Transitions, Departures

If I never got to know the winter in the Adriatic, I certainly came to know it in the north. When I returned to Croatia again, it was Christmas 1996. This time I stayed with Tea in her mother’s shack in Brezje. With that decision I set in motion the next significant stage of my life, changed the relationship with the people I had known all these years, and shucked my youthful, single self. Nothing was going to stop me. Yet every decision has consequences.

I exacerbated things by not visiting Srebrnjak immediately on my arrival. When I did go, I went on my own, and Mila let me have it, “You’ve been here two days, two days, and you didn’t visit!” The phone rang and when Mila answered, she said, “Tony is here! And guess what? He’s not staying with me. No! Not here. In Brezje! With the Ratkovići!”

Joe, too, gave me an earful over the phone. He ordered me to visit anyone of consequence in our extended family. It didn’t matter to him that I had no way of getting around other than by foot or bus. I admit following through obsequiously, even going so far as asking Tea to wait outside Miško’s house in Samobor while I said hello to him, his wife, and their children because I suspected their disapproval of my choice, and couldn’t count on them treating Tea properly, or even letting us in. Or that’s what the daughter had slyly hinted at. I remembered Strina Slava closing the door on Tea in 1988.

When I left the house, Tea tore into me. “What a coward you are! How can you do this to me? I’m so ashamed. Forced to stand out here like a dog. You have got to be enough of a man to let everyone know who I am to you. Pathetic!”

Despite these problems, that Christmas stands out for me as a special one, a glorious pause during which I lived each day without anxiety about what lay ahead, the reading I had to do, the syllabuses I had to prepare, or anything else about the future. I played with Lora in the little bedroom, tossing her into the air and catching her giggling on the bed. Through the cold, smoke-filled air, Tea and I walked into the hills every day. We spray-painted pinecones golden to decorate our Christmas tree. When snow fell heavily for days, we walked through a wonderland along the same lanes and through the same orchards that we had the previous summer. When it warmed and then rained and then froze, the pendent branches of the trees turned to glass, so that the country was made of crystal that gleamed under moonlight. And then we had each other at night, our quiet conversations, the intense electrodermal contact of our bodies, as Lora slept in the crib and the old woman moved around the kitchen, not always quietly, not trying to be quiet, even hacking up rattling gobs of phlegm and spitting them noisily into the wood stove, which was for us just an annoyance far on the edge of our awareness or caring.

The tension and bad feeling between myself and my Croatian family passed, leaving me at the end with a tempered, more realistic attitude about these people, the people I’d known since boyhood, a reconcilement with who they were, the generation and culture to which they belonged.

During this period, I got to know others in the area that I might not have otherwise. One of these was Marko, Štefek’s brother. He saw Tea and me walking down the road in Srebrnjak and invited us into his house. He lived there with his wife, his daughter, who was one of the two girls whom I played with in 1969, his grandson, the boy I got to know in the winter of 1992 who had smashed his fist on the table in anger at the Serbs, and the boy’s father, who wasn’t there when we visited. I will never know what made Marko invite us in. Maybe it was just coincidental hospitality. Maybe he’d gotten wind of my new situation and wanted to be friendly. His wife Mima brought us coffee and some cookies, and we sat there for an hour talking about I know not what. It felt good for a while to know that not everyone was against Tea and me. Marko and Mima had gone through their own hell four years earlier with the death of their other daughter, but here they were supporting us, even if they didn’t know it.

Mima was a simple, willowy woman with teeth missing, whom Mila used to mock because she milked her cows at midnight. Joe said he talked to Mima a few years later upon his departure for Canada, saw her as she was stepping out of the house and complaining to him of a headache and nausea that she blamed on eating a pear that had been sitting outside too long. As it turned out, she wasn’t being honest about what had happened to her. When he arrived back home, he heard that Mima had died from her headache, from the trauma of a blow, and was to be buried that coming Saturday.

Marko lived on a few years. Then I got wind of a story about him. He had knocked on Mila’s door one night, well after midnight, asking to stay there, having escaped through a window of his own house. The door had been locked against him. The next day he went home, then, a few weeks later, moved into an institution for the elderly. Eventually he returned to his house, but soon after became sick and was found in the pigsty, cold and soiled and no longer coherent. His daughter called the ambulance, but he died the next day or day after. Details were sketchy, but Mila had a pretty clear idea of who was responsible for what happened to Marko. No one I called from Canada about the situation wanted anything to do with it. This cold consensus, benign neglect, or perhaps fear, angered me about the people there. I had expected moral outrage and action. Marko was family, after all. But, instead, I got nowhere.

During this period, Tea and I also socialized with other members of my Croatian family whom I’d hadn’t seen much over the years. These included Mila’s sister Draga and her husband Ivek. They had moved out of their house in Samobor to live in their cottage in Srebrnjak, partly to make room for their son, his wife and two children. The son was the guy who had played guitar at the pig roast on our last family trip. Mila said he had failed to pay the house’s power bill, so the power had been cut off. Her eager gossip about Draga’s situation might have prompted Draga to invite us over, who knows? We visited them several times over the next few years, sitting on their small terrace by their grove of plum trees. Ivek smoked one cigarette after another, drank gemišt, and talked politics in that gravelly, dysphonic voice of his, acerbically making fun of my accent and expressions. Draga talked with Tea, brought out cakes she had baked and asked us about our plans, where we were going to live and so on. I have pleasant memories of these evenings; they were a sort of affirmation of my decision, and of my sense that not everyone was overly invested in negative judgement and snobbish moralizing.

Then there was the Rudolf family in Brezje whose daughters were friends of Tea’s and whose old man, “Charlie,” had taught my father in the 1950s at the school in Sveta Nedelja. That Christmas of 1996 was the first of many late-night drink fests over the years with Neven, the husband of one of the daughters, a former professional water polo player in the Croatian first division and geological engineer. Neven was a tall, handsome man with a charming smile whose nationalism and social conservatism were typical of Croatian sportsmen of his generation, and whose brash loudness and ravings and gesticulations got more and more entertaining as the drinking went deeper into the evenings and early mornings, or more stupid if you came at it from the point of view of his wife (not unlike my own ravings after too much brandy and my soppy crocodile tears on one occasion when my son tried to get me into the car and I fell onto the concrete and he drove off without me). Neven would yell, “CRO-A-A-T-I-A-A-A” or say, “Tony, in dees moment of speaking, I tfink you need gemišt. Here, give glass.” His English was worse than my Croatian, but somehow we managed to understand each other well. The sober other side of him was very loyal to family but also darker and more sensitive. After his company went under so that he was forced to work for others, he turned to gardening and to religion, going faithfully to mass every Sunday with his brother-in-law, Ivica, whose family used to own the mill across from Tea’s place, and who himself had gone through the hell of war, not speaking for months after his return home.

When Tea and I married in the summer of 1997, no one from my Croatian family attended other than Vlado (as best man), his son, Mislav, and Miško’s son, Mario. Neither my father nor mother were there nor my sister, who couldn’t afford to come. Miško sent a canister of his wine and Mila a single chicken. The next day Miško showed up asking for the empties back and any remaining wine. Despite these slights the day went off without a hitch and remains a nice memory. I took the bus in the morning to buy wine and brandy, and Tea’s mother, Draga, who had only recently mistrusted me and made her feelings known by hawking gobs of spit into that stove every evening, came around to the idea of Tea and me together and covered the cost of the food, preparing it all with some friends and calling me affectionately “Tono” now, informing me that her pension from her employment at a pharmaceutical company had left her precariously short every month, giving me a sidelong look every time she told me so, and then at the wedding crying into a handkerchief when Tea, the only daughter she had ever known, dressed beautifully in a white dress with small white and yellow roses in her hair, her breasts all perfume, said yes, I will, yes. The Ratkovići daughters set the tables, arranged the cold cuts, and helped otherwise, even though they hardly knew me. The little time I had spent with that family was playing soccer with the brothers in the abandoned mill on summer evenings (not one of the brothers showed up). Yet with Tea’s close friends from Brezje and Zagreb, and neighbours who’d known her for her entire life there, such as friendly, round-bellied, gregarious Pepo with all his ideas for striking it rich, like the plan for a travelling door-to-door massage business that never panned out and whose additions to his house looked as though they just might collapse from the next stiff breeze, the wedding was a friendly, casual not soigné affair, where everyone went away feeling good. Even if it wasn’t a “real wedding,” as Mila informed me.

After Tea and Lora emigrated, we returned five times in the next nine years. Our son, Lucas, was born on 23 April 2000 (Shakespeare’s birthday and Easter Sunday). Somehow, I shoehorned myself into a permanent post in academia. When I returned to Croatia in 2006, I went alone, having enough funds that year to cover my research on my book about Bosnia.

I drove to Srebrnjak and spent an afternoon there. Things had gone back to normal by then, and Mila had gotten used to the idea of Tea and me as a couple. One thing that broke the ice was the smoked sausages she’d offered us during our visit in 1998. The sausages had been boiled to an inch of their lives so that you needed a strong set of teeth to chew them, and when Tea had tried to stick a fork into hers, the fork deflected off the sausage and the sausage leapt off the plate and onto the floor. It lay there forlornly for a second. There was a momentary, awkward pause, then Mila laughed, and we all laughed. She threw the sausage into the pig pail and gave Tea another. So that sausage, anyway, set in motion a sort of normalcy from then on.

There was nothing memorable about my visit to the house in Srebrnjak in 2006, nor can I recall what we talked about. But there was this. Štefek said he wanted to show me something outside. It was the first and only time he had ever done so. I followed him under the walnut tree by the well and to a wide swath of land behind his barn that stretched 300 metres from the road all the way to the top of the hill. Štefek pointed to a path of destruction in the soil, the earth torn up and piled all around. “Atomska bomba,” he said, with a laugh. It was a good description. I knew right away what he was showing me. In the midst of the torn earth I could see the footings of the house Joe was starting to build. He had shown me the blueprints the year before. Six bedrooms, five bathrooms, terraces on front and back. The house would be built on the same piece of land where he had been born, where the little peasant farmhouse had stood in which he and the others had lived all those years ago. The new place was going to be very different. The significance of this new house built on the land where the old one had stood, where my father had been born, wasn’t lost on me, and I’m sure Štefek understood it as well. But he was a practical man, so it didn’t surprise me when he said, “Velika, pre velika—Big, too big.” He was right, the house was too big. There were all kinds of reasons against it being that big. But I could also see how it couldn’t be anything other than what it was.

We walked back to the house and we said our goodbyes. I was leaving for Canada in a few days. I can see Štefek now as we shake hands. He is smiling, the last of the afternoon sun shows his face clearly to me. The sharp eyes, hooked nose, the brown cap. It was the last time I saw him alive. He died in January 2008, having come downstairs before Mila to start the fire, as he did every morning. Sitting on the wood box, where Strina Slava used to sit, he was tying his boots when he just slumped to the ground. The thud was loud enough to startle Mila upstairs. The moment she saw him sprawled on the floor, a shooting pain stabbed her eye and she lost sight in it forever.