A Slower Tempo Hvar

When next I went to Srebrnjak, my fourteen-year-old son Lucas travelled with me. He hadn’t wanted to go the summer before. “What am I supposed to do there?” he’d asked. “It’s gonna be boring. Walking in the hills? Yeah right, dad.” This year I told him, “Deda Joe has a .22. Ivek Mikek, the guy he escaped with from Yugoslavia in 1963 gave him one. It belonged to his brother. You can maybe use it—there are pheasants.” As an afterthought, another temptation, I said, “Oh yeah, and you can have crispy boar like Asterix and Obelix, or crispy pig. Down there in Rakov Potok, they roast them all day long.” He said, “Okay, but there’s only two things I want to go to Croatia for: the roast pig and the .22. Don’t think I’m gonna have any fun besides that.”

We flew into Frankfurt and drove south through Bavaria, then the next day through the Austrian Alps, as I had the year before. It was a pleasure for me to see everything through the eyes of my son. That was a difference in my trip this time. I looked at every experience through him: The incredible vistas, the cars that tore past us on the Autobahn, the schnitzel, the life-sized crucifix with the painted blood in the room where we had our continental breakfast in a village on the Chiemsee.

Many of his activities in Srebrnjak were layered with my own over the years, so that when I observed him, I saw myself too. When he went for a run on top of the hill, I thought of myself back in 1987 doing the same. When he did planks or sprints in the cool evenings on the street, or push-ups, it reminded me of my own discipline and training when I used to run fartlek intervals way back when. Joe said, “He doesn’t need to do this. I have plenty of stone he can move to get strong. Plentyyyyy!” Not everything Lucas did reminded me of myself, though. With the sticks and thirty pucks we’d brought, he shot half an hour every day at a makeshift net my father had built. The plastic on it tore through right away and I ended up running in the grass with a pail to collect the pucks. But when Lucas rode the dirt jumper I’d bought him and drove on the road and around the place, launching jumps over the flower bed on the son-in-law’s land next door, which caused the man to have a fit, I revisited my own bike rides down the Srebrnjak road, relived my own departures, returns and adventures. When Lucas sat at the table for a meal with guests who didn’t know English, sat there a little stiffly and not saying anything, I remembered myself in similar shoes all those years ago. They were strange for me, these double experiences; haunting but pleasurable too.

I didn’t feel old that summer, didn’t feel the pressing reality of time having gone by. Every day brought certain duties, so I was satisfied living within the structure that came with them. And yet there were times, especially when I started to write, when a stark awareness of the passage of time stung me. When I thought how far in the past the past actually was. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? That’s when I felt like stomping harder on the pedals and tearing down the road faster. . . .

In that frame of mind, to push back the years a little and to test myself under the heft of a full summer sun, I went on a long bike ride from Srebrnjak into the Samobor Hills.

I also wanted to experience the country up close again. I hadn’t been on a bike here in years. I missed exploring the villages, seeing the little things you don’t see driving in a car.

What I found was that with every kilometre as I rode deeper into rural Croatia, I was also ticking back the years, back to an earlier time.

The hot day was filled with summer life—birdsong on all sides, a weedwhacker snarling in a field somewhere, sparrows in swarms looking for bits of gravel on the paved roads and clearing out of the way at the last second when I rode through.

The severe hill from the main road to Marija Magdalena gave me a great view of the sharp peak in the blue distance, the medieval ruins of Okić and, beyond that, the Žumberak hills and Slovenia. That was the direction in which I was riding. A memory of walking to the chapel with Tea returned to me; standing together inside the church and making those pretend vows; then our walk down the Srerbrnjak road, hand in hand. I felt myself transported back into the moment again, and yet, as I stood there leaning on my bike, swimming in the nice feeling of it all, my memory seemed too beautiful to be real, like a vision in which I had been dreamed into life by someone else.

But the physical world was solid and just as I remembered it. A vineyard near the chapel clung to the steep sides of the next valley, Bušićka. Empty plastic bottles, as always, had been cut open and placed on the pointed poles so they would rattle when the wind blew, to scare off birds. A wooden wine klet with a concrete terrace and wooden benches was at the top of the vineyard. (Later, I learned that the klet belonged to none other than the son of Kata Deak, the sister of Draga Husta, and that a few years later it would be burned down in retribution by the son of the woman with whom he was alleged to have had an affair.)

Two roads diverged and I took the one of rough clay and stones into Bušićka. Images returned to me of pitchforking hay onto a wagon here twenty-five years ago. Slavko and John Deery. The ride back to the barn on top of the swaying wagon. The view from on high. No worries, no thoughts about the future. Those were the days!

Driving my bike west into the afternoon sun, a farrow of white clouds piled above the hills, I came across three roads that gave me the exact same option—climb or go back—and I began to climb. When I saw a hale elderly guy walking towards a café, I shouted to him, “These hills have grown since last year,” to which he answered with a wave, “And the bar always seems farther!”

