“She will teach,” Jasminka said. “Ana say you buy butter, milk, flour, walnuts.”
Then Ana headed across the street to Pavice’s for the news of the day. Pavice was a tremendous gossip. One of the summer girls had broken up with her boyfriend, and within an hour, before her own mother even knew, Pavice called for details. I watched Ana park it on a tree stump outside Pavice’s summer kitchen and light up a smoke.
“We finish today with čaj škola,” Jasminka announced. “Now you know everything!”
I laughed. “It’s about time someone told me that,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Is no thanking,” Jasminka said. “I like.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“You are liking Mrkopalj,” she said as we hugged good-bye. “All Mrkopalj is like family.”
Then she leaned forward and chucked me in the stomach with her elbow. “Addams Family!”
I gathered my things and crossed the street to Pavice and Ana Fak. Ana was rolling her eyes and making circular hand gestures as if to indicate something taking a very long time. I guessed she was complaining about having to teach me the epic recipe of povitica. This was really busting up Pavice, whose humor was along the lines of the Three Stooges’. She guffawed and slapped me on the leg and Ana just smiled with her eyes, watching me, smoking, as if it was good to be needed all the same.
“Yenny!” Pavice yelled. “Yenny, dal ti voliš koprivu?” Pavice started haw-hawing again, slapping her own knees now. Did I like kopriva? Sort of like asking someone: Do you like a kick in the pants?
“Neh, kopriva!” I shook my head.
Jasminka joined us and looked up the English word for kopriva: nettles. Women with circulation problems once beat their legs with kopriva to improve the blood flow. Pavice said this was an old Bosnian cure. Jasminka added that kopriva was actually good to eat in springtime, when you could pick the young leaves and fry them with potatoes.
“You people have big problems if you think nettles are good for you,” I said, rising from my stump, laughing with the ladies. I headed back to the dorm, where Jim was cooking dinner, which would not have anything ridiculous like nettles in it.
As I crossed the yard, my skin prickled with the awareness that I was being watched. I looked around and caught a glimpse of the old woman Manda, wife of Viktor, looking out her window. I’d seen Manda out picking gospina trava on my first full day in Mrkopalj; I’d rarely seen her again. As far as I could tell, Manda hardly left the house.
Yet there she was, watching. I raised a hand and waved to her. Manda waved back, then disappeared behind the curtain, joining the ranks of the mysteries of Mrkopalj that now included hidden copies of the Book of Names, the foreboding air of Valentin’s house, the use of nettles as a skin bracer, and the fact that a guy like Cuculić could hold one of the most important jobs in town.
chapter fifteen
In a dying village where church was everything and few people had babies, Helena and Paul invited us to their new daughter Magda’s baptism on the last Saturday of July. It was a great honor.
Robert asked if we’d take his girls. Goranka was working at the tollbooth, and he would be in Stari Baća. All seven of us packed into the Peugeot, breaking every child-safety law on the books, and drove to the church in Sunger.
We pulled into the parking lot, the one with the bar, and parked.
Jim looked over at me. “Remember the first time we were here?”
I did remember. “It wasn’t even a month ago,” I said as the kids piled out.
“It feels like a year,” Jim said.
Our short time in Mrkopalj had been intense. We’d gone from feeling like foreigners to feeling like family in a matter of weeks. We had Robert to thank for that. Without the Brown Bear vouching for us, we never would have had such instant access. After the service, Helena even insisted that we join in the family portrait. To this day, somewhere in Mrkopalj, there are four bewildered Americans peeking out from the pages of the photo album of one little girl’s baptism.
The best part came at the end: the after-party at Helena and Paul’s house. They’d crammed wooden tables and benches into their living room and the makeshift layout gave the festivities a raucous air. We were greeted by cousins at the door handing out Dixie cups of rakija. Sam and Zadie flowed into a river of kids.
