Srebrnjak Mansion Cres Vis

Seven years went by before I returned. During that time, Joe completed his house. It rose from the atomic bomb site to its grand final form of granite, slate, and marble. At a time when all the working peasants other than Tomo had died out and only one cow remained and weekend houses had sprung up throughout the valley, a modern world encroaching, his modern house was a crazy and beautiful anomaly.

I flew into Frankfurt then drove south through Bavaria. The next day I passed through the bright green valleys and soaring cloud-ripping peaks of the Austrian Alps, so that my arrival in Srebrnjak, into a small valley between low hills, low compared to the mountains, made me realize how unlike the sublime it was.

I noticed some changes. The weathered wooden crucifix had been replaced by one made of concrete and plastic, and the road was paved all the way up the valley, widening to two lanes near Joe’s place. There were curbs now. Where once there had been a ditch along the side of the road in which ducks swam, now there were underground pipes bringing water efficiently from Samobor.

I arrived at the gate. I stopped the car, let the engine idle and looked up at the house. It seemed to have taken over the land around it. I thought of Joe’s assiduous care with the planning and construction, like his purchasing every piece of stone from China rather than from the stone yard in Sveta Nedelja three kilometres away (because, he claimed, it was cheaper); I remembered all the delays in getting building approvals, the shiftlessness of hired workers when he was in Vancouver earning the money for the place, the loss of the first footings because of an earth slide, and the near catastrophe of bankruptcy and having to build himself back up. To my eye, sure, there were also questionable decisions like a driveway made entirely of grey granite bricks that had started to sink in places and through which weeds grew. There was the craziness of the size. But the overall effect, when I took everything into account, was impressive. It was a symbol for his entire life. The completion of a full circle.

I drove up the driveway and parked in front of the garage and greeted Joe when he came out.

“What took you so long,” he asked. “Did you get lost?”

“What do you mean? I did 130 the whole time,” I said.

“Which direction did you go?”

“Villach direction.”

“That explains it, that road is longer.”

“Yeah, but the views are great. It’s not how fast you come, but the experience. Don’t you know that? Anyway, I’m here now.”

I looked him over. Eight years had gone by since I’d last seen him. He was barefoot, shirtless and wore khaki shorts and a brown leather belt I’d given him ten years ago. Around his neck was a fat gold chain from a former girlfriend. His arms looked skinnier. The leathery hide of his super-tanned skin hung looser.

“You should do some push-ups,” I told him.

“I do push-ups every day.”

“You do?”

“Every day. . . . When I dig with the shovel,” he cackled.

“Not the same.”

“Oh, you’re going to see, you’ll see. There’s some work I have waiting for you, plenty, just for you sonny boy!”

“Just the reason I came.”

His wife, Denise, came out, a Vancouverite of Slovenian back-ground with high cheekbones and a bobbed haircut like the women of the 1920s. She was a former corporate secretary, high-ly organized, and was responsible for choosing the furniture in the house, much of which came from Bali—the incredible wooden tables with elaborate carvings of rice farmers ploughing with cattle and other scenes, all encased by glass, the other furniture like the massive armoires of solid wood, the corners decorated with carved pheasants, ears of wheat, cobs of corn.

After we’d eaten, my father gave me a tour of the house. I think he wanted to see it through my eyes. The physical house, I mean. Its position on the land, whether purposeful or accidental, and the deeper experiential feelings that that produced in me over time were something else altogether. We started out front, where a winding staircase of granite with a wrought-iron railing led to the second level, a stair we never used. On this second level, the front door of Balinese teak that weighed 200 kilos and had to be brought in by crane, was also never used. On either side of that door were the two second-storey bedrooms, each with a balcony. A row of Izabela grapes supported by steel poles and wire stood to the right of the driveway when you drove up to the house. The front terrace, the stairs on the left of the house that led past a row of lavender to the back terrace, and the entire façade, were all made of cream-coloured granite. The roof was covered by brown slate. On the back terrace was a free-standing stone barbecue and pizza oven, roof not finished yet, but a motor already built in to turn a steel bar and roast a pig. On both front and back terraces were massive round granite tables and benches. At first, I thought they were ugly but then I recognized how useful they were, how they didn’t shift when you leaned on them and how you could put a hot pot directly on them without a trivet. Other things around the house caught my eye, like the brass faucet on the back terrace in the shape of a rooster. Inside, in the wine cellar, were three steel barrels and a thick wooden table hewn from a single massive teak tree and elk antlers on the wall from a hunt in British Columbia and an oak wine barrel that had once belonged to Marko’s father on which was inscribed, in Croatian, “If you drink you die, if you don’t drink you die, better drink then die.”

For me, an important quality of the house wasn’t what it was made of or what it contained, but how its spaces were connected to time, and how that determined how I spent my time, how it channelled and shaped my experiences. Because it faced the east, the front patio had the sun of the early morning and the back one had the shade. In the morning I sat in the back taking in the first sounds of the day and breathing in the still dewy smell of morning, the mixed together smell of grass and flowers and herbs around the place, dandelions, red clover, chamomile, yarrow, sage, wormwood. By lunch the sun passed to the rear of the house, and the front terrace was in the shade, so we occasionally ate our midday meal there as the shadow cast by the house progressively descended the sloping hill towards the road. By early evening, when the sun still hung over the hill and the back terrace was still an inferno, after I returned from a walk, I sat out front with a beer, some bread and smoked špek and just enjoyed the warm breezes, the view down the valley, the buzzing of the last bees in the lavender. By 7:30, the evening sun had slipped behind the hill so the back terrace was in the shade again and I would sit on one of the benches, the granite filled up with the day’s hot sunshine even as the sun was beginning to set and the grass was growing moist from the dew, the night settling on the land; or I would water the vegetable garden with a hose from one of the big plastic canisters or watch the last swallows cutting up the back yard with their manoeuvres or wait for the bells from Marija Magdalena. And in the period between sunset and dark I read on the back terrace, a peaceful time for me when I didn’t have to talk to anyone, and sometimes what I read seemed part of the moment in which I was living, and the place too, like Mink Snopes ploughing the land during the hot day and digging the fence posts for Jack Houston at night, walking beside woodlands of wild plum and beside planted fields standing strongly with corn, and dreaming for sure of an evening like this one, on his own land, his own place. When it got too dark to read, the bats appeared swooping floppily around the orchard. Then it was time to go in. Later, when everyone was asleep, I slipped outside again with a glass of šljivovica and stood there under the stars and the white moon, drinking in the sweet-smelling air and listening to the crickets, the hot summer earth boiling with life. . . .

I dreaded it but I knew I had to do it. So I had Joe strap me into the weed whacker and I headed up the hill. At first, I was all geared up with goggles and earmuffs but then ditched them both because of the heat and just went with the straw hat. I did poorly at first, kept knocking the head too hard on the ground and stretching out the wire. Joe yelled at me from below. But then I got into the rhythm. Long smooth arcs, the arcs of a peasant scything grass. My thoughts went back to Štefek cutting grass on this very hill and around his yard in the evenings with the wicker basket on his back, while I kicked a soccer ball by myself. The smooth sound of the blade through the grass. The quiet of it. How unlike the loud revving of this machine that you could hear from half a kilometre away. That was a major difference in Srebrnjak these days: the snarl of a machine disturbing the quiet. I cut the grass in the orchard, then moved higher up. The land steepened viciously so that it was hard to keep my footing. My lower back started to ache from bending and swinging back and forth. My feet and ankles hurt from trying to keep my balance in my father’s boots, which were some cheapos he’d bought in China, and had no ankle support. I was sweating and thirsty. My body wasn’t what it was when I came to Srebrnjak, that much I recognized. I could see too how my father wasn’t going to work on this hill much longer. How did men here keep doing it into their seventies? And by hand? I had personal experience scything and knew how hard it was. Finally the wire snagged on a branch and broke off completely and I was happy to use that as an excuse to go back down.

“That’s it?” Joe asked when he saw me. “You just started!”

“What do you mean just started?” I said. “I was up there a couple hours!”

“Fifteen minutes, tops,” he said.

“You were on the couch watching TV; you lost track of time. Plus, the wire broke. Maybe if your gear was better, I’d still be up there.”

“Oh sure.”

I wrestled myself out of the harness, threw my wet shirt and socks into the sun, and asked, “What time is it?”

Joe looked at his watch. “Eleven.”

“Shit. We’re behind.”

“That’s riiiggghhht, you should have started earlier.”

