Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  Robert turned away from Tomo and craned his neck toward Jim and me. “My friend, he say he is helping me, but he is not very much helping.”

  Tomo tried to look innocent.

  Jim turned to me. “I seriously can’t believe you don’t love it here.”

  I gave my own Robert-like shrug and went upstairs alone to our dorm. I stood in the window, looking out over Novi Varoš. Ivana had lined the kids up for footraces on the sidewalk. Next door, the old man named Viktor, husband of Manda, whom I’d seen harvesting tea on our first day in the village, slingbladed his yard, stopping occasionally to sharpen the tool with a whetstone stored in a ram’s horn that was tied around his waist with a piece of leather string. The old people of Mrkopalj worked. Gnarled hands tatted lace on back stoops. An old widow rocked on the porch of the bakery, a single smudge of flour on her black dress.

  I heard Jim downstairs, laughing with the older guys, probably drinking a halp-halp. They’d been bragging when I left that they could start drinking at 6:00 A.M. and still remain sober enough to work. All the while, the workmen, sober themselves, were the only ones actually doing something, gently herding the old boys away so they could finish the floors before anyone could find a hole to fall through.

  Jim was right. I was not the kind of person who just sat around and felt bad. It made me feel unattractive. I made a mental list of things that would lend some mom-like structure to this family sabbatical business.

  First, I needed an exercise routine. The endorphins would keep me from going all Sylvia Plath. Plus, we’d had some incarnation of bacon at pretty much every meal in Mrkopalj. I couldn’t afford to buy new pants. A little reconnaissance was in order.

  Second, I would quit with the random crazy-lady wandering. There would be form and shape to this exploration, starting with afternoon drives a few days a week to get the lay of the land.

  Third, I would make a friend or two.

  When Jim came back upstairs to start dinner, I told him about the list and he gave me a big, fat hug.

  From that day forward, my life in Mrkopalj changed.

  chapter eight

  In the morning, I took my first jog to the neighboring village of Tuk. I’d driven the smooth blacktop road in the Peugeot, snaking through a flat green cleave between mountains. The odometer read 2.8 kilometers. There and back, just shy of two miles.

  Still, I could not make it all the way without stopping. Charla the GPS had told me that Mrkopalj was 880 meters above sea level, about 2,887 feet, roughly comparable to an Adirondack village. The slightly thinner air didn’t seem to power my lungs properly, but that probably had more to do with my lungs than the altitude.

  I jogged to the sound of the hiss of distance, flanked by the wide-open fields from which Mrkopalj took its name. Long ago, in my great-grandparents’ time, every family dreamed of having a plot in this fertile stretch between Mrkopalj and Tuk that they called the polje (POLE-yay). Land was everything. Land meant possibility. Houses were crammed into the far corners of properties, to allow maximum space for grazing sheep or extra gardens or another house for a son’s family. I learned these things in my fledgling efforts to engage, forcing Robert to translate for me over late-morning coffee in Stari Baća.

  I huffed past fields now abandoned to weed and wildflower, a few still planted with krompiri. Wooden watchtowers loomed at the edges, lookouts for hunters of brown bear or wild boar or deer. A Renault Twingo whizzed past on the narrow road, so close I could feel the driver’s-side mirror shearing the air at my elbow. I braced for death, and the imagined brush with mortality made the exertion even more intoxicating. At the end, I walked home dripping wet down Novi Varoš, feeling watched, seeing no one, exhilarated nonetheless.

  At the same time, we commenced afternoon drives in the Gorski Kotar, through tunnels blasted into white rock, under cathedrals of spruce trees so old their needled branches seemed to melt to the earth. The mountains tumbled low and rounded, their thick wig of forest studded with shocking white calcareous rocks. The slopes worked their way up in height to the narrow ridge of Bjelolasica, the highest peak of the Gorski Kotar’s Kapela mountain chain at 1,534 meters, or a little over 5,000 feet.

