Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Grgich went in and asked the bartender, “Do you have any rooms?”

  “We have twenty-four rooms,” he replied.

  “Any empty?”

  “We have twenty-four empty rooms.”

  “Can I get one of the rooms?”

  “Two bucks. Go upstairs and take any room you want.”

  Grgich took out the American money he had gotten at a bank in Vancouver before his trip and paid the bartender two dollars. Then he picked up his suitcases, walked up the stairs, and opened the door of the first room at the top.

  A long journey had taken Grgich from Desne, a village five miles from the Adriatic Sea, to St. Helena, a town forty-five miles from the Pacific Ocean.

  Miljenko Grgich was born on April 1, 1923, into a peasant family in a rural Croatian village of about a thousand inhabitants. Wine had always been the centerpiece of his life. He was born the eleventh of eleven children, and since he was the last child his mother Ivka nursed him longer than she had the others. That made him feel special, but one day the two-and-a-half-year-old boy did something that made her angry and she snapped at him, “No more milk!”

  The boy was crushed to lose his privileged position. Now he had to join the other family children and drink a mixture of water and wine calledbevanda . Although his parents were illiterate, their folk wisdom had taught them that the combination was safe for the children to drink. The family’s water came from rainwater collected from the roof into a small cistern. Ivka sanitized the water used for food during cooking, but there was no purification system for drinking water. Although the parents didn’t realize it, wine sanitized their drinking water. As Miljenko learned later in college, ingredients in wine killed contaminants in the water, makingbevanda safe to drink.

  The Grgi family, like most others in the village, was virtually self-sufficient. They grew all their own vegetables, corn, and wheat and owned a few animals—horses plus cows and sheep that provided both milk and cheese. Ivka made clothes for the family from wool sheared from the sheep. There were also shoes made from the skins of animals they slaughtered. Skin of cows or pigs was used for soles, while the top was made of lamb skin.

  Anyone in Desne who owned land set aside a plot for growing wine grapes. Croatia for centuries was a crossroads of Europe, and conquering Romans, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, and others left behind their favorite grape varieties as they passed through. Miljenko later did his college thesis on Yugoslav grape varieties and found more than a hundred in use in Metkovi , the county where he grew up.

  Wine was one of the Grgi family’s few cash crops. They saved half the production for themselves, selling the other half to villagers who did not make wine. Wine was even the family medicine. If one of the Grgi children had the flu, Ivka would boil some red wine and add sugar to it. The concoction was painfully hot and often burned the inside of the child’s mouth, but more often than not the next morning he or she felt better. Miljenko’s father, Nikola, started his workday by gargling somerakija, a wine brandy.

  As in any farm family in Desne, Miljenko went to work at an early age. When he was three his small feet were already crushing grapes at harvest time. The wine was fermented in a vat located in the basement of the family house. Starting at about the age of ten, when the grape juice was fermenting into wine, Miljenko would open a door in the floor above the cellar before he went to bed and lower himself into the vat by holding onto the sides. He would then stomp around to push down the crust of wine-skins and seeds that had collected on the top. Breaking up the cap like that allowed carbon dioxide that developed during fermentation to escape. Then Miljenko would lift himself back up and get back into bed. First thing in the morning he would go through the procedure all over again.

  The center of Grgi family life was theognji te, the fireplace in front of which everything important took place. All food was cooked or baked there, and children were even born there because the fire provided the warmth Ivka needed during childbirth. At night the family gathered at theognji te to talk and play. Father and mother passed along to their children the wisdom of the ages, much of it in the form of stories.

  One of the greatest pleasures in young Miljenko’s life was eating an egg cooked in the fireplace. Nikola would first put an egg into the hot coals and turn it round and round with a stick. The father would explain to his son that when the first drop of moisture appeared on the shell, the egg was almost ready, but the yolk was still too runny. Only when that drop evaporated and another drop appeared was the egg ready to eat. After putting Miljenko on his knee, Nikola would kiss him and then open the egg by knocking off the top with a knife. Finally, the father would take a piece of bread, dip it into the yolk, and give it to the boy. It would be delicious, and Miljenko never forgot the taste of the egg or his father’s gentle kiss.

  When he was about six years old, Miljenko had the chore of watching over the family’s sheep. Before going to school he took them up to a nearby mountain and after school he brought them home. The best place to graze was on public land. So in the afternoon, after the government watchman had left, he often took his sheep there to forage. In the twilight when he guided the sheep back home, the animals were so full that they could hardly walk.

  Religion played a very important part in the life of the Grgi family. They were Roman Catholic and always attended church on Sunday and holy days and regularly went to confession and communion. Just as the children never challenged their parents, no one ever doubted the village priest.

  Miljenko was a good student, first attending primary school for four years in Desne. The education of most village youngsters ended there, but since the boy seemed eager to learn his mother sent him to the nearby town of Metkovi to stay with his sister, Stana, so he could get four more years of business schooling. After eight years of education and at the age of fourteen, Miljenko got his first degree, the Mala Matura. Anyone with that much book learning was considered something of an intellectual, and that was enough education for a while.

