Coda Yugoslavia Rab

When my mother took a sabbatical in Paris, we visited Yugoslavia as a family again. It was the last time we would ever do so because within in a year my parents would separate. Miško later said, shaking his head wistfully, “So the dynasty has come to an end.” It never occurred to me until now that our family fell apart around the same time as Yugoslavia itself.

It is apt then that in this period of breaking apart my grandmother, Joe’s mother, made an appearance in Srebrnjak. Draga Husta showed up like some character out of a book I had read and had brought to life but never expected to see in the flesh. She was wearing black clothes and a black kerchief because of the recent death of her husband, Husta. She was a tall woman with a loud, windy personality that blew heavily through the little kitchen in Srebrnjak. I was told she had been good-looking in her youth, but I had trouble imagining that when I looked at her sagging, somewhat masculine face with its large jaw and fleshy nose and dark, not exactly friendly eyes. Her reason for visiting Srebrnjak as opposed to us going to Molvice as we had in 1977, where she lived with her husband and two stepsons—one with whom she was alleged to have had an affair; the other a hunchback called Jura who conscientiously watched over my sister and me when we were put astride the heavy horse—was because Joe had decided never to go to Molvice again on a visit. So, there she was in Srebrnjak. How long had it been since she’d seen Strina or Mila I don’t know. Likely decades. They had lived in the same little peasant house for four years, but after her marriage and departure there had been no reason to communicate. She didn’t seem nervous at all. However, with every passing minute, the atmosphere in the kitchen got more uncomfortable, the oxygen more sucked out of it, and Joe more paralyzed, sitting on his chair not talking, abject and stiff. Luckily, Miško was there to take up the conversational slack; he was the only one who said anything really, engaging her about this and that—her health, the upcoming crops. Mila, I remember, said a few words of greeting when Draga Husta arrived, invited her to sit, but beyond that didn’t offer much in the way of conversation, and watched instead the spectacle unfold from a voyeuristic distance, slyly enjoying the awful uncomfortableness of it all. Strina Slava was on her wooden box, but beyond Draga Husta’s attention, as though she were inconsequential. They were total opposites in personality, these two women, and the best and least selfish of the two was the meekest and most invisible. I wish I’d asked Strina what she thought, but I never did. Draga Husta ignored my mother too for the most part and, thinking she knew no Croatian, disparaged her with the observation that she looked like a little girl. My mother, who had understood her, piped up, “Well I am not a little girl!” (On the issue of the size of my mother, who was just over five feet tall, I’m reminded of a story she told me about her stay back in 1969, when she showed some outsized moxie by daring the people in Srebrnjak to sing the (then) “discouraged” Lijepa naša domovina, the Croatian anthem, which they did. She also took it upon herself, when she heard that Štefek and his father had not spoken in two decades, to go over to the old man’s house and, with hand gestures and faltering Croatian, invite him over for lunch.)

I too was outside the scope of my grandmother’s attention. I don’t think she spoke to me other than “hello” and “goodbye.” Even that I’m not sure about. I’d been told by Jana that I resembled my grandfather, that is, Draga Husta’s first husband, so maybe that put her off. I don’t know. In hindsight, I’ve become more charitable towards her and her visit to Srebrnjak and have subsumed it within a bigger picture of her possible remorse for the past, thinking that she wished she could have chosen a different path, had it over again to do differently—a wish covered up by her bluster, loudness, and self-centredness. Or, contrariwise, maybe the way she behaved in Srebrnjak was exactly who she always was. Yet, even as I say that I remember Joe telling me she did have a selfless side because she made sure her sons were legally titled to the land in Srebrnjak upon her marriage and because she had been on a local committee after the Second World War, which helped saved the life of Štefek’s younger brother, who had been arrested by the Partisans and probably would have been hanged had she and the committee not convinced a local commander that seventeen-year-old Miško was innocent, was a nobody without political interests.

