Running Away to Home

by Jennifer Wilson

  Both men crouched next to the weeping Katarina 2. Robert grilled her for details as Jim sketched on the kids’ drawing pad. Petar and Katarina Radošević were buried with her mother, Matilda, the one who died when her husband left for Le Havre.

  “On grave is only one small board where is written ‘Matilda Radošević,’” she said.

  Back then, family members could be buried in the same grave after ten years had passed between burials. Jim and Robert worked furiously on a cemetery map.

  Katarina 2 looked up at me. “Something in your eyes looks like family.”

  The living room was hot, close, and still. Sam and Zadie were flushed and restless and, after Vlatka served them cake and two plates of cookies, Sam passed me a note informing me that their tummies hurt. As the men finished the map, my mommy radar indicated that the kids had approximately ninety seconds until meltdown.

  “It’s time for us to go,” I said. Everyone jumped up in visible relief; apparently the kids and I weren’t the only ones feeling uncomfortable. The Katarinas and I embraced and took photos. I herded my pack toward the door, scooping Zadie into my arms, and she quickly fell asleep even as we filed into the hallway.

  Outside, Celio and Vlatka took us behind the villa to an overgrown garden, lush with lemons and kiwi and neglected flowers. Celio pointed out the grape arbor they harvested for wine near a charred outdoor fireplace. It was gorgeous and decrepit and the sun revived us all. This side of the family had done well for themselves.

  Once again, we drove home in moody silence. The kids were just happy to be out of that living room. Robert and Jim basked in the mutual satisfaction of having ferreted out the grave of Valentin’s parents, even without the aid of the original family tree!

  As for me, I was thinking about what had happened to the family that stayed in Croatia. Jim and I were a hundred years and three generations away from the difficulty of that turn-of-last-century life. How much had I been spared because Valentin had so abruptly cut ties with his home?

  Since coming to Croatia, Jim and I had blessed America on every crappy unpaved road that dropped off a sheer cliff into a rock-strewn abyss. Every time someone ladled sour cream onto our pizza. Every time we opened our dorm-sized fridge or lay awake on a bone-crushing futon, wrapped in a sleeping bag, head resting on a pillow as soft as a bag of hammers. It was great to meet relatives I never knew existed. But Zadie was right. We didn’t know them. I didn’t find anything in Lokve and Rijeka that I didn’t already have.

  I’ve spent years inventorying things about my childhood that could have been better. Add a freethinking feminist (yep, even from the start) to one quiet, dutiful Catholic family, and you can do the math yourself. But there was nothing in that equation that could match the strain, the trials, and the heartaches I’d just witnessed. The Radošević children were physically abandoned, left to their own devices to grow up. From what I’d seen, they’d made decent lives anyway. Even prospered. They were living proof that pain didn’t preclude happiness.

  My own parents raised four good and hardworking human beings. My dad, Harold “Bud” Wilson, kept a stable job all his life to provide for us. He didn’t lout around in the bars. He didn’t do anything to make us less than proud of the gentle country man he is. He took me fishing and he taught me how to shoot a gun. Though I was the type of person to yell “Run!” to the first squirrel I had a chance to shoot, I still got the lesson that girls have as much right to the outdoor life as boys. Dad taught me to drive a stick shift. He played my first records: the Spinners, the DeFranco Family, Al Jolson.

  In my memory, he and Mom never missed one of our school events, even when I went through that awkward show choir stage.

  I am 100 percent certain that a complicated, wandering girl was not an easy daughter for my parents to raise. I’m pretty sure I’m raising one of my own. But Mom did what she could to make a good home, in which chocolate sizzle cake or rhubarb crisp was always cooling on the stove.

  Because Valentin Radošević left and never looked back, I was spared the calamities that Franjo and the Katarinas had been subjected to. So were the American generations before mine.

