Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

I also didn’t like kindergarten because some kids were bullies. The worst was Goran Brezovec, who, on our first day at school, made up a ditty about Damir Noklec, who was fat. It didn’t even rhyme, but everybody repeated it and laughed, and it stuck. The main point was that Damir split his pants when he bent over, though as far as I knew, that had never happened. Goran Brezovec was the biggest kid in the class, his dad was village head, his mom worked at the post office, and everybody wanted to be in good with him. I, too, sang the ditty a few times. I was afraid if I didn’t he’d make up one about how a bird pooped in my mouth and that’s why I didn’t know how to sing.

There was a mean song about a girl when the teacher found lice in her hair. A quiet boy who wore glasses was nicknamed Kiss-Ass. I didn’t know what Kiss-Ass meant, but I imagined it might be a person who kissed his own, or maybe someone else’s, ass. Of course, I had no idea that when I grew up I’d kiss someone else’s ass, and it would be very, very nice.

Somebody made up a cruel song about Dejan Kunčec, who sat next to me in class and was my best friend. He pooped in his pants. We had just started drawing a forest and a river, when beneath the odor of the markers there was the smell of poop. The teacher was the last to notice, and she quickly sent Dejan home. He flushed red as a beet and lowered his head, and his tears fell directly in front of the light-brown stain that had dribbled down his pant leg and onto the floor. Goran Brezovec and a few others hooted with laughter, and the teacher opened the window, and then she asked us to raise our hand if we’d never peed or pooped in our pants. Nobody said a word except Goran Brezovec, who mumbled something about how he knew where the toilet was. That’s when I loved the teacher, because she stood up for my friend. She was fair-minded, and that was enough for me to believe that Yugoslavia, too, was fair-minded. At the end of the day, she told me to take Dejan his things. This was a few days before the long black car pulled into our yard, before the weird funeral performance happened. He told me he’d only barely felt something bad in his belly, and he’d had no idea this would happen. I knew just what he meant. To be at kindergarten meant constantly feeling bad things in your belly and having to go to the bathroom all the time.

“I felt this fart coming, and then everything was warm between my legs. And it was sliding down.”

“So why not say, ‘May I please be excused’ and run to the bathroom?”

Dejan gave a heavy child’s sigh.

“Once I pooped just a little at home, and nobody even noticed for two hours. I thought it wouldn’t be that long till the teacher let us out.”

“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.