The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  ‘Nova Zelanda!’ They said the name over, liking the promise that it held. Father Ilya had even got them a piece of the kauri gum from the museum in Vienna. It looked rich and wonderful stuff. They all wanted to hold it, to feel its polished smoothness, to look into its mottled depths for a sign of the future. ‘A new kind of gold!’ Stipan’s grandfather, old Dida Petar the village stareshina (patriarch) pronounced, and Father Ilya said: ‘It means gold and that’s what you’ll never get if you stay here. I tell you young men, go. Look for a better life in a new country far from the troubles here.’

  ‘Eh! I’d be off to this New Zealand like a lightning streak if I was a young man!’ Dida Petar said. ‘You wouldn’t tell me twice!’ Young wives looked at their husbands. Fathers of families looked around at their sons, thinking which to send. Mothers heard, hope and dread alternating in their eyes.

  They discussed it in the adruga (co-operative). How would they raise the money for the passage out? Money was something none of them ever had to spare. ‘I will go to see the money-lenders,’ Father Ilya said. ‘We will borrow against the land.’

  Three were chosen to be the vanguard of the new emigration. Stipan and Ivan and Toma, because they were strong and fully grown, and their fathers had other sons, and they were not yet close to conscription age.

  Up to now Stipan had not thought much about his luck in being one of the chosen three. He was going and that was all. He listened to the older men talking about the new country where you dug money out of the ground, and from Father Ilya he learned some English words. They made strange noises in his ears but he felt important saying them. With the other two he went to the nearest market town to be measured for a new brown suit and to buy the few necessities for the journey across the world. He felt rich already. ‘A Man of the World’ as they called all emigrants. But what that world would be like he never even thought. In all his life he had never been farther than six villages away. True he had heard stories from returning emigrants, men who brought back the proof of its existence in the visible signs of fine American clothes, money in their pockets, gold watch-chains. But their stories belonged with Dida Petar’s much-told stories of his travelled youth—something you heard but only half believed in. If his life was hard he had never known any other to compare it with. All he knew was that when the stones were sharpest under your feet, the wind sang sweetest in your ears. ‘Youth!’ old Dida Petar would say. ‘It’s a pair of wings for time to clip.’ But Stipan only laughed. How would he ever get old? The old man was for ever pouring out his unheeded wisdom to the boy. ‘Eh! my lad, it’s all right when you’re travelling on Franich’s donkey, but wait till it’s Begov’s mule you’re riding. That slows us all up!’ It was a favourite saying. Once he heeded long enough to ask what ‘Franich’s donkey’ meant. ‘It’s the ride for the young, my boy!’ the old man answered. ‘Franich’s donkey, that was a mount that could climb the steepest track without a puff! Begov’s mule couldn’t even go downhill without a stick to push her along.’

  The row was almost finished. Stipan stood up to straighten his back and look at his day’s work. The little trees clung firmly to the soil as if the roots had taken already. He felt a glow of pleasure at the sight of them. Below him he saw the familiar village scene. Above him the stony mountains watched. The late afternoon light washed the stone houses with saffron, giving the village a picture-postcard beauty. The monastery spire lifted its white radiance above a symphony of greens: grey-greens of olives, darker greens of cypresses, blue-green of the spiked aloe leaves sharp against a blue, still sky. Everything just as he had always known it. But at this moment it took on a new meaning because tomorrow he was going away.

  At the other end of the field he could see his father working. Never stopping, digging and planting and digging again, his back bent with labour that was at once work and prayer, because, planting olives, a man works for generations and God and man are served by the holy yield.

  ‘Hoy, oche!’ (Hey, father!) the boy called to his father, not because he had anything to say to him, but because it was suddenly necessary to see that known face look up in answer, to remember this moment against all the years ahead.

  ‘Hoy, sinko!’ (Hey, son!) the father called back to his son, and went on with his planting.

