When the Sea Is Bluer Brač

“Like a horse back to its stable” was how my mother put it. My father hadn’t been to Yugoslavia since his escape in 1963 so he was eager to return to Srebrnjak, the village of his birth. It was 1969. The three of us had been in France, near Montpellier, where my mother was finishing her doctorate in French literature. He had bought a new white Citroën DS 21 Palas, the car he would later ship to New York on the SS Michelangelo and then drive to Alberta in the winter of 1971. We arrived in Srebrnjak late at night when everyone in the house was asleep. It was raining and muddy and when they were awakened, my mother said, the people looked like a primitive bunch, smelling of the stable. The house had an odour of dank concrete and sour milk and had only one light, which meant we had to go to our bedroom upstairs by candlelight, so my mother was disappointed because my father’s descriptions of Srebrnjak didn’t match her first experience of the place itself.

The next day everything was different, she recalled. The grass was green and shiny from the rain, the sun had come out, the trees were heavy with plums and apples, and the people seemed so friendly. So hardworking, so kind to her. What a difference! Her mood improved from then on. They cooked for us and washed our clothes by hand using water from the well, which freed her of those chores and gave her more time to study. And she didn’t let the inconvenience of the outhouse, located at the end of a narrow corridor between the pig sties and cow stable, spoil the trip for her.

I had memories of this time, which became the stories my mother told me. I chased chickens in the yard and played with two girls who lived next door, Milena and Zdenka. I learned my first Croatian from them and spoke about myself in the ženski rod, the feminine gender, my mother said with a laugh. I had other memories that were entirely my own. When we came home late at night from somewhere, travelling on the pitch-black Srebrnjak road, the car’s headlights lit up the glowing eyes of creatures in the bushes and shone on the white trunks of trees. White eyes and white trees in the sleepy blackness. At some point I figured out that the eyes were those of foxes or cats and the trees were plum trees that had been painted with lime to protect them against rabbits and insects and also to reflect the glare of the spring sun and slow the growth of blossoms when a late frost could kill them.

My memories began in earnest in 1977. I was eleven years old, and I remember flying into Zagreb and seeing the orange-tiled roofs of the houses among the hills, the hills that looked like a carpet bunched up and tied together with grey strings that were the roads. I don’t remember the drive from the airport. However, Srebrnjak stayed with me from the beginning. On each side of the gravel road, which was full of holes and had no streetlights, there were houses of brick with roofs of the same orange tiles I’d seen from the plane, mounds of manure behind the barns, and chickens, ducks and turkeys wandering around dirt yards. Some yards were closed off by iron gates from behind which mangy, unfriendly dogs on chains barked at us as we passed. Narrow bands of wheat and corn went all the way to the top of the hills on each side of the valley.

We arrived at the house where we were going to spend the summer. Located on the left upper part of Srebrnjak, it was a two-storey concrete and brick building set back fifty metres from the road, with a field of cut grass in front, plum and apple trees behind, and a long barn of dark wood and concrete blocks on the right. Chickens and turkeys roamed in the open yard. On the hill were two vineyards. The whole place gave me an airy and wholesome feeling from the start.

The woman who owned the land was Strina Slava (“Aunt” Slava). An important figure in my father’s life, though I didn’t know this in 1977, she had assumed care of him and his two brothers after the death of their father, Josip, in 1943 when he was serving with the Hrvatsko domobranstvo, the Croatian Home Guard, during the Second World War, and after my father’s mother abandoned the boys four years later to marry a man across the hill.¹ When Strina Slava’s husband, my father’s uncle, died soon after of tuberculosis, she became responsible for six kids—my father and his siblings, as well as her own three daughters.

