Drink in the Summer

Between 1988 and 1990 I returned to Croatia three more times, when it was still part of Yugoslavia. No one knew the hell that was to come, and life in those summers with its peaceful and predictable normality seemed destined to go on forever. The end of Yugoslavia turned out to be the political and military counterpoint to the gradual coming-to-an-end of peasant life in the region where I always went. But that hadn’t happened yet.

Across the hill in Dol I met a man Štefek’s age, born in 1924 or so, but different from him in every way. While Štefek had joined Tito’s communist Partisans and my grandfather the nationalist Domobrani, Slavko Jakopač had originally fought with the Germans, who were allied with the Croatian Ustaše, the fascists who ran the Axis-occupied part of the country from 1941 to 1945. His hatred for the Partisans and communists never waned, although at a critical moment during the war, when he saw the tide turning, he’d abandoned his German-run unit and joined the Partisans, a decisive and shrewd move that probably saved his life. Now he liked to hurl brickbats at the communists every chance he got. I remember him pulling out a few dinars from his wallet, tossing them to the ground and stomping on them. “This is communist money, scheisse!” Knowing my background, he sometimes spoke German to me, what pigeon he dimly recalled from the war. He was a big man with a big, cropped head and meaty hands who moved them around when he talked. “Dies ist junge Mann!—This is a young man,” he yelled at me, “Aber dies ist alt, scheiss alt!—This one’s old, old as shit,” pointing at himself.

He was in the yard that belonged to Mila’s sister, Jana, and her husband Dragec, because he owned a tractor, a John Deere he pronounced “John Deery,” and had been paid to pick up hay from one of their parcels of land. That’s how he earned extra money. I don’t know whether he was commenting on his earnings that afternoon. Probably there was a going rate, and he was happy to get it. Jana listened to him as she always did, with some skepticism and probably distaste, because she was a civil woman who didn’t approve of his loud, vulgar swagger.

I, on the other hand, having just discovered Henry Miller, liked Slavko and enjoyed talking to him, enjoyed his mouthy wildness as though Miller had somehow been reincarnated in the body of this Croatian nationalist stranded in this socialist country, even though they were very different politically. No one I met in Yugoslavia spoke out against the Yugoslav government or the system as much as Slavko did. Mind you, I didn’t have political conversations with people I knew either. Conversations of the sort I had with Slavko had probably happened among people there long before I showed up, and everyone knew where everyone stood. Maybe they didn’t trust me, or maybe they had no criticisms. Probably it was the latter. After all, life in this part of Yugoslavia was humming along reasonably well on its tracks towards the distant goal of a workers’ paradise that people all probably knew was either far off given the present social and economic conditions, or total crap. And people in this region at least had the security of jobs in factories, state-owned stores, and so on, plus their own land. They were forced to work hard but weren’t starving either.

I used to sit at a table outside Slavko’s house drinking gemišt on hot mornings, listening to him blast the communists or relive his war years or just joke around. During the war he’d found himself in some precarious situations, the most dangerous of which was in the middle of the war when he and members of his unit had been lined up by the Partisans to be executed, but a firefight had ensued like a godsend. When the bullets spared him, he’d thrown himself down among the others and had gone still. Somehow in the chaos he just waited it out, then crawled out from the pile of bodies, his hands still wired together, and left his unit and made his way back home, back to this valley, where his family saw a gaunt, bearded ragged young man at their door.

At the end of the war, he witnessed hangings of convicted political “criminals” from the Russian poplars on the straight road between Sveta Nedelja and Samobor, the road of concrete slabs built by the Germans that survived until 2013, solid as hell. He saw the Partisans stand these men on stools and noose their necks. “Then kick the stool. Down. Bam. Dead!” he yelled, knocking my arm with the back of his hand and kicking the leg of the table to demonstrate, jolting the wine out of our glasses. “That was communism. That was Tito.”

“Shit,” I said.

“For them, yes,” Slavko shouted back. “But what the hell, what do we care now, here we are! Drink, young man. Drink in the summer!”

