Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

My sister helped me pull on my PJs, tucked me in, and left. I watched the shapes of shadows cast on the uneven ceiling by the weak light from the hall. I prayed to the guardian angel my mother told me was always looking over me and tried to fall asleep. After a while, I got up and opened the kitchen door a crack. My sister was at the table, her back to me, taking photographs out of a shoebox. One by one, she held them gingerly, brought each photo to her lips, kissed it, and set it down to her left on the table. I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling.

For the next four days, I didn’t have to go to kindergarten. Everything was almost like normal when Dad was away in Germany, except Mom was wearing black and she’d had her hair cut short, and my sister’s eyes were glassy and she said very little, and only in a hushed voice. In the evening the TV would be turned on as if to justify the hush that filled the house, which I was finding more and more difficult to bear.

Wisps of fog floated all day long between the houses around ours, dispersing when the rain came down. Mom told me I couldn’t go out. I mostly looked at picture books and the ceiling, and through the window where the world was shifting from downpour to shower and back.

I perked up when Mom said she’d be going to the graveyard. I asked if I could leave a message for Dad on the grave, and she said I could. Since I still didn’t know how to write all the letters, I drew myself, then the house and the workshop, and Dad, with his hands and face dirty. Finally I drew water flowing out of a spigot, and a bar of soap. I knew he’d understand.

I’d only started kindergarten that fall, but during the hours I was there, the world outside my classroom became, in my mind, an endless series of miracles and delights. The same thing happened when Mom and Granny decided I was old enough to start going to Sunday Mass. All the best shows were on at the same time as Mass. On the Slovenian channel, there was the cartoon Živ-Žav , and I watched a Serbian kids’ show, Musical Toboggan , which I liked because they used Serbian words I hadn’t heard before. For example, they called children deca instead of djeca , and called rice pirinač instead of riža —the way we said it at home—and for paper they said hartija while we called it papir . I stayed home once thanks to diarrhea, and another time I faked whooping cough and got away with it. One Saturday after my bath I told Mom I’d rather go to Mass on Sunday evening instead of Sunday morning. She asked why, and I told her about Živ-Žav and Musical Toboggan . She said Jesus hadn’t chosen watching cartoons over dying on the cross to save us all. This was no consolation as far as I was concerned. I told her Granny said Jesus was already old when he died on the cross, older than thirty, so maybe he’d watched cartoons as a kid, too, and then still had time to die for us all later. In the mirror I saw a look that meant she was mad, and I knew that in a few minutes I’d be sent to bed even though it was only seven thirty.

Everything outside the church became enticingly delightful as soon as Mom or Granny sat me down on the pew and crossed me with the holy water. It stopped seeming so tempting as soon as I heard “Go in peace.” After Mass there’d be Sunday dinner—yuck—so no way could I go in peace. In those first weeks of kindergarten, the way I imagined everything outside of school also changed. As soon as I stepped through the front door, before I even sat at my desk, a giant seesaw, huge swings, and a trampoline would rise up from the ground, and on it the fat postman, Joža Popić, and Milica, the saleslady with a mustache, would be jumping, eating chocolate and ice cream. Buses would be waiting to take everybody swimming and out for hot dogs in Petišovci. There’d never be news, weather, or cooking shows, but always Tom and Jerry , ALF , or Knight Rider , with KITT, and movies with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. Farmland would transform into soccer fields, and farmers would play one-goal hockey using hoes as sticks and potatoes as pucks. We would all drink our cocoa cold so there would be no creepy skin from the cooked milk. As soon as I left the classroom, however, my fantasy world evaporated, and everybody pretended to go back to living their boring lives.

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.