Fortunately, I was able to move near her a short time later.
Harold and I were living at the time in Minneapolis, where we had met and married. We loved it, but knew we wouldn’t stay in that cold northern climate forever. Our children—for that’s how I always thought of my stepchildren Beth and Brad—were finished with high school and would both go to college in Colorado. I had just sold a technology company I had been running, and Harold suggested it was time for a lifestyle—rather than a career—decision. We decided that the San Francisco Bay Area offered everything we were looking for. It had a strong technology base for jobs, my family lived there, and we both loved it. Harold had fallen in love with it while at Stanford, and had no desire to head back to New Jersey. Besides, it had long been home for me. A few months later, we started the shift to San Francisco.
I took a job as Chief Executive of a company in Berkeley and moved to a condo in San Francisco. Harold took another year to unwind from an executive position at the large computer company in Minneapolis where we both had been working when we met, and then joined me. We spent as much time as we could with Zora, and she and I finally grew very close.
In Yugoslavia, meanwhile, Josip Broz Tito had died in 1980, and the mesh that was keeping the Yugoslav states together started fraying quickly after that. By the end of that decade, it was coming apart, first with the inevitability that was Slovenia declaring its independence, and then with the wars that started when Croatia and Bosnia, eventually followed by others, also tried to break free.
When Yugoslavia started splintering, Zora struggled with the conflict from the security of her home in San Francisco, safely distant, not comprehending what was driving the emerging viciousness of the conflict, and finally serving as the only link between sisters caught on opposing sides of the war. She couldn’t do much more than call them as often as possible, send money, and worry.
One day Harold, Zora and I were sitting in her kitchen, talking as we so often did. The large bowl that always held chunks of Guittard semi-sweet baking chocolate had been offered around, and, as usual, Zora was cooking something that smelled really good. Harold teased her about her recent attempts at an exercise class at the senior center, which she quickly dropped when she realized she would have to wear shorts or tights and that men attended the class too.
“Zora, are your sisters all right?” Harold asked.
“Yes, I talk to them all the time. You know, fortunately there are no young ones in the military.” Then she turned to me as she so often did and continued in Serbian. “I don’t understand any of this. When we lived there the union of all the states was a strong way to keep a group of small countries from being too insignificant to matter in the world, at risk of someone attacking them or simply taking them over.” I interpreted for Harold as always. We had wonderful conversations this way.
“Weren’t there issues over religion?” Harold asked.
“I think this religion thing is all trumped up to give them something to fight about. The Turks were defeated many years ago; the Moslems who stayed are long integrated into the community. And no one in Yugoslavia was very religious.”
“What about the issues around World War II?”
“That was awful,” Zora said. She talked about the radical Croats who sided with the Nazis, and killed a lot of Serbs. And the Serbian Partisani who retaliated as the war was ending. “But I lived in both those countries after the war. I thought we could live in peace. I was wrong.”
“Mama,” I interjected, “ti znaš, you know, after all this time, I’m not sure I even know how you tell a Serb from a Croat. They all look the same to me; they speak almost the same language.” As always, I could only speak to her in her language.
“Oh,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. “It’s easy. You can tell by the last name.”
“By the last name?”
“Yes. If the person’s last name ends in –nič or –čič, they are Croatian. If it ends in –vič or –sič, they are Serbian.”
“Oh.” I was amazed. “It’s that simple?”
“Yes,” she said, as if there could be nothing more obvious.
I turned this previously unheard of thought over in my mind for a while. I had never been able to distinguish between the various peoples in Yugoslavia. There was a myth about tall blonds on the Adriatic, or Dalmatian, coast. But really, they all just looked like white people to me. And most of them sounded alike, with more or less of the soft “e” pronunciation, what is often referred to as the ljekavka—strongest in central Croatia.
My mother’s definition, concerning family names, was something I had never heard before, and have never been able to find any other independent substantiation of since.
“But Mama,” I suddenly had a startling thought, “your name was Marinovič!”
“So?”
“Well, that ends in –vič.”
“Of course it does, Tania.”
“But you’re Istrian, and that means you are Croatian. And you told me the ending -vič meant Serbian.”
“But remember, Tania, 400 years ago our family came from Montenegro.”
“Oh, right.”
She said it as if everyone knew where their families were 400 years ago. When I was young, I asked her how she knew this about her family. We had no documents of any kind that were older than our birth certificates. Even those were only translations, sneaked out of the country when we fled.
“My father talked about it all the time, Tania. How could I not know?” she answered.
I put it down to folklore, but couldn’t get it out of my mind. In high school, however, I was awarded a trip from an organization called Junior Achievement to their annual conference in Indiana and added on a visit to Dyadya Zenya, who was then living with Vava in New York.
I visited the public library on Fifth Avenue and found they had a department dedicated to Slavic Studies. An elderly woman who worked there helped me research the subject of my heritage, which I described from old stories of Mama’s as including Venetian ships that came to help people from Montenegro emigrate to Istria four hundred years ago.