  The names of the villages sounded so funny on our tongues: Belo Selo; Zahrt; Čučak; Skrad. We passed river towns plumed with ferns, campgrounds strangely empty but for rows of overturned canoes. We drove mountain roads so cockeyed they felt like amusement park rides, not a guardrail in sight, giving ourselves over to a perpetual state of danger and carsickness. The kids and I got into the habit of tucking extra grocery bags into the pockets of the car doors. “To barf in,” explained Sam, when Robert’s girls saw us ferreting away plastic sacks. Eventually we figured out that burping eased queasiness, and the Peugeot became a fantastic acoustic stage for great croaks of relief.

  We didn’t see many people; there hadn’t been many to begin with. The five thousand square miles of Gorski Kotar land had barely been populated until the Turks came sniffing around, spurring the Habsburgs that ruled Croatia into protecting their resources by forcing people to actually live here. They had to import settlers: Orthodox refugees from the Ottoman Empire seeking religious freedom, plus large clans of legendary troublemaking coastal pirates called Uskoks. My ancestral land: settled by exiles and criminals. Secretly, I hoped I was a rowdy Uskok from way back.

  Because Cuculić remained useless in a tourism capacity, we learned all of this as we would have had we never left home—from Wikipedia. But, like the mosquitoes in Minnesota, the lack of user-friendliness kept the rabble out. We felt like the first visitors to this place. We weren’t sure if this was because of the intimidating density of the forest backcountry or the perpetual morning slivovitz buzz of any potential outdoorsmen. Whatever the reason, the upside was a very soft footprint: Nobody had ruined the nature yet. It was the thickest wilderness we’d ever seen.

  Plus, the weather was great. Even on warm days, the air exuded a hint of glacial coolness that smelled of bark and rock and moss. The Gorski Kotar seemed both vast and hidden—a curiously tucked-away pocket of backwoods. I’ve felt this way while paddling through Iowa stretches of the Upper Mississippi River, similarly untouched by people, a lone patch of the original state of things. Traveling in such a place, earning entry to it, is the reward itself for the isolation that goes along with getting there. If you could deal with the narrow roads with the sheer drop-offs, if you could dodge the bears and the wolves and the pine martens, if you averted the GPS mix-up to find the appropriate forest hobbit to whisper the correct password to the wood-sap nymph and snatch the key from the lumberjack troll, you could enter this insanely untamed territory.

  We didn’t venture far on those first drives, staying within the ten-mile radius. We drove north to the village of Lokve, where we threw rocks into a mirror lake at the foot of a huge mountain and considered walking the lakeside trail. We chickened out when we realized we were the only souls in sight, save for a creepy wooden sculpture of a woman watching over us. So we looped our way south to Fužine, perfectly placed along its own mirror lake, reflecting a pleasing arrangement of quaint houses and a church spire, a scene worthy of its own Franklin Mint plate. Buses discharged hordes of elderly tourists into the streets. We judged them to be German, based on sheer size and paleness of skin.

  “What’s going on in Fužine?” Jim wondered aloud.

  “This must be where all the people live,” said Sam. “I think these are the first people I’ve seen today.”

  We headed up the street, passing an overcrowded pizza shop before settling on a fancy-looking hotel restaurant. The posted menu declared bear paw as its specialty.

  “Don’t waste the thirty-five dollars here,” Jim said as we sat down. “Edo told me he knows the butcher in Fužine, and he can get us fresh bear much cheaper.”

  I stared at Jim, incredulous. My husband already knew a guy who knew a guy.

  “Who is Edo?” I asked.

  “Oh, just a friend,” Jim said, looking
over the menu. “No big deal.”

  Jim and I ordered hunter’s stew and bacon with a side of sausage and sauerkraut over boiled potatoes. It was an oily mess of goodness that we ate until our faces were slick. We’d switched to Karlovačko because we liked the Croatian checkerboard on the label, and now we ordered two as chasers. The kids picked at their fries, looking disgusted with us.

  “They’ll eat anything,” Sam said to Zadie.

  Driving did us all good. It made us feel that we belonged, and gave context to our existence in the Gorski Kotar.

