Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  I tried to imagine what it would feel like if the entire county where I grew up suddenly emptied out. The closest I could come was the deserted feel of when the Maytag factory closed down. Still, my people moved by choice. This was a whole different ball game.

  Manda continued. “In that war, from my family, four people died,” she said. “Father, brother, sister, uncle.”

  “The Ustaše killed them?” I asked.

  Manda shook her head. “Partisans.”

  She was eighteen when her father was shot. After a skirmish with the Ustaše, the Partisans counted up their losses and killed ten civilians for each of their dead soldiers. “They were innocents, but never mind.”

  “Her sister was killed behind her own house,” added Viktor. He tapped his mints.

  “Fifteen years, she had,” Manda said, looking straight at me, eyes full of tears.

  Those who survived in Manda’s family ran for a full year, sheltered by churches or other sympathetic souls. For weeks they lived in a ruined and roofless house, where they were perpetually rained on. Once, she’d been herded into a group of people as Partisan soldiers prepared to shoot them all. Manda held her breath, waiting to die. But a man rode up on a horse bearing a white flag for reasons she never knew. He saved all their lives. They ultimately waited out the war in Zagreb, where Catholic families adopted many refugees.

  Manda had spent a vast portion of her life peeking from windows—at first too scared to go outside, then, finally, too old to venture out.

  “Moj meni,” Manda said. “Who could even say all that has happened to me.”

  I covered her hand with my own. I didn’t know what to say; I was humbled by her hardships. Pavice had gotten up and left somewhere along the line. I hadn’t even noticed.

  “I don’t know which side was worse, Ustaše or Partisans,” Manda said. “They were all doing against the people.”

  I held up a hand. “But I thought the Ustaše were the bad guys.”

  Much of Mrkopalj, Viktor and Manda and Stefanija agreed, had sided with the Ustaše.

  Wait. What? My ancestral village on the side of Nazis and Fascists in World War Two? This isn’t the kind of uplifting revelation one likes to make when researching family history.

  “Partisans were Communist,” Stefanija said. “Ustaše were from the people.”

  “Italians were the best,” Viktor opined, holding up one bony finger. “At least the Italians were feeding us. They were chickens, actually. They fenced us in because they were scared of us. Partisans were just schmucks. And the Ustaše: They were fighters!”

  It surprised me that Viktor would feel this way. Especially after what he told me next: The Ustaše, a bizarrely disorganized bunch, had nearly destroyed Mrkopalj entirely. In fact, I came pretty close to having no ancestral village at all, thanks to the Ustaše.

  It all started, Viktor said, when somebody reported to the Nazi Germans and Fascist Italians that Mrkopalj was full of Partisans. They told the Ustaše to burn the houses along Muzevski Kraj and Stari Kraj. Italian forces set fire to the village of Tuk, razing the whole place.

  “Funny thing is, all those houses belonged to Ustaše families,” Viktor cackled, shaking his head. In 1944, the Germans bombed Mrkopalj on Good Friday, destroying the Catholic church that once stood at the crossroads of the town. The villagers used the rubble to build a stone fence around the cemetery at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows. The fence was still there.

  “Even then, nobody changed their minds about the Ustaše?” I asked.

  Viktor harrumphed, his blue eyes squinting. “No,” he said. “All Mrkopalj was in Ustaše. There was just a few that wasn’t. Hundred fifty Ustaše from Mrkopalj were killed, all of them married with three or four children. So they were getting theirs anyway.”

  “A lot of widows,” Manda added, wringing her hands.

  “The history books say the Ustaše were Croatian Nazis,” I said. “Is that how they were viewed here?”

  “Partisans call it that way,” said Viktor. “But the Communists were even worse than the Ustaše.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “They were fighting against the Nazis and Fascists. Where I come from, that’s a noble cause.”

  Manda smiled gently. “If you weren’t there, you couldn’t imagine it. Catastrofa!”