We had agreed to have a barbecue for our midday meal, which we ate at one as was the custom here. We got kindling together and started a fire in the outdoor oven and I drove to Samobor for the meat. The single-lane highway between Sveta Nedelja and Samobor, which had until now been made of concretes slabs built by the Germans, the area where Slavko had told me the Partisans had hanged men after the war, was covered by new blacktop. But the big change was the new enterprise. On the Sveta Nedelja end was Croatian car manufacturer Rimac Automobil, founded in 2009 by then twenty-one-year-old Mate Rimac, a precocious car genius who produced one of the world’s fastest production electrical vehicles, the Concept One. On the Samobor end of the highway were all the new grocery stores. Kaufland, Lidl, Plodine and Croatia’s own Konzum. What a difference from the early post-Yugoslavia days when a country corner store or two seemed like a profusion of capitalist enterprise. For me, the choices of my favourites were astonishing: hundreds of double-smoked bacons, hams, dried smoked sausages, cheeses from Croatia, Germany and Austria, walls stacked with different beers from Croatia and Europe (all the labels, all the beautiful coloured glass!), Ožujsko, Karlovačko, Osječko, Tomislav, Zmajska pivovara, Pan, Laško, and the usual big names like Heineken, Beck’s, Warsteiner, Erdinger, Paulaner, Holsten, Kaltenberg, Budweiser Budvar, Staropramen, you name it, some now in two-litre pop bottles (but not a single brand from North America), and not to mention inexpensive white graševina from Slavonia, four bucks a bottle, and red Plavac Mali from the coast, and the Williams pear, plum, and herb brandies. But I had no time to hang around, so I got the chicken legs and čevapi sausages and went back to Srebrnjak.

Joe had been tending the fire in my absence and the embers were about right when I returned, so we put the meat on the grill. The sun was beating hard on our heads (this was before he had finished the roof of the pizza oven). I had to make some trips downstairs for a longer fork and a bowl of olive oil and a brush to baste the chicken, going up and down the stairs beside the row of swaying lavender, the bees droning, and small white butterflies dancing around the purple tops. I watched Joe turn the meat. I remembered him barbecuing on our backyard patio in Edmonton, barbecuing that Alberta steak.

“In Alberta steak is two inches thick,” I said out loud.

“That’s right,” Joe answered, “they know what they’re doing over there.”

He wasn’t following my thoughts. I said, “Steak two inches thick and jobs five bucks an hour, hey Tonček, you gotta come!”

Joe laughed. “Well, he listened, didn’t he?”

“I bet he was happy with you!”

“He made the right decision in the end.”

I wasn’t so sure. “He left France and came to Edmonton, so what do you think is better?”

“He’s a millionaire now.”

“Yes, but he woulda worked there too. Plus, there he could wear a suit jacket and leather shoes in the winter. You’re the first person to understand that. And there were other reasons to stick around. Young stud in his prime, you know. . . .”

“Maybe.”

“He followed you all the way from Srebrnjak to Edmonton, Alberta. Escaped Yugoslavia as well. Just eighteen years old. He told me about that once. Walking in the night on a deer trail through the mountains. Quite a story.”

We went on for a while discussing Tonček’s decision. Then the meat was ready, and we went down to the table on the front terrace. The shade from the house and a light easterly wind made it cool compared to the back. Joe brought his wine from the podrom, and Denise the potatoes and salad, and we ate. A few wasps showed up and we shooed them away. Three grey cats that lived at Mila’s appeared, waiting expectantly in the bushes. It was 1:30. With my back to the house I had a view of the big hill across the street, the Izabela grapes and driveway on the left, Štefek’s barn below and, farther to the right, the well under the walnut tree. If I walked down the sloping hill to the well and then under the tree, I would end up in Mila’s yard. If I turned around there and faced my father’s house and looked up to where I was eating now, I would see the vineyard on the hill high on the left, the one my grandfather and his brothers planted in the early twentieth century, now Miško’s, and to the right, even higher, the vineyard Štefek had planted, which belonged now to the loudmouth son-in-law who had taken the apple meant for my grandmother in 1977. All this was part of my positional awareness as we ate.

When we were done, we sat there longer, Joe and I. It was a hot, bright afternoon. Above, a hawk hung slow turns onto the cloudless blue sky. Doves cooed sleepily. No other sound. No weed whacker to ruin the silence. People were waiting for it to cool off. I looked down at Mila’s barn and pictures suddenly ghosted through my mind, one layered on the other like double exposures—of the family moving through the yard working; of Mila walking to the barn to milk the cows; of Strina Slava picking nettles; and of the pig roasts under the plum trees, people gathered, their shapes flitting here and there, gathered together for a photo. I saw myself running from the hill for a drink of water from the pail and then going into the barn and coming out grown up and heading off down the road on the black bike to the sound of Mila’s, “Kuda, Tony?” And then a change of light and returning in the dark searching for the key on the windowsill, heart beating hard, those dogs. . . .

“Štefek would be out there hoeing corn now, wouldn’t he?” I asked Joe. Five years had passed since Štefek had died, but we hadn’t spoken much about him.

“Maybe he would be hoeing, but even he knew when to cool it. He got smarter when he got older.”

“I saw him going up the hill right over there, him and that hoe. More than once. Hot like this. A whole field of it waiting for him.”

“That’s riiigggghhht! And you complain about weeding a little garden, sonny boy.”

“And always ahead of Mila.”

“To make it easier for her, probably.”

“Just imagine the boredom of it,” I said, “hour after hour.”

“Maybe he didn’t find it boring. Not everyone finds work boring, you know. Not everyone is like you. But that’s what he did, he worked. There was always something. Even here there is no end to it. He had to work or he would go hungry. Simple. And you know he had other options. After the war he could have had a career in the military. The communists wanted him. They kept writing him with offers. The police wanted him. He could have been chief of police in Sveta Nedelja. He would have had benefits.”

“Earned more money.”

“Maybe more money, but for sure an easier life. But he refused.”

“Why did he do that?”

“There were all these promises. The communists made all these promises after the war.

We will have freedom. Everyone will be free. Brotherhood and Unity. All this crapperoo.

He was a Partisan in the war, and maybe he believed it all. For a while he believed it all. Then his brother was arrested and nearly hanged. For nothing. My mother helped save his life. He would have been hanged otherwise.”

“So you’re saying he started to have doubts.”

“He just gave up on all that. He had principles.”

“I remember there was never a picture of Tito in the house, not that I ever saw.”

“None of that, no Jesus either. And there is something else. When I was small, I saw this. It was in the bedroom; I was young, maybe five years old. It was coming to the morning, and he had a dream. It woke me up. He started to scream. He was screaming about being bombarded. We all had to run because we were being bombarded. He jumped up and jumped out of the window. It was summer, I think. Then he woke up and he was back to normal. He didn’t have another of those episodes, not that I saw.”

“You didn’t see everything,” I said. “For sure he was going through this shit all the time, and who knows how long it lasted.”

“Maybe forever.”

“Maybe forever.”

“You can talk about what he gave up when you start to write,” my father said. “I remember this too. After the war, he worked at Top, the aluminum factory in Kerestinec. He walked there and he walked back. He was too poor for a bicycle yet. The bike was later. But at that time he had to walk. After work he went to buy a loaf of bread at the bakery by the factory. In those days we couldn’t use up our corn for bread. There was always a lineup by the time he showed up. Sometimes he waited an hour for a loaf of bread before coming back home. He could have had one waiting for him with the right connections. If he had joined the communists, you better believe someone would have been there with a loaf for him. He would have had connections. He chose to wait instead.”

“Made a decision that he was going to wait and then stuck with it.”

“That’s right. And he never got a military pension either.”

“Maybe he regretted that.”

“Maybe. You make decisions and stick with them. He knew how to work, that’s for sure. He was up every morning at four to feed the animals and then to walk to work. Then when he came home, he ate and then continued to work on the land. That vineyard up there. Not my father’s, the other one. He dug it by himself, dug the trenches for the vines by himself.”

“Imagine the sheer physical hardness of that. Holy shit,” I said.

“There’s something else too,” my father added. “He used to beat me. For this and that. I can’t say I was perfect, I know that. But he hit me. Even across the head. I was just a kid. My brother Dragec told him if he did again, he was going to kill him. Dragec was maybe thirteen or fourteen. Said he would kill him if he did it again. And you know what? He never did.”

“So maybe that is why Štefek didn’t like handouts from you, like when you gave him money to put in the washroom upstairs.”

“Could be. He was ashamed possibly.”

