. Spinning .

“The outside was ceasing to be.  After some quiet, clumps showered his casket.  They bumped against the wood, first loudly and then more and more softly, as the earth thickened above him.  Then only a dull thudding of shoveled soil, and then it grew quiet, except for a few choked sounds from above, as if a storm were brewing somewhere far away, and the ground carried the waves of thunder, like a murmur, through the ocean of soil.

And then it was quiet.  A grave silence.  Not a sound.  Nothing.”

And so Ivan has been suitably buried.  He wonders what will become of him.  During his death, the recurring symbol of a skull has entered his thoughts:

“Now the dry skull grinned at him wryly, the jaws clanking, showing brown tooth-holes.  The large, empty eye orbits loomed.  The skull grew ever larger, gazing stupidly, bringing forth senseless Nothing.”

Back to his childhood memories of seeking the answers from the skulls of those who died in the bunkers?  Is the reality of bones what makes the transition from life to death?  Is this the structure that holds the core of the soul?

There are some wonderful twists to the story here, but Ivan has been changed from his experience.  Novakovich’s final paragraph leaves us wondering:

“During the day, only brave boys come to the bunker entrance but don’t go farther, and they report that one can often smell fine Cuban-cigar smoke there.  And indeed, sometimes, at early dawn, willowy blue smoke comes out of the bunker and floats silkily.  And if you strain your ears, you might hear a sorrowful sigh accompanying the smoke, but you can never be sure, because some damned owl nearby tends to hoot around that time from the county’s largest oak.”

“The candles glimmered.  His visual screen was changing through all the nuances of brown, nuances of the soil out of which he was made, and it seemed that the art of dying, in dusty pastel hues, was being enacted right there—dust was turning to dust, in this beautiful and hazy and horrifying preview.  The browns were becoming dustier and dustier, less and less substantial.  He was turning into dust, which would be blown over the horizon unless it was contained in a good coffin.”

Since his wife, Selma found him unresponsive in their bed, Ivan has been pronounced dead by the village doctor who, while being a bit put out from being called away from his stool in the tavern, has also later managed to console the grieving widow to the point of a wild climax that knocked Ivan in his coffin off the living room table.  But Ivan is no longer of the living, and in his thinking, he forgives his wife and only regrets that he did not appreciate her in life.

“Ivan thought that the last day of his life had come—the last chance to think something essential.   He now had leisure and no distractions.  (…) Now he could think honestly.  He did not need to worry about whether his thoughts were presentable, clever.  No need to worry about politics anymore.  What a relief!  His death would be his own and nobody else’s—a private event outside the scope of socializing and nationalizing.  In his coffin there would be no spying, intimidation, balkanization, propaganda, ideology, war, taxation—nobody could disturb him.  He was free to think about what really mattered—death, eternal life, soul, God. 

Ivan’s consideration of God is of a very simple nature, as if his own new status is not a momentous step from life to death, being to not being, but rather like the anticipation of meeting someone one has heard much about.

“I would be happy if a cat or a mouse or a fly were scared of me.  That would tell me that I was alive!  If a mosquito believed I was alive and wanted to bite me, that would mean so much to me! 

“Maybe for God, too, it would suffice if a mosquito truly believed in His existence and tried to bite Him!  That might be all He is looking for. 

“Suddenly, he felt sympathy for God.”

Ivan is unable to clearly comprehend his circumstance, worries that death is this netherworld just outside of living, and his attempts at understanding what is happening to him is only—as is true for all of us—comprehensible through the limited tools of relating to life experience. 

Does death then hold the same possibilities of disappointment as in life?  Is that all there is?

"One white wintry day, a green mufflerless truck dropped Milan Dolinar off at home, maimed.  Milan carried his severed arm and leg in a potato sack, because he had heard that science could put his limbs back on.  After several weeks the ice thawed, and the hand and the leg rotted, despite Milan’s keeping them in the coldest corner of his basement.  Yet he kept even the bones, thinking that science would one day be able to restore his limbs."

In the above excerpt from the beginning of April Fool’s Day, as Ivan Dolinar’s father returns to his Croatian village in 1948, we get the image from Novakovich in the same stark honest manner that is war.  The narrative voice is not one of horror or sorrow or indignation.  It is acceptance of these things as part of life.  This is what struck me in the beginning of the story and armed with both the experience of Candide and recent studies of early western civilization, I thought of the difference in various cultures in their thinking on life, and the ultimate end of life—death.

“He took one skull with a hole in the pate and carried it home wrapped in newspapers like a watermelon.  He hid the skull in the attic, imagining it would work as a ghost-receptacle.  The executed man’s ghost would visit what remained of his body and would perhaps come out of the skull at night to smoke cigars and sigh with sorrow.  In the evening, while visiting the skull, Ivan lit a cigarette butt he’d found in the gutter, and smoked and coughed.  There was no sighing of the ghost, and Ivan felt brave indeed.  Maybe there were no ghosts, only souls, and souls went far away, to heaven or hell.  What would happen in resurrection?  He savored the mystery surrounding the skull.”

After medical school, labor camp, teaching positions, marriage, a child, and an illicit affair, and having experienced the continual upheaval of the Balkan wars and witnessing the death of friends while in service, Ivan finds himself unable to move or speak one morning.  He is fifty years old, and has tried every which way to make his life a full one, yet feels he has accomplished nothing, has touched no one, has no great faith or belief.  Yet he muses on his dying, as he is able to hear everything going on around him as he lays in his coffin; first on display in the living room, then on its way to the graveyard. 

Here we see a change in how Ivan views his past life, and his current state of death, as he lingers somewhere in between .

To be continued…

I have pretty much been brought to task by Mark and Steve to provide more in depth disclosures of my readings than I have been delivering here.  While my interest in reading and writing about my reading has been under the guise of reading to write (still with me?) I believe my bluff has been called.

April Fool’s Day by Josip Novakovich is fiction that contains political, religious, historical views of the Balkans in a period of time that is prime (Ivan Dolinar, the protagonist was born in 1948) for giving a voice to the underlying structure of a country and an era via fiction.  While I can say that my postings here have not touched on these things because I was not following that path of reading, the truth is that it is exactly what I have been pestering someone to teach me to do.  To read it all–not just as writer, but as philosopher, historian, picture framer, etc., in fact, person-who-just-like-everyone-else-in-this-world-is-going-to-die-someday and Novakovich gives just one look-see account of death that we may consider. 

I will, however, go back and provide some examples of what I’ve read, and my thoughts on them as I read them–even though I shared neither the text nor my considerations of them with you all.  The book, the author, me as a reader, and you as readers of this do deserve to see for yourselves exactly what I’ve been reading and writing about.  I promise to make it as intellectual as I can–though not on a level with my readers, I am sure; hopefully I won’t come off as a complete ass.  It will be better than the fact that I have finished the book and I liked it.