  (I asked historians about this later, and the point remains murky to me. Apparently, the actual number of Ustaše fighters in Croatia was quite few. It would have been unusual—and highly unlikely—for such a small village to have a large population of Ustaše soldiers. One historian also told me that the Communist Partisans had a tendency to label anyone who opposed them as “Ustaše,” so there may even have been some misunderstanding locally, and indeed some of the villagers insisted later that being Ustaše simply meant you wanted Croatian independence. Many more men throughout the country enlisted with the Croatian Home Guard, known as the Domobrani, whose main job it was to keep war out of the villages. It’s my best guess that if Mrkopalj truly did lean Ustaše politically, it was because this was the one of its two rotten political choices that seemed least likely to endanger their beloved Catholic Church.)

  When Germany lost the war, the Communist Partisans in Mrkopalj stepped forward. Neighbor turned on neighbor, informing about anyone who’d opposed the winning party. People disappeared in the night. Viktor and Manda hid in their house most of the time, wanting nothing to do with any of it.

  “There is one hole here in Mrkopalj. Fifty people died in there,” Viktor said. “Partisans killed them.”

  “Fifty men and one girl,” Manda corrected. “That girl was killed because they couldn’t find her husband to kill him. This left four children without their mother. But we couldn’t say anything! You must be frightened of everything.”

  Viktor nodded and tapped his mints.

  “We had an expression, ‘The night will eat you,’” said Manda. “The church keeps us all together and keeps us strong. But the Communists are killing the priests and they want to destroy our church and our religion.”

  This sense of lawlessness remained in Croatia until about 1947, Viktor said. At the end of World War Two, Mrkopalj was bombed out. Tuk was burned. Partisan soldiers dismantled wooden houses and sent them to Serbia by train as rewards for soldiers there. After Marshal Tito took power, his men set up secret police and they acted as judge and jury for anyone whose politics were suspect. Which, my hosts told me, was most of Mrkopalj.

  “If you went with them,” Manda said, “you didn’t come back. Ever.”

  “It was a violent time,” I said.

  “Yes, it was,” Viktor agreed. “If you were on this side, it wasn’t good. If you were on that side, it wasn’t good,” he said. “On any side, it wasn’t good.”

  “These days, the truth is in the middle.”

  Stefanija breathed out, hard. “I have to smoke,” she said, rooting around in her giant purse. She found a pack and lit up shakily, pulling so hard on a cigarette that her face nearly went concave. “This was very disturbing for me.”

  No wonder people were still arguing in the bars about World War II. It had ripped this village apart.

  “Are Croatians done with war now?” I asked Manda.

  “They say that Croatians will not go to war anymore, but who knows,” she answered.

  “There will be war, definitely,” Viktor said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We usually fight for our land. Our territory,” Manda said. “To be Croatian.”

  “Italians want part. Slovenians want part. Serbians want part,” Viktor said. “We have the sea. They want the sea. Not for anything else.”

  “And you have all the good-looking women,” I said.

  “And some who are not,” Manda tilted her head to the side and lifted her eyebrows. “Good and bad and smart and stupid. We have every kind.”

  “I am sorry for your troubles,” I said.

  “It is past, it is past,” she said, patting my hand. “What you have pas
sed through in life, you must forget.”

  But they hadn’t forgotten. No one in Mrkopalj had. It was their blessing, and their curse.

  I was desperate to know one thing before I left.

  “Were the bad people, the ones who killed others in the night, were they Iskras or Radoševićs?”

  Viktor thought. “Radošević people, there are good and bad ones.” He laughed a slow, rumbling laugh.

  “Which Radošević are you?”

  chapter twenty-six

  It was my turn to head to Stari Baća alone. I had some thinking to do, and I wasn’t going to lie on the leaden futon to do it.

  Only a few of the dedicated drinkers were in the bar on a Sunday night. Marijan, the young and dapper tenor from church, was among them. He seemed to be mulling something over. I sat down next to him at the bar. There had been a controversy that day at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, he said.

  “I also decorate the church,” Marijan said. “My family was Partisan in World War Two.”

