The Woman from Brezje Pag

In 1991, my maternal grandmother, Oma, died of a second stroke. Alone of all my family, I happened to be in Edmonton at the time and visited her in the Misericordia Hospital every day after she’d been admitted, though I wasn’t by her side at the final moment, having stepped out for a break from my vigil. Her death was a shock to me, even if it was anticipated, because she was the first person in my immediate family to die.

I returned to Fredericton, where I was working on my doctorate at the University of New Brunswick. In the months after Oma’s death, I phoned my grandfather, Georg Panzer, regularly to keep up his spirits, and to give him someone to talk to. I called him around 5:00 in the evening his time, and invariably he was getting himself ready for bed. There was nothing left for him to do, and he was going to bed. By the time he woke up, it was midnight, so he had the rest of the night to contend with. His own Gethsemane. The man who had been imprisoned in a French prisoner-of-war war camp between 1943 and 1948, who had never spoken to me about it except once, on the very front steps of the house where I’d read The Lord of the Rings as a kid, told me almost nothing about the war except that he and the other prisoners were fed raw potato peels in the first months, which caused their bodies to bloat and which made them sick, who spent much of his Edmonton life finding refuge in his back yard and working in his garden, smoking cigarettes and nursing a warming beer, warding off his wife’s regular censure of his character because of his supposed drinking problem and other shortcomings, the same man found it too much to live after her death. He lasted three months.

In 1993, Strina Slava followed my grandparents. During this period, then, three people who had known me as a boy died. Whatever memories they had of me were also gone. In a sense, a part of me was gone too. Until that moment, naively, I’d been oblivious to this reality about my aging that everyone eventually comes to know: that people’s memories of you as a child die, that you become separated from a part of you that is unknown and unrecoverable. Maybe this is what Oma understood when she was impelled to tell me all those stories of her childhood.

But these feelings of mine passed. When I returned to Croatia again, things were looking good. I’d finished my doctorate, gotten my first teaching contract and earned the money to pay for my flight for the first time. By my sister’s prompting I ignored my mother’s nose-to-the-grindstone advice to carry on working out west where Joe lived after the end of my contract in Newfoundland and decided instead to enjoy the money I’d earned.

My decision had some important consequences. Yet again, I decided to visit the woman who hadn’t given me the time of day the last time I was in Croatia. Why I went exactly, where my life would have gone had I not knocked on the door of the little house again, I don’t know. But go I did, maybe not on the first day I was in Srebrnjak, nor the second, but soon after. I rode off on the same black bicycle I’d always ridden. Mila would shout at me, “Kuda?—Where to?” She would do this with increasing sarcasm as the days went by.

I parked outside the gate of the little peasant house and, somewhat nervously, knocked on the door again. This time the face that looked at me through the opened door recognized me right away. The eyes had more brightness and life. This time Tea said, “Come in! You can meet my daughter!” I was surprised. I had envisioned, I suppose, our story carrying on just as if no time had passed, our returning to our walk to Marija Magdalena and reliving it all over again. The contrail of that half-imagined storyline dissipated as I followed her into the small, creaky-floored kitchen and sat down on the u-shaped, padded bench that went around the table. A beautiful eighteen-month-old girl with large dark eyes and blonde curls just like Tea’s clung to her mother when she came out of the bedroom, still sleepy after having woken. When she saw me, she gave me a similar, sullen, affectless “Who the fuck are you?” look perfected by her mother. And this without practice. Just came naturally to it!

Tea explained her reaction the last time I came to visit as a gap in her memory caused by a bad and sometimes violent relationship from which she had been trying to escape.

I don’t know if it was immediately then or days later that the situation of the two of them, mother and daughter living in a shack in a little village in Croatia, no husband or dad in the picture, opened up a door inside me that had been waiting for a while, had been waiting for the moment but had been closed. I was ready for something more serious, and this was more serious.

