Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  Along the main road, I spotted a green tourism sign on a squat white building. I pulled over. Inside, I found a series of closed doors and a rickety wooden staircase. Dust motes drifted through the air. I couldn’t read any of the signs, but I figured a tourism office would surely have some sort of multilingual welcome on it, so I headed up the steps in search of a friendly face. Or any face, really. The building smelled musty and stale. Where were the people in Mrkopalj?

  On the second floor, I spotted a woman furtively walking out of one closed door toward another. “Tourism?” I asked.

  She pointed down the steps. “Hvala,” I told her. “Thank you” was my Croatian specialty. Though the word is produced with the same muscles used when you clear your throat, I had a little in-country cold and could do it pretty well.

  As I picked my way down the steps, a wiry old guy in a dirty coat shuffled out a door, locking it behind himself. It was one in the afternoon.

  The man stopped when he saw me on the steps. His eyes narrowed, which I mistook for the squint of the aged.

  “Are you looking for me?” he asked, his voice echoing in the silence. This was Željko Cuculić, tourism director of Mrkopalj. The name sounds like TZU-tzu-litch.

  “I am!” I said, relieved. A travel writer doesn’t even have to acclimate when she’s being led around by guides who explain everything and arrange stuff and grease the way toward the unnaturally happy travel experiences you read about in magazines.

  I smiled wide and hurried down the steps. “I’m the American travel writer! My family came to the United States from here three generations ago!”

  Cuculić waited until I reached him and leaned in close. “I am here for three hours WAITING!” he yelled. I smelled slivovitz. “And now I leave!”

  I took a step backward. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be here at any certain time,” I stammered.

  Sweet Jesus on Calvary, don’t leave me alone in this town! I thought. Please hold my hand and show me the friendly locals and a quaint cafe and explain why a herd of goats just crowded past the front door.

  “You go now to hotel,” Cuculić said. He stormed out the door, muttering as he did: “Tomorrow is national holiday. Nobody works. Maybe you call me on the next day.”

  Dude was no Siniša, I’ll say that much. I followed him out of the building, fumbling my keys in my hands, trying not to cry. I had promised Jim a thorough scouting report of Mrkopalj—by the time I left Des Moines, he’d already mentally quit his job and started packing—and I had so many questions of my own. But I wasn’t getting a damned thing for at least two days, thanks to this alleged national holiday. And Cuculić smelled like a distillery and looked as if he might be homeless. Except that he had a sweet new cherry-red Chevy.

  “I put you in Hotel Jastreb,” Cuculić said. “If this is good enough for you. It is only two stars. You follow me.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry, I—”

  But he was already powering up his saucy ride to lead me to the hotel. I got into the Polo and whipped a U-turn in his wake. I was doing my best not to panic, but I could feel myself breaking into a sweat in weird places. Without assistance from Cuculić, I would have no language here, and that would put a real damper on my fact-finding mission. Now, I’m a mom. It’s my job to be competent and efficient and functional. But in Mrkopalj, I felt a tremor in the Force.

  Just outside town, Cuculić pulled over. I did the same. We were entirely alone on a backwoods mountain road. He stalked back to my car, short and trim, hands stuffed in his khaki pockets, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. What was he going to do? Flush me into the woods and hunt me? I didn’t roll the window down. I weighed my options. Driving straight to the Zagreb airport for the next flight home seemed like the safest one.

  “I make a mistake,” Cuculić’s voice was muffled through the glass. He put up his hands. “If you want, we have coffee first.”

  Call it childhood abandonment issues or maybe just the stainless-steel soul of a Midwestern woman, but I avoid vulnerability like the mall on Black Friday. I had a sneaking suspicion that Cuculić wasn’t going to be much help in navigating Mrkopalj. Plus, he scared me.

  I cracked the window. “No coffee,” I answered, though Croatia had a handle on the coffee thing. Every cup I drank—even in scuzzy gas stations—was better than anything back home. “Just get me to the hotel and I’ll take it from there.”

  Cuculić shrugged. “You go up the hill, three miles,” he said, pointing along a winding steep path. “Stay on asphalt only.”

