Running Away to Home Page 5

  I flew out the following morning, feet firmly planted on the floor of a Boeing 747 to spare my fellow travelers the aroma of Mrkopalj cow poop emanating from the bottom of my Chuck Taylors. I dozed peacefully for the first time in days.

  When my flight landed in Chicago, I checked e-mail during the layover. My in-box was flooded with messages I hadn’t been able to retrieve in the Gorski Kotar. Scrolling through, I saw a note from Jim. I opened it.

  According to Jim, back when times were booming on Wall Street, he had moved our savings into the stock market. The savings for our Great Family Escape. We’d lost a lot of it in the market freefall of the past few weeks. As in half.

  “We can look at this in two ways,” Jim wrote, always the pragmatist. “We can panic and scrap the whole idea. Or we can take this as a sign. They’re saying the economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Maybe this is the kick in the pants we needed to do something completely different. There will always be an excuse not to go.

  “I hope you’re liking Mrkopalj, because at this point, Mrkopalj is about all we can afford.”

  And that, friends, is how a typically sane middle-aged mother decided to drag her family back to a forlorn mountain village in the backwoods of Croatia.

  chapter three

  I returned home with a troubled mind and possibly a tapeworm. I’d lost five pounds for no reason, but decided to wait it out for another five before calling the doctor. It was a nice souvenir.

  In a stunning role reversal, life in Des Moines felt surreal after Mrkopalj. Just driving the familiar route to the kids’ happy Montessori school across town could get me disoriented. The signs for weekly deals in our neighborhood grocery store seemed brazen and overzealous. After spending two weeks in a country where I was rarely understood, I felt harassed when ample speech was required of me. Compared to living out of a carry-on for two weeks, managing the sheer amount of stuff in our lives seemed impossible. Three trips to Goodwill later, people started to wonder if I was suicidal.

  The only place I still felt okay was at church, a great big Congregational number that I’d settled on after leaving the Catholics. One Sunday, the pastor gave a sermon about repentance, the Greek translation of the word being the more provocative metanoia.

  “Metanoia means a ‘change of mind,’ not in the sense of a new decision, but in the sense of a whole new being,” Reverend Ruhe said, roaming the altar. He was short with thick glasses and a sensible black Congregational robe—a smart, sane version of the owl priest of Mrkopalj. “Metanoia is coming to a new life. It’s like stepping through a door, out of one existence and into another.”

  I’d never heard of this metanoia. It’s a tricky word, difficult to define and hard to understand unless you’ve felt it. But I knew it after visiting Croatia. Everything seemed different, like that day in September when you know summer is over because the afternoon light has changed. I’d walked through the door of what once was. I was about to lead my family through it, too.

  Over a series of late nights in front of the fireplace, Jim and I hammered out a loose plan. We would save every extra penny until the kids were out of school in June. At that time we would leave for Mrkopalj, staying through the summer and into autumn—about four months total. Before the snow came (often so heavy that the mountain roads were impassable), we would relocate to the Croatian seaside village of Rovinj a few hours away, spending the first temperate winter of our lives. We would travel until the money ran out, which we’d calculated as just shy of one very frugal year.

  We began Croatian language classes. I ordered stacks of history and travel books. But truthfully, it felt as if everything we learned in those months leading up to the trip went in through our eyes and leaked out of our ears. We met some Bosnian couples through mutual friends and they assuaged our worries: Try as we might, the real learning wouldn’t take place until we got there.

  When Jim and I told the kids we were leaving the country as we were tucking them in to bed one night, they had vastly different reactions.

  “No,” Sam said simply, tucking his hands under his armpits. He complained bitterly about leaving our dog, a cute and unsuspecting schnoodle, and about leaving his room filled with Legos and Transformers and everything he liked, all in one happy space painted orange, which he also liked. Sam was a sweet kid, but he was fond of the merch.

  “I’m not leaving,” concluded our son, his big moon face pulled down in a frown. “Granny said people die in airplanes.”

  That would be my mother, who for several years had not willingly left the house except for holidays and shopping trips to Walmart.

  “I’ll buy you a hamster,” I said.

  “I want a snake,” Sam said, knowing this might be a deal breaker. I’d been dragging him to garage sales since he was a fat toddler. The kid knew how to negotiate.

  “You can only get a pet that you’re willing to hold,” I said. “If you can hold a snake for fifteen minutes, we’ll get a snake.”

  “I want a hamster,” he said. Then he buried his head in my shoulder and cried.

  “I’ll go to Croatia,” Zadie offered, probably because she had no idea what this meant. “But I do not need a hamster.”

  Now for the hard part.

  “When you’re traveling, there isn’t much room for toys,” Jim began.

  “So we’re going to have a garage sale to sell them,” I said.

  Sam sat up in bed in horror, as if I’d punched the schnoodle curled at his feet.

  “If you sell all your toys, you’ll be able to afford a Nintendo DSI,” Jim reasoned. “Which fits in a suitcase.”

  “And also is awesome,” I added.

  Sam relaxed. “Well, I do want a DSI.”

  Zadie watched Sam intently.