They lived, all of them, in a wooden house part way up the hill. Inside was only a kitchen and a bedroom and they slept in those two rooms. “A lot of us crammed together,” my father remembered. “But it kept us warm in the winter! We had bunks that pulled out from under the beds, and some of us slept in the kitchen.” During the hot months he and his brothers spent their nights in the hay loft of the barn. There was an outhouse, but in the summer he relieved himself outside. “I used two or three leaves to wipe my ass!” They took baths in a barrel that was filled with hot water off the wood stove; kids first, adults last. Because his family was poor, there wasn’t much to eat in the years after the war. “A lot of beans, a lot of potatoes, a lot of fucking žganci! Corn meal and pork grease every day, and meat only on Sundays!” As a result, he acquired the habit of eating fast, which is why to this day he always finishes before the rest of us, but it’s also why he enjoys cooking fine meals, taking his time and savouring the experience, drinking wine as he goes along, overdoing it with all the spices and herbs, his haute cuisine. . . .

A typical peasant woman, Strina Slava in 1977 was small and plump and wore a kerchief knotted at the back of her neck and an apron over her dark skirt. She lived in the new house with one of her three daughters and her daughter’s husband, and even though the land was legally hers, she didn’t seem in charge of anything anymore. While we ate at the table, she sat on the box by the wood stove, either eating from the plate in her lap or waiting for us to finish before she went to the table and had her almost surreptitious, guilty meal.

Strina Slava was nice to me, always smiled when she saw me, and showed me where the apples were in the cellar. I used to follow her around the yard. One time, I still remember it, she caught hold of a chicken and went with it behind the barn. I peeked around the side and saw her holding the squawking fluttering body and doing something to it. I knew, but didn’t know, what she was doing. A weird feeling filled me. Strina, who was a shy and gentle woman, had no problems cutting the head off a chicken. And yet I can remember her feeling pity for some of the animals too, like for the pigs that had been castrated without anaesthetic and that afterwards were let out in the yard to recover and to feed.

If I spent time with Strina Slava and developed a closeness to her, her son-in-law, Štefek Juranko, was the most removed from my memory. He was a distant figure I saw cleaning out the cow dung in the barn or scything grass in the evenings with a wicker basket on his back. As far as I can remember, he never addressed me. I don’t think he had patience or time for kids. I was just the son of my father; that was about it. He was a lean, handsome man of medium height, clean-shaven, with a hooked nose and sharp eyes. He always wore a cap, except for meals. The Štefek I saw spent most of his life working around the place, though I know now he also had a job at an aluminum factory, called Top, in Kerestinec, and had to walk the three kilometres there and back. In later years rode a bicycle. Like many Yugoslavs, he was a factory worker in the mornings, a peasant in the afternoons and evenings. I didn’t see him socialize much at the kitchen table after a meal or relax outside the house during the summer, as his wife Mila did (Strina Slava’s daughter and my father’s cousin).

Mila in those years was a thin, gristly woman with a sarcastic laugh who would pinch me on the cheek with her strong, chapped hands as a show of affection, which hurt and which I dreaded. Her lively mind and dry sense of humour eventually made her an interesting and central figure in my life in Srebrnjak, and I see now that her personality had a lasting impact on my father. But in 1977 I noticed only her physical self. I saw her cook, work in the garden, clean the pigsties and milk the cows. She always walked slowly towards the barn, in no rush to get there. She trudged even more slowly up the hill to the cornfield for an afternoon of hoeing. If there was any resentment about the direction her life had gone, there was to me no hint of it other than her body language; it would take many years for me to get a fuller picture of Mila’s attitude, and that only near the very end.

I spent much of my time running around the place. I ran through the family’s two vineyards, and I ran on top of the hill, from where I could see the orange roofs of Srebrnjak and the shimmering white dots in the distance: Zagreb. Then I ran back down again for a drink of cool well water from the steel pail that sat on a stool in a side room. Whenever I was on the hilltop, I noticed how quiet it was. Just the wind in the branches and an occasional rooster crowing in the valley. If I was in the cornfield, hiding out from everyone and spying on the goings-on below, I could hear the stalks rustling. That was all.

