The buns were hard, the meat dry and bland. Mario passed, claiming an aversion to “mixed meat.” But mostly our friends wolfed down the burgers with enthusiasm, marveling that Americans certainly have big mouths to be able to manage such a giant sandwich. For some reason, this made us proud. We had big mouths!
Robert, more than anyone, seemed to sense the gravity of Jim’s Burger Quest. East met West in one big greasy package of gratitude delivered from a visitor who had embraced Mrkopalj from the very beginning. The Originale American Hamburger was the first thing we’d forced Robert to eat that he actually enjoyed. He’d run away in alarm when Jim offered the chili. He’d covered his face in horror when I showed him my peach cobbler. But he stuffed so much of that hamburger in his mouth that he shot out chunks of it when he complimented the chef and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Jim looked so pleased that I thought his chest would burst. He had communicated love in his own meat-centric way and our friends in Mrkopalj had copied the message.
Sam and Zadie served jelly beans and Twinkies from a care package my parents had sent. This offering Mario accepted. It turned into a game between him and Zadie, with him asking her for just one more, and her digging into the bag to hand him jelly beans throughout the night.
I busted out a tin of Jiffy Pop popcorn, another care-package goodie. Tensions mounted as the Jiffy Pop expanded and erupted. When Jim cut open the foil to reveal popcorn, everyone seemed visibly relieved, and we ate the whole thing in minutes.
As the sun began to set, we noticed Željko Crnić sitting at his backyard picnic table, looking skyward. Jim hollered across the fence, asking him to join. Željko went into his house and returned with an old straw hat full of delicate pears from one of his trees. Željko gave Jim the pears, nodded in thanks, and took a burger. He had been outside, he explained, because he was waiting for the Perseid meteor shower.
And so we built up the fire, brought out more chairs, and waited for stardust to fall from the sky as Tomo, Jim, and Robert floated away on a sea of gemišt, which culminated in Tomo’s passionate declarations about the large heart of Mrkopalj. I think this was the local equivalent to “I love you, man.”
And that night, for all of us assembled around the fire, the feeling was very much mutual.
chapter twenty-one
I’d hit an impasse on my genealogical mission in Mrkopalj. The more comfortable we got with life in the village, the closer we felt to its people, the more distracted I became from finding my blood connection to the place.
Plus, it turns out, I don’t really have a head for genealogy. (I feel like an idiot even admitting that.) I’d made a list of ancestors from the Book of Names. I’d tried drawing maybe twenty charts illustrating how we all were connected, every effort thwarted as my brain was overtaken with some rare form of dyslexia, scrambling when I tried to understand who had been related to whom, and how. It was like playing Tetris, and I’m bad at that, too.
I wondered if it might help to get another look at the Book of Names, now that the new priest was in town. Barely in his thirties, he couldn’t have the historical baggage of the Owl and those book-burning Communists. So I headed on over after a Sunday mass in mid-August. Robert and Jim came with me. I can’t remember why I let them. But for whatever reason, they were right by my side when the new priest handed over the Book of Names with all the breeziness of an anti-birth-control pamphlet and shut us in a small meeting room with it.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said excitedly as the priest closed the door. “He just gave us the book!”
But I realized within moments that I had new barriers to contend with. Their names were Robert and Jim.
Robert grabbed the book and sat down at the long conference table. Jim stood over him with a notebook. I sort of nudged between them, reaching across Robert’s gut to open to the first page number I’d found with the Owl.
Robert read off the names of Valentin’s family. Jim wrote them down. I just stood there. “Now wait a minute—which Marija is that again?” I’d ask. “I get it confused. There are a lot of Marijas.”
Robert blew me off. Eventually they just pushed me aside altogether. Every time I tried to help them as they paged through the Book of Names, I’d notice something irrelevant to their hard-core fact-finding. “Hey look! It’s Mario and Jasminka’s names!” I’d exclaim, and Robert and Jim would sit, pens poised, as if waiting for my stupidity to pass so they could get back to work. What it probably boiled down to was that modern-day Mrkopalj just interested me more than the paper trail of the dead.
This made Jim impatient with me, and annoyed at how little I now cared about that big dusty book. But I was finally enjoying life in this place where my ancestors had lived. When it came to family, I was walking in their very footsteps. I ate from the same soil that fed them. I was fairly certain that I could trace an ancestral line to each and every person I passed on the streets of Mrkopalj. I was learning more every day about what my family left behind, the good and the bad, rather than learning more about them. Maybe it was one and the same. I just didn’t know.
Either way, I hated when Jim was mad at me. He was the first person who’d ever had complete faith in me, and I felt rattled to the core when I thought his faith was shaken.
So after a sleepless night fretting that I was botching my ancestral calling, I walked to the Church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, my sandals slapping against worn slate tiles as I made my way to the front. I eased onto the kneeler and sank my forehead into my hand. I breathed a heavy sigh, and though it was late summer, I thought I could see my breath in the cold of the stone church. I offered up my worries into the cool air. Should I be seeking my family more diligently in Mrkopalj? Or had I already found them?
Almost instantly, these burdens lifted from my mind. The quiet of the sanctuary always calmed me, though I no longer had the faith of my youth, when I wore a brown scapular and arranged the Stations of the Cross in my bedroom next to the Duran Duran posters. In Mrkopalj, where the silent pleas of men and women seemed palpable in the air, I felt steady companionship for my heavy heart.
The church bell tolled eleven times. I noted that the sculptures of saints in Mrkopalj were particularly well muscled under their metallic robes—church was the village refuge, and the heavenly guards were ripped. It made me feel stronger myself; I supposed this was the intended effect. I walked outside to take another spin around the cemetery to find the graves of the people Valentin and Jelena left behind.
Tombstones sprawled forever toward the tree line of the mountain. I put my hands on my hips and looked around.
“Well, where is everybody?” I asked out loud.
I looked to my left and then to my right. The first grave my eyes rested upon read Josip Iskra. Doubly heartening: The one next to it bore the name Marija.
I called Jim on the cell phone—his was the only number I could dial with ease; we still hadn’t fully figured out Croatian cell phones and were starting to suspect it wasn’t entirely a user error. I checked the dates on the headstone with him.
“You’ve got the wrong Josip and Marija. Sorry.”
“Hm,” I said. “I was excited there for a second.”
“Well, don’t give up already,” he said, testy.
“I’m not! Gah!” I said, and clicked the phone shut. That man.
Looking out over the crowded stones, faded flowers, and flickering red hurricane lamps, I wondered if maybe there was an old grave map existing somewhere in the church. For a village that tended its cemetery with such care, this seemed like a real possibility.
I concocted a sentence to communicate to the priest that this time, I wanted to know if perhaps there was a Book of Names: Cemetery Edition. I scribbled my sentence onto a piece of scrap paper so I wouldn’t screw it up.
Vidim kniga cuvajmo red na groblju. Or, in mangled Croatian: “I would like to see the books of the lines of the cemetery.”
I crossed the street to the priest’s residence. The nun answered the door.
Before I even had a chance to hand her the note, she winked at me, whirled me down the hallway in a flap of black vestments, grabbed the Book of Names, presented it to me, and pushed me into the back room.
“Neh, neh!” I protested. “Kniga cuvajmo!” Graveyard book!
She smiled as she shut the door.
I stood for a moment, blinking. Then I fished my cell phone from my purse to call my first neighbors, who also happened to be devout members of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows. I looked up Mario’s number in my phone as Jasminka had entered it for me, and after three or four attempts I successfully called him. He answered, I started babbling, and he handed the phone to Jasminka, who promised to send Jakov, who happened to be on break from Olympic training.
I clicked the phone shut. Good. Jakov spoke fluent English. Plus, he was hot.
I watched out the window. Within about eighteen seconds, he drove up in a little silver car plastered with Olympic sponsorship stickers. He bounded up the steps, and I heard him talking his way into the priest’s residence.
