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  His name is basically the same as mine, except that mine is Josip, the Croatian version of Joseph, and his is the English. My father’s name was Josip as well. I know in many traditions it’s considered bad luck to name your son the same name as yours, but I don’t think I had much choice; there are so few traditions in my family, it’s easier to break one than to create one or keep one. My father’s father was Josip, and his father was Josip; that one was killed by a tree when my grandfather was only three years old.

  My father apparently didn’t feel like continuing the tradition to name the eldest son Josip, so he named my brother Vladimir. Another, he named Ivan, and then when I was born, my father pondered what the hell to name me. My mother wasn’t interested in naming me since I had given her too much pain in childbirth; she nearly died. That was before C-sections. So Vladimir told my father, You forgot something.

  And then he remembered. Oh, of course.

  And so, thanks to that crazy tradition, to see what my tombstone will look like I go to the cemetery and see my father’s, with Josip Novakovic clearly inscribed in silver letters.

  When you have a father, you learn how to become a father. At first, I was excellent friends with my son, but lately we have our problems. He can’t stand it if I win at ping-pong or chess. I tell him, what would you like me to be, a loser? I played this game for thirty years and you for thirty days and you already want to beat me? When he was six I taught him how to play soccer, and if I scored more than he did, he cried, so I had to pretend that I was trying but would have to let him win if I wanted him to continue. Then we went to a soccer practice at his grade school. I did the same thing with the boys in school, when I was a goalie for a joke. I let a ball pass by me into the net. My son cried. I said, what’s wrong? It turned out he believed that I was the best soccer player in the world, invincible, and that a kid could score on me seemed to him insufferable. He had just lost the image of an invincible father, and that shook him up. Of course, that he could score against me would make him the best player, and my letting others score not only devaluated my image but also his.

  How necessary are fathers? Most mammalian families don’t include fathers. At the essential biological level, father is not a necessity, mother is. Maybe it’s a matter of evolution that gives humans an edge to have a father assist with feeding and protection, but even so, in the early stages of civilization, fathers usually didn’t hang around that much. They were out hunting, waging wars, engaging in risky activities that frequently resulted in their early deaths. And when they died, other men could take over the protective functions for the tribe, of hunting and waging wars. In old Hebrew marriage laws, if a man died, his brother was to take over the role of husband to the widow. So, a specific father is dispensable. A father who always stayed at home was perhaps a blocker of development for kids; with his presence, perhaps the male children aren’t propelled into work and independence quite so quickly as without him.

  Despite the sense of uncertainty that losing my father gave me, I found out that I was more independent now, freer. I could use my father’s absence to my advantage. When I was 12, I was about to be excommunicated from the Baptist church because of several incidents—growing long hair, smoking cigarettes, and stealing empty wallets at the town fair. I missed many meetings, and during prayer meetings I refused to pray. The tyrannical minister came to me and said that because I didn’t have a father, the church elders had decided to give me another chance. If I needed a father, he’d act as one. I thanked him for the offer. In retrospect, that sounds like Bush’s offer to Putin to bring democracy to Russia.

  At school, I skipped many classes. For a while, I’d walk toward the school, circle around it in the park, and walk on into the forest, and spend the whole day climbing trees and reading. My poor attendance was excused since I didn’t have a father. The house was quieter now. I could afford to be lazy. I didn’t have to play musical instruments. But my brother, who refused to play while the father was alive, now played like crazy… as though to invoke father back.

  I remember many comforts of having a father. He used to sing occasionally, in the evening, accompanying himself on a guitar. He played the violin, tambourine, double bass, and several other instruments. He told us stories—maybe not many times, maybe only half a dozen times, but that left a great impression on me—about Dugonja, Vidonja, i Trbonja (the tall one, the seeing one, and the fat one). He improvised quite a bit. Each of his trips turned into a tea time, and while the rest of us chewed bread with honey and butter, he told us how he, with the help of his heavenly father, got out of many dangers. Maybe my writing has something to do with both his absence and the lingering sound of his stories, the most impressive of which was the trip to the other world, when his heavenly father did not intercede to get him out of the dangers of his heart.