  I drove up the pass to the teeny grain of a village called Begovo Razdolje and lugged my bags across the empty parking lot of Hotel Jastreb, a black-and-white monolith of post-and-beam construction rising from a mountaintop pasture. I checked in with the clerk at the front desk of a sixties-but-not-in-a-good-way lobby; I was Hotel Jastreb’s only guest. Under my breath, I chanted a protective mantra—“What would Rick Steves do? What would Rick Steves do?”—as my room’s rollaway mattress and faux brick walls conspired against me. Though stone-cold silent is often how I wish a hotel to be—no sounds of whining kids through thin walls, no neighbors boinking against the headboard—when the quiet comes from being the lone guest, it’s really an eerie feeling.

  I dropped my bag and sat down to assess the situation. Croatia had been entirely dreamy until I hit the Mrkopalj county line. I felt as if I’d traveled from the First World to the Third World in a three-hour drive. Though I’d imagined Mrkopalj might feel somewhat kindred and familiar, I’d never felt so far from home in my life. Was it me? Was I doing something wrong? I might be a mid-level travel writer, but I’ve always thought myself a really good traveler.

  Travel had been no less than a salvation my whole life. As a scholarship kid at Iowa State University, I’d sleuthed the cheapest study-abroad program in the manual, hungry to know what everyone else knew about the world, and when I got to England and the adviser tried to kiss me in a creepy old uncle way, I bartered an A for my freedom and spent the balance of my semester using my train pass as a textbook for my crash course in European icons. Now the Louvre! Now Big Ben! Now the Alps!

  Fresh out of college and working as a high-school English teacher for troubled kids, I stepped between an angry student and his social worker, earning a mouthful of stitches and some serious questions about my career choice. So at the end of the school year, I cashed in my 401(k), gave away everything in my Minneapolis apartment that didn’t fit into my ’87 Honda Civic, and spent one full year traveling around the United States and Canada, crashing in parks and on the couches of friends, trying to get my head right again. It was cheaper than therapy, and it actually worked.

  Then there was my favorite and my best road trip: with Jim to Northern Minnesota, where a justice of the peace and part-time moonshiner married us on a lakeshore in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

  For crying out loud, I’d even built an entire career out of successful travels. I did this stuff for a living! And yet this one-chicken town in Croatia’s back forty had me completely unhinged. I had no idea what to do for a whole week in Mrkopalj, where the only signs of life had been barnyard animals and Cuculić. I’d dropped down like Dorothy, with a bump and an oof! I’d gone from a coastal Technicolor Oz to this dark enchanted forest that was no place like home.

  I checked my watch. Seven hours away, on American time, my long tall husband was waking up with the kids. He’d be reminding Sam for the thirtieth time to brush his teeth, and patting Zadie on the back for staying in bed all night like a big girl. In a few minutes they’d head downstairs for breakfast, Zadie dressed in jarring shades of pink with a mop of blond hair in her eyes and Sam re-creating the Droid Army battle scene from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones where Anakin Skywalker loses an arm. I could see them all. I could smell the coffee. I could hear the cereal being poured and the milk being spilled.

  I crossed the hotel room to a sliding glass door, stepping warily past the threshold onto a weather-
beaten patio that appeared to be whimsically attached to the side of the hotel. The mountain air was sharp with the primordial rot of fall. I dried my eyes with the palm of my hand. What did the ancestors mean by this clipped, indifferent greeting? Was it a message from Valentin and Jelena that this was my starting point? That we had it all, but appreciated nothing? And that this was what nothing felt like? Was this how they felt when they first arrived in America? Confused, scared, clueless? Something told me these emotions were part of my journey. Besides, if I turned back now, I had a haunting feeling that my family and I would spend the rest of our days stagnating on a couch in middle America.

  I had to do the thing that had saved me so many times in my life: I grabbed the keys to the Polo and went for a drive.

  Down on the main road, dairy cows with bells on their necks grazed in open pastures. A stout woman leaned from the front window of a small cottage, beating a rug. An old man walked along the street in dark pants and a baggy sweater, hands clasped behind his back. Humanity! At last!

  I drove both of Mrkopalj’s streets, then continued on the blacktop in the direction of the neighboring city of Delnice, pronounced DELL-neets-uh. Delnice had shops and cafés, a bus station, and a nice-looking hotel that advertised wireless Internet. Hotel Jastreb didn’t even have phone service. “We lose in thunderstorm,” the desk clerk had told me.

  In Croatia, you can make calls from the house phone of a post office, then settle up your bill at the counter. I figured that if I could just hear Jim’s steady voice, I might be able to pull out of my panic, so I headed for Delnice’s post office. But his cell would only relay the slow chant of his voice mail: “This is Jim Hoff. I’m unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message.” I called and called and called. Against my better judgment, I finally left a message, but I was snorting and crying, sputtering into the phone and causing that horrible spitty smell that makes people hate public phones. He later told me that the only words he could make out were drunk, homeless, and out of here.

  At the counter, the postal worker spoke little English, but her face was kind like a friendly aunt’s. I didn’t want to leave her. She was the first nice person I had encountered in the Gorski Kotar. Close to the first person altogether, really. I tried to make a few more calls, just to stall. I paid again, and the lady looked nice again, so I hung around some more and bought postcards. I left another message for Jim. I paid again, and watched a couple in matching tracksuits purchase lottery tickets. I bought a phone card, because the post office would be closed the next day—the only useful information imparted by Cuculić—and the lady behind the counter continued to smile at me. If I could have spoken her language, I would have told her I’d had a tough day. That I wasn’t usually this soft, and I had such awful PMS that I felt like a tick about to pop. We’d laugh, and maybe she’d share with me the time she went to visit her nephew Svorlag in America, and it was equally bewildering and off-putting. It would’ve been enough sustenance for me just to communicate that much information with another human being. But instead we just smiled at each other; she did me the favor of not looking as if she felt sorry for me, and I silently submitted to my role as the freaky foreign lady hanging around the post office. Eventually, I hung my head and left, the short drive back to Mrkopalj dark and heavy through a dense canopy of trees.

  Passing through town on the way back to Hotel Jastreb, I noticed a sign I’d missed before. This, painted on a section of a tree trunk and slapped on the side of a building: BISTRO STARI BAĆA, M. ROBERT STARČEVIĆ.

  I’d heard of this place. A week before, in Rovinj, my tour guide was an aging rocker with a mullet who led us through the city with a black suede fringed jacket hooked over his shoulder. Renato was the lead singer of Le Monde, a band that sometimes played a Mrkopalj bar called Stari Baća because it was the hometown of their keyboardist, Ratko. The bar seemed like a better place to spend the afternoon than the deserted Hotel Jastreb. Rick Steves would surely agree. I landed the Polo in a patch of grass across the street from Stari Baća, scattering a few sheep in the process.

  A low white building with brown shutters, Stari Baća (STAR-ee BOTCH-uh) bumped up against main-street Mrkopalj, its steep red metal roof sheltering a stone exterior, front windows thrown open wide, red gingham curtains flicking in and out in the breeze. I walked over the cracked concrete pad of a side courtyard, stepped into a small foyer, and pushed through a second door to find grizzled men sitting with beers at wooden harvest tables covered by red woven cloth. An ox yoke hung above the fireplace. Antique pictures of the town in more bustling times lined the wall below pairs of handmade snow skis. Though Stari Baća’s décor seemed to shoot for a nostalgic vibe, the effect was a gloomy reminder that Mrkopalj’s best days were long past.

  Behind the bar top that separated the pub from the restaurant side stood Robert Starčević, drying a glass that seemed tiny in his hands.

  “Govorite il ingleski?” I asked, slaughtering his language.

  Robert Starčević (the name sounds like STAR-cheh-vitch) was a sleepy-eyed man with a mess of curly brown hair that made him seem physically larger than he actually was. He looked up at me with what seemed like resignation.

  “Renato call me yesterday and say you look for your family.”

  “I do,” I answered, eager. “I’m also looking for beer.”

  Robert lit a cigarette. Croatians are always lighting cigarettes.

