Jim laughed. I passed the beer back to him. We sat in the quiet of the dorm, watching our babies sleep as cool air drifted in from the night, basking once again in the extravagance of simplicity that was uniquely Mrkopalj’s.
chapter thirteen
Toward the end of July, I began using a more modern method to fill in the blanks that the Book of Names left me with. There’s a ton of information on the Internet about genealogy—though most of it could double as a sleep aid. A friend from college was an avid genealogist and sent one particularly useful site that I hadn’t heard about back in the States (made even more useful by the fact that is was free, funded by the Ellis Island Foundation). On it, I could look up PDFs of actual ship manifests that listed the 25 million immigrants arriving in New York Harbor at the turn of last century. Its more legible text version was a searchable database, and there I found my people.
Nineteen-year-old Valentin Radošević had declared himself single, “Hungarian,” and a resident of “Mrkopat.” (I could just imagine a harried-looking scribe set up at some makeshift desk on a harbor dock squinting through tiny round glasses and desperately trying to cipher the answers of the thick-accented immigrants so he might fill out his books properly.) Valentin was delivered on the ship Graf Waldersee from Hamburg, Germany. From the look of things, Valentin’s ship was delayed: The arrival date had been scratched out from February 17, 1905, to read February 18 instead.
Valentin had sworn by oath that he was not a felon, a polygamist, or an anarchist or deformed in any way, like poor Johann Mave a few lines down, who the “Dr. says conjunctivitis.” Valentin had $14.20 in his pocket. He’d never been to prison or an almshouse. He’d traveled with other guys from Mrkopalj, heading to Colfax, Iowa.
This blew my mind. I grew up in Colfax, where my dad’s side of the family had lived for as long as anyone could remember. I could recite five generations of Wilson men from Colfax (mainly because their names were Harry, Thomas, Harry, Thomas, and Harold). Valentin Radošević, who’d declared himself a “laborer” on the ship’s manifest, started his life in America toiling in the same coal mines as my Wilson grandfathers. Wouldn’t it be something if they’d picked at the same sparkling black rock side by side? The thought pleased me to no end, which gives you an idea of how easily entertained one becomes when rummaging through the dusty archives of genealogy.
I searched for Jelena next. I didn’t find her quickly. I tried many different spellings, feeling now that I knew that little bespectacled man recording the immigrants’ answers at the docks. I imagined he must have grown tired of his work, and was perhaps considering a job in sales, or consulting, as the day-to-day grind of helping shape a nation was really wearing him down.
At long last, I found Jelena Iskra, her name hopelessly and immediately mangled into “Yelena Yskra” from “Mrkopaly, Austria.” My great-grandmother was so ungainly at five feet eleven inches tall that the poor woman had been listed as male.
She’d come via Cherbourg, France, on the ship Philadelphia, arriving on May 30, 1909, with a boatload of others from Mrkopalj county: Lokve, Sunger, Tuk, Delnice. Jelena traveled with a group heading to Madrid, Iowa, where Valentin had eventually settled as a miner. On the same page as Jelena was an older Starčević man named Anton, perhaps an uncle sent to look out for her.
Jelena listed herself as “farmhand,” and her father, Josip Iskra, as her nearest relative. She was twenty, had $100 in her pocket, and was coming to see her “friend,” Valentin Radošević. I still couldn’t believe they thought she was a man. Maybe she’d told them that herself, out of fear that someone might try to take advantage of her.
I looked out the window onto Novi Varoš as it rolled toward Čelimbaša, a view that never failed to enchant me. What had Valentin and Jelena seen when they looked out their windows before leaving Mrkopalj forever? How had they found the courage to go? The sadness they must have felt as they surveyed their home for the last time made our own emotional dramas seem like surfing on a velvet pillow into a tangerine sunset.
I heard the whirr of a moped and peeked out the window. Outside, the portly Mrkopalj mailman was pulling up the driveway on his government-issued scooter. He’d spoken to Jim and me one day in good English, telling us he couldn’t haul the heavy care packages our friends and family had been sending like humanitarian aid drops—peanut butter, ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese, gossip magazines—but we could pick them up at the post office in the afternoons.