  Had Sister Paula grown up in Croatia instead of America, she could very well have been killed by Partisans. Instead, she traveled widely and lived to be almost a hundred years old. The husbands of the Radošević sisters went to war, but they stayed home safe, never knowing the horrors that their Croatian relatives witnessed. In my generation, I’d seen the look those horrors left behind. I’ve mentioned that many refugees from the Yugoslavian Wars landed in Des Moines. Men and women who had been doctors and lawyers and professors in Yugoslavia were now bagging groceries, looking humbled and stunned but grateful to be alive. I was so far removed from my Croatian heritage that I barely knew about the war that had brought them over; and my own brother had been in it.

  In leaving without a trace, Valentin led us all to safety without even knowing it. Or maybe he did know it.

  My family had a hundred years to forget how lucky we were to be in America. A country that, while maddeningly imperfect, still held the torch of possibility. After all, a small-town kid like me could work hard to make my wildest dreams come true.

  That evening as I brushed Zadie’s hair before bedtime, we discussed what we might tell our friends back home about Mrkopalj.

  “I think I will tell people about how old this place is,” I told her. “Old in good ways, like how it remembers the past. And old in bad ways, like not having a good Mexican restaurant.”

  “And putting pigs in fire,” Zadie said.

  “I kind of like the pig cooking,” I told her. “What will you tell people?”

  “I will tell them that there are no Popsicles in this world. The girls, for Popsicles, they say it’s ice cream,” she said.

  “In this world?” I repeated.

  “On this planet,” Zadie corrected herself.

  Mrkopalj seemed such a strange place to my daughter that she thought we’d entered an entirely different universe. I was about to ask her more about this when my cell phone rang.

  “Molim?” I answered, like everyone else in Mrkopalj. Please?

  It was Stefanija, calling to tell me it was time to meet the old people of the village. She’d spoken to Viktor and Manda, and they’d agreed to talk with me. To walk me through the Mrkopalj of their earliest memory, which would be much like the Mrkopalj of my great-grandparents, as little had changed in the village during that century.

  chapter twenty-five

  Viktor Šepić kicked the gravel on Novi Varoš on his way home from school. The year was 1933. The time was noon. He was six years old and happy because he got to leave school early. His main job was not reading and mathematics, which was good because he was bad at them. Viktor’s main job was to feed his family’s six cattle and herd them through the field behind his house at the foot of Čelimbaša. When he turned seven, he would look after the horses, too.

  Viktor sniffed the air. Soon it would snow. It snowed in Mrkopalj from October until late April, and it piled so deep that everyone in the village wore skis all the time, even to go to the mercantile to buy sugar, cloth, oil, and corn. Viktor’s family shopped Golik’s store across the street from the Radošević family. The Goliks were so rich from that store! The village got electricity in 1929, and the Goliks’ house was very modern in that way. But even they still had an outhouse.

  Before the first snow, little Viktor had to go to the pilana and get a few scraps of wood to carve new skis that he’d attach to his old shoes with a belt. Viktor’s mama had been angry and had broken his old skis. It was worse than being beaten, the breaking of skis. He cut over to the pilana to look at the scrap pile. It wasn’t hard to find perfect wood in Mrkopalj. There were five pilanas in Mrkopalj and Sunger. When Viktor was a man, he would work in the woods with his tata. Maybe he could save enough money to buy a bicycle. Everybody wanted one, but no one could afford it.

  Working in the woods was dangerous, but Viktor co
uld not wait until he was old enough to do it. With as much as eight feet of snow on the ground every day, there were snowslides on the mountain. Men would climb the mountains for wood anyway. Sometimes they cut themselves on their axes. Viktor knew three men who died when logs rolled over them. Because Mrkopalj had no doctor, one worker died of a burst appendix because nobody knew what was wrong with him.

  The men in the šuma worked for six months, then the pilana closed and fired all the workers each year. Viktor’s family and their neighbors, all with at least five children, had to work very hard on their farms to make their small bags of pilana money last so that nobody would starve. There were five thousand people in this village now! Still, lots of children would die from fras, especially in winter. When a baby had fras, it would be so hot and it would shake. Viktor had seen it. Babies died from fras, but grown-ups and kids died from tuberkuloza.