For the first time since 1988, Tea and I walked together in the hills while Tea’s daughter Lora stayed at home under the care of Tea’s foster mother, an illiterate and wildly vulgar woman who was fiercely loyal to the little girl and highly distrustful of me at the start. The hills above Brezje were un-familiar to me. The whole area had started to change. I saw new weekend houses on the spine of the hills, new gated mansions of stone with security cameras and guard dogs that snarled at us as we passed; I saw upscale bungalows of brick like those in a north American suburbia, saw other houses built in the style of dark wooden peasant homes but modernized. On the opposite financial scale were many concrete slabs put there by owners who hadn’t yet scraped together enough money for the rest of the structure, and in some cases never would. A new neighbourhood across the street from Tea’s house was inhabited now by Croatians from Herzegovina who weren’t exactly welcomed by the locals; they went to mass in Sveta Nedelja, where they sang the hymns in their own dialect, which irritated many long-time residents so much that they went to worship in Samobor instead. On this first walk with Tea I also saw new vineyards with concrete posts and green netting to protect the grapes from hail, as well as abandoned vineyards going to seed.

The newness of these vantage points combined with the newness of our rediscovery of each other. I can see Tea now. A cataract of blonde curls, the swings of her curvy hips in jean cut-offs, the tight T-shirt, the legs. The melodic voice. She projected this fascinating image of a vaguely tragic enfant sauvage and Bambi Woods. Tea had been looking at me too. Once when we were enjoying the view, she turned to me and told me to take off my glasses. When I did, she said, “You have nice eyes. Actually, they’re quite large. It’s your lenses that make them smaller. They change your whole face. You should do something about that.”

Farther on was an orchard of cherries. Tea, after casing the area, led me in by the hand. The cherries were very dark and ripe. When she picked them, she split open a few to check if there were worms. “These are fine,” she told me. They tasted more richly sweet than the cherries I was used to. She faced me, cherry between her lips, tonguing the smooth skin, smiling. After she ate another cherry without opening it first, I asked her why and she answered, “This tree seems okay. But if not, what’s an extra little meat going to do to you? Why so worried? Don’t be a pubic louse.” She told me her foster father, Marijan, who had died of cancer ten months before I came, used to steal into orchards and vineyards around here with an empty bag and then return with a filled one, managing somehow to avoid detection, or maybe not managing. Who knows, maybe that was one of the reasons the Ratkovići had a poor reputation. The only grapes he owned grew beside the house—red Izabela, or Concord, grapes. That reminded me, I told her, of my Croatian grandfather, the one who had died in 1943 fighting for the Domobrani. He too, they say, never used to come home empty-handed, bringing back not only fruit but wood, which was a more precious commodity during that scarcer time.

Farther up the lane along which we were walking was an unvisited weekend house, judging by the tall grass in the yard. Tea pointed out the spikes of the iron gate, said, “When I was a girl, I tried to climb this gate. My cousin Branko accidentally bumped me as I was trying to climb it. When I slipped, one of these spikes went into my leg, my shin. Here, look, you can see the hole still. The funny thing was there was no blood.” She said she’d been a tomboy when she was younger and had beat up Branko all the time, one of the cousins she’d inherited when she was deposited among the Ratkovići.

In a glade, protected from the sight of the neighbours, as shafts of afternoon sun shone through the trees and white butterflies danced around us, we sat and talked. We revisited our brief history together, remembered our first meeting and our first walk to Marija Magdalena. She laughed and said I was a nerd, with my glasses and tucked-in shirt and futbalerka mullet. Coming closer, green eyes lit by the sun filtering through the leaves, she whispered, “I’m going to have to do something about that.”

Later, we walked on for kilometres in the direction of Sveti Martin pod Okićem, a village with a ruined castle on a high peak among undulating blue hills to the south. Hours went by and the sun set. On our return we went through the village of Dol and ended up passing the house belonging once to Slavko Jakopač, who had died. In the dark I could make out the wooden table in the yard where he and I had sat and drunk wine nine years ago. Farther on was the house at the crossroads belonging to Jana and Dragec. I could see the windows upstairs of Vlado’s and Željka’s bedrooms.

As Tea and I neared the crossroads, a young man heard us talking and laughing and stepped out of his house. He was pointing a rifle at us. “What are you doing making this noise?” he demanded, the rifle waving up and down unsteadily. The streetlight cast a hollow glow and lit the gun dully. I am gun-shy, as in shy of a gun pointed at me in the dark by some possibly crazy guy with a temper who’s had too much to drink. So I turned tail. Without looking away from the man, Tea grabbed my shirt and pulled me back. “Where are you going?”

She stood in front of the guy with the rifle pointed at her. The thought didn’t come to me at the moment; I was just stuck in my tracks watching the scene unfold as though I weren’t part of it. But I wonder now as I write whether some other imperative—a moral rectitude against cowering, a stubborn refusal to back down—played a part in her standing up to him too. “Listen,” she said calmly, “We were just passing by and didn’t mean any harm. Why don’t you put the gun down and go back into to your house?”

“I heard a noise. You were making noise, laughing, and it is night,” he said lamely, with less assurance.

She told him with the same measured voice and tone that we had a right to laugh and to walk on the street, no matter what time it was, and that we were sorry if we had caused a disturbance and we were moving on anyway and wouldn’t it be best if he just took his gun and went inside? He stood there not saying anything, the gun waving a little back and forth.

At that point, an older man poked his head out the door and ordered his son into the house. The guy with the gun hesitated. “Watch yourself. You watch yourselves now, coming around here.” Then he went inside. Tea told me as we walked back to Brezje that the guy’s father was the butcher who had killed their cow so they could pay for the funeral of her adoptive father, Marijan.

I was relaxed again as we walked back to Brezje. This was the same road down which Tea and Natalija had met me years ago, the same road Željka and I had ridden on the way back from Zagreb. Tea and I passed in and out of pools of light from the streetlamps, past houses with open windows, white curtains visible in the dark. One man was snoring so loudly we heard him fifty metres away. I asked Tea whether this thing with the guy and the gun, her walking with some foreigner at night, was going to make her the object of gossip. “I don’t care,” she said, “we weren’t doing anything wrong.”

The days went by with more of these walks, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with Lora in her stroller. I didn’t know it then but it would be the last summer of staying in the house in Srebrnjak, the last summer I would ride that black bike, the last time I would hear Mila’s sarcastic “Kuda, Tony?” as I drove down the Srebrnjak road and she’d spied me when she came out of the barn after milking the cows, though I never heard Štefek make any remark, because he was of the attitude that it was none of his business to meddle in another person’s affairs.

But in that spring of 1996, I was still single and could still travel freely. The war was over by then and I was ready to embark on an ambitious walking trip down the Adriatic coast. That had been a main reason for my coming to Croatia, not to find love. And so there I was hitchhiking on the Magistrala Highway looking out at the white barren flank of Pag.

The sun was already high, its wicked light hurtful to the eyes, and the bright sea sparkled then, farther out, melted into the horizon. On my head was my khaki safari hat from Canadian Tire and on my back a canvas knapsack that sweated up my back and that I shut with a safety pin.

My first impression of Pag was shaped by my experience on another island, different from it in almost every way, but similar in the feeling it produced in me. The previous year I had arrived on the Rock of the North Atlantic, Newfoundland, on a teaching contract. My trip there, my stay through fall and winter, suggested the similarity, not difference between these two island rocks. On that first drive across Newfoundland, I remember how the Trans-Canada, or TCH, as was painted in faded white on the blacktop, took me at first past the Long Range Mountains. The tops of the mountains seemed sheared off and stunted pines grew up the sides almost to the summit. The morning sun, which shone from behind them, left their western face in a dark blue shade. They looked vast and ominous, and the overriding feeling they gave me was of a huge implacable force brooding over the puny human life that scurried back and forth on the road nearby. The country unfolding over the next couple hundred kilometres—the wide tundra-like spaces, boggy in the summer, open howling wastes in the winter, the anemic pines leaning to one side from the prevailing wind, the fast-moving black-water rivers bursting out of black forest—can be described as the sublime.