Skyping with Joe this afternoon as I write this story, he denies she ever asked him to come to Canada, which I assumed was part of her reason for visiting that afternoon, denies her regret and remorse, denies she asked him from her sick bed one last time before she died, wailing loudly as though he were on the other side of the house. I have a memory of this happening, and even wrote about it in my first book. During our conversation, he says, “Why the fuck would she do that? She wasn’t stupid, you know. She knew what the answer was going to be.”

Joe didn’t want to talk about her anymore. I could see it on his face. Suddenly serious, sombre, petulant even, poking at his teeth with a toothpick. “I’m going to tell you this slowly so you never forget it,” he said. “So listen. I was four, and she came to Srebrnjak to visit us; she didn’t come after that. When she left, I followed her to the top of the hill, right over here, where my father’s vineyard used to be. I asked her to take me with her. She gave me twenty dinars. I will never forget it. She gave me twenty dinars to go home. To get rid of me. The money was useless; it had no fucking meaning to me, nothing. I watched her go on. And I went back home. I gave Mila the money because I didn’t have any use for it.” He stopped talking. There was nothing else. Even now, seventy years later, that incident with his mother was like an old wound that still hurt inside, a scab that was still raw underneath.

To me, the meeting with Draga Husta lingers more powerfully now than it did when it happened. As uncomfortable as it must have been for Joe, her visit to Srebrnjak, which brought back all the bad feelings of that scene on the hill, was for me just an awkward and unpleasant encounter of second intensity.

My own experiences during that period were light by comparison. I went to Zagreb several times to see a movie or just to experience the city. Željka and I rode to Sveta Nedelja and left our bikes inside the yard of a family she knew, caught a bus for the Ljubljanica station, and from there rode a tram to the centre of town, the Trg Republike (Republic Square).

The centre of Zagreb had been refurbished for the 1987 University Games, so its newly painted pastel façades and paving showed off well even at night. Hundreds of young people were strolling through the streets, many of them university-educated, culturally sophisticated, and well travelled in Europe (Tito had long before loosened travel restrictions). By then I’d met Vlado’s fellow medical students, like Hrvoj (“Harvey” I called him) whose parents had gifted him their apartment somewhere in the concrete wasteland of new Zagreb and where we listened to his record collection, especially the Doors’ first album and his favourite band, Colosseum, and drank Stari Zagreb beer. Vlado had a decent record collection, much of it produced by the record label Jugoton, which was based in Zagreb but distributed throughout Yugoslavia and that had signed the biggest acts in Yugo rock and popular music, like Azra, Bijelo Dugme (White Button), Crvena Jabuka (Red Apple), Đorđe Balašević, to name just a few. An irony of my relationship with Yugo rock was that I never listened to much of it while I was in Yugoslavia, but only on YouTube years later when the country was dead, in the heart of the snowy Newfoundland winter. As I write this, the Bijelo Dugme ballad I listened to the other night comes to me, “Evo, zakleču se—Here, I’ll swear,” “Hey, carry this song one last time / To a street by the river / Forever forbidden / Except for my steps. / Hey, if someone could carry an olive branch / To one door, / A door I forever closed / A long, long time ago. . . .”

In Zagreb’s lively evening atmosphere, through the streets filled with people, we went to an old movie house, Željka and I, to see Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. It was the only film I ever saw in Yugoslavia or in Croatia and it left a lasting impression because I ended up teaching it when I got my first contract. The film tells the story of a passionate but jealous husband and his young, beautiful, at first naive wife, their violent breakup, and his redemption at the end. The story of extreme love and violent jealousy really didn’t square with any of my own tepid and jejune experiences up to that stage. Maybe that was still to come, but on this evening it left me wrapped in a thoughtful, sweetly bitter mood.

My bike ride home that evening with Željka was benign and unremarkable, yet pleasant and memorable nonetheless. Talking and laughing, we rode side-by-side in and out of the pools of lights from the streetlamps. Crickets were chirping in the freshly mowed fields. The warm air smelled sweetly of the grass. When we arrived at her place, we went into the kitchen to eat the smoked ham, boiled eggs and bread Jana had left for us. Upstairs we played a few hands of poker, a game I’d introduced to her that summer. Afterwards, I headed back to Srebrnjak. It was one in the morning.