The tables were piled with plates of lamb placed every few feet, along with bowls of cucumber-and-tomato salad dressed in oil and vinegar and giant baskets of crusty bread made by Paul’s mother, Pavla. Pavla slid a big plate of fresh green onions in front of me, indicating with a proud wink that these were hers, as she was one of the most prolific gardeners in the county. Pavla’s onions were so robust they probably could have gotten up and walked to my plate themselves. She showed me how to eat like a real Mrkopaljci: pinching the lamb with bread and following each bite with a chomp of green-onion chaser. Pavla and I cleared a whole platter of this melty, fatty goodness until I was so full I only had room for more rakija, a bottle of which sat in the center of the table, the label written out by hand, among so many pitchers of wine and beer.
I introduced myself to Helena’s dad a few seats away. “Moja ime je Jennifer Wilson,” I said.
He shook my hand, his distinct voice like that of the martian in Warner Brothers cartoons. “Valentin Radošević,” he answered.
I halted my rakija shot in midair. I had forgotten Helena’s maiden name. “That is the name of my great-grandfather,” I began to explain incredulously, but just then someone handed him a guitar, and Paul took up his tamburitza.
Everyone sang and clapped and, after enough booze, danced. We pushed aside the tables and hopped and twirled and hollered. Helena peered into Jim’s camera, coquettish as Marilyn Monroe, and gushed: “Hell-o, America!”
Every Croatian village has its own song. That night, Helena’s family sang Mrkopalj’s. “Malo po Malo,” or “Little by Little,” had been the village anthem for more than a century. We sang it well into the night, a disheveled bunch celebrating love and family and home.
The next morning, we would rise and attend church, where the Owl would introduce the new priest, all Thorn Birds young and dashing in Italian leather shoes. We would drive for our weekly coastal adventure to the seaside town of Čižići (roughly, CHIZH-uh-shee), where we’d spread the black, metallic-smelling muck of its famous therapeutic mud beach all over our bodies before diving into seawater shallow enough that even Zadie could play safely. Afterward, we would drive up the mountain to eat handmade surlice noodles near the church in Dobrinj while feral cats crowded around for handouts. But in the shallows of Čižići, I back-floated while the kids played around me. Fully submerged but for my face, I hummed the tune of “Malo po Malo” as the mud rinsed from my body and bloomed into the clear Adriatic Sea.
Viva! Viva!
Our mountain countryside!
Little by little,
Little by little,
Little by little,
I will come to you.
These were our days of becoming enmeshed in the life of the village. Jim even began walking with me to Tuk.
On a typical morning, we woke when we felt like it, usually at eight, sometimes nine. Jim assembled breakfast—cereal, drinkable yogurt, coffee, juice, and fistfuls of wild mountain blueberries now purchased weekly from Aziz. After we ate breakfast, we’d tidy up the dishes and assign the kids their morning cleaning jobs. Sam swept. Zadie made beds. We allowed Sam to run to the Konzum for milk or other staples, a very grown-up task that he loved, especially when the Konzum ladies, ice-cold to most customers, gave him suckers for his trouble. Once they had completed their work, the kids could watch TV.
Now both Jim and I would put on our exercise clothes and walk to Tuk, leaving Sam and Zadie alone for the first time in their lives. But first Jim would make them recite the order in which they’d go to the neighbors for help, should problems arise.
“Where do you go if you have trouble?” he’d ask, crouching to meet thei
r eyes.
“First Mario, then Pavice,” Sam would answer. “If no one else is around, Robert.”
Jim would hand Sam one of the cell phones. Sam would make a practice call.
Then we’d leave.
Our forty-five-minute walk was the kids’ favorite time of day. They’d literally shoo us out the door. Only once did we have a problem. They’d argued and Sam ended up crying. Robert narced them off the minute we got back from Tuk. Thus, Sam and Zadie learned the valuable lesson that if you’re going to fight, be quiet about it so you don’t alert the neighbors.
Jim and I talked the entire time we walked, synthesizing the events of our lives in Mrkopalj and making plans for the month of travel in Europe before we settled in to Rovinj for winter. It was the closest thing to intimacy we had in Mrkopalj, not having our own bedroom or even locks on our door, the lack of which was blossoming into our neighbors’ favorite joke.
“Oh, hey, Jeem,” Robert might begin. “When rooms are finished, you have bed, and door … and your wife! Is a very good situation, eh?”