The sublime, Edmund Burke said, is often confused with the beautiful, but a beautiful landscape—pretty meadows, softly undulating hills, gentle valleys, exactly the sort of place that Srebrnjak is—seems safe and pliable to human will, whereas a sublime one does not. Nevertheless, despite our sense of weakness before the sublime, we search it out, find pleasure in it even, and consider it beautiful, in a generic sense. It might be that a sublime landscape is awesome and worthy of respect, that because it is more powerful than we are, it is worth worshipping, is divine. So not knowing it, on my first trip, I was viewing Newfoundland in these terms.

Similarly, my walk to Pag was fretted with dark worry. The island cast a haunting aura of fear and awe when I saw it up close for the first time. Not far off the coast, it is a low cream-white strip of jagged karst like the back and tail of a plated beast—massive, hostile, and empty. From the mainland the island looked to me even more barren than Rab, so that the usual word used to describe this side of Pag, a “moonscape,” remains probably the best one.¹

The feeling Pag projected intensified as I trudged along the highway. Few cars passed by, and I was alone. The only sounds were my own footsteps, the cicadas in the rocky fields and a soft mewing of sea gulls high on the left, against the backdrop of the Velebit Mountains unspooling grey-blue into the distance.

I’ve written about this experience before, but now, after all these years, I better understand my own situation in the wider context of the country itself. I was entering a new phase, just as Croatia itself was. It was a year after the end of the Yugoslav war, around ten months since Croatian forces had completed their Oluja (“Storm”) offensive into the Krajina, reclaiming territory seized by the Serbs, so the whole region had the reputation of instability and danger. No one from the rest of the world was here. I was a solitary traveller at a special moment in Croatian history.

At first, I enjoyed the solitude. I didn’t think of the people in Srebrnjak, nor of my recent experiences with Tea. All of that was behind me.

But soon the pleasures of solitude were driven off by the relentless heat of the sun. I crisscrossed the empty road, searching out shade from stone walls. The wind from the sea cooled me, but the ferry terminal for Pag was still fifteen kilometres distant. It would take me hours to get there. I knew I was overmatched.

The guy in the rusted white VW Rabbit who picked me up was a big black-haired army corporal with dense eyebrows, a hooked nose and a right thumb that looked like it had been melted off then glued back on. He said he was returning to his wife and kids after a three months’ tour in the military. He lived in Zadar, fifty kilometres south of Pag, which could be reached more easily by continuing on the Magistrala. Still, he offered to take me to Pag, a detour for him, and even paid for my ferry ticket. I was suspicious. I wondered why he offered help to a stranger when he should have been keener on getting back home to his family. Nevertheless, I went with him.

On the boat he scared the hell out of me. “See this,” he growled, pointing to a scar on his left arm. “Serb sniper almost got me. Lucky I moved at the last second.” He glanced at the water then back at me. “I was carrying a howitzer, so I pointed it at the fucker and killed him.” His face froze into a smile, and goosebumps sprang up on his arms. He waited, gauging my reaction. “Boom,” he added.

I had nothing to say. A nervous thrill washed over me, but I pretended to be cool. Instead of facing his eyes, I looked at the island approaching. Like my mood in that moment, Pag seemed desolate: no trees, no shelter, no life. This side of Pag seemed a real rock, far more inhospitable than Newfoundland, so I had trouble imagining that there was anything worth seeing.

But soon my thoughts began to change. When we docked and drove off, we soon reached the summit of the island from where the land slopes down to the sea on the southern coast and evergreen maquis is sprinkled between the island’s white rock. Olive trees scattered here and there were bent away from the sea like stooped old men. Stone walls lashed down the island like ropes securing cargo when the bura blows in the winter. A hot wind blasted through our open windows, carrying the same curry aroma I’d smelled on Rab. The perfumes of other herbs, more muted, wafted in as well.

The car sped along, and my worries left me as I watched the arid but beautiful landscape pass by. I was grateful for the ride, ashamed of my suspicions. I realize now, as I write, that my driver had known better than I did the difficulty of hitching a ride off the ferry. A long walk across Pag in the blistering heat had awaited me. He had been looking out for me.

Soon we made an ascent and cut through an opening at the top of the island, from where we could see the town of Pag far below simmering in the heat. I said goodbye to my driver, who wrote his name and address in Zadar on a piece of paper, and invited me to his place, any time, any time at all.