I struggled those first few seconds in the saddle. The light on Štefek’s bike, powered by the generator on the wheel, shone feebly onto the road ahead of me. My sleepiness wore off, though, when I hit the gravel road in Srebrnjak. I was wide awake then. I knew that up ahead Tomo’s gate was going to be open. Tomo was a farmer just down the road from Štefek; an old school friend of Joe’s—the two of them used to go out chasing girls back in the day. I knew Tomo’s dogs would be unchained and roaming free. During the day, Tomo’s gate was shut and his dogs used to race wickedly along its length when I passed by on my bike. I had no doubt they would have attacked me had the gate not been there. Štefek himself had told me that one of Tomo’s dogs had bit him on the ankle once—not nipped, no, actually bit him. Besides, my recent bad experience with a German Shepherd guard dog on a boat in Toronto was fresh in my mind. At night, Tomo loosed his dogs, two of them for sure, maybe three, and left his gate wide open. Why he did that I don’t know. I guess he wanted to free them because they were locked up during the day. He didn’t expect anyone to pass by after a certain hour. But a part of me wondered whether a punitive morality made him free his dogs. He was deciding you had no business passing there at night or must be up to no good if you chose to do so and would sure as hell face his dogs. So that is why I wasn’t sleepy anymore as I drove up the Srebrnjak road. I’d gone past Tomo’s before and had narrowly escaped. This time I could vaguely descry the menacing shapes of the dogs ahead of me, darker than the road itself, like black phantoms. It was almost worse seeing them wait for me than being surprised by them as I rode past. I took an emergency circuitous route off the road and into the field on the left and around the back of one of the houses and then back onto the road again. Things might have turned out a lot worse for me had I slowed there and not been able to outrace the dogs, but that didn’t occur to me at the time. They didn’t notice me, it turned out. Or had noticed me but didn’t go beyond their territory. When I leaned the bike against the closed barn at home and found the key on the window ledge and entered the kitchen, my heart was still beating fast.

That summer in Srebrnjak ended with one final get together of our extended family for a pig roast. Among those attending were my half-uncle Ivek, snazzily dressed in a blue polyester shirt and brown slacks, and his wife Luba, a pretty but by then rotund and sedentary woman who’d sewn my parents a blue table cloth with white checks similar to the Croatian šahovnica (Coat of Arms) that I still use for Christmas now; also at the pig roast was Mila and Jana’s other sister, Draga, an attractive dark-haired woman with large, sad eyes who was soft on her twenty-something-year-old son, Božo, who was in his element that afternoon with the wine and his guitar. Also at the roast was Božo’s father, Draga’s husband, the chain-smoking politically savvy Ivek Krajačić with his white hair slicked back and his suave gravelly voice that made me think that the rumours of his infidelity must have been true or at least possible. It was he who long ago had carved chess pieces out of a willow tree and gifted them to my father. Miško had been in Srebrnjak the whole day, working. He had helped my father and Štefek prepare the pig, tying its feet with wire and impaling it on the wooden spit, and he’d turned the pig for long stretches. When finally he took a break out front of the house with my mother, who was sitting in the shade reading African literature for an essay she was writing, he questioned her, as he had me, about this intellectual business of hers, so that she dismissed him with a click of her tongue, which she did when she was annoyed, and then carried on because she wasn’t going to argue with a driving instructor who hadn’t read a thing in his life. My sister Natasha was there too—sweet sixteen, slim and dark-haired, her brown hair nicely coiffed, having just come from Paris where my mother had been on sabbatical. My sister, who resembled Joe and moved shyly around, not talking much, who would help me that summer secretly empty my mother’s Dalmane capsules and put flour inside instead to prove she could sleep without them. Even Jana and Dragec had left their work at home and had come to Srebrnjak for a few hours.

