Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  People clapped as they sang. They beat the tables with their fists. They got up and danced, linking arms and jigging in circles. They bounced along in their chairs. They roared in song, whether they sounded any good or not. The singing of Mrkopalj dwarfed everything, as it always had.

  I hardly drank a drop. I didn’t want to miss a thing. A few of the guitar-playing Anthony Hopkinses we’d seen so long ago in the Sunger church parking lot even showed up. Robert sang so long and so loud that he sounded like Joe Cocker as the night wore on. He was truly at his best commanding center stage. It was a delight to be part of his audience, and I glimpsed the wild beauty of the boy inside him. He worked the room until everyone was a flush-faced fan. Sometimes he stood. Sometimes he dramatically wiped sweat from his forehead and flicked it to the ground. Sometimes he whacked the guitar like winter wood. Sometimes he held it as if it were a woman and plucked tenderly, his ear pressed against the side of it, as if he was listening for something very faint and far away.

  Stari Baća was filled with music and laughter and cheering. It would be filled with the same energetic pride four months later, when my family returned for one last time on a bone-cold February, Valentine’s Day night, just to watch with the rest of Mrkopalj as Jakov competed in the Winter Olympics. We crowded around a tiny television at 3:00 A.M. to see our hometown boy ski and shoot and ski and shoot, jumping up and down and hugging around the hearth of Stari Baća when he did it—Jakov Fak won the bronze medal!

  The frenzied magic of our going-away party was the stuff Jim and I would dream about for the rest of our lives. But my posse of eighty-somethings had long ago pooped out, and I was close behind them. I took one last look through the window of Stari Baća and smiled at the crowd: flushed, sweaty, singing. Stefanija looked up and saw me. She raised her hand in a small wave that I returned with a smile. I stepped away and walked alone to 12 Novi Varoš, loving my new family with all my heart, even though the next day, Robert presented us with the bill for the party, about double the price he and Jim had ultimately agreed upon, calculating our farewell down to the last lipa, and then some.

  Still, Robert had been a good guide. He was our passport into the Old World, and we emerged from it squinting and blinking into a strange new light. In his Blue Period, the Brown Bear had more questions about his life and his surroundings than ever before. My husband and I felt exactly the same way. But if Robert was at his best when he didn’t know a damned thing for sure, I had to consider that perhaps we were, too. Sureness, as we’d seen in Mrkopalj, hadn’t done anybody much good.

  In the end, it was easier to tell Robert good-bye like this. If Mrkopalj was family, then Robert was my troubled brother.

  I loved him as much as I loathed him. Halp-halp.

  chapter thirty-six

  When I finally found my ancestors’ graves, it was All Saints’ Day, November 1, the only holiday that all religions and all ethnicities celebrate together in Croatia. We’d been traveling around Europe in the Peugeot before settling into Rovinj for winter. We returned to Mrkopalj to pick up the last of our stuff from Robert’s place, then drove to the cemetery to locate those overgrown graves once and for all. This time, I knew where I was going.

  Hundreds of people gathered in the cemetery dressed in wool coats against the forty-five-degree cold. The new priest spoke into a boxy PA system, but the microphone was broken, so no one could hear his blessings. Instead, the choir sang. The sound carried loud and pure and strong on the brisk air.

  The kids and I made our way to the graves of Jelena Iskra’s parents. Jim grabbed his camera to photograph the choir’s silhouette against the blue sky. Sam and Zadie held my hands, theirs little pulses of warmth better than gloves.

  Finding the graves of Jelena’s parents really had been as easy as asking Pavice. Her relative just gave us directions to the family plot over the phone. Josip and Marija Iskra were buried with their children on the far south side of the cemetery in a grave marked, oddly enough, Radošević. The family from Germany still visited often, from the looks of the tidy white cinder gravel. Silk roses and daisies in urns decorated the grave, alongside three red candles that once danced with flame.

  The simple black metal cross with a gold plate read Poćivaju u miru Božjem, roughly meaning “Here they rest in peace with God.”

  It’s difficult to manufacture the emotions of loss and sorrow in a culture where the dead felt just as present as the living. Anyway, I wasn’t here to mourn. I was here to acknowledge a feeling that grew clearer every day: I was grateful.