No one had been able to tell me why I couldn’t find Valentin and Jelena’s house numbers. Now I rushed downstairs to ask what the mailman might know about the numbering system.
“Our numbers change three times in past one hundred years,” he told me. “What was Number 262 then maybe is not 262 now.
“Book might be wrong, too,” he added, turning around and preparing to putt away. “There is more than one Book of Names.”
I stopped in my tracks. “More than one Book of Names?”
“Da,” he said. “There is another.”
The duplication of the books had something to do with the Communist government after World War II. I spent the afternoon at Stari Baća reading my history books, seeking clues. As with many things in the village, Mrkopalj’s recent history was gnarled with a more ancient one, in which two lines of thought about Croatian identity had caused centuries of bloodshed.
The first kingdom of Croatia was established around the tenth century. Almost immediately, it was occupied by another country. First the Hungarians took over, then the Turks, then the Austrian Habsburgs, then Napoléon, then the Habsburgs again. By the time the 1800s rolled around, smaller Eastern European nations like Croatia (and Serbia and Bosnia) wanted more. Some Slavic people wanted the whole chaotic region to unite under one bigger centralized power.
Others just wanted to strengthen the individual nations they already had, mining rural places like the Gorski Kotar for the Croatian identity, where the same foods and crafts and songs had been passed down for generations. Being Catholic also became a symbol of the Croatian nationality, because it set them apart from their Orthodox and Muslim neighbors. “We are Catholic in Croatia like Israel is Jewish,” Helena told me.
At the end of World War I, Serbia was given several Slavic provinces, forming the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Croatia went along with it because it feared Italy and Serbia would soon start snatching up their land. (Italy helped itself to some of the coast and islands anyway.) This was the first Yugoslavia, or Land of the South Slavs, and it worked out pretty well for Serbia, as the government was based there, and the Serbian king turned out to be a dictator.
But for Croatia, it was really just more domination. The war had wrecked Croatia’s economy, and the people were poor and desperate. The most popular Croatian political party wanted a truly independent Croatia once and for all.
At about the same time, an ultranationalist fringe party called the Ustaše cropped up, led by a guy named Ante Pavelić. Their goal: absolute independence for Croatia, and that meant a racially pure Croatia. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany knew a needy ally when they saw one and took an interest in the Ustaše, whose leaders had been expelled from Croatia for being bat-shit crazy, among other things.
In 1941, Germany defeated the Royal Yugoslavian Army in about ten days. The Axis Powers first offered the position of Croatian prime minister to the leader of the popular Croatian Peasant Party, but when he declined, Ante Pavelić came out of exile to lead the Independent State of Croatia.
Pavelić’s men began forcibly moving or murdering Serbs from the borderlands. Pavelić was Croatia’s Hitler equivalent, building concentration camps for Jews, gypsies, Serbs, and political dissenters.
The Ustaše was too roughneck for the vast majority of Croatians. People peeled off to join anti-government rebels, causing a civil war as World War II raged on. A Yugoslavian Communist leader named Josip Broz Tito headed up the movement against the Nazis and Fascists, and by association, the Ustaše. Tito’s Partis
ans fought the bad guys guerilla-style in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, working toward the restoration of a unified Yugoslavia. In the end, the Partisans aligned with Soviet Russia and won. Tito took control of this second attempt at a unified Yugoslavia, and ran it for the next fifty years in a sort of hybrid of communism, socialism, and capitalism—a “middle way” between East and West.
Tito was a big personality, hanging out with famous people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Elizabeth Taylor. He was promiscuous, married several times (first to a fourteen-year-old Russian girl), and carried on juicy affairs. Tito was also a badass. When Stalin repeatedly tried to assassinate him, Tito wrote him a note:
Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle … If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.
