Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

Dejan gave his father’s name and said where we were from, and Dragec suggested that Milena find the phone number and dispatch a patrol car to fetch our folks.

“So tell me, boys, what could have possibly brought you here by yourselves, all the way from home?” Stankec asked, offering us wafer cookies from a box.

“The bus,” I said.

Dragec guffawed and thumped his fist on the desk.

“And? What for?”

Dejan glanced at me, and at first I didn’t know how I could explain it, so I muttered: “I don’t care, go ahead and lock me up, too.”

“Now why would we do a thing like that? Did you filch something? Break a window somewheres? Run a person over?”

“Naw. I came here to tell you my dad ain’t never said anything against the government, and he only went to German Mass at church, and he never built a cottage. Never did none of that!”

While I was speaking, Dragec and Stankec glanced at each other, and their faces darkened.

“Wait a minute, hold your horses now. What’s your daddy’s name?” Stankec asked me solemnly.

“Gusti.”

“Dragec, look for an August or Augustin Dolenčec.” Dragec stepped out, and we were left alone with Stankec. He offered us pretzel sticks, and we nibbled them in silence for a bit. “Matija, where’d you come up with this? Anybody say stuff like this to you?”

“You locked up my daddy ’cause you reckoned he was saying bad things against the government and going to Croatian Mass…”

“…and building a cottage, right. But why? Did somebody come and take him somewheres?”

“Nope, in the village they said he’s dead just so I’d think he was, but I’m sure he’s alive. I came here to get him, and my granny says the government takes you away if you’ve got too much or you say bad things against the government or…”

“…or you build a cottage. I know, so you said. Matija, I’m pretty sure we ain’t locked up your daddy.”

At that point, Dragec and Milena came in and called Stankec over. Milena no longer looked as if she’d eat us alive. She even winked. They spoke in hushed tones, but since I was nibbling pretzel sticks and wafer cookies, I didn’t hear most of what they were saying.

“…if that’s the guy, he’s died…”

“…don’t say nothing to the kid…”

“…right, let his mother do the talking…”

“…no need for social services…”

I didn’t care what they were saying. I was happy I’d had the gumption to go as far as I had, and the room was even beginning to look a little less awful.

Stankec finally came over, and this time he was even kinder.

“Boys, nice of you to come by, but your parents are waiting for you outside.”

Dejan trembled a little, but he stood up and went to the door. Milena extended her hand, so we could part as friends. Stankec took me by the shoulder, leaned over, and said: “Friend, hey, boss, hold on a minute. Listen. Believe you me when I tell you your daddy ain’t in jail. The government wasn’t after him, not a bit. You oughta be looking for him somewhere else. Talk with your mom, and… do you go to school?”

“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.

“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.”