Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  I grabbed Zadie to put her hair up, tugging through tangles, finding a sucker stick on my first pass through. Her hair had grown so much over the summer it was remarkable. It had been shoulder length when we left Des Moines, and now it almost hit the middle of her back.

  “What time is the phone call tomorrow?” Jim asked, only half paying attention, studying a European road atlas. We were getting ready to spend some time driving through Italy.

  “Six in the evening,” I said.

  A techie niece was Skyping us in to the surprise anniversary party for Jim’s sister and brother-in-law. It was going to be our first real contact with anyone back home, other than care packages and e-mails. Funny how we didn’t miss it as much as we thought we would. I felt nostalgic about visiting with neighbors on our porch. I missed peaches-and-cream sweet corn and the Des Moines farmers’ market. But living in the bubble of Mrkopalj, I felt for the first time that I could parent exactly how I wanted to and be whoever I needed to. We didn’t have obligations. We didn’t have to be anywhere, ever. This could be excruciatingly boring, but it was also liberating. I was connecting every day with Sam and Zadie, but giving them the independence and freedom I believed in. Jim had started homeschooling them. He was making his own discoveries that he would reveal to me later. I had asked myself, so long ago it seemed, if I could get away from it all and take my family with me. And here I was, doing just that.

  I drained my coffee and stood. “I think I’ll head down to the church to look for the graves,” I said.

  “We’ll walk you out,” Jim said, rising too. “See what’s happening in the ’hood.”

  We all wandered outside, past Manda’s laundry waving in the breeze like prayer flags, where Robert and his daughters picked through their potato patch. Robert had already filled a wheelbarrow with silk-smooth, caramel-colored krompiri. Cuculić, who had once claimed the field as partially his, was nowhere in sight.

  “Oh, hey, Jeem!” Robert called. “Look here!”

  Robert had been saving the weird potatoes in a bucket. He held up a giant mutated one shaped like a Mummenschanz mask. Jim laughed.

  Then he held up an elongated one. “Like pecker!” Robert called.

  “Oo! Let me get my camera!” Jim said.

  The kids and I wandered over to the Starčevićs. Bobi lounged nearby, gnawing a potato. The meadow was deep green under the cluster of houses with crimson rooftops crowding around the open field. It was tailgating weather. Eventually, I pulled my sweater closer and walked the road to Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, leaving behind the kids smashing pecans with bricks, and Robert and Jim setting up photos of misshapen potatoes.

  The church was unlocked as I entered. I walked toward the front and sat down. Silence washed over me like cold water. It was exhilarating to be alone in the dark sanctuary on a quiet morning. I knelt and prayed for my family, for peace in Mrkopalj, and that the world would leave Croatia alone with its sea, as they had done such a nice job of taking care of it.

  I unfolded the piece of paper in my pocket: the cemetery map that Jim, Robert, and Katarina 2 had sketched. It seemed fairly simple to just walk outside and find the graves of Valentin’s parents, hidden beneath that of their daughter-in-law, Matilda. I was pretty sure that all I needed to do was ask Pavice to figure out where Jelena’s parents were, too.

  But for some reason, I wasn’t quite ready to do it yet. If I found the graves of my ancestors, what was left for me to do in Mrkopalj? I knew our time would end before long; we couldn’t stay forever. And the way our American lives seemed to swallow us whole, there was a chance we’d never be this close as a family again. I wanted to savor the mystery for just a while longer. I folded up the paper and put it in my pocket. Out of habit, I crossed myself. I left the church and walked home to my family. I would find those graves another day.

  On the way back, I saw Željko Crnić and Viktor sitting in Željko’s backyard at the picnic table shaded by a grape arbor. They’d been working on a stone fence Željko was erecting between his house and Robert’s. I think they’d moved maybe three stones before starting on the wine. Željko’s precocious granddaughter Lucia buzzed around me as I walked. As we visited, Jim joined us.

  “Are you studying your Croatian?” Lucia asked me, smirking.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Say something in Croatian,” she said, tugging on her purple cardigan.