“Maybe you go to Rovinj for to be alone with Jim,” Jasminka wiggled her eyebrows.
Then everyone would haw-haw-haw, and our neighbors would dissolve into racy humor, at which time I felt relieved to not know much Croatian and therefore to be considered exempt from the conversation—a state of being I was finding quite peaceful.
Jim loved the walk to Tuk as much as I did, with the jangle of cowbells in the distance and the strong breeze running through the valley to dry our sweat. Jim said the mountains reminded him of the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and I think he half expected choppers to crest the ridgeline at any moment. As it was, the only thing he had to fear was being attacked by the animals we passed, none of which had ever bothered me. One house had a guard goose that screamed in outrage when Jim walked by. Its owner looked and dressed like Fidel Castro, but he always waved at us because he was a friend of Josip and Pavice’s. Dogs displayed varying stages of viciousness. One wiry salt-and-pepper mutt barked nonstop at Jim, throwing his body against the wrought-iron fence that contained him. We later learned that this dog was from a strain of stringy mutt bred by Stefanija’s family, and he was named Bobi, as were most dogs in Mrkopalj.
Tuk looks a lot like Mrkopalj, except that the skyline is dominated by an east-facing Orthodox church spire instead of a Catholic steeple. People told me Tuk was populated by Orthodox Serbs who’d fled from the Turks in the sixteenth century.
We’d turn around at Tuk and jog home to our kids, who were lying inert in front of a television behind a door that did not lock. I’d shower and head to Stari Baća to write. Jim would settle in to a day of hanging out, steeping in the sweet boredom of being entirely absent from the workaday life. His favorite yard buddy, of course, was Robert.
Jim and Robert sat side by side for long stretches of day in red plastic lawn chairs, legs crossed, watching the kids play, sometimes sipping beers, idly chatting like two old geezers in the park. Jim’s favorite game was making Robert recite the names of all the bands he’d been in. Jim liked hearing the band names partly because Robert was always verging on tipsy, and recalling twenty-seven years of history put him into a state of great agitation. He also liked it because Robert’s band names were awesome.
On the first day of August, I sat with Jim after our morning walk as he asked Robert the band question for probably the tenth time since we’d come to Mrkopalj.
“First band: Emotion,” Robert began. Emotion made its debut in 1982, when he switched from tamburitza to bass and began riffing with the neighbor boys, Ratko on synthesizer and Butzo on drums. Their first gig was in the Mrkopalj cultural center, across the street from the tourism office.
“Is be good,” Robert said.
“What kind of music did you play?” I asked.
“Only rock ’n’ roll,” Robert said. “Nothing else. Deep Purple ‘Smoke on the Water.’ Rolling Stones ‘Satisfaction.’ Eric Clapton ‘Layla.’”
Jim threw his head back and busted out some White Snake. “In the still of the night!”
Robert looked at him, nonplussed.
“And domestic rock ’n’ roll. We got our own songs, but they never let us to the studio,” Robert said.
“Like, what was the best one?” I asked.
“I write ‘Bijele Stijene,’” Robert said. “Is about White Rocks, a mountain park near here. And another: ‘I Like Mrkopalj.’ Text is very provocative because we are teasing every person in the place. But the song about White Rocks is great.”
“Can you sing me the lyrics?” I asked.
“No,” Robert answered plainly.
After Emotion came Arch, which included Stari Baća regular Frankie, a sweet guy with facial rosacea whose wife had left him long ago. Frankie used to drink gemišt with the best of them, but he had switched to red wine, shocking everyone. This is how people came to know that Frankie actually dated, unlike other men in Mrkopalj whose wives had left them. The switch to red wine was Frankie’s signal that he was seeing someone; the guy knew how to clean things up for the courting ritual. Frankie beat incessantly on the bar at Stari Baća, which is how I knew he’d replaced Butzo on drums.
Arch was a punk trio that played every Saturday in Sunger, perhaps in the bar in the church parking lot.
Robert’s next band was simply called White Rocks, like his favorite song of the same title. After that, it was Amadeus, also with Frankie.