  I grew interested in storytelling perhaps because Father was a fantastic storyteller. He knew long segments of the Bible by heart, and now I kept reading the Bible, as well as Alexander Dumas, Karl May, and the Iliad and the Odyssey. Maybe the world of imagination and myth brought me close to the absent father.

  My father’s death gave me an impetus to write. Upon reading The Death of Ivan Illych, I thought I could describe my father’s death, and I wrote two hundred pages of sketches involving our backyard and streets of my hometown, yet I couldn’t write about his death, and instead began to write a satirical story about dying, a comedy of sorts. Later I wrote a few poems about him and his dying and my dreams of him as still alive and dying for the second and the third time. I wrote a couple of essays about his death, and an autobiographical story, which got me my first serious publication, in the Discovery issue of Ploughshares. And my novel, April Fool’s Day, has a long segment, a description of a strange death, which, I am sure, came out of my father’s death.

  So writing is my patrimony. Even this essay is. Or at least I imagine so, perhaps wishing to give my father a role in my life, so that even his absence is a form of ghostly presence.

  TERRIBLE TWOS TRAVEL

  TO TAKE OUR SON JOSEPH out in public meant stress, for the parents and for the public. We could not in good conscience take the little savage to Burger King, let alone to a good restaurant, because he’d scream, toss fries and juice on the floor, and, once he had the attention of the chewing audience, grab his mother’s bra and pull it, exposing her breast, with the war cry Milka! So when my wife, Jeanette, suggested that we take a trip to Europe, and take Joey along to Zurich, Paris, and Venice, I wanted to say no, but didn’t. I became the yes-man, and Joey, of course, was the no-man (outis), and I’m sure that if he’d had a say in the matter, he would have said no. Since he was a month short of two, his airfare would be only ten percent of the regular fare. This was our last chance to go to Europe as a family and not go bankrupt.

  Soon after our decision, Jeanette and I, Joey, and two French friends of ours sat in a corner table near the entrance on the second floor of a restaurant near the Bastille in Paris. Although it was warm, Joey insisted on wearing his woolen ski cap and his blue mittens. He played with a bulldozer and a dump truck, little orange metal toys. He giggled, hugged a bottle of wine, lifted it and panted, as though he were weight-lifting, and said, “Wine, Mama, that’s wine!” He was proud that he could identify and name things.

  The dinner conversation about world politics did not go smoothly because Joey often interrupted, calling for milk and for trucks. To keep him quiet, we called a garçon, and asked for chocolate. “We have only black chocolate for cooking,” he said. He brought a little plateful of chocolate shavings. Joey tasted a little, spat it out. We wiped the spot he hit on the white tablecloth. “Dirt,” Joey said. But he did not mean anything bad by that. Dirt was the most precious material to him. With his bulldozer he pushed chocolate shavings from the plate onto the tablecloth and across it. Once he had a streak of chocolate on the table in front of him he stood in his chair, grabbed the steamroller and rolled over the chocolate, grinding it into the tablecloth. He was paving the road.

  “Don’t do that!” I said.

  “What’s the alternative?” Jeanette said. “At least he’s quiet and happy. Better than if he screamed.”

  We looked anxiously around, to see how the waiters would take this. A waiter walked away briskly. Trouble. He came back with another plateful of chocolate shavings because Joey was running out. Soon Joey was building a cross-highway, his ski cap on, his tongue licking a corner of his mouth, his mittens on.

  “He could not get away with this in the States,” I said. And that was true—I never saw a culture so much in love with babies and toddlers as the French. On the French highways, there were probably more ads with babies than with pretty women. The Michelin tire commercials with babies were quintessentially French. In the streets people stopped when they saw Joey, laughed, joked, teased him. A tired old man became happy looking at him, and wanted to touch his hair. “It’s hot,” Joey said. “It’s burning.” Joey had got burned on the iron once, and whenever we did not want him to touch something, we told him it was hot. Clearly, he understood our strategy. “Joey’s hair is fire,” he said.

