Empty mountains, nowhere help
Misery and pain sat and stayed
Forever tired, cursed to die,
Left lying without hope.
Living continued with last effort
Travel without end
Speechless
With only a wish
To finally see the saving light of salvation
To finish the sickening battle.
Jim looked at me. Across the gravel road, in the field of stones and wildflowers, the kids chased a grasshopper to put in a Coke bottle.
“Well,” he said. “That clarifies everything.”
It was Jim’s first lesson in the wars of Mrkopalj. We were about to get more.
That night, as I laid on the futon trying to adjust myself into some semblance of flatness so I could read my Croatian history book in relative comfort, Jim returned from his evening nightcap at Stari Baća all aflutter.
“We’re going to a party!” he whispered loudly, trying not to wake the kids.
“What for?” I asked, sitting up. “Now?”
“No, on August fifth,” he said. “They’re killing a sheep and everything!”
“Who is?” I asked.
“Robert and the guys. It’s out at the biathlon training field. On Wednesday!”
“What’s the party for?” I asked.
“The way everyone explained it to me, it’s like Croatian Thanksgiving,” he said, pulling on his pajama pants.
Jim had become part of Mrkopalj. He could name every car at Stari Baća when we’d walk down for coffee. My husband, who can drink most people under the table back home, was considered a lightweight in the village, and the men thought it was sweet when he tried to keep up with them. He learned more by gossiping in Stari Baća than I ever did walking around with a notebook. He could tell me who was having marital problems, whose woman was nagging him about the drinking, and why one man refused cigarettes (the old “my dad forced me to smoke a whole pack” story). This “Croatian Thanksgiving” was a yearly event that Robert sponsored through Stari Baća. The guys at the bar assured Jim that August 5 was celebrated nationwide, in honor of the end of the Yugoslavian Wars.
Knowing that few things are that simple in Croatia, I surfed the Internet to learn more. August 5 was the anniversary of the success of Operation Storm, a defeat of Serbian forces in a battle so crushing that it effectively ended the war. President Clinton approved the operation and the Croatian forces were American-trained.
At dawn on August 5, we were awakened by the sound of a buzz saw.
“I swear to God, these people make more noise by six A.M. than most people make all day,” Jim grumbled, getting up to make the Nescafé. Later we headed to the south edge of town and a wide patch of cleared forest dominated by a rusty shooting range.
“It’s like the Mrkopalj version of Little League fields,” Jim noted.
This was Zagmajna, where Jakov Fak and the local Olympians trained to compete in biathlon. Robert welcomed us in a denim jacket and matching jeans, carrying a clipboard and solemnly keeping track of the various field games.
“Go: you get breakfast,” he urged us. “You are very late!”
It was only ten, but Robert wanted us up at the campfire with Mrkopalj’s war veterans, a great flank of men in sleeveless T-shirts, flannels, and bucket hats roasting gargantuan weenies on sharpened sticks. Sam and Zadie dragged us along.
This burly bunch had been preparing our breakfast from the moment we got out of the car. Our sticks were ready when we walked up, and they stoked the last of the roasting fire that others had abandoned for the field games. Croatian hot dogs were nothing like their dainty American cousins. Big, hand-stuffed, greasy, and salty—these miraculous things seemed steroidal in comparison. A man gently handed Sam and Zadie their sticks, loaded with sausages scored three times on each side so they wouldn’t burst as they cooked. The kids couldn’t believe their good fortune: Sticking stuff in a fire was the best.
One guy unfolded a camp chair and seated me in it, then proceeded to fuss over my cooking methods. Another hauled out a cutting board and unsheathed his comically large hunting knife—“Souvenir from war,” he explained—then sliced generous hunks of country bread and onions as garnishes. In a minor culinary miracle, the kids even ate the onions. We chewed so enthusiastically that grease dripped down our chins, pleasing all those present.
