Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  “I know it doesn’t sound sensible,” I said. “But for some reason it sounds right.”

  Now, in most marriages, there is a contented partner and a restless one. You can probably guess which one I am. But Jim wasn’t quite the contented spirit he had been. He’d suspected for a long time that architecture wasn’t the best career choice for someone who would rather build a house than draw one. At night, he pored over cooking magazines, dreaming of owning his own lunch truck. To most people, he was the same old Jim, the guy who’d push your car out from the snowdrift. But I recognized restlessness when I saw it.

  I sat there waiting for the onslaught of Reasons Why We Can’t. We’ve got a mortgage. We’ve got pets. We just hooked up the TiVo. But Jim sat in silence.

  Then I realized that he was breaking into the same look he’d had the first time we met, when he was bellied up to a bar with his buddy Dave, pretending to watch Hawkeye basketball but really watching me drink whiskey near the jukebox, harmonizing poorly to the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” with my sister, Stephanie.

  I liked that look. I married that look. Jim stayed quiet, rubbing his beard and running his hand over his mouth. Then he got up and poured me a glass of wine.

  When he sat down again, he spoke. “You know, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t do something like that. We’ve got some money saved up. We could rent out the house.”

  I chimed in. “We’re not getting any younger. And it’s the perfect timing for Sam and Zadie—they aren’t old enough to put up a fight yet.”

  “I could take a leave from work,” Jim said.

  I was stunned he was even considering this. “Really?” I said. Maybe we were both crazy.

  “Why not?” he asked. “I just sit at my desk all day and think of the things I’d rather be doing—working on the house, making dinner, just hanging out. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a whole day just to hang out with my kids?”

  He got up and grabbed the atlas. He flipped through it with an enthusiasm I hadn’t seen since, well, since he took me home on “Take It Easy” night. We were clicking on this.

  We studied the map of Croatia for a while: the funny tilted wishbone shape, all that seacoast, the proximity to Italy.

  “The idea of just leaving. Just walking away.” Jim shook his head. “Can you imagine?”

  I wish I could say that our decision to run away to Croatia was more carefully crafted than the drunken midnight talk of two tired parents. But it wasn’t. Jim and I could argue for hours about the frequency and aptitude of his lawn-mowing skills, right on down to how he only used the weed eater biweekly. The smallest minutia imaginable. But in regard to the biggest decision we’d ever make in the trajectory of our family, it really was as simple as two restless souls in a rambling mood setting in motion a ball that hasn’t stopped rolling since.

  Before we did anything rash, we decided I should probably check out Mrkopalj in person. Occasionally countries host travel journalists on familiarization trips, so I wrote a heartfelt letter to the Croatian Tourism Board, begging to be included on one. I received a tepid e-mail brush-off. I called the office. I got a recording. I called again, and got another recording. I called three times, then four. Nothing but silence.

  Now, maybe it was that beautiful surfer boy in high school who never called me back, or maybe it’s just standard Iowan tenacity, but for whatever reason, when I’m blown off, I develop this epic stubbornness that borders on compulsion. I called again and again, until I lost count. I heard nothing in response.

  I was getting the picture that Croatian Tourism did not want me to visit Croatia. I mentioned in my messages that I wrote for National Geographic Traveler and Frommer’s Budget Travel. (I did not mention that my stories were the teensy ones in the front of the book.) Still, no one responded. I couldn’t help but wonder: What are these people hiding?

  Finally, a woman with a deep, harried voice returned my messages. I’ll call her Vesna. Vesna told me that a press trip was indeed coming up. I could go if I could get an assignment from one of my magazines.

  “I’ll do it,” I assured her.

  But I didn’t. I called every editor I could think of. No dice.

  A week later, Vesna called again to chew me out.

  “What is happening?” she barked. “What is wrong? I try to help you go to Croatia, and now you do not have press letter.”

  “I want with all my heart to go on the press trip!” I said. “But I can’t get an assignment.”

  Vesna reminded me quietly: “Jennifer, I try to create special circumstance so that you can come to Croatia.”

  “I understand that, and I appreciate it,” I said. “But it’s a little-known country and I think everyone has all the Croatia coverage they need right now.”

