“Where is his wife?” I asked Cuculić.
“His wife left. She has joined the occult. It is a very sad thing. We are good friends and so he visits Mrkopalj on the weekends.”
I looked at Nikola Tesla. He shrugged, closed his eyes, and danced in his chair.
Jim pulled me closer, and I put my head on his shoulder. We watched our kids doing a respectable job moving around the cue ball.
“It takes very good parents to have very good kids. We say simpatico,” Cuculić said to Jim. “You and your wife do a very good job.”
Cuculić rose and corrected Zadie’s pool shot, and she sank the ball then. Zadie, miraculously, did not squirm under his guidance.
My husband and I were having fun together the way we had when we were younger and meeting our friends for drinks after work. Even though our kids were a foot or two away from us, I felt as if Jim and I were on a date.
And, God help me, I enjoyed the company of Cuculić. I might say that it was because he was being especially nice that day, but in truth, we were both being nice for once. It struck me that I hadn’t been, ever since the first day when I burst through his door wanting to be babied through my job.
Jim and I gathered the kids eventually and walked back to 12 Novi Varoš. The crowd was dwindling. We saw one of the carnies hunched over in the flatbed of a truck, sleeping, but jerking awake just at the point when he was about to fall over. Napkins and beer cups littered the streets. The hawkers were spectacularly aggressive, trying to move merchandise so somebody else would have to carry it home.
“Well, do you think our sins have been forgiven?” I asked. “We made our pilgrimage to the festa.”
“We just drank in a bar all afternoon while our kids played pool and a video game called Tank Wars,” Jim said. “We’ve got a whole ’nother set of sins to account for.”
I held Zadie’s hand. Jim held Sam’s. He slipped an arm around my waist and we walked home, connected.
That evening was peaceful in the dorm. We’d gotten into our jammies early to lounge around. I was writing down a few thoughts in my notebook. Jim and the kids curled up on the futon watching TV, waiting for the random moment when Conan O’Brien would be on. We never knew when to expect it, but we waited. He’d gotten the Tonight Show gig just as we left the States, and he lost the show at about the same time we left Croatia. We considered ourselves fellow travelers. “I like that guy,” Sam said. “His forehead is so big that he could fit another face on it.”
While they waited for Conan, they watched another dorm favorite: a German show that featured a piece of rotten stinking cheese that talked.
Though it was quiet inside, the streets of Mrkopalj remained in a state of ruckus. The local festa parties started. Faint at first, then getting stronger, the sounds of karaoke drifted through the dorm windows, coming from the direction of the convent.
I leaned out, straining to catch a glimpse of the singers.
“Why don’t you go out there and have a look around?” Jim asked lazily.
A truly terrible voice hit the karaoke microphone, wherever it was. A real crooner whose singing sounded like a tribal war cry. He sang loud and proud until, in mid-song, I heard an “Oof!,” then feedback. Then the music played on, without a singer.
I put down my notebook and pulled on a jacket over my jammies. “Be right back,” I said.
I’d only intended to walk the length of Novi Varoš in search of the fallen karaoke performer. But it was pitch dark, and though I heard partying going on, I couldn’t see anybody. When I made my way down to the convent, I did discover a stage out front, but it was eerily abandoned, as if I’d been hearing ghost singers. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
The streets were cleared of the vendors’ wares, and most of the cars were gone. In their wake lay great heaps of garbage. Where was everybody? I still heard partying, and I wanted to see what kind of damage had been done to the rest of the village, so I walked on.
Trash was piled everywhere in knee-high mounds. Here and there, I noticed movement in the shadows, usually a drunken person veering along. People had set up temporary beer stands in backyards, and that’s where the remaining partiers were clustered, standing around keg taps and picnic tables, singing local songs, arms thrown around necks, calling for more drinks! More drinks!
I turned the corner from Novi Varoš to Stari Kraj, careful to stay in the shadows myself so no one would see me in my pajamas. Then I heard someone warbling my name. “Jeeee-nnifer! Is that Jeeee-nnifer?” someone called in English.