A sharp, brutal incline followed. From there I turned left towards the village of Galgovo, then I passed Nataša’s bar where some fans were gathering before a soccer game, then the fire hall, inside which men were socializing, and then on past a concrete soccer court where kids were booting around a ball.

Beyond that lay the country. Head-high corn, a wide field of nodding daisies and buttercups and chamomile, a churring of insects, swallows skimming the surface of the land. Sliding off on a westerly current was the same brown hawk as always. A linden tree stood on one side of the road across from a tiny chapel called Sveto Trojstvo, which had a bell and was inscribed with “M. Ž. 1907,” possibly the name of the builder.

I rode deeper into the Samobor Hills. The new Croatia hadn’t made many inroads here. In the village of Konščica, perched on a very steep hill, stood a sagging wooden house in which someone still lived, and an old barn covered by faded blue plaster with two cows inside.

Following a sharp descent through thick woods where the temperature dropped pleasantly, I hit the killer hill to Klake and, right by the village sign, as I bent over my bike to recuperate, I met a seventy-nine-year-old villager called Vilim Razum on a red Zetor tractor by his vineyard. “I used to be a master glassblower at the crystal factory in Rude,” he told me, “and now I just mess around here.” Vili, as he was called, told me he had various grapes—graševina (“Welschriesling”), muscat, and kardinal (a red variety)—and said he usually produced a few hundred litres of wine every fall. Vili liked to talk and had a long memory. When I explained who my family was, to my astonishment he remembered my grandmother’s husband, Husta.

After our conversation, I rode the twisting lane through the rest of Klake, a tidy village of newly façaded and well-kept wooden houses, then I turned left towards Okić through more thick woods where there are wild boar, foxes, and deer. The castle at the top is the blue peak I had always seen on those walks around Srebrnjak.

Onward to Kotari as the candent globe of the sun began to sink towards the big western hills. I was soaking wet and tired, but I pedalled on. I wasn’t rushing, wasn’t trying to test myself any longer, or trying get to the end of my journey faster. I knew the hills had beaten me, there were no two ways about it, so I just settled down into a steady rhythm and enjoyed the ride.

I passed plum orchards, the plums already covering the ground, waiting to be collected; I saw freshly cut firewood stacked everywhere and, at the top of the village, in the open space where there was a bus stop, the view of mountainous forest-covered hills rolling on to the west like waves pushed to the shore by ceaseless tides. I felt the same quickening of pulse as I had on top of Vis, the feeling of being on the summit of an island surrounded by the sea. In deep, gorge-like valleys covered by deciduous trees were more villages of the kind I had already seen. A large peak to the west was called Japetić where there was a mountaineering hut and restaurant. From there you could see the highest point in the Žumberak on the border with Slovenia, Sveta Gera, and then on a clear day the highest mountain in the Julian Alps and all of the former Yugoslavia, Triglav.

Samobor was an orange pointillistic shimmer in the distance below. I headed there, passing more small villages, and arrived finally at Samobor’s main square, where I collapsed into a chair and had a beer and watched the crowds. I was soaking wet, and my legs were fried. I would have happily stayed there the rest of the evening, had more beer, and watched the people go by. I thought of calling Joe to pick me up. But I still had the last leg home and I felt I should find it inside me to finish the ride up under my own power . . . the final ride back home through flatland and wide fields and a long straightaway near Kerestinec where fireflies in the growing dusk danced on the edge of the road.

That summer, Joe, Lucas, and I drove south to the island of Hvar. Joe was in a good mood. He was looking forward to our trip because his grandson had finally come to Croatia. We three had never gone on a trip together before. And so, on the ferry, he had a few celebratory drinks, periodically taking long slugs of his white wine from a plastic container he kept in a cooler. I cut up sausage and cheese. Joe took more slugs of wine and then, all of a sudden, began to remark on the legs of the women sitting across from him. In English, but a little too loudly, he said, “Those are great legs; you’re not going to find much better legs, let me tell you, when they point up at the sky!” Lucas shook his head and laughed. I passed Joe a piece of cheese. “Here, eat this. This will keep your mouth shut.”

We sailed into the town of Stari Grad through a long fjord as the sun beat down on the dark blue glittery sea. The hills around were thickly covered by dark pines, and here and there was a house strung off a thin gravel road.

When I first sailed to Hvar back in May 1996, the scene had been different. It was night, and a wildfire on the northern tip of the island lit the night air, varnishing the black surface of the sea. Among only four or five passengers on the ferry, I had stood on deck taking in the scene. A heavy cool wind had begun to blow.

At dawn the next morning, the wind rattled the wooden shutters of the room I had rented. The shutters banged insistently for a while and kept me awake, so finally I threw them open and looked over the faded terracotta roofs of Stari Grad through the pale morning light. Founded by the Greeks in 385 BCE, at which time it was called Pharos, Stari Grad (“Old Town”) felt like a small Dalmatian town typical of those island settlements secondary in importance and size to the main ones which, on this island, is Hvar.

It was a cool Sunday morning, the northern bura still driving through. Stari Grad’s cobbled streets were empty. The shutters were sealed tight, and church bells, shredded by the wind, tolled somewhere in the heart of the town, ringing parishioners to mass. I walked around with no particular purpose, and with plenty of time.