I wore overalls or black lederhosen that my maternal grandmother had brought back from Germany the year before, and a racoon hat I soon ditched because of the heat. The bowie knife I wanted to bring with me on the plane was confiscated by airport security for some reason. I imagined myself a combination of Davy Crockett and Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings.

A precocious reader, I’d already finished The Lord of the Rings the summer before, reading for hours on the front steps of my grandparents’ house in west Edmonton in the blue afternoon shade of the big spruces my grandfather had planted. That world arrived in Srebrnjak in the person of my grandmother, Helene Kristine Luise Panzer (née Bartschek), who visited Yugoslavia in 1977. I still find it strange to imagine her transported from her Crestwood home, where she had become a permanent fixture for me, like the house itself. However, there is a photo of Oma, as I called her, in a white sleeveless dress and yellow terry towel hat holding an umbrella and standing by a sun-drenched field in Srebrnjak. She had come up to watch Štefek and Mila rake hay. The photo shows she didn’t really fit into that world. That umbrella! But my father thought she did belong, in a sense. He said she belonged because she was willing to work however she could, like taking care of my little sister and me and helping in the kitchen with the cooking and afterwards with the dishes, which was an elaborate business, dumping the leftovers into the slop pail for the pigs, then using pails and plastic containers to wash up and then throwing the dirty water into the grass on the side of the house. I remember too how everyone told me that Oma was dobra, that she was a good woman. A part of this assessment was that she was willing to work, though she was under no obligation to work at all according to local customs when it came to guests.

With Oma there that summer, and other members of the Croatian family showing up, the kitchen became too crowded for our midday meal, so we ate outside. Many of these Sunday-type meals began with chicken or beef soup ladled out of big pots, the noodles in the soup having been prepared from fresh dough in the morning; this was followed by boiled meat with horseradish sauce, which I detested at the time; then a main course of roast pork or fried chicken pieces in a breaded coating, which I liked better, with pommes-frites or wide mlinci noodles fried in grease and bowls of sliced cabbage salad and green salad and plates piled with fat spring onions fresh from the garden and a basket of thick-hewn cornbread. Afterwards came cheese or apple strudel. The strudel appeared on big plates as if out of the blue, but I knew from my time later in Srebrnjak that Mila or Strina had grated the apples in the morning and rolled the dough flat on the kitchen table (the same table we were using outside), which was lightly dusted with flour. Then they had sprinkled oil on the dough and billowed it like a sheet in the wind before adding the grated apples and cheese and rolling up the dough in long sausages, ready to be put in the oven.

As I write, a memory comes back of my three-year-old sister refusing to eat any of the food in Srebrnjak, and my mother hitting upon the idea to mince some chicken liver and mix it with rice and lie to my sister that the result was “normal” Yugoslavian rice. I can still hear my father discounting my mother’s worry, telling her, “Listen, if she gets hungry, she’ll eat. Don’t you worry. Quit your panicking!” Even then, though I didn’t understand it at the time, my father’s loud mockery and my mother’s aversion to it, and her dismissing him with an annoyed click of her tongue, hinted already at my parents’ different personalities and incompatibility.

After lunch, when the afternoon waned and there was less movement around the place, except Štefek with the wicker basket scything grass in the yard under the plum trees, I used to kick a soccer ball around. I played by myself, making moves and deking imaginary defenders. Strina Slava, sitting outside with my mother, giggled, covering her mouth with her hand to hide her teeth, and said, “Our Tony never walks anywhere!” My father, though he had coached our Parkview community league team to the Edmonton city championship three years before, was too busy talking politics and drinking wine to waste time playing with me in Srebrnjak. I can see him there now, glass in one hand, other hand gesticulating, probably explaining how great Canada was and how crappy Yugoslavia was. But as a boy he had played here too. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, he and the other kids had made their ball out of pantyhose stuffed with newspaper and tied together with string so that the game only seemed to have begun before the ball disintegrated. If there wasn’t enough food, there sure as hell wasn’t any money to buy a real soccer ball!

