by Alen Mattich
“No, it’s the same. Otherwise I’d be a private second class,” Anzulović said. “Where did you finish up in the commandos? Hard to believe they took you, of all people.”
“Somebody had a sense of humour,” della Torre said. “I managed lieutenant. Funny to think I’d be your boss if we were knocked back.”
“Wouldn’t it just. Be straight out of Sergeant Bilko,” Anzulović said.
Della Torre nodded, though the reference didn’t mean anything to him. The man’s obsession with Hollywood was surely his only real weakness.
“Right. If you set off now, you can get to your father’s for a late lunch. Tomorrow you can do whatever it is you need to do in Poreč. Think of it as a working holiday. I expect you back at the start of next week.”
“Any nice cars left in the pool?”
“I sold them all. Use yours. The old UDBA petrol card ought to work. We’ll be getting new IDs and uniforms when we move offices, which will be as soon as Kakav figures out where he put his thumb.”
“Thanks. If you don’t hear from me again, it’s because my brakes failed going around a clifftop bend.” His Yugo was aptly named. Like the country, it was a car designed to fall apart at the worst possible time and in the bloodiest, most destructive way possible.
“Avoid clifftop bends. You’re back here at the start of next week. Understand?”
Anzulović made it clear the interview was over. Della Torre didn’t say goodbye. He just shut the door behind him. He was most of the way down the corridor before he remembered the half-bottle of whisky he’d left on Anzulović’s desk.
Della Torre took the long way to his father’s house, navigating the slow road down Istria’s precipitous east coast. He’d always preferred this route, even in the summer, when traffic crawled behind German caravans and overladen Czech Škodas. It wasn’t a problem that August afternoon. Traffic was as light as on a drizzly Sunday in January. Looming war was keeping tourists away.
As the road climbed he took in the deep blue waters of Kvarner Bay, the green haze of Cres Island, and farther still the stony white starkness of the Velebit range on the mainland. He could see rising black smudges, high in the distance: smoke from fires lit by Serbs who’d declared independence from Croatia in their pocket of territory just inland from the coast.
The Serbs called the territory Krajina. It was a borderland within Croatia that the Austro-Hungarians had created as a frontier buffer against the Turks. The Austrians had populated the area with displaced Serbs, and now their descendants were trying to secede from Croatia, just as Croatia was struggling to break free from Yugoslavia. In doing so, the Krajina Serbs all but cut Croatia in half, blocking the main road that connected the long, thin slice of the republic’s Dalmatian coastline to the main body of the country up north. The dark columns of smoke marked his course south from Zagreb until he’d crossed the coastal mountains.
Della Torre turned into Istria’s verdant interior. Stands of poplar stood among oak forests, orchards, wheat fields, and everywhere vineyards rose out of the rich red earth. The countryside was guarded by hilltop villages, each a little fortress of white walls with a church tower rising from the centre like a sentry against the pirates who used to pillage these lands in centuries past. The farmers wouldn’t be harvesting their grapes for another month; they’d wait for the berries to absorb the sun’s full sweetness so that they would not need to add sugar to the juice to aid fermentation. It was always a delicate balance; a late storm could yet ruin the crop. But for the coming weeks they could do nothing but wait and hope. And wonder whether, even if it was a good vintage, there would be a market for their wine.
Come the time, maybe he’d take a few days off and help his father with the picking. Della Torre hadn’t done it in years. He’d hated the work as a boy and young man; it was hard, back-breaking effort. But he was starting to feel nostalgic. Honest work, his father called it.
Somewhere in there was an unspoken criticism of della Torre’s UDBA job, a subject neither father nor son ever broached. Maybe it was because in his years as an academic in Zagreb, the state’s long shadow had loomed over everything della Torre senior wrote, everything he said, much of what he’d allowed himself to think. And then to have his son become a servant of the pitiless, arbitrary machine that maintained the state . . .
Della Torre drove past the village where his grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins lived. He seldom saw them. Even within families, Istrians were reserved.
The Yugo’s rattle lessened as he turned onto the newly asphalted road taking him the final two kilometres to his father’s house. The car had somehow survived another four-hour trip without falling apart. It wasn’t old, but it was as reliable as a wooden horseshoe.
He stopped at the high iron gates that opened onto a walled courtyard. Della Torre found the key, hidden behind a loose stone in the wall. It was as big as a revolver and just as heavy. He fed it into the massive lock. The gates were well balanced and on oiled steel rollers, so they opened easily and noiselessly. He drove into the courtyard, which had been paved with smooth white Istrian stone by some distant ancestor three centuries before.
He parked the car in an old ox shed, stopping only to wonder at the new blue Volkswagen Golf that stood alongside his father’s decrepit Renault 4 and an equally old canvas-sided truck. Those vehicles couldn’t have been much younger than della Torre, and he was coming on for thirty-seven years old. The Golf was a rental and had Zagreb plates. He wondered if his father had a guest, or perhaps he’d borrowed the vehicle from a cousin in Poreč who managed the local branch of a car rental company. Sometimes he did that when he was planning a longer trip, say to Trieste or Zagreb or Ljubljana.
