“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?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology