Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  I looked around the dank bar. “It sounded fun when we were back home, anyway.”

  Things did get more interesting with Helena around. She told me that “mrko” meant “dark,” as the town was covered in shady forest when settlers arrived five hundred or so years ago. The word “palj” meant “field” or “ladle” or “loogie,” depending on if you asked someone old, or a woman, or a young person who had to drive all the way to Rijeka to find work.

  We talked about Mrkopalj’s ancient dialect, and about how Croatian-Americans who visited left some words behind, such as “ćuguma,” pronounced “CHEW-goo-mah,” for chewing gum. Or “lumbrella,” for umbrella.

  She told me about Mrkopalj’s problem with bears. They descended every morning from the mountains to cherry-pick from people’s backyards. “They ruin a garden, but they don’t attack people,” she said with a coy smile. “They are only huuuuuuungry.”

  This would bother Jim, who had grown up across the street from a Kmart in Mason City, leaving him largely uncomfortable with the natural world.

  “You have the stress,” Helena noted. “We will go for a walk.”

  Outside, the fall air was bracing. She walked me through the church cemetery that spread out toward the foothills, its graves decorated with old photos, flickering candles, and plastic flowers.

  We crossed the street to the priest’s residence to ask about the big book of names, but a tiny nun in full habit told us the priest was not in.

  We headed back to Stari Baća, where Helena suggested I relocate from Hotel Jastreb to the rooms above the bar, so Robert and his wife, Goranka, could look after me. Robert worked the phone, and soon townspeople alerted to my presence started showing up. Men peeled off winter coats and greeted each other through a smoky haze, amid the sounds of clinking glasses and occasional spasms of gruff laughter. There were no women except Helena and me and the kitchen helpers.

  Robert called from behind the bar as Helena and I settled onto stools. “How is name ‘Jennifer Wilson’ if you are Croatian? Where is husband from?”

  “Well, actually, I kept my name when I got married,” I explained. “My husband’s name is Jim Hoff. He’s Norwegian, mostly.”

  Robert stood back and studied me, calculating, smirking.

  “Do you like Obama?” he asked, his gaze unfocused as if maybe he had been hitting the loza himself. This was a different Robert than the quiet one I’d met earlier.

  “Oh,” I stalled, recalling that my guidebook advised against discussing politics. “Obama is running for president.”

  Robert leaned in. “You know that he is nigger.”

  My jaw dropped. Was this a language barrier thing, a word uttered by a guy who’d listened to a few hip-hop songs and thought this was a standard-issue American noun? I just couldn’t tell, as I sat in that bar full of drinking men who didn’t speak my language. I was nervous and worried, and Robert had just offered to hook me up with a house to rent, so I didn’t want to start a fight with him. I had to gather my scouting report in Mrkopalj, and fast. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to fly solo in this place.

  “We don’t say that word where I come from,” I said simply. I tried to change the subject. “Hillary Clinton is also running for president.”

  “Oh ho ho!” Robert said in mock horror. “Hillary Cleen-tone!”

  Robert fell back to his huddle of buddies, and they conducted a thorough parsing of the American lady traveling without the husband whose name she had not taken and speaking of the Hillary Cleen-tone.

  Then Robert called over, “Ronald Reagan was the best president in America!”

  “And now he’s dead,” I noted.

  Helena leaned over and nudged me. “Here, men think they know everything,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  Stari Baća filled up with people stopping by to ogle the curious stranger. Beer flowed. One or two of the younger guys tried out their English skills on me. Someone offered a tour of the family cheese operation. I saw Cuculić at the bar, his thin face lurking in the dark, glaring at me. Old men set up a table to play cards. I could make out the words Radošević and American drifting through conversations. A couple of guys with the family name stopped by my table, but we couldn’t really understand each other, so I don’t know if we were related. We toasted anyway with my new word: živjeli! To life! It wouldn’t rent me a room or anything, but it would probably point me in the direction of the nearest bar, which seemed equally practical in Croatia.

  A startled-looking old Radošević was paraded before me by several others. Helena translated that he knew my great-grandmother’s maiden name had been Iskra, not Eskra, as Sister Paula had spelled it. His wife’s maiden name was Iskra, too. Many villagers left for America, but he couldn’t summon more than that.