“Hey Jennifer! Will you have a drink?”
It was Stefanija, walking with Marija, Pasha, and Stjepan. I approached them reluctantly. Stefanija took me by the arm. “Of course you will join us!” Stefanija said.
They hustled me over to a makeshift bar set up outside Cuculić’s office. I spotted some Konzum ladies, and they raised their glasses to me as they sang along with an accordion player. We moved through the group over to Goranka, who was nursing a Jägermeister shot. She’d colored her hair Debbie Harry blonde, and it really brought out her brown eyes.
I was never entirely sure how to act around Goranka. We had no common language. Sometimes when I would ask Robert to help me with something, he’d put me off. But if Goranka was around, she’d speak a few soft words and he’d change his tune immediately. I suspected she was his conscience.
Goranka called something over to the bar, and soon I had a Jägermeister shot, too. “Živjeli,” she said quietly.
I hadn’t drunk Jägermeister since a bad experience at a Hole concert years before. But I drank in the spirit of bridging the cultural divide. Plus, it tasted like candy.
Pasha bought a round of beers.
“What happens to the trash in the streets?” I asked. “It’s like the sky rained garbage.”
“It will be gone by morning,” Pasha said.
“Workers will clean it in the night,” Stefanija confirmed.
Just then a man whom Jim and I had seen before at Stari Baća lurched into our group. His name was Igor, and he was a tall, rail-thin sailor with a jet-black mop of hair and a sparse mustache. Igor and Jim and I had chatted over coffee one afternoon in Stari Baća about all the places he’d been and found we shared a mutual fondness for Mexico. But it wasn’t amiable international Igor who lurched toward us the night of the festa. This was way-drunk Igor, who appeared to have lost control of his extremities, his gangly body thrashing dangerously, whacking first into Pasha and then into Goranka.
“Where’s your fucking husband?” he slurred to me. His voice sounded as if it had been stretched like taffy.
“Fucking home,” I joked. I felt Pasha inch closer to me.
I turned away from the drunken sailor, and he whirled off to harass someone else. When I glanced around the crowd a few minutes later, I saw him crash into another cluster of people. Igor was bothering everyone, but people avoided him carefully, as if they were used to this. He pinballed around until Stefanija’s brother, Valentin, the guy with the sideways elbow, stepped in front of him and took a swipe.
The fight didn’t work out very well. Valentin’s punch missed, and Igor put up his dukes just like in the movies, except that he put them up about forty-five degrees away from the actual location of Valentin. Eventually Valentin’s friends pulled him away to administer a “Don’t do it, man” talk.
It was Goranka who finally calmed Igor down with a combination of sweetness and stern mothering. This was the smooth work of a woman who ran a bar. She maneuvered Igor to a picnic table and sat him down, and he stayed there, looking bewildered, searching the crowd as if he had lost something.
I turned away from the dispute, ready to make an excuse to walk home myself. But standing in front of me was a short guy so drunk he couldn’t swallow his own saliva, which streamed down his chin in a thin trickle.
“Radošević!” he cheered.
“Yay!” I replied.
Then he reached out and grabbed my boob. He lost his balance, and
nearly fell over with the effort. Goranka pushed this guy away, too.
I stood there, so incredulous I couldn’t speak, hand over my jammied chest. I made my way to a picnic table and sat down hard.
Stefanija joined me. “Are you having fun?” she asked.
“I guess.” I laughed. I had gone from feeling the love in Mrkopalj just that afternoon to being baffled and daunted all over again.
Robert wobbled into the fray, shitfaced, and took his place beside Goranka. She’d been smiling and joking, but now she fell silent. Robert glared at her, then at the crowd. I couldn’t do all the drama anymore. Drinking made people so unpredictable, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Robert and Goranka, two people I liked very much, rolling toward a booze-induced fight.
And so I crept home. Maybe a better traveler would have gone swiftly into the anarchy, but those days, if I’d ever had them, were long past. I scooted up Novi Varoš, the wind piercing through the thin material of my nightclothes.