At the harbour, there was more life as some locals on their small fishing dories busied themselves with their nets or stood around by their tour boats talking or having a coffee at a café. I was the only tourist. I walked out of town on the empty promenade that went along one side of the narrow bay. The wind was roughening the sea, which was blue-black and looked cold.

When I returned later, I came across some elderly men playing bocce on a dirt court in a side street. There were five or six of them standing over the balls discussing something. I thought I knew these guys! They looked just like the men I’d seen on other islands. I remembered the ones on Korčula, like these, wearing the same white undershirts, short-sleeved collared shirts, shorts, sandals. I remember that the guys on Korčula weren’t discussing something; what they were doing was arguing; they were arguing over the position of the balls, whether a dark metal ball or its white counterpart was closer to the jack.

A tall skinny guy with a thatch of white hair who seemed to represent the black ball said to a short guy with bandy legs and round glasses, “It’s obvious if you look.”

“I am looking and nothing is obvious to me.”

“That’s because you are looking at it from the wrong angle, come over here and you will see better,” the tall man said.

“Why would I go over there when it is the same as over here? Didn’t you study geometry in school?” the little guy answered.

“I studied it same as you! Listen, perfesser, take that bicycle off your nose, maybe that will help you see better.”

“I know how you did in school, so don’t talk to me. And I can see fine, don’t you worry.”

“Then just go get the stick and we will measure the balls,” the tall one said.

“We’ve gone over this before,” the little guy answered, he was starting to move around on his short bandy legs in agitation, “the stick is bent and is not to be trusted. We need a new stick.”

The tall man threw up his hands. “Like this we will go on forever. I say we start again.”

The little guy eyed him a moment, then answered, “Why would we start again when it is obvious.”

“I am looking and nothing is obvious to me,” the tall one said. And so it went on . . .

Returning to the centre of Stari Grad on that trip in 1996, I happened across Tvrdalj, the mansion of Renaissance poet Petar Hektorović (1487–1572). A grey stone structure that Hektorović began in 1514 as a stronghold against attacks by Turkish pirates, its quiet halls and courtyards, sunlight filtering here and there, gave me the feeling of a secure and peaceful retreat. I saw a dark pool of slow-moving fish, other objects that portray traditional Hvar life like a pan for hot coals to warm a bed, and various solemn inscriptions in Latin carved in stone throughout, “Alas, the days flow by like waves and do not return.”

The guide to Tvrdalj at the time, a young man with a boyishly handsome face and brown hair, Tomislav Alaupović, led me to the sun-dappled garden courtyard of mint plants, fig and olive trees, and exotic Mediterranean flora. Here, where Hektorović himself tended his garden, one can find a fitting homology for his poetic energies, his sixteenth-century poem Fishing and Fishermen’s Conversation.¹ Often called the first realist poem in Croatian literature, it is a travel narrative in the form of an epistle to Hektorović’s cousin, relating the journey of the nobleman poet and two fishermen from Stari Grad to Šolta and back. Wrote Hektorović:

There are so many people who appear simple,

Poor and ill-clad and yet have plenty.

For such people are possessed of

Reason and sound judgement which are their clothes;

So virtue dwelleth in them secretly

Like the gold covered by earth:

We think them no more able than the sea slug,

Yet when they speak, they speak like sages . . .

And here I said to them: “As you see,

My brothers, all has been as we planned.

Well have we voyaged across the deep sea

And well returned to our island home.

You have sung and recited plentifully

And your many talents deserve every praise.

Where are the knights now of whom you told,

The dukes and princes whom you mentioned?

They are no longer of this earth,

Nor scarcely are their names known;

No more than dreams I’d say, as those of other men . . .

Time hath borne them away on its silent flow.”²

After visiting the mansion, I spent a few hours exploring the rest of Stari Grad. Later I returned to the house where I had rented a room. The patriarch of the place greeted me and invited me for a meal. He led me into their small dining room where the table was already set. His wife served us sardines and squid fried in garlic and olive oil, and he brought out a carafe of his red wine. We talked while his wife stood by the door to the kitchen listening. He was a short, black-haired man with a face like a browned pork chop. At first he was cheerful. For example, he told me, pointing at the sardines, that “a fish has to swim three times: in the sea, in oil and in wine.” But his mood soon changed. “You know,” he said, “this is not a good time for us in Dalmatia. Everything has changed since the war. No one comes now. You are the first this season. Stari Grad is empty. Probably the ferry was almost empty. . . Am I right? Yes, I thought so. Before, when it was the high season, the Germans came, thousands of them. One day things will get better again, but it will take time, maybe years. The Germans might not come again. Look at our house, we added to it for the tourists, but now they are not coming.” Neither he nor his wife held a job; only their daughter worked, it seemed.