After our meal, after the dessert of strudel, kremšnita, and Turkish coffee, Božo pulled out his guitar and they sang some songs. Even Štefek joined in. He had a good voice and had been known to enjoy singing. This was the first and only time I ever heard him. He was flushed in the face, not from the wine that he didn’t drink anymore, but from some feeling that brought the colour out, and I see him still, sitting at the head of the table, his back to all that work for an hour, for an hour at least.

Then my mother herded everyone together for a photograph. Presciently, it seemed, she sensed that this extended family would never be together again. When she was about to snap the picture, however, she noticed that Štefek had disappeared. He had gone to the barn to deal with the cows. We could hear him swearing at them for sitting in their dung. He didn’t come out, maybe because he was busy or just because he thought a photograph was frivolous. So now when I look at the photo, I don’t see him there. What I see is the photo of us together one last time, much younger, many dead now, but alive then and in a good mood and happy.

On that last family trip to Yugoslavia, we travelled to the coast to wrap up our stay. It was our first vacation on the sea since our trip to Brač in 1977. And it would be our last together. We were going to another island, Rab, farther north than Brač in the Kvarner region of the Adriatic.

The road to the coast took us first through Kordun and Lika, a sparsely populated area, past Plitvice Lakes, a six-kilometre-long chain of sixteen turquoise lakes and numerous waterfalls in deep woods, then through wide rolling grasslands where white stones poked from the earth and sheep, whose shepherds used to guide them north in the spring and return later in the summer, grazed. The road reached the mountainous coastal interior and eventually ascended steeply in hard turns before it sheared through the last rock and descended to the Adriatic.

On this road during the Yugoslav years, school kids from the north were driven to the sea for holidays. As one former student told me, “Plitvice was an important stop on all those treks: not for the natural beauty, but because of the bathroom stop. Everybody had to pee by the time the bus came up in Plitvice.” The kids would “barf all the way up those hills” as they crossed the Velebit Mountains, but all would be forgotten once they reached the sea.¹

The landscape of Lika is wooded and hilly in places, open and empty in others. I saw an occasional brick farmhouse with its straw ricks and fruit orchards and peasant women sitting at tables under umbrellas selling jars of honey and large discs of cheese. Outside gostionice, the local roadhouses, pigs and sheep turned on spits in giant cast-iron barbecues and modern folk music floated out from the speakers. We sat on the veranda at one such place and as we ate, we looked out at the land around, a big flat space of dry grass bordered in the distance by low grey mountains that rippled from the heat off the highway. I liked the area, but I could also see that it didn’t offer much of a future to an imaginative and ambitious person, like the inventor Nikola Tesla, who was born in nearby Smiljan.

A Yugoslav flag hung outside the gostionica, but I noticed some stickers of the Croatian flag with its checkerboard šahovnica on a light pole by the road. These were the last days of Yugoslavia. During that time, the dinar plummeted. I remember buying groceries with a 1,000-dinar bill and a few months later needing a 100,000 bill. (That increasingly useless 1,000-dinar bill aptly depicted a way of life and ideology that was fading too; it showed a communist-style image of a young peasant woman in a kerchief presenting grapes on her open palm, along with a corn cob, an apple, and other products of the “diligent” Yugoslavian farmer). In August 1990, militant ethnic Serbs around Knin and other areas of the Krajina district, hard on the Bosnian border, protested the new nationalist Croatian government and barricaded roads leading to Dalmatia with logs (an event mockingly dubbed the “log revolution” by Croatian media). But few Croats realized that these laughable “Balkan primitives” would help set in motion the war in Croatia and seize one third of its territory by the mid-90s. I knew little about all of this at the time, though when a Serbian clerk refused me, a Canadian with a Croatian last name, a boarding pass on a JAT flight from Toronto to Zagreb in 1990 because I didn’t have a visa, something routinely granted on arrival, and that he had no authority to demand, I see in hindsight how enmity between Serbs and Croats was already building.