  The boy bent to his work again. There were five trees left in his bundle. He came to the last. It was a small sickly tree, and as he was setting the thin roots in place he thought how he would not be there to see it grow, to mark how twisted and bent it would get with the years. Because it was such a little tree he felt an impulse of tenderness towards it. He wanted to leave it something of his own. He thought for a minute, then stamped his boot hard into the soil that covered the roots. ‘There, little tree!’ he said, ‘There’s Stipan Kosovich’s mark to stay with you for ever.’ He smiled down at his bootprint there like a primitive signature on the land. The action pleased him. In all his nineteen years he had never done such a thing. Living was a matter of eating, working, sleep and play. But in each man’s life comes a moment when he is a poet, and that was Stipan’s moment, his gesture to the past that he was leaving, to the future that he did not know; and it pleased him in the way a man is pleased when he paints a beautiful picture or makes a song. Carefully he covered the imprint, layering the earth gently so that the footprint should remain there undisturbed.

  The son and the father walked home together. Mattocks slung across shoulders, each one carrying his torba (hand-woven bag) that held the day’s food. The father did not speak, but every so often he looked quickly at his son, as if there could be some detail of his face he might forget if it was not bedded in his memory. Finally he spoke. ‘Tomorrow!’ he said as if the word was enough speech between them.

  ‘Tomorrow!’ Stipan echoed. They did not speak again.

  Home. They washed and put on their best clothes because it was to be a special family meal tonight. Afterwards neighbours and relatives would come in to say their last words to the young man about to go into the world. The younger children were excited about the fine dinner they would have. A roast sucking-pig, a special cake of rich fruits and nuts; such food they only had on Christmas and high saints’ days. All the afternoon they had run in and out of the kitchen looking for tasty scraps of cooking, and for once their mother had not chased them out. Only Stipan’s sister, the next to him in age, was quiet. She was betrothed and would soon leave the house for another, but tomorrow’s parting lay heavy on her, too. She worked beside her mother all the afternoon and shared her thoughts.

  The family assembled for the last dinner together. They took their places around the big table and waited for the blessing. Dida Petar said it. ‘For all of us here we ask blessing, but especially for our young Stipan who goes tomorrow to find his fortune in the unknown world.’

  After the meal the guests began to arrive. The kitchen filled. Everyone was aglow with the wonderful possibilities that were opening up for Stipan. The younger ones listened, wonderingly. Mothers sat with their babes on their laps and listened too. ‘Grow, little one, grow,’ their eyes said, ‘and go to New Zealand too!’ Family and guests sat around the stove, the big brick komin that was their winter warmth, where the women cooked the meals and baked the bread, around which so much of their lives were lived. The older ones relived the past in story, telling of this one and that one who had gone to America, to New Caledonia, to Australia, and how they wished they had gone, too. The young ones thought of the future and the opportunities it might hold for them. The women sat spinning and knitting, the girls busy with their dowry linen and dreaming their own dreams of another komin, another house. Stipan’s mother listened to all the talk and kept her thoughts to herself. Such was life, that you should bear a son and he would grow to manhood and you would see him go off to find the ‘better life’ they all asked for, where bread was sure, and the Emperor’s long arm couldn’t reach.

  The Emperor was Frane Yozip. The Hapsburgs ruled from Vienna and whispers of their might drifted
down to Dalmatia to mingle with darker murmurings. At school the children were taught to say, ‘God Save Frane Yozip!’ At home their fathers reversed it. ‘God curse Frane Yozip!’ His face was on their money, his boot was on their necks. ‘It won’t be for ever!’ the more daring promised, and around the komins at night they talked of the day when the Schwabo’s might would break.

  Old Dida Petar took up his favourite story, his interminable tale of how he had gone to the Austrian wars. ‘Even when I was a young man they were talking of emigration. But we were called to the army. I went to fight Kossuth. I never did see this Kossuth. Some said he was a devil, but we gave him a beating, Ban Yelachich and I!’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘Ay! But the worst one was in 1863. Took my mule and me, and off we go again. Near perished with the cold. A heller a day we were paid and I got this into the bargain.’ He pulled up his trouser leg to show the hole where the musket ball had penetrated and never come through. It was still there after thirty years and he was lame all his life because of it. ‘Frane Yozip!’ he spat on to the hearth. ‘He sits in Vienna in a castle bigger than a hundred of our churches and smokes a golden pipe and they say he sits on a gold chair, too!’ The little ones were round-eyed with wonder. ‘Did you see the golden chair, Dida?’