A whole other side of Štefek had suddenly appeared to me. The person I’d known had turned out to be just the front part of the man, in back of which were the hidden things. His relentless work now took on a different meaning. The anger in the barn with the cows. The separation from others. How much else was there? How long did the war last in his thoughts? Even Mila might not have known all of it.

Joe had never told me the story of his brother Dragec warning Štefek. Joe’s full brother, “Charlie” as he became known in North America, had left Srebrnjak in the 1960s and had never returned. Not coming back was an indictment of a place and people that had always seemed peaceful and decent to me. Charlie, more than his two brothers, seemed to bear the consequences of his mother’s abandonment the most, caving in to all the addictions over the years except drugs, and never returning to his home until his ashes were buried in the grave under the black granite headstone Joe had put in the cemetery in Sveta Nedelja. No one in Srebrnjak ever brought up Charlie’s name. In one of my conversations with him over the phone (he called every two years or so from some city in America—at first San Diego, then San Francisco, then Chicago, then Reno at the end)—his rough American voice told me about the whippings he and Joe had gotten. He said, “Mila was a bad person.” He didn’t go into more detail. But there was a bitterness and hatred there. He spared both Jana and Strina Slava, whom he called a “great woman.” However, with the others there was no burying the hatchet. He’d never felt at home with them in Srebrnjak. He had other reasons for not going back too. He rarely had enough ready cash to buy a ticket after the casino and the booze. Plus, he hated the communists who still ran the country. In another conversation, Charlie shared his views of the world with me. “They think they’re educated; they think they know something,” he said once, “those people with their university degrees, but you know fuck all. Being a machinist like me takes just as much intelligence. Don’t think it doesn’t. I always think, calculate, when I work.” I thought his remarks were partly directed at me. “Whatever you say, buddy,” I answered testily. I always felt bad about that. He was for sure a proud person. And forceful too. That was obvious even when he was a kid. The man who had lost two fingers to the axe in Srebrnjak, Tonček Juranko, told me how Charlie had taught him chess. “We used to play in the barn loft. If I made a mistake, he got up and leaned over and slapped me across the face. Wham! Then later, if I made another mistake, he got up and slapped me again! Holy shit! Did I ever learn fast!”

Joe and I sat there for a while longer, then I went to my room for a rest. I lowered the shutters, took off my shirt and tried to nap. It was hot, 39 degrees outside, that’s what the thermometer read by the pizza oven, so that even on this level of the house, with another storey above, I was sweating. Now and again I heard Marica’s rooster crowing lazily down at Mila’s place. A car down on the road. I was thinking about what we’d been talking about and then I must have slept because an hour had gone by when I woke up.

Downstairs, Joe, who had napped on the couch, the TV still blaring, had just gotten up and was in the garage with a spade in his hand.

“You came just in time,” he laughed.

“What do you mean?”

“Here let me show you.” He went over to the grapes. “See here.” He began to dig at the earth between the vines. “This has to be done.”

“What do you mean? It’s a hundred degrees outside and you want to kopati.”

“It’s shady now. This digging has to be done. Look at the weeds.”

He was right about the shade. Some of the grapes were in the shadow of the house at this time of the day. I took the spade and dug half-heartedly. He kept his eyes on me.

“Turn the soil over, there’s no point if the weeds stay inside. You’re not doing anything. Here, give me that, watch now. See how I’m doing it.” He took the spade and began to dig, stepping under the grapes to get at the earth on the other side. He made sure not to spill soil onto the driveway.

“I do see,” I said. “You’re doing great! You’re good at it. Keep going, keep showing me how to do it properly.”

He gave me a wicked smile. Then he kept going. “Like this,” he said. He had got to the point where he was in the sun and as he kept turning over the soil he started to sweat. He stopped and looked at me and laughed. “Pheww, it’s hot.”

“Obviously it’s hot. Give it up for today. Mañana, man. You’re not wearing a hat either. One of these days you’re going to have a problem. Do you want to have a beer? Come and have a beer.”

We sat out front with our beers. It was cooling down a little, and the shadow from the house was halfway to the barn. The sky was a darker blue, the hawk now gone. No sound broke the thick stillness of the early evening. A man was coming up the hill on the land beside the house. We saw it was the son-in-law pushing a wheelbarrow to his garden. I said hello and he waved back with a nod and said hello but kept going.

“There he goes,” I said.

“Oh shit,” Joe said, laughing, “Just the other day he came over here,” he pointed to the land on the other side of his house, just beyond his grapes. “His apricot tree is close to the property line and the branches hang over onto this side. The apricots fall onto this side. So he came over and cut the branches down. He left the apricots on the ground because he knew he couldn’t touch them now, but he decided no more were going to fall on our land. That tells you all you need to know.”

“He and his wife are here every day now,” he went on. “Working harder now than they ever did.”

“They used to pick up supplies at Mila’s groceteria, and now they’re working for it.”

“That’s right.”

“Why do you think?”

“No idea, maybe they need to.”

“Pretty much the only people working on the land in Srebrnjak. Other than Marica and Miško, plus there’s Tomo and his wife. That’s about it.”

Srebrnjak had for sure changed, Joe said. “It’s going back to what it used to be. There weren’t many peasants then. Rich people from Samobor and Zagreb owned much of the land before the wars, even after. They had vineyards. They would come for the weekends. They hired peasants to do the work. The Špišička family from Samobor. Their house is still here, just up the road in the trees.”

I think I knew what he was talking about. I remembered the winter of 1992 and the old house that had become visible from the road because the trees had lost their leaves. Joe went on to tell me that the daughter of the family who had inherited all the land, had fallen on hard times and had sold the land piece by piece until there was nothing left. A once wealthy family reduced to nothing. “She drove a taxi for a while. A big Mercedes. The colour of champagne. There wasn’t much money in it. No one could afford a bike let alone a taxi ride.”

“What happened to her?”

“No idea.”

“She might have gone into another line of work.”

“Maybe.”

He told me the story of rich people coming into the valley during the winter. They drove horse-drawn sleighs on the winter-solid roads and spent time in their cottages. Once, when he was walking to school with his brother, Charlie, or possibly his cousin in Dol, the other Štefek Juranko, he wasn’t sure any longer, a rich man drove past on his sleigh. “We were going to school in Sveta Nedelja and we had two more kilometres to walk. We asked him for a ride. You know, to sit on the back of the sleigh. He wouldn’t let us. He said the extra weight would be a burden to the horse!”

“A total asshole!” I said.

“Complete.”

“Bet he forgot about you. But you remember him!”

“That’s right. We were just some poor nobodies.”

“And you were kids. But you still understood how he looked at you. That’s why you remember.”

“That’s right.”

“Buddy never would have imagined his decision on that road would end up being talked about seventy years later! Serves him right.”

“Yes.”

He told me that during this postwar period, he and his brother had only one pair of boots. Going to school in the spring and fall, he would wear one boot, Charlie the other, then they would switch halfway.

We talked for a while longer. Later, I fetched my book and read on the back terrace. Joe went around with the hose watering the plants. It was cooling off finally, the sun having dipped beneath the hill. One of the cats was on the hill hunting for mice and a few last birds were flying about and twittering in the trees. Crickets chirping in the orchard. It was a beautiful sound, especially just after I’d arrived and not having heard it for so long.

After the bells from Marija Magdalena tolled, when the light started to go out of the day, I went down to Mila’s. She liked it when someone came to visit her at night before bed. By now she was expecting a nightly visit from Joe or Denise. Left the door unlocked and waited in the kitchen. She felt less alone in the empty house. Seven years had gone by since I’d last been here, saying goodbye outside the front door after Štefek had shown me the footings of Joe’s house, and when I went into Mila’s house I smelled the dank concrete again and wine from the cellar. The house no longer smelled of milk and cheese as it did in 1969.

She was sitting at the kitchen table watching TV. At first, I wasn’t sure it was her. She had lost weight, her face was gaunt, and the lenses of her glasses were dark, giving her the appearance of a blind woman. She didn’t recognize me at first either.

“Tony!” she finally said.

“Mila!” I answered.

“Tony!”

“Milaaaaa!”

She laughed. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I’ve come.”

“I know that.”

“Didn’t you recognize me?”

“Tony, listen, I can’t see out of this eye, it’s like a fog, and the other one isn’t much better. I know it’s you, I can see it’s you, but you’re not very clear.”

“That’s not good.”

“It’s not good, but what can you do? What can a person do? There’s nothing to do.”

