Learning to Fly

It would be ten years before I returned to Yugoslavia. My parents gifted me a trip there after I’d graduated from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia with a degree in English. I went on my own because we couldn’t all of us afford to travel. We’d moved to Antigonish a few years before when my mother landed a tenure-track position in the Department of Modern Languages, and because Joe wanted to get the hell out of Edmonton finally. He had never liked its freezing winters or mosquito summers and thought anywhere else would be better, and his real estate business in Edmonton was failing because of the recession in the early 1980s. Little did he know that the cliquishness of small-town Nova Scotia was going to kill his job prospects. (He once applied for a job as a janitor with a local construction company and was told by the boss that he was “overqualified”!) For years, Joe didn’t have work in Antigonish other than cooking and cleaning, taking over the role of housewife, which wasn’t what he had envisioned for himself when he left Edmonton. Later, he worked at a machine shop in Dartmouth (he was a machine fitter by trade), putting in long hours of overtime and sleeping all week in the back of our Chrysler LeBaron station wagon to save money. It was this last decision some people in Antigonish remember well. The editor of The Antigonish Review at the time, George Sanderson, recalled Joe decades later, and told me once when I was at his office about a story I had submitted (it was the same day he handed me a copy of Walker Percy’s essay on the loss of the creature), that what Joe did was quite something. There is a lot to unpack there. The irony was that the more Joe thought he was doing, the more it was all slipping away. But that is another story.

The LeBaron station wagon, by the way, was the same vehicle he and I drove out west in in 1988, me to carry on with my M.A. at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, he to help me along and to find work at another machine shop. We too slept in the car every night on our trip across the USA. Somewhere on a long straight stretch in South Dakota, my foot got heavy on the pedal and the LeBaron hit ninety miles an hour. A highway cop coming the other direction flashed his lights at us, turned around and ticketed us $100. “You can pay me now, or you can wait for the judge in town,” he told us. “Your choice. But the judge is on holidays and ain’t gonna be back ’til next week. Maybe.” Joe was pissed. Nevertheless, he handed the man a hundred-dollar bill. There went the money we’d saved sleeping in the car. We spent the next night in a motel.

Travelling to Yugoslavia by myself for the first time after having graduated that spring gave me a sense of freedom, release, and nervous anticipation. I was tired after my red-eye flight but alert and excited at seeing the villages again. More of the houses were façaded with white plaster this time; that was a difference I noticed, but everything else looked the same. Iron gates around each yard, plum and apple orchards, sunburnt peasants on tractors pulling loads of hay. I saw hundreds of Yugoslav soldiers digging a ditch beside the road for telephone wires. At the turnoff for Srebrnjak the weathered, wooden crucifix at the entrance to the valley was still there, and the road was still gravel. When we got to the house, I saw it was covered by white plaster now. For a moment, I was astonished that the house had been here the entire time I was gone, that the people had been going through each day, working each day as they always had, without me to witness them and bring them to life.

My second cousin, Vlado, had picked me up at the airport. A medical student at the University of Zagreb, he asked me if I wanted to stay at his parents’ place in the nearby village of Jagnić Dol rather than being stuck out there in Srebrnjak—that was basically how he put it, but out of loyalty to my father and the people there and my memories of my past visit I guess (I was even then a creature of habit), I declined his offer.

When we arrived, it was a late Saturday afternoon. Members of the family were sitting around the kitchen table. Strina Slava was on her wooden box, and when she stood up to greet me, kissing me on both cheeks, she seemed small and frail. Mila had gained weight, wore glasses, and didn’t pinch me on the cheek as she had before. Štefek, since I’d had little contact with him the last time, and had only a hazy memory of him, was a figure that was newer and more unfamiliar than the women, yet with his cap, worker’s clothes and strong peasants’ hands, seemed like an archetype as much as a person I didn’t remember well. The two daughters were there with their husbands—the friendly round-headed driving instructor, Miško, and the other one, a less friendly but confident and charismatic loudmouth.

I didn’t know much of the language then, so Vlado translated their questions and my answers. He said, “You should be free to say how you feel. We are honest people, and we say what we think.” For a while I thought there was some irony about his remark about freedom of expression in a country that wasn’t a paragon of free thought, since he was a stalwart Yugoslav, not a nationalist Croat. Joe told me, for example, that after World War Two Štefek’s younger brother was nearly hanged for remarks he allegedly made against the Partisans. But obviously things weren’t so sensitive now, and Vlado probably meant regular thoughts and feelings, not political ones. Joe said, however, that there was never any worry in that house about saying the wrong thing or being “reported” by someone.

The sun was shining through the windows in the white-walled kitchen, which had a white wood stove, a table and chairs and a black-and-white TV in the corner. I felt happy to be there, and even though I didn’t understand much unless Vlado translated, I felt I belonged. A little over-confidently at one point, I asked the loudmouth son-in-law a question for some reason. He was the one who ten years before had eaten the apple I’d picked as a gift for Oma when she was to arrive in Srebrnjak, and that I’d placed on top of a basket of apples in the cellar rather proudly. He had eaten it without knowing its importance to me, but I never forgave him. I asked him if he felt happy, and his taciturn response and dismissive shrug were probably justified, “That’s not something I need to answer.” I wonder whether this question of mine, when he and his wife, Mila’s younger daughter, were going to the coast with their son later that summer, came back to bite me, made him decide he didn’t have room for me and the TV set in their car. As a result, I didn’t make it to the coast that year.