  “If Sam sells his Legos, he will not be happy anymore,” she said. “He will not be Sam.”

  We agreed that Sam could keep his Legos. Still, he only consented to our Croatian sabbatical because he wasn’t old enough to stay home alone yet.

  “So he’s unhappy about moving to Europe for a year,” Jim said as we talked in front of the fire later. “I can think of worse problems. It’s okay to be unhappy sometimes. He’ll have to deal with new things. It’ll be good for him.”

  The next several months were a blur of work. Throughout the winter and into spring, I scrapped for every story I could get my hands on. I dominated Craigslist and held a name-your-own-price porch sale, selling all extraneous detritus in our home. I cleared enough to cover the cost of our visas, the application process of which transformed trip planning from merely difficult into a soul-sucking nightmare.

  Just explaining to the Croatian consulate why I wanted a visa was complicated.

  “I’m a writer interested in returning with my family to my ancestral homeland. We want to move to Croatia for a year,” I said during that first phone call.

  The woman at the consulate fell silent. I thought perhaps she was overwhelmed with emotion that this great granddaughter of immigrants was returning after all this time.

  Instead, she asked in an incredulous whisper: “Why?”

  Okay, so that caught me off guard.

  Before I could rephrase, she asked again: “Why would you want to do that?”

  I ended the phone call quickly, embarrassed that I’d done something wrong. I checked my information again. Yup, in Croatia, if you’re staying longer than three months, you need a visa. What I was asking was not unreasonable. In fact, it was the law.

  I called back. Again, the odd silence. Then the consulate official suggested in a hushed voice: “Why don’t you just leave the country every three months and sneak back in?”

  I envisioned Jim being interrogated in a dirty white room by border cops, a single lightbulb swinging above his head as they slapped him repeatedly while the kids and I watched, horrified and clearly without visas. “Why are you forever coming in and out of Croatia? What is your business here?”

  But I thought voicing this concern might of
fend. So I simply answered: “I want to be in Croatia legally.”

  It would’ve been easier to do it her way. The visas cost a fortune, and you could be a MENSA scholar and still not understand the application process.

  “It is confusing to only you, Mrs. Wilson,” the consulate official once admonished me, all steel and nails. “No one else has these problems.”

  I began to wonder if no one else had these problems because no one in their right mind would apply for a Croatian visa.

  Meanwhile, back at the Croatian Tourism Office, they’d gotten wind of my early-morning defection from Mrkopalj on the press trip. I’d called to ask if I could get a little help with the visa application and Vesna slapped me with a “You are very unprofessional!” Why should she help me again?

  She yelled and yelled. I took it at first, trying to be respectful. Then, sort of as an experiment in the Croatian yelling thing, I yelled back.

  “Your tourism guy was drunk!” I yelled. “So who’s unprofessional?”

  “I did not know this,” Vesna said, instantly defused.

  “Who are you working with at the consulate?” she asked.

  I told her.

  Long sigh from Vesna. “She is new. I know her mother. I will call you back.”

  I hung up and called Niall, a Bosnian hairdresser down the street. Niall and his family had fled Bosnia during the war. He invited me to his house for a visit.

  “We had the prettiest refugee tent in the camp,” he boasted as he sat me down at his kitchen table. He moved gracefully about the room, assembling coffee.

  He’d heard of my visa woes through the grapevine, he said. People had seen me walking around the neighborhood, looking stunned and beaten. “I know this look. I am from Bosnia,” he winked.

  “Just remember this: You are on Croatian time now. Get used to standing in line. Get used to waiting. Do not hurry. Nothing is easy.”

  He laughed. He poured me some coffee. I asked if he could translate my visa applications for me, one of the consulate’s requirements.

  “Oh dear, I have no time to do this,” he said. But he did give me great advice. “Just find someone who can stamp your papers as many times as possible. Stamp it all, with any stamp you can find. It doesn’t matter what type of stamp it is.”

  “What?” I asked. “A stamp?”

  “Yes. Stamp everything,” he said. “Croatia is still very hungover from those Communist days. They like everything to look official even if it is not official. So stamp and stamp and stamp!”

  I tracked down a Croatian translator in a local hospital. Eddie had married a notary public—meaning she had a stamp and she knew how to use it. They were endlessly patient and painstakingly thorough, and they stamped the shit out of my papers.

  Then I asked the Croatian consulate to give me a break on just one of the visa requirements. They’d asked for a rental certificate from my lodging in Croatia, stamped (of course) by a Croatian notary public. I didn’t have lodging yet in Mrkopalj. During my brief stay, Robert had assured me he’d have a place for us, but it was under construction. Also, when he assured me, he was drunk. The worst thing I could imagine was arriving in Mrkopalj, with my family this time, and not having a decent place to land.

  “I don’t think I can get a rental certificate,” I told the woman at the consulate. “And I sure as hell can’t get a stamp.”

  “Can’t you just put together something?” she said. “Anything? Just make it look official.”

  “I’m going to a tiny mountain village where people might very well do commerce by exchanging chickens,” I said. “If it’s going to be official, it will have to come from here.”

  “You can try,” she said. “But the final decision is up to the Ministry of the Interior in Croatia.”