We might have eaten more slowly had we known that the sausages were merely appetizers. The war vets moved us along to a picnic table, where Mrkopaljcis ate bowls of fazol soup, an aromatic glop of army beans and kobasica sausage. It was lunchtime at this end of the field, and nobody would be letting us skip a meal. I’d seen the beans soaking the day before at Stari Baća, where the summer girls were chopping tubs of onions and slabs of bacon. I looked around to see where the soup had come from, and saw the Sausage Man of Sunger dipping into a giant camouflage-green steel cooler under a makeshift party awning. He gave me a foxy wink and brought over soup for my family. Even Zadie wolfed down the thick broth. Sam picked around the meat. When they finished, full to the point of looking woozy, they waddled toward the woods to join the other village kids.
“Mind if I have a few drinks with Robert?” Jim asked.
“That’s cool,” I said. I wandered toward the field games and sat down on a rock to watch the festivities unfold in celebration of Croatian Thanksgiving. It was such a nice party that I had a hard time connecting it to something as bloody as war, though I suppose American Thanksgiving is no less bittersweet, when you think about it.
I’d been trying to understand local history better. Croatia’s thorny past was pretty hard to reckon for a newbie like me. But in a way, it was my own past, and I knew I had to make the effort. This, too, was part of the journey. Reading Croatian history books, however, was about as exciting as sitting through a PowerPoint presentation. So to get a better handle on the Yugoslavian Wars, I’d visited Mrkopalj’s Škola Mira, the International Peace School that had looked so creepy and abandoned when I’d visited Mrkopalj the previous fall. It was there that I met Robert’s uncle, Professor Franjo Starčević.
I’d seen him walking around Mrkopalj, slight of frame and milky-eyed old, dressed in a faded flannel shirt, a baseball cap, and black soccer shoes, hip for an old dude. He shambled along, stopping occasionally to gaze at a house or the sky, present but not entirely present.
When I visited the school, I was met at the door by a kid named Danijel, a student in Zagreb with cerebral palsy who introduced himself as the new director. Almost a year after I’d first seen it, Škola Mira was still a mess on the outside and, I soon saw, on the inside as well. Flies buzzed around dishes stacked in the sink. The walls were wavy with water damage. It was a far cry from the jubilant art studios for children of all ethnic backgrounds that Professor Starčević had founded during the Yugoslavian Wars, when Škola Mira had been a beacon of hope.
Danijel led me inside, where Professor Starčević sat at a long table in the empty dining hall. Danijel translated as the old man spoke.
He had been a professor in Zagreb until the “Croatian Spring” in 1971, a thaw in Marshal Tito’s Communism when young Croatians agitated for independence from the largely Serbian government of Yugoslavia. When Tito eventually crushed the movement, the students and their leaders were frightened into silence or arrested. Professor Starčević was fired and returned to Mrkopalj to write a book called The Quest for the Gorski Kotar Soul. Future Croatian president Franjo Tuđjman, who was also involved, served jail time.
Tito had a way of keeping ethnic tensions and general unruliness in check. Dictators are good at that sort of thing. And then they die, which Tito did in 1980, and Serbia’s president Slobodan Milošević tried to assert control over the Yugoslav federation—Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. The other republics generally resisted, but rather than keeping the Yugoslavian federation together, Croatia and Slovenia used Milošević�
�s power grab, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as an excuse for their own aspirations of independence. Whole states were imploding.
In the Gorski Kotar, Croatians and Serbs who had lived as peaceful neighbors for generations were suddenly suspicious of each other. The Serbs felt disconnected from the Yugoslavian government in Belgrade. They worried that the Croatian nationalist furor would end in another Ustaše-style government like the one that killed thousands of Serbs in concentration camps. Croatian-born residents were suspicious that the Serbs would turn on them if Croatia declared independence, trying to claim Croatian territory as their own.
Slovenia peeled off from Yugoslavia in June 1991 in a short ten-day war. Slovenia is immediately north of the Gorski Kotar, and as the Yugoslavian army—it’s officers mainly Serbian—pulled out of Slovenia, its soldiers passed through Croatia. Some of the Gorski Kotar villages built barricades with trees felled from the forests that had always sustained them.
