Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  In Montenegro, meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire fought constantly to subjugate the population. Wars continued around them for centuries with little respite. The Montenegrins were fierce fighters who used their harsh landscape to confound the conquest. But it was always a brutal existence. Finally their ancestors couldn’t resist the opportunity; they boarded those big ships and left their land behind.

  It was a good life they had found here. A life very different, and in so many ways easier than the ones their ancestors had endured on the hard rocky coast of Montenegro. On this sheltered peninsula, with the fish and the warm climate, they were never hungry, never too cold. Summer brought figs and grapes, winter the root vegetables. The cellars under the houses kept the potatoes fresh and the wine cold. And in the late autumn they could go into the hills and pick mushrooms, or even better, the wonderful dark brown globules of truffle.

  Venetian rule lasted a few hundred years, then Napoleon defeated them and briefly took over. But he traded the area to Austria in exchange for the Netherlands, and by the 1800s it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire that controlled the land, incorporating it into Croatia. It was the only government young Katarina and Martin knew, and they really didn't have much to do with any government. Their town was too small for anyone to bother them. And through all these changes, for hundreds of years, their Slavic language was protected. Everyone around them spoke po našemu, in their way, a dialect evolving from Serbian and Croatian.

  Katarina and Martin grew up across the road from each other, in old stone houses deeply embedded in that land. They knew each other all their lives, but they were the first to tie the two families in marriage.

  During the early years of the century, Martin, like his ancestors, worked as a shipbuilder in Pula, by then the primary port of the Austro-Hungarian navy. A five-mile walk from his home, it held much of Austria’s fleet, a fact that gained enormous significance with one fateful event.

  On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, the nineteenyear-old son of a Bosnian Serb postman, walked out of a sandwich shop in Sarajevo, deep in the Balkans, onto the street where a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was backing up, having made a wrong turn. The world was never the same again. The assassination of the Archduke by Gavrilo Princip launched World War I.

  The Balkans ignited the fighting, but this was a battle for the domination of Europe by Germany and Austria against Britain, France and Russia.

  Istria itself was no more than a dot on the map of that conflagration. But the results of the war had an outsized effect on the Slavs who lived on this small peninsula, and life would change irrevocably for Martin and Katarina.

  Italy had been expected to enter World War I on the side of Austria and Germany. Instead, in 1915, the country signed a secret treaty with Britain which promised that portions of the Dalmatian Coast, and, most important to Katarina and her family, the entire peninsula of Istria, would go to Italy if the Allies prevailed. In addition to providing deepwater ports, the Dalmatian coast—with Istria at its northern edge and Dubrovnik to the south—is blessed with clear water, jagged cliffs, picturesque islands, and beautiful small seaports. It could also open the door to eastern trade routes. Italy desperately wanted this land.

  Martin didn't want to remember those hard years of war, of building and repairing ships for armies he wished would all sink to the bottom of the sea. Whether the winners were the Italians or the British or the Austrians or the Germans, he wanted nothing to do with any of them. And mostly, he just wanted his family back.

  Eventually it became clear Germany would lose the war. Then the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved. The women would soon be home. But Martin didn’t know what country they would return to.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Balkanization

  A brief look at history could help clarify why this question lay so heavy on Martin’s mind.

  For most of the world a simple geographic descriptor—the Balkans—paints a picture of impenetrable chaos. This was the part of the world that included the Marinovič heritage—both Medulin and Montenegro. That very word, Balkanization, describes things crumbling, disintegrating, dissolving—again and again and again. The word first appeared in the early 1800s, but took firm hold after World War I, as Martin and Katarina were trying to find their way forward. Unknown to them, it would apply for over a century, growing more toxic over time.

  The land known as the Balkans—an area the size of France, and including Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Slovenia as well as parts of Greece, Bulgaria and Hungary—was the location of Europe’s first advanced civilizations, beginning with the Bronze Age around 3200 BC. It was where the Greek and Roman Empires met—with the Roman, or Latin, influence coming from the north and west, the Greek, later Byzantine, influence coming from the east and south. Even today, Serbian and Croatian, virtually a single language, use two different alphabets—Serbian the Byzantine-influenced Cyrillic and Croatian the Roman-sourced Latin.

  Bronze Age tools are found regularly in hill towns of the area and Pula boasts an almost intact enormous Roman gladiatorial arena. But like a high school prom queen who bloomed too soon, that was the end of the golden era.

  By the Middle Ages, the wars between the Byzantine and Roman empires had already launched hundreds of years of nearly unremitting conflict. When those two empires finally dissolved, the Ottoman Turks created a new cataclysm for the region, one that started in the thirteenth century and ended only with the First World War. During that period, with the development of modern Europe focused primarily toward the west, the Balkans suffered hundreds of years of conquest, depopulation and cultural stagnation. Whenever the Turks were defeated in one area, it seemed, there was another conqueror ready to step in: the Venetian Empire; Napoleon and the French; the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All these conquests brought political dominance, but also a different religion, a different language—with its concomitant alphabets—and a different culture. There was no end of outside powers—just as there was no end to a desire by the dominated peoples for self-rule.