I emerged from my sequestered room and stepped up behind Jakov. He seemed to be explaining my purpose here, but the new priest and nun were grilling him. Jakov was a local celebrity. Everybody wanted a piece of the guy. He’d stand in the street, all bronze and blue-eyed, sheathed in shiny bike shorts, and girls and boys alike would flock to him to ask questions and request autographs. The fact that he spoke politely to the clergy impressed me even more than his finely tuned calf muscles. Well, just as much.
Jakov turned to me, almost imperceptibly rolling his blue eyes. “He is reminding me that I must put Bog and prayer before the Olympics,” he said.
“Bog?” I said.
“God,” Jakov explained.
“Okay,” I said. “What else?”
“He is also telling me that there is no Book of Graves.”
How in Bog’s name would I find Valentin and Jelena’s parents?
The nun spoke up. “If there is such a thing still in existence, it is at the municipal building,” Jakov translated. “This is where the office of your friend Mr. Cuculić is.” Then he winked. Hot.
Jakov drove me the block to the municipal building—seven seconds, including a brief wait for a goat herd—where a guy named Marin was hustling out the door.
“That is the man you want,” indicated Jakov.
We stopped Marin, who was in charge of county records. He was also the tax man, the fire chief, and a fairly decent boccie ball player down at Šume Pjevaju. Jakov asked Marin about the Book of Graves. Cuculić appeared in the doorway, a standard grimace on his mustached face, and maneuvered around behind Marin, trying to get into my field of vision.
Marin confirmed that the Book of Graves no longer existed. Even worse, many of the oldest graves had disappeared over time, the plots sold to other families. The village mapped out a new guide to the cemetery in 2004, but graves were included only if families were present in Mrkopalj to pay a tax. The government had effectively stolen Mrkopalj’s oldest history.
“No way!” I turned to Jakov. “They sold the old graves?”
“Yes,” Jakov said. “I am sorry.”
“This is true,” Cuculić said.
Marin shrugged, then hurried away, casting occasional worried looks behind him.
Jakov turned to me and nodded once. “There is no book. It is gone.”
Cuculić stepped forward. “He says there is no book! It is gone!”
I turned to Cuculić, who was feeling expansive. “During Communist times, the books were confiscated because all property became public, including the cemetery. This book you search for was never seen again,” Cuculić said. Tito’s men had destroyed it.
Cuculić saw my face fall. “It is our problem, and not your fault,” he said, and I do believe he was trying to comfort me.
“So, unless some miracle happens, I won’t be able to find the graves of Jelena and Valentin’s parents,” I said, mostly to myself.
That evening, Jakov sat on a stationary bicycle in the Fak driveway. He’d pedal furiously, halt, take his pulse, and go back to pedaling like a man possessed. He’d been at it for an hour and a half before I walked over to ask what on earth he was doing.
“I raise my heart rate to its limit,” he said. “Then I stop and force my heart to calm down.” This came in handy for an Olympic biathlete in training, he explained. If he was going to hit those shooting targets in between rounds of skiing, he couldn’t be panting. Part of biathlete training was gaining control over one’s respiratory functions.
“That’s pretty cool,” I said. I thanked him again for helping me with the Book of Graves, or lack thereof.
He stopped his bike and mopped his face with a towel.
“You are disappointed,” he said.
“I am,” I said. “I’ve been having a hard time staying focused on the search for my ancestors. I thought this was a way to connect with them, without paging through old books or surfing the Internet. But if those graves are unmarked, I don’t know how I could possibly find them.”
“Maybe it’s a mystery,” Jakov said. “Maybe figuring out how to find these graves will put you near your ancestors somehow.”
“Half the time I don’t even know what I’m searching for,” I said, chuckling. “How will a couple of unmarked graves change my life, right? Why are we here anyway? I guess that’s always the question, though.”
Jakov thought about this for a moment. “There is a word in Mrkopalj,” he began. “It is called ‘init.’ This is when you want something so bad, and someone tells you that you cannot do it. Tells you that it is not possible. Then you say ‘Yes I can. It is possible. And I will make it.’”
He pressed his fingers to his neck and breathed in, long and deep.