Della Torre went back to shut the gates and replace the key. As he did, he took in a lungful of the smells that told him, better than his eyes could, where he was. Hay and ancient dung from the barns behind the house. A faint whiff of wine spilled on the cellar floors and gone sour over the years. His own sweat from the searing heat of the afternoon sun. Engine oil and petrol from the ox shed. The distant, overripe sweetness of fallen fruit in the orchard. Wheat from a field just beyond the house. The hot earth, as deeply coloured as rust. And fresh-baked bread.
He walked over to the house. It was built from the same marble-white blocks of stone that paved the courtyard. The house’s bottom storey was a tall wine cellar; he climbed an outdoor staircase to a large vine-covered terrace onto which the main door to the house opened. In the middle of the terrace, which was as big as a town garden, was the wellhead to a giant cistern. Water was a precious commodity in Istria, and though the house was connected to the mains, the cistern still fed a walled vegetable garden abutting the building.
The green-shaded terrace immediately softened the heat of the sun, heavy clumps of grapes, plump but still a greenish blue, almost touching his head.
“What a nice surprise,” his father said, rising to give him a hug. He’d been sitting on a stone bench built into three sides of the terrace wall. A heavy wooden table was laid out in front of him. On it was a carafe of wine and the remains of lunch: a few slices of the local cured ham and cheese next to a few spears of raw red pepper, a handful of cherry tomatoes, and a half-eaten slice of homemade bread. Two places had been laid.
“Looks like you were expecting me,” della Torre said, and then noticed the dregs of wine in the tumbler and the crumbs of cheese on the unoccupied plate.
“How could I have been expecting you when you don’t pick up the phone and you don’t answer your messages?” Dr. Piero della Torre’s eyebrows came together for a brief moment, a sign of irritation that his son remembered well from his youth. “No, I wasn’t expecting you, but you’re welcome to join us.”
The older man smiled contentedly, in a way that caught his son by surprise. Not that his father was a grim man. But since his mother’s death — when della Torre wasn’t yet a teenager — his fa
ther’s every expression had been smudged by grief, sometimes only just apparent in the distant corners of his eyes, but always there. Even after a quarter of a century, laughing over the old Laurel and Hardy films they both loved, della Torre could sense a distant sorrow in the older man. Or maybe it was a reflection of his own feelings when they were together.
“Sorry. I’ve been . . . I’ve been distracted. I’d have called to say I was coming, but I didn’t know until this morning. I’ve barely packed anything. I’ll be here for a few days, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course I don’t mind.”
Della Torre sat in the chair opposite the older man and washed the used tumbler in front of him with water from a second carafe, draining the contents into a ring of holes drilled into the stone floor. Into the same glass he then poured wine the yellow-orange colour of petrol, and helped himself to the remains of his father’s lunch.
“So, who else is here? Old man Brnobić?” della Torre asked. Brnobić was a cousin, a retired priest, and his father’s chess and drinking companion. They were divided on any number of subjects, from politics to religion to culture, but were brought together by loneliness and intelligence.
“No. Haven’t managed to see him for a little while. I’ve been busy.”
“I guess with Libero getting older you’re needing to do more of the work yourself. Time you found yourself someone else to help around here. I hope you’ve still got somebody coming to tidy the house.”
Over the years various middle-aged women from the local villages had come to gossip and do basic housework for him. They’d come once a week for a few months, and then his father would chafe under their intrusion and tell them they weren’t needed, until the mess got the better of him. Then the women would come again.
“Libero’s fine. And I’ve managed to do a bit of sorting in the house,” his father said.
“Oh really,” della Torre said, trying not to show his skepticism.
Having knocked the edge off his hunger and thirst, della Torre took a closer look at the older man. Now in his late sixties, he was showing signs of age. He’d been retired from the university for nearly a decade, and the hard work on the farm was beginning to be beyond him. His eyes were watery. Not quite the bloodshot eyes of an alcoholic, but maybe heading in that direction. The jowls were heavier than della Torre remembered. The back was rounded from a lifetime of bending over manuscripts. Like many long-time bachelors, his father softened his own company with too much drink, hoarded too much junk, lived in his own dust. Della Torre knew something of that existence too. But the older della Torre’s writing kept him busy. Kept him alive.
There were still hints of the man he’d been. His shoulders were still broad and strong. He was, after all, the son of farmers and knew how to work the soil himself. Even stooped, he was nearly as tall as his son. There was something of a Roman emperor to his aquiline nose, the high forehead, and the short hair, now gone silver-grey.
His forearms spoke of residual strength. Della Torre remembered when as a teenager he’d once asked his father to open a recalcitrant pickle jar. The old man hadn’t been much older than della Torre was now. He’d watched as his father gripped the jar, muscles straining until the glass buckled, exploding in his hands like a crushed egg. He’d cut himself slightly, the vinegar making him wince. He’d grinned and said, “Pour encourager les autres.”
Now the silver hairs on those forearms against the tanned, wrinkled skin betrayed his age. Yet there was a surprising liveliness to the old man’s smile that della Torre hadn’t seen in a long time.
“How’s the elbow?” his father asked.
