THE MATH IS SIMPLE: men marry older and die younger than women. That means that many children born to older parents grow up with a dead father lurking in the background. My father died when I was eleven. One of the first things I want to find out when I meet people is whether they lost their fathers. I think there is camaraderie among the people who lose their fathers early. I experienced that as soon as my father died; I made friends with a boy who seemed to hate me before.
The day after my father died Mladen and I stood kicking stones in my backyard, and he said, Now we are the same.
What do you mean?
My father died when I was three. You will see what it’s like not to have a father.
He seemed gleeful to have a friend in the same predicament, and while I can’t say I rejoice to find out someone had lost his father early on, I do feel immediate camaraderie on that account.
I take this camaraderie into the writing world, where I notice which writers lost their fathers in their youth. My friend, Bill Cobb, lost his at the age of four. The first novel Bill wrote opens with an image of a father’s ear pickled in a jar, for remembrance—a beautiful and macabre image. I think that describes the sensibility of many of us, male or female, in this non-exclusive club, the dead fathers club. Another friend of mine, Madelon Sprengnether, describes in her book, Crying at the Movies, the moment that sent her adrift into her youth and adulthood: she saw her father drown in the Mississippi. He slipped off a sandy islet while saving his son, and an undertow pulled him in, and to Madelon’s horror, he didn’t resurface. When I visited her she was listening to Mahler, some of the most tragic-sounding passages. You sure know how to spread cheer, don’t you, I asked her. She laughed. I like grief, I find it beautiful. OK, that is slightly twisted, but then, I agreed with her. Those jolts in minor keys, they do something electrifying for my brain, too. Of course, it would be too much to claim that the others who haven’t lost their fathers early don’t know such pleasures of grief.
At a certain level, when I get together with friends who have lost their fathers, I have the sensation of being in a group of kids who are playing without supervision. The supervisor, the builder of the super-ego, has vanished. Sure, he lingers on in a ghostly and sometimes intimidating way.
It’s possible that in moments of fear, I clung to the superego, as though it could give me the security of being with a father the protector. To this my faith in God was easily grafted, and sure, in moments of danger, I prayed to God, but in moments of pleasure I shunned God. My father died in such a way that he only strengthened my fear and my faith. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the Biblical saying goes, and seeing my father die filled me with dread and with a desire to transcend it.
In 1968, February 6, midnight, both my brother and I finished our shrieks of horror upon seeing blood coming out of Father’s nose after his heart attack, and upon feeling no pulse in his hand and neck, yes, after our frantic prayer to God to save him, we paused, almost surprised that we were alive ourselves. And what now? I asked. My brother Ivo stared at me with incomprehension—that life would go on. For a few seconds we were both calm, strangely relieved. A horror could happen, and you could go on. Soon we relapsed into wailing and prayers, and when I tried to go to bed, I shivered. (Well, it was a winter night, and I am not sure we remembered the heat.)
My relatives and family friends who came to pay homage to my father’s corpse, which was laid out on a table in the living room, looked at me with sympathy, petted me on the head. I hadn’t felt loved that much before. I slipped away from the party into the yard, and there, the thought that I was free startled me. Who could catch me now? I could run away, I could do something bad, and there would be no father to flog me (he believed in the biblical don’t spare the rod). There would be no father to judge me. Nobody else’s judgment had mattered that much. Who should judge me now? My mother? Sure, but she was milder, and she was consistently cynical, so that if she said something negative, it didn’t matter—I was used to it. She would whip me with her words, not with a rod, and words would leave no wounds but self-doubt.
I came back into the house to mourn, but I had this dirty secret, that at some level beyond and beneath all the horrors, I was pleased. But that didn’t last. The fear—How will we live now? Will we be poor? Will we have enough to eat?—came to the fore. Who will run our father’s clog-making workshop? Even before then, we could afford to eat meat only once a week; the rest of the week we ate vegetable stews, dark wheat bread, and eggs.
My brother and I were known to be good fighters among the kids in town. Almost every day we were involved in fistfights, wrestling matches, and so on, many for sport, as a test of strength and skill, and many out of conflicts of pride, or a sense of justice (if I saw a boy torturing a cat, I would attack him). Soon after the death of my father, I had a fight which I thought I should win, but suddenly I got scared that I would lose, and I was too slow, so I found myself under the boy, who was hitting my head against the cement of the handball stadium. I lost another fight soon afterward. This loss of self-confidence may not be universal with the loss of a father, but it does seem to be fairly common. My brother went through the same crisis. He quit fighting and began to play the guitar. He hid himself in the attic and played for hours; he wanted to become a classical guitarist but there was not enough support for that. He became excellent nevertheless, and was invited to play with one of the best rock groups in Yugoslavia, but he admitted that he didn’t show up for the first concert because of stage fright. Maybe he could have become a rock star, but his doubts drove him back to the attic. He dropped out of the fancy grammar school where he was enrolled and became a factory worker, and later, he became philosophical, and pursued his introverted activities to such an extent that he just got a Ph.D. in Theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary. He is almost certain that his life path would have been different if our father had lived past our adolescence. Well, our older brother, who was twenty-seven at the time of our father’s death, had become a doctor, a far more practical man than the two remaining brothers.
Of course, my theory is subjective, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a sociological study proved my common sense wrong. Before my father’s death, I didn’t have a practical bent anyway. I wasn’t one of those guys who at the age of seven knows exactly what he wants to do with his life and proceeds to do it, like Tesla, who had a clear image of putting a turbine generator into Niagara Falls, and did just that thirty years later.
When I visit friends who have fathers, I’m usually surprised. Sometimes I wonder why one would want to hang out with an old guy. Hardly any of my friends’ fathers have struck me as anchors of stability and wisdom. Maybe I don’t make friends with people who have strong fathers, but more likely there are very few strong fathers. It’s hard to be a good father. I know it, because I’m a father. Actually, now my son is as old as I was when my father died. Sometimes, jokingly, I tell him to be nice to me because you never know—fathers just don’t last.
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.