I want to add here, before going any further, that everyone in Srebrnjak knew my father as “Joža,” an informal version of “Josip” (Joseph). My mother, however, called him “Joe,” as did all the kids on the Parkview Charlie Browns, and as I did too. I started to call him Joe because I had been influenced by some boyhood friends who lived across the alley from my grandparents—two brothers who addressed their artist professor parents from England by their first names, a habit that rubbed off on me for some reason. My father never corrected me. “Joe” he became and “Joe” he has always remained.

Near the end of our stay in 1977, Joe invited members of his family and their descendants to a pig roast. Among them was his half-brother, Ivek, one of the boys left behind with Strina Slava. Ivek never got to know either of his parents. His own mother died a few days after he was born, and his and Joe’s father had died in the war. His second mother, Joe’s birth mother, abandoned him for a man across the hill. And because there was no room in the little peasant house, he was forced to leave the only home he had known and move in with his grandfather in Rakitje. Yet he held things together. He got married, had kids, and lived a good life in Yugoslavia. Three years older than Joe, he had receding black hair, a fleshy nose, and a purplish complexion from drinking that his summer tan couldn’t conceal. He took the time occasionally to talk to me, and when he spoke, he mumbled his words as though he’d just been at the dentist. Even when I got to know the language better, I had trouble understanding what he said. Mila, who had grown up with him, told me once that Ivek always had “stones in his mouth!”

Also at the pig roast was Joe’s cousin from nearby Jagnić Dol, another Štefek Juranko. His character, however, was quite different from that of the Štefek Juranko who lived in Srebrnjak. He was a jovial man with laughter in his eyes and a round, dimpled Santa Claus nose who had a ready bag of jokes and stories in the company of others and poked fun at his wife and argued politics with his daughter. He kept rabbits in a hutch and owned a vineyard in the upper part of Srebrnjak. In his poorer years, back in the 1960s, he stretched out his pale wine so that he could sell it. It was Štefek from Jagnić Dol who left a mark forever on Joe’s friend from Srebrnjak, Tonček Juranko, by slicing off the two middle fingers of his left hand with an axe when they were chopping wood as boys. “Don’t worry, just hold the wood steady,” Štefek had said. A cruel retribution came back to hurt Štefek in his later years when he was suffering from diabetes and had to have his toes amputated, then both feet, and eventually both legs. But to the end he was optimistic, Joe remembered, and clung to life.

At the pig roast, too, was one of Mila’s two daughters, Marica, and her husband Miško, an amiable, shirt-off-the-back kind of guy whose principles and life lessons sometimes bordered on authoritarian dogma. Miško stood maybe 5'4", and even back in 1977 didn’t have much hair, but did sport copious 1970s-style sideburns along the edges of his round head and had a gap between his front teeth. He taught driving in Samobor and drove a white Volkswagen beetle. He was a registered communist, though I didn’t know this at the time, and kept a golden bas-relief of Tito on a wall in his house. He and his wife came to Srebrnjak every day, year after year, to help on the hill or in the garden. By contrast, Mila’s other, younger, daughter and her husband arrived each Sunday for a meal, showing up with empty baskets and leaving with baskets filled with eggs, milk, cheese, and meat, as though they’d come to a grocery store. It was this younger daughter’s husband who helped himself to a big apple I’d picked from the tree in the backyard and put in a wicker basket in the cellar as a present for Oma.

By the end of my Srebrnjak summer I was at home in the green fecund world of northern Croatia, with its rolling hills and head-high corn rustling in the wind, and with the plums that had already fallen to the ground stored in barrels for distillation. I’d become used to all the sounds of Srebrnjak also: the crowing of roosters first thing every morning and throughout the day; the sleepy clucking of hens and the cries of swallows that flew in and out of the barn; the pigs grunting and squealing when they were about to be fed; and the hooting of an owl somewhere distant (which wasn’t an owl, it turned out, but a dove). All these sights and sounds of the summer in Srebrnjak became embedded in my mind. And so that is why my first trip to the alien landscape of the coast, especially to my first Croatian island, made such an impact on me as a kid.