He poured more wine into our glasses, and I added water, and he knocked his glass against mine, the wine spilling onto the table. “Živjeli!” he yelled.

Slavko lived alone in the big, cavernous four-bedroom brick house. His wife had died three or four years ago, and what remained of her memory inside was a small crucifix on a wall in the kitchen. His two sons no longer lived with him. The older of the two drove a transport truck to Germany and would soon be arrested and imprisoned for running contraband, while the other was a louche, handsome guy nicknamed Lepica (The Moth), for his late nights out at bars, who was shot dead in the chest at a drunken card party at the start of the war in 1991.

Jana and Dragec owned land in Bušićka, one valley south of Srebrnjak, so more than once I helped them load a wagon of hay. The occasion about which I am writing was a rowen sometime in August. Dragec had scythed the hill the evening before, leaving the drying and transportation of hay to his wife who didn’t hold a job outside the one at home and had time during the day for such chores.

Slavko drove Jana on John Deery. I rode by bicycle with Vlado’s sister, Željka. An engineering student at the University of Zagreb, she was younger and prettier than her brother, with a mole on the bridge of her nose and straight jet-black hair down to her shoulders which, when she had menial chores to do, she wore in a ponytail, showing her pale neck. Her paleness distinguished her from her mother, whose brown summer skin told you where she spent most of her time. Jana always hoped her daughter was destined for something greater than a life on the land, supporting and accepting her long hours of study, and yet Jana often bickered with Željka about her lack of enthusiasm for farm work, especially during the summer when lectures had ended and the excuse of some distant exam on the horizon rang a little hollow. I can no longer remember exactly what drew me to Željka at first other than her prettiness, but she entered my life at the right time, the first girl I’d spent any extended time with, spoke to at any length, even though she was my second cousin.

We arrived in Bušićka and got to work while Slavko sat on the tractor smoking a cigarette. With pitchforks we turned over the bands of cut grass. It was noon. After ten minutes, Jana said to me, “Tony, it is hot, you should rest. Go to the shade and rest.” To Željka she said, “You missed that spot over there. Can’t you do it properly?” To show Jana the work wasn’t hard work for a fit young guy like me, I bounded around with my pitchfork, turning over the grass with energy, jumping over the rows of hay, sometimes in my haste jamming the steel into the ground. What a fool!

Within half an hour we were done. Slavko tossed his cigarette to the ground and we drove back to Dol.

After lunch, Slavko returned to Jana’s house, this time towing a wooden leiter-wagon. Jana sat on a board behind Slavko, facing backwards. Željka and I sat on the wagon, our legs dangling over the edge. On the gravel road into Bušićka we bounced around on the boards. “Hey, this is fun,” I yelled to Željka. We always spoke English and she answered, “Maybe it is fun once or two times but imagine doing this work all your life, all of it, year after year. I don’t think this wagon would feel so fun then!”

The grass had dried since we’d turned it at noon. We set to work piling hay ricks with our pitchforks, pushing hay down from the top of the hill, then collecting the grass with wooden-toothed rakes. This time Slavko got off his tractor and helped toss big grass mounds onto the wagon. The work was harder than before, especially when the pile on the wagon got high. The late afternoon sun, poised now above the crest of the western hill, blazed on us. We were sweating; Željka’s pale face was flushed and sweat dribbled down her cheeks and neck. I wanted to take off my shirt, but I remembered Štefek warning me not to do that because bits of grass could collect on your sweating body as well as flies and, even worse, ticks.

After working for a while, we took a break. From a bag, Jana brought out a wicker demi-john of white wine, a bottle of mineral water, and glasses. Slavko started to chafe Jana, which he did, I suppose, because he suspected she didn’t approve of him or had some negative attitude towards him that he was never going to shed. “Hey Tony, look at this woman, look at her work. It’s something to have a woman like that, a very good woman, very moral, better than the rest of us, and look at those strong legs!” He laughed and I laughed a little, and Jana smiled ruefully, shook a roguish finger at him and said, maybe a little stiffly because she didn’t have experience countering this sort of wise-guy talk, the casual banter of men, “You just make sure you get this load back home in one piece.”