The town of Pag was built in the form of a grid with two wide streets meeting at right angles, dividing the town in four, at the centre of which was a spacious main square and a large fifteenth-century church. The flagstones on the main streets were wide and smoothly polished; the façades of the houses had been redone, shutters newly painted white and the wooden doors green and brown. Pag’s linear design gave the town a clean open feeling unlike that of other medieval coastal towns with their warren-like streets.

I walked to the stone waterfront. Three or four cafés, bordered by squat palm trees, waited for the summer crowd. A few men smoked over a beer or coffee. At dock was a sailing vessel, its sails brailled up on the masts. It was the same one I would see in later years, always in the same spot. The heat had slowed down the day, and a thick languid breeze ruffled the flags on the ship. The water gurgled sleepily against its brown flanks. In the distance was a big beach curving in an arc, and on the hills a few houses scattered along the lower slopes.

I bought half a loaf of bread, a smoked sausage, and some slices of paški sir, Pag’s hard, sharp ewe’s cheese. From my spot in the shade I ate and looked out at the barren white section of the island across the bay, darkened by shadows from the clouds, as a few white boats bobbed in the harbour. Behind me, a street led to the centre of the old town. Few people walked along the dock and there were no tourists at all.

Having finished lunch, I explored the wide, clean-swept streets of the town. The simple, square buildings were two storeys high, painted soft pastel colours, beige, lime and yellow. My footsteps echoed down the long narrow spaces. On the main street a man was talking with an old woman dressed in black and sitting on her stool. Farther down, well-spaced out from each other, were other old women, one dozing, another sewing intricate pieces of čipka, her finished lacework displayed like big snowflakes in the window of her house. Many of these snowy windows were on show throughout town.

I stopped to watch the woman sew. Her hands moved with practised precision, her head bent over a section of lace on a green pillow backing. Her blouse was light blue, metal hairpins kept her bun in place, and she wore a blue skirt draped to the ground.

“Very nice,” I said after a while. “How much?”

She pointed up at the window, not looking at me. “This one is 100 kuna, this one 150.” About 25 to 40 dollars for around eight square inches.

“Do you work every day?”

“Not every day.”

“Today you’re outside.”

“Yes, there’s a breeze and the light is good.”

I wondered why she was facing the window rather than the street. Looking to my right I saw another woman a few doors down seemingly asleep.

“She’s not sewing čipka,” I said.

Without looking up, she answered “Never has.”

I assumed the neighbour was a friend of hers, but when I mentioned something to that effect the woman still sewing answered, “We don’t talk much. I don’t think we’ve spoken in the last month.” Her head was down as she continued to work so I said goodbye and walked on.

Not long after speaking to the old lace-maker, I had another encounter with a woman, this time without conversation.

Having explored the town by then, the sun shining wickedly, I decided to go for a swim to cool off. The main beach in Pag town is a long arc of stone shingles at the head of the bay. Besides a wooden skiff that had been pulled onto shore, the beach was empty. The sea was a motionless slab of light jade. Against my hot skin the water felt cool as I front-crawled out to sea.

When I returned and stood up in waist-deep water, recovering, I noticed I was no longer alone on the beach. A young woman with a baby in a stroller had parked herself a few steps from my towel. She had dark hair and wore a short sleeveless dress of blue and white. Two ideas went through my mind: the first was that she had chosen a spot so close to mine on a vast, empty beach. The second idea was a directive to myself that I should get out of the water and move my things. A person with no sense of appropriate social distancing ought to be taught a lesson. What was she thinking, anyway? But I didn’t move my things, didn’t do anything, just stood there in the water looking out to sea and back to the beach.

The woman checked on her baby and, when she found everything in order, the baby sleeping, I guess, she began to undress. She kicked off her sandals, slipped out of her dress, and then removed her bikini top as well. In the second it took for me to turn away, I saw that her breasts were paler than the rest of her.

She walked into the water just a few metres from me, splashed herself, her arms and her shoulders, and then her breasts. She did it in a way that reminded me of elderly women preparing themselves for a dip. Except she wasn’t elderly. I pretended to concentrate on the white clouds above the bone-coloured limestone hills to the north. My eyes panned in the other direction, to the hills to the south, but at the same time, without being too obvious about it, back to the woman’s shapely and ample breasts.