  “Croatia is not little-known country!” she yelled. “Rudy Maxa has come to Croatia!”

  I did not mention that few people have heard of The Savvy Traveler either. Instead, I said: “I’m sorry. I’m just saying I tried to sell the story. No one is biting.”

  Vesna lowered her voice. “Can’t you just make something up? I want you to go. I do this because your people are from Croatia.”

  I had not thought of this option. And so I wrote my own assignment letter. Something about sourcing posh lodgings and local booze for an upscale home magazine. I figured, reach for the stars, right? And sure enough, by day’s end, Vesna had secured my slot on that fall press trip to Croatia and a rental car to visit Mrkopalj afterward—a two-week trip in total.

  “Good luck, Jennifer,” Vesna said. “You will be very happy there.”

  I would leave in ten days. There was much to do before my departure. In addition to clearing my desk of work, I had to prepare the house and the pets and the family for an absence of their mama for the longest period of time we’d ever been apart. At some point during the writing of the twelve-page instructional manual for Jim—“Please remember that we have a cat” and “The children will need to be washed periodically”—I realized that my trip research time would be severely limited. For some reason, I didn’t use that time to track down a relative or two, or to learn useful phrases in Croatian. Instead, I figured the easiest way to do the trip planning would be to meet someone who was from the area and ask a few questions. Surprisingly, not a difficult thing to do in Des Moines. During my lifetime, Iowa has been a haven for war refugees, including people from the former Yugoslavia fleeing from the wars of the 1990s. I made a few phone calls and connected with a friend of a friend whose family had moved to Des Moines from Rijeka (pronounced ree-YAY-kuh), a port city about a half hour away from Mrkopalj.

  The ridiculously attractive Zlatko met me at a local coffee shop, where he quickly assessed the vast abyss of my Balkan knowledge with gorgeous blue eyes in a tanned face. You could practically hear the Al Green song playing as he slid his wraparound sunglasses over his gold-brown hair. He gave me the once-over, finding before him a mildly frumpy mom whose potential for hotness had faded soon after she started getting spiral perms in college. And so he set to work giving me a no-nonsense schooling in the ways of his homeland.

  Zlatko borrowed a piece of paper and sketched Croatia. The region my family is from is called the Gorski Kotar, or Mountain District, and is in the northwest corner of the country, the “handle” of Croatia’s odd wishbone shape.

  So that was the Gorski Kotar geographically. But, running his hands through his continental hair, Zlatko seemed to be having trouble coming up with the right words to talk about the place culturally.

  “Gorski Kotar is one of the places…,” he began. Then he closed his eyes, resigning himself to something. “There are a lot of crazy people there. They’re not as civilized in a traditional way. It’s a little more primitive than you think it is.”

  I stared at him. I considered touching his face.

  In the Gorski Kotar, Zlatko said, one of the most ancient dialects of Croatian is spoken. My Croatian phrasebook wouldn’t help me all that much. So b
izarre was the Gorski Kotar, in fact, that every region surrounding it had been affected by the Balkan wars from 1992 to 1995, and yet it had remained oddly untouched. He had no explanation for why this was.

  “What exactly was that war about?” I asked. “I’m sorry to seem ignorant. It’s because I am ignorant.”

  “The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918,” Zlatko said. “It was a country with many different nationalities and three different religions—Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox. During the 1990s, Yugoslavia broke up, and the people had a nationalistic conflict. Everyone wanted more land from the division, and in the end they all went their separate ways.”

  I’d never heard it explained clearly like this. I’d asked my own brother, Brian, for a Reader’s Digest version of the war. He served as an Army doctor in Bosnia. “Some guy stole another guy’s sheep two thousand years ago,” he said. “And they’ve been fighting ever since.” The series of conflicts was so confusing that they didn’t even have an official name. I’d done some reading and just referred to them as the Yugoslavian Wars.

  “The war is over and has been for a long time,” Zlatko said. “It won’t be dangerous by any means. Besides, you have the most important thing that you need in Croatia. You have heritage.”

  “So it’s not dangerous for us, because we’re family?”

  “More or less,” Zlatko said.

