Running Away to Home Page 9

  “So, you do not work, but your woman work?” Robert took Jim aside to ask.

  “While we’re here, yeah,” Jim said.

  “This is very interesting,” Robert mused. “This is a very good situation.” Robert took a long swig of halp-halp, lost in thought. As Robert considered his future as a kept man, I could see Goranka’s life increasing in difficulty right before my eyes.

  We met Robert’s niece, a smart blonde named Petra, a law student in Zagreb who’d competed as a biathlete in the 2006 Winter Olympics. She’d been the youngest Olympian in Torino.

  “This is something Mrkopalj is known for,” Cuculić noted with casual pride, which I believe is the first and last piece of tourism information he ever gave me. “We produce many Olympic athletes. All parents in this village send their children to biathlon training. They do this all year, not only in wintertime.”

  Everyone ticked off the Mrkopalj Olympians. There was cross-country skier Nada Birko-Kustec in 1952 in Oslo and 1956 in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Franjo Jakovac competed in biathlon in Sarajevo in 1984. Mario and Jasminka’s son, Jakov Fak, would even carry the Croatian national flag in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, also competing in biathlon.

  It did not surprise me that biathlon, the most confusing sport ever invented, was the Mrkopalj specialty. It involves cross-country skiing a great distance, then lying down to shoot five rounds at a teeny target, then more skiing, more target shooting, and skiing again. Sometimes it snows. Everyone wears a shiny leotard and carries a gun.

  “So people in Mrkopalj are athletic?” I asked Petra.

  “It is mostly the children who train,” Petra said. “Everyone else is losing the vitality of the old ways. They sit too much or watch TV. Not to offend you, but we always hear that Americans are quite fat because of that.”

  I looked down at my pile of sausage and bacon and potatoes. I wondered how my own figure would fare over the coming months.

  Everyone studied us surreptitiously. I blabbered on in English out of nervousness. I hated the me that showed up when I was anxious. I talked and talked, just to fill the quiet. I had not yet learned that once you wade through the language barrier and struggle to the other side of it, silence is a great vantage point. You can learn a lot when you’re not gacking up the airwaves with babble. Oh, but there was nothing quiet about me under the darkening sky that night. A sense of isolation was creeping in as the kids and Jim relaxed into the place while I still felt unsettled outside of my well-controlled mommy realm.

  Wine flowed. Jim put his arm around me. I looked up at him. When Jim returned my gaze, I prepared for sweet words of comfort.

  Instead, he said: “I love Mrkopalj. The alcohol is cheap, everybody’s really nice, and it looks like I can get away with never wearing a dress shirt.”

  I blinked.

  Jim rubbed my back with one hand. “Good thing I didn’t pack a dress shirt!”

  Well, it made sense that unfussy Mrkopalj was Jim’s latest love. My minimalist husband had packed four shirts, two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shorts, and three pairs of shoes for our entire trip—and he still regretted bringing that third pair of shoes. He’d shaved his head to reduce his grooming needs. He’d already shot a hundred photos, from the spire of the yellow church to the makeshift garden scarecrows made of old clothes and holey straw hats and strung-up wine bottles.

  The men at the picnic table pestered Jim to join them at Stari Baća for some serious drinking. I could see that Mrkopalj would quickly become the fraternity Jim had never bothered to join in college. He begged off, opting instead to remain at the table with a slightly higher-maintenance love, also known as his wife.

  I could feel the men looking at me, waiting for me to dismiss Jim so he could join them. I would not do it. I needed my husband now. And so we all sat there, staring at each other.

  I saw myself through the eyes of this cadre of Mrkopalj men. I bet they wondered if we’d gotten our heritage mixed up. Jim seemed a lot more at home than I did. Next to Jim, I was the uptight, worry-faced lady who drank fancy red wine and talked entirely too much for someone who didn’t even know Croatian. I hated being seen as the killjoy, but I suspected that Mrkopalj had an air of male fantasy to it. The women worked. The men drank. I would have to squash that fantasy.

  Soon Robert was antsy. He got up from the table and drained his gemišt.

  “We go now, and look at your rooms on the second floor,” Robert said, hitching up his pants and wobbling for balance. “Rooms are finished in one, maybe two weeks.”

  This was going to be good. We moved toward the house in a pack: Jim and me and Nikola Tesla and Cuculić and the kids. We filed up the steps, through the second-floor door. Proud Robert noted how much progress had been made in just one day.

  Robert swung open a second set of French doors off the breezeway. The young workmen had left the picnic table the instant they’d finished eating and were now laying cement board and insulation as the foundation of what would eventually be a floor in the main room. Nikola Tesla and Cuculić eased in carefully, inching along the periphery and stepping only on the heavy beams in between the insulation.