“Yes,” I said, “But you can’t look at it that way. I told Oma all the time, I told her at least she had her eyesight when she had lost her sense of smell and taste. At least she had that. She could watch TV or talk with people or whatever. You have to look at the bright side.”

“There is no bright side.”

There was no reasoning with her. I thought of the story Joe had told me about her and her eyesight. “Joža said you asked him the other day where he was going in the car. And he said to you, ‘Hey Mila, how could you tell it was me if you’re blind like you say you are?’”

“I knew it was his car by the colour. He drives a white car.”

“You’re right, he does drive a white car.”

“I could see the colour and I knew it was him.”

I turned the subject to Joe, something other than herself, and her mood improved. The old sarcastic Mila reappeared.

“Hey Mila,” I said, “I came yesterday and saw the house, and let me tell you it is one big place.”

“Too big,” she said, “you could put an army in that house!”

“But he wouldn’t listen. I told him, but he never listened.”

“Why would he listen,” she said, “when he knows everything himself. Even when he was a boy, he knew everything better. He was always smarter. Oh yes, so smart!”

We had a laugh at that.

“Mila, listen, I came here and almost first thing he has me working on the hill. Can you believe it? Up on the hill cutting grass. It was hot.”

“Tony, listen, you didn’t come here for that. You are a professor, not a peasant. What are you doing that for? If he wants the work done, let him do it himself.”

“That’s right, let him do it himself.”

We went on to talk of various things, going back in time as we often did. She told me that the woman who had called me crazy for running in the hills back in 1987 was none other than Kata Deak, the youngest sister of Draga Husta, who still lived in Mala Gorica. Mila described how Marko had come in the night and knocked on her door, having escaped his house through a window; this was after Štefek had died and she was alone. She said that whatever had happened to Marko was karma for what he had done to his own father, how he had maltreated him. She didn’t go into details, and she didn’t use the word “karma.” What you sow is what you reap. Then she turned her lens onto herself again, said with sudden bitterness, her face looking away from me for the first time, her voice low, self-pitying, “What a waste all this was, this life here. I could have done more, learned something. Instead I ended up here. With a man like him.” She was rubbing her fingers together anxiously. Looking into space as though she were alone. The TV was on, some variety show with people singing and dancing, which we weren’t paying attention to. She had never talked to me like this before. A window had suddenly opened into her mind and what I saw was dark. She couldn’t see much anymore with her eyes, but she was looking all the way into herself. Even now as I write I think of her as the tough, practical Mila whose view of life was unemotional, clear and unambiguous, without doubt, the one who told me straight and without hesitation, when I said once that I was contemplating sleeping on a bench in the airport to save money on a hotel, “You’re not an animal, sleep like a human.” For years I had an idea of who Mila was—the woman who had fed me and had long talks with me and gossiped with me, laughed with me, who had helped raise my father, who worked hard every day but never liked it (now I had a better idea why). For years this was the woman to whom I remained loyal even as others slandered her by saying she was bad or crazy. Even as she became the gossip of others, the tables having turned, when she went into the podrom and pulled on the son-in-law’s wine barrel after he’d refused to drive her up Joe’s driveway to his house, a difficult walk for her in the heat but also an odd request, he saying he was too busy, though no one knows for certain that is why she did it, why she pulled over his wine barrel and lay on the concrete floor in the wine, lying there on the cold wine-covered floor until she was found the next morning incoherent, then mute about it all, so that even as she became the gossip of others, I remained loyal to the Mila of my choice.

Now this veiled comment of hers about Štefek set me back on my heels, especially after my conversation that afternoon with Joe. I had reassessed Štefek once, and now I was having to do it again. My eyes went to the floor by the wood box where he had fallen dead that morning in 2008, when she’d come downstairs and saw him and went blind in one eye. I thought of the relentless, distant, sometimes angry man. Later Joe told me that Mila had asked him to be buried in his grave rather than her husband’s. And then I learned that Mila had told Denise a terrible secret about her life, swore her to secrecy, told her that Štefek had done something terrible to her, that it involved her own mother, but swore her to secrecy. . . .

A few weeks went by. Near the end of my stay, for the first time in many years, I travelled to the coast again. I was glad to leave the north behind, the heavy human drama, all the history. None of that would exist for me on the islands I was going to.

And yet I couldn’t go completely in peace. My wife had given me a hard look when I told her I was planning another travel writing excursion for my third such book. It was a look of disdain like the one she had given me when we first met on the road in Brezje as she was roller-skating and I was driving my “Mercedes.”

“More of your piddly scribbling?” she asked. “Bothering people you don’t even know. Why don’t you write a novel instead? Why don’t you write a bestseller that will help your family? Why don’t you think of your family like a real husband?” I answered that Joe was going to come with me on the trip, knowing that his presence would soften my wife’s bitterness because she knew all too well that I had only so much time remaining with my not so young father, and that every opportunity missed might be a source of remorse later.

I admit I didn’t have her words in mind when I approached Cres by ferry as the sun went down and the old familiar thrill went through me when I saw the sea and the islands again.

As our boat approached, Cres rose high and dark, covered by oak woods. We climbed a twisting road from the terminal and drove to the town of Cres at dusk, past a thousand blue olive groves, grey ribbons of rock walls hundreds of metres long, stone sheds, and wooden fences to keep in sheep, so that the island in these parts, open to the darkening sky, wildly ominous and empty, reminded me of Pag in spots.

We found a place to stay in the town of Cres. Then we made for a restaurant down the street, close enough for Joe, a lazy walker, and settled down for a meal on a terrace open to the night sky. The clacking of cicadas surrounded us. Gone were the crickets of the north. The evening air was dryer and warmer than in Srebrnjak and smelled of the sea, flowers, and garlic.

An Italian family was sitting at a long table when we arrived. They were among the Italian crowds who came to Cres on the weekends early in the season, then flooded the island for longer stretches during high summer. An elderly German couple, long-time visitors judging by their meeting with the owner, arrived. The owner seemed enthused about their return, kissing them on the cheeks, tapping the old man’s arm, but his superficial verbal exchange and reticence about himself made him seem in fact distant and uninterested. He went to bring them wine and they began to smoke. Smoking had been prohibited at restaurants, but here, at a place where they had evidently spent a lot of money over the years, there was no stopping the old habits.

When the owner came to our table, he ditched some of the formality with which he’d greeted the others, maybe because he considered us Croats like him and could speak to us in his first language, though he did say he had learned Italian as a boy. He told us about the island, lowering his voice discreetly when he mentioned the Italian fascists who had settled in Valun during the Second World War. He gave us advice about what to see on Cres. “You must go to Beli, yes, and Lubenice, but Beli is a must.”

The menu was in four languages, Croatian, Italian, German and English. We ordered a mixed dish of squid, škampi and mussels, which was served generously on a large platter, and washed it down with Ožujsko beer, followed at the end with two jiggers of šljivovica, on the house. The boss knew what to do to bring us back! The Italians continued to talk, the Germans to smoke, and we sat there for a while longer as music played and a half moon moved through the black branches. Then we got up and went back to our apartment.

The town of Cres is an attractive pastel-façaded bit of Italy that reminded me of Rovinj and Pag combined, but after exploring it briefly, we took the waiter’s advice and drove the twenty-three kilometres north to the mountaintop village of Beli. The narrow, rough road gave us views on the right of the glittering surface of the Adriatic, cross-hatched as it is when you look at roughened seawater from a plane. Beyond that we saw the island of Krk and the blue-green mainland behind. The one-lane road wound on through deep woods of oak, chestnut, hornbeam and elm, shaded and peaceful, with spots of light dancing through the thick cover. We passed rock walls so close to the road that we had to come to a standstill when other cars approached. Finally, after an hour or so, we arrived in Beli.

A raucous thrumming of cicadas in the trees around the village met us when we got out. The street that led up into the village was like a hilly path made of round mortared stones, slick, shiny and uneven. The village was built high on the northern side of the island, so that every contour of the land dictated the cant of the streets and position of houses. The farther in I walked the more I felt enclosed by the gloom of time having passed the village by. There were abandoned houses peeling blue and pink paint, with closed shutters and decrepit iron balconies that now seemed sad and pathetically ornate. But there was life too; I heard voices through open windows, smelled fish frying in a kitchen. Grapes and wisteria hung on trellises throughout the village, flowers stood in rows outside doors, oleanders, begonias and others not native to the coast, rosemary and bay leaf in small pots. One alley led through a wooden gate down a steep trail to a beach at the base of the mountain. Almost invisible, tacked high onto the blue sky, was a bird, possibly a rare griffon vulture, but too far away for me to be sure.

