Page 65 of Slanting Towards the Sea

SIXTY

I MANAGE TO HARDEN myself for the funeral.

At the chapel, I stand beside my dad’s casket with Sa?a and Silvija.

The river of people snakes around the coffin as they offer their condolences.

I’m sorry for your loss , they say. Your father was a good man.

I look at the casket that seems too small to contain a man of Dad’s size, and think, he wasn’t particularly good.

Not that he was bad either. He was the way he was—honorable, strict, decisive, but flawed as we all are.

He was human, I want to tell them, and so the loss of him is as unique as his fingerprint was.

Mom would’ve been happy with the turnout.

So many people, many of whom I’ve never met or heard of.

I worked with your father , they say. I knew him from the army , they say.

I knew him from his village. All knowing who he was at different points in his life.

So many versions of my dad that are unfamiliar to me.

There are a few of Sa?a’s friends from high school.

When they approach us to pay their respects, the absence of my own friends is even more conspicuous.

I look outside and wonder if Vlaho is respecting my wishes that he and Marina not come.

I wonder if that was really my wish in the first place. But he is not there.

Someone’s arms close around me. Tara. I’d texted her but didn’t expect her to come all the way from Split. “I’m so sorry, Ivona,” she says, and this almost destabilizes me, almost makes me cry.

I receive hands, and shake them, and murmur the required thank-yous, and think about my dad. How separate he is, lying inside that coffin, from all of us. How none of this matters to him, how none of this matters anyway.

This thought follows me as the pallbearers put the coffin on the funeral gurney.

The people carrying the wreaths line up before the gurney, and the rest of us line up behind, first my brother and his wife and I, and then everyone else.

Over the open grave, the priest gives a brief speech about passage of life, and how my father—whom he didn’t know—left a big mark on all of us who’ve gathered here today, and I think about the one mark he wanted to leave, the Lovorun hotel, and how I was the one to deny him this wish.

I also think about the marks we all leave on one another, willingly or not.

Gentle touches we offer. Scars we inflict.

When his coffin has been lowered into the grave and shoved onto one of the concrete shelves, I throw one white rose in for him, and another for my mom.

I don’t wait for Sa?a and Silvija to do the same as I retreat toward my car.

At home, everything is ready for the wake, but I won’t be there to see it through.

There’s nothing left for me there, all the ties already neatly cut.

It is just a place, a house, not a home.

A single suitcase in the back seat of my crappy little car.

A car that’s not meant to travel far, that I bought for my very contained life in a very contained town of this small country and my curtailed place in it.

A car that’s no more made or destined for big adventures than I am, but that’s going to get one just the same.

Inside the suitcase, some underwear, socks, a few trusted T-shirts, an old hoodie.

A couple of pairs of jeans, one blue, one black, so I’m set for any occasion.

A couple of towels, one big, one small. The T-shirt Vlaho left on the night we laid all our cards open after a decade of hiding our hands.

A journal with rich golden intarsia that Asier brought me from London, with a couple of olive twigs from Lovorun pressed between the pages.

An ordinary blue pen. An old, tattered wallet with a note folded inside, a perceptive teacher once responding to a girl in pain, a girl who remained in pain, but who is now tired of pain.

A printed email from the Italian scientist, saying to get in touch if I need anything. Need is all I have right now.

And perhaps a little potential.