The daughter, the waitress who had called her brother from the bar the night before when I’d inquired about accommodation, arrived while we were still at the table. She was motioned over by her father with a discreet nod of his head, not apparently meant for my eyes. Her face was masked by white foundation and her lips painted dark red—a Gothic look. She had just finished another shift. As I talked with the father, she was silent, but I noticed her watching me, her big placid dark eyes looking out from her white vampire face. She told me something about her plans for university, which I can’t remember, then she said, “You know, my friends and I are going out tonight. Maybe you would like to come. We have plans for tomorrow night. And the rest of the week. Every night. The night is the best time.”

I was evasive. “I planned to go to Hvar early tomorrow,” I said, which was not a lie, “but I might be able to come back. I’ll see.” I was trying to untangle the reasons behind her invitation. Her parents watched me, waiting for my answer. I could feel the daughter’s big black eyes on me. The next morning, I took my things and was on the bus to Hvar.

All this went through my mind as Lucas, Joe and I docked. It was a different time in Dalmatia’s history. The dearth of tourists the man had mentioned had ended. There were no Germans, but our ferry had been packed with Croatians, Poles, Czechs, and Italians who drove off in their luxury cars to the other side of the island and to the town of Hvar.

We, however, drove to Stari Grad. I expected a different town this time, but I found it almost as sleepy as it was on my first visit. At the round head of the harbour, roughly the same number of boats were moored. No yachts or fancy ships. A kid sitting on a boat with a long pole poked leisurely at a hub cap on the floor of the harbour and, under the dark surface of the motionless water, dark green fish like the ones in the pool at Tvrdalj swam lazily. Only a few tourists wandered through the streets.

We walked around looking for a restaurant. As usual, Joe and I argued about which one we were going to choose, but this time we had the added complication of a fourteen-year-old who had ideas of his own. “Can we have pizza? I want pizza,” he said. “You can’t have pizza,” I answered. “You had pizza last night; you can’t just eat pizza. And drink pop. A pork chop with fries, and some ajvar on the side, that’s the thing. With milk. You’re supposed to be training. And that’s what your mother would want.”

He looked at me. “Who cares? Mom’s not here, dad.”

Joe, who had been listening, said, “I don’t know what he’s going to eat, that’s your business, but I know one thing for sure.” He waited.

“What’s that,” I asked.

“I’m the pensioner and you’re the rich man, a professor, so you’re going to be paying, ha-ha,” and he let go that cackle of his.

“Funny,” I said, and he began to laugh even harder, his face turning purple. I looked inside my wallet and saw I didn’t have any kuna; there was a twenty Austrian Schilling bill I kept as a souvenir for some reason, and a credit card, neither of which would be any use at these restaurants. Otherwise my wallet was empty. “Okay, we’re all set,” I said, “let’s go eat!”

We decided on a restaurant not far from the riva that served pork chops with fries and ajvar, among other things, and were waited on by a young woman, the daughter of the owner. She was a tall, beautiful girl with a beautiful mouth and black hair past her shoulders. She was studying law in Split but worked here with her father over the summer.

I told her that Stari Grad was a nice town, that it must be a good place to live.

“Well, yes,” she answered in English, “it is very good town in summer, when there is life, and there are people. But, you know, it is not so good in winter. I have been here in winter; it was not good. It was so depressing. It was totally dead; there were almost no people. No young people. You could walk through streets and hardly see anyone. They are all gone to Split to study. And then it is windy and cold. The bura, you know of the bura?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The bura it is not nice wind!”

I thought of the howling winter winds in Newfoundland that drive snow horizontally across my yard and whistle around the bungalow, creaking the aluminum siding and tearing strips of snow from the eight-foot-high mountains along the streets.

“I understand,” I said.

“Yes, so anyway, Stari Grad is much nicer now.”

“You no longer stay here in the winters?”

“No, and my father shuts the restaurant and goes to Split.”

“Do many islanders do that now?” I wondered.

“Some, yes, though there are elderly ones who were born on Hvar and never leave. And not just elderly ones. They don’t know anything except this. Imagine not knowing anything else!”

“If you don’t know it you don’t miss it.”

“Well I would miss it.”

“You would also miss your own island.”

“It is not my island. We came here after the war, from Bosnia. But I understand your point. I was young when we came, and so I think Hvar is a kind of home. For my father it is more complicated.” Her father joined the conversation, talking in vague terms about his own origins and reasons for coming to Hvar, then getting more heated when he remembered those days, rehashing familiar grievances against the Serbs for their part in altering his life forever.

It was time to go. I opened my wallet, tilting it towards Joe who was sitting next to me. “Look at that, would you,” I said, “I must’ve used my last kuna paying for gas. You’re gonna have to cover this, sorry to say.” Joe was in a good mood after chatting with the restaurant owner, plus the man was watching, so he laughed with pretend ruefulness, and reached for his wallet without hesitating.