She didn’t notice. Didn’t seem to notice me at all. Not once did she look in my direction or say anything out loud, not even an innocuous “Nice day” or “The water is warm”—nothing. I seemed no more consequential to her than the wooden skiff dragged onto the beach. I didn’t talk to her either. I was inside the moment, mute and indecisive. A parallel possibility, a woman with a child, had appeared to me like some temptation or test from God. What would have happened had I started a conversation? Where would this all have gone? Was I going to miss out if I did nothing? I would never find out. I don’t even know whether these questions entered my mind at the time. She slipped under the water finally and swam a few strokes and then returned to the baby. I swam a little longer before going back to my towel and drying off. The baby woke up and the woman began to fuss over it. She had become a mom again. I lay there for a few more minutes before I stuffed my things into my pack and went back to town.

And so the scene ended and would have died forever were it not for the act of writing that brought it back to my memory. Various interpretations of who this woman was and what was going on swim through my mind now. As I write I think it possible she came to the beach every day and I was the one intruding on her familiar spot. I was nobody to her and she had a husband working back in Zagreb, or somewhere. Or maybe there was no husband, no anybody; maybe he had died in the war (there were many widows at that time). In that case, I was a somebody. She was another single mom like Tea and was interested in a young guy alone on a beach who looked like a foreigner, a rich foreigner (except, of course, there was that old canvas backpack and wrinkly safari hat that seemed to torpedo that possibility). She had seen me and had come to the beach on purpose. Or maybe she had none of those intentions; perhaps she had just imagined herself spending an afternoon with someone who wasn’t from around here and looked like he was moving on. . . .

I was moving on, walking down a baking slab of concrete on the way to Povljana, a village by the sea. The highway south of Pag town cut through a wide valley bordered by white hills. A yellow sign pointing me to the right read “Povljana 7 km.” The narrow, paved road brought me into a flat stone-pocked land, with fields of sparse yellow grass stretching all the way to the sea, marked off by the same hip-high rock walls that held down the whole island and divided the land into big pastures. Gaunt sheep huddled near the road in the narrow shade of a wall, holding out against the sun as it crossed the scoured blue sky. On other trips here, I used to see sheep walking in formation along Pag’s narrow roads, their wool the same cream colour as the stones, always a single black back in the herd. Today I noticed a shepherd’s hut of rough blocks and small rectangular windows in an empty field and then a sign that Povljana was not too far, a marshy inlet to my right and a small fishing boat on the land, half busted, bleached by the sun.

It was peaceful. As I walked through this wide open space, I felt detached from things, from the world of people I’d left behind in Pag town, even from my own self—a feeling of separation from everything that was me that I would have now and again on my solitary travels. The sparse world of Pag, the white bony landscape in which the only living things I saw were lizards scurrying off their sunning spots and black and grey snakes whipping their tails at me when I approached, seemed to erase my own identity into nothing.

The feeling continued for a while as I came to the village in the quiet afternoon and made my way down the main street past the post office towards the sea. I had drifted in there like a ghost. No one had seen me. No one was in sight, not a soul moving, no sound of children playing or people talking to break the silence. Doors were open, but no one going in or out. Fruit, vegetables, and weigh scales sat on the cement and rock walls that lined the street, but there was nobody to buy from. In the courtyards shaded by grapes or fig trees, the tables sat empty. Finally, through branches of a tree, I saw a foot on a hammock, then the body of an old guy having a nap. But I saw no one else. The heat was stifling. Everything seemed to have slowed down and even the wind that gently swayed the trees felt thick and sluggish. Farther on, where the sea became visible, I saw a boat frozen near the horizon, and flags on the skiffs at dock furling and unfurling slowly. From the dock I saw a small bay and a peninsula—a long, rocky finger dusted by grass and thatched with pines. Rock walls zigzagged over the top and down the other side. Just above the main beach stood a small stone chapel, and a cemetery grown over with tall grass, its crosses leaning left and right.