  A cousin, Sre ko Grgi , had opened a general store in Desne, and Miljenko was put in charge of it. The shop, which was open seven days a week, sold everything from food to clothing. The boy still lived at home and helped each year with winemaking.

  This pleasant, simple, and orderly life ended in 1939, when Miljenko was sixteen. The winds of war began blowing across Europe, and they were felt particularly intensely in the Balkans, where a ratatouille of rival ethnic groups had been fighting for centuries. The war provided another opportunity for them to restart the killing. Ethnic groups split into Fascist, Communist, Royalist, and pro-Western factions that battled each other for the next five years almost as much as they fought the occupying Germans and Italians.

  In 1943, the Communists took control of the region around Desne and carted away everything from the store that Miljenko was still running. He then escaped to a neighboring village, which the Communists did not control. That same year Italy capitulated and the Italian army moved out of Dalmatia, but the German army soon moved in and started a brutal search for resistance fighters. German troops devastated Desne, destroying nearly every house in the village.

  When the war ended in the spring of 1945, Miljenko had just turned twenty-two, and the Communists, led by Marshal Tito, controlled the country. The young man knew he wasn’t going to do well there. He had seen what happened when Communists confiscated his cousin’s store and had also read about what took place when they conquered other countries. During the Communist seizure of power he saw them steal anything of value from the peasants and kill two women. Miljenko, though, still had to make a life for himself. He could have become a Communist and gotten a government job, but his experience running the general store and books he had read about American businessmen like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison had turned him against Communism.

  Miljenko thought for a while about becoming a scientist. He knew that in the Soviet Union scientists enjoyed a somewhat better life because the Commu
nists needed them. He also noticed that there was plenty of work for bookkeepers in the new Communist country to keep track of things in the heavily centralized economy. So a year after the war ended, Miljenko went to a business school in the town of Split to learn bookkeeping.

  Life was tense in the Communist-controlled country. Once while studying in Split, he ran into someone he had known before the war who was now a Communist and an officer in the Yugoslav army.

  “What are you doing?” asked the old friend.

  “I’m going to business school,” answered Miljenko.

  “Who gave you permission to do that? Only Communists can go to university.” That, however, was not actually government policy.

  After finishing his business studies, Miljenko worked for a year as a bookkeeper of a state-owned co-op in Metkovi .

  Wine, though, which he had been drinking since his mother stopped providing breast milk, had a hold on him. During the war Miljenko had seen wine become almost as valuable as gold. In bad times people drank wine to forget their troubles. Winemaking, he concluded, was a trade that would always serve him well. Miljenko had regretted pulling out some grapevines at home in the early days of the war and replanting the land with wheat, corn, and vegetables because his father thought food would be more important than wine in the tough times ahead. It would have been smarter, Miljenko thought, to have left the grapes, which the family could have made into wine that could have been exchanged for food.

  In 1949, Miljenko decided to study viticulture and enology at the University of Zagreb in the capital of Croatia. Only twelve students were allowed each year into the program, but he thought that if he arrived at the university early on the sign-up day, he might be able to get one of the coveted spots. Since he didn’t have a bicycle, much less a car, and the streetcar didn’t start running until 5:30 a.m., Miljenko had to walk. He got up at 2:00 and walked the seven miles to the university with a friend. When they arrived, the two found a woman already ahead of them. But no other students came until about 5:30, when the streetcars began to run. Soon a hundred students were vying for those twelve spots, but only the first twelve students in line were accepted. The rest went home unhappy.

  While studying in Zagreb, Miljenko also held down two jobs: one working on genetic experiments to make new varieties of corn, wheat, and other cereals; the second doing research on new varieties of fruit. He lived far from the university in the center of Zagreb near the Opera House in a tiny upstairs maid’s room. The building was more than a hundred years old, the rooms narrow and dark. His room had no heat, running water, or even a table. In winter it was so cold and the light so poor that Miljenko often studied in nearby cafés. He would order a glass of water and read from two to six in the afternoon, when he had to leave because dinner customers started arriving. For the first two years Miljenko took courses in general agriculture and such sciences as microbiology, climatology, and botany. During his second two years, he studied viticulture and enology.

  It rained frequently and heavily in Zagreb, and Miljenko rode the streetcar to classes. One day he forgot his umbrella on the streetcar, but when he went to buy a new one he didn’t have enough money, so instead he bought a beret to keep his head dry. He’s been wearing a beret ever since.

  During his last year at the university, Miljenko got into trouble when he joined a protest movement against the administration for firing a popular professor, Marko Moha ek, just two months short of full retirement. Moha ek had dared to voice complaints about Communism, and the firing reduced his pension by 25 percent. After the protest a friend told Miljenko, “Be careful. The secret police are following you.” Grgi decided he had to leave Yugoslavia as soon as possible.