  “Sit down,” he said, exhaling and indicating a table nearby.

  Robert uncapped a bottle of Ožujsko and placed it in front of me. I fumbled through my backpack and produced copies of my great-grandparents’ naturalization certificates. Robert took them in his paws.

  He held up the certificates, pointing at “Radosevich.”

  The spelling had been Americanized. “No h. We spell with no h here in Croatia,” Robert said, looking up and exhaling a steady stream of blue smoke, “rad-OH-sheh-vitch.”

  And with that, Robert Starčević retrieved the first shred of my family history.

  Robert told me I should head to the church, where I would find an old book. Through the centuries, the village priests had recorded the baptisms, births, and deaths of every family in Mrkopalj. In that book, I would find my Radošević-no-h family names.

  I drank my beer as we did the math. Valentin and Jelena were born in 1886 and 1889 respectively—though the year of birth mattered little. Family records were kept by street address, which I didn’t have, so it would take a while to find them in the book.

  Then Robert and I sat and stared at each other. It was unsettling business, this staring, so occasionally he smoked and studied the documents, the papers rasping against each other as he looked at Valentin’s, then Jelena’s. I nervously peeled the label off my Ožujsko. When the language barrier hangs like a gaping maw between you and everyone you meet, there’s a lot of uncomfortable silence and awkward mangling of meaning and intent. You phrase things and rephrase them, hoping to hit the shaky mark of actual communication every now and then. I tried to tell him what I’d seen so far. I tried to tell him that it didn’t seem as if many people lived in Mrkopalj. I tried some small talk, just to fill the quiet.

  “So,” I said finally. “What’s the deal with your tourism guy?”

  “Cuculić is okay, but he drink too much loza,” said Robert.

  “I knew he was drunk!” I slapped the table. “I come back to this town like a hundred years after my great-grandparents leave, and the tourism guy who looks like he probably partied with them can’t even do me the favor of showing me where the bar is!”

  Robert Starčević smoked quietly and watched me.

  I dropped my head to the table and uttered one of Grandma Kate’s top phrases of exasperation. “Joj meni,” I groaned. Yoy manny. Oh my.

  “Joj meni,” Robert mused. “Is very old saying in Mrkopalj.” I cut him a look. A slow smile spread across Robert’s face. It may have been amusement. Or perhaps he realized that sitting before him was a helpless, moneyed Ame
rican. A living, breathing entrepreneurial venture, right in front of his heavy-lidded eyes.

  Robert got up, grabbed another beer for me, and dialed the phone behind the bar. He spoke into the receiver for several minutes, then returned to the table.

  “I have called my niece, Helena,” he said. “She speak good English. She will help you.”

  I drank and waited for Robert’s niece, whose maiden name, it turned out, was Radošević. Just like my great-grandmother. Her father’s name? Valentin. A sign from the ancestors if ever I saw one.

  A half hour later, the door to the bar opened with a whoosh of cold air, revealing a smallish blonde several months pregnant.

  Helena unzipped her winter coat and sunk into a chair while her uncle poured her a glass of water. “I am sorry about Cuculić,” she said. She looked tired. “It is only because of politics that he has this job. I hate politics.”

  Helena and her husband, Paul, a local forest ranger, had just moved back to Mrkopalj from Delnice with their toddler, Klara. “It’s a better life here for children. More freedom,” she said. “I don’t like a place with too many people. I don’t like Delnice.”

  Apparently she hadn’t been to the Delnice post office.

  Times were tough in Mrkopalj, Helena said in a slow lilt. Her words began in the higher octaves and drifted downward until the end of each sentence, where she lingered on the final syllable. Like a noon whistle, but soothing. Helena said young people were moving away to the cities to find jobs. After her baby was born, she said, she’d return to work as a teacher’s assistant. “It’s boooooring and depreeeeeessing when you live here and have noooothing to doooooooo.”

  Still, the woods and mountains were wild and beautiful, and she and Paul wanted their kids to grow up with the old ways. I confided to Helena that Jim and I were longing to do the very same thing: return to Mrkopalj to live the simple life of my ancestors.