Incredibly, the woman was able to find a variety of sources, and one did in fact talk about the Venetian Empire’s need to repopulate Istria after the plagues of the Middle Ages wiped out the local populace, dropping it to 10,000 from an original 100,000 during the Roman Empire. I was shocked to learn that family myth seemed to be based in historical fact, but I lost the reference. On more recent visits, I found that the librarians had been replaced with computers, and I could not replicate my search.
But to my mother, these subjects were current and clear, requiring little explanation. She tossed out centuries-old information as if it explained everything.
“Besides,” she continued, “what does it matter if we are Serbian or Croatian; we’re all one people; we all speak one language. Govorimo po našemu. We speak our language.”
“Well,” I said, “right now a lot of people are killing each other over this very issue.”
“Oh that,” she said, as if swatting a fly rather than clarifying a debate that was tearing her family and an entire country apart. “That is just something that prokleti Milosevič is using to foment war. He doesn’t really care about Serbs or Croats.” She believed he had a power complex and wanted to keep everything under his control.
“People are unfortunately nationalistic enough that he is able to use it to generate hatred. You know, Hitler and Mussolini were able to do the same thing,” Zora continued. “I’ve never lived in a world where someone couldn’t come along and use human nature against itself.”
In one brief discussion my mother clarified her perspective on a subject of confounding complexity from both a historical and sociological point of view. I suspected that this world viewpoint was what gave her the ability to live through constant turmoil, repeated exile and emigration with an amazing equanimity. There seemed nothing more to say on this subject.
I neglected to pursu
e, at that moment, as the country started collapsing, whether she considered herself Croatian or Serbian, or perhaps Montenegrin. To me she was just Yugoslavian and our language Serbo-Croatian.
Together for the only time in their adult lives, the six sisters meet in Zagreb in 1973. Zora is on the right.
Tania and Harold‘s wedding, with the family.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Taking Zora to Medulin
By 1992, the Yugoslavia I was born in was disappearing. Fighting had spread throughout Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Zora hadn’t been back to visit her sisters since long before the wars that ripped up Yugoslavia started, and she really missed them. She no longer had my father to talk to, and no one she knew in San Francisco spoke her language.
Harold and I kept offering to take her, but she deferred, worried about the fighting. We determined to pull her out of her resigned state, shake her up a bit, liven up her existence. If nothing else, we would travel in Europe together, perhaps in Italy, close to where she was born, and where she and I had lived as refugees.
“Mama, we know you've wanted to visit your country for a long time. Maybe we should go now. Harold has some vacation; I'm between jobs.”
“You know it's too dangerous, Tania. They are still fighting over there.” It disturbed her that it just wouldn’t end, this fighting going on between countries she knew so well, countries she had lived in, countries her sisters lived in.
“Well,” Harold said, “we’d like to go on a trip with you.” He wanted to break through her seeming reluctance. She had been unable to bounce back from the death of my father a few years earlier. Now the continuation of this war was pulling her further down.
“Let's just go where they aren't fighting,” I said. “I’d love to go to Italy, I've been studying Italian for months now. I'm ready to test it out!”
“Italy?” Mama asked.
“Yes, wouldn't you like to go to Italy?”
“Where would we go?”
“Well, I'd like to show Harold Trieste and the refugee camp we lived in when I was young. We could start by going there.”
“I'd like that,” interjected Harold. “But weren't you born somewhere near Trieste, Zora?”
“Sure I was. I was born in Istria, in the village of Medulin. It's the peninsula just below Trieste; it’s not far from it at all.”
“There's no fighting in that part of the country, is there?” asked Harold.
“Oh no, the fighting is farther south, in the border areas between Serbia and Croatia. Istria is in the far northwest. There’s been no fighting there.”
“Well, maybe we could start in Trieste, then explore Istria.”
“But Harold,” Zora said, “what about Italy? I've never been anywhere but Trieste, and you two are always going there. What's your favorite place?”
“Our favorite town is a small place just south of Genoa called Camogli. It's a little fishing village.”
“Oh, goodness,” her face suddenly lit up in memory. “We left for America from Genoa, on that big ship!”
“See,” Harold chuckled. “You have been somewhere else in Italy.”
“Well, that doesn’t really count,” Zora said. “We just boarded the ship there. It wasn’t a real visit.”
“We could start in Trieste and travel through Venice, go to Florence, and then head across to the coast,” I said. “It would be fun!” I couldn't wait to try out my Italian on real Italians.
“But I think we need to go see where you were born, Zora,” Harold insisted. “And Tania really wants to go back to Trieste with you. We could do all that in two weeks; it's really not that big a distance. It would be like exploring Northern California—it's no bigger!”
By then he had the atlas out, and was drawing lines. “Let’s see. Trieste is just a few miles east of Venice, on the Adriatic, and right on the border. Immediately across the border to the south is the Istrian peninsula. It looks like the city of Pula, at the southern tip of Istria, is less than a hundred miles south of Trieste. I bet we could even take a boat there!”