Jasminka and Jim stood at the end of Robert’s driveway.
“It’s crazy out there!” I called.
“I’m sorry!” answered Jasminka.
“No,” I said, coming up to them. “It’s okay. Robert and Goranka are fighting. I figured out what to do with a drunken sailor. And some guy grabbed my left boob. He was so drunk that he’d lost his swallowing mechanism.”
“Maybe he’d swallowed enough for one day,” Jim said.
“Joj meni,” Jasminka said, putting her hand to her forehead.
“Pasha and Stefanija are down there by Cuculić’s office,” I said to Jim. “You should see how Mrkopalj got weird when the sun went down.”
We said our good nights to Jasminka, and Jim walked down the street. I went upstairs, where the kids were sleeping.
As I was brushing my teeth, I heard a loud crash downstairs. I spat in the sink, wiped my mouth, and walked over to the rolling door. I stopped and listened. I could hear Robert stumbling around on the second floor. There was another crash. He was falling-down drunk. All three of his daughters were home. It was a school night.
Then I heard the voices of other men. One I recognized as belonging to a guy I saw at Stari Baća sometimes. He was from out of town, big and quiet and wearing thick chains around his neck. People told me he was somehow associated with the Russian mafia.
I couldn’t quite identify the other voice.
The three men argued loudly. I heard Ivana yelling something and then a radio blared. The men yelled louder. There were more crashes. I heard numbers. I heard the word kuna. Then I am pretty sure I heard the word “američki” a few times. The two male voices seemed to get louder, as if they were moving closer.
I was afraid for Robert’s girls. I was scared for my kids. We didn’t even have a lock on our door. I stood with my back up against it so it couldn’t roll easily aside. Even if they didn’t come upstairs, I knew Karla and Ivana and Roberta were down there, alone, their dad no protection whatsoever. I debated going to get them.
I called Jim and got no answer.
I called Stefanija.
She picked up right away. I told her what was going on.
“Tell Jim to get home. Now. Tell Goranka, too.”
I flipped the phone shut and stood waiting.
A few minutes later, I heard Jim’s footfalls in the driveway. As he walked up the concrete steps, the three guys hailed him in. They were out of graševina for gemišt. Could they have ours?
Jim came up the steps and grabbed our box of wine.
“They don’t need more to drink!” I hissed. “The girls are down there!”
Jim shrugged. “Do you want to wait for them to come up and ask for it?”
He said he knew the guys and they were fine. He’d talked to them and told them our family was upstairs trying to sleep, and if he gave them the wine they had to keep it down and leave when it was all gone.
The whole situation was wrong. Plus, it smelled as if they were smoking about four cigarettes at a time down there.
Jim went back downstairs to deliver the wine. Stefanija called to see if everything was okay. I told her it would still be a good idea if Goranka came home now. I stood alone in the dorm for about a half hour, listening through more arguing and more falling-over crashes.
I heard Goranka’s voice eventually.
Jim came back upstairs. I was furious.
“This is what happens when we join the drinking crowd,” I said. “What if something really bad had happened tonight?”
“But it didn’t, Jen,” Jim said. “Those guys are just drunk and stupid.”
“Exactly,” I said.
What was the worst that could have happened? I don’t know. But there would be unhappiness in the house for days now until Robert made it up to everyone for getting so hammered. Before we went to sleep, Jim slid a chair and a box of books in front of the rolling door.
In the morning, Mrkopalj was quiet. Stefanija and Pasha hadn’t been joking: The streets were totally clear of debris. Mrkopalj had returned to its usual self. We could hear Robert’s sisters downstairs on the second floor, probably giving him an earful that he wouldn’t acknowledge anyway. Jim made coffee and we parsed the night’s troublesome events as the kids slept.
Mrkopalj had been a protective cove in which to start fresh. It was probably time to finish up my work and go. We were fledglings when we arrived. Now it felt as if we were being pushed from the nest. “Don’t worry,” Jim said. “We don’t have much longer here.”
But neither of us was the kind of person who just closed their eyes and waited for life to pass anymore. I would not leave Mrkopalj daunted and skittering away, just like the first time.