  On the first Sunday in July, the Starčević girls mentioned that it was the day of the annual church festival in Sunger, and so we drove a kilometer west to see it. The afternoon rain threatened to electrocute the sound guys amping the string band in matching black suits with peach shirts. All of them looked like Anthony Hopkins. We settled under the awning of a café-bar built right in the church parking lot. The speakers crackled through “Love Me Tender” as the kids browsed the handful of nearby toy vendors. It was kind of a bust, though, as most of the toys were just fake guns. Sam asked for a semi-automatic sniper rifle. Zadie was partial to a fake pistol with a removable chamber called the Warmonger.

  “No,” Jim and I both stated flatly, in unison.

  “I wouldn’t mind a plate of those sausages,” Jim said, looking out over the rows of picnic tables where churchgoers feasted and smoked and drank and stared at us.

  “Same here,” I said.

  “Well, how do we do it?” Jim wondered aloud. This appeared to be a church picnic. People were even bringing some form of roast beast from a cookfire next door. Was it free? If not, whom did we pay? Small mysteries such as these baffled us most. Our cell phones still languished at the bottom of empty suitcases, because figuring out how to purchase minutes would be a daylong affair.

  Jim tipped his beer toward me. “It’s your turn to get in there and figure something out.”

  I looked over at the man frying sausages in the Sunger church parking lot. Stout yet compact, inexplicably tan, he cut the figure of a high school softball coach. Not to be braggy, but I was first-team all-conference my senior year, and The Coach is a breed of man I am familiar with: body of a teddy bear, face like Dick Van Patten. I stood up and straightened my sporty skirt. A captive audience in the steady downpour appeared to collectively wonder what I was going to do next. I took a deep breath, steeled my soul, and made a mad dash across the parking lot, my head down, running as fast as if I’d bunted a dribbler down the first-base line. I slid under the canvas tent top where the Sausage Man of Sunger was lighting a tabletop grill with a rolled-up paper plate set on fire. I felt the eyes of the entire gathering upon me, the interloper at a party that had hosted the same guests for a hundred years. I beat back self-consciousness and pretended I was the kind of person who casually orders meat from a softball coach.

  The skinless sausages appeared to be of the Jimmy Dean variety. The Sausage Man of Sunger basted them in their own grease with a silver spoon before rolling them onto paper plates dabbed with a thick red sauce from a jar labeled “ajvar.” Next, he piled on sliced white onions and bread and doused each plate with a final blast of oil before handing it to a server. There was more fat involved than at a Wisconsin fish fry.

  I stepped forward. The Sausage Man of Sunger looked up from his work and scrutinized me with the full-on Croatian stare. A hush descended on the crowd.

  “Slika?” I asked him, holding up my camera.

  “Da.” He nodded once, his mouth still but his eyes smiling.

  I snapped a picture of his shiny hands, fingers thick like sausages themselves.

  I held up two fingers. “Dva, molim?” I asked. Two, please?

  He looked up at me with a radiant smile, his face slick with grease. “Dobro hrvatski!” he said loudly. Good Croatian! He pointed to the sausages and named them: “ćevapćići!”

  He rolled a few onto a plate for me, pronouncing the word again, something like cheh-VOP-chee-chee, and made another plate for Jim. “Da!”

  I was so pleased that I actually clapped. I successfully paid for the sausages—another victory!—and returned to the table amid a steady stream of approving words from the Sausage Man of Sunger, who, when I turned to glance back at him, was watching my backside intently as I walked.

  The four of us wolfed down the spicy little sausage rolls. There was something familiar about this food, and it made us all happy.

  People stared at us. We stared back. Something struck me during all this staring. There wasn’t anything menacing about it. We were just getting used to each other. If I was going to meet my goal of becoming a Slavic people person, I would have to submit to the Croatian Stare. It was easier to do with Jim and the kids nearby. Most things were.