We said goodbye and went to our apartment. I left my father and my son there and went in search of my only contact, Tomislav, the former tour guide at Hektorović’s mansion. When I met him again, as he was holding court with some local guys, I thought he looked like a different person. He was still handsome, his light brown hair thinning, but the polite almost diffident young man had been replaced by a larger, grander one. He was bigger around the middle, but the real change was inside, evident in his easy demeanour, in his stance, the calm gaze of self-possession. He knew who he was, where he belonged, and nothing was going to rattle him. He looked me over, and I wasn’t totally sure he liked what he saw. But he was friendly, shaking my hand, “So you’ve come back to Stari Grad! I guess you like our island. And what’s not to like!” I told him I was here with my father and son. “Ah,” he said, “the three generations travelling together!”

The next morning when I went to town to shop for bread and a newspaper, in a rush walking briskly past the same café where I had seen Tomislav yesterday, I heard him yell out at me, “Hey, what’s the rush? Pomalo. Slow down, man, slow down. You’re moving too fast. Never move too fast!” I lamely held up my loaf of bread as a sort of explanation, slowed my steps and carried on towards the apartment. “You’re in Dalmatia,” I heard him call out, “never go too fast!” Someone in the pastry shop laughed through the open window. I was embarrassed a little and my first instinct was to walk faster, to get away more quickly, but I corrected myself. I had heard this idea of slowness before about Dalmatia, usually in the context of a contemptuous remark by those in the northern parts of the country, that the people here are lazy, like tovari who have to be prodded, lashed, to get to work. In fact, the word for donkey, tovar, has become pejorative slang for “Dalmatian.” Probably this stereotype has its origins in the reluctance of Dalmatians to work during the afternoons, but everyone knows what working in the sweltering heat is like, including those in northern Croatia where this stereotype apparently originates. The Dalmatian fjaka, which I’ve mentioned before, came back to me now with Tomislav’s advice; he was encouraging a fjaka-inspired ethos in living life generally, not just how quickly or slowly I should move, at what pace I should walk down the street with a loaf of bread, or how much energy I should use after a hefty meal on a hot summer afternoon, but my mode of being and my frame of mind when I get out of bed in the morning and carry myself throughout the day and just in general exist. The frenetic hurry of the rat race would seem foreign to the Dalmatian character.

On this day, in this island town, on a summer vacation, I thought that Tomislav was right. What were another few minutes going to matter? Would my father and son starve if I brought this loaf of bread five minutes later? I remembered my first stay in Stari Grad, the slow unhurried walk around town, the tempo of my whole stay on the island. Much had gone on in the meantime, more responsibilities and pressure, and like a billion other people I had lost that tempo. As I walked back to the apartment with deliberate slowness, I thought that with this visit to Hvar maybe I could rediscover the right pace. Maybe Hvar could be the start of something new. Something new, something old.

We drove to the southern side of the island on a well-paved road that took us out of Stari Grad into the flat breadbasket country of vineyards and gardens (a UNESCO Heritage site due to its ancient plots of land dating to the Greek period). In the distance was the mountainous ridge of the island still blued by morning shade.

After some turns through rocky hills, we came to the tunnel at Pitva. The green traffic light told us to go, so we drove in slowly. A kilometre and a half long, the tunnel resembled other barebone ones built by the military in the former Yugoslavia. It was a bumpy, narrow one-laner through a low, pitch-black passage that sweated with condensation. The ceiling looked like it had been hacked out with pickaxes by some guys who had had too much to drink. The opening at the far end was a pinprick of light, and there were two parking spaces in case cars met head-to-head, which happened when the locals didn’t bother obeying the traffic light. Caches of wine, it was said, had been stored in the tunnel because of its cool temperature. “What if we get stuck or there’s an accident or something? What then?” I joked. “Then you’re going to have to walk, sonny boy, all the way to the end,” Joe answered, firing off that cackle of his, which he did when he enjoyed sticking it to me.

Out the other side and into the day again, we zigzagged over wide sloping hills, through craggy fields of white-grey stones spotted with evergreen maquis and wizened trees. Eventually we came to Sveta Nedjelja.

We parked and walked straight ahead for a view of the sea. We had stepped onto a four-metre-high islet called Veli Kamik attached to Hvar itself by a walkway. A tree grew in the middle of it, and some stairs led down to a concrete dock that had been built for mooring small boats.

I knew this place! I had come here on my first trip to Hvar, in 1996. Without any forethought, I had jumped joyfully into the sea. Waves slapped and gurgled against the high cliffs of the cove, and I had swum out to open sea, where the water roughened, and where I turned back to look at the island, the white shoulder of the mountain behind. Only when I slid back up to the dock did I realize I couldn’t get out. There was no ladder, and the water was too low for me to pull myself up. No one was around. No tourists, no one to help me. This was 1996, and the coast was deserted. My excitement about being one of the only visitors to the coast at a unique moment in its history changed to panic. Even if someone spied me from afar, they would have thought I was waving, not drowning. Now, the idea of striking out to sea and swimming around the islet and along the coast in search of a place to get out was a scary one. In that moment, I didn’t know how close the harbour was. I decided to stay and find a way out, treading water, checking along the edge of the dock and the islet’s slippery flanks for some foothold, something to grip. I was angry with myself for having jumped into the water without thinking. Finally, when I was sure I would have to swim for it, I noticed a thin, ragged rope the colour of the stone, like a muskrat’s tail, attached to a pike that someone had nailed there, probably having gone through what I had, and I pulled myself out.