  Now, at the restaurant, we drank red wine, and ate our entrees: salmon, deer heart, lamb. When Joey was done with his highway, the waiters came, replaced the brown tablecloth with a white one, and brought Joey more chocolate. I ate some kind of cottage cheese mixed with sour cream, onions and bits of parsley. I enjoyed this, and this brought back memories of eating cottage cheese with onions in Croatia as a kid.

  And that’s where we would take Joey, to my hometown in Croatia to meet my mother, brother, and various relatives. On the way, we went to Rüschlikon, the suburbs of Zurich, where my brother and his wife studied theology at the Baptist Seminary. We drove into the mountains and went sledding with Joey. My brother and Joey went down the slopes, and Joey squealed, “Catch Ivo!” There were many people sliding down the slope. Ivo’s kids, who spoke four languages, and in nightmares shouted in Swiss German, sledded as well.

  In Zurich, since Joey loved trains, we took him into something similar, a tram. It was about eleven in the evening. Joey celebrated, stared out the glass into the streets at Christmas lights. People were entertained, but several of them angrily said, “Sleep, baby should sleep.” Good thing we did not get arrested for abuse. Every baby should sleep by nine o’clock, or parents ought to be arrested. We all had jet lag; it was only five in the afternoon for us.

  The next day we took a mountain train up Mt. Rigi. From there, on all sides we could see little towns, lakes, mountain peaks, as though we were looking on a picture map above which we hovered. Going down, we missed a train, and so we hiked. Each train station was about five minutes apart, and it took about fifteen minutes to walk the distance, going steeply downhill through evergreens, over streams, past castles. “That’s where the green frog and the princess live,” we told Joey, “in that castle.” He pondered over that but did not say anything. I guess it puzzled him that something that seemed to be only in the picture book would also be out there in the real world, if he made such crass distinctions between the imagined world and the real world. At another stop we just missed the train. We sat in a train station the size of a shed, and listened to the creek below us rumbling and the wind being combed in the evergreen tree needles. I saw a little cart for carrying luggage, and said, “Let’s put Joey on it and run down to the next station.” We ran down the mountain path, skipped another train station, and kept running.

  On the way to Croatia we visited Venice. It rained, so we bought a large umbrella, sipped cappuccinos, and walked, which proved hard, since Joey chased pigeons. He called them chicken. Generally, he knew how to distinguish fifty animals, but he did not make room for a distinction between chickens and pigeons. He jumped into puddles of water to splash it over the pigeons, and shrieked, “Fy chicken! Fy!”

  Outside of Venice, at a rest area along the highway, we went to shop for wine and cheese to take to Croatia. When we got out, it was dark. We opened the car and drove, and it was only later, in Slovenia, that we discovered that the lock on one side was wrecked. Some Italian thieves broke into our car, probably with a screwdriver, and jacked the lock up. Breaking into locked cars is easy—I read that with a screwdriver it takes only about five seconds to break into most cars, Volvo about half a minute, Mercedes a minute and a half. What did the Italians steal? It turned out—a bag of diapers. We also had a suitcase with a thousand dollars in cash, but that one they left alone. And the camera was on the floor. It used to be in the diaper bag, but the thieves must have been in such a rush—maybe they saw us coming out of the store—that the camera fell back into the car. Now, I did not know that Italians wanted diapers this badly. This lowered my opinion of Italian organized crime, but maybe this was not organized. And later, when we went to buy diapers, we found out that it may not have been that unreasonable to steal them—they were three times more expensive than in the States, as was gasoline.

  We had told Joey that he was an angel. And now when we took him to a castle in Slovenia, Mokrice, and showed him a sculpture of a winged angel, he said, “Mama, I have no wings.” He pointed at his shoulders. He had discovered that he was not an angel, or that he was not a complete angel, and that hurt his feelings.