Professor Starčević said Croatia had waited for a long time to be a free nation, that his country had been dominated by its neighbors for a thousand years. And it was now prosperous, too. Less prosperous Serbia wasn’t about to let Croatia go without a fight, and in July 1991, that fight began between Croatian and Serbian forces. Only the smallest republic, Montenegro, sided with Serbia as war spread through the former Yugoslavia. This time, it was Serbia whose brutality bathed the Balkans in shame. Though violent acts were committed by all sides, the Serbian military was infamously ruthless, laying siege to Sarajevo, Bosnia, destroying the city and starving its people for years, holding women in “rape camps,” and slaughtering eight thousand Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica, Bosnia, among other macabre atrocities.
“In each of us, there is good and bad,” Professor Starčević said, as if that explained things. “The dualism inside each of us demands a fight between those two components.”
Professor Starčević knew that the Gorski Kotar, an ethnic mix of people since anyone could remember, was in trouble. A Serb living in Croatia was once as benign as a Nebraskan living in Iowa. With the breakup of Yugoslavia, that Serb was suddenly a suspicious foreigner who might steal your land. Croatians only wanted Croatians living in their country. Serbs only wanted Serbs. Nobody wanted Muslims around. Serbia and Croatia wanted to divvy up Bosnia and dissolve it altogether. It was a great big bloody mess. To give you an idea, the term “ethnic cleansing” was coined during the Yugoslavian Wars.
Professor Starčević knew something had to be done to ensure harmony between neighbors in the Gorski Kotar. With the help of other peace-minded leaders, he visited villages with large Serbian populations and asked them to pledge peace. Professor Starčević drove from village to village, imploring friends and families to get along as they always had in order to protect their mountain home. Sometimes his car was blocked by barricades and so he walked.
His most famous walk was in 1992, to the village of Jasenak. He’d arranged a meeting with local Serbian leaders, which lasted until after dark. The walk home traversed a stretch of woods along a ridge of Mount Bjelolasica, where Serbian snipers hid in the trees, waiting.
“Don’t be afraid; our people won’t shoot at you,” the Serbian leaders of Jasenak assured the unarmed Professor Starčević as he left their village.
“Were you afraid?” I asked him.
“I was afraid,” he said, nodding. His gray hair curled around his ears, framing a narrow face with a thin nose, high cheekbones, and a long upper lip. “I was afraid, but then I thought that if those soldiers shoot, I will die for an idea that is higher than myself. That didn’t happen, they didn’t shoot, and I am here now with you, boring you with my story.”
In the end, war never touched the Gorski Kotar, just as Zlatko had told me back in Des Moines. One by one, its villages agreed to peace, and Professor Starčević started the International Peace School. The village of Mrkopalj gave him the old ski hostel, and there Croatian and Serbian and Bosnian children ran the halls together, painting and making clay models and building their creations in art classes, even as their fathers faced each other on the battlefield. In the strangest story of that morning, Professor Starčević told me that soldiers in the Croatian army even drove out to the peace school to cook lunch and dinner for the children there.
But after peace was negotiated throughout the former Yugoslavia, the school went quiet. People didn’t see the point any longer. The director who took over after Professor Starčević retired merely squatted in the place, living there for free and letting it go downhill. Though Danijel had taken over, during the summer we lived in Mrkopalj, the building was bereft of children. As far as I know, it remains that way, though Robert did set up a satellite version of Stari Baća in its dining room during ski season.
I asked Professor Starčević why he thought his peace efforts worked in the Gorski Kotar when they so obviously hadn’t worked anywhere else in the former Yugoslavia.
He thought for a moment before answering me, touching the fingertips of his knobby hands together. He’d made a career out of contemplating the soul of the Gorski Kotar people. Who were my people too, he reminded me.
During the war, the good part of our souls won out over the bad, he said. There was peace here, thanks to “the highness of this hillside country, our closeness to the sky, and the fact that the stars don’t shoot at each other.”
As I sat on my stump at the August 5 celebration, this seemed as good an explanation as any.
I finished my fazol and walked to the field. Jasminka and Mario were among the players of a game that looked like boccie but was played with small discs of wood like hockey pucks.
