Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  And she stepped up when I needed it most. When Sam was born, I was inconsolable. There is perhaps no greater life change for a woman than having a child. Some women thrive on it. I had friends who lived and breathed for their La Leche League meetings and spent hours shopping for the latest baby slings. I loved Sam from the moment I peed on the stick, but one small nub of my soul felt this was a setback of sorts. At thirty, I was just coming into my own power. Then along came motherhood and the sleepless nights and that cooped-up feeling and the endless worry that somehow I wasn’t doing things right. The realization that my life was no longer my own hit hard. My career was just gaining momentum—I’d moved from rock writing to city news to travel writing, and I was exhilarated by all of it. I worried, as I spent whole days watching Sam coo and breathe and nurse, that my life was over before it had even really begun.

  Then my mother knocked on my back door, walked in, took my son in her arms, and became his Grandma Kate. She adored him immediately and without reserve. For the first two years of his life, my mom came to our house regularly to sit with him while I desperately wrote stories, hunched over the dining room table, sometimes with a breast pump attached to my chest. They sat for hours on the couch in our tiny house. She talked to him quietly all day, pointing out neighbors, pushing away our huge dogs when they’d sniff him too much. The dogs triggered her allergies to the point that she looked as if she was weeping when she left.

  And maybe she was weeping. It’s a great gift for a mother to have a worry-free break from her kids. I’m not sure she had that from her own.

  Things faded for us again when I had Zadie. She’s not the uncomplicated kid her brother is. Zadie is inquisitive and intense and independent. In other words, she’s like me. Plus, Mom was getting older. Keeping up with two kids was tough. She receded from the picture. But I never forgot what she did for me during my initial growing pains as a mother.

  I had met families in Mrkopalj shot through by the self-absorption of alcoholic fathers. Kids who lived at home well into their thirties, adrift in a bum economy where $2,000 a month was rich-man’s money and $300 was usual. I’d seen put-upon mothers leaning on church and neighbors for comfort. And yet they all lived together in messy harmony in Mrkopalj. In addition, for all our American advantages—jobs, industry, good malls—they felt sorry for me. No one in Mrkopalj could fathom what it must have been like to not even know my great-grandparents. To have to sleuth down clues about my relatives. I tried to explain that this was the norm in America. People barely knew their own grandparents. But Mrkopalj understood what we’d lost, and the gravity of it was dawning on me, too.

  Sometimes, as a bar trick, Robert would make Jim recite our combined lineage. “Jeem,” Robert would begin, “tell my friends which country your family is from.”

  Jim would patiently repeat the same thing he always said. “On my Dad’s side, from the fjords of Norway. On my Mom’s, from Alsace-Lorraine and Germany.”

  “Okay,” Robert would say, pumping up his audience. “Now tell where Jenny family from.”

  “Dad’s side, Ireland and England and some Cherokee Indian. Mom’s side, Croatia and Italy.”

  Robert would hold up both hands, the big finish. “Now tell me, what country is blood from Sam and Zadie?”

  “Norwegian, Alsatian, German, Irish, English, Cherokee, Croatian, and Italian.”

  And the drinking men would shake their heads in disbelief.

  “American families,” Robert concluded with a squinty-eyed philosophical face. “Like United Nations, but knowing none.”

  But we were trying to know. Everything we’d been through in Mrkopalj so far was part of that knowing. What I was finding in Mrkopalj wasn’t as simple as good herbal remedies for cramps, or my kids learning how to shoot pool in the bar, or the best way to milk cows. I was finding gratitude for what I had, rather than a low simmer of anguish over what I didn’t. I missed my family back home with a basic longing, missed that familiarity, that mysterious connective tissue. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost something important. You feel free, sure. Americans like the lone-wolf illusion. But you also feel disconnected from something primal and essential.

  If I doubted any of these revelations, I had only to think of Franjo Crnić, standing blind and alone in his courtyard, looking up at the sky and waiting for family he didn’t know and couldn’t possibly remember.

  chapter twenty-four

  I was walking down the concrete steps of 12 Novi Varoš to hang out the laundry when Robert, in wraparound sunglasses, a cigarette hanging from his lip, skidded into the driveway on a yellow bicycle.