Marshal Tito also rebuilt Yugoslavia. He gave people jobs. His young Communist worker crews boosted infrastructure and created fantastic tourist sites that remain today. But in those early years following World War II, Tito’s ranks of secret police and informers were also brutal. People who spoke against the government simply disappeared.
You could practice Catholicism, but the government didn’t like it. Several prominent priests had sided with the Ustaše. Tito executed some, jailed others. The government confiscated church property. This was the connection to the Book of Names. I called Helena to ask about it.
She told me that indeed Communist secret police had raided Mrkopalj and destroyed village records. In the 1940s, as protection, the clergy from Our Lady of Seven Sorrows made copies of the Book of Names and hid them throughout the village.
That was as far as I got in my research. Stefanija, the summer girl, was pouring me a cup of tea when the Brown Bear rushed in. Robert spoke hastily, winded from excitement. He grabbed a beer from the cooler and guzzled half of it. Jim had told him about my conversation with the mailman, and Robert knew a retired municipal employee who not only had a hidden copy of the Book of Names, but remembered the old house numbers.
“We go to house of man with another Big Book! Jim drive me!” He paused to catch his breath. “We come, ten minutes!” Then he left.
Stefanija stood behind the bar, looking at me, eyebrows raised.
I just shook my head. “It’s a long story,” I said.
“And very dramatic,” Stefanija agreed.
I packed my computer and notebooks and watched patiently through the red-checked curtains of Stari Baća, waiting for Jim and Robert. And perhaps another man. Who knew? These bewildering Mrkopalj invitations had become the norm. I just went limp in the face of them now, waiting to be acted upon by outside forces. Eventually, Jim and Robert pulled up in the Peugeot and beeped the horn twice, and I joined them.
We drove maybe a block up the street to the house of Zdravko Skender, a Mrkopalj municipal employee for thirty-six years during Communist times who knew the original house-numbering system. As we crossed the street, I could see Skender on a bench in a garden, sitting upright with his hands on his knees, watching traffic go by with his wife. He was old and angular, with bottle-thick glasses. By the time we’d gotten to his front door, he and his wife were up and inside the house, welcoming us in.
There was a faint nervousness in the air. Jim asked if he could take photographs. Skender said no. Skender’s wife siphoned me off from the group, and we sat at her kitchen table and watched the men discuss our situation in the living room.
While Robert explained that I was seeking the houses of my ancestors and we would like to see his Book of Names, Skender sat stone-faced and unmoving on his slipcovered couch.
Robert looked over at Jim, filling the silence with nervous rapid-fire words. “This book is original book,” he said to us with gravity.
Skender had hidden it all these years, safe from the government that employed him, the government that made people disappear if they did things like hide books.
Like the Owl, Skender was intensely protective of the book. I finally understood why.
Skender spoke, indicating my camera and tape recorder. Robert appeared to reassure him that Jim and I were just a couple of American idiots in search of family. We were not in Skender’s home for surveillance purposes. I was Mrkopaljci. I could be trusted. To a man who’d spent much of his career protecting public records from destruction, this seemed like a very important point to make.
At least I hoped that was the point Robert was making. I longed to hear firsthand Skender’s reluctance and Robert’s reasoning, but Robert didn’t translate. I don’t know if this was forgetfulness or a basic lack of language skills. If it was the latter, Robert would never own up to it. He was proud of his role as our village guide.
All this time, Skender leveled a steady Croatian stare at me as I hung back in the kitchen with his wife. So I stared at Skender’s wife, because she had a very friendly face, and it made me less nervous. We smiled at each other. Robert fidgeted, hitched up his Capri pants, and cleared his throat a few times. Jim, rattled himself, wandered over toward Robert and hovered behind him, as if seeking protection.
At long last, Skender slapped his hands on his knees. He got up. He crossed the living room to a closet. From deep within, he drew out an oversized rectangular Book of Names, bound in striped green cloth and edged in brown leather. The book didn’t look older than the one at the church. Probably Robert had gotten this detail wrong.