  With my belly full of sausage in a church parking lot bar, being serenaded by Anthony Hopkinses dressed in formal wear while my kids shopped a toy artillery arsenal, I felt pretty good. I’d accumulated a few tools in my emotional toolbox over the years. It was time to start using them.

  chapter nine

  Closet shy. Huh. Jim had called it.

  It’s not that I was a loner. It’s just that, over time, I’d come to prefer my own quiet company. I used to think this was because I had kids who peppered me with questions all day long and so I craved peace more than anything else. But I guess it was also tied to an emotional laziness I’d developed in my thirties. I’d never been a party girl. Then, somewhere along the line, it got easier to curl up with a book than to go out and be social. Books had beginnings and endings and clear-cut characters I could understand. In real life, my friends morphed into spouses or parents or committed singletons, and suddenly everyone seemed more sensitive and distant than when we were all in college and had the same life, spending full days discussing the intricacies of pizza delivery and the portions of alcohol consumed the night before. As an adult, I went out less and less. Most of my socializing was in the vicinity of my house, talking plants and street gossip with neighbors, or e-mailing with editors I’d never seen in person.

  So my friend-making skills were a little rusty. How does one make actual 3-D friends as a grown-up without seeming creepy?

  This was on my mind as we began our second week in the village. We’d grabbed our European atlas from the Peugeot on a Monday afternoon, hungry for something to do. We settled on a drive straight north through a splaying mountain valley toward the Slovenian border.

  As we drove, a river skimmed alongside the road. It was the sparkly trout-fishing kind, burbling over smooth boulders and pretty as a movie. This was the Kupa, according to the map, and it formed the natural border between northwest Croatia and Slovenia. We’d heard that its source bubbled up from somewhere deep in the woods near Mrkopalj, and we hoped someday to find it.

  I unfolded our Gorski Kotar map and scanned the area. I spotted a tiny hamlet to the east called Radoševići and typed it into Charla the GPS. She sent Jim pinwheeling off the main road. The kids groaned from the backseat as we navigated squiggly mountain passes. The nice thing about having our own car was that we could linger in the pretty places, and get the hell out of Dodge when it proved too dodgy, such as the gray smear of a railroad town called Brod Moravice. Later, someone explained that the place was largely Serbian, and it hadn’t fared too well after the Yugoslavian Wars. The vibe was pure eeriness, complete with a village idiot rocking back and forth in the town square, his deep-set eyes tracking our slow drive through his haunted realm.

  As we continued toward Radoševići, we passed an odd sight: a giant grill set up just a few feet from the road and, next to it, a wheelbarrow of split wood.

  “Do you think that’s some version of a restaurant?” I asked.

  A grill master recognizing his own kind, Jim whipped the car around. “That’s gonna be tasty.”

  We parked the Peug in the gravel lot, where an exhausted-looking blonde smoked in the doorway of a low building. She snuffed out her cigarette and disappeared as we flopped d
own in plastic chairs under an awning. The waitress reappeared. We pointed to another table, where two men sat, sharing a giant platter of meat.

  “And pommes frites,” I added, for the kids.

  Within a few minutes, a burly guy in a jumpsuit walked out of the next-door garage, hauling a dead pig trussed to a metal pipe with its stomach knit shut by a giant nail. When the man passed by the kids, he nodded.

  They froze in shock as he walked to the road and staked the pig to the spit.

  Minutes later, a platter of unadorned roast pork arrived at our table. Fries on the side, plus a pile of bread slices.

  Sam and Zadie turned to me.

  I knew I must choose my words carefully now to avoid some hefty therapy bills in their futures. “Remember how I used to tell you guys that meat comes from real animals and not from Styrofoam containers?” I began.

  Zadie, who knew where I was going with this, nodded her head. “We’re going to eat that pig,” she said, poking at the food. “I never eat pig alone. It looks just like meat.”

  “Meat is just flesh from an animal,” said Jim, half a knuckle already in his mouth. “This is pig flesh.”

  Sam sat down, pale. “No thanks.”

  “No French fries until you eat some pig,” I said. “Actually, it’s called pork, and you guys both liked it back home when you didn’t know what it was.”