For the green boy of 1977, the island of Brač was exotic. Momentously, for me, it was the first island I ever visited, and vivid impressions stayed with me long afterwards—the fierce quality of the sun’s light in the hot afternoons, the iridescent sea with its million black sea urchins, and the cobbled streets of old towns where donkeys dozed in the shade. It was a place like none I had seen before. My openness to adventure coincided perfectly with my arrival on an island, as though islands invited new experiences and greater adventures than the mainland, as if the ferry that sailed me across had taken me into a new world. And it was a new world, not only in the sense that I’d never seen it before, but because it was set apart from the land near it. As one Croatian writer put it, typically “you do not go to an island by road, you do not approach it on foot. You do not leave an island as you leave a village or a city. You suddenly put on shore, descending on an island like a seagull. You drop off an island just as the island itself dropped off from the shore and just as we disembark from a boat: only over a temporary, narrow and swaying bridge which is and yet is not a bridge.”² So my feeling of adventure and discovery, which everyone knows is part of travelling anywhere, seemed concentrated into that first island experience. And the islands of Croatia in general called to me for years afterwards towards the end of every long winter or on those grey spring days when the mounds of snow got black and ugly, and when I longed to escape.

To get to Brač in 1977 we drove south from Zagreb along the Adriatic Sea in a white ’72 Citroën, similar to the white ’69 DS 21 Palas we still owned in Edmonton. There was no air conditioning, and the windows were shut because Oma was travelling with us and was worried she would catch a cold.

“Guck mal wie ich schwitze,” she told us, wiping her forehead and showing us her wet hand. Then she would say, “Es zieht hier.” “It’s drafty here. If the windows are open, I could get sick.”

“You’re sweating because the windows are closed,” Joe, answered. “If we opened them, it would be cooler.”

“I’m a seventy-four-year-old woman, and I think I know what is best for me,” she said. “I have been around a little longer than you. What would happen if I got sick? Do you want me to catch pneumonia?”

There was only one right response to this comment, and I think it was my mother who answered quickly. So, with every window shut except the driver’s one, which Joe left open just an inch for a “little fresh air,” we suffered penitently in the stifling heat the rest of the way. Naturally, it took us most of the day to arrive in the city of Split, from where ferries sailed to the islands, since we were forever slowing to a crawl behind convoys of trucks and campers and tourist buses on the Magistrala Highway that wound along precarious cliffs from Istria to Dubrovnik. Joe used to mock the Yugoslav communists for celebrating the highway as though it were one of the greatest engineering feats since the construction of the Great Wall of China. “And whaaat,” he would say, drawing out his words as he did when he was mocking something, “and whaaaaat. A road that’s no bigger than the one from Rakov Potok to Jastrebarsko, and that takes you all day to get from A to B. Big fucking deal!”

I don’t remember much else about our road south except our stop at a Roma camp on the side of the highway, where a mangy brown bear was on show. In those days this was a common sight in Yugoslavia. The bear was muzzled, had a ring in its nose by which it was chained to a stake, and was forced by his master, a wizened old man with a leather face, baggy trousers and a whip in his belt, to get up on its hind legs and dance a few steps. Tourists could pay for a photo of themselves with the bear, but my mother didn’t want to reward the man’s mistreatment of the animal, and Joe didn’t want to give the man any money, so no picture of that day exists.