“It’s this sort of mentality that came from Mrkopalj. That came from your people,” he said. “Init.”
Later that day, when I went out to enjoy the sunset from Robert’s front-yard bench, Jakov was still pedaling in his driveway, staring straight ahead into the evening sky.
I watched as the sun tinted the green overgrowth of the land with a holy shade of gold. Mrkopalj in summer was a wildly fruitful place. Gardens rioted with vegetables and vines to the point that they appeared to be encroaching on the households that tended them. Wildflowers flew their last banner of color for the season in deep tones of yellow and purple and red. A second bloom of tea flowers burst forth, and two old women made slow passes through the meadow in babushkas, dropping handfuls of blossoms into their aprons. Apples and plums rained into Robert’s yard from Željko and Anđelka’s trees. Jakov’s brother Stjepan pushed a wheelbarrow by to harvest the fruit for a friend in Rijeka who made rakija in the fall.
“Jennifer!” Jasminka called from her balcony. She waved and jogged down her steps, passing her son on the stationery bike.
I rose and we met halfway in the road.
“Mario and I have tourism for your family,” Jasminka said. “Tomorrow, we drive to pick berries! New berries for fall.”
A rare mix of blueberries and mountain cranberries simultaneously fruited during a narrow window of time in late summer. On a Sunday in late August, we followed Mario and Jasminka’s van up a steep mountain road that eventually dipped back down into a bowl like a dense forested volcano. In Mrkopalj, they called this place Okruglica (oh-KROOG-leets-uh).
Though it was hayfever-and-humidity season back home, fall iced the air in the Gorski Kotar. I bundled Zadie into a white cardigan and tied a flowered scarf on her head. I pulled a ski cap over Sam’s noggin, which was a task because he had taken to wearing his hair in a self-styled Mohawk. My son was a vegetarian with punk-rock hair. I was raising Henry Rollins.
“How does nature even develop berries in the woods?” Jim wondered aloud. “We see them everywhere. Raspberries, blueberries, strawberries.…”
I thought about this. “Bears eat berries. Bears poop seeds. There are lots of bears. There are lots of berry bushes!” I reasoned. “Oh, look how muc
h we’ve learned!”
The kids giggled in the backseat. It didn’t solve the question of how the berries had gotten there to begin with, but wondering passed the time in the car.
Zadie even joined in. “In this world, the government of the woods invented them so the animals can use berries for money.”
We spent our Sunday afternoon in the vast Okruglica heath. Many people were out with their families picking along the hillside, where tufts of wildflowers mingled with the low dark-green groundcover where both berries grew, side by side.
We hiked up, and Mario scouted a patch that looked promising. Jasminka handed out empty yogurt cups. We moved aside leaves in search of blue and pink fruit. Each success was followed by the satisfying plonk of berry hitting cup. Mario crouched next to Zadie, dwarfing my tiny daughter, gently handing over his cranberries and blueberries so she’d have the most treasure.
Eventually, Zadie crept over to Jasminka and whispered into her ear. Jasminka nodded gravely and said something in Croatian to Mario, who smirked and began putting the berries in his own cup.
“Zadie tell me to make Mario stop giving blueberries,” she told me. “Only pink! Pink is pretty.”
Zadie nodded to herself. “Only pinks,” she repeated under her breath.
Jim and Sam worked over a small section of bushes for the better part of an hour, Jim lounging on the ground watching his boy with an easy smile on his face. I pulled on Sam’s discarded ski cap, wrapped my sweater around me, and spread out in the sun, listening to the hum of my children’s voices, to Jasminka encouraging them, and to Mario visiting with a man who’d brought his grandkids here, and who sounded mildly grouchy that Mario had invited outsiders like us. In my mind, I imagined Mario explaining that we, too, were family.
That night, Jim made his mom’s recipe for peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies. We shared with Mario and Jasminka and the other neighbors and he received two recipe requests, which we delivered with the caveat that chocolate chips cost about $10 and you had to drive all the way to Rijeka to find them.
Running Away to Home Page 22