“Kindergarten.”
“So talk to your teacher, too. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ask them whatever you’ve got to ask. Off you go.”
In the lobby, Mom was disheveled and tearstained, and she held me by the shoulder and said I must never-never-never do that again and that nobody knew where we were. She’d had something to drink, I smelled it on her breath. In the corner, I saw Dejan’s dad slap him. In an inhumanly deep voice, he explained that there are bad people who steal kids, take them to Italy, and make them into soap and sausages. Dejan said I made him do it, and I didn’t hold this against him. His legs were shaking so bad he could barely stand. I guess that was when I understood what they meant when they sang that camaraderie was the most precious treasure, but I doubted anybody had a friend anywhere near as good as Dejan.
When we were on our way back home in the patrol car, each of us stared out the window. I wished Dejan would burp so we could giggle. Mom told Dejan’s dad she’d reimburse Dejan’s granddad for the bus fare by the end of the week, and he told her not to worry about it, he’d see to it. Through tears she said, “Thank you.” When she and I got home, she knelt down and asked me why I’d gone to Čakovec, and I was so scared I almost told her the truth. She was breathing hard and shaking her head. Although it wasn’t Saturday, she said I could take a bath, and she made sandwiches with cheese and mayonnaise, and we ate them in silence. I lay down on the floor of my room and drew a picture of the prison, the police with pistols, my dad sitting in a cell, myself, Dejan, and his dad slapping him with his big hand. Mom was ironing and putting things away in drawers. I paid no attention till I noticed she’d stopped and wasn’t moving around. I peeked through the door. She was sitting on the bed, holding black socks in her hand; she must have missed them when she put Dad’s things in the attic after the funeral.
7.
“So if the government ain’t locked him up, I guess he won’t be coming back home and he’s down there under the ground,” said Dejan, trying to stick a piece of paper to his pencil with snot. It was recess, everybody had eaten their sandwiches, and they were chasing each other around the classroom, spreading the smell of bologna.
It’s difficult for me to explain today, but I simply could not believe he’d gone when we buried that wooden box. Maybe I’d have understood it if somebody had really explained it to me. Your father stopped living after his organs failed. His heart stopped pumping blood, so the cells in his brain began to die. After a few hours, his body became stiff, and the microorganisms in his digestive tract began producing gasses. His body temperature dropped, and a process of rot and decomposition began that would end only when all that was left were bones, nails, and hair. These last two go on growing after death, so the corpse looks like a starving drunkard. There, if they’d told me all that, that this is what happens, some people die sooner, some later… I wouldn’t have gone on looking for him. They might also have said that death is not the end and there’s something after it that’s beyond our grasp and continues a person’s existence beyond their body, in another place, in cracks and fissures we cannot even grasp most of the time. If they’d talked to me that way, maybe I’d have believed them. But what the grown-ups told me was confusing and unclear. Mostly they’d say he’d left, that he was with other members of our family who’d died, that he was waiting for us, that he could see us.
“He’s underground,” I said, finally. “So that’s where I’ve gotta go looking for him.”
“C’mon, what’ll you do? Dig up his grave?”
“Not his grave. He ain’t in his grave. We’ll go to the Mura after midnight and tell the Mura maidens to give him back.”
Dejan snickered, closed his eyes, shrugged, and turned his head away, like grown-ups did.
“Hold on. He was never one for night fishing. How could the Mura maidens pull him under the water? And I don’t even believe they’re actually real.”
“Really? So why doesn’t anybody in the village go night fishing?”
“They got better things to do. At night, they’re either asleep or going at it with their wives.”
“My granny says the Mura maidens are too real. They guard the entrance to where the dead folks are, the ones who still haven’t made it to paradise. My dad’s there, I know it. At night, they lure boys into the water with their breasts and then pull ’em down to the bottom to drown them.”
Both of us were disgusted by the thought. We were certain we’d never do those things ourselves, whatever that meant, though Dejan once told me his plan was to live with a woman who had soft breasts and long red fingernails. He’d touch her breasts, knead them, maybe they would sleep in the same bed and watch TV together in the evening, but that was it. They wouldn’t make babies or anything like that.
“Breasts. Yuck. We definitely won’t be jumping in—we don’t care about that stuff, do we? We’re only going to ask them what they want with my daddy.”
“Okay. But I still don’t think they’re real.”
“Then you won’t be scared to go there at night. Or are you?”
“Scared? Take that back, or I’ll sock you. See you there, at midnight.”
I didn’t know what the maidens looked like. I imagined they wore long white gowns that drifted across the water and had black hair plastered to their pale faces. Their eyes were completely black, and they could see into a man’s soul, to steal what was warm in his heart. I didn’t know how I’d stop myself from running away when they appeared, nor how I’d ask them what I had to ask, but I knew the answer they might give me. My granny told me: a person can return from the land of the dead only if somebody alive is traded for them.
We agreed to meet by the old mill, where we’d heard the fisherman had disappeared a few years back. The mill was spooky by day, nobody had used it for a long time because the marshy backwaters of the river were dead, the water stagnant, the riverbanks boggy with water lilies and water striders. If phantoms were going to appear, this was the place. Dejan already knew how he’d sneak out of the house because he did it whenever his parents were grilling something and sent him to bed early. He’d stolen the extra key and hidden it, and after a while his parents stopped looking for it. I couldn’t go out the front door, but I was sure I could climb out the window. I was calm and settled that evening, I did everything I was supposed to without whining—I ate my whole omelet, brushed my teeth, and went to bed on time. I waited a few hours for my mom and sister to fall asleep. I shook when I remembered that outside the night would be dark and silent, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. If I could’ve, I would’ve let Dejan know we shouldn’t go just yet. Still, I didn’t want to ditch him after he’d been punished because of me. So I snuck to the door of my mom’s room and listened for her snoring. Then, over my pajamas, I pulled on tracksuit pants and a knitted sweater. I couldn’t get my sneakers so I pulled on two pairs of socks instead, one over the other, and closed the door softly. I moved two flowerpots from the windowsill to the floor and stood on a stool to reach the latch. I clenched my jaw, hoping the sound of my teeth grinding would stifle the creak of the hinges.
I raised the blinds slowly and felt coldness wash over me. There was something hellish in the outside world, as if a great evil were stirring that night, something that had compelled people long ago to build what they later called walls. I dropped down from the window and felt my socks get damp and cold. I glanced back. I probably wouldn’t be able to climb back in. Out on the street, I realized I’d have to walk past fifteen houses before I got to the turnoff that would lead me through the brambles to the riverbank.