  “Will it help that I’m writing a book about how great Croatia is?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  Jim would rub my shoulders when I felt defeated. “Eye on the prize,” he’d say. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing exactly what they dreamed of.”

  I was finding that the escape fantasy and the actual planning of the escape were two entirely different beasts. When I needed focus, I recalled a conversation with my sister a few years before, when Croatia had not yet overtaken my psyche, but the restlessness had.

  Stephanie and I were at our favorite restaurant, Centro, in Des Moines. I’d excused myself to go to the restroom. In the full-length mirror next to the sinks I caught sight of an older, frowning woman. Her chin melted into her neck. She looked a bit stuffed into her skirt. Until this woman reached for the soap dispenser at the exact moment I did, I hadn’t recognized the reflection as my own. I’d begun the downhill tumble into midlife malaise and I hadn’t even noticed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Stephanie said when I returned to the table. “I just read a magazine article that said forty is the new thirty. And thirty is the new twenty! Which works out pretty good, because I’ll be thirty this year.”

  “Magazine stories aren’t true,” I said, shaking my head. “Articles like that are written by interns in New York barely old enough to vote who will conduct their entire adulthood sleeping around like Tri Delts.”

  “What a life,” Steph said dreamily.

  “We are Midwestern women,” I said. “Age comes in real time.”

  “Who knows? We’re not plowing fields and popping out whole football teams of babies anymore,” she said. “Maybe aging is different now.”

  “I don’t feel like it is,” I said, making a grab for the bread basket.

  “Why don’t you start by putting down the fistful of carbs,” Stephanie said.

  “There are so many things I haven’t done yet,” I said to her. “And let’s face it, my life is pretty much halfway over.”

  Stephanie’s face sagged, impatient. “Oh come on,” she said. “What haven’t you done? You’ve traveled all over. You have a great job. You lived in Minneapolis, for gosh sakes! The mother of all cities!”

  “But I accomplished all that stuff before I was a mom,” I said. “Since parenthood, what have I done? I’ve used my kids as an excuse to become lame! My thirties have been this endless cycle of postponement. I’ll wait and write a book after the kids grow up. Jim and I can travel more after we retire. And what does that leave us?”

  “A bitchin’ retirement,” Steph said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that there are three decades in between college and retirement that I would like to be more fulfilling.”

  “Your kids are fulfilling,” she answered. “Once they’re old enough to be into their activities, things will get even better. I’m pretty sure Zadie’s got the Wilson arm. You should probably get her out there throwing the softball now, while her muscles are still forming. Anyway, you’ll stay busy. You won’t even notice how time flies.”

  “I don’t want to just preoccupy myself for a third of my life,” I argued. “I love my kids, but it’s my job to show them the options in life, not live it for them. Or live for them.”

  “Well, what are you going to do then?” Steph asked.

  “I want to stop postponing,” I said. “I want to be as engaged and curious in my middle years as I was in my twenties.”

  “So, you want to party more?” Steph asked.

  “No. That’s not it at all. I’m not a kid. I want to see what I can do as a grown-up woman. See what I’ve become,” I said. “I have no idea what I can accomplish as an adult because I haven’t tried much yet.”

  “Well, you better get on it,” Stephanie said. “You and I are not the kind of people who sit around and feel bad. We solve the problem. It might be our only redeeming quality.”

  Oh, I would get those Croatian visas. By God, I would. I stood fast and firm, assembling all documentation of my family’s humanity, and one afternoon in late spring, I got a phone call from the icy voice at the Croatian consulate.

  “Mrs. Wilson, I have good news,” she said, emotionless. “
Your permits to stay in the country of Croatia have been approved.”

  The kids were still at school. Jim was at work. So I turned off my computer, quietly gathered my purse and coat, and walked the few blocks to my favorite old Naugahyde supper club for a single sublime vodka martini to celebrate before I told anyone. I sat alone in the quiet of an old bar in the daytime lull and enjoyed my triumph. An ancient waitress in a bouffant hairdo walked by, trailing the scent of Grandma Kate: Chanel No. 5 and cigarettes. I knew then that the mammoth boulder of our lives, grown mossy and solid through inertia, was finally starting to give.

  Now we just needed to find a place to live in Mrkopalj.

  I’d been e-mailing with Helena back in the village, attempting to negotiate a place to stay. At first, she wrote that we could stay in those same rooms above the bar, and it would cost only $1,000 a month! Considering we’d chosen Mrkopalj on the assumption that it was a bargain—and we’d figured about $500 a month for rent in our budget—this was bad news. Plus, those rooms above the bar were awful.

  I wrote back to Helena to tell her we would look elsewhere for lodging.

  I quickly received another e-mail that Robert’s family and friends would renovate the rooms on the second floor of his family’s house, and we could stay there! We could have it for the low, low price of $1,500 a month!

  Jim and I couldn’t decide if we were offended or impressed. Either Robert was shrewd as hell or he thought we were rich. I asked Helena to thank Robert and tell him we appreciated the extra effort but didn’t want him to go through all the trouble. We just couldn’t pay that much rent.