  Viktor did not find good wood in the pile on this day, and so he walked home. His mama had served the usual breakfast—polenta with milk—and it was now time for lunch. Viktor got the lumberman’s lunch of one piece of bread and one hunk of slanina, or raw bacon. For supper, Viktor would have polenta and milk again, and he hoped this was enough food to make him grow taller someday.

  A group of woodsmen sang “Malo po Malo,” the song of Mrkopalj, at the edge of the forest. Viktor’s chest swelled with pride. Their village was the best village! The people sang all the time! When they were hungry or bored or worried about family who went to America. But Viktor did not remember seeing any people leaving for America, so he did not know this to be true.

  “What? How could you not remember something like that?” squawked a heretofore quiet Manda Šepić from under a black babushka to her husband, Viktor.

  Immediately, we all snapped out of the last century. It was a Sunday night at the end of August. Stefanija, Manda, Viktor, and I were sitting in the Šepić kitchen together. Viktor, in a white cotton button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and wool pants, firmly tapped a box of mints against his kitchen table. This was the only indication that Viktor ever gave of being rattled about anything.

  The difference between Stefanija interpreting and Robert interpreting was the difference between taking a smooth ski lift up a mountain and trudging up the thing wearing shoes with no tread. Being able to talk freely and ask questions was such a heady feeling that I felt nearly drunk, and I would have felt this way even if we weren’t drinking gemišt made with a bottle of green wine labeled with tape and a marker-scrawled date.

  Viktor and Manda met when she was the cook for the priest in Slunj, where she grew up. That priest was Viktor’s brother, who noticed that both Viktor and Manda were single, so Viktor’s brother picked him up from the pilana one day and drove him straight to the church, where Manda was waiting at the altar. They married and that was that. There were no children.

  Manda motioned to Viktor. “He complains all the time. His brother never complained,” she said. “If his brother didn’t like what I was cooking, he’d just say he wasn’t hungry.”

  And she could not believe Viktor didn’t remember people leaving for America. “Each of us had somebody in America,” Manda said, through a mouth full of handsome dentures. Her eyes were the brightest blue I’d seen.

  “Why did they go?” I asked. “Why would my relatives leave a happy Mrkopalj?”

  “They couldn’t work here,” Viktor said. “There weren’t enough jobs.”

  It was simple as that. Mrkopalj lived off the land, and land could only support so many. Because of this, Mrkopalj experienced waves of emigration at the turn of the last century, then after both World Wars.

  Manda rose to walk to her stove. Her kitchen was a pretty shade of aqua that was popular with the vintage hipsters back home. When I told her this, she put a hand to her cheek. “This old kitchen?”

  “It’s a beautiful kitchen,” I said. Compact, with a linoleum floor and shelves lined with pretty canisters for tea, flour, and spices. Rosaries were draped above the table.

  “Would you like tea?” she asked me.

  I said yes, though I was also drinking with Viktor.

  After World War II, Manda said, there wasn’t much of anything to put in a kitchen. The shelves at the mercantile were bare, so the people of Mrkopalj culled their closets and drove in oxcarts to Rijeka, where they traded clothing for sea salt. Then they’d get back in the oxcart and rumble the seventy-five miles to Karlovac, where they sold the salt to buy corn and staples.

  An easier, but less reliable, source of money came from relatives abroad. “When someone went to America, everyone was happy,” Manda explained. “Now they would send money.”

  Well, most of them would. I told them about Franjo and the Katarinas, how their fathers had abandoned them.

  “Only men could work at that time,” Viktor confirmed. “It was a terrible time for the woman, because she must be home then. Nobody wants a woman for a worker. Many, many women lived like that in Croatia.”

  “A woman managed how she knew,” Manda said. “She sells milk from cows. She works in garden. She fights to save her children from starving.”

  “Did people think poorly of the men who left?” I asked.

  Manda thought for a moment. “Anyway, it wasn’t good,” she said, finally. “The worst was for the children.”

  We sat and drank for a while, me double-fisting it with both tea and wine.

  “What did it look like, when someone was leaving for America?” I asked. “Were they walking down the road with suitcases and everyone waving, like in the movies?”

  Viktor chuffed a laugh. “No suitcases,” he said. “A few clothes. Maybe some food. But they are walking. Walking all the way to Rijeka.”