  ‘No, dusho! (dear soul!) Frane Yozip never asked me to his palace. Just my leg he wanted.’

  ‘Is Frane Yozip in New Zealand, too?’ Little Milenko, the second youngest, looked up from the cat he was playing with.

  ‘No. They have the English queen there. Viktoria.’

  With his clothes neatly packed into one straw hamper, wearing the new suit his father had got for him in Spalato, proud of it and his new brown boots, Stipan boarded the little Adriatic steamer that was to take him on the first part of the journey across the world. Toma and Ivan going with him made it seem not so bad. There was so much talk, so much bantering and good-wishing and blessing that you had not time to think anyway.

  The three mothers stayed closest to the boys, eyes searching their faces, hands reaching out to touch a hand, a cheek. They were mothers and the breaking of the natural bond was not, finally, to be achieved without pain even though none would have held back her child from the ‘better life’.

  The Adriatic shone like blue glass, the sea’s edge reflecting the houses along the shore, the spiked aloes, and the cypress trees. The houses in the upper village looked as if they had grown from the stone, and the olive trees could have been painted there. Stipan took it all in. He was excited, eager and reluctant at the same time. He felt himself a man going to a man’s life. The five English gold pounds sewn into the pocket of his new coat made him feel rich already. It was more money than he had ever seen.

  The buzz of talk stopped suddenly. Father Ilya had come. His monk’s skirts swished impatiently after him as he strode towards the boys. They knelt down and he gave them a blessing each and a holy medal. ‘It is a great thing for Zaostrog that begins today,’ he said to them. ‘God’s blessing be with you. Do not forget your parents and their need. Work hard. Be good. Remember your homeland.’

  Stipan was suddenly impatient for it all to begin. The new life rushed at him, no longer to be held back. But when the steamer’s siren blew and it was time for the others to go, and his youngest sister, suddenly aware that he was going, ran at him, and threw her arms around him crying: ‘Brother Stipan! Brother Stipan! Don’t go!’ he felt his new manhood breaking. His mother pressed kisses on his face and her tears wet his cheek. His father put his hand on his shoulder and held it tight. His grandfather blessed him. It was a scene that was repeated with the other two going with him. Tears stabbed at Stipan’s eyes. He felt his heart would burst under his new brown coat.

  A lifetime later Stipan remembered the little olive tree. He was digging at the roots of an old puriri. It had been split by a storm and had to be cut down. But the puriri was stubborn like the land it grew on. How stubborn that had been, years of back-breaking work told. There was a permanent stoop to Stipan’s shoulders put there by work. ‘Farm on Tiritiri?’ the bank manager had laughed when he had first approached him for a loan to buy the Tiritiri land. ‘Mr Kosovich, the only good in that land was the gum that was in it, and you Austrians have cleaned all that up!’

  ‘Austrian!’ Stipan scowled at the hated name that had followed the Dalmatian emigrants to New Zealand. He suddenly remembered his grandfather’s leg, and the old man’s hatred of ‘Frane Yozip’. ‘I am not “Austrian” Mis-ter McDonald,’ he said in his still accented English. ‘And that land can be made good. If you won’t give me the money, someone else will!’

  The man at the Loan and Mercantile was just as discouraging. ‘Never be any good, Kosovich. It’s sour land. You’d get bogged in swamp. There’s better land a hundred other places.’ But Stipan did not give up easily. The land was cheap and he wanted the money to develop it. Work! He wasn’t afraid of that, as his hands could tell.

  ‘Mis-ter Johnson, you are wrong. Give me the money and I will show you what I can do with this land. Where I come from, in Dalmatia, we make farms on stones!’

  ‘I can believe that, too, the way you Austrians work. I’m not saying you’re not a damn good proposition as a farmer. Any one of you is and that’s the kind of men we want on the land. But Tiritiri’s no good. You’d break your heart and your back, there.’ This time Stipan let the ‘Austrian’ pass. He wanted the money. Politics could wait till later.