My stay in Toronto as a result of missing my flight was an eventful one. At the airport I met a Croatian Canadian by a row of pay phones in the departure hall and, hearing him speak Croatian, I struck up a conversation with him. Ivan Kačić took me in for two nights, fed me and showed me around Toronto. This tour included a Croatian-owned ferry boat in the harbour, where, when the cooks in the kitchen said we could go freely to the third level of the ship, I was attacked by a German Shepherd guard dog as soon as I stepped through the door. It rushed at me and bit me in the leg. I had just enough time to back out the door and slam it shut. The cooks smiled slyly as we came back down. Ivan drove me to the hospital for a shot. The next day we went to the Yugoslavian embassy to buy a visa and Ivan did most of the talking to the Serbian clerk, all of it in English. In the end I paid five bucks and got a sticker in my passport, which is what I had always received when I used to arrive in Zagreb.

On our last trip to the coast together, my family and I drove through the area just before the roads became impassable. After Gospić and the hills of Ličko Polje, we crossed the Velebit Mountains through a pass aptly named Oštarijska vrata (Dangerous Doors). Like most roads across the Velebit range, this one drills between serrated white limestone crags and wrenches cars left and right as it climbs and descends. Once over the top I was able to enjoy the long view of sloping, rocky meadows and slim white strips of barren islands and then, finally, at the limit of where my eyes could reach, the open Adriatic. The dark blue sea melted into the sky. Sunshine spread warmly on the crisp fresh air. The feeling that came over me was the same one I would have year after year, that I’d left behind the ordinary all too-human world of the earth and had arrived instead in the land of the gods. It was a feeling of elation, a moment of breathless pause before the clean lines and pure air of sea and islands and sky.

Soon after, we were sailing to Rab on a Jadrolinija car ferry. My mood was high, but when I first saw Rab, its white, rocky, desolate carapace rearing out of the sea, I was disappointed. The island didn’t seem worth visiting.

Half an hour later we were driving inland where I saw the country change. The stone-pocked fields were now sprinkled with a yellow herb with a curry aroma which I misheard one woman tell me was bosilje, basil, but which I discovered years later was smilje, a form of everlasting, or immortelle. I saw junipers, olive and fig orchards, low-growing vineyards covered by the dust from the roads, and pens for goats and sheep. There were new white-washed villas with balconies and vine gazebos. Villas and housing complexes were everywhere.

The island of the 1930s that Rebecca West describes in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was a rather different one. “[H]igh up on the bare mountains. . . [are] olive terraces; in the valleys there are olive terraces; in the trough of the valleys there are walled fields where an ordinary crop of springing corn or grass strikes one as an abnormal profusion like a flood. On these enclosures black figures work frenetically. From a grey sky reflected light pours down and makes of every terrace and field a stage on which these black figures play each their special drama of toil, of frustration, of anguish. As we passed by on the stony causeway, women looked up at us, from the fields, their faces furrowed with all known distresses.”²

However, on my trip to Rab I didn’t see the numerous olive terraces, nor the indigent peasants mentioned by West. Rab’s natural vegetation had covered over this past. Later, though, I saw an abandoned house or two in the hills above the main road that hinted at the difficulties people had trying to make a life on Rab. One was notable for its size and presence, standing empty, but regally, above the world around it, with its balconies and well-wrought cornices, an extension of the people who once owned it and might have left Rab at the end of the nineteenth century when phylloxera (vine lice) infested the islands and decimated the wine industry, or who had escaped during the Yugoslav years. Inside were castoff items like old boots and personal letters, stained and crumbling, best wishes from a family member already far away.

Now, at the start of this visit to Rab, I got out of the car and looked around at the country. Nimble black birds flew past and whistled in the bushes. Patches of bay leaf clustered along dusty brick-hard paths that crisscrossed the hills, and a faint scent of rosemary and thyme was now mixed with the curry-like herb that had blown into the open windows of my car and was blowing across the island. I put a sprig of the stuff in my camera bag, and when I opened it months later, the smell was still there, which took me right back to the island.

The old man waved me up the concrete steps to the seat across from him, then called over the café owner, a paunchy guy wearing gold chains and rings and a big-collared, flowery shirt.

“You from Kanada?” the owner asked. He spoke English with a thick accent. When I answered in the affirmative, he filled three shot glasses with šljivovica. We knocked them in a toast and downed them.

“No charge,” he said, waving aside my money. He brought out another bottle that said “Zadarski Maraschino” on the label. He filled the shot glasses again, this time with a hard liquor that had a sweetish cherry flavour. The two shots warmed me pleasantly. It was around nine in the morning on a windless sunny day. From the café on the promenade that wound along the coast to the town of Rab, around two kilometres distant, I could see a little sandy beach, already crowded. Two guys were playing a game called picigin, tossing a small rubber ball around in the shallow water.

My host, who had lived in Mississauga in the 1970s, had run this business for ten years. He wanted to expand but was discouraged by restrictions imposed by the Yugoslav government. “I give example: I want bring Warsteiner for my German guests, but too many taxes, red tape, so I no can. They put me in situation I have no choice.” Hands up, shrugging. He said he was fed up with the country. It was time for Croatia to be independent. However, he didn’t know whether that would ever happen in his lifetime. He was hopeful, but not optimistic.

When I went to Rab next, Yugoslavia would be no more, and Croatia would be a new nation, but for now it was still Yugoslavia, though of course it had always been Rab no matter who governed it. I asked them about how they thought of themselves, as islanders first or as Croatians.

“Well you know,” my host answered, speaking in Croatian now, “that depends, and it’s different for some people. For me I come from Rab, this is home, but I am a Croat you better believe it. Not everyone who lives here was born on the island. I would say I’m a citizen of Rab, but not exactly an island nationalist.”

“Look, it’s like this,” the old man said, “this here is the mainland, and that over there is an island. Where we are is always the centre, if you follow me.”

He wagged a thick finger. “This is the most beautiful island in all of Croatia. You got a lot to see.” Looking across the bay at Rab’s shimmering walls jutting like a prow into the sea, I couldn’t imagine he was wrong. “We have everything,” he went on, using his fingers to list the items, “we have the sea, we have good food, we have a beautiful town, another Dubrovnik. . . .”

“What about the other islands?” I wondered.

“Every island has qualities,” replied the owner. “They are all different. Each one has a special flavour. But in his opinion Rab is the best.”

“And not in yours?” the old man asked.

“Sure, in mine too.”

“Good. Now let’s have another one,” he said, pointing at the bottle.

“He can have another one. You’ve had enough. Besides, you owe me.”

I thanked him but declined. I said goodbye and made my way to town.

Walking from the east, I circumnavigated the marina, which in the summer was jammed white with skiffs, small motorboats, and the occasional sailboat, though no grand yachts as there would be a few years later. I went into the oldest section of Rab, Kaldanac. Rab is built on a rising peninsula of stone pointing into the bay of Sveta Fumija (Saint Euphemia). The cream-coloured, neatly fitted flagstones of the main street, named in those days after Yugoslav Partisan youth hero Ivo Lola Ribar, were perpendicular to strings of smaller streets, many paved smooth with stone or patches of concrete of the same hue. The lower section of town nearest the marina was the most active, with the usual cafés, restaurants and shops selling jewellery, clothing, wooden furnir (scenes of the town built out of little bits of wood) and engraved wooden bowls. Farther up, on the other side of town, were the main churches, including the four bell towers.

I left the main street and took a crooked alley to this quiet section of Rab. Not yet noon, a few locals were out taking care of business, and some windows were open so I could hear the voices of people inside, but otherwise I was alone. Arrows of sunlight slanted down the lengths of the main streets or collected in pools in little corners. As the sun moved across the sky, more and more of the town was in the shade. Looking at a map, I noticed that most of Rab’s main streets avoid the longitudinal rays of the sun’s worst heat. I came to this quarter in other years, later in the afternoon, and it was always shady and cool in comparison to the world outside. And quiet as a church, which is appropriate since there are around half a dozen of them along the western wall.