  “My great-grandfather didn’t even have fifteen dollars when he left,” I said. “How could he have afforded a boat ticket with that?”

  Viktor let out a long “Pffffff!” and slapped his hand in the air. Manda threw her head back and laughed.

  “Nobody is paying on that ship!” Viktor said. “They were hiding on that ship! They hide for four or five days. If they are found, ship turns around, they go to prison. They wait in prison. They come out. They run back to ship again.”

  I said I remembered Aunt Terri telling me that there had been some strange family rumor that Valentin had been a pirate. “That’s probably the thing,” Viktor said. “He got caught. He was in jail. He had to try a few times.”

  Once a stowaway successfully hid for half the transatlantic journey, he’d present himself to the crew and they’d usually let him stay on. “They have to pay for the ship crossing somehow,” Viktor said. “He does work on ship nobody wants to do, maybe. Or when he get to America, he work on the dock and first pay goes to government because he was sneaking on the boat.”

  “Surely some people crossed legitimately,” I said.

  “Yes,” Viktor nodded. “Then they need passport.”

  “That probably cost money, too,” I said.

  Viktor let out another bwah-ha-ha laugh. In those days, Croatian people bought their cattle from Germany. Germany issued cow passports—no photo, just the name and lineage of the cow. Each family from Mrkopalj with a German cow had this version of a German passport.

  “They were running then!” Viktor said. “Oh, they were running! Your family was running, too! All the families run to America! Running with their cow’s passport!”

  “You people with your cows.” I smiled.

  “My friend was running. He worked a while then sent another friend his passport,” Viktor said. “One cow sends so many men to America!”

  “Did you ever try to go to America, Viktor?” I asked.

  “Never,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked, amused.

  “Because”—he spread his hands before him—“I like it here.”

  At that moment, Pavice rapped on the kitchen window. She came around through the side door. Stefanija explained that Viktor and Manda were telling me about old times.<
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  “If you ate just a piece of bread back then, you’d eat it happily!” said Pavice. “Now we are different. Now we throw away the crusts.”

  Stefanija rolled her eyes.

  Pavice had news for me.

  “Yenny, what is the name of your granny?” she asked.

  “Jelena Iskra,” I said.

  “Uh-huh!” Pavice nodded once, with gusto. “Josip’s sister married an Iskra man. Her mother was Jelena’s sister! They live in Germany now. Everybody in Iskra family is gone from Mrkopalj.”

  “See?” Stefanija said. “Pavice knows everything.”

  “Now you understand!” Pavice slapped me on the knee, hard. That would leave a mark. “Now you understand what it was like for them!”

  Viktor leaned a cheek on his hand. “With most of them running on the passports of cows.”

  I filed away Pavice’s revelation and turned back to Manda and Viktor. How could Jelena have had so much money for her passage—$100 according to the ship manifest.

  “Usually people from America send money for their woman,” Viktor said. “The man was running, but the woman gets money sent to her family. Later, the man had money to pay for that ship.”

  I asked them what life had been like for those who stayed in Croatia, those who’d lived through the poverty and chaos around World War Two, when the Communist secret police terrified everyone, and the Ustaše built concentration camps. They said it had been a nightmare.

  “First was Italians, then Ustaše, after that Partisans,” said Viktor. “They all march in to Mrkopalj, and people must decide what side they are on. You change over time.”

  Each new political alliance was suspicious of the others. During the 1940s, the Fascist Italians actually fenced in the village with chain link topped by barbed wire, a barrier that ran the length of Mrkopalj, from Stari Baća westward.

  As Viktor had told the story of his life, now Manda spoke. Her voice, which I’d barely heard before that day, emerged loud and full of passion: a wailing. She told me that many small villages were forcefully overtaken as the Communist Partisans fought bitterly against the ultra-nationalist Ustaše for control of Croatia. “During World War Two, everybody left my village,” she said. “Partisans tell everyone in Slunj we must go. With nobody to look after the houses, they were ruined. Where I lived, there were seven villages. Seven villages were abandoned.”