  “Everything is mixed up,” he said sadly, pointing to his head. The men bought him a drink, which seemed to both bewilder and cheer him.

  I stuck it out at Hotel Jastreb for the night, its one lonely inhabitant. It was through sheer force of will that I didn’t fixate on the notion that my situation was the perfect premise for a horror movie: Cuculić showing up with an angry mob of drunken bears, screaming “You are three hours late!” as he bludgeons me with both a hammer and a sickle. Okay, maybe I fixated.

  The next day, after I moved my stuff to Stari Baća, I walked around in the chill of Mrkopalj, silent but for the echo of someone chopping wood. The town was abandoned on the holiday. I meticulously photographed the place, every towering barn and rickety wooden fence. I wrote down phone numbers posted on houses with rooms to let should Robert prove unreliable, which was highly likely. I popped in to Stari Baća once or twice, and a guy asked me if I was married, or if I wanted to be. He seemed to be checking out my teeth.

  Someone tried to sell me cabbage from the back of a truck—at least I think that’s what he was selling. Another offered in perfect English to sell me his sister’s house for half a million dollars. “We can’t keep,” he said, shaking his head. “We have no reason to stay. No one wants to live here anymore, and tourism is not so good.”

  I had a good guess as to why tourism wasn’t doing so hot, and his name was Cuculić. But I kept my thoughts to myself.

  The whole scene was like something from a grainy foreign movie I would’ve pretended to enjoy in college. A black cat crossed my path—I’d counted eight such occurrences during my stay in Croatia. I spit three times to my left, a trick Siniša had taught me to ward off evil. Across a meadow, a woman in a black head scarf rounded up sheep. A family herded milk cows over the main street, the grandmother using a stick to tap their bony behinds. I was so engrossed in their movements that I stepped in a big pile of poop.

  I was scraping my shoe when Cuculić pulled up beside me in his Chevy. “Why are you walking?” he asked. “What are you looking for?”

  “An interstellar teleporter,” I said without looking up.

  “How did it go with the priest?” he asked.

  I dropped my stick and looked up. “He wasn’t there. Maybe I’ll leave my documents at the church and have them e-mail me an image of the names when they’ve found them.”

  “Oh ho ho!” Cuculić sneered, sounding like a bad guy in a cartoon. “I do not believe it would happen!”

  “Well, could you maybe help—” I began, but my voice was lost in the grinding of gravel as Cuculić drove away.

  I stood there in the road. Cuculić almost willfully avoided doing his job. This offended me on pretty much every level of my Midwestern being. “From this day forward, you are my nemesis,” I declared to his taillights.

  A flock of little boys on bikes rustled past me, their unzipped coats flapping like wings. I’d hoped to feel something in Mrkopalj—a message from my ancestors, maybe even the spirit of Grandma Kate. But there had been no spiritual connection at all, only a simple and desperate need to see Jim and the kids that had turned into a physical ache in my chest and throat.

  I knew Robert now and had taken down his phone nu
mbers. I knew Helena, and she had e-mail. In just a shade over twenty-four hours, I’d filled my notebook with a respectable scouting report. I walked across the street to the post office pay phone and used my calling card to change my flight reservation. I would leave at dawn. My urgent-mom-need-to-be-in-constant-motion would not survive a full week in Mrkopalj. I would go crazy here alone.

  When I hung up, I stood on the post office steps and breathed a sigh of relief. The village seemed strangely beautiful now that I knew I’d see Jim and the kids soon. I joined the lines of women wearing heavy dark stockings and babushkas filing through the streets to attend evening mass in the tall yellow church with a spire that rose into the mountain sky. As the priest mumbled prayers I’d heard every Holy Day and weekend of my childhood, I whispered along in English, glad of the familiar cadence.

  I resolved during mass that I must make contact with the old relatives before I left. They were the most basic reason I was here in the first place. I couldn’t do much without an interpreter, so after the service I stood outside and wordlessly held up Jelena and Valentin’s naturalization certificates. This time, the travel gods delivered. Soon I was surrounded by old women. I pointed to the papers and then to myself, saying “America!” over and over.

