In the days after the funeral, I saw how wrong I’d been.
By the third day, I was getting angry that Dad hadn’t shown up so we could go to pick up some milk at the store, fiddle with the car, go to a soccer game and later down to the Mura ferry, where he’d have beer with the grown-ups and I’d slosh Cockta or an Ora soda around in my mouth. I was so angry at him that I probably wouldn’t have run to him if he finally showed up at our door.
Still, I wanted to bring him home faster. In secret I did the things that usually summoned grown-ups (sometimes I thought I had an invisible brother telling on me). I wiped my nose on my sleeve, but the only person who saw it was my sister, who rolled her eyes and walked away. With the door to my room open, I’d put one of my Legos in my mouth, which always infuriated my parents, who’d remind me, yelling, of a nameless boy from a nameless village who choked to death doing that. This time—nothing. Both Mom and my sister walked by a few times, and I eyed them, legs crossed and the blue number eight right there between my teeth for all to see.
Then I thought of something that would be sure to work. Dad seldom got mad, but he’d gotten furious once when I made a mess of things in the workshop next to the garage. He told me I was bad, gave me a time-out, and sent me back to the house. That was the only occasion he ever used all three punishments at once.
So after dinner one night, not long after the funeral, I snuck out. I left the door to the workshop open. Everything was organized the way Dad left it: the nails with the nails, the nuts with the nuts, the screws with the screws. I dumped out the boxes and grouped the rusty nuts, nails, and screws in one box, the dark-gray ones in another, and the almost-white ones in a third. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched for his shadow to cross the window. My heart pounded when I thought about how furious he’d be. But the only thing breaking the silence was a tractor on the road. I dumped the three perfectly rearranged boxes onto the floor, then added a big box of monkey wrenches. Again I looked at the door. Nothing. I took the biggest screwdriver, the drill with a cord, and a set of paint scrapers, added them to the unusual pile, and, finally, sprayed it all over with WD-40. I was more and more impatient. I must have said something out loud, because a shadow fell across the doorway.
“What? Have you lost your mind? Into the house, on the double!” The days had been so hushed I’d forgotten what it sounded like when Mom raised her voice. As I raced past her, she reached out and grabbed my shoulder. I ran straight into my room and threw myself onto the bed.
I ached, suffered the way kids do. I was overcome by a sullen, sad mood and would burrow deep down into myself. Away from the world and into me. Granny sometimes said I was pensive like my grandpa Matjaž, whom I was named after. He was a bit odd, stared at his feet, talked to himself, and paced around the village. I’d go into myself so deeply that I no longer experienced what other people did, and I saw and heard things others didn’t.
The disturbing and tedious performance of the days after the funeral hurt me because once, when we were playing, Dad had spoken of treasure buried deep in one of the dark forests above the village. He stopped short of telling me where it was, so I threw a tantrum and said I hated him. He told me that if that was the case, the two of us wouldn’t go searching together for the treasure. I was sad and angry and, maybe, hard to say (because I didn’t articulate it or draw a picture of it), maybe just for a second I wished him gone. And maybe, somebody somewhere heard my wish and granted it. The thought that I’d killed him had been hiccupping in my mind for days, and I bounced between that and the conviction that he hadn’t actually died at all.
Dad often sang a song about people who lived in a valley of dreams, where this boy and girl first kissed. He whistled the parts where he didn’t know the words, and sang the loudest when he came to the part about the valley. Until then, I’d taken this to mean that the two of us would leave the valley of dreams to find the secret treasure in the hills. Now I wasn’t so sure.
Mom came into my room, but I turned to face the wall so she couldn’t see my eyes. She said now it was just the three of us, and I had to do what she said and be good. I mustered all my strength and said: “Would you still love me if you knew I’d done something bad? Not like messing up the screws—something way, way worse?”
“What? I’ll always love you, come hell or high water. Spit it out, what’s this bad thing you’ve done?”
“I can’t say it, I’ll never tell.”
She let me go visit Granny, a few houses away, closer to the Mura. I was relieved, I could no longer bear the hush of absence in the house. There was always a subtle feel of absence at Granny’s (probably since Grandpa Matjaž died), but I was used to it there.
I helped Granny get the chickens settled in for the night, and then I played in her room while she knitted and watched TV. Her house was smaller, but more fun than ours. On the wall by the bed hung a rug that showed two deer drinking from a stream and a needlepoint tapestry of big rabbits, and in the kitchen there was a sizable picture of Jesus, a long-haired fellow with a beard and mustache in a red-and-blue robe. Through the red you could sort of see his heart, and he was pointing to it. I thought maybe he had a T-shirt on under the robe with a picture of a heart on it.
I loved my granny so much that I’d even watch the quiz show Numbers and Letters with her and pretend it was interesting. I wondered if maybe she was only pretending to like it for my sake. That didn’t bother me, maybe we both watched it because we loved each other. Mostly we didn’t say much except when I convinced her to tell me stories. I had to promise I wouldn’t have nightmares (as if that were something I could promise) and that I’d pray a decade on her rosary beads with her. As she put the rosary down beside the red-and-white polka-dotted enamel cup, her dry lips brought to life stories about the ghoulish will-o’-the-wisp folk, about the Mura maidens who drew young men to the river’s silty bottom, about the knight of Malekoci, who hurled his mace all the way to the next village, about the little girl from a song whose father drowned in the Mura though she escaped death, about the ancient church that sank long ago but poked up at times through the river’s surface, and about miners who were still buried deep down in a shaft up there in the hills.
These stories didn’t scare me when I was with Granny, because she seemed essentially fearless. She’d survived hunger and disease and the war with the Germans and the Russians and the Cossacks of Cherkasy, and she wasn’t afraid of bad weather or the future. Still, there was one thing that gave her nightmares: pop singer Josipa Lisac. Lisac wore weird clothes and stared intensely at the camera. Granny wasn’t really scared of her, she was really scared of hell, because she thought that if Saint Peter balanced Granny’s scales wrong, Josipa Lisac would send her to the fiery depths wearing spikes on her head and a metal corset.
That evening she told me about the invisible children. Adam and Eve had many children, and when they heard God was going to visit, they started washing their grimy offspring. They didn’t have enough time to wash the whole kit and caboodle, so they only showed God the clean ones. God knew they were hiding some so he decided that everything they hid from him, he’d hide from them. Ever since then, those children have been invisible.