  “Well, the wilderness sounds nice,” I said. “Maybe my husband will learn to like camping!”

  Zlatko leaned forward gravely. “You need to not go into the woods, Jennifer,” he said. “There are wolves. There are wild boars. You tell someone in Gorski Kotar that you’re going into the woods, and they’ll pull out a shotgun from behind the counter and tell you to borrow it for the weekend!”

  But it wasn’t really what was in the woods that got Zlatko worried about my family and me. And on this point, he would not elaborate.

  “Jennifer,” he said, sighing heavily, “you never know who you’re going to run into in those woods.”

  And that was the first indication that perhaps my Motherland wasn’t quite the idyllic rustic family vacation destination I’d thought it would be.

  chapter two

  My press trip spanned the Istria and Kvarner regions—roughly that wishbone handle of Croatia jutting into the Adriatic Sea. Another journalist and I were whisked from the airport to the island of Krk by a lovely bald hunk of a guide in dark sunglasses. Siniša (pronounced SEE-nee-shah) herded us through the most beautiful and travel-ready destinations of the Adriatic Coast. Each daily sightseeing itinerary included English-speaking guides expert in Croatian history, sweets shops with effusive proprietors, and the good booze and soft hotel beds I’d requested in my press letter.

  The sea was clear as tap water, and the sun warmed terra-cotta rooftops on craggy waterfront cottages. I ate all the food I’d eat in neighboring Italy, at half the price and without as many international males in pointy fashion shoes who, despite a reputation for hitting on any female who isn’t their mother, didn’t hit on me. In coastal Croatia, the olive oil was so green and fresh that it burned my throat going down. Meals began with hard sheep’s-milk cheese and prosciutto cured in a cold sea wind called the bura.

  In the church of Saint Anthony the Hermit, overlooking the sea-soaked harbor town of Veli Lošinj, a caretaker showed me a hundred sacred relics behind the altar. The leg bone of Saint Clementine. The elbow of Saint Gregor. Below a whale-tendon-covered crucifix, the old stone floor bore the names of ancient sea captains. “It is our history,” the caretaker said. “History is everything.”

  Perched on a rocky cliff over the Adriatic, medieval Vrbnik once produced more priests per capita than anywhere in Croatia because its men wanted to avoid serving on the galleys of the ruling Venetians. There, a woman, upon discovering that I was the returning great-granddaughter of Croatian immigrants, threw her arms open wide and announced: “Welcome home!”

  In the harbor city of Pula, in a Roman amphitheater where gladiators once battled lions, a woman with an unearthly shade of burgundy hair told me that being Croatian meant getting used to other countries trying to steal your land—Austria, Serbia, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia. “We figured they’d take what they wanted and leave,” she said. “We were wrong.”

  In the vegetable market in Rovinj, as artists hung their paintings on the sea walls, a guy with a smile as big as his belly led me to a back-alley stone room, where we drank shots of homemade slivovitz before he sold me truffles.

  I drank a goblet of grappa on the island of Mali Lošinj as I walked through gardens of lavender, sage, and rosemary outside a fourteenth-century cottage guarded by a watch-donkey named Dragan.

  Old men on mopeds buzzed along cobblestones worn to a fine patina over the centuries. Locals lounged in outdoor cafés on the riva as their kids ran in happy packs nearby. Goth teenagers kicked past ancient fortifications built just a few years after Pangaea broke apart. And there was wine. Wine with everything! The Croatians produced all the wines of the world in a country roughly the size of West Virginia; their tart malvazija and graševina were the first whites I ever truly liked. The olive oil and bread and pasta and fish all came from the ground and sea around them—fresh and natural and wild. Coastal Croatia was the Europe I was looking for when I spent my student loans to go backpacking through skanky youth hostels in college. Lonely and poor, I didn’t find it then. I found it as a thirty-eight-year-old mom, hungry for all those connections with land and food and family. Though my ancestral history had faded away, I was drawn to these people who seemed to have it pretty good, despite being mired in war over the years.