From a high point on the northwestern side of town, I could see Rab’s four campaniles rise cleanly from the ruffled irregularity of the tiled roofs. The church of Sveta Justina (Saint Justine), now the Museum of Sacred Art, is said to contain the gold-plated reliquary of the skull of Saint Christopher that was brought to Rab by an eleventh-century bishop during the period when the town was under attack by Sicilian Normans. Placed on the city walls, legend has it, Saint Christopher miraculously repulsed the invaders by changing the direction of the wind and driving their ships off to sea. Somewhat removed from the churches, appropriately as it turns out, was the palace of the Nimir and Dominis families, and the birthplace of Rab’s most famous citizen, Markantun de Dominis (1560–1624). He was a Jesuit-educated natural scientist and theologian who explained the phenomenon of refraction in the workings of the rainbow, which was acknowledged by Newton, and who first proved the moon’s influence on the tides. However, his independent and irascible personality vexed most of his later years. Promoted from bishop of Senj to archbishop of Split (“Spalato” in those years), he quarrelled with clergy, was excommunicated by his archdiocese, and departed for England, where he was warmly welcomed by James I. He stayed six years, railed against the Catholic Church in his ten-volume De Republica Ecclesiastica, and was named Dean of Windsor in 1619. But in England too his days were numbered as his relationship with authorities there (and even with the king) cooled off. Never wholly committed to Anglicanism and, concerned about his position due to changing political circumstances, he decided to return to Rome in 1622, counting on his benefactor, his relative Pope Gregory XV. Unluckily, for both the Pope and former archbishop, Gregory died in 1623, and de Dominis was imprisoned by the former’s less sympathetic successor in a cell without windows in the Castel Sant’Angelo. When he died his body was burned in the Camp dei Fiori, along with copies of his writings.

I descended steep stairs to a walkway beneath Rab’s westernwalls. Sunlight was just peeking over the roofs and onto the promenade, still moist with dew, and onto the narrow inlet. The sea was light turquoise near shore and a dark cyan in deeper places. The smoothly polished surface of the water undulated gently. It was very quiet. Only the voices of a few elderly people, who had placed their towels on tiny beaches between the stones or on the walkway itself, disturbed the silence.

This was the spot my grandmother, Oma, visited in 1938. I know because of a black-and-white photo of her I found half a century after she had been to Rab. It was dated 1 June 1938. She is sitting against some stones on this promenade, relaxed and smiling, dressed in black pants and white blouse. I recognize her face, her hair, though it is not the face of the woman I knew. She is accompanied by two girlfriends and three local men who happened to stop by. The photographer saw them together and snapped the picture. The photo of Oma itself doesn’t speak very much but the evidence of her presence here long before mine is haunting, our meeting of sorts across time that neither of us could have imagined, indirect and accidental. I’m able to look back at her but she can’t see me. What was she talking about as she sat there? Did they leave together, the three couples, ascending the very same stairs I had just come down? What happened then? The identity of the elderly woman who took care of me as a boy—who picked me up from school at lunch and made me potato pancakes and read German magazines in the summer shade of her west Edmonton house and fell asleep watching The National with her head back, mouth open, snoring—began to change. Another woman, a young woman with another life, suddenly appeared through the photograph.

On that trip to Rab I didn’t know any of this yet. I was in my own moment. I picked a spot between boulders to put my things and slipped into the sea. With three or four strokes I broke the green glassy surface of the still water and got part way across the channel. Looking down, below my feet, I saw black fish slide past in tubular formations. There must have been sounds too, the putter of an outboard from a boat taking tourists somewhere, bells from the high towers tolling, but I couldn’t hear them. All I remember is looking around me, seeing Rab’s high stone walls, sun golden, and Rab’s towers rising above the rest of the stone city that pointed into the blue Adriatic as though it were setting out on a voyage.