Lucas and Joe stayed on the islet while I went to Sveta Nedjelja. A village of around 140 people, called Sveta Nedilja in the local čakavski dialect, it sits part way up the mountain of Sveti Nikola. This is the highest point on the island. Savage grey-white cliffs amphitheatre the village and the vineyards on the slopes below, shielding them against direct blasts from the northern wind. I parked and walked uphill to the vineyards, through olive orchards and past copses of Aleppo pines. Tall cypresses, like minarets, stood here and there. The sun had come out; now, in the late afternoon, the large bowl of the valley under the mountain was packed with dozens of vineyards that formed a carpet of light green when you looked at them from a distance. Some of the vines grew low to the ground, and many were thick and twisted, like arthritic trunks of old trees. A hothouse aroma rose from the warm ground.

I saw a man in a vineyard off the road. As he walked down the low row of vines, he bent over and clipped the odd leaf, then moved on, looking closely at his grapes. He wore a baseball cap and a blue T-shirt, and his thin arms and hands were as gnarled as the branches of old vines. He had come to look at his vineyard. “There’s not much to do here now,” he said, “I let the sun do the work.” In the north, in the hills around Zagreb where it rains more often, bunch rot can be a problem; here less so. On Hvar, the grapes soak up the heat and are cooled by winds that come across the mountain or sweep up from the sea.

The man and I treaded between rows of vines up to a stone wall where another vineyard grew on a higher terrace, then we came back down again. Dry, grey-brown karst soil crunched under our feet. He swung his right arm over the vineyards around us and turned his grey watery eyes to me. “This is Plavac Mali. Take a look; you can see.” The grapes were small blue nodules packed closely together. The name of the grapes was appropriate—plavac, from plavo or “blue,” and mali meaning “small.” “This vineyard was planted by my grandfather in the 1920s, but there are older ones too, and newer. New vineyards are business. Mine is not so much business, just my own business, ha-ha.” He went on, “Plavac Mali is a very old grape. The scientists say it took good qualities of the parents—one is Dobričić from island Šolta, and the other is Crljenak.” He meant Crljenak kaštelanski, a variety of Dalmatian origin, also known as Tribidrag, neither of which is widespread any longer.

“The Americans call Crljenak Zinfandel. You know of Zinfandel, famous American wine, but it really is old Dalmatian type.”³

“I didn’t know that, but I’ve heard of Plavac Mali. It must be good,” I said.

“You never tried? Come, I show you.”

He led me out of the vineyard and down the gravel road to his house. In his cellar, he took out two drinking glasses from a cupboard, went to a steel barrel, opened the spout, and filled them. He knocked his glass against mine and said “Živjeli!” The wine was ruby red, transparent like a stained-glass window. It filled my mouth with a touch of sunshine followed by a drier taste of stony earth, if it were possible to turn the minerals of the ground into smooth liquid. I felt I had travelled from the bright hot summer sky down to the dry karst earth on which I had walked just earlier. I liked his Plavac, and I didn’t have to lie when I said, “It’s good.”

He told me more about his vineyard, said that last fall’s harvest yielded 500 litres of red wine. Some of his wine he sold to restaurants in Hvar, the rest he drank himself. He wasn’t interested in making a large profit. “What do I care,” he said, “I sell what I sell, and that’s it. Look around, I have everything I need. I have enough to live. What more does a man need? Those young guys,” and he named the owner of a large local winery, “those guys they export their wine all the way to Australia, can you believe it?”

As he talked, his thin brown hands lay on the table between us. When he leaned forward, I could see pouches under his watery eyes, accentuated by the light from the bulb above, the surface of his face like brown onion skin pages in a worn-out anthology. His grey hair curled tight and thick like steel wool. At one point he got up, went to the cupboard, and returned to his chair, covering his mouth with his hands, and worked at something between his teeth. After a bit he said, “All my life I have made this wine, and before that when I was a boy, I helped my parents collect the grapes during the berba. Our whole village was out here harvesting; you could hear them talk and joke. There was singing; the valley was full of singing. Songs from the far side of the valley. And you know what, we worked together, helped each other in those days. And if you had trouble with someone over the year, you let it go during the berba.” He stopped and finished what was left in his glass. I asked him whether life was better in the old days. “Better, maybe, maybe better, now it’s everyone for himself. That was not a thought before.” I asked whether this was due to the attitudes in the former Yugoslavia. “No, my son, that was just life on Hvar. My life on Hvar.”

With that, I said goodbye, left his cellar and walked down to my car. I came to the harbour, and the restaurant, a newish building built out of stone, where Joe and Lucas were waiting for me. My father had a glass of red wine, my son a pearling bottle of Coke. I had been gone a while.

“Where have you been?” Lucas asked.

“Were you worried?” I answered.

“Oh sure,” Joe said, “that’s all we’ve been thinking about.” And they laughed.