  “Today we go to Rijeka to find the Katarinas!” he said. I think Goranka browbeat him into arranging the visit, because we’d asked him on the way home from Lokve and he’d said he was too busy.

  “I call,” Robert said. “They wait.”

  I clothespinned the wash before gathering Jim and the kids. I was getting good at hanging out laundry. If I got started early enough in the morning, I could finish a whole load in one day. This was a tricky maneuver, considering that the average Croatian washing machine takes approximately three hours to cycle through (slowly wringing the color from all fabric until everything we owned morphed into a weird shade of lavender). Still, the smell of line-dried clothes made the extra effort involved in doing laundry in Mrkopalj well worth it. Except for the scorpion-like pincer bugs we found nestled in our underwear elastic—Pavice assured us they were harmless, but then again, I still couldn’t feel my fingers from the kopriva incident, so what did she know?

  Within the hour, the kids and I were in the backseat of the Peugeot while Robert and Jim commandeered the front. Robert drummed his fingers to the rhythm of one of our road-trip CDs. His sunglasses bounced as he head-banged with an imaginary bass guitar while staring at Jim. Robert complained bitterly when Jim’s weepy Nick Drake music came on. We found common ground when Robert embraced one of my favorite underrated bands and found them “not good like Bon Jovi, but good.”

  We stopped in Belo Selo, a tiny dot of a village with a natural mountain spring. We knew about this spring because at the edge of the village was an old stone fountain that trickled into a giant stone trough. Robert told us the water ran from the fountain all day every day for as long as anyone could remember. Jim and I made a habit of filling up empty bottles with Belo Selo water every time we passed through, often waiting in line behind other locals doing the same. We weren’t entirely sure where the water came from or what it was exactly, but it had a taste similar to the smell of someone who’s just come indoors on a cold winter day. We concluded that it had filtered through the mountains for one hundred years, and thus we were drinking snow that had fallen in my great-grandparents’ time.

  Jim filled his bottle first, followed by Robert, though I’d never seen him drink water, and his bottle boiled in the Peugeot for weeks after. The kids and I went last.

  We pressed on to Rijeka, stopping along the way to say hi to Jasminka, who usually worked in the Number 3 tollbooth. She waved and slid open her window.

  “You go now to Rijeka to meet cousins?” she asked us.

  “Yep!” I hollered from the backseat. “How did you know?”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “Everybody in Mrkopalj know everything about everybody in Mrkopalj!”

  Robert directed us with surprising precision through the headachey, pencil-lead-gray maze of downtown Rijeka. Communist-era tenements towered over the city, blocking the view of the Adriatic. We took a wrong turn in an effort to locate the side street Franjo Crnić had given us as his sister’s address, and leaked into an outlying area where makeshift homes from pilfered construction materials squatted under a bridge.

  Jim stopped to ask for directions from a bone-thin man with a pyramid of a nose. He shrugged at us and stared.

  Robert suggested we get back on a main street. Fast.

  “Gypsies,” I whispered.

  Robert looked at me gravely and nodded.

&nb
sp; Gypsies picked through the smećer on the outskirts of Mrkopalj, and families camped out behind the Konzum on some nights. Anđelka let them pick from her fruit trees. A crinkly-skinned grandma materialized at my side one morning as I was on my way to get a new jar of Nescafé, her hand outstretched, intoning words that didn’t sound familiar, but I got the drift. I begged off as an amerićki, but truthfully I was scared. What I knew of gypsies came from books and Cher.

  I was relieved when we were out of the shantytown and back among the looming tenements. “I don’t understand,” said Robert. “Franjo tells me she lives in house, not apartment.”

  We parked and walked around a cluster of buildings, past battered compact cars and young people in slacks and long-sleeved shirts, overdressed on another unemployed afternoon. And then, suddenly, right in the midst of all these tenements, we came upon a two-story villa-style house at the end of a pleasant, shaded stone walkway. Narrow brown shutters opened upward toward the sky. It was as if modern Rijeka had grown up around this place that might once have been a country estate, and time had simply passed it by.