In the centre of Beli was a church, a tall tree casting quiet shade, a well, and a stone trough. The well was no longer used, and the square was empty. We were about to move on when an elderly man showed up, seeming to have arrived for no particular reason, and pretending not to look at us, yet somehow watching us with interest. He wore a white T-shirt, shorts, and rubber beach shoes. My father thought it would be a good idea to talk to him, a local who would tell us about his village. When I addressed him in Croatian, to our surprise, he answered in English. English with a Croatian and American accent. “I’m from Croatia, but I been in States last fifty years. Chicago and Boca Raton. This was my wife’s house, my wife’s parent’s house, but now they’re gone. My wife she died three years ago, so there’s only me. I come to Beli every summer. Then I go back. I used to go back to Florida, but I’m comin’ over here for good. I gotta apartment in Rijeka. Tomorrow gotta go back to Rijeka for business (‘beesness,’ he pronounced it). My accountant he’s sendin’ me a fax about how my stocks are doin’.”

His name was Vladimir Ingrec and he was eighty-five years old. He was a big man with still lively eyes and thick legs that had long scars along the side of the knees. “Wanna see my place?” He pulled out a key, unlocked the front door of the house, or apartment, and showed us inside. There was a new kitchen, a washer/dryer, and stairs leading to bedrooms upstairs, which he didn’t invite us to see. Across the square was another place that had belonged to his mother-in-law’s side of the family. It was danker and more run-down than his own, had eerie black-and-whites of long dead family members, a row of silver Turkish coffee cups on top of a cupboard, and cramped low-ceilinged bedrooms on the second floor above creaky stairs.

Outside in daylight again Vladimir invited us for a beer at the beach. We walked down the bumpy street to the car, and I marvelled at his confidence on the stones, even though he teetered at times. We drove down the steep road to the beach and sat at a picnic table on the terrace with a crowd of young beachgoers. Most of them were here for a few days or weeks, just passing through. Some young guys said hello to him, the waitress was on familiar terms with him, and he ordered the latest citron-flavoured Ožujsko.

“I swim here every day,” Vladimir said, pointing to the white line of buoys across the cove. “There and back, that’s enough for someone like me. I was good athlete. I played tennis back in U.S. They called me ‘Destroyer’ ’cause I was big force on tennis court. Nothing could stop me. The only thing could stop me was my knees. I had surgery on both, look at this.” He showed us his scars. “That slowed me up, but I kept on playing, up to I was seventy-seven.”

He started to talk about his wife. “My wife she was great woman, beautiful person. What a lady! We got married fifty years ago, same summer we went to States. We married in church here in Beli. The priest who did the ceremony he was still alive last summer, ninety-six years old. He remembered me. He died this summer, and I went to his funeral. But as I was saying, my wife and me, we went to America. First, we took boat to Halifax, and then train to Montréal. It was something, it was beautiful, we made love, my wife and me, in the cabin of the train in the night.” He laughed at the memory, and we laughed too. “I still have her wedding dress. I brought it back from the States. It’s in my apartment in Rijeka. Something to remember. I don’t really look at it.” He went on for a while recalling the past as the beach crowd came and went at the bar, and the light began to change. I felt sorry about it, but we had to go.

“I gotta go too. I’m leavin’ for Rijeka tomorrow. My accountant he’s sendin’ me a fax about my stocks, so I gotta tell him what I want him to do. I’m gonna swim and then go back. The taxi comes at five tomorrow.” I asked if he wanted a ride back up, but he said he would find someone here, there was always someone, and then we waved goodbye and left him.

We went to the mountaintop village of Lubenice on the western side of Cres as the daylight started to fade, the sun sending its last warm light over the western ridge of the island, on rock walls, sheep huts, copses of low evergreens and other trees that dotted the stony fields. There were a few oak tree sections, but the landscape looked aridly Mediterranean. We’d thought the road to Beli was tricky, but the one to Lubenice was worse. More of a paved bike path than a road, it snuck slyly through forests and dry grass meadows, insidiously throwing out blind curves as though it were trying to delay us. Walls crowded the road, the pavement was very narrow, so when cars approached we had to pull in both mirrors.

“Slow, here, sonny boy” Joe warned. “SLOOWWWW down!”

“I AM slowing down! What does it look like I’m doing?” I shouted back. “If you were driving you would have scraped the hell out of the sides by now!”

“Sure, sure,” he answered. Luckily, makeshift patches of concrete had been laid down at various places to create more room. Even so, what should have been a ten-minute drive from the “main” road, five kilometres distant, took us much longer.

We arrived as the sun was setting. An agglomeration of stone buildings on cliffs high above the sea, Lubenice was founded some 4,000 years ago. More hamlet than village, its streets were bumpy rock and grass paths with no names. In contrast, Beli seemed like a city.

I got out of the car and walked into the village, past the big parish church and other chapels. There seemed to be more churches than people. Sitting on a concrete bench, leaning on her cane, was an old woman wearing black, the sort I had seen in Pag years back. Through an archway I passed into the northern part of the village where there were little vegetable gardens, some right on the cliff edge, chicken coops, patches of marigolds and foundations of long-gone houses. I peered down and saw a crescent-shaped beach far below. The few tourists who had wandered around Lubenice had left and I was alone now. The wind rose from the sea, bending the golden grass and driving the last clouds to the darkening east. I imagined the same wind in wintertime, howling through chinks in the stone houses, but now there was heat still in the sun and the light tinged the buildings and the grass with gold.

On the way back to the car I stopped at a former school and library that had been turned into a gallery. The young caretaker of the gallery, twenty-five-year-old Romano Faganel, spent most of the summer here, sleeping in the loft. He had no running water or electricity and ate with a family in the village. His wages were paid by the Cres tourist board, but they were probably a pittance. “I don’t mind. I didn’t come here for the money. I wanted to experience Lubenice like this, like it must have been.”

The shelves had books in Croatian and some in English, like Alistair MacLean’s South by Java Head, a book I owned and read as a boy. On the walls were photographs of the village and its remaining aged residents, who numbered five or six. The pictures from the previous winter were taken after a snowstorm, and where today there was tall grass, gardens, and marigolds, in the winter there was snow ten centimetres deep. The transformation of Lubenice from an Adriatic seaside village to a wintry alpine one was incredible. “You see, Cres is farther north than other Croatian islands. If you go just a few kilometres south, to Lošinj, you have a sub-tropical climate. There the temperature is two or three degrees warmer. There is always difference in sea temperature.” I looked at the rest of the photos, the snow-covered Mediterranean evergreen maquis, a covered chapel roof, an old man gathering winter fuel.

Before leaving I donated twenty kuna to a Cres eco-tourism association and got a wooden pin. We stepped outside into the last sun and the warm blustery wind. I shook hands with Romano and returned to Joe. He had walked around a bit, which told me he had found something in Lubenice worth seeing.

“Quite a place, isn’t it?” I said.

“Quite a place.”

Next day we arrived at the southern tip of Cres, which used to be joined with the island of Lošinj until the Romans dug a channel at the end of the third century BCE. We came to the small town of Osor, where there was a rotating bridge to let water traffic through. During the Roman period, 15,000 people lived here; now there were sixty. Still, with its straight cobbled streets, its finial architectural touches and its garden delights, like a tall red blooming oleander tree growing out of the cobbles near the main square, and flowers in ceramic pots on sills outside windows whose trims were painted bright blue, Osor projected the feeling of a town, not a village.

We sat at a café in the middle of Osor. A truck had backed up to the terrace and delivery men were dropping off containers of beer. Some June bugs were flying around clumsily. Other than that, not much was happening. We were tired still from the long day before, and I sat there absently while Joe drank his usual morning coffee. He picked up a newspaper, then put it down and said, “This government has to go.” I thought he knew something about Osor I didn’t, its municipal politics or something along those line, but he was referring to the national government led by then Prime Minister Zoran Milanović. A favourite topic of his.

“How did you get onto that track?”

“I’m reading about more stupidity. It reminded me of something the prime minister said a year ago.”

“What was that?”

“He called Croatia an “accidental country!”

“Accidental country?”

“That’s riiiigghhht.” He gave me a wicked smile. “It happened by accident. Just happened, no one did anything.”

“Out of the blue,” I said.

“Out of the blue, that’s right. No one fought, no one died. This tells you where his mentality is about Croatia, it tells you a lot. For a prime minister to say this about his own country, this is serious business. Seerrriooousss.”