  Robert stood directly in front of me in the doorway, extending his arm to reveal the place in a grandiose manner, though it appeared largely unchanged from the night before.

  “My American friends!” he said with a flourish. “Your rooms!”

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Robert take a step forward. By the time I turned to listen to his speech, he was gone.

  I looked all around. Robert Starčević had disappeared.

  Then I heard a muffled snorting sound. I looked over to see the young workers trying to keep straight faces. Cuculić and Nikola Tesla broke out in backslapping laughter, clutching their sides, pointing down.

  Robert had fallen through the floor.

  A mess of brown curls poked out from the sea of insulation. Robert did not move. He’d broken his fall by catching himself with his elbows, and now he hovered above the first floor with his bare arms half-cocked like chicken wings between wooden trusses. He stared straight ahead, stunned.

  Then he slowly looked up at Jim, who was holding the camera, unsure if he should snap a photo.

  “Just one picture,” Robert mumbled miserably. Then he lowered his head to once again stare straight ahead, stone-faced.

  The click of a single photograph hung in the air, just like Robert. The entire room burst into laughter.

  I started liking him then.

  Eventually, Robert swung his lower half back and forth, gaining momentum to pull up. He hefted his body onto a beam. He’d lost a shoe in the fall, and his bare foot dangled into the kitchen below.

  When Robert was up and safe, I laughed harder and longer than I had in a long time. Nikola Tesla slapped his knees and wiped his eyes beneath his gold-rimmed glasses. Cuculić sniggered, hands stuffed under his armpits. Jim’s laugh exploded like machine-gun fire. The kids ran downstairs to pull off Robert’s other shoe. Ivana and Karla began dustpanning the latest of their father’s messes.

  Robert brushed himself off, shaking loose cement board and insulation, a few pieces of which would stay in his hair for the next several days. He looked up at Jim and me. “Your rooms finished in three, maybe four weeks.”

  Over the course of the next few days, both Cuculić and Nikola Tesla would also fall through the floor. The job of the workmen would change from installing flooring to patching the ceiling downstairs. Goranka grew tired of the rain of men into her kitchen.

  With Robert at our side, everything took on an air of the absurd that afforded me entry into our life in Mrkopalj. I still felt unsteady. Still wondering how we would fill the days and find the old relatives. But I was learning. And I wasn’t fleeing.

  In his own inadvertent way, Robert was a worthy guide.

  chapter seven

  During those first few days of July, I felt like we’d been dropped, blinking and disoriented, onto a random point on the space-time c
ontinuum. I walked Mrkopalj’s streets and country roads, peering into crumbling houses and deep-set eyes. I jostled past the herd of goats that twice daily crossed Stari Kraj, driven by a solitary man whose front yard was dominated by a colossal chain-saw sculpture of an attacking bear, and who mercilessly blared from his windows a far-flung catalog of music ranging from American cock rock to traditional tamburitza. At night, I dropped exhausted onto the stiff futon bed but slept little for its discomfort, our big window thrown open to mountain air that nearly vibrated with energy.

  Because we hadn’t mastered the grocery store yet, Jim made tasty sausage-and-cheese meals like daily picnics. He never faltered in his immediate and wholehearted embrace of Mrkopalj. As soon as the sun was up, Jim would head outside to study his Croatian language workbook on the front-yard bench. By the second day, a guy named Zoran added Jim to the coffee carpool. Zoran would pull up on Novi Varoš in his battered Renault and honk twice, and Mario and Jim and Robert would pile into the car to be ferried away for morning coffee. They did not choose Robert’s café-bar for this outing, or the café-bar at the crossroads of Mrkopalj, which people told us was Serbian, and whose shutters were held back with an iron knob in the image of Leon Trotsky. Instead, they drove to Mrkopalj’s oldest café-bar, serving the village for more than a hundred years, Šume Pjevaju, on the outskirts of town on Muževski Kraj. There, they would meet Cuculić and Nikola Tesla and Tomo, Robert’s good friend and Cuculić’s grim-faced cousin, who had a thick thumb of wrinkle between his eyebrows.

  While Jim was busy hanging out with his frat brothers, the kids were absorbed in the playful world of Robert’s daughters. Sam scooped endless loops of sidewalk with Karla’s bike, breaking only to browbeat her into a round of Money Play, Croatia’s version of Monopoly. To Zadie, the Starčević girls were the sisters she would never have. Ivana propped my daughter on her handlebars and drove her around the village like E.T., showing her off to the school friends who roamed the village in a giggly pack.

