Out I went into the yard. Alongside the low stoop there were early spring flowers, forget-me-nots, pansies, and white-button daisies. On each side of the house grew a large purple lilac bush. This almost childish symmetry touched me deeply for some reason. Behind the house stretched a spacious garden and orchard with a dozen fruit trees. It all seemed well-tended, somebody was regularly mowing the grass. Lettuce was just coming up in the garden and there were a few tufts of scallions. A portion of the garden was planted with flowers, I recognized two bushes of peonies that hadn’t yet flowered and beds of ox-eye daisies. There were no houses nearby: the woods began right behind the orchard.
I called the lawyer. I told him there was, apparently, an “intruder.”
“Hold your horses, no cause for panic, the intruder may turn up, in any case I’m sure there’s nothing criminal involved.”
I sat on a bench on the porch and watched the sun set. The fields in the distance sank into a pinkish haze. It was warm and still. The wooden wall of the house warmed my back as I leaned against it. I shut my eyes. I’d nearly dozed off. And then I heard the sputter of a car. A man got out, roughly my age, and with light step came up onto the porch.
“Hello,” he said warmly. “Welcome to Kuruzovac.”
“And you are?”
“Your intruder, Bojan,” he said, offering me his hand.
“Who told you it’s not me who’s the intruder?”
“Your lawyer.”
This surprised me.
“What should we do now?” I asked.
“Nothing. I’ll take some of my things now and come for the rest tomorrow. Would that be OK?”
“Of course . . . I’m sorry . . .”
The man packed several items of clothing into a bag and collected his toiletries from the bathroom.
“Listen, my cat may turn up. She’s out and about all day long but in the evening she comes back to the house, so please let her in,” he said.
“Out of the question! I can’t stand cats!”
“How do you feel about dormice?”
“Who?”
“It’s a kind of rodent. Between a mouse and a squirrel. The attic was crawling with them when I arrived. Since the cat has been here, no dormice.”
I stared at him in surprise. None of it made sense. This was an entire new genre I’d stumbled onto, village sci-fi.
“OK, I’ll feed her. I saw milk in the fridge . . .”
“Good night,” he said.
It occurred to me I hadn’t asked him where he’d sleep, but then I had to wonder if I was losing my mind. Was I actually worrying about where a man I knew nothing about and who’d broken into my house would sleep? But then again, didn’t he say he was in touch with my lawyer? And didn’t that mean that the lawyer knew about him but hadn’t said a word to me? Meanwhile I caught myself noticing the lightning speed with which my ownership instinct (my house, broke in, intruder) had asserted itself.
If the cat showed up that evening, I never knew because I soon fell fast asleep and slept straight through until morning, when the cat’s meowing woke me. She’d come for her saucer of milk.
9.
The next morning I drove to the nearest place with stores, a crossroads I’d passed through on my way the day before, to see what my neighborhood had to offer. It was some five-six miles from Kuruzovac and didn’t look like much, a stain on the map that was best referred to as a place because it couldn’t be said to be a city or a town or even a village or hamlet. There were provincial non-places much like this all through the interior of Croatia, and they all looked the same. I was born in one just like this, grew up and lived there till I went to university, and along the way I developed a permanent allergy to the provinces and provincial rituals. True, there were several stately old Austro-Hungarian houses here gracing a park, but their façades had been painfully strafed with shrapnel. I spotted a grocery store, a pharmacy, a shop selling household linens and fabric, a store with handy merchandise for village households, and a bakery. The municipal building had been renovated and a Croatian flag hung out in front. Sullen bushes grew in the park, water sprayed in the modest fountain in unpredictable spurts, and frozen there was a new statue, raised to the defenders who lost their lives fighting in the Croatian homeland war, 1991–1995. I figured the new statue probably stood on the pedestal of the earlier one glorifying the victims of fascism who died during the War for National Liberation, 1941–1945. The situation with monuments was identical everywhere: “Partisan” statues were torn down and in their place were raised new “homeland” sculptures, or sometimes the old “Partisan” ones were just slightly adapted. All they had to do, after all, was chisel the number 4 into a number 9, and replace the words “National Liberation” with “Homeland.”
At the grocery store I purchased a few basic foodstuffs and then took a seat at the café and ordered a cappuccino. Local kids were loitering at the café, the boys always too loud, the girls, silent, wearing too much makeup.
“So what’s up, Auntie? You lost?” asked one of them jauntily, while the others smirked at his audacity.
The children were clearly translating the word “Mamma” from American urban street slang into “Auntie” in Croatian and that was, likely enough, how they addressed all women who didn’t fit the category of “Grandma.”
I averted my eyes—a defensive gesture reserved for encounters with those who are “stronger”—downed my cappuccino, stood up, and left.