  “Kopriva,” I said.

  “Pecker,” Jim offered.

  Željko asked us to sit down. Viktor removed his newsboy cap and nodded to me.

  Željko was a big man, not tall, but stout like an old barkeep. His eyes wrinkled at the edges before his loud, Santa-like laughs, which were usually followed by a fit of wet coughing. He wore suspenders, and he and Anđelka puttered endlessly in this backyard, which was my favorite in Mrkopalj.

  I said I’d just been to the church, and Željko told us about its history. It was built on the site of what had once been a roadside shrine honoring Our Lady of Seven Sorrows. We’d seen similar chapels all over the back roads of the Gorski Kotar, flickering red candles illuminating plastic flowers and a Virgin Mary inside. In the time of kuga, or cholera, in Croatia, the people came to Mrkopalj’s shrine to pray for Mary to cure them. They promised that if she ended the plague, they’d replace the shrine with a church, and they did so in 1854.

  I’d seen the small statue of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows on the altar. Mary cradled her son Jesus after he’d been taken from the cross, her eyes turned to heaven. Seven swords pierced her heart. Jesus wore gold pants.

  Željko noted that one of the popes—and I never figured out just which one—had decreed that anyone who made a pilgrimage to the September festival of the Church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows would be forgiven of every sin.

  I told Jim to make a note of this date.

  “Done,” said Jim, writing it on his hand.

  “Sister Terezija runs that church very well,” I said.

  “She doesn’t run the church; she just works there and cleans it,” Željko corrected. “The nuns did everything from when the convent began in 1928.” They cooked for the priest, they rang the church bell every hour on the hour, they taught domestic skills to girls—like my cousin Katarina, whom they’d taken in as an orphan. The sisters farmed and raised cattle.

  “Like normal people,” Lucia assured me.

  Nuns started the Mrkopalj choir. Children sang before school, during school, and after school. Adults sang in the evenings.

  “We’re from Mrkopalj! Mrkopalj sings well!” Željko said with pride.

  The convent closed in 1977 when its numbers dwindled. With the proceeds of the sale, Mrkopalj bought a new electric bell ringer.

  “When you come to church, you don’t have to stay downstairs. Come up and sing with us,” he added, smiling.

  “We’ll do that!” I promised.

  Jim and I headed over to the meadow where the kids played. He threw his arm around me. “Thought you were going to look for graves,” he said.

  “I guess I’d rather spend my time with my living family instead,” I said, giving him a squeeze.

  We decided it was a good day to take a beach drive together. Just as I’d felt those first pangs of wistfulness about our time in the village, we both noticed there wasn’t much summer left to wring from the days before the frosts. Jim grabbed the atlas from the Peugeot and we searched for the place along the Adriatic waterfront that Pavice’s grandson, Hervoj, had told us about. Hervoj was a breath-diver—that’s deep-sea diving without a tank, baby—and he’d recommended the secluded village of Brseč, an art community back in medieval times that even then boasted zero illiterate residents. Only about a hundred residents remained.

  Sweet cottages with sky-blue shutters overlooked a sea shining back in a similar shade of blue. Hervoj had directed us a kilometer from town, where we eased the Peugeot down a dirt path to a deep cove ringed by sheer rock faces. There was no official parking lot—this wasn’t an official beach�
��so we stuffed the Peugeot between cars on a high precipice. The path to the beach was so steep that we sometimes slid on our butts.

  But the payoff was heaven. I had never seen water so blue and clear, and it lapped the curves of this tiny protected canyon. Sifted white gravel served as a beach, where women wore no tops and teenagers clambered up tall cliffs to dive, their silhouettes soaring through the sky into turquoise water.

  There were some lower rock perches, and so Jim and Sam performed a bit of cliff jumping too, at which time Sam switched his climatological allegiance from Iowa’s winter snow to Croatia’s summertime sea. Zadie and I sunbathed.

  “Mommy,” Zadie began, lying prone on her foam mat next to me, pink Dora sunglasses dwarfing her little face, “I like it when we’re fancy girls together.”