Next came M.I.D.I. Band.
“What does that stand for?” I asked. Jim leaned in. This was his favorite part.
“Musical Interface Digital Instruments,” Robert fired off. “Very good band. Is very interesting onstage. Is easier to get some girls.”
Then Robert got a little serious. “Everything is easier then.”
“Okay, so after M.I.D.I. Band, then what?” Jim urged him.
“Next is Cro Voice,” Robert lit a cigarette. “Then I have Miloš and the Guys. After this, there is Winch.”
“Miloš and the Guys!” Jim clapped. “It’s awesome because there was no Miloš!”
Robert rolled his eyes over to Jim, then back to me.
“We play in Istria, mostly,” he said. “Tourist towns. We put our hair long. Like Rolling Stones. Sometimes we take off all our clothes or maybe just some part. We thought it was very stupid and funny to piss on the stage.”
Jim’s head lolled back and he sat that way for a long time, smiling.
Robert said that once, when he and his bandmates were living in an apartment in Istria, they grew pot plants on their balcony. The old neighbors, not recognizing the stuff, watered the marijuana for the boys when they were out on tour. When the band finally harvested the crop, the neighbors mentioned in passing what a pity it was that these pretty plants had been stolen from them.
In 1997, somebody slammed a door on Robert’s hand, severing three fingers, only two of which were put back on properly. A surgeon in Rijeka reattached the third one sideways. That 33.3 percent margin of error ended Robert’s career as a bass guitar player.
This was Jim’s version of playground talk. It beat the heck out of “Which preschool does your kid go to?” or “Do you think this is pinkeye?” and was the high point of Jim’s days. He struggled with the typical stay-at-home parent drama—lots of stress, little recognition, the interminable drag of time. But the kids were growing up before our eyes in Mrkopalj. We knew that both our stay-at-home lives would morph into fond memory when Sam and Zadie were grown. I left Robert and Jim to argue about who was better, White Snake or Bon Jovi, and headed out to Stari Baća to write, as both my husband and I continued to live our own versions of our lifelong dreams.
chapter sixteen
On the first Sunday in August, we thought we’d find some relief from the ninety-degree heat with a cool mountain hike. We stopped by Helena’s house to get directions to Samarske Stijene, or Summer Rocks, a labyrinth of stone sculptures and sinkholes in the Kapela mountain chain and the geological sister to Bije
le Stijene, or White Rocks, the subject of Robert’s finest song.
Helena directed us ten miles south of town, where Jim parked the Peugeot at what appeared to be the trailhead, and we started on the path into dark evergreen forest, its floor thick with ferns, a tiny slash of trail cutting through. We never did make it to the signature view—we lost the trail about halfway in and decided to turn back when the forty-five-minute hike Helena described had already taken us two hours. But on the way home we saw a line of twenty-six tall, roughly sculpted rocks like marching soldiers in the waving grass. We pulled into a gravel parking lot that seemed designated for viewing them and got out to stand before a monolithic plaque, inscribed in Croatian, probably explaining the whole thing. Another mystery of Mrkopalj. As always, it was beautiful.
A car rumbled down the road toward us, skidding to a halt where we stood. Helena threw open her door and rushed toward us.
“Where have you been?” she yelled. “You have been gone for almost three hours and I am worried when I go to Goranka and ask if you are home yet!”
“Ah, we’re fine,” I said. “It just took longer than we thought it would.”
“There are downed trees all over the hiking trail,” Jim said. “You can’t even walk in there.”
“I will tell Paul about that,” Helena said. “This is the time of the year people are taking trees from the wood for fire in winter.”
She paused. “But I am scared you are dead in the woods! The next time you go in there, I must go with you.”
“We just followed the trail,” I said. “We only saw three bears, a jackal, a wild boar, and a yak. No big deal.”
“You are cheesing me,” Helena said flatly.
“Hey, what does this say?” Jim pointed to the plaque. “What is this place?”
“This is Matić Poljana,” she said. “Soldiers are walking across this field in World War II, and they freeze to death.”
She read the plaque:
Running Away to Home Page 17