“Auntie, hey, you’re not scared, are you?” Jaunty hooted after me, and the rest snickered and sneered.
I wondered what kids use as their retort these days. In my time it would have been, “Change the record!” or “Switch the channel!” What would the analog be now?
“Reboot”? Whatever, the kids must be dying of boredom if they had nothing better to do than taunt a middle-aged lady. The name of the café was “Zdravko.”
Back at the house I began an inspection of the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen was modest, but adequately furnished, there was almost nothing missing. I found cleaning supplies and a vacuum cleaner in a closet. The house had nearly everything I’d need. I checked the garden woodshed and there I found an orderly array of tools, hoes, shovels, a sickle for mowing grass, rubber hoses for watering the garden, and a few things for who knows what . . . The inspection was exhilarating, and the word mine (my house, my garden, my tree) clung to my vocabulary like a burr.
First I took out the vacuum and vacuumed up the dust on the first floor, then I mopped the wood floor with a wet rag. In the bedroom I changed the sheets and dumped the dirty sheets into a plastic bag. I’d fallen asleep the night before on the sofa in the living room, covering myself with my sleeping bag because I didn’t have the energy or will to make the bed up with fresh linens. Then I mopped the attic floor with a wet rag and swept the cobwebs from the rafters. I discovered linens stored in a cupboard, several clean towels, and some men’s clothing. All of these, I assumed, belonged to the intruder.
Down I went to the garden and picked some as yet unripe lettuce and onions. Along the way I cut some of the ox-bow daisies to put in a vase inside. While I was snipping the daisies the grass around me swayed; something slunk by me and scampered off into the woods. The intruder’s cat? I went back into the house; the living room was now beginning to look almost presentable. The little curtains on the windows were ghastly. I took them down and tossed them out. Then I washed the windows. With a new surge of energy I went on to the bathroom, wondering as I scrubbed where this almost physical glee was coming from. Cleaning was usually more of a chore for me than a pleasure. As if all those images from long ago had poured into me—mainly from the movies—of pioneers venturing westward in America to seek a better life (although, truth be told, I was not able to dredge up a single film title), and in which the hard-working, resilient heroines salvaged abandoned log cabins. These were scenes of solace, a matronly ethics, the aesthetic of poverty, the symbolism of scrubbing. Cleaning always signals a transit
ion to a new, better life. And when my gaze fell on the vase with the daisies on the table, which I had set there just a moment before, I realized I was performing a well-practiced genre I’d internalized years ago. This discovery, by the way, did nothing to diminish my glee at “bringing order to the chaos.”
I had just showered when I heard a knock at the door. It was Bojan.
“Come in, come in, have a seat,” I said.
He looked a little surprised at my words, my tone, but down he sat politely. And I bit my tongue: the man had, for God’s sake, been living here until the day before, and now here I was with my voice of the newly minted housewife (where did that come from?) inviting him in to have a seat.
“May I wash my hands?”
“Yes, of course . . .”
I asked him to join me for dinner. He acquiesced. I made spaghetti with tomatoes and cheese and a salad with the spring lettuce from the garden.
“Are there any animals here? Aside from the dormice, that are now gone, and your cat?” I asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because while I was in the garden, picking the lettuce and scallions, something slunk by me and scampered off into the woods . . .”
“A fox . . .”
“A fox?”
“A kit I’ve been trying to tame. I’ve been bribing it with food . . .”
“What have you been feeding it?”
“Chicken. I buy it from the local farmers.”
“The fox from The Little Prince,” I said, with irony.
“Ah, yes, the fox from The Little Prince,” he said, ignoring my irony.
“What century was that in! The feeling, I mean . . .” I said, instead of an apology.
“That was when we were starting our studies at the university. Cheap ‘spiritualism’ was the height of fashion: make love not war, Herman Hesse, Japanese Zen and the bicycle, exotic peyote and local hash, The Little Prince . . .”
We ate our modest repast, which he politely praised, then we moved out onto the porch. I uncorked a bottle of wine and poured us glasses.
“It has barely been twenty-four hours since you moved in and already you’re completely at home,” he said amicably and raised his glass to me.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.
There was an internet connection, he’d had it installed because without the internet he was lost and he assumed this would mean a lot to me as well. If I had a laptop, iPhone, or iPad with me we could test it. There was no landline set up though there was a phone jack. He used only his cell . . . He didn’t have a lot to tell me, in fact. The washing machine wasn’t working, he could find somebody to tinker with it but I’d be better off buying a new one, this one was ancient. He didn’t know much about the village, there were a few houses, some older people who lived off the land and a little livestock, mostly pig and poultry farming. As far as he knew there were no other weekenders about, this was the only summer cottage he knew of here, but there were several scattered around neighboring villages. I’d seen the town center and it was convenient, what with the grocery store, the doctor who showed up twice a week, and the little pharmacy. There was a school some fifteen miles away. The countryside was lovely, there were a few pretty spots, a pond in the woods, for instance. He’d take me there if I liked. The woods were full of mushrooms, porcini and chanterelles, one could live off the mushrooms alone—fresh while they were in season and otherwise dried. There were blueberries and wild strawberries.