Like her mother, Željka didn’t share my enthusiasm for Slavko. She thought his talk and bluster concealed something else. “I don’t know what it is, but he is hiding something. Maybe from the war. He seems happy on the outside, but I don’t think he is. I think he is very unhappy, maybe in despair.”

We were finished in Bušićka. Slavko and I hoisted a log timber on top of the hay pile and roped it down to keep everything in place on the drive back to Dol. Željka and I clambered on top of the hay and sat there on high, back-to-back, ducking when we passed under low-hanging branches, and laughing when the branches strafed us. Our ride on the fragrant hay was more pleasant and more cushioned than it was on the way here and the view grander from above. My satisfaction at having finished a job, plus the wine I had drunk, and finding myself on top of a wagon of hay where I could see far and people could see me and I was sitting with a girl for the first time with her body pressed against mine, a situation that was new to me, all of it had put me in a good mood.

Back in the yard Slavko reversed the wagon into the barn, unhitched it and went home. The job of hoisting the hay into the loft was waiting for Dragec and a next door neighbour, a mountain of a man called Milivoj, the son of the gossip Strina Zora. He and Dragec, in expert metronomic pas-de-deux, flung the hay up top while Jana distributed the hay in the loft, and then when they were done, they strewed a couple boxes of salt in the grass.

Afterwards, we sat at the table outside the kitchen, ate and drank gemišt. Milivoj was a huge guy with massive hands, but a boyish face flushed at the cheeks from working and a dense wiry head of curly brown hair. Shirtless, he sat across from me and spoke very simply so I could understand him, and I answered similarly, so that we must have come across as a couple of idiots. “Tony,” he said, “you work very much today. You good man. Strong man. Show me hand.” I showed him my blistered hands, which made him laugh good-naturedly, “Not worry, you work more, you strong! Here, živjeli!” I said to him, “Maybe I strong, okay, but not as strong as you, strong like Milivoj. Milivoj is big boy! Veliki dečec!” The last word I used, dečec, is a diminutive for “boy,” and in effect meant “little boy,” so I was calling giant Milivoj a big little boy. That made him smile, and Dragec laugh outright, and probably repeat to us ten times over the next few summers because Dragec was a recidivist when it came to telling jokes and bon mots, going back to the well a few times for the same laugh.

Dragec was a tall man, though not Milivoj’s height, with intelligent bright eyes and wiry grey, cropped hair that stuck up from his head like the quills of a hedgehog. Typically, he wore slacks and a collared short-sleeved shirt tucked in and crisply ironed. That was Jana’s doing. Now after working he wore only an undershirt. A teacher long ago had convinced his father, when his father had wanted Dragec to quit school, to let the boy continue, with the understanding that he be let out early every day to help on the land. So that was a cachet Dragec privately carried with himself throughout life while he worked as a labourer at the cement company Samoborka, and it helped instill, with Jana, who had also been forced to leave school early, the importance of education in his two kids.

On the question of education the husband and wife agreed but on other things they didn’t see eye to eye, especially when it came to work, who was doing what, who was working harder, who could make the other feel guilty for not doing this or that fast enough, in the right order, and so on. But on a night like this when work was done, when the pressure was off for a while, everything ran smoothly. Dragec sat there with his gemišt, tossing out a few last queries about jobs that had to be done, and she answered “Je sam” or something else to the affirmative, and he responded with “Dobro!—Gooood,” stretching out the word and adding a lilt to it to show his relaxed satisfaction and okayness with everything.

There we all sat; even Jana eventually came to eat, and Slavko showed up to tow his trailer back home, but not before a gemišt and more conversation. When darkness began to settle on the yard everyone dispersed. I sat with Željka on the steps for a while talking, watching the swallows fly in and out of the barn and then the bats begin to circle the streetlights, and the fireflies in the grass by the garden.

In Srebrnjak life was going on as it had before. Štefek was entering his seventies lean and fit and otherwise unchanged. Strina was more stooped and slow-moving and had a growth of some kind on her nose that she tried to scratch off every night with her fingernails, leaving a bloody scab. Mila, despite her cheerfulness around me, lumbered through the yard with familiar heaviness. She had begun to shoulder even more of the workload because her mother wasn’t up to it any longer.