After the bear, we made it to Split, Dalmatia’s largest city, and from there we sailed to Brač. On deck, we were hit alternately by wafts of fresh sea air and cigarette smoke, a combination you can still count on in Dalmatia. We could see the blue-green island in front of us and behind us, the massive grey wall of the Mosor mountains on the mainland rearing over Split. In half an hour we were on the island. On a rough gravel road we ascended to a plateau. The land was dry, covered by olive groves and pine scrub and rock walls, and soon we descended the southern side of Brač, where we saw the Adriatic glitter in evening sunshine, and the long blue shadowy back of Hvar rising from the sea like a prehistoric beast.

Our stay in Brač wasn’t notable for the resort in Bol, or our hotel, a rectangular communist structure typical of tourist spots in the former Yugoslavia with its big, framed photo of President Tito in the lobby, or our spartan, white-washed room. It was Bol’s famous beach, Zlatni Rat (Golden Horn), a curving peninsula pointing into the green and blue water of the southern Adriatic that made our trip memorable. Anyone who sees it for the first time will agree it is a stunning beach. Yet, to my eyes, Zlatni Rat wasn’t what it was cut out to be. It was crammed with tourists and there were cigarette butts and garbage everywhere. Plus, the sight of middle-aged German Hausfrauen greased heavily with suntan lotion, their breasts there for everyone to see, was an uncomfortable one for a sheltered kid from a chilly Canadian suburb of the 1970s.

To the boy in 1977 the beach was more beautiful in photographs, especially ones from the air, than it was on the ground. Later, I found this experience of disappointment confirmed in an essay by Walker Percy called “The Loss of the Creature.” His main example is a contemporary sightseer’s reaction on visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time. Unlike Garcia Lopez de Cardeñas, the first European to encounter the canyon, no one can experience all the awe of its visceral reality because it has been taken over by the “symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind.”³ All the photographs, travel pamphlets, as well as the name “Grand Canyon” itself, have established an image of the canyon long before the traveller ever actually reaches it.

In Walker Percy’s example the pictures precede the reality, but I wonder if the reverse is possible too. In my case, not knowing anything about Zlatni Rat beforehand, I experienced the loss of the creature in Percy’s sense afterwards, after seeing tourist brochures of Bol and thinking to myself that pictures of the beautiful empty beach taken from up high didn’t really look like the thing itself. The beach seemed sandy from a distance, for example, when it was really made of stone shingles. Tourists, poor fools, were going to come all this way and be disappointed.

The upshot for Walker Percy when it comes to travelling is that an original experience is no longer possible, in the sense of an experience unfiltered and untouched by the symbolic complex. This would seem even truer since the arrival of the Internet, which floods us with information about a destination, exhausts its unique properties and lays bare its secrets. And it seems most true especially when it comes to famous places. But, as Percy himself goes on to write, you can try to recover the canyon by avoiding all the facilities for seeing the canyon, leaving the beaten path, approaching the canyon from a different angle, or you could try to see the object anew by deliberately searching for the most beaten track of all, a dialectical savouring of the familiar as the familiar. Or, more simply (and maybe this is what has guided me in the pages that follow), a traveller can take the position that even familiar, noisy and well-trodden locations reveal hidden images of themselves if you know how to look for them.

Here is an example of Percy’s symbolic complex at work, the apocryphal story about Brač—the myth that the entire White House in Washington is made of Brač’s white alabaster limestone or, to put it in the terms of local jingoism, that a relatively unknown island like Brač is important to a great country like America. Once you hear this story, you come to the island with a different attitude than you had before. And once you learn that the story is not true, your views change again. Even though some well-known structures around the world, including Diocletian’s Palace in Split and Canada’s Vimy Ridge Memorial in Flanders, are constructed from Brač’s limestone, the White House is not. It is built out of Aquia Creek sandstone from Virginia, which is grey-brown and was only later painted white.⁴

Oma sat in the shade of the pines along Zlatni Rat while we roasted on the packed beach with thousands of loud, flaccid, partly nude Germans who had driven south in campers and were settled in equally congested RV parks. The water was beautifully turquoise at the edges where it met the land, but the beach was hot and painful on my winter-soft feet, and I concluded that overall Pigeon Lake near Edmonton, Alberta, where I was born, was just as nice. Had I gone a few hundred metres farther along the coast, as I did years later, I would have thought differently. There, in rocky inlets, the water taps out a gentle rhythm against the white pebbled shore, and from the pine trees the vigorous clacking of cicadas rises from the forest and floats out to sea like the whirring of summer popsicle sticks on the spokes of a thousand bicycles.