  Then I waved good-bye to my press-trip compadres, hugging the fantastically large and firm Siniša an extra-long time, and drove away in a rented Volkswagen Polo to Mrkopalj. The land that formed the old family. The land I hoped would mend my new one. Though I missed the hell out of Jim and the kids, I was high on Croatia and its possibilities.

  Just east of the country’s sunny seacoast is the Gorski Kotar region, where the village of Mrkopalj is located. Called “Little Switzerland” by tourism folks putting a good spin on things, this seldom-explored area might be described by less upbeat souls as Croatia’s dark heart. But the English-speaking village tourism director had promised a complete itinerary upon arrival, noting in an e-mail that the tourism bureau was “unusually happy to receive the mentioned journalist.” Which made me unusually happy, too. Croatia had been idyllic so far, and I was sure my trip would come full circle with a spiritual connection to Mrkopalj.

  But the clouds seemed to drift over that coastal sun as I drove, eventually blotting out the light altogether. I passed very few cars on the highway, and when I exited onto the back roads, none whatsoever. Supernaturally thick evergreen forest and an uneven landscape encroached upon the lonely blacktop. The air took on a wintry chill, and I rolled up the windows of the Polo. Giant spruce trees crowded the narrow, twisting road. Wisps of wood smoke rose from rickety cottage chimneys. Tidy piles of firewood were stacked high against stone walls. The rooftops were Hansel-and-Gretel steep, covered in terra-cotta tiles or shiny corrugated metal to shed the massive amounts of snow that whomp the Gorski Kotar in winter.

  I came over a slight rise and saw a sign for Mrkopalj. Printed underneath the town’s name was the word Kalvarija, with an arrow pointing up. On a hill above the village were three giant crucifixes staked into the ground. Mrkopalj had re-created the death scene of Jesus and the robbers on Calvary as its welcome sign.

  Without fixers like Siniša around to give this foreign land some context, I was intimidated. I guess I thought it would feel more like home right away. We fear what we don’t know, and man, I had no idea what to make of a place that appeared to have been suspended in amber since the Radosevich family left. Well, there had been a few changes. The looming hammer and sickle cast in stone on the bridge into town had probably gone up within the last fifty years. Communist rule in Croatia started after World War II and ended
with the Yugoslavian Wars. From the looks of things, the Iron Curtain hadn’t quite been raised on Mrkopalj.

  My mind drifted to Zlatko’s warnings about the Gorski Kotar, and there I was, unable to read basic road signs and still slow with the currency. I didn’t even have enough words to figure out the tollbooth on the main highway, and a Croatian trucker stormed out of his cab to do it for me. He called me “shtopite,” which I added to the very short list of Croatian words I could pronounce. Though calling someone stupid doesn’t help a traveler much.

  I’m usually pretty good about picking up a few phrases to get by once I’m in a country, but there is no casual picking up of Croatian, which sounds like a normal language that’s been bashed by blunt force. The j sounds like a y, and c sounds like tz, and regular letters are flagged with little slices and dots and lines that denote that they’re about to turn from straightforward sounds into gargling practice.

  I wasn’t entirely illiterate. I knew a few things from Grandma Kate, such as prdac, prase, and guzica. I’d always guessed them to be terms of endearment, me being her favorite and all. But when I tried them out on Croatians, I was told that they meant “fart,” “pig,” and “ass,” respectively. Which mostly confused people, and wouldn’t go far toward finding a place to stay or a reasonably priced meal.

  As I drove into the village for the first time, I resolved to set aside my doubts. I’d come thousands of miles on blind faith. I was the American returning home after a hundred years. Of course this would be awesome! I wondered if I’d see the house of my ancestors. Maybe whoever lived there would even offer to rent it to us. I daydreamed of a parade. I wasn’t counting on the rending of clothes in the streets or anything, but I suspected there might be some weeping or maybe a key to the city.

  But Mrkopalj was dead quiet. As far as I could tell, no humans dwelled there, though I did see a few chickens milling around. I drove past the “ski resort” I’d read about on the Mrkopalj website, but in autumn it was empty, its ticket-booth window broken. Nearby, the International School of Peace sat abandoned at the perimeter of town where the houses just sort of died out into the hills, a ramshackle two-story building looking all forgotten and sad.