  A gray-haired woman in a sleeveless black housedress answered our buzz. She was as pear-shaped as Franjo Crnić and my grandma Kate. She greeted us with a tentative kindness as we descended upon the airless, quiet sanctuary of her home, and directed us into a spotless living room with peach-slipcovered furniture and a gray area rug designed like a peacock’s fan. Family photographs lined the wall.

  She motioned me toward a plush chair as “guest of honor,” explained Robert. I was again surprised to be thought of as such. I stole a look at the kids, who were getting the picture that they were about to be forced to stay seated and quiet for a long period of time. Zadie squirmed noiselessly as if trying to escape her own skin. Sam twiddled his fingers, looking pale and worried.

  “Mom? Can we go outside?” Sam asked. They’d seen a grim play set by the tenements.

  “Not yet,” I said. Both kids winced. “If you can make it through this, we’ll stop at McDonald’s on the way home.”

  They nodded seriously.

  Katarina left us to settle in the living room while she made a few calls. Within the next half hour, we were crowded by relatives. Her son, Celio, and his wife, Vlatka, a lawyer for Croatian Railways, came from their upstairs apartment to help translate.

  The room was warm and still. I fished in my purse and found a pack of crayons and paper, arranging them for the kids at the coffee table. This occupied them as the adults stared at one another.

  Robert cleared his throat, causing everyone to jump. “Jenny, I must see family tree. Can I have, please?”

  I dug into my purse again, moving things around in search of the family tree. I was sure I’d packed it. I’d packed the empty water bottles for Belo Selo. I’d packed the kids’ art supplies. I’d packed fruit snacks sent by the grandparents. I’d packed the directions to the Rijeka McDonald’s.

  But I hadn’t packed Jim’s family tree.

  “I didn’t bring it,” I said to Robert sheepishly.

  “Jenny!” Robert exclaimed, smacking his own forehead. “How you forget?”

  Jim rolled his eyes. “You are kidding me.”

  “I’m sorry!” I pleaded, putting up my hands. “I forgot! I just—forgot!” For as much stuff as I remembered to bring along every time my family walked out the door—sunscreen, wipes, snacks, art supplies, gum, reading material that spanned three generations of interests—they sure weren’t very forgiving when their personal Sherpa forgot something. Sheesh.

  Both men stared me down. Wordlessly, I shrugged.

  After a long pause, Robert rolled his eyes toward Katarina. “So, you have heard of Valentin?” he asked her.

  Katarina sat quietly and thought.

  “I have heard that he leave and he never contact anyone here, never,” she said, Celio translating. “That’s what I have heard.”

  I asked Katarina if she remembered Petar and Katarina Radošević, her grandparents, Valentin’s parents. She said her grandmother died before she was born, in 1918, but she remembered Petar.

  “We were always going to visit his house,” she said.

  “Do you remember where your grandparents are buried?” I asked.

  “No, I have never known that,” she said.

  Katarina’s story was the same as her brother Franjo’s. She’d been passed from family to family as a small girl. But in Rijeka she met and married a nice man, a successful shipping magnate, and she’d had a comfortable life in adulthood.

  The door buzzer rang again. Katarina rose to answer it. A lovely dark-haired woman, also in the shape of the Radošević pear, stood in the doorway, dressed up for this occasion in a gauzy black outfit and perfect makeup. This was Katarina Blažević, daughter of Matej Radošević (Valentin’s brother). For those of you keeping track at home: Katarina 1, Katarina 2, and Franjo were the children of Valentin’s brother and sister, all first cousins to each other and to my grandma Kate. See? Genealogy is hard.

  Katarina 1 left for the kitchen, to fix drinks for all. Robert and Jim ordered gemišt. Katarina 2 stood looking at me, her dark eyes nearly black, like my aunt Terri’s and my mom’s and my sister’s. She walked slowly to me and hugged me tight, speaking gentle words in Croatian. She was so soft she seemed like liquid in the heat of the living room. She walked over to Sam and kissed him. As she spoke, Robert translated.