  The village had taught my family a deep gratitude for what we had. We’d been spared the senseless murders, persecution, sorrows. We’d been spared hunger. The old ones in Mrkopalj knew hunger like they knew their backyards, because they were one and the same. Our trip hadn’t been about finding these graves. It was about losing what didn’t matter, and gathering to us all the things that did. It was about discovering the sacrifices of my ancestors that had spared me and mine, so we could find a better way. And for that, we would live with gratitude.

  Gratitude didn’t mean groveling to the boss or buying everything we could get our hands on or indulging our children so much that they expected everything yet appreciated nothing. It meant respecting our place in the world, actively embracing it as citizens of the best and brightest among them, starting by teaching our kids more about it. Because when we lost that knowledge, we lost what it meant to be American in the first place.

  I had been a fool to think that this trip was only about my family. It had been about the whole family—those who left, those who stayed, and all those connective tissues on either side of the journey my great-grandparents made. The journey that began with their parents. Mrkopalj had needed to tell its far-flung family its difficult story.

  Josip and Marija Iskra, whose house stood on gypsy ground, had ushered their tall and by all accounts unattractive daughter out the door of House No. 40 to embark on a journey into the unknown. Josip and Marija had lost five children either at birth or during their childhood. Then they gave up their daughter to America. For this, I got down on my knees to thank them and asked my children to do the same. I straightened a red candle that had fallen over and smoothed the cinder with the flat of my hand.

  The altar boys for the Church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows swung censers full of incense, the little pots on brass chains scenting the air just enough that we caught whiffs as we moved on.

  We used the grave with the porcelain face of Ana Crnić on it as a guide, and followed the row toward the cemetery fence. Petar and Katarina were buried with their daughter-in-law, Matilda Kružić, who had married their son, Matej. The grave was inscribed with Matilda’s name only, and the words “Podižu, kćerke,” or “Arise, daughter.” But Petar and Katarina were in there too, added to the plot in lean times, keeping their daughter-in-law company as their son had not. Perennial bushes sprouted from the ground alongside a yellow spray of button flowers and a white vase of pale-pink roses. Candles flanked the marble headstone, atop white posts marked with a cross and an olive branch.

  The kids and I knelt, then just sat down and listened to the choir. I was content near Petar and Katarina. Their son Valentin had pioneered my American family, though he’d abandoned his own to do it. He’d become “Wally” in America, a funny little guy shaped like a gourd, a man who’d loan money to anybody who asked for it. Because of that, his family rode a constant roller coaster between prosperity and poverty, as Wally Radošević handed out cash in America rather than send it to the Old Country. He had left Mrkopalj without a trace, never looking back. There was a good chance that Petar and Katarina Radošević had told him to do so. And because he did not, there I stood, alive and unscarred and a citizen of the only country in the world that didn’t believe in carrying its baggage. And everyone knows that when you travel without baggage, you’re free.

  I had spent a whole summer looking for these people, hunting down their physical remains in the vast graveyard of a village
that once seemed small to me. All were nothing now. They didn’t even have a stone that bore their names. But through their children, they had placed their own cog in the machinery that powered a Nation of Immigrants, a brand-new country that restored the idea of possibility in a world that had been ravaged again and again by the same old mistakes, a world in which each village had, in Cuculić’s words, burned to the ground at least five times in the last two centuries.

  The stories of each of us mattered, every step of the way, from the dust below us to me and the kids sitting above. The connection was bigger than I was. It was bigger than Petar and Katarina Radošević and Josip and Marija Iskra. Bigger than the families they’d raised, and their families, and their families, and my own. I had come to witness because this had been forgotten. What happened to these people happened to me and mine. The reverberations were like rings in a pond. This was the lesson that I would pull back home and make part of the essential DNA of my own family. The newspaper story about Serbian and Croatian leaders exchanging apologies for wartime crimes gave me hope, because I understood it, not dwelling on the past but witnessing it, so I could know better than to stand idly by if it threatened to repeat itself. To build on its foundations instead of coasting into the sort of laziness that’s easy to fall into when you’ve got it pretty damned good.