I added a spoonful of sugar to my coffee. “It is time for us to go soon, yes,” I said. “But I still have a few things I need to do.”
chapter thirty-three
Josip stood holding something small and furry in his hand. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be a rodent. It was also dead.
A puh is a vole. Or maybe a dormouse. It looks like a big rat but feels much softer. The one in Josip’s hand had been squashed by some kind of blunt trauma, and its intestines hung out of its little puh tummy. Blood had dried around its mouth.
We saw it and we petted it. Even Sam had a turn. I held the thing as mites skittered across my hand. Pavice rubbed her belly and said: “Nom nom nom!”
After a while, the novelty of the puh wore off. Josip and Pavice headed back to their house, and we thought that was that. Zadie went to biathlon practice with the girls. Sometimes, I wondered if her long-term plan was to abandon our family altogether.
Twenty minutes later, Pavice and Josip returned, carrying a plate. They presented it to Sam, Jim, and me and upon it was very clearly a puh—but skinned, fried, and plated.
We really liked Josip and Pavice. We didn’t want to be rude. So we ate it. It tasted like chicken.
We enjoyed the novelty of this rodent snack as Zadie returned with the girls and the sky turned dark. The fall night was cold, and we snuggled in to the third-floor dorm. Jim headed out to Stari Baća to meet Stefanija and Pasha after we’d spent the evening talking about what we might do when we left Mrkopalj, trying to pump ourselves up for the inevitable moment when we drove away from 12 Novi Varoš for the last time. We’d soon see all the places that we’d daydreamed of back home. The south of France. Basque country in northern Spain. Barcelona. My grandpa Gino’s ancestral home in northern Italy.
It felt as if Mrkopalj was ready for us to go, too. Living in the third-floor dorm had lost its charm. The smell in the bathroom had never been resolved, and now it was joined by an epic flooding in the shower. The futon was threatening long-term nerve damage.
The kids and I curled up like hamsters on the futon. I asked them what they’d miss most about Mrkopalj when we left, which Jim and I had decided would be the following week, at the start of October.
Sam jolted from the crook of my arm.
“We’re leaving next week
?” he asked. “For good?”
I figured the guy who spent the first month in Mrkopalj weeping openly would be happy to hit the road. I was wrong. “We’ll probably come back to visit during the winter when we live in Rovinj,” I said. “But we won’t be living here anymore.”
“Can’t we just stay for a few more months?” he cried.
I reminded him that not long ago, he’d hated Mrkopalj.
“Now I want to stay,” he wept into his pillow. Within minutes, he fell asleep.
Zadie had been silent the whole time. She sat up and dragged a few strands of hair out of her face. “I’ll miss the guwls,” she said.
“Karla and Ivana and Roberta?” I asked.
She nodded. “And their ice cream.”
“They have ice cream in every country, pretty much,” I offered.
“Are you coming with us when we leave?” Zadie asked.
“Of course,” I said. “You and I will travel the world like two fancy girls.”
Zadie snuggled closer to me. “I’ll go then,” she said, as if she had a choice. I truly did think she believed she was a de facto Starčević.
If nothing else came of this trip, if I never made one lick of sense out of any of it, I had slowed down long enough to actually get to know my complicated little daughter.
Who, turned out, wasn’t all that complicated. She just wanted her ice cream cold, and her parents close by.
Really, that wasn’t a lot for a four year old to ask.
I went about finishing up bits of business in Mrkopalj. Most important, getting the recipe for rakija that continued to elude me. In the morning, Jim and Stefanija and I headed over for coffee in Anđelka and Željko’s backyard. They were huddled with Viktor around the picnic table.
“So,” I began, trying a little small talk to loosen up my favorite tough guys, “are there many wolves around here?”
“Before forty years, there was a reward for killing the wolf,” Željko said. “The wolf killed the farm animals. When I was a child, if someone kills a wolf, you go see it. Now, there aren’t so many wolves, so they have protection from the government.”
Running Away to Home Page 32