Mila and I chatted every day. I continued to sit outside the kitchen in the mornings and throw my two cents back through the open window and Mila would answer. Often, I scouted the traffic on the road, which was very slow in those days, every vehicle a sort of special event that drew Mila to the door to check out. I informed her when the Avon lady had stopped at the neighbours, which was an exciting moment for Mila because she could buy a cream to salve her cracked hands. One day, when Mile, a Croatian Jew who worked in Frankfurt, drove past I asked, “Where is Mile going?”

“What do I know?” Mila said. “Maybe back to Frankfurt.”

“He’s building a house here. It’s not finished yet, so he’s sleeping in the barn.”

“If he would work faster, he could get out of the barn.”

“He likes going slow. He says he’s not in a rush. He’s going to put the washroom in next year.”

“He’s a fool,” Mila said.

“He says he likes the process.”

“If you’re building a house,” Mila said, “then build your house.”

I had no answer to that logic.

When my stay was coming to an end, I floated the idea of sleeping on a bench in the Frankfurt airport before my flight home the next day to save money on a hotel. Not hesitating, she said to me, “Spavaj kao čovjek—Sleep like a human. Sleep in a hotel.”

As I said, life in Srebrnjak was going on as it had before. However, the collective work with neighbours and the camaraderie I’d experienced over in Dol, which was common in the former Yugoslavia, was absent at Štefek and Mila’s. True, their older daughter Marica and son-in-law Miško helped daily but no one else from the village did, not even Štefek’s brother, Marko, who lived in the ochre-façaded house next door. Never in all the years I spent in Srebrnjak do I remember Marko helping his brother, or vice versa. At the time I thought this had to do with some old grievance because Štefek had decided to marry Mila against his father’s wishes and had moved into her family’s house across the road, a decision that insulted and embarrassed his old man. The two apparently didn’t speak for twenty years. And when he needed some help, the old man got a third party to ask his son over. They would work for hours, side by side, without talking. In any case, Štefek had disenthralled himself from the rest of the village, was proud and self-sufficient.

The house in Srebrnjak wasn’t completely without society. People wandered in from all over, mostly needing something or buying something. I saw bowlegged, hard-bitten Pavek Lacković saunter in from his village carrying a bottle he wanted filled with šljivovica. A confrere of hard drinkers, it seemed he’d run out up there in the village of Lacković Breg at the very top of Srebrnjak. I’d been to Lacković Breg before, a more primitive village than Srebrnjak, with smaller cramped brick houses and muddy shit-covered yards and wild slathering dogs that pulled hard on their chains when strangers passed. Lacković Breg was what villages around here probably looked like in 1950. Štefek took the bottle, gave it a once-over because it had a cloudy look, and went into the cellar. Lacković stood just inside the threshold, waiting, rocking back and forth on his bandy legs, either uninterested in sitting down at the kitchen table or not invited to do so. Štefek handed him the full bottle and accepted the money politely—it couldn’t have been more than seven or eight bucks in our present money—and gave it to Mila, who put it in an envelope in a kitchen cabinet. They said a few parting words and then he followed Lacković out the door and went on with his work.

There were other visitors. People from neighbouring villages came for water in the summer because their well had dried up, and this well was known to run deep no matter what. Štefek didn’t like handouts but he sure wasn’t averse to being generous himself. He never demanded a single dinar. “I always have water, so why shouldn’t I help someone who needs it?”