On this same afternoon when I arrived, I noticed some changes to the house. Upstairs was a new bathroom with a toilet and tub. Joe had given Štefek money and he’d finally gone ahead with the construction. I was pleasantly surprised. I remember being worried before I left on this trip about where I was going to wash, and Joe had said, “You’ll just go outside in the back with a pail, and just tell them not to look at you! Nemoj gledati! It will be warm so don’t worry, sonny boy. It’s hot in the summer!” He had a laugh at my expense.

The shower in the tub was connected to a tall water heater with a stove at the bottom. They used dried corncobs for fuel, and every Saturday Mila would start a fire in the late afternoon for her and Štefek’s weekly bath together. Even though there was no closeness between the two of them during the day, not that I ever saw, here was some breaking of bread or whatever each Saturday. Either that or it was more economical to kill two birds with one stone, or to put it differently, wash two bodies with one bucket of corncobs.

Much of my Yugoslavia experience in 1987 was in Srebrnjak and followed a similar pattern. Each morning Mila cooked me a breakfast of fried eggs and cornbread, or žganci, which was corn or wheat meal in chunks slathered with pork grease. Štefek had a bowl of žganci pieces floating in coffee diluted with milk and, like my father, ate with similar concentration and speed. Mila also made me majčina dušica tea (“mother’s soul”) from some flowers that grew in the valley. Often I had a shot of šljivovica after breakfast, a morning custom among men there at that time, and sat outside the front door, buzzed a bit, because I was new to hard liquor, listening to the sounds of the day like the hooting of a dove somewhere and the occasional crow of a rooster, plus the noises from the kitchen as Mila prepared lunch, added wood to the stove, and so on. Smells wafted out through the open window in the late morning: a simmering pot of cabbage, beef or chicken soup, the cornbread cooling on a board on the windowsill or, on some days, meat roasting in the oven.

Now and again I would go inside to chat with Mila and see how lunch was progressing, or I would chug back a glass of water I’d put in the fridge, which caused her to warn me not to drink water so cold, one of the many examples of peasant lore about the body I heard while in Srebrnjak (another was that I should never sit on the ground, even in the summer, because doing so could make me sick). Or I would talk to her through the open window and let her know that Vlado the mailman was coming on his motorbike, or a woman was approaching selling clothing in a wicker basket or a Roma on a horse-drawn wagon looking for scraps of metal. Mila would step outside and yell out, “We don’t have anything.” Around one o’clock she would leave the kitchen, stride out into the yard, and holler up the hill, “Štefek, odi jest,” then return and tell me, “Come and eat, Tony.” Then we would begin without him. Whatever it was we were eating, she would say much the same thing year after year: “Tony, uzmi—take” and I would help myself, and then she would say, “Take some more” or “Why don’t you take some more?” or “Samo ječ—Just eat.” If I complimented her on the food, invariably she would tell me to take more, uzmi još, and then I would reply, “No, thanks,” and she would laugh and say, “Then it mustn’t have been that good.” And I would retort, “How much am I supposed to eat?” Soon after we started eating, Štefek arrived from the hill and told me “Dobar tek—bon appétit,” hung his hat on a hook and washed his hands and then went to the shaving mirror by the front window, combed back the thin strands of his hair and gave himself a final once-over. Then he was ready to eat.

Another part of my day that summer was reading every morning outside the kitchen. I had recently discovered Henry Miller, whose brash, Rabelaisian vulgarity and anti-establishment views were consistent with my own rebellious ideas, which were bookish and never put to practice. The buzz from the šljivovica, a full stomach, the new freedom from my family, the adventure of being in a country that was still new to me, all aligned perfectly with the writing of Henry Miller. I had a paperback of Black Spring with me that summer, and even though it concentrated mostly on Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Paris at the start of the twentieth century, its wildness and effusiveness arrived in my life at the right time. This passage from “A Saturday Afternoon” is typical of the book: “At the St. Cloud bridge I come to a full stop. I am in no hurry—I have the whole day to piss away. I put my bicycle in the rack under the tree and go to the urinal to take a leak. It is all gravy, even the urinal. As I stand there looking up at the house fronts a demure young woman leans out a window to watch me. How many times have I stood thus in this smiling, gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window, her smile crumbling into soft little bits which the birds gather in their beaks and deposit sometimes at the base of a urinal where the water gurgles melodiously.”¹

I did some writing myself too, upstairs in the attic, because it was quiet and had a small table and chair by the dried corncobs piled up to the rafters in one corner, even though the attic became as hot as a sauna by mid-morning.