  “What does that have to do with decorating the church?” I asked.

  “Did you notice the flowers on the altar? They are red,” he said, tipping his face toward me. “Communist.”

  I just shook my head.

  “I know, it is absurd,” Marijan said, rolling his eyes. “More absurd when I don’t even buy the supplies. They are purchased by someone other than me and then I decorate. Anyway, you are who you are. If I shut my mouth, my ass will talk.”

  Suddenly, it seemed impossible to escape politics in Mrkopalj. And I was humbled by my lack of knowledge. The previous night, after everyone had gone to bed, I sat up into the late hours, surrounded by a pile of books and magazine articles about Croatian history. I read and read until I could only rub my eyes and cry as everyone else slept. What had these people done to each other over the years? And why didn’t I know any of this stuff?

  “I just don’t understand the politics here,” I said. “I had no idea I was such a stupid American, but I am.”

  “I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Marijan said. “It could be good or bad, I don’t know. But to have a cross to bear on your back all the time? I think it’s not good.”

  I ordered my new favorite, boiled wine, a cheap red served steamed by the explosive cappuccino maker. I headed to the bathroom for safety while the summer girl behind the counter made it. When I returned, Marijan and I drank in silence and I thought over the things Manda and Viktor had told me.

  “You know, it seems like the more I drink here in Mrkopalj, the more I feel I’ve I become part of the place,” I said absently.

  “To know Mrkopalj, you must drink, of course,” Marijan said. “The people here are hard workers, and they’ve had a hard time.”

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “Well, maybe not now. Now, most of them are drunkards,” he said. “Even me! I must go.”

  Marijan pulled on his tailored gray wool coat and wrapped a cashmere scarf around his neck. He had to return to Rijeka early in the morning and told me good-bye. A few of the college kids came in, crowding the bar near me, but I stayed on my own.

  Some time later, Cuculić entered the bar.

  “Hello, Gospodin Cuculić,” I said, looking over at him.

  “Hello, Mizz Veelson,” he replied, sitting next to me.

  The kids snickered. He was the only person I had met in Mrkopalj who looked consistently and entirely miserable.

  Viktor and Manda had told me that not everyone in Mrkopalj joined the Communist party after World War II. However, those who did received good jobs and cozy lives, as did their families after them. (In Mrkopalj, on the other hand, the government closed all the lumber mills except the one near Čelimbaša, and jobs pretty much evaporated.) Only one guy in town exuded the scent of cronyism Manda and Viktor had spoken of. Someone who held a plum job, and who showed no fear of losing it, despite never really doing that job. That guy was sitting right next to me in the bar.

  “Gospodin Cuculić, can we talk about history?” I asked.

  “No!” he said loudly, plainly, staring straight ahead.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Everyone in Mrkopalj picks on you. It’s because of your family’s politics, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head, more in refusal than denial.

  “Can I get Cuculić a beer over here?”

  I heard Mario and Jasminka’s son, Stjepan, say something in English, and therefore directed at me: “He will not talk, so she buys him beer.”

  There was more snickering. I didn’t really care. Cuculić didn’t seem to either. He took the beer. We drank together, outsiders.

  “You have been here three months?” Cuculić asked finally.

  “About that, yes,” I said.

  “You could spend three years trying to understand this place,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t I try?” I said.

  Cuculić looked over at me. “In our country, here is reality: one brother is Ustaše; one brother is Chetnik, one brother is Partisan. They are carrying knives against each other. Knives! And that fight never ended. It has been going on for more than seventy years now.”

  He took a sloppy pull off his beer, dousing his nicotine-stained mustache in suds.

  Cuculić did talk to me, with the caveat that his simple English could never encapsulate Croatia’s turmoil. He told me his father was high up in the Partisan government just after World War II, that bloody time that had terrified Mrkopalj.

  “Do you know who is Aleksandar Ranković?” Cuculić leaned in to ask.

  I did not. I do now. Aleksandar Ranković was the minister of the interior and head of military intelligence in Tito’s Yugoslavia after World War II. In other words, he was the guy who invented the secret service.