  They spoke to me in Croatian, slowly and loudly, as if I would eventually understand. And in a way, I did. The women wanted to help me. When the squat little priest limped out of the empty church, they gently and collectively grasped my arms and led me to him. He was the keeper of the big and ancient Book of Names. A guy walking by the church, the same one who’d tried to sell me his sister’s house, paused and offered translation assistance. He introduced himself as Milivoj, and he had a curious speech habit of adding the words “like this” to the end of most sentences.

  “Call me Mile,” he said, pronouncing it Mee-lay. “Like this.”

  The women watched with hands folded across their chests as I walked away with the men, waiting to see if they’d righted my ship and if I would now sail. I cast a few glances behind me as we crossed the street to the three-story priest’s residence. Each time I looked back, the old women made shooing gestures or nodded enthusiastically.

  The priest’s English seemed pretty good at first, but by the fourth time he asked if this was my first visit to Croatia, I had a sneaking suspicion that someone’s rosary might be missing a few beads.

  The priest rotated his head toward me, his large square face dominated by large square glasses. He looked very much like an owl. Again with the repeating, but this time a question that Mile translated: “He wants to know if you can guess how many bibles in different languages he has.”

  “Holy, Holy Bible,” the priest said, grinning.

  “Um, five?” I guessed.

  “He has a bible in eight languages!” said Mile. “Like this!”

  The priest reiterated: “Holy, Holy Bible!”

  We climbed a set of side steps and pushed through a channel-glass door. A short hallway led to a seventies-era study, its only sound a ticking clock. Mile and I sat at a table as the priest pulled out a dusty tome that held the history of Mrkopalj.

  The priest introduced himself as Father George, and then he and Mile spent forty-five minutes discussing how hard it would be to find the Radošević and Iskra names in the book because I did not have their street addresses. They did so almost entirely without my input, as if my presence—the reason we were gathered to begin with—was entirely extraneous.

  “The priest, he says that your great-grandmother cannot be Iskra,” said Mile, patiently nestled in his parka. “He has never heard of name Iskra, like this.”

  “Jelena, Jelena, Jelena,” the priest’s finger slowly traced the column of the Radošević entries.

  “Actually, Jelena is an Iskra,” I said. “I know this for sure. You might start with Iskras. I see on that index page that they do exist, and there are fewer of them than Radoševićs.”

  This confused Mile. “Why look up Iskra?”

  “Because Jelena’s maiden name is Iskra,” I said. “She married Valentin Radošević.”

  “Valentin? Who is Valentin?” asked the priest.

  “Valentin Radošević,” I answered. “My great-grandfather.”

  “Why you say Jelena?” the priest asked.

  “That is my great-grandmother,” I explained. “Jelena Iskra.”

  “This is impossible,” said Mile. “Jelena did not marry her father, like this.”

  Language barrier. Language barrier. Language barrier.

  There followed a long discussion about how difficult it would be for the priest to check every single Radošević name to find Valentin among them. There were at least fifty Radošević families! Fifty pages to turn! And turning pages was hard.

  I listened to them nattering on for a while, then began to inch over toward the book, trying to be inconspicuous.

  “Maybe I can just do it myself?” I asked gently, raising my eyebrows as I slowly reached for it.

  The priest recoiled as if he’d been burned, pulling the book away protectively. My participation here was minimal, and there would certainly be no book touching by a woman. And so, in an uncharacteristic show of patience, I waited.

  After about an hour, when it appeared that the priest had nodded off to sleep, I roused him, and he suggested I check the Internet for my great-grandparents’ names. “Not long ago” he had sent the whole book to Zagreb so the information it held could be entered into the Croatian citizen registry. Maybe everything was online now.

  Then he wrote down a website, which was illegible, and I was dismissed.

  Mile looked at me and shrugged. We rose, the priest slid the Book of Names back onto the bookshelf, and we left the room. Mile bade me good night, and just like that, I was out on the dark street, returning to the bar.

  I looked up at the night sky. “Sorry,” I said to the dead relatives. “That’s the best I can do for now.”