  “We’re like fish baking in the sun,” I said. “If you taste your arm, it’s all salty.”

  I looked over and saw her tentatively stick her tongue to her forearm.

  “I wouldn’t eat fish,” she said. “They pee in their own house.”

  Sam came up and dripped cold seawater on us. “Dad says to look at him.”

  I sat up on my elbows and scanned the water for Jim. He floated out a ways, nodding toward two fifty-something biker types making out furiously against a rock.

  “Wow, those people really love each other,” Sam said.

  “They’re just tasting each other’s salt,” Zadie corrected.

  Brseč was a dream, but getting out of there was not. We’d wedged the Peugeot between cars on the edge of a cliff about five hundred feet above the sea. Our departure required an approximately thirty-eight-point turn, executed on the precipice. We spent thirty sweaty minutes with Jim behind the wheel and me calling out “Okay, forward!” “Now back up again!” “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Driving away, we laughed with astonished relief. How had we done that? What a crazy thing! If Jim had made just one false move, the Peugeot would have plunged to its death in a shallow sea!

  Suddenly, Jim stopped laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  His voice shook. “We had the kids strapped in the car the whole time.”

  Neither of us had even realized it. We’d been so afraid they’d screw around and fall off the cliff that we’d buckled them into the car while we tried to get out of that impossible parking spot. Had the Peugeot rolled off the edge, as it could have any number of times, it would have taken the kids with it.

  Jim and I fell silent. I rested my hand on my cheek, stomach churning. Jim slipped his hand into the backseat to rest it lightly on Sam’s leg.

  We’d had enough gut-wrenching excitement for one day. We drove back to Mrkopalj, thankful to be together, and alive.

  “Remember the first time we saw that?” Jim pointed at Kalvarija, its three monolithic crosses on the hill above Mrkopalj lit by spotlights in the night.

  I nodded. “Viktor told me that the Communist government actually moved Kalvarija to the churchyard. The first thing the Croatian soldiers did at the start of the war in the 1990s was to get those crosses and carry them back up the hill.”

  We watched Kalvarija as we passed. I couldn’t understand all the trouble that Mrkopalj had known. The most violence I’d ever experienced was the silent treatment. But I would never again think of any war as storybook simple—good guys versus bad guys. Life was just more complicated than that.

  That theory proved itself ever more true when, a few weeks later, Stefanija took me to meet a Serbian family in Tuk. I’d been asking her if there was someone who could tell me firsthand what it was like to be Partisan here and she introduced me to an elderly couple and the husband’s crippled sister, ethnic Serbs and all faithful Partisans. Shrunken Ankica’s leg had been crushed when the stage collapsed at a dance in the 1940s, and the Italians who invaded soon after fixed it in a prisoner hospital. Her brother Milan, in round plastic-framed glasses, had earned patches like a Boy Scout in Tito’s Communist work crews as a young man, when everyone in Yugoslavia had a job and a little spending money to vacation by the sea. His wife, Marija, was a heavyset woman with the cleanest house I’d ever been in, save my own mother’s. The home was so close to the street that when they hid inside during the Nazi invasion, they could have reached out the window and touched the swastikas on soldiers’ arms.

  I would relay their story right here—their family had suffered unspeakably; Milan and his father had once crawled through open graves in search of a sister, hoping not to find her in the faces of the dead—but it would be like repeating the ones I’ve already told, with only the names changed. The Serbian village of Tuk is almost a physical mirror of Mrkopalj (just substitute the steeple for a spire), once known for its raucous weekend dances just as Mrkopalj was known for singing, and now similarly silent.

  When the Italians burned Tuk, Milan and his family found refuge in Mrkopalj. With the family that lived in House No. 262, no less. I was connected to them, too. The ghosts I had felt in 262 could have been the ghosts of the dead in this very family.

  Who knows what I would have done, if I had lived in this place during all its bad times. Probably Jim and I would have been like Viktor and Manda, hiding from the soldiers, hoping that this, too, would pass. We would have sheltered Milan’s family when the Italians had burned down Tuk. And we’d probably be joining the ranks of people filing in to Our Lady of Seven Sorrows every Sunday, when this dying village made the most joyful noise we’d ever heard.