A body experiences a different degree of pleasure lying on one of these small beaches than it does by a Prairie lake, probably one more akin to the experience in the South Pacific. The water is pleasant, almost too warm to be refreshing, but with the sun’s heat against your skin and the aromas of the pine forest and the sea around you and the beat of cicadas, your body is almost perfectly in tune with the Dalmatian world. I remember another island that we visited a few years later, Maui, which was exotically fresh and distant from my normal world and my past self, an island whose sun and ocean all complemented my trip to Brač as though it and Brač belonged to the same chain of warm-water islands, and even though remote from each other in distance and geography, were linked naturally within my personal islands experience, becoming fused in my thoughts and dreams. It was my young age too, when I first touched down in the Pacific, that embedded a certain attitude about the world into my island journeys to Croatia, most of which took place years later when I was older, much older. It injected all those later trips with the same joy of physical youth, the realistic (it seemed) impossibility of aging, decrepitude, and death that I knew at some other level would come soon enough. I was just sixteen, at that stage of my life when a curvy girl in an orange bikini caught my imagination and sent me off on fantastic daydreams, but when I still didn’t have the guts to approach her. Joe egged me on futilely, “You’ll be sorry one day, sonny boy, just you wait.” I’d been landlocked in a new, sterile suburb where the trees hadn’t grown yet. Maui, by contrast, was surrounded by the vast Pacific, and its great waves and beaches were warm, beautiful, and full of life. It gave me a sense of new possibilities. Anyone who has travelled here from a Canadian city in winter understands what I mean so I say nothing new, but for me arriving at Kahului airport became a memorable travel moment.

There’s the opposite scenario—a traveller who comes from a benign climate, steps into the hostile wintry air of a northern region and experiences a shock to the body. This is what happened to Tonček Juranko, Joe’s boyhood friend from Srebrnjak who flew into Edmonton on a freezing howler of a night in November 1970, still wearing the patent-leather shoes and sports jacket he’d become accustomed to in Rouen. Joe had tempted him to western Canada with talk of steak two inches thick and plentiful jobs that paid well (five bucks an hour!), but he knew he’d made a mistake the second he went outside. He said the icy air froze his throat and seized up his lungs and he couldn’t breathe. He went right back to the ticket counter to ask about a return flight. Of course there was no return flight, not right away, so he was forced to stay a few days. When he arrived at Oma’s house, she pulled him out of the cold and the snow and drew a bath for him. It was ironic, hilarious even, that the very person who had convinced him to leave France for Edmonton, Joe, was nowhere near the place that winter, but instead was enjoying the French Riviera in Palavas-les-Flots, not far to the south of Montpellier, where my mother was completing her doctorate. Tonček’s temporary visit led to a few self-imposed, depressed weeks. He found he couldn’t just up and leave for fear of being called a quitter and disappointing Joe, who was a big brother figure to him. His entry-level job as a machinist paid him just $2.50 an hour, not the five dollars he’d been promised, yet his stay stretched out impossibly to a few months, and then a few more months, and then a few years. Of course, he’s been in Edmonton ever since . . .

