“Goran Brezovec made up a song, and he’ll tease you.” He parked his toy truck between the armchair and the cupboard, without saying anything. “But I won’t,” I said, and really believed I wouldn’t.
Dejan shot me a grateful glance.
The next day we were playing Chicken Laid an Egg on the playground, where everybody crouches in a circle, and one child runs around and puts a handkerchief or a rock under somebody. When they ran past Dejan, a few held their noses and the others laughed. I’d never really understood the game, so, to hide my ignorance, I laughed, too. Dejan glared at me. The next day he didn’t want to walk with me to school. I went to bed a few nights really sad because he was mad at me, and I didn’t know how to explain to him why I’d laughed.
After Dad’s funeral, something changed at kindergarten. Everybody was kind to me, and, most important, Dejan wanted to be my friend again. With the naivete of a child, I saw the finger of fate in this. Maybe Dad had left so the other children would be my friends and so Dejan would forgive me for laughing at him, and then Dad would return after a while. He knew nobody made fun of a child whose dad died. So my first day back at school after the funeral was one of my very best days at kindergarten.
That day I was in a good mood, and I couldn’t keep quiet any longer, so at recess, in confidence, I told Dejan what was happening and that my dad wasn’t actually dead. I trusted him because maybe he wasn’t complicit in the circus everybody else seemed to be part of. Sure, Dejan’s parents were commies and they didn’t go to church, but he’d told me he believed in God and ghosts. He said he hadn’t been baptized, but he’d been vaccinated when he was little, and for commies that was like being baptized. I tried to explain to him that they weren’t the same thing, but he yelled that they’d had a tree, too, just not for Christmas but for New Year’s.
He didn’t understand what I told him, so he told me a story about a man everybody loved who had died. Everybody was sad except his wife, who tried to convince people he had just fallen into a deep sleep and that it had happened before—he’d fall asleep for a day or two, hardly breathing, and then wake up as if nothing was wrong. They had to tie the woman to a chair so she wouldn’t throw herself on the coffin, but everybody who went to the funeral heard her cries for help. The next day, at the crack of dawn, a gravedigger happened to be walking by the new grave and heard pounding from deep under the ground. He knew that the man’s wife had begged them not to bury the man because she thought he was alive, so the gravedigger called out to people who were heading off to work in the fields to come dig up the grave as fast as they could. It was too late. The man’s suit was torn to shreds, and his fingernails were bloody, broken, and twisted across the tips of his fingers. His legs were doubled up under his chin, as if he had been trying to push up the coffin lid. One of his arms was unnaturally bent behind his head. On his face was the grimace of a man who ached to breathe one last time. That was ages ago, said Dejan, before the two of us were born. Only after that did the village begin holding vigils over the dead for at least one night, and sometimes—and I knew this, too—they’d put this little tin bell in the coffin. I let him tell the story all the way, though I knew he hadn’t understood me.
“I ain’t saying my dad was buried alive.”
“No?”
“He wasn’t buried at all, dummy. I saw what they buried, and that was no person, and no way was it my dad.”
“But they all saw—”
“Oof, what they saw. Did you? Me, I sure didn’t. The whole village pretended like he was dead, just for my sake, though I don’t know why. Maybe they think he abandoned us so they refuse to go looking for him.”
He saw I was serious.
“You gotta help me find him.”
“But where will you look?”
Good question. I didn’t know.
Later that day, I thought I saw my dad from behind as he was going into a neighbor’s house, and then later I saw a man with hair and a mustache like his leave a store. I knew he was close, but I couldn’t figure out where he might be.
I told Dejan I thought maybe the government had kidnapped him. Granny was always warning Mom that the government would take our house if we built a weekend cottage because that would mean we had too much money. And every time Dad came home from Germany, men in suits would come to ask him about what he’d been up to and who he’d been with there, where he’d gone to church and how long the Mass had lasted. I knew Mom and Dad went to German Mass in Germany, because there was somebody at the Croatian-language Mass who handed out pamphlets (I pictured these as being little videocassettes) against Yugoslavia. If the government had taken him, I reckoned, it must have been because they thought he’d built a cottage or gone to Croatian Mass in Germany. I knew I had to tell somebody from the government that it wasn’t true.
I knew that the people working for the government were police, customs officers, and aunties at the bank and post office. The aunties at the stores in Čakovec seemed suspicious to me, too. They were equal parts brusque and rude. They addressed everybody as honey and touched the slices of bologna with their bare hands. There was something comforting about the single-party system and the thought that there were no alternatives… that’s roughly how I remember that government. On the other hand, we also had God, and the parish priest, the chaplain, and the sacristan all worked for God. The ministrants were working for Him, and with them was a pile of invisible players—the angels, archangels, saints, and the like. Although they told us at catechism that God was the most powerful, stronger even than Yugoslavia, there was no talk of God at school except when the teacher asked who was going to church and made a list of us (until she realized it was easier to list the two kids who weren’t). The socialist system and God had some things in common—the Young Pioneer Club for the little kids was like first communion, and the youth brigades for teenagers were like confirmation, but as far as I could see, God and the government weren’t the best of friends.
Dejan said we could ask his dad. His dad was a car mechanic and a member of the party, so he’d probably know somebody.
But what if the government hadn’t kidnapped my dad? What if he was hiding in one of the other villages along the Mura? What then?
At the time, I thought the Mura flowed in one direction, and the Drava flowed the other way, with Međimurje between them, a little like an island, and I was seriously worried that Međimurje—for I wasn’t entirely certain how heavy it was or how deep it went—might come loose and spin around like a boat with no anchor. And then Železna Gora would end up where Črna Mlaka used to be, and Črna Mlaka would be where Žalosni Klanjec had been. The only thing that made this fear bearable was that I might be able to sit in a boat without oars or a rudder in the marshy backwaters of the Mura and watch as my world spun around. Then I’d switch all the names, and I’d help everybody move to where they’d been before, and everything would be fine. After the funeral I was worried that all of Međimurje really was turning and that Dad, when he came back from Germany, might’ve gone to the wrong village, where maybe they’d taken him prisoner. At a soccer game once, I’d heard shouts that people from the neighboring village were “rotten” and “thieves,” so that seemed a genuine possibility. I asked the grown-ups when they came to Granny’s, pulled the doily off the TV screen, and watched the evening news. If they’d said, “Listen, we pretended to bury him because we have no clue ourselves of his whereabouts,” I would’ve been the happiest boy alive. I asked them whether all of Međimurje could turn around. From the semidarkness, five pairs of eyes lit by the glow of the TV turned to look at me.