Other visitors included white-collar residents of Zagreb who owned weekend houses in the upper part of the valley. One woman, whose name escapes me, showed up from time to time in her dresses and heels to pick up a new supply of Mila’s hard ripened cheese and sour cream. The contrast between this stout middle-aged city lady and the peasants who lived there, as she stood in the little kitchen stiffly on her block heels emitting some kind of Yugo perfume, affecting sophistication, was funny to me. But she annoyed me too because she eventually turned my way and asked me who I was and what I was doing there as though she were checking out my credentials and right to be in the house, assuming the authority to ask, then wondered whether I was going to the coast, a typical question to visitors, as I struggled to communicate adequately at her level of Croatian. So, she had that over me. Another time, I got annoyed by the woman because she ignored me completely and conversed only with Štefek and Mila as though I weren’t even in the room, which made me feel slighted by her—who did she think she was anyway?! Mila spoke to this person as she spoke to everyone, there was no change, but Štefek wasn’t the same man. His sometimes-stilted manner of talking and his stiff hand gestures were exaggerated in the presence of the lady from Zagreb as though his moment on stage tightened him up badly and, like Polonius in the presence of the king and queen, he became ingratiating, a little sycophantic. Or maybe that wasn’t what it was at all. Maybe I’ve just misread him. When she left, he went right back to work, striding a little faster, as though he had to catch up with his other self who hadn’t been delayed by the city lady’s arrival.

Another visitor was my uncle Ivek, Joe’s half-brother. I can’t say for sure I ever saw the man completely sober. He drank first thing in the morning when he poured šljivovica into his coffee, then throughout the rest of the day as he drank one gemišt after another, although this impression of insobriety came partly from his manner of speech, the stones in his mouth, as Mila had said. Ivek showed up in his cement mixer which he drove for the factory in Rakitje called Tempo. Even though perhaps he wasn’t totally sober, he drove that thing with skill, which prompted his daughter, another Željka, to remark proudly to me once that her father “never had an accident, not one. He was an excellent driver!” The other thing I remember about Ivek was that he was missing his right index finger. The story about the finger was that he’d lost it in the military sawing wood on a stand-up saw. This was around 1960 and he was about to start his two-year service. The authorities began an investigation into whether he’d mutilated himself on purpose to avoid duty, but in the end concluded that his injury was exactly what it seemed at first glance—an accident.

He came to Srebrnjak just before lunch, around one in the afternoon. Štefek was back to normal, and both he and Mila were relaxed and friendly. They seemed happy to have Ivek there, and why not—he was one of the boys from long ago. He was family. They talked about people they knew, who’d died recently, what so-and-so was doing. Ivek lived in Rakitje and wasn’t up on any news about people around here, so Mila told him what she knew from that telepathic peasant wire she got gossip from. Štefek kept filling Ivek’s glass of wine, adding a little water too (he didn’t drink himself), and sat there after lunch in no special hurry to get back out there. That was the other thing I remember about Ivek’s visit—Štefek’s not especial hurry to return to work. Maybe he was just sleepy after Ivek’s soporific speech; it was hard work trying to figure out what the hell he was saying!

After lunch, Ivek drove me in his cement mixer to a café bar up in the hills. There were other cafés closer by, but he picked one at the summit of a hill on the road towards Sveti Martin pod Okićem. From there, we could gaze down at the surrounding valleys and the wide plain to the west where the town of Samobor twinkled orange in the distance. It was really something to sit up high in that cement mixer and drive along those narrow country roads across which the odd chicken would race idiotically just as that big truck ploughed along, and really something to see Ivek handle every corner like a professional even though he’d had multiple gemišt in Srebrnjak. The café was spare in the communist way, with metal chairs and a large photo of Tito above the bar. Men wearing blue tunics who had finished work for the day were drinking beer, and Ivek and I sat by the window with a nice view of the cement truck. I can picture us there now, drinking beer and trying to communicate, me expressing myself in my newly learned but improving Croatian, he talking with stones in his mouth, so that in the end he might have understood me better than I him. But he was full of good will; he had really nothing else to offer me other than this time together, and I am always happy he took me with him and that we had this brief memorable bonding at a bar in the hills above Srebrnjak.

Due to a lack of men on hand one afternoon, I was asked to hold down a pig’s leg for its slaughter. Normally pigs were killed every fall, but this summer Jana and Dragec had run out of meat. I don’t remember if I knew all day that I was to help, or whether it was a last-minute thing, but I have a clear image in my mind of Dragec in the yard sharpening the knives on a grinding stone that he turned with a foot pedal. He took great care with the long blade.