Still, I imagined the book when it had first been painstakingly copied out, perhaps by Skender himself. I wondered about its journey to the darkest corner of Skender’s house. Perhaps it had been stuffed into a nondescript bag, maybe a potato sack, like the ones I saw beyond open cellar doors in the houses of Mrkopalj, then tossed into the back of an ox cart as if it was just another bit of daily cargo, like hay or bolts of cloth or a mountain of cabbages. Perhaps, upon reaching its destination, the potato sack was hefted into the kitchen of the house, hauled carefully to the cellar by the faithful matriarch of a good Mrkopalj family. Perhaps she stowed the copy of the Book of Names in a hole in the floor, where she also hid extra milk money for the son she prayed would one day go to America to ease the burden on the house and send home a few dollars from the coal mines. There was probably a chain of Mrkopalj people who had risked their lives to keep this book—none of whom I would see or know—until it ended up in the very ordinary surroundings of Zdravko Skender’s closet.
Skender hefted this Book of Names onto the couch, then planted himself on an ottoman in front of it. He ran his hands over the cover for a few seconds then opened it. Jim and Robert and I crowded in. The book was tidier and more uniform than the one I’d seen in the church: definitely a copy. Skender licked a finger and paged through. He raised his eyebrows under his glasses and quickly found each of my family’s pages, as if he had the thing memorized.
He said that, according to the book, Valentin’s House No. 262 was now House No. 48 on Novi Varoš. Did Robert know where this was?
“Yes,” Robert assured him. “It is very near to my house.”
We’d first see a yellow cottage that was slightly set back from the street, Skender told us. Directly behind it was another house, hidden from casual view, wooden in structure. This hidden structure was the one we were looking for.
Jelena’s house, he said, was just a few houses from where we stood.
Jim and I exchanged wide-eyed “No way!” looks.
I was so happy I wanted to hug Zdravko Skender. This, I knew, would not go over well. Instead, I held out my notebook and asked him to write the correct spelling of his name. Robert translated incorrectly, saying instead that I wanted Skender’s autograph. It worked out all right, as signing an autograph seemed to please Skender, as if he’d been recognized for being such a discreet keeper of the book, and he had been.
He signed with a flourish. It read, simply, “Skender.”
When we’d finished, his wife poured shots of pelinkovac, an her
bal Croatian liquor made with wormwood that tasted like earwax.
“Živjeli!” we toasted in unison, Skender still looking only mildly amused by our presence. We drank quickly and left, despite urgent pleas from Skender’s wife to stick around and do a few more shots. We left them waving on the front steps, a Balkan version of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, as we piled into the Peugeot like clowns.
Robert, intrigued by how close my great-grandfather had lived to his own great-grandparents, wanted to see Valentin’s house first. So Jim executed a tidy three-point turn and raced toward Novi Varoš—a drive that took approximately thirty-seven seconds. As we passed 12 Novi Varoš, Robert, a veteran of ten Croatian rock bands and gifted with a flair for the dramatic, rolled down his window and counted down houses to Valentin’s.
“Von! Twoo! Tree! Stop!”
Jim stopped the car.
“No, wait!” Robert said. He waved his hand. “Keep going.”
Jim started driving again.
Robert pointed out the houses with dramatic juts of his finger. “Fore! Fie-eev! Seex! Stop!”
Jim stopped.
Robert shook his head. “No, sorry. Go on.”
Jim pealed out.
“Okay! Say-van! Now stop!”
Jim slammed on the brakes and we all heaved forward. When Newton’s first law of motion had finished with us, we sat in silence.
“Now out!” Robert commanded. Three car doors opened in unison, and we emptied into the street.
We stood before a set-back cottage of faded yellow stucco, just seven houses from where we lived with the Starčević family. Its windows were broken, curtains drawn, lawn overgrown. I’d passed this abandoned place every morning on my walks to Tuk, sometimes stopping to admire its soft shade of paint against worn dove-gray doors closed to the bustle of earthly beings.
“Look here,” Robert said, pointing.
Running Away to Home Page 15
