there on other people’s graves, right on top of the genuinely dead and buried, crying as they leaned on the marble headstones, had any idea that I knew the score, that I could tell the whole thing was a farce. I was onto them. To be clear, I was no child genius. Everything I knew about the past was just lumped together in my mind. For all I knew, Emperor Augustus commuted to work in a car. Jesus and Josipa Lisac, the pop singer, watched cartoons together as kids. The will-o’-the-wisp folk Granny had told me about had their own soccer club but didn’t make it into the big leagues, so the owner and the coach had a fight. I thought earthworms turned into snakes when they grew up. In Afghanistan, which we kept hearing about on TV, people went to midnight Mass through deep snow and to Hungary to buy their groceries. I frequently wondered what the pope watched on TV, whether ants could see microbes, and if they could see them, did they torture them the way I did ants? And when I was missing the words for something, I’d just point. I knew other people didn’t understand me most of the time. It’s strange, the number of things in the world I’m missing words for has changed. It’s so much bigger.
I wasn’t particularly sharp, but I was no fool. I knew what funerals were supposed to look like. They looked a lot like this—a pile of flowers and wreaths, a big hole in the ground… but as far as I was concerned, the coffin was just a big wooden box that could have been a decent wardrobe, and everybody was pretending, for my sake, to be burying my dad.
It was all a show put on just for me, an audience of one. The sobs got louder when our neighbors—Pišta, Vest, Rumenige, and Mario Brezovec—began lowering the light-brown coffin into the ground. They sweated and groaned as though with real effort. Pišta slipped and almost fell with the coffin into the open grave. Vest (who didn’t play soccer, but drank a lot and picked fights) was panting, “Fuck, fuck, hey wait, slow down, Pišta,” because the rope was slipping through his hands. The priest coughed delicately to cover up their voices, and just at the right moment because I could have sworn that Mario Brezovec farted from the strain. Things like that don’t happen at real funerals, I reckoned. Angels lend a hand at those.
And, I should say clearly, I had seen my dad’s body. When the big black car with German plates pulled up, and they set the coffin down in our living room by the TV on a makeshift bier, everybody fell quiet. Mom was flustered, she looked out the window and said something to herself. Everybody but me cried, even my big uncle. I wasn’t sad, I was happy because I knew this heap of pale flesh, this dead doll with a bluish double chin and hands crossed over his belly, could not possibly be my dad. Everybody should have been able to see this, even Granny, who bumped into furniture all the time, groping her way through life instead of seeing it. Maybe death was with us, but not on that bier by the TV. Death was smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee, listening to the conversation about how the spuds ain’t doing so hot this summer and it’s high time we started digging the ditches so’s we can pipe in running water.
One by one, mourners picked up a clod of dark earth, gave it a kiss, and dropped it into the grave, where it landed with a thud. The power of their performance stirred in me, if nothing else, a sense of awe.
I had a few ideas for how to explain everything. Maybe he’d left us for another family in Germany, and now everybody was pretending he’d died. I’d seen them do the pretending thing before when I’d wanted a red-and-white lollipop and they told me the factory had closed. Then again, maybe he didn’t have another family. He loved Mom so much he was always kissing her, to my horror, on the mouth. More likely, he was angry at me because last spring, when he was working in his workshop, I told him he smelled bad, and now he was punishing me. If I apologized, he’d come back for sure. The whole village would come over when I hollered, “I knew you were pretending!” and I’d figure out where to punch my uncle so it would hurt the most. Then there’d be a barbecue, and the grown-ups would smoke cigarettes and drink wine spritzers. We’d open presents: my uncle would get a new set of monkey wrenches, my sister would get something for school, and I’d get a toy I couldn’t care less about. The next day, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I would eat at the fish restaurant in Čakovec where I’d be allowed to have a second Coke if I cleaned my plate.