When the hour approached, Željka went for a walk. “I hate the sound,” she said, “it is one of the most terrible things to hear.” She paused, then added, with a smirk, “but I like pork chops!”

Jana gave me a pair of work pants and old leather shoes, which were too big, and in which my feet swam around. The place chosen to slaughter the pig was in the narrow space between the outdoor kitchen and the woodpile that ran parallel with it. The front door of the pigsty led straight out into that space. Dragec, Milivoj, Miško, and I waited while Jana opened the door and coaxed the pig out with some bread or grain she’d strewn on the concrete. The pig came out hesitatingly and blinking against the sharp light of the day like a prisoner that had been locked up in dark solitary confinement. It was a big animal, 150 kilos. Uncertain, suspicious. It seemed to presage dimly something bad about to happen to it but couldn’t resist the food. Pigs are smart but they never learn. At a gesture from Dragec we were on it. Milivoj and Miško used their weight to heave it on its side and I held a back leg as the pig bucked ferociously and squealed in terror. The sound was like a saw grinding through rusty metal. It bucked under our knees, its ears flapping around, eyes popping out. Dragec tied up its snout with a rope that he’d already tied in a noose, the most precarious moment for him, then when he was ready for Jana to hand him the knife, she was nowhere to be found. He started screaming—What the hell was she waiting for? Maybe the priest to deliver the last rites?—and when I looked up I saw her lying on the ground on her back, the knife beside her. She struggled to her feet and handed Dragec the knife. He drove the blade in, and the squeal rose to a crescendo that finally gurgled out and lapped red against my shoes. Jana had tripped on a shovel that stuck out of the woodpile. Now, after some bickering with Dragec, she sat on a stool by the outdoor kitchen, wiping a tear away and holding her back. The pig lay there, massive and silent. I stood not moving, my heart beating hard.

Jana couldn’t sit there any longer because there was still work to do. The pots of boiling water on her stove had to be emptied into the large cast-iron tub in the middle of the yard, into which we were going to put the pig, and it was going to be scraped of its hairs and cleaned. So back and forth she went, with Miško pouring in the water. Then we lifted the pig and placed it in the tub. There were two chains across the tub so that the pig could later be lifted out of the water cleanly. “Don’t just drop it,” Dragec warned us. After they’d cleaned the body, they hung it upside down on chains from hooks that were embedded in the concrete roof above the outdoor table, and Dragec slit open the belly so the guts fell out in a purple-blue bunch, which he cut out and put in a pail, some of which would be used for sausage casings, some thrown to the cats in the field behind the barn, and some of it thrown away. There was the business of cutting up the pig on the table by the outdoor kitchen—the same table where we’d sat after haying, with Dragec giving orders and Miško giving back directions, and Milivoj, the biggest man there, just following along. The blood was collected to make sausages, and the fat piled together for lard and fried fat bits called čvarci. By then I’d kicked off my shoes, which were soaked with blood, put my gloves on the wood pile, and went to shower. I wanted to get the smell off my body. Afterwards, the smell was off me, but when I came back down it was still heavy in the air as the men worked, and only the next day, after Jana used a corn broom and water on the concrete, and the night dew freshened the air, did it finally go away.

During this period, I explored the area beyond Srebrnjak and Dol, hopping onto the black girl’s bike that had once belonged to Štefek’s younger daughter, and that he sometimes rode to pick up supplies from the store like salt or sugar or flour, stacking them on the front handlebar. I rode to the bottom of Srebrnjak then turned left towards Sveta Nedelja, a large village with two churches, a school, graveyard, grocery store, and some café bars. Before Sveta Nedelja, I passed through the hamlet of Brezje. There, in somewhat ramshackle houses, lived the Ratković clan. The Ratkovići had a bad reputation among people in the area because they were poor and slovenly and were just generally considered to be “trash.” A few of their younger children were playing on the side of the road, some of them barefoot and in underwear. A young woman was roller-skating a hundred metres farther on. I assumed she belonged to the Ratković family, though my first thought when I saw her up close dispelled that possibility. She didn’t look like anyone around here. Her blonde curls, fair skin, now a honey-coloured in mid-summer, and her green almond-shaped eyes and high cheek bones gave her the look of a misplaced gem in the wilderness. She was also cold and standoffish, so that now looking back I don’t think she said a word to me.