  And finally, as the First World War was ending, they had their chance. Southern Slavic nationalists called for independence and unification. The people of these countries didn't always like each other, but they hated a common enemy more: any outside power that tried to defeat and control them. It was a Serb whose action started the war that had now freed the Croats and Slovenes of their Austro-Hungarian overlords. But Serbia had paid a high price: they had the highest casualties per capita in the war. It was enough. They overlooked their differences and bonded together, in desperation and fear of what might be done to them if they didn't. For it was again the outside powers—the Americans, the English and the French—who were deciding postwar boundaries.

  In December of 1918, before the Treaty of Versailles was finalized, an improbable but almost inevitable union of countries with embattled histories was proclaimed in Belgrade as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It was an incredible, independent act of self-determination that occurred in spite of all the outside powers. The United States quickly recognized the Kingdom. And the Austrians, in their retreat, granted their naval headquarters to this new Kingdom rather than hand it over to the enemy, Italy.

  Martin and his co-workers celebrated when the shipyard in Pula was ceded along with the entire Austrian fleet to this newly formed union, this Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Their kingdom. Its awkward name would soon evolve to Yugoslavia—from the words yugo, or southern, and Slav.

  They continued repairing war-damaged ships and there was talk of building new ones, but this time for their own people. However, conflicting news reports swirled around them endlessly, with talk of treaties, discussions in Versailles, debates over country boundaries, the creation of a League of Nations—uncertainty about the future. How long would this good news last?

  Martin couldn’t understand why it was so hard to figure it all out. They were all Slavs here, certainly it made sense they should be part of t
he new Kingdom. But now that the fighting had ended, happy as he was that they had gained ownership of their country, he just wanted to be back with his wife, his Katarina.

  She wouldn't talk about what happened to her there, negde daleko, somewhere far away, while she and her children were in exile. She never did.

  And then, suddenly, there was to be another child. Too soon. Martin feared for Katarina, for how recent her losses were. He trembled at the thought of the tragedy that had taken place, the violation she had endured while she was away from his protection. Ultimately, though, he saw that only love—for the new child and for each other—would help them move forward. No one would ever replace the boys, but they could start rebuilding the family.

  Just before her labors started, Katarina grabbed Martin’s hand in a grip so tight that a big red spot formed over his middle knuckle. “Promise me, Martin,” she whispered, looking deeply into his eyes, terrified of what she might see there, “that you will love this one as much as you love the rest.”

  Her dark eyes looked through Martin as she spoke, and he knew she was seeing far beyond him. He could hardly breathe for the pain that shot through him, but spoke calmly, knowing that only the reassurance of his deep love could bring her back to him.

  “Oh, Kata, Kata, ljubov moja, my love,” One tear—the only one she was ever to see on that wind-hardened face—ran down his cheek. “I will love her as much as I love you, draga, draga moja.” And he knew, right then, that it was true. That he would look at this child and always feel the gratitude of finding his family again.

  Martin wasn’t far away, on that first day of 1919, when the new baby came squalling into the world. He could hardly bear to leave the room, terrified that something would go wrong, that he might lose his precious Katarina.

  Slava, they called that child—Glory—Slavića in the diminutive, and she was indeed a glorious baby who brought joy to their lives. She patched them back together, this little human weighing barely over seven pounds, and they started moving forward, trying to put those awful years out of their memories.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Post war crises

  Like Katarina, many of the women and children in the small town of Medulin had been deported to Hungary for the duration of the war. They were all trying to return to a normal life. While the memory of her two young sons would torture Katarina for the rest of her life, she did finally move on, with the support of her Martin—her sweet Martin, whose warm body wrapped itself around hers, whose embraces, as they moved from gentle to passionate, gave her such deep comfort, even when the newest baby was still young. She knew what it would lead to. But she loved those new soft warm bodies next to hers as much as she loved his hard one.

  Little Jana followed Slavića's birth by just over a year. And then in the summer of 1922, the birth of another child, Katarina's seventh, approached. It was the baby that wouldn’t wait.

  Katarina was developing a renewed love for her home—for the sea breezes that blew up the hill and swirled around the top before moving on toward Italy, cooling off the mainland. For her brother Bogdan and his wife Roža, just across the road. It was a good life they thought they were rebuilding on that sheltered coast.

  But while the war was over, the battle for peace continued unabated in the Marinovic family’s part of the world. It would be a long time before borders were finalized and the implications fully understood. If life were fair, Medulin and the Marinovič family, also Southern Slavs, would stay part of that new federation, moving into a new future. But the secret treaty signed between Italy and Great Britain, the one that had brought the Italians in on the right side of the war, had promised the Dalmatian coast to Italy. And Istria was to prove pivotal to that commitment.

  Italy would not get its promised Dalmatia. Croatia would stay in the Kingdom, now called Yugoslavia. But by early 1920 a new treaty gave Italy control of one small but key part of that land: the Istrian peninsula. Suddenly the future was not so clear. They were to be ruled by the Italians. How could it be that one more time they were under a foreign power? What would happen to them now?