  “My father was what you call his right-hand man,” Cuculić said. They’d had a falling out in the 1960s over Ranković tactics—which included bugging Tito’s own vacation home in the Brijuni Islands—and Cuculić’s dad quit his position.

  “We were neighbors in Belgrade with Tuđjman,” Cuculić said. “I was born there. I grew up in Sarajevo.”

  I told him that it seemed as if he was tortured by his father’s life. Tortured by the fact that his dad had helped create an organization that left Croatia with some of its deepest scars. I was feeling very philosophical, with all my hot wine.

  “He was a good man,” Cuculić quietly insisted.

  He looked up from his beer. “I am a child of the flowers. I am for peace! For love! I just do not like the present days,” he said. “Everything is so rough.”

  I told him that I’d been scared of him when I first arrived.

  “Why?” he exploded, typical Cuculić: head cocked, hands out, shocked.

  “You were so angry,” I said. “You were yelling at me that I was late!”

  Cuculić nodded. “This is true,” he said.

  “Plus, I’m pretty sure you’d been drinking,” I said.

  “This, too, is true,” he said.

  “I was lost, I needed help, and you were my only contact here,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “So why wouldn’t I have been scared?” I said.

  He looked at his beer. “I don’t know of this.”

  I suggested that perhaps the drinking was part of his problem, too.

  “From my generation, there are many men like that,” he said. “We drink too much. But we hurt no one.”

  Jim had once asked Cuculić if he planned to retire any time soon. “I don’t think about that,” he’d told Jim. “I will be dead in a few years.”

  Cuculić’s Partisan father had written a private history of the village that was still considered the best. Even ultra-right Robert thought Cuculić’s dad’s book was good. I asked Cuculić if he’d share it with me. I could use the historical help.

  “No,” he said simply.

  “You’re not being very helpful again,” I said.

  “It will be a hundred years before we understand the wars of Croatia.
This is how long it takes for people to gain perspective. Europe is different than America. You’ve forgotten your history. We remember ours. We remember our cousins. We remember our wars. In 1944 this place was burned—destroyed!—by Germans.” He shook his head and took a drink, not finding the words again. “See? That’s the problem in talking about that.”

  He said there was no way an American, with my country’s wimpy two-hundred-year history, could possibly appreciate the complexities of Croatia. “In any country in Europe, we are destroyed three times in a hundred years. Five times! Everywhere in Europe. Everywhere!”

  He told me that the monument Jim and I and the kids had seen, the twenty-six stones in the field by Summer Rocks, actually commemorated the deaths of Partisan soldiers in the 13th Primorsko-Goranska Division, who’d all died in a forced march in the middle of winter during World War II. The Mrkopalj cemetery contained a common grave for seventy-six Partisan soldiers. They’d died fighting Fascism and Nazism in the Gorski Kotar. In Mrkopalj, there had been a lot of blood.

  Cuculić was bereft of hope. Terminally sad and lost. And he knew it.

  We continued to drink together, speaking the common language of nothing at all. History and drinking made up so much of Mrkopalj. I was thoroughly soaked in both that night. Viktor recalled singing in the Mrkopalj of his boyhood. The party sure had ended. I walked home with only one clear thought: Their loss was my loss, too.

  From that day on, Cuculić was fine by me. The guy didn’t need any more enemies. And anyway, what did I know about the past? It was just now a hundred years since Valentin and Jelena left. I was only beginning to understand what that meant. Just as Cuculić had said, it had taken that long to gain any sort of perspective.

  chapter twenty-seven

  It was a crisp Saturday morning, the first weekend of September. Jim and I sat at the kitchen table drinking Nescafé in flannel jammies. We could faintly see our breath from the chill air coming in through the windows along with the morning sounds of Novi Varoš: the guttural clucking of Josip and Pavice’s turkeys; a rooster crowing; Cesar’s random barks; Jasminka vacuuming the inside of her car.