In English I began, “Nice evening, eh?” sounding to myself, not for the last time, like an American parody of a Canadian. “Do you live nearby?” No answer. Just skating along. “Do you know English?” I asked. I was under the impression that speaking a foreign language to girls from around here was a big advantage, a sort of distinguishing mark. She gave me a searing, contemptuous look that clearly said “Fuck off.” When English didn’t work, I tried German, my first language. But nothing. So that was that. I got back on my bike and went on to Sveta Nedelja. I felt chastened, sure, but also proud of myself for having for once followed through on the advice Joe first gave me long ago in Maui when he urged me to approach the girl in the orange bikini.

Two days later, I drove to Brezje again and again saw the girl on the road, this time just walking along. Even though I have no memory of it (just a memory of being rejected the first time!), we had a conversation, then another one a few days later, and then made plans to go on a walk to the Marija Magdalena chapel. Teodora Hictaler was her name, Tea as she called herself. Her last name sounded Austrian or German (taler or thaler being the old German currency), so perhaps her ancestors had been officials in the Austro-Hungarian empire that controlled Croatia in the nineteenth century. Her English turned out to be better than anyone’s I’d yet met in the country, totally without an accent, yet she had grown up in Brezje in a little shack by the road with two illiterate peasants who had been given a stipend by the Yugoslav government to raise her. Not right off but later, she told me, “I never knew my father, and my mother was just fifteen when she had me, and too young and immature to take care of me properly. Actually, she was always too immature, even when she was a grown woman. And she became an alcoholic also. She visited me here when I was eight or nine, then afterwards maybe once a year. It was always strange. I felt uncomfortable with this strange person who was my mother. Once, I was still very young, she sat outside our house here under the trees, and every few minutes went inside to the bathroom with her purse. As the afternoon went on, she started to change. Her face got redder and more swollen. She acted strangely. That’s all the little girl that was me knew. Now I know she had liquor in her purse and was drinking secretly in the bathroom. It was terrible!”

On the day of our walk I went down the Srebrnjak road to meet Tea as she walked up from Brezje. She was accompanied by her thirteen-year-old cousin who was visiting. She said he followed her everywhere that summer, like a puppy. That was okay; I wasn’t disappointed, this wasn’t a date exactly, nor was he a gooseberry. Yet her face and those curls, the melody in her voice and her mysterious, somehow tragic presence, left me with an afterglow every time I looked at her.

The three of us climbed the gravel road to the Marija Magdalena chapel. We met no one on the way up. It was very quiet. Swallows darted around telegraphing messages with their flights. The ochre chapel was unlocked so we went inside and, for some reason, jokingly, said a few pretend vows. She told me her grandmother, the woman who had taken care of her for the first years of her life when her mother was unable to, had recently died, and that I was saving her. As we walked back home, the cousin took her hand and placed it in mine. We went down to the bottom of the Srebrnjak road, walking hand in hand. And then we said goodbye.

I saw Tea two more times that summer. I saw her once on the road to Dol with her next door friend, Natalija, a girl three years younger, so sixteen, whose black curly hair made her seem altogether the opposite of Tea, whom I met only this one time and knew nothing about. I couldn’t have known, as she could not have known, the direction her life was going to go, so that when I think of her now as I write and know her story, and see her smiling and happy on this walk with Tea, I want to reach out and shake her and tell her to wake up, tell her she can still turn it around and stay away from all those men. The second time I saw Tea was on the same road, with Natalija again, this time from my vantage point of Vlado’s bedroom window where I was spending time with Željka, listening to his LPs. When I saw the two girls approaching the house at the crossroads, I moved from the window and let them go past. It turned out they were going to Srebrnjak to see me. When they neared the yard of the house an old woman, Željka’s grandmother, Strina Slava, heard them ask for me and, without a word, turned around and went inside and shut the door on them.