There were several layers to what Joe was saying, but it boiled down to the idea that the prime minister didn’t appear to agree with the story told by Croats about the birth of their nation in the ’90s, its defeat of Yugo army-led Serbian insurgents in eastern Slavonia and the Krajina, and so on.

“The prime minister is not a nationalist,” I said.

“Not a nationalist. He’s a communist, the old communist party. They just changed the name.”

“So why did Croatians vote for him?”

“Who knows? The other party was corrupt. He dressed himself up, talked about joining the European Union.”

“So, you can vote him out. His government will be finished. Power always comes to an end. In democracies or otherwise. Look at Osor,” I said. “This town was big once, important. There were thousands living here.”

“And some of them had power, you better believe it,” Joe said.

“Not anymore!”

“Ha, not anymore.”

So, after a brief stay on a beach in Veli Lošinj, we ended our trip to the northern Adriatic. However, that summer Joe and I also travelled to the far south and the island of Vis. For the first time ever, we drove down the new “superhighway” that allowed us to bypass the narrow Magistrala. This meant no more slow winding roads through Kordun and Lika, but also no more sights of small villages and women by the roadside selling their honey and cheese, no more views of the sea and the islands off dangerous cliffs. Of course, there wouldn’t have been Roma with dancing bears any longer, either. The highway swept through the continental north then bore through the Velebit Mountains via the Mala Kapela and Sveti Rok tunnels and brought us out to the other side, where we saw the Adriatic far below. The rest of the route was through arid hinterland, Bosnia-Herzegovina to our left and the Velebit on our right.

The ferry from Split to Vis covered thirty nautical miles in two and a half hours, slipping through a narrow channel between Šolta and Brač called Splitska vrata (“Split doors”) and then heading out to open sea where Hvar and Korčula floated in the distant mist. Thunderheads hung low over the Mosor mountains on the mainland, but at sea it was sunny, warm, and windy. Over the intercom a cheerful voice greeted us: “Welcome, visitors, to the Petar Hektorović. Welcome to the new Croatia! Yes, the new Croatia! We have finally entered Europe. However, the question is, when will we get out!?”

This comment produced that cynical cackle from Joe. The guy on the intercom was referring to Croatia’s entry into the E.U., which not everyone in the country supported. The voice went on, quoting at length from the long poem by Petar Hektorović, Ribanje I ribarsko prigovaranje (Fishing and Fishermen’s Conversation), and then signing off by saying, “This little message was brought to you by Pepe, Pepe from Komiža. Do viđenja!—Goodbye.”

We stood on the upper deck as the ferry entered a very long narrow bay and approached the town of Vis. A warm wind buffeted us as the houses around the harbour slid past. A large, abandoned stone house was on the southern side. Joe remarked, “They left a long time ago, and not because of the last war.” He meant that under the Yugoslav regime Vis was a military island closed to all foreigners until 1989. Locals couldn’t profit from tourism as islanders could elsewhere, and many were motivated to leave for good.

Vis had the look of an old place, even more so than other Dalmatian towns. On the steep hills, former garden terraces and spaces where vineyards used to grow were visible. Clutches of cypresses, taller than the scruffy garrigue shrubbery, added to the impression of the classical antiquity of Vis.

As we waited in the lineup to get off the ferry, an elderly man with wine red cheeks and wild pitch-black hair that looked dyed approached our car and asked in English, “Did you enjoy your voyage? Did you enjoy the commentary? That was me, Pepe. I’m Pepe. Pepe from Komiža. If you need a place to stay, come to Pepe’s apartments in Komiža.” With that he whirled off into the crowd, yelling greetings to people he knew.

The road from Vis to Komiža was a new blacktop twisting across the mountainous spine of the island. The setting sun was in our eyes and lit the steep faces of the mountain, the stone piles and longish wall-like mounds that had been built up to clear the ground. There were no more vineyards, however, just the island’s natural vegetation. After a while, though, Joe pointed to a tended vineyard, light green against the surrounding darker green, and said, “There, that gives you an idea of what it used to be like here.” I could picture the face of the mountain covered by gardens and vineyards; I imagined the early settlers, the Greeks, then the Romans, in their distant age, wending up the path and clearing the rocks for hours in the catatonic afternoon sun, then trudging back down to the settlements and repeating it all the next day, and then those who carried on in the years afterwards working among the rows of vines, and then in late summer harvesting the grapes in baskets which they slung on either side of donkeys and transported down the winding paths. . . .

We arrived on the other side of the island. Komiža spills out below to the edges of a round bay of the same name. Signs for sobe and camere were everywhere, but nothing suited Joe (he thought Pepe’s apartments would be too pricey). Then he noticed a cardboard sign on a wooden wine barrel that was printed in a rough hand advertising the prices for vino, likeri. The owner of the house was sitting in his small courtyard; he came to the gate when we stepped out of the car. His name was Srećko Božanić, a stocky seventy-three-year-old in a pressed white short-sleeved shirt, suspenders and khaki pants who walked with a cane. He led us to the cottage at the end of the courtyard. It had only one bed, and at first the memory of that freezing Christmas in Srebrnjak, when Joe and I had huddled under blankets together, put me off at first, but with no better options, I caved in.

Our host surprised us by bringing two shot glasses filled with a copper, slightly transparent liquid to our outdoor table. The liquor, smokvica, was sweet and tasted slightly like the figs from which it was made. We sat and talked to Srećko, who remained standing, one arm holding a tree branch, the other his cane. When we had finished our drinks, he brought us a tart lemon liquor, limoncello. The limoncello tasted light, fruity, and seemed to fit the season.

The drinks set us a good mood, so we decided to walk to the harbour. The street descended for two hundred metres and was made of knobbly stones mortared together with long slabs that sagged from years of walkers’ steps. Komiža’s crooked meandering streets, unlike Pag’s, hadn’t been repaved for many years. Most of the buildings in this old quarter were constructed out of beige, unfaçaded blocks, which meant that none stood out from the others. The town felt like a puzzle that had come apart and had never quite been put back together.

We got to the quayside as the sun was setting out at sea. Larger than Pag’s dock, Komiža’s quayside was fairly active with locals and tourists. Old men in ironed shirts and tank tops were chatting on a bench, and a woman selling wine and bottled capers was talking with her neighbours. Kids were tossing a ball on a wooden platform attached to the imposing Kaštel. In the harbour were a few excursion vessels, sail boats and dories, but no big fishing trawlers that hinted at Komiža’s venerable fishing history.

The quayside is the most important part of social life in Komiža. Especially in the evenings, locals come to the quay and saunter along the bollards, chat, or just sit on the stone walls to watch life go by. The custom of an evening stroll in Croatia’s island towns has no equivalent in the peasant villages to the north. Here, in Komiža, the quay has been the site of countless pageants, tombolas, rallies, brass band parades, and colourful wedding parties with songs and flowers and coins tossed at the newlyweds. The pastry shops along the quay sell custard, candied apples, ice cream. Funeral processions file darkly past. Long-time resident, Jakša Fiamengo, had other memories of the quayside, memories from the Yugoslav years: “The deliberations before sailing, the greetings at the fishermen’s return, enquiries who had escaped [in the 1950s and early ’60s] and left his leut in an Italian port, the grief of Komiža when the military killed Jozo Pulenta in the night when he tried to escape to Italy with his crew. . . . The fishermen’s nights with fish stew bubbling on the boats and fish exuding deliciously smelling smoke on the sacrificial fires [of the boats] along the quayside on St. Mikula’s day, for the salvation of all boats at sea.”¹ From the promenade, locals always looked out to the sea expecting news from abroad, waiting for the world to arrive at their shores, the next boat, the next event, the newest disruption to the tiresome repetition of their days. Waiting was a part of the experience of the quayside, as it was on islands everywhere.²

Joe and I walked to the end of the quay and around the corner, where we came to a pebbled beach right off the street. The smell of garlic and fish wafted out of a restaurant that had flung wide its second-storey windows. I took a swim in the evening light. I swam for ten minutes, then floated back to shore. The wet pebbles had a golden sheen, tinkling and crackling when I ran them through my fingers. Joe, who was sitting on the wall just taking in this new place, probably feeling the same thing I was—that it was good to be here—observed as I came up and sat down, “You see, Lucas made a big mistake not coming.” He was referring to his grandson, who hadn’t wanted to come to Croatia that summer. “This water, this water you can’t find in Canada. He would be. . . .” He searched for the right phrase.

“In heaven,” I finished the sentence for him.

“In heaven.”