  At first not much changed. The shipyard continued briefly under Yugoslavia, as the entire Austro-Hungarian naval and merchant fleet had been ceded to them. The flag on the post office was replaced by the Italian one, and government offices in Pula were swiftly changed out. Life in the countryside was hardly affected until a new name started appearing in the news.

  Mussolini, a man whose significance was not yet understood by the outside world, was gaining power and consolidating his position in Italy. He started acting quickly and quietly to assert Italian dominance over this new area and its populace. Mussolini's influence would eventually touch everyone in Istria deeply, for he publicly spoke of his hatred of Slavs.

  As the implications of those events became more apparent, with Slavic schools closing and Italian families moving in, Martin grew frightened, concerned that they were being pushed out of their home. And where could they go? That prokleti rat, damned war. That prokleti Mussolini. For the rest of Europe, for America, it was over. But not for them. Here, it seemed it might never end. If, or more probably when, Mussolini consolidated his growing power in Italy, he would act decisively to rid himself of the Slavs, whom he viewed as interlopers on his land.

  “We need to talk, draga.” Martin said one evening in that summer of 1922, when the baby was getting close. He was clearly under stress, and knew it was only a matter of time before he had no work, as the shipyard was in the process of being transferred to the Italians.

  “We can’t stay here worrying about our lives. I’ve been thinking about moving, even if only for a time, to where we can feel safe, where I can find work, where we can speak our language.”

  Martin hadn't told Katarina that when Bogdan went down to enter his son’s name in the birth records at the church, Father Carlo suggested they write the Italian name Milan, as well as the name they had chosen, Matte. Bogdan didn't want trouble and followed the advice. But their son would be Matte at home, where it mattered, and Bogdan didn't want to worry Roža about it. Besides, there were bigger issues to deal with. Their very way of life was at stake.

  “What are you saying?” Katarina asked.

  “Mussolini hates all Slavs, and it looks like he will soon be in charge,” Martin said. “Bogdan has heard he wants us out of here. He’s moving in Italian families, taking over whole villages. Bogdan thinks they're going to try to ban our language.”

  “Our language? How can they do that?”

  “They can, believe me, they can,” said Martin. “Bogdan thinks we should just live quietly, without complaint. He doesn't believe it will actually come to this. After all, our people have lived here in peace for hundreds of years.”

  “And you, Martin?”

  “I'll be damned if some Italian puppetmaster is going to force me to give up my soul,” cursed Martin. “This house was built by the ancestors of my ancestors. It was here before Mussolini was born, and it will be here long after he dies. Did we fight a war just to have it taken from under us by this false peace?”

  “Please be careful what you say, Martin. Bogdan might have the right idea; just let them think you are going along with them.”

  “I'll be careful, Katarina,” he said. “But it might not stop with the language. Mussolini might take our homes, our jobs, everything. That’s why I think it is time to consider where we might escape to, mila moja, my dear one. Thank goodness the Yugoslavian union was created just in time. I think we can be safe there.”

  “You’re frightening me, Martin. I can't bear to think about leaving here ever again. Once was enough. I want us to stay. Things have been getting better here since the war ended. Besides, this baby is all I can worry about right now. It should be a joyous time for us, Martin. The beginning of a new life. Please,” Katarina continued, “let's talk about her name.”

  “I know the name!” Martin exclaimed. His face lit up, and he seemed to put his worries behind him for at le
ast a moment. Maybe Katarina was right, and they could stay. But either way, he was ready to move forward with their lives. “If it's a girl she will be Zora, the dawn, and if it’s a boy, Zoran. In spite of how things look, maybe it can be a new dawn, a new day, even for us. I know we can make a new future for our family.”

  Zora, thought Katarina. This was the perfect name for the child who could help them usher in a new life. Zora would be the first in their family to have a name picked for her by her father. She would mostly be called Zorića, since everyone always used diminutive names in the family, and it was an adorable nickname.

  Martin left soon after this conversation, thinking he would be back before the baby was born. He had one last trip to take as the commercial ships were leaving, and he had to solidify his prospects so he could talk to Katarina about the future with confidence.

  A leaflet from the period of Fascist Italianization prohibiting singing or speaking in the "Slavic language" in the streets and public places of Dignano (now Vodnjan, Croatia, near Pula in Istria). Signed by the Squadristi (blackshirts), and threatening the use of “persuasive methods” in enforcement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Finding another way

  Martin went out the door, waved to Bogdan, and walked down the hill. Perhaps it was the sorrow of losing it, but the village seemed more beautiful than ever. The stone houses were strong; there was lots of room for growing families, and plenty of space for the children to play. In the evenings they could sit in the courtyards and have a rakija, a homemade fruit brandy, or a sweet wine made from their own grapes.

  He passed the parcels of land that had been in his family for centuries, as well as the new ones he had been acquiring, the land that was supposed to give his daughters an edge when they were searching for husbands. He didn't mind if the next baby was also a girl. Martin still ached at the loss of his boys, but there was no replacing them. At least girls wouldn't go fight, if it ever came to that again.