The narrow road from Stari Grad to the main city of Hvar climbs in hard switchbacks across the mountainous island and descends sharply on the other side (where, if you take a left on a winding trail along the sea, you return eventually to Sveta Nedjelja). In 1996 I took the inland road from Stari Grad to Hvar on a bus driven by a big man who wrenched the steering wheel back and forth along the wicked turns. The doors and emergency hatches were open to let air blow through the bus. Along the way were forlorn houses, their shutters closed, roofs sinking, and people long gone. Some inhabited settlements and small stores appeared too. Below the road, in the valleys, amid pines, olive and carob trees, rock piles and walls, were small gardens, vineyards and swaying fields of lavender.

Now the new road from Stari Grad to Hvar passes through a modern tunnel and leads with modern efficiency to the island’s main town. Built on a hill beside the sea, Hvar is a town of stairs overlooking the open sea and an archipelago of eleven small, forested islands ringed with white stone, known as the Pakleni otoci (“Hell’s Islands”). The houses piled on top of each other seem to tumble towards the rectangular harbour. In this elegant town you can find the largest square in Dalmatia, one of the oldest theatres still standing in Europe (1612), and numerous palaces such as the one that once belonged to Hanibal Lucić (1485–1553), author of the first secular drama in Croatian. A UNESCO World Heritage site, Hvar replaced Stari Grad as the island’s capital in the thirteenth century, and wherever one looks it projects an image of a refined, cultured and happening resort.

We arrived in the outskirts, which were more ragged and unkempt than the showy centre of town. While Joe chose to stay in the courtyard of the apartment we had rented, chatting with the owners and drinking more wine, Lucas and I walked to the riva by ourselves.

We passed through an opening onto the quayside, which was lined by palm trees, and where young women with long legs held signs to draw customers’ attention to the restaurants. Beautiful, ample girls in miniskirts sashayed by us, their perfumes noticeable as they swept past. I pointed out a few Lucas’ age and suggested he go talk to them. He had been walking beside me, looking stiffly ahead, but alert and wired. “Yeah right, Dad,” he said. “You’ll be sorry one day, sonny boy,” I answered. “Just keep walking, Dad.” We kept walking. Big sleek yachts like sharks were lined up perpendicularly to the promenade, flying Bahamian, British, American, and Italian flags. One white-haired owner, chic like Richard Branson, was wearing a pressed white shirt whose crisp folds I could make out from a distance as though the shirt had just been removed from its package. Another owner sat back on a lounge chair with some ladies in airy summer dresses and pumps who were drinking white wine from fluted glasses. But amid this elegance, an Italian in a blue Speedo, just off a newly arrived yacht, staggered back and forth in front of his boat singing, beer can in hand, then rolled onto his back and shouted something con brio as his buddies laughed from the deck. Although it was early in the evening, and early in the season, Hvar was already showing its character as a popular party destination.

We came to the head of the harbour, where we could have continued along the promenade and out of town, but dusk was settling dark blue around us, so we went back. On return walks like this my eyes always hit upon new sights, or are drawn back to the same ones I’d seen before—the cream-coloured columns of elegant buildings, the polished stone slabs on which I was walking that glistened when the lights came on, the palms along the riva, a yellow lantern hanging above a street, a ceramic pot with an oleander, flowering white, a row of green shutters. On a backstreet in 1996 I had seen an old fisherman in his white undershirt and shorts sitting on a pail repairing a white fishing net that hung from his balcony like a huge bridal train. Over the next few days, through gaps in the lanes, I saw the sea from high above and motorboats zippering white trails behind them like jets across the sky and smelled the aromas of sea breezes blowing through canted corridors.

We saw him, a short young man, T-shirt over his head to protect himself from a hot morning sun, dandering along towards us on the highway two kilometres outside Hvar. We had parked our car on the road and were about to descend a rocky path to a beach far below. The Irishman, who said he was from Dublin, told us he’d been partying on a yacht in Hvar’s harbour the night before, and when things had quieted down early in the morning he’d gone to sleep below deck.

“Next thing I knew,” he told us, “we were out at sea in the morning sailing God knows where. All my things, my car, clothes, were back in Hvar.” The English owner hadn’t known he was aboard and had left bright and early for some other port.

“He wouldn’t box the compass, so I told him to drop me as close to shore as he dared. Then I swam for it, shoes and all.” As an afterthought he added, “I had to leave my cell phone behind.”

Now he was here, at ten in the morning, pleasantly strolling towards Hvar, the whips of panic just a memory.

“How far is it to town?” he asked.

“Not two kilometres,” I answered.

“Right then,” pulling his shirt over his head. “Goodbye.”

“Bye,” we answered. And off he went, a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.

The steep trail down to the beach was a long one over rocks, so Joe balked at coming with us. The Adriatic was to our right, a smell of herbs around us. There were broadleaved cacti, eucalypti, and wild grass. A few years ago, there used to be a forest of big pines here, slanting against the steep slopes, and cicadas clacking furiously, but the trees had been cut down so instead there was an orchard of young olive trees and cicadas somewhere in a glade to our left, much more muted. We could see down to a small cove. Some century-old stone houses, once a fishing hamlet, lay at the head of a beach of white pebbles, and on one side of the bay, on a piece of land jutting out to sea, was a much larger stone house, formerly belonging to the wealthiest family of the hamlet.