Then I got my things together and we walked back down the side streets to the harbour to find a restaurant. This decision at the end of a day of travelling was never a simple matter for us since we either couldn’t agree on a place or couldn’t combine the right price of meals with the right price of beer. The deciding factor almost always was the price of beer. “Look here,” Joe said, pointing to a menu that was sitting on a table of one restaurant, “Ožujsko is twenty-five kuna here, and over there it’s only fifteen. What do you think? No way,” and he snapped the menu shut. The difference was around two dollars, but it seemed more in kuna (at that time, one Canadian dollar got you 5.3 kuna). The waiter, who had been standing by the open door of the restaurant, had just started to walk across the terrace to serve us, but stopped short when we left.

Walking back and forth on the quay some more, Joe pointed to one of the restaurants. “Look there, see the cats. All of them waiting by the tables for a snack. You feed one of them once and they never forget. Best is to give them nothing. Otherwise you have a problem, a serious problem.”

Eventually we settled on a place for a meal, with Ožujsko, as people passed by on the quay and music played and cats nearby waited for a handout. I ordered lignje risotto, squid in a dark garlic sauce on rice. Joe had a grilled sea bass with olive oil, parsley, and garlic. We ate for a while in silence. I ordered more beer. When there was a lull in the music and the voices of customers around us, I could hear the sea softly clapping against the flanks of the quay. Then the noise picked up again and I lost the sea sound. I noticed a visitor beside our table. A scrawny cat a shade darker than caramel. “We have a guest,” I said. Joe cast his eyes down and said, “Well, what do you want?” Then he stuck his fork into his last piece of fish and, after a covert glance around, dropped it onto the ground. The cat pounced on it and slipped away with it to some quiet corner. “You see how grateful he is,” Joe said. We sat there longer, then we walked back up the knobbly stone street to our place.

The next day outside our cottage we spoke to our host, Srećko, who sat down with us this time. He wore a newly ironed short-sleeved shirt and pants, held up by the same suspenders. He was a serious, strait-laced man who had been born in Komiža in 1941 and had lived his entire life on Vis.

“I did go to Split once,” he told us, “when I was sick, but never anywhere else.”

“Have you gone to any other island?”

“No, I never saw the other islands. I saw them on the television, of course. But I didn’t feel the need to go there. Why would I go when I have everything here?”

“How did you get around?”

“I walked. I still walk.”

“You didn’t have a car?”

“Never drove a car. School was close, just over here; work over there. I walked.”

I asked him how much of his own island he had seen. “I have been to Vis, obviously, and other villages, but not all of them. There is much of the island I do not know. But I know Komiža.”

“Sure, Komiža is home.”

“That’s right, home.”

I didn’t know if his lack of curiosity was the reason for not travelling or whether as an islander he inevitably lived in his own corner, his own island. It was the sort of insularity and lack of curiosity that reminded me of Štefek and Mila in Srebrnjak. They too lived on an island of sorts, except theirs wasn’t surrounded by water.

Srećko told us he had eight years of regular schooling, one year in army school, and two years of political school. Later Joe said he meant a Yugoslav communist school. I wondered what they learned there, and he said, “What do you think? How to be a good communist!”

In broad brushstrokes, Srećko painted us a picture of his life after those years. He worked as a bartender in the only hotel in town. Eventually, he built his own house, having lived with his parents and his four brothers his entire life. He tended his land and traded his produce for food in the lean years of Vis’ isolation. “We were never poor; there was always enough to eat.” His orchards and vineyard made him comparatively well off. Such were his connections with the establishment, and so big was his vineyard, that the local military commander in the 1980s ordered his soldiers to help harvest his grapes. “At that time, I had 18,000 litres of wine,” he told us.

But not everyone chose to live on Vis. Around three and a half thousand residents of the island emigrated to America before and after the Second World War. Many left for California, Australia, and France. San Pedro, California, became the destination of choice, and an entire community of fishermen grew there, another Komiža in the new world. This was partly due to the skill, foresight, and courage of one man. At the turn of the twentieth century, a fisherman from Biševo, the little island off Komiža, had had enough of the hard life on land and at sea and decided to make a go of it in America. Martin Bogdanović, so the local story goes, “broke his hoe while digging in his vineyard. He was faced with a dilemma—fix the hoe or go to America? He decided to throw the hoe into the sea and leave for the States. He had just served his term in the Austrian navy and could freely leave his homeland.”³ This turned out to be a momentous decision. He became a successful fisherman in San Pedro. In 1914, he bought the San Pedro Fish Company, which sold fresh fish, and in 1917 with three partners and ten thousand dollars he built a small fish factory that became known internationally as Star Kist Food. The factory really grew during World War II because of the increased demand for canned goods.

Srećko told us that the fishing industry on Vis had declined in recent years. Fish numbers were down, and only one cannery operated periodically. Other crops on Vis were also in decline, like the flat leathery pods of carob trees whose beans were ground into flour that was exported as far off as South Africa, or used as a substitute for coffee and cocoa, or distilled into brandy.

By now it was early afternoon. Joe and I said goodbye to Srećko and went to explore the other side of the island. The narrow road took us past the huge thirteenth-century Benedictine monastery of Saint Nicholas known as Mušter, then over the southwestern shoulder of the island. When I saw no one travelling down, I drove in the left lane to avoid the horrifying drop off the right side. There were places to stop for a view, and when I got out to take some pictures, I felt the heavy fullness of the summer sun as it hit the exposed flank of western Vis. I could hear the loud stridulation of bugs in the dry grass and saw in the hazy blue of the sea the island of Biševo.

About five nautical miles from Komiža, dark green and seemingly close enough to reach by swimming, Biševo could be visited on “the line,” a sea passage that had been operating since 1935, usually in the form of a small white boat. A Slovenian writer long acquainted with the island, Mate Dolenc, described the island’s differing shapes and moods when viewed from Komiža: “Biševo lies in the sea like a dog, asleep with its head between its front paws, with a lighthouse at its rump. Sometimes it seems to be swimming and moving. And sometimes, when it gets dark and the scirocco is on the rampage, it almost disappears. And then after the bora, it comes so close to Komiža and you have the impression that you could step on it from the riva [waterfront].”⁴ A few dozen people lived on the island during the summer, and just a handful over the winter. There were no hotels or cars, so the only way of getting around was by foot, donkey, or boat.⁵

I turned the last bend, crested the mountain, and began the descent. Along the road on our left was a barbed-wire fence made of concrete posts that curled at the top like candy canes. The fence had once sealed off the Yugoslav military’s compound. The small road that turned left took us to our next stop, Tito’s Cave, where Josip Broz himself had allegedly holed up during the Second World War when Vis became a garrison base for the Yugoslav National Liberation Army and Navy.

The road to the cave was narrow, steep, and devoid of traffic. I parked and began the climb up wide stairs, following the red arrows painted on the rocks. It was hot and lizards by the hundreds skittered off the steps as I approached. When I finally got to the top, I saw a stone tablet embedded in a rock wall that read, “Here Comrade Tito stayed and worked in 1944 at the time when Vis was the headquarters for the political and military leadership of the People’s Liberation War.” From what I’d heard, the cave had been large enough to function as a hall and dining room, with a nook for Tito’s Alsatian, Tigger. But what I found was much smaller, hardly bigger than a living room, marked everywhere on the ceilings and walls with black spots. A loud drone from hundreds of wasps or flies—I didn’t stay long enough to check—issued menacingly from the cave.

On the way down, 290 steps by my count, I wondered how true these descriptions of the cave were. How reasonable was it for Tito to come here at all when he was already on an isolated island and could have stayed in some village instead?

When I got back to the car, Joe was waiting on a wall in the shade. He wasn’t about to climb 290 steps to see a cave where Josip Broz or any communist had spent time. When I told him how many steps I’d counted on the way down he said, “So I was smart and you were not.”

I drove up to the end of the road. We had come to Mt. Hum, the highest point on the island. I climbed a rocky footpath that led up to the chapel of Sveti Duh (literally, Saint Soul). From here I could see the orange roofs of Komiža and far out in the hazy blue the outlying island of Svetac, fourteen nautical miles west of Vis. Farther out, visible only in my imagination, was the tall rocky island of Palagruža, the island most distant from Croatia’s mainland, halfway to the Italian coast, and alleged to be the final resting place of Diomedes, King of Argos.

The wooden door of the chapel was unlocked and inside, hanging from a nail in the white-washed wall, were a few rosaries. I looked back out at the wide expanse of blue sea and sky. This was the farthest I’d travelled from the mainland in Croatia’s Adriatic region. It was the farthest south I’d travelled on this journey. I was a long way from Newfoundland where I lived, from the sublime landscape there, a long way from those drizzly grey days in the spring and the colossal mounds of blackening snow. I was in a different world than the valley from where I began this journey. And I was far from all the pressure of work. My wife and children were back there doing their thing.