“And the orchard?”
“Come, I’ll show you . . .”
The orchard seemed large to me, but he said that an orchard this size was just enough for one household. Two apricot trees, he made jam from them, I’d find a couple of jars in the kitchen cupboards left over from last year. These were apple trees, only two varieties, the Yellow Transparent, an early apple, while the other, a Reinette, ripened in the fall. There were more cherries on the two cherry trees than he could pick, a pear tree, a Petrovka, and another with smaller fruit the locals called squash pears. Over there were two plum trees, a white plum and an Empress, and every year a neighbor picked them to distill the plums for brandy. Here we had vineyard peaches, a rarity today and by far the tastiest variety. And this here? A gooseberry bush. People here weren’t familiar with it, he’d planted one so he could try his hand at making gooseberry preserves, all because of Russian literature. He’d remembered the mention of gooseberry preserves. Was it Chekhov? Did I know? True, the orchard wasn’t purely eco and bio, it was a challenge to keep an orchard viable with no “chemicals.”
“This really is your house, Bojan,” I interrupted him, chagrined.
“Now it’s yours,” he said. “I moved in when there was no owner around. True, I’ve kept the house and garden in good shape, without me this would all be overgrown. There’s a lot to do around a house, I don’t know how handy you are with that sort of thing.”
The cat appeared in the garden and twined around Bojan’s ankles.
“There you are, you little tramp,” he said, scratching it on the head, and turned to go back to the house to feed it. I followed him.
“Bojan, what are you doing out here in this village?”
He stopped for a moment, and then answered with an tinge of reluctance.
“I’m a de-miner.”
“A what?”
“I clear minefields . . .”
“What minefields?” I asked stupidly.
“I’m not here alone, there’s a whole team of us . . . Quite a few landmines were abandoned after the war. The war was awful around here. You saw the damage to the houses at the crossroads . . . They look like Swiss cheese.”
“It’s all so mindless!”
“Right you are, mindless . . .”
“So where’s this team of yours?”
“Not far, I can show you our work area, if you like, our MSA . . .”
“MSA?”
“Mine suspicious area . . .”
“Do you mean to say there are land mines nearby?”
“Well, that wouldn’t be far from the truth.”
“And then what do you do?”
“We search the area we’ve designated as an MSA and when we find the landmines, we de-mine them.”
“How many mines are there?”
“Official Croatian sources give the number as 60,000, with three times as many in Bosnia. But unofficial tally has the numbers much higher.”
“So sixty thousand potential Croatian corpses, but only according to official sources? Unofficially, every Croat might be a victim?”
“You think like a fundraiser. Luckily, only a third of the people who step on mines are killed.”
“And the others?”
“They’re likely to lose an arm or a leg.”
“Conversation with you really does lift the spirits,” I said and poured more wine.
I fell silent. The sun was going down and a chill crept in. I rose to get a sweater and came back to the porch.
“After what I told you, you have the feeling that there are mines lurking at every step, don’t you,” he said.
“Exactly. Does that mean I’m a coward?”
“No, it means you’re normal.”
“But there are none in the garden?”
He laughed.
“Or the orchard?”
“No.”
“What about the woods?”
“No, these woods are not categorized as an MSA.”
“Still, one never knows . . .”
“True, one never knows. But if you follow the well-trodden paths I doubt anything will happen to you. The local farmers all know that.”
“Still, people are sometimes killed?”
“It does happen.”
“So mindless . . .” I repeated the phrase like an ugly tic.
“War is mindless. It’s over now but the landmines are still with us. And the whole problem has sunk into illegality . . .” he said.
“Illegality?”
“The war no longer interests anybody except those who think there’s still profit to be made. Our heroes have been acquitted of guilt for war crimes on all sides. Most of them will never do time. The few who have gone to prison are welcomed back as heroes. New statues have been raised, veteran pensions granted, the refugees are not coming back because they have nowhere to come back to. The landmines are all that’s left to remind us of what happened here . . .”
“What you’re telling me sounds like the opening for a novel.”
He chuckled.
“The most interesting paradox is that the de-miners are doing the job to eke out a living.”
“Excuse me?”
“At first it promised to be well-paid. The European Community, but also the Croatian government, set aside considerable sums of money to clear Croatia of landmines. Private de-mining firms began cropping up, some forty of them in Croatia alone.”
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