We walked onto the beach. Its roundish stones were already warmed by morning sun. Only a few people were here, and no one was in the water. We put our things under a pine tree and, while I sat watching, Lucas hobbled over the stones and walked into the water up to his chest. Then he dove in. He disappeared for five or six seconds, then popped up three metres away, then went under again. Over and over he repeated his dives. When I joined him, he pointed out fish near the bottom, silver-blue, much smaller than the sea bass we had tried to catch barehanded off Cribbon’s Rock in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. I watched him dive deep for a stone, a shell, crouch on the sea floor and rocket up to breach the sea’s surface. When I treaded water, I felt hot sunshine on my head, saw a bright sheen on the water like a polish made of light. I floated on my back, not moving, ears under water, hearing a soft underwater roar. I lay there blocking out everything, trying to stay in the moment and enjoying the slow tempo on Hvar as the words of advice returned to me: “Take it slow, man, you’ve been moving much too fast, pomalo, pomalo . . .”

I went back to my towel and dried off. As I waited for Lucas to finish, I noticed an elderly man appear from one of the small stone houses. Wiry and bowlegged, he wore a red and grey flannel shirt and grey pants, as though it were a cold December day, and he stepped unsteadily outside his gate and looked out to sea. Then he went inside. Later, when Lucas was drying off, the old man came out again. Maybe he had come to check on the guy who had emerged from his big house, a big man with a thatch of white hair and no shirt. He was on his concrete dock about fifty metres away, untangling some fishing nets beside a dory. Possibly he’d been out that morning and was tidying up. Or maybe the old man wasn’t interested in him at all. A few steps from the guy with the nets was a slim woman in a bikini bottom and no top, tanned all over, helping him. They were focussed on their jobs, didn’t speak to each other, or take any notice of the old man who had been watching.

I went over to the old man’s house to talk with him. A blue tin sign that read sobe was nailed to a wall at the entry to his yard. Marigolds in pots sat on a low wall and grapes grew along a wire trellis on the right. The ground was made of paving stones and packed earth. He met me coming in as he was going out. Up close he resembled the winemaker in Sveta Nedjelja, but this man’s hair was white, a little wispy and wild from the wind, and contrasted sharply with the brown skin of his face. His nose reminded me of Jimmy Durante’s and the skin on his face was tight to his cheeks, healthy-looking, though I thought he was unmistakably in his seventies.

He talked in a quiet, high voice, telling me he was born elsewhere on the island—he named a village; I forget which one—but that his father had bought this property years ago and had passed it on to him. His wife, the woman going in and out of the open door in the yard behind him, was not his first wife, but his second wife, and she was from Split.

“Have you talked to that man there? he asked me and pointed at the man working on the fishing nets.

“No,” I answered.

“Do not speak with him. He is a bad man, an evil man.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yes, yes, he said once he would kill me.” He whispered so I could hardly hear him, and his eyes opened wider.

“He and his brother, they wanted to have a café here, right here on shore. I told them I did not want it. I knew all would change here. People, hundreds of people would come. There would be garbage, and there would be noise. They would play music,” he whispered angrily as he leaned forward.

“Yes, there would definitely be music,” I said.

“One day they were bringing supplies by boat. Two men were carrying a barrel of wine onto the beach. I ran into the water and pushed them, and the barrel fell into the water. I tried to turn over their boat, but I could not. The man there swore he would kill me. He was very angry, and I was afraid. I walked back to my home. Now we never talk. We have not talked all these years.”

“When did this happen?”

“In 1998.”

The café never went ahead. He looked over my shoulder once more, then turned back to his house. His story was at an end. He led me to a table in his yard that stood in the shade against a wall of his house. Lucas came over; the wife served us juice, and the old man, relaxed now in his chair in his yard, told us about his life. He said he lived on Hvar all year. They rented out their extra room to tourists from time to time. He and his wife went shopping for groceries once a week. He was eighty-one and she was seventy-three, and they carried their groceries down the winding path from the road above.

The old man asked me if I would like to try his wine. I declined. Before we left, his last words to me were these, “Do not talk to him, he is a bad man, an evil man.”

Lucas and I climbed the path to the car as the noon sun pounded down. We had taken a last dip and now, water dripping off our heads, we dried off in the wind and sun. I was in no rush. I took my time picking my way over the stone path so I wouldn’t heat up again. I looked out at the Adriatic, which was dark and shining, a white sail a kilometre out, not moving, like a splotch of white in an impressionistic painting. Cicadas strummed in the trees behind me, growing fainter the higher I climbed, the stronger the wind got near the summit, sending their signals out to sea. Long grass bent back and forth with the breezes. My hair was already drying, and when I got to the top it was almost dry. I took a last look over the sea, at the sun glittering white on the dark blue waves, and I thought that if I could fly, I would fly from these cliffs and across the water and become part of the white light on the sea.