  ‘If there’s anyone can make anything of that land, it’s an Austrian will do it!’ the Loan and Mercantile man from Auckland said. ‘Maybe the man’s right and it can be farmed.’ They went out to have another look at the block. Five hundred acres of stunted tea-tree and clay bog.

  ‘You know,’ the Auckland manager said, ‘I’ve a mind to give him the money. Any man that can look at this land and say he’ll make a farm of it is either mad, or he knows what he’s talking about. And I don’t think Kosovich is mad. Besides,’ he went on, ‘there’s a hundred blocks like this. If he proves he can farm on it, then others can do it, too. We’ll give him a go.’

  Ten years after he landed in New Zealand, Stipan wrote home to his father. ‘Today I am a landowner. Five hundred acres, as much workable land as there is in the whole of the village, and it’s going to be mine.’

  That had been fifty-three years ago. Stipan had done all that he’d said he’d do. Tiritiri was the show farm of the district. When the Dairy Co-operatives wanted to show anyone a model farm they came to Kosovich’s. There were share-milkers on it now, but the old man still saw to everything. He was like a tree that stands up against time and weather. The passing years might be seen in the stoop of his back, in the sharp lines on his face, but he could still work.

  Five years after he had bought the farm Stipan had sent home for a wife. He wrote to his sister and she picked him a good, strong girl who was glad to come out to the new world too. Her name was Ana, and she was kind and plain. Like Stipan she had grown into the land, nursing it with peasant skill and love. Together they had watched it grow into the fine farm it was today. But there is always something that is withheld. They had no child.

  As he worked at the roots of the puriri, Stipan thought back over those fifty-three years since he had bought the farm. The tree had been there then. A young sapling that had grown with the farm. ‘Soon I will be like this,’ he mused, ‘a tree with no strength left in it, only roots to hold me here.’ Over the past few months he had felt a slowing down of his powers. Sometimes he would go out to do a job and forget what it was he came to do. More than once lately Ana had said to him: ‘Stipan, it is time to know that you are an old man. You must not work so hard but take it easier now.’ But taking it easy had never been his way. He swung the mattock down into the earth and dug at the roots. But the effort told. He stopped to wipe away at the sweat that was running down his face. Leaning against the puriri’s trunk, he looked down at the tangled roots and from somewhere in the depths of his memory came suddenly the picture of the little olive
tree he had planted that last day and the bootprint he had stamped into the earth around it.

  For the first time in all his New Zealand years he found himself thinking back to his young years in Dalmatia with a feeling of loss that disturbed him. Faces came back to him out of long buried memory. Father Ilya with his eagle look. His father looking at him that day when they walked home from the olive planting. His mother, sisters and brothers, all dead now. He thought of the village. How had it fared through two wars and half a century? What did it look like now? Were the olive trees still there on Porech?

  He looked up to see Ana coming towards him. She was walking slowly, the light breeze lifting the thin white hair around her face. As if it was something he had never noticed before, he said to himself, ‘Ana is an old woman!’ And when she came up and smiled at him with her kind eyes netted in a mesh of lines he half-wondered when it had all happened.

  ‘What is the matter, Stipan?’

  ‘Matter? Who says anything is the matter?’

  ‘I have been watching you from the house. This is young man’s work, Stipan. Not for you any more.’

  And for once he agreed with her. ‘You are right, Ana. I will get young Toki to do it. The puriri’s been there a long time. She doesn’t want to go.’

  Ana smiled. ‘Like us, Stipan. We’ve been here a long time too.’

  That night when they were sitting out on the cool verandah, Stipan spoke suddenly of the old country. Ana listened. He remembered people and places, the things he had done when he was a boy. He set Ana remembering too. Like children they went back into their memories … ‘the Herzegovinian women that used to come down for the olive picking, I remember how they would climb high into the trees, their black skirts billowing around them like tents and they would sing all day and work ….’ Ana smiled at the picture her memory made. ‘I loved it when my mother sent me down with bread for them. I would have stood and listened all day if I could.’