The boats bobbing up and down made the water gurgle sleepily, and I dropped my pack and lay on the dock. I was tired, hungry too. It seemed that I, like the rest of Povljana, was succumbing to the fjaka.

The fjaka is often associated in Croatia with the people farther south in Dalmatia, though that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Jakša Fiamengo has presented it like this: “If we were to attribute all our moods to the seasons, the fjaka, as a specific state of mind and body, could be said to be a conspicuous product of the summer, the result of its sweltering heat, and a general dissolution of body and spirit in the baleful high temperatures of the day, when we just don’t feel like doing anything. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t succumb to the fjaka in other seasons as well—because it is primarily a state,” as he further explains, “which is beyond control and thus defies set definitions and names: it cannot be categorized either as a layabout idleness or as relaxed respite from everyday life, or as a phlegmatic state, or as leisure time, chronic listlessness, or the mere slowing down of life functions. Actually it is, and at the same time it is not, a mixture of all of the above.”²

As I lay on the dock, in a fjaka like the rest of Povljana, I understood its hypnotizing mood. The pine forest sighed coded messages to the seagulls whirling around the treetops. Motionless, the boat on the horizon seemed forever delayed on its journey home. I lingered for a while, then picked up my pack and walked back up the road.

In the spirit of the fjaka, Povljana too is relaxed in its spatial design and its daily human life. There is no centre, and the streets wander to the country or sea in no rush to take you there. On these casual thoroughfares, villagers go slowly about their business. I saw shepherds herding their flocks through the village, bells clanging, and farmers driving past on one-man tractors, handlebars extended from the engine like those on a Harley, and old ladies in black roosting after mass outside the main church, and tall, darkly-handsome Casanovas with cropped hair and flip-flops and cigarettes in hand striding into a café, from which the loud voices of men inside greeted them, and vans dropping off fish at the store early in the morning, some of which ended up for sale on walls beside the wine and vegetables.

The way to the main beach was a footpath through parcels of farmers’ fields and gardens where bees droned and finches swooped from tree to tree. Lined with villas, the road became a short gravel stretch curving beside a field, a rock wall and Sveti Nikola chapel. The walkway to the chapel was made of stone slabs that looked like sarcophagi carved with unreadable inscriptions. A slit of a window in the western side, sun shining through, gave me a view of the rounded interior: a small altar, a wooden crucifix, a rickety dais with a half-melted candle, three wooden benches. A swallow’s nest was tucked into one corner and cobwebs hung everywhere else. I turned from the door and took in the view of the sea, the fields, the peninsula to the left. A new section of Povljana had begun to grow across the bay to the right. A modern world encroaching. A few years later there would be a bar near the chapel, built on a concrete slab, which sold drinks and ice cream to beachgoers and had loud music blaring, whose owner wanted to make a buck and didn’t care that his bar ruined the scene.

But the rest of old Povljana wasn’t changing. The village was positioned by the sea, would always rely on it. Povljana always looked inland too, and its villagers always depended on its gardens and fields. An amphibious place, a village of the sea and of the land, Povljana was a bit of Srebrnjak and a bit of the regular coast combined.

When summer ended and Povljana emptied and life slowed down even more, on quiet days through the fall and winter, the locals sat for long hours in cafés talking politics or playing cards or drinking or watching soccer. I thought of arguments that might flare up and then die out after a few hours, or longer—who knows how long these things last in villages like this. I wondered if Predrag Matvejević was right when he wrote about arguments among men of the sea, whether his comments were even applicable to amphibious Povljana, its men not all men of the sea. “True fisherman . . . lose their temper and quarrel (over bad weather, a bad catch, or bad workers), but do not fight like, say, dockers, or common peasants. When arguments break out among them (as they do over to and from which side to cast the net or when and how to haul it in), they never reach the intensity of arguments over who owns what land. The sea is easier to divide than the land because it is harder to own.”³

On those winter days, boredom settled on the village as the north wind kept people inside and the grey waves slammed against the harbour walls. It was a very different world, the winter world of Povljana, of the Adriatic, a little dismal and sombre, one I never got to know and could never associate with my experiences in the hot summer on the islands.