  Maybe the welcome I received at Stari Baća was an answer from Valentin and Jelena that indeed I’d done just fine on this first go-around, for it was warm and sweet and comforting. Helena and Robert’s wife, Goranka, came out of the kitchen as I walked in the door, clucking over me and removing my coat. Where had I been all day? Was I all right? Everyone had been worried.

  “I was just looking around town,” I said. “Getting the lay of the land.”

  As I settled in, Helena asked, “Will you come back here with your family?”

  I told her I just wasn’t sure yet.

  “Helena, what would my family do here all day? I mean, seriously. What happens in Mrkopalj?”

  “Well, you wake up and have breakfast. Then you go for coffee. Then you have lunch. Maybe a nap. Then go for coffee. Then maybe go for hike in the woods. Then supper,” Helena said. “We will think of things to do.”

  Goranka hovered nearby, awaiting a translation.

  Helena tried the hard sell. “We have a good mountain to climb. We have rivers. We can take the canoe out!”

  “Maybe we could start a garden together,” I suggested.

  “Who?” Helena asked.

  “We women,” I said. “I garden. Maybe you could teach me some new tricks.”

  Helena translated for Goranka. They stared at me, dubious, then steered me into a secluded dining room just off the bar where the girls in the kitchen had laid out a fresh batch of deer goulash for me. The women shut me away by myself, a peculiar show of respect that made me lonely and fond of them at the same time.

  The wild meat was tart and gamey in a thick stew of tomatoes and onions. Helena told me the deer had been shot not long before it hit the table, which explained the tiny pile of bone shards that grew on the side of my plate as I ate. It wasn’t a key to the city, but it was the Mrkopalj equivalent, and I was proud to have it. Alongside my plate was a platter of crisp lettuce, unusually thick and stout, peppered and sprinkled with vinegar and oil. The greens had probably been plucked from a garden just before I walked into Stari Baća
that night, most likely by the kids peeking at me through a crack in the door. There was also deep yellow polenta and a glass of malvazija. I chewed slowly, considering my short stay.

  I’d come to Mrkopalj in search of family, but family had been drawing my thoughts homeward since I’d first arrived. And all news from the States was grim. The America I’d grown up with was wheeling out of control like Cuculić’s Chevy on a Saturday night. Friends were losing jobs. The national debt had passed $10 trillion. The wars in the Middle East were putting us right up with North Korea in the international popularity contest. The world was rapidly reconfiguring, and it didn’t feel as if the United States was coming out on top this time. This was not a bad time for a sabbatical.

  A college girlfriend who worked at CNN had called me before I boarded the plane to Croatia from my connection in New York. “I can’t meet you for lunch. The Dow just dropped six hundred fifty points,” she said breathlessly. “Time to start living below our means and teaching the kids to do the same.”

  Wow, I thought then. Do we even know how? In his presidential campaign, Barack Obama was calling on Americans to return to their Nation of Immigrant values. I wasn’t even really sure what that meant.

  But I thought about Helena raising her kids in Mrkopalj, near the wild mountains and with the old ways. I thought about the $25 I paid for my room in Stari Baća, which included the deer in the deal. I thought about those happy boys on rickety bikes. I thought about working in a big garden, baking bread, getting a couple of chickens. I thought about this place where the people knew who they were, because the priest had a big Book of Names that told them. I tossed and turned in my room above the bar, a giant medieval crucifix above my bed. I knew in my heart that if Jim and I were going to forge a new way for our family, it would be best accomplished in a simpler place. But did it have to be Mrkopalj? I mean, we had other relatives with interesting roots. Grandma Kate had married a full-blooded Italian man. Maybe we’d spend our year abroad in northern Italy, where Grandpa Gino’s family came from, a place famous for balsamic vinegar, cheese, and wine. I pictured myself riding a vintage bicycle past the Duomo, a baguette peeking out from my fashionable Italian tote. I imagined Jim in a Brad Pitt tweed cap, bringing me a bouquet of fresh flowers after a morning in the vineyard with the kids, ready to share lunch and afternoon grappa, Maria Callas singing on the Victrola in the kitchen. It would cost a fortune, but we had a decent savings account, and at least we wouldn’t have to know how to field-dress a boar to survive.