  “That is one nice boy,” she said.

  She turned to Zadie and approached her.

  “That is my daughter, Zadie,” I said.

  “Very nice girl,” Katarina 2 said.

  The kids looked panicked, anticipating more kissing, but Katarina 2 returned to my side. She hugged me again, then pulled away to look me over. I wasn’t prepared for all the emotion, being Iowan and all, and I didn’t know what to say, but I let her poke me and hold my face and gaze at me, probably seeking the same recognition that I was. We were blood relatives who had never known each other.

  “I am your aunt,” she said, tears spilling down her cheek.

  “Well,” Jim corrected, under his breath, “technically she’s not your aunt. She’s your grandma Kate’s first cousin, which makes her your first cousin, twice removed.”

  I cut Jim a look.

  He shrugged. “It’s true.”

  Robert said: “In your family, every other woman is Katarina, Katarina, Katarina.”

  Katarina 2 and I were locked in on each other. “The blood in our veins is the same,” she said. Suddenly, the whole room seemed to be spinning. I started crying, too. I was hot and afraid I might pass out. This all took place in absolute, carpet-padded silence while the whole room stared at us.

  Then Zadie, as if psychically mirroring my own thoughts, whispered urgently: “Mom! I want to go home!”

  I excused both of us to a small powder room at the back of the apartment so we could have a little privacy. “I don’t like all these new people,” Zadie cried as I stood against the bathroom door, breathing hard.

  “It’s tough for me, too, but we’re going to have to stick it out,” I said. “This is our family. We’ve just never met them before.”

  “Then why are they our family?” she asked, settling on the edge of the tub, her little sandaled feet dangling.

  “Because my great-grandpa and their parents were brothers and sisters,” I said.

  “But we don’t know them,” Zadie said, to which I had no answer.

  When we emerged, Jim placed in front of me a new sketch of the family tree that he’d made during this break in the action. I sat down to study Jim’s drawing, which saved me from the agony of having to ask “Now, who are you people again?”

  Then Katarina 2 told us her story.

  Like his brother Valentin, and like Franjo’s father, Matej Radošević had abandoned his family. He left his wife, Matilda, and two daughters when he moved to Le Havre, France. Matilda died in 1944 and he didn’t even know it, because mail didn’t run in Croatia during World War II. Matej’s
first letter home arrived in 1948, more than ten years after he’d left, addressed to a dead wife and daughters who were all but orphans.

  Katarina 2 pulled out a picture her father had sent in that envelope. Matej looked happy and healthy in Le Havre. Meanwhile, because there was nowhere for her in Mrkopalj, where families had barely enough to feed their own kids, Katarina 2 and her sister had been sent to live with the nuns in the convent that was just two doors down from Robert’s house. The convent was a warm and happy place, and life was acceptable, though it didn’t pass for real family. Katarina 2 married and moved to the island of Krk with her husband, who died in 1985.

  She blotted her eyes. Valentin, or “Tine,” had disappeared and never returned. When she was fourteen or fifteen and living in the convent, she told me, Sister Paula had written to her, inviting her to come live with the Radošević family in the United States.

  “She did?” I sat forward, incredulous. “Do you have the letters?”

  “I can’t remember how all that ends or how we stopped our letters,” she said. “I get married later, and we lost every contact.”

  Since then, she explained, the Radošević family line had been broken. Until today.

  Why, I wondered aloud to the Katarinas, had Valentin cut ties with his Croatian family? They didn’t know for sure. So many of his relatives had died or moved, it probably just didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  “People left because they were hoping to find a job in America, but the same things were happening there. No money, no jobs,” said Katarina 1. “They were just normal people, and having no education made things worse.”

  “Did you know your grandfather Petar?” Jim asked.

  “Yes,” said Katarina 2. “There exists a grave in Mrkopalj, and my mom is buried there, too.”

  “Eee!” Robert said, jumping up. Jim did the same. “You know where is buried, parents of Valentin Radošević?!”

  “Yes, I do know,” Katarina 2 replied passionately. She reached for my hand.