  After Zagreb, we drove on the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, the highway connecting Zagreb and Belgrade. Since the highway was blocked by two Serb enclaves, you could not go through to Belgrade, and the sign indicating directions said Lipovac, a village near the Serb border. We drove on a deserted highway, ninety miles an hour. There was very little light anywhere, and the asphalt was black. In a sixty-mile stretch we passed only four cars. We took the last exit before the Western Slavonian Serb enclave, and drove north, on country roads, toward Daruvar, my hometown. In the hills, it snowed and the roads were icy. At one point we saw fire, and I stopped. There were several soldiers standing around the fire, next to big piles of sandbags. Checkpoint. For a second I did not know whose it could be. Taking country roads, had we strayed to the enclave? These could be Serb soldiers, and it probably would not be healthy to get near them. But maybe it would be a Croatian checkpoint, and the Croats would turn us away and give us directions. But when we saw that one of the soldiers wore a white helmet, we realized that this was a UN checkpoint, and we drove on. The Nepali soldiers let us pass.

  We arrived at my childhood home at three-thirty in the morning. The door was locked. I threw astone up to the second floor, against the window pane, and pretty soon my mother peeked through.

  Joey was ready to meet my mother, who was seventy-seven years old. We had prepared him for this by reading Strega Nona books. Strega Nona had a scarf on her head, a long nose, an apron, and wore clogs. “Joey, this is Strega Nona!” we said. He hid behind his mom, peeked over her ear, and clearly could not believe his luck. “Ah, so, that’s the little blondie,” my mother said, in Croatian. The Strega Nona book contained Italian words and Jeanette read it imitating the Italian accent, so this too must have made sense to him.

  The following morning my mother prepared the dough, rolling and flattening it on the table, and then she cooked a dish of pasta with cabbage. Joey gazed at Strega Nona, pulled at her apron, kicked her clogs, pulled at her woolen socks, probably to test whether she was real.

  Clogs may not seem like an important detail, but in this household they were. My parents used to make clogs, and my mother believed that the key to good health was having warm feet. Jeanette and Joey often walked barefoot. “How can they walk like that?” Mother asked me. “They’ll get sick!”

  She pointed at their feet, and said in English, “No! Shoes!” She knew about a hundred English words from having lived in Cleveland, Ohio until the age of three, and from watching American movies on TV. She raised her forefinger in a didactic manner.

  And one night, Joey and Jeanette did get sick. First he got feverish and vomited, and then Jeanette did the same. Woken up by the noise and commotion at two in the morning, my mother came to our part of the house, and as soon as she saw Jeanette and Joey, who were right then vomiting into a tub, she said, “But they should have their boots on! I told you.”

  I said, “Look, they have some kind of stomach virus, you can’t get that from bare feet.”

  “They should put their boots on right now.”

  “What are you? Mussolini’s sister or something, to love boots so much?”

  Fortunately, my older brother, who lived downstairs, was a doctor, and we called him. He gave Joey and Jeanette strong anti-bacterial medicine. They recovered in a day.

  Though I ate the same things they did, I did not get sick, probably because I had grown up with the food bacteria. Jeanette thought this had to do with cheese, unpasteurized cottage cheese, similar to what I had eaten in the Parisian restaurant. She’d read something about it, and now thought that Joey could have died if he had not got the medicine in time. From now on, she was cautious with foods, but still walked barefoot around the apartment. Joey however, loved the new Italian leather boots we had bought for him on the way to Croatia, and you couldn’t take them off him even in bed, unless he was asleep. He was proud of his boots, and his pride was augmented because wherever we went people laughed and said that the boots were beautiful. He probably believed my mother’s word, that good boots guaranteed good health.

  But although Jeanette was cautious with food, she was not cautious enough, according to my mother. Jeanette ate warm bread. That was one thing she had looked forward to—warm, tasty bread in the morning. But my mother had the theory that warm bread was bad for you, that it was sticky, and that it would tie your intestines into knots, and that you might die from it. My mother woke up every morning at six to buy bread and then stored it in the larder shelves. She hid fresh bread from us, and gave us bread that was at least three days old—now sufficiently dry to be good and safe. The problem was, it didn’t taste so good any more. Peasants customarily baked their own bread once a week. On the sixth and the seventh day this theory—the older the bread, the healthier—served to keep kids from complaining, and my mother obviously believed what she’d grown up with. So we bought our own bread, and Jeanette hid it in a suitcase.