“Better. Mostly healed. It’s a bit stiff. They think they’ll keep the metalwork in, though I could probably ask for it to be taken out eventually. It’s as normal as you can expect for somebody who never uses his left arm,” della Torre said.
“So they’ve given you another holiday, then?”
“Something like that. I’ve got to go back early next week.”
“Fine,” his father said. Usually he welcomed della Torre’s company, wanting him to stay as long as possible. He liked it even better when della Torre’s wife . . . ex-wife, Irena, was with him. Though it had been a while since he’d stopped asking when she was coming.
“How’s the work?” della Torre asked.
As an academic, his father had specialized in middle European Slavic languages. But during recent years he’d remade himself as an impartial commentator on Yugoslav political developments. Business was good. Interest was constantly growing.
“Not bad. I’m writing commentary for U.S. policy journals. The Americans have suddenly discovered us. But . . .”
Della Torre followed the path of his father’s gaze, twisting in his chair to look back towards the house. The younger man’s mouth fell open, as if a hinge in his jaw had come loose.
There, on the step leading from the farmhouse’s front door onto the terrace, stood a woman wearing a green print bikini top that matched the vines crawling up the overhead trellis. She’d wrapped a similarly patterned sarong low around her hips, so he couldn’t tell if she was wearing anything underneath. Her heart-shaped face was freckled, and her copper hair fell loose around her bare, pale shoulders. If there was a blemish, it was her nose, its ridge a little too prominent and marginally bent to one side. But della Torre forgave the flaw when she smiled at him. It was the sort of smile that made men weak at the knees.
“Hi,” she said in American-accented English, as she walked barefoot towards father and son.
“My son, Marko, who you’ve been asking so much about,” Piero said in his accented but clear English, nodding towards della Torre. “This is Rebecca Vees. She’s the American researcher I told you about, the one who’s interested in my work. She’s been staying with me.”
Della Torre stood up quickly, almost knocking his chair backwards as he did.
“How do you do,” she said.
“Yes. How do you do,” he echoed.
Della Torre was mesmerized by the softness of her naked flesh between breasts and hips. It took him an awkward moment before he noticed she was holding a hand out towards him. Her hand was cool and small, but her grip had substance and there was a roughness to the skin. He recovered a semblance of composure, enough to step back from the table and offer up his seat.
“I’m afraid it seems I took your chair,” he said. “And your plate and glass too.”
“Never mind, I’ll sit next to Piero. The stone’s nice and cool anyway,” she said.
Her eyes opened wide as she spoke to him. She turned to della Torre’s father and lay some bound papers she’d been holding in her hand on a clear corner of the table.
Piero? Hearing her use his father’s Christian name came as an aftershock to della Torre. Istria was old-fashioned. People still used formal language between the generations. Okay, so on closer inspection he could tell she wasn’t quite as young as she’d first seemed, when she’d been framed by the front door’s white stone architrave and lit by sunlight filtered green through the vine leaves. There were fine wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, and the backs of her hands looked like they were familiar with physical work. Even so, she couldn’t have been past her early thirties; she was at least four or five years younger than he was.
She sat on a flat, long cushion bleached with age, next to his father. So close they touched.
“I’ll get you another glass,” della Torre said, making a move for the house.
“Don’t bother. I’ve had lunch and I don’t drink much in the afternoon,” she said, smiling brightly at him.
She picked up the folder and turned to della Torre’s father. “This is as much as I came up with back in the States, but they’re only rough notes. I hadn’t really intended to work on them. Only if something came up.”
“I’m sure we can do a bit of work on it over the next few day
s,” his father said, tilting his head back so that he could read the notes through the bottom edge of his glasses.
“I’m researching the development of the Glagolitic alphabet,” she said, turning to the son.
“So you study Slavonic languages, like my father,” della Torre said, struggling to regain his composure.
“I’m no specialist. I’m beginning to research the subject.”
“Oh, are you an academic?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she said, not elaborating.
“Where?”
“At George Mason,” she said, that smile never leaving her lips.
He shook his head. “Where is it?”
“In Virginia,” she said. “Ever been there?”
“Never,” he said, trying to refresh his memory of American geography from primary school. Once upon a time he could name every state and its capital. Now he had only a rough idea of where Virginia was. Somewhere to the east and south.
“It’s very nice,” she said. “Rolling hills, beaches, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. You should come sometime. I’ll show you around.”
“That’s a kind offer,” he said. “So are you doing a doctorate or post-doctoral work?”
“Your notes here give you away,” the older man said to Rebecca, interrupting the conversation. “They show that you come at your analysis from the Russian. You’ve been deceived by some false friends, words from different languages that sound the same but have different meanings. Very naughty to start with the presumption of Russian when approaching middle European Slavic languages. It’s like the mistake people often make in thinking the word histrionic is related to the word hysteria. Hysteria comes from the Latin for womb. But histrionic is from Histria, which the Romans called Istria. The most famous actors were from Histria, and so histrionic refers to an ability to act, and not to womb or women.”
Della Torre couldn’t resist a little indulgent smile at his father. Piero loved explaining the etymology of histrionic because it often came as a surprise, even to linguists.