“I hadn't thought of it that way,” I admitted. “Makes you wonder why we have waited this long.”
Harold and I looked at each other, then at Mama. I was waiting for her to tell us it was impossible.
And then Zora uttered the unexpected words that actually set us off on this adventure: “Ti znaš, Tania, ne možemo više čekati. You know, Tania, we can't wait forever for this war to end.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Finding Cousin Milan
Who was that vibrant woman? I wondered a few weeks later, far from that kitchen in San Francisco. Did I know her?
She looked a bit like my mother: tiny, short dark hair complementing a black-eyed sparkle, linen dress showing a bit of knee, slender legs, and with a figure still close enough to nubile for a woman way beyond that stage of life. Her feet were shod in comfortable walking shoes that nevertheless had a bit of heel to accentuate an ankle beautiful enough to justify the painful bunions caused by years of artfully heeled feet.
But wait! This woman’s face pointed upwards—not submissively—grandly, as though bestowing a gift on the person she addressed. She wore a big smile and carried herself with a flirtatious bearing. My mother’s eyes didn’t sparkle. They hadn’t since Tolya had died. And I hardly remembered that freely bestowed smile—let alone one given to a stranger.
Who was that woman, and why was she standing in a foreign town, flirting with a tall, handsome, white-haired gentleman?
Those thoughts ran through my mind as we travelled to the small town of Medulin, Istria, to look for Zora’s birthplace and her maternal Uncle, Bogdan.
We landed in Trieste, Italy and a few days later took a taxi to Pula, the city on the southern tip of Istria, which was quite close to Medulin. The taxi was our only alternative as rental companies, because of the war, would not let us rent a car in Italy and enter the former Yugoslavia with it. No buses or trains plied that route, and boats went only between Venice and Istria, not Trieste and Istria.
It started in the taxicab. Harold had no sooner seated Zora in the front seat than she recognized from the driver’s accent that they shared a common language; one which was certainly not Italian. She learned he had fled from Serbia, and they talked non-stop po našemu for the hour it took to arrive.
In Pula, we checked into a deserted and slightly worn hotel on the water and then stepped out to find the car rental office. When we became briefly disoriented, it was Zora, and not I, who stopped the stranger walking toward us and asked questions. I just stood and watched, entranced. It was the first time I had an opportunity to observe my mother in the land of her birth. She opened like a flower that spreads its petals when warmed by the sun.
A few hours later Zora, Harold and I ended up, in that late summer of 1992, in Medulin, lost, wandering through the streets of the small, deserted town. We were on a mission to find an uncle Zora had seen once in her life, fifty years earlier on a visit with her own mother shortly after the end of World War II. We had searched both for the house my mother was born in and for her uncle Bogdan Rojnič. Her only relative, he had stayed in Istria after the Italians took over and forced Mama’s family out. But Bogdan was simply not to be found. We had just learned that our last possible source, an older postman, had left town for the weekend. It seemed hopeless, and the depressive atmosphere of a country beset by wars didn’t help.
Harold tried to get Mama to talk about the past, about her village. The stories bore no resemblance to the slowly crumbling town around us. It was fun listening, and we sat in the café for a while, sipping coffee and eating torte that reminded Harold of the ones Mama would bake for him at home. But we didn’t make progress on coming up with new places to search.
Despondent, we decided to head back toward Pula. In three days’ time we were taking one of the last boats of the season from Rovinj, just up the coast, to Venice. Maybe we could re-invigorate ourselves after lunch to go explore the area more deeply
than we had done so far. There had to be some landmark, some memory we could help Zora trigger.
As we pulled out of the center of town, we passed a small bank on the side of the road. I pulled over, not realizing how significant that simple act would be.
“We should get some local money.” I was used to being the organizer. But when I got out of the car, Zora followed.
“I want to have some money also,” she announced. A new Zora was continuing to evolve, a woman confident in her surroundings, and in command of her world. I had grown up with a mother who was confident in her own home, and sure of her role as my mother, but not completely at ease in the larger world where everyone spoke English, her fourth and probably weakest language.
“I could get some for all of us.” I said.
“Hvala, thanks, Tania. I will get my own.”
Two young women sat behind the counter, deep in conversation. The unexpectedness of strangers was clear from the expression on their faces as they glanced up.
“Gospodje,” one of them said. It meant “Ladies,” and the intonation, with a slight questioning lift at the end, indicated hello, welcome, how are you? who are you? what do you want? and do you understand me? all in that one word. We instantly understood its implicit complexity.
Zora approached the one on the left saying, “Dobar dan. Kako ste? Good day. How are you?”
“Good day. Very well, thank you. How can I help you?”
“Can you change dollars?” Mama asked.
“If you have a valid passport, we can.”
I turned to the other young woman. We discussed exchange rates and whether they accepted traveler's checks. I heard a lively conversation going on next to us, but wasn't really paying too much attention. I assumed it was polite small talk, as one might have while converting dollars.
Until, that is, the woman working with me suddenly jolted upright and said: ”But that's my grandfather!”
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