I didn’t feel any negativity about this intellectual activity of mine from anyone living in that house, and never from the oldest and least educated people there. Instead it was Miško, the driving instructor son-in-law, who remarked, “Reading again?” or “This writing of yours better lead to something” or “What does all this thinking do for you, for your brain? You’re going to hurt yourself with too much thinking.” In retrospect I suspect he was just ribbing me good-naturedly, but at the time I was pissed off at him. He wasn’t my father, was he? but there he was making comments. I lacked the self-confidence of Henry Miller, and Miško’s remarks produced self-doubt in me. I started to stick to my room whenever I wrote or cracked open a book. If I, with all that support for reading growing up, could become self-conscious about it, I wondered how others like me would have fared in this world. How many others were there who had been stifled by the pressure? My mother told me that at some point she had tried to teach Strina Slava the Croatian alphabet after Strina had expressed, with a sigh, the wish to be able to read. Her schooling with my mother didn’t last very long because everyone there made fun of her, and she became too shy to continue.

Another thing I did with regularity that summer was go running; that is, running for exercise. I ran all around the area, especially along the crest of the Srebrnjak hill to the Marija Magdalena chapel. Mila said that someone in Mala Gorica who had seen me running had called me a luđak, a lunatic. Mila’s laughter at my expense reminded me of Joe’s when he mocked me about something. The story had travelled from Mala Gorica and across the hill to Srebrnjak and to Mila’s ears. She hadn’t left her yard, she rarely left her yard except maybe to get her hair permed at the salon in Sveta Nedelja, yet somehow she had heard this bit of gossip as though it had arrived on the wind or had been transported by some mysterious peasant telepathy. The person in Mala Gorica had thought I was crazy because there was no understanding or acceptance among peasants of an activity like running; they thought it was for people with too much time on their hands, too much leisure time, people who didn’t have serious work to do. Plus, what sort of fool runs in the heat when he doesn’t have to?

That summer, as I had before, I followed Strina Slava around the yard while she did her chores. Even though Mila had taken over the heavy work, Strina still contributed. Work never stopped for people here. They worked until they dropped, and when they couldn’t work anymore their family put them on the wood box or on a couch in the kitchen or in the bed upstairs. But Strina was still active and useful. She and I talked a fair amount; I was learning more of the language each day. She chattered on about simple things, talked to the animals she was feeding, told me what she had to do next. She smiled and called me lijepi dečko, handsome boy. I watched her pluck nettles with her bare hands and take them to the barn and chop them with a hatchet. The chopping block was on a table and had a dip in it from all the chopping. She mixed the results with corn grain, went outside, and called, “Puro, puro, puro,” and the turkeys gathered. She watched them eat, laughed at them for their behaviour, and swore at them for their stupidity.

Strina Slava wasn’t treated well by her daughter. I don’t think Mila ever addressed her except to criticize or mock her. For a long time, I thought Mila had inherited this hostility from Štefek, who never looked at Strina or even acknowledged she existed. I don’t think I ever heard them talk to each other. I’d arrived at the conclusion that he thought of her as a third wheel who was more irritating than useful. One time, while Strina was plucking a slaughtered chicken in hot water, she said, a little simply and childishly, “What a beautiful chicken,” admiring its plumpness, I guess. Mila shot back, “Beautiful chicken?! Shut up! It’s a chicken, that’s all it is. Just a damn chicken!” But on other occasions, Strina showed some backbone and ripped off a retort that shut Mila up. “You are wrong to think she was all soft,” Joe told me. “She hated strife, but if she was pushed too far, don’t worry, she could respond.” Mostly her days were spent by herself, either working or resting on her box by the stove. At night, she rubbed šljivovica on her arthritic knees. Every month or so, she spent the night at her daughter’s, over the hill in Dol. This was the house in which Jana lived, Mila’s sister and Vlado’s mother. I can remember Strina there in the summer kitchen, the one separate from the house, cheerfully sitting on a stool or peeling potatoes as Jana cooked or went around the yard doing other chores, and Strina Zora strode in, a strong-legged local gossip with a staved-in toothless face who spoke loudly and turned her head with the sharp nervous movements of a chicken. Mainly women filled the outdoor kitchen with their talk, gossip, and cheerfulness. I think that must have been Strina’s reason for visiting; the mood back home was unfriendly and unpleasant, but here she felt relaxed and comfortable.

I didn’t give much thought to Strina’s situation at the time. Like most young guys, I concentrated mainly on myself. I was just enjoying the summer. I had started to loosen up as I hadn’t so far in my life, didn’t hesitate to talk at a full table of family and friends in my Croatian patois, newly improved by Vlado who came home tired from university but still found time to teach me. I wasn’t afraid to crack a joke or tell a simple story, to set the table on a roar, discovering an ability I didn’t know I had, everyone favourably disposed to me because I wasn’t silent and inhibited. That summer was a turning point in my life given the uncertain, diffident, and even aloof person I’d been in my undergrad years, though the cliquishness of little Antigonish for sure had a role to play in that. Now in this environment with this extended “Yugoslav” family backing me, or at least focussing on me for a few months, I began to change and grow.