  There was something to that. Despite the darkness, Mrkopalj sang.

  chapter twenty-eight

  So what kind of Radošević was I?

  I wondered as fall wound down. After the dizzy lushness of the growing season, Mrkopalj bore so much fruit in fall as to seem lewd. Tiny makeshift tractors putted down Novi Varoš piloted by stoic men with old farmwives sitting on mounds of potatoes. When apples came on, even men without a decent tooth in their head didn’t leave a seed uneaten.

  Jim and I had dreamed of simplicity when we left home. Of time and space and filling an emptiness inside our family. When we’d first arrived in the village, I worried that our act of bravado would somehow damage us. And though it did stir up more questions about the world than ever before, in our updated version of the American Dream, we knew this to be a good thing. Mrkopalj showed us that it didn’t matter what we had (although I still wished I hadn’t left behind my super-cute chocolate suede clogs). We’d been eating cheese and crackers for at least one meal every day and could now pack all our belongings into five suitcases, yet we didn’t feel as if anything was missing. This feeling only got stronger as the night chill turned into flat-out cold, and the children of Mrkopalj returned to school.

  Our outlook had changed so much that on our walks to Tuk, Jim and I openly wondered how we would return to a place where people had everything and appreciated so little. Sometimes, we just wanted to stay. For people in Mrkopalj, life had been bone-hard. But there had been singing in the streets, and sudden electricity between two people who’d known each other all their lives. They’d built their own houses, planted their fruit trees, perked their own liquor for God’s sake. They needed their family; they needed their neighbors; they needed a piece of land. Most of them needed that church over there.

  We had become part of this fabric, in the twilight years of an old village. Nothing was here to keep the kids home except the bars and each other, so they left, like my great-grandparents had. Another exodus. Croatia had earned its freedom, and yet it didn’t seem to know what to do with it. As an American, I could relate.

  Little by little, Mrkopalj told me its story. We’d been drawn together. I had grown to love Jasminka and Ana Fak and Pavice and Anđelka and Manda and Stefanija and so many others in our ever-widening circle. I hadn’t even found the family graves yet. Did it matter? I had a month left to figure it out, if the snow held off for that long.

  We took our final beach drive to a stretch of shoreline from Opatija to Mošćenička Draga, the Croatian Riviera, a w
inding seaside necklaced by old resort towns. We’d brought Roberta along with us. Our little Peugeot skimmed past the old villas fronting the towns of Lovran, Ičići, Medveja. The kids and I stared dreamily at the sparkling sea with international yachts like quills poking out of the surface. Jim drove slowly, looking around with almost athletic interest, his love for shabby architecture piqued by the old-timey tourist towns. Stone pathways wound from the shore drive to meat-centric taverns called konobas, ice-cream shops, resort-wear boutiques. White Christmas lights were strung from the trees above cobbled ancient downtowns. The oldest resorts still held moonlight dances on patios overlooking the water.

  We pulled over for coffee at a little restaurant perched on a hill, an Adriatic overlook with stone tables and chairs.

  “I feel like a character in a Merchant Ivory film,” I told Jim.

  “Except that we’re not miserable,” he said before heading inside to hunt down a server and put in our order.

  Zadie and Roberta vibed on the place. Zadie took out a paper fan and demurely looked over its edge at the water. Roberta slid on a pair of sunglasses and tipped her head back, soaking up the morning rays.

  Sam brought out his new favorite toys, knowing Jim and I could languish forever over coffee. He held up four fingers on each hand, then upended them on the stone table. These were the Little Guys: Warrior One and Warrior Two. My son had gone from being the prime toy consumer of the family to playing with his fingers. The Little Guys were built-in soldiers, light and mobile. Two fingers of a hand served as legs, two fingers as arms. The thumb behind the palm? A jet pack. Today, the Little Guys moved to the old stone patio railing, chasing each other through a jungle of a bougainvillea vine.