  The bell atop the yellow church tolled. Jim joined us, crouching on the cinder of the old grave. I thought of the parable told by Jesus in the Book of Luke about prudent and grateful servants who stood in greeting when the master returned from the wedding party: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”

  It all came down to dust beneath the feet, and the simple question from an old man: What kind of Radošević are you?

  To which my family and I had heard the resounding response, channeled through the warm hands of old women: You were the very best of us. Do not forget.

  glossary of croatian people, places, and words

  baka (BOCK-ah). Grandmother.

  čaj (CHAI). Tea.

  Čelimbaša (CHELL-eem-bash-ah). The ski hill in Mrkopalj.

  Željko and Anđelka Crnić (JHEL-ko and ON-jell-kuh TSER-nitch). Our next-door neighbors to the north in Mrkopalj. Owners of the best backyard in town.

  Željko Cuculić (TZU-tzu-litch). The tourism director for Mrkopalj; my former nemesis.

  Delnice (DELL-neets-uh). The biggest town in Mrkopalj county.

  džezva (JEZ-vah). A small pot with a long handle designed for making Turkish coffee.

  gemišt (gem-EESHT). A popular Mrkopalj drink—half white wine, half fizzy water.

  Gorski Kotar. A forested region of Croatia that roughly translates to “mountain district.” Its main cities are Rijeka and Karlovac. It is separated from Slovenia by the Kupa River.

  groblje (GROBE-lee-yay). Cemetery.

  Joj meni (YOY MAN-ny). Oh my!

  Karlovačko (KAR-loe-vatch-koe). A brand of Croatian beer.

  Mrkopalj (MER-koe-pie). The village of my great-grandparents in the Gorski Kotar region of Croatia where my family and I lived in 2009 for a period of about four months.

  Novi Varoš (NO-vee VAR-osh). Our street in Mrkopalj. It means “new way.”

  Ožujsko (OH-zhu-skoe). A brand of Croatian beer.

  Pavice and Josip Paškvan (PAH-veets-uh and YO-seep POSH-kvan). Our farm-family neighbors and owners of the evil dog Cesar.

  Valentin and Jelena Radošević (VAL-en-teen and YELL-eh-nuh rad-OH-sheh-vitch). My great-grandparents on my mother’s side. They left Mrkopalj in the early 1900s.

  rakija (ROCK-ee-uh). A clear liquor made by the people of most Slavic countries, but distilled particularly well in Mrkopalj. Good luck trying to get their secret recipe, though.

  Rijeka (ree-YAY-kuh). A major port city thirty minutes from Mrkopalj.

  Viktor and Manda Šepić (SHEP-itch). Our elderly next-door neighbors to the south in Mrkopalj.

  The Family Starčević (STAR-cheh-vitch). The family we lived with in Mrkopalj. Parents Robert and Goranka and daughters Ivana, Karla, and Roberta.

  Stari Baća (STAR-ee BOTCH-uh). Robert’s café-bar.

  šuma (SHOE-muh). Forest.

  Šume Pjevaju (SHOE-meh PYEH-vah-you). The oldest bar in Mrkopalj.

  Ustaše (OO-stash-ee). An ultranationalist Croatian movement that became the pro-Nazi, eastern European arm of Fascism responsible for the World War II Yugoslavian genocide.

  Zagmajna (zag-MINE-uh). The biathlon training field on the outskirts of Mrkopalj.

  živjeli (ZHEE-vell-ee). Cheers! Locally, it is said that one must maintain eye contact when making this toast, or suffer seven years of sexual bad luck.

  RUNNING AWAY TO HOME. Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Wilson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, Jennifer.

  Running away to home : our family’s journey to Croatia in search of who we are, where we came from, and what really matters / Jennifer Wilson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  e-ISBN 9781429989084

  1. Wilson, Jennifer. 2. Wilson, Jennifer—Family. 3. Croatia—Social life and customs. 4. Croatia—Description and travel. 5. Mrkopalj (Croatia)—Social life and customs. 6. Americans—Croatia—Mrkopalj—Biography. 7. Mrkopalj (Croatia)—Biography. 8. Des Moines (Iowa)—Biography. 9. Group identity—Case studies. 10. Social values—Case studies. I. Title.

  DR1522.W55 2011

  305.89183'0730922—dc23

  2011024841

  First Edition: October 2011