While I spent my days on the beach in Maui, Oma, who was with us on another vacation, sat on a picnic bench under the palm trees. She smiled at me when I came up, sweeping her arm across the scene, “Oh wie herrlich, Tony! How glorious!” And yet, despite the beauty around us, her thoughts invariably returned to her native Schleswig-Holstein and to memories of her family. When she remarked how I enjoyed the water, she got to thinking about her older brother, Otto, who liked to swim too. Pictures of the thatched roofs of Großenbrode and the sand dunes of the cool Baltic coast swept over her and she was back in 1912 with her brother. Otto had no fear of the water, and swam in all conditions, even where he wasn’t supposed to, like under the gate in the harbour and out to sea. The little girl watched him go, a pale phosphorescent flash in a blue-grey sea, watched him as he struck out with confident strokes. He was a real athlete, and a good boy, such a good boy, Oma told me, with blond hair and blue eyes, a typical northern German.

I have a black-and-white photo of Otto in uniform wearing his sailor’s cap, with the name of his division on the band. He was eighteen. Now when I look at him, I don’t see myself, but my son, who is just as blond as Otto, and who could have been his younger brother. Like Otto, he too likes to take physical risks, and isn’t afraid of the ocean. And when I see him dive off some rocks on a beach in Nova Scotia and descend to the bottom, then resurface brandishing a lobster, I think a bit of Otto must be inside of him.

Of course, these thoughts could not have come to me as I sat with Oma on the bench above the beach under the palm trees. I was bored of her stories because I’d heard many of them before, but I was loyal to them also because I knew she was old and her health wasn’t good. She had suffered an aneurysm five months be-fore and had nearly died. Her hair hadn’t quite grown back fully where it had been shaved. And even though she always brought a book with her to the beach—Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann—she never managed to get beyond the first page. The past, though, always seemed to come back easily to her.

As we sat on her bench, she told me the rest of Otto’s story. An irony of his life was that the boy who could swim so well died at sea. During the Battle of Jutland, around three in the morning on 1 June 1916, the SMS Pommern was torpedoed by the British destroyer Onslaught. Otto and 838 other crewmen went down in the dark with the ship. The loss for Oma was still fresh, and it crossed the decades and arrived here, on a glorious day, as the blue waves rolled in and the sounds of children playing reached her on her bench.

“Ach, Tony, meine Mutter, meine arme Mutter sie wollte sterben.” Her mother, she said, had wanted to die.

After telling me the story, Oma was quiet for a while, then went back for lunch, and I took a last swim. With new, special vigour I threw myself against the waves and dove to the bottom where the sun on the corrugated surface cast flickering shadows and I rode one wave after another, imagining as I did so that I was swimming under the gate and out to sea, like Otto, with confident strokes. In those moments the afternoon sun shone harder and with more heat than before, and the blue of Maalaea Bay was bluer than ever. Later, when I was tired, I sat on the bench above the beach and, in the place where Oma had been before, I took a last look around. I tried to memorize the scene, the blue sea, the clouds, to remember all the little things—my habit when I was leaving a place for good. I stayed for a while, then I picked up my towel and started back.

So, in that moment, Maallaea Bay was for me what the Adriatic Sea would always be, a place that made me feel good to be alive. The hedonistic attraction of the coast was obvious, but even the Croatian islands’ tough arid country on summer afternoons when the candent sun beats every living thing into submission, and when the wooden doors and windows in towns and villages are shut tight, gave me the same feeling of the marrow of life. More than once I wandered out in midday, sometimes under the pressures of my writing, at other times for no other reason than the craziness of youth. Each of these walks was different yet the same: a country road alongside a vineyard or a meadow of lavender or a garden; swallows skimming over the ground, carving the warm blue air; olive trees, stooped and gnarled, cantankerous, their dusty leaves quivering, silver underneath; corridors of black pines along a sea walk carpeted by brown needles, the lean of the trees telling the direction of the prevailing wind, and white clouds schooning on the horizon, heading out to sea. And always, the Adriatic in its usual daytime summer mood, green near shore and deeper blue farther out, perhaps torn with patches of white if the wind was up, but always pleasantly cooling on my body, on my sun-blasted head.