  One day in early 1954, the life of the now thirty-

  one-year-old student changed. A professor at the University of Zagreb had just come back from a six-month sabbatical in California, and a group of students including Miljenko asked to meet with him to talk about life in the United States. They wanted to know what it was really like there. The Communist-controlled Yugoslav media reported regularly on how racial injustices and worker exploitation were rampant in the U.S., but people knew there was more to life in America than that propaganda.

  “What does California look like? What is it like?” the students insistently asked.

  The professor talked for a long time. At one moment almost in passing he said, “In California where there is no water, it’s a desert. But where there’s water, it’s paradise.” Paradise. The word echoed in Miljenko’s mind that day and for years to come.

  “And what about the farming equipment?” asked a student.

  “Almost all farmers have a tractor,” the professor replied. “But every five years they get a new one because the new model is so much better than the old one and more efficient.”

  “Everyone has a tractor!” the students said in disbelief.

  Miljenko had been thinking of leaving Croatia for a while, and after the meeting with the professor he knew for sure that he wanted to go to California. An older sister, whom he had never met, had married a Croatian-American. They lived in the state of Washington, and their son was a Catholic priest. Perhaps they could help him get a visa so that he could go to that place that was paradise if there was water, and where every farmer had a tractor.

  Shortly before he was due to graduate, Miljenko applied for a United Nations fellowship to go on a two-month student program to West Germany. He knew that he would not be allowed out of the country if he had finished his academic work, so he deliberately did not complete his thesis on the grape varieties in the Metkovi region.

  Miljenko got the fellowship and in August 1954 hurriedly left Yugoslavia with a passport valid for only four months. Before departing he went to a shoemaker and had him put an extra sole on his shoe under which he hid thirty-two dollars in American money that he had obtained on the black market. Miljenko hoped that thirty-two dollars would take him to California.

  His first stop, though, was Schwäbisch Hall, a small town located between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. He arrived by train in the middle of the night and slept on a bench in the station waiting room. In the morning, a clerk at the station telephoned Hannfried Franck, a farmer in the Oberlimpurg section of town, where Grgi was to stay under the UN program. Franck picked him up and took him to his farm about one mile away.

  Miljenko was warmly received and both worked and lived with the family. The common language among them was English, which Hannfried’s wife, Gertrud, had learned when she lived in New York City in the 1920s. The family had five children, three girls and two boys. The younger boy, named Peter, who was fifteen soon regarded Miljenko like an older brother.

  Schwäbisch Hall was beautiful, with the Franck farm standing in the shadow of the Limpurg Castle. The farm was a research station that employed some thirty people and did studies on new varieties of cereals, which Hannfried Franck also sold.

  The other Yugoslav students who came to West Germany returned home at the end of the summer, but Miljenko stayed on and began trying to get a visa to enter the U.S. After his Yugoslav passport expired, Miljenko officially became a refugee in West Germany. Schwäbisch Hall was in the American occupation zone of West Germany, and he was taken to an internment camp in Nuremberg. Hannfried Franck, though, paid the required money to get him released.

  Miljenko ran into severe frustration trying to get an American visa. His hopes soared early on, when he received a letter from New York City’s Cardinal Francis Spellman telling him that a job had been found for him and that his transatlantic trip by ship would be paid for. The letter told Miljenko that in two months he would be in the U.S., but he never heard anything more from Spellman.

  The months dragged on with no action on a visa, while Miljenko continued working at the farm. The number of U.S. visas in those days was based on the percentage of a nationality currently living in the country. Since the number of Yugoslav-Americans was small, there were few visas. Miljenko soon realized that he mig
ht be waiting years to get one.

  After he endured eighteen months with growing impatience, one day in December 1955, a friend suggested that Miljenko emigrate first to Canada, and then see if he could get into the U.S. from there. He went to the Canadian consulate in Munich and that very day received a visa. When a Canadian official asked him where he wanted to go, Miljenko pointed on a map to Vancouver because it was close to the state of Washington where his brother-in-law, Vide Domandich, lived.

  As soon as Miljenko received a Canadian visa, he called Domandich, and asked him for two hundred dollars to pay for his passage, adding that he should send it as soon as possible. Miljenko then began making reservations for the train trip from Schwäbisch Hall to Hamburg, the northern German port city where he would board the shipItalia, which was to take him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada.

  All the tickets together cost about $150, but as the day of leaving approached, no money had arrived. The day before departure, Hannfried Franck paid for the tickets, and Miljenko promised to repay him as soon as he could. The morning Miljenko was to leave, the money finally arrived, and he immediately repaid Franck. Grgi , though, never forgot the man who was ready to give money out of his own pocket to a refugee so that he could make a trip to start a new life.

  The Franck family threw a going-away party for Miljenko that included not only family members but also people working on the farm. During the party Miljenko became very emotional. He told the elder Franck privately that although he was happy to be leaving, he was also scared about his venture into the unknown. At the end of the party, as many people as could squeezed into the family’s gray Mercedes-Benz to take Miljenko to the train station for a tearful good-bye.