I wasn’t experiencing anything new in the history of journeys to southern Europe (a region often depicted in travel writing associated with the Grand Tour). Describing the Bay of Naples in her Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), Anna Jameson places the sea and its feeling of unbounded infinitude in implicit contrast to the “vapoury atmosphere” that she knows: “To stand upon my balcony, looking out upon the sunshine, and the glorious bay; the blue sea, and the pure skies—and to feel that indefinite sensation of excitement, that superflu de vie, quickening every pulse and thrilling through every nerve, is a pleasure peculiar to this climate, where the mere consciousness of existence is happiness enough. Then evening comes on, lighted by a moon and starry heavens, whose softness, richness, and splendour are not to be conceived by those who have lived always in the vapoury atmosphere of England.”⁶

On Vis and on the other islands of Croatia, especially from summits like Sveti Duh, I had a similar experience of a “quickening pulse” and liberation from constraining bonds when I looked over the vast space of blue. The sea that was all around me, the contours of the coast of Vis and other islands nearby, the massive ceiling of the sky, blue like the sea, all of it added to the special “islandness” of the moment.

We drove into a flattish open area on the southern side of Vis, passing villages, vineyards, lavender fields and dusty olive orchards—the only ones I had seen on Vis so far (olive trees aren’t native to Vis and were only introduced in the 1980s).

The people of this area, pojori in the local dialect, still fished and still worked the land, but as in other parts of Croatia, rural life was declining. Evidence of this was all around Vis. I came across an abandoned stone house, with a lane leading in from the main road made of the same rusty beige stone as the house. A derelict beige Renault 4, the same colour as the stones, was parked in the back between the house and barn. A green cloth hung in the passenger window as though someone had just recently needed shade on the drive home. The house was a double-storey, which likely meant that its first owners had been relatively rich and had probably kept their animals on the ground floor (if they had not built their barn yet) while they themselves lived upstairs.⁷ The people who had owned this place were long gone, like thousands of others who had escaped during the “barbed wire” period of Yugoslavia, or had left earlier during the phylloxera blight. The village of Podšpilje had a population of 1,500 in the 1950s, but now only 150 people remained. The buildings were here, though. This house seemed to be saying, “My builders are gone, their voices, their songs, but I am still here, still strong.” I wondered whether the builders’ families, somewhere overseas, even knew this place existed, knew they owned property on Vis. Could enough time go by for a property like this to be forgotten?

I returned to the car.

“What took you so long?” Joe asked.

“Did you miss me?”

“Oh yeeesss, it was lonely!”

“I noticed you kept the car on the whole time. Didn’t think of turning it off and maybe opening a window?”

“No, not really. It’s hot outside.”

“Okay, how about a swim?”

“Sure, drive on.”

By then it was well into the afternoon. The sun was past its peak, the heat sunk deep into the earth. We came to the settlement of Milna on the shores of a small cove. From the road, the shallow water near shore was a bright, intense turquoise as though it were lit by a lamp underneath, then it grew darker fifty metres out where a line of white buoys had been strung.

Joe cooled his feet in the water while I swam beyond the buoys. It was my habit to swim farther than I was supposed to, like my grandmother’s brother Otto, who used to dive under the barriers of the harbour in the sea in Schleswig-Holstein, even though a side of me was more and more cautious and knew all the dangers.

Back on land again, as I was sitting on the dock, a man in a black Speedo came down from his white bungalow. Bald but handsome, like a slimmed-down Brando in the role of Colonel Kurtz, he talked to us for a while as he stood in the water. When he learned what we were doing in Croatia, he invited us to his patio. “Just go on ahead, I’ll be right there,” he said. Then he jumped into the water for a dip.

We sat at a table in the shade of an awning and a fig tree. A cat was stretched on the steps on a spot where the sun flickered unevenly through the leaves. The wind was up, ruffling the surface of the cove, and two sailboarders were tacking at speed out near the island. Back and forth they went, and just as I thought they were going to break free of the cove and sail out to open water, they swung around again.

When our host returned, he offered to make us a pitcher of lemonade. I smiled to myself when I imagined Joe’s reaction because I knew he was expecting something else. “It was okay,” he said later, “I was tirsty,” mispronouncing the word as he always did. So we drank fresh lemonade and talked about Vis with our host, Miljenko Vojković, a retired coast guard captain, sixty-seven years old, who spent much of the year on Vis but still kept his place in Split.

“My father was born on Vis in 1920,” he said. “When he was a boy, he was barefoot most of the year, even in winter, though he sometimes wore a sort of slippers. He got his first pair of shoes, leather ones, when he was twenty and was going into the army. Yes, so, those were different times, people were not rich, but Vis, the island, was more populated than now. There were 10,000 people on Vis a hundred years ago. Now there might be three and a half thousand.”

In his father’s day, fishing and viniculture were the main industries, the former practised mainly in Komiža, the latter in Vis, though as I had already seen, there was evidence of a robust wine-making practice around Komiža. “Donkeys and mules were used for work. Mules were bigger and stronger and were more expensive.”

“And no tourism in those years?” I asked.

“Not really. Of course, some people came, but very few. But you know there is this story, you’ve reminded me, of a traveller to Vis more than a century past. He was an Austrian, surveying the islands. This was during the Austro-Hungarian occupation, and he was an “expert.” He asked some old guy the name of a nearby island, and the old guy answered, ‘Kurva.’ So the Austrian wrote it down just as he was told. Kurva. ‘Whore.’” Miljenko laughed at the story as though he had never heard it before. I tried to picture the exchange between the two men, and it assumed various versions in my mind, with different satirical possibilities, the superior prig of a colonial representative versus the wily, uneducated, resentful local, or maybe the other way around, the practical, reasonable man of science for whom maps were needed, and the bovine, insulated islander who didn’t need a map to know what the neighbouring island was called or how to get there, and who gives a shit about the rest of the world.

“Besides Vis, what other islands have you seen?” I asked.

“All of them. My job took me everywhere. I could go on a long time about them. Susak, the island of sand, with big steep dunes and sand beaches and canes, the only such island in Croatia. I saw the Kornati archipelago in northern Dalmatia—from the Italian, Isole Incoronate, ‘Crowned Islands,’ islands with no trees, white, like necklaces in the blue water. I have smelled the scent of herbs blowing from the islands when I sailed by. People from Murter, Sali and elsewhere raised sheep on the Kornati. When there was a drought in 2007, the sheep started to drink from the sea when the water ran out and they all died. The names of the Kornati islands are sometimes funny: Babina Guzica (“Grandma’s Ass”), Kurba Vela (“Large Whore”). South of Korčula, there is the island of Lastovo. It is the second most remote inhabited island from the mainland, after Vis. In the main town, Lastovo, the chimneys look like minarets, though the Turks didn’t settle there. Lastovo has a carnival, the Poklad, which is held every year before Ash Wednesday. The legend about it is interesting; five centuries ago when Catalan pirates sent a messenger to Lastovo ordering them to surrender, the Lastavans armed themselves instead. They prayed to Sveti Jure (St. George) to protect them. Their prayers were answered because a powerful storm sank the pirates’ fleet. The citizens of Lastovo sat the messenger on a donkey and rode him through town and then burned him to death. For centuries, a straw puppet, the poklad, has replaced the messenger.”

Miljenko the sailor was quite different from Srećko, the communist. Miljenko was a traveller, a man of the sea, while Srećko was a landlubber, even though he lived on an island. Miljenko, from what I could gather, was an energetic person. By his own account he was also a reasonable and logical one, scientific in mentality. He told us he didn’t care much about debate. When he listened to politicians wrangling about some issue or other, he got pissed off. “Daj šuti,” he said, slapping the air (and the politicians) with the back of his hand, “Keep quiet.”

We sat there a while longer, chatting some more. The windsurfers were coming back now, and it was time for my father and me to go. But I felt like staying on. Miljenko told us he lived here on Vis much of the year, when the tourists had finally gone and it was quiet and he could still enjoy the sea. He continued to swim and fish. Who knows, maybe one day we would return to see Vis in that different mood. Already I had a twinge of regret for having to leave. I had already formed a nostalgic longing for Komiža, for the vineyards of the pojori countryside, for the whole island.

I looked at Joe.

“Time to go?” I asked.

“Time to go.”