Jasminka walked over to me. “Hello, Jennifer!” she said, her dark eyes sparkly. “You are playing ploskanje?”
“I might,” I asked. “What is it?”
She explained that the bored shepherds of Mrkopalj once played this mountain game ploskanje (plo-SKAN-yay) with discs sawn from tree trunks. She and Mario had made the wooden disks that morning. (Aha! The 6:00 A.M. buzz saw!) As Jasminka and I talked, another woman sidled up beside me. Her blond hair hinted at gray and flowed down the back of her thin ski jacket. She wore typical Euro eyeglasses—rimless lenses framed by a jumble of complex metalwork, a popular look that had disillusioned Jim and me, who’d thought Europeans were more fashionable than Americans in all matters.
Jasminka introduced us with a hint of mischief. “Jennifer, this is Dragica Cuculić,” she said. “Dragica is wife of Cuculić.”
I shook Dragica’s soft hand, her long fingernails scraping my skin a little as it curled around mine. “Drago mi je,” I said.
Cuculić’s wife fished into her clasped cigarette case. “You smoke?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“You are smart,” she said.
I could get behind the kind of person who acknowledged me as smart at a time in my life when my vocabulary never got much beyond the phrase “Where is the food?”
Jasminka pulled the kids into a ploskanje game. Dragica invited me to the beer tent, operated by the summer girls from Stari Baća and a giggly Goranka, who handed me a shot of a murky liquid. I noticed people watching to see what I’d do with it. Dragica sniffed my cup and made a face.
“I never drink,” she said.
“Your husband sure does,” I said without thinking, nearly kicking myself even as the words came out of my mouth.
“I hate it,” Dragica said.
I took a deep breath and drained my cup of the sweet, milky liqueur of dubious pedigree. Goranka clapped for me. Dragica shook her head and made a face. It wasn’t even noon yet.
I scanned the crowd. Robert lorded over the grounds with his clipboard, mysteriously sober. This was his gig, his yearly show of Croatian pride. Jim hung back at the picnic tables, drinking beer with Cuculić.
“Your husband makes friends with everyone.” Dragica laughed.
I smiled, watching him. “He’s like the prom queen of Mrkopalj,” I noted. Jim looked over at me and
waved.
In the afternoon, everyone gathered under a shady clearing where Robert had set up a microphone to award the field day winners.
During the awards ceremony, Robert called the crowd to attention. “Today we have special guest!” he announced. “Jennifer Wilson visits our village with her family to find her ancestors. She is reporter for New York Times and a very famous writer!”
People started shouting and clapping, and though I was neither a Times reporter nor a very famous writer, I walked forward. Robert squeezed my shoulders, and the applause continued. I felt like an idiot until I saw Jim and the kids on the sidelines, clapping too, their faces smiling and proud. So I took a small bow. This was a celebration of the homeland, and I was part of the show. People had left Mrkopalj for generations because of war or poverty or general misery. I came back, and not because it was some big tourist destination or anything. We were here because something powerful in Mrkopalj had pulled us. My family’s return was a source of pride for all of us on that day.
Someone pulled up in a little Toyota, rolled down the windows, and cranked music that sounded like a combination between rock and tamburitza. Everyone started dancing.
In the chaos, Dragica came over with Helena’s sister, Cornelia.
“We are going to Stari Baća for coffee,” Dragica said. “Would you like to come?”
I looked over at Jim. “Go on,” he said. “Have fun.”
Dragica took my arm. As we reached Cuculić’s red Chevy, the Toyota’s speakers began to blast Cher. The hardened soldiers of Mrkopalj gave a mighty cheer, threw their arms over each others’ shoulders, and began belting out “Life After Love.”
By the time Dragica, Cornelia, and I made it to Stari Baća, we were giggly like high school girls on Senior Skip Day. It seemed to me that the more I drank in Mrkopalj, the more I became part of it.
Dragica ordered tea. I had a coffee and so did Cornelia, a Catholic-school teacher from Rijeka with frosted hair, a slight figure, and a shy manner.
“You should come to Rijeka and I will show you around,” Cornelia said.
Running Away to Home Page 18