  “It’s like I live with playdates,” Zadie murmured one night as she went to bed.

  The Starčević girls spoiled Zadie to the point that she informed us she would like to live with them, rather than with us. One day I caught her over at the Konzum, having an ice cream without asking permission. It made me mad because dinner was on, and she seemed almost completely interwoven into their family and practically gone from ours. I crossed the street, stalked over to Zadie, and took the ice cream.

  The girls stood wide-eyed, horrified. “Why you do that?” Ivana stepped forward tentatively as Zadie cried.

  “Because Zadie has to ask her parents if she can have treats,” I said. “Zadie, it’s easy just to come upstairs and ask.”

  “But you always say no,” Zadie sobbed, turning to Ivana for a hug. All three girls stared at me accusingly, standing up for the kid they’d co-opted as their own.

  I was probably crabbier than I needed to be. Though I’d made the Herculean effort to get us to Mrkopalj it took me the longest to acclimate. The Eastern European lifestyle was a bit of an adjustment for this busy American mama.

  I had no understanding of the way time worked here, for starters. People buzzed away to their jobs in little Citroëns in the morning, or they hung around town to move their cattle or weed the garden. I felt too self-conscious to assert myself into any of the situations unfolding around me. How does one walk up to a complete stranger who speaks a different language, and who is herding sheep, and ask to help? One does not.

  I began to long for the person who had comforted me most in my life, Grandma Kate. To hear her laugh so hard she spit out her partials, or have her repeat her single bit of sage advice: “You might be poor, but you have no excuse to stink.” To hear the jangle of the Virgin Mary medals on her giant bra, or that one bedtime story about the kid whose mother sent him to the store to buy liver but who instead cut it out of the side of a homeless man. My aunt Terri suggested that perhaps this story might be too scary for children.

  “It should be scary, Terri,” Grandma snapped back. “How else she gon’ learn not to be lazy?”

  On the afternoon of July 4, Independence Day back in America, Jim and I sat with Robert on his front-yard bench. Robert nursed an Ožujsko and gestured to Novi Varoš.

  “I love this … everything!” he said, tipping back his head, hands open to the sky. “It’s a good situation. This is the Mrkopalj! This is great city!”

  Of course Robert loved his village. Here, he could shirk even the most minor responsibilities and someone always had his back. Mario, a nondrinker, walked and fed Bobi regularly because Robert would forget when he was boozing it up. Which was usually.

  Robert held up his beer to toast. Jim raised his own Ožujsko. I halfheartedly raised my blueberry juice purchased from the Konzum, where the red-smocked checkers gave me the stink-eye if I paid with anything larger than a 50-kuna bill, roughly $10.

  The young workmen turned into the driveway, back from their lunch break in a van decorated with ski stickers. Tomo followed close behind in his own van, an ancient taupe capsule with brown racing stripes. Robert lurched off the bench. He staggered to regain his balance, tugged down his cutoff shorts, and pushed up the sleeves of his denim work shirt.

  “Hello! I must work for one week!” Having drunk enough to mess up both his English and his sense of time, Robert saluted Jim and me, turned unsteadily on his wafflestomper boots, and stumbled for the steps to the second-floor construction zone.

  Jim looked at me.

  “How could you not love this place?” he asked.

  “I don’t hate it,” I said.

  “But?” Jim asked, swigging beer.

  “All the dudes love you. You fit in. I, on the other hand, do not,” I said.

  He laughed. “You haven’t tried to fit in! You’re hanging back. You’re trying to figure everything out before you actually enjoy this. I don’t think the point is to figure anything out. I think your time is better spent getting to know people.”

  “It’s easier to get to know people when they like you,” I said. “They recognize a kindred spirit in you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘kindred spirit’? The guys around here either work all the time or they’re hammered all the time. I’m neither of those.”

  “Do you remember before we were married, and I asked you what you would do for a living if you had no social pressures to worry about?”

  Jim smiled. “Be a barfly!”

  “Exactly. The barfly fantasy is still alive; it’s just been dormant,” I said. “These guys see it. They’re sucking you into their barfly world.”

  “Jen, that was a joke. And how do you even remember that?” Jim said. He was quiet for a moment, considering me. “We bought a year off from the desk job and the home repairs and the cable bills to live another life. I’m not going to spend the summer standing outside looking in, like Mrkopalj is some weird experiment we’ll watch but not dirty our hands with. I have fun. I don’t judge.”

  I set down my glass. “Just be careful. Be a good example for your family.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he boomed. “I quit my job so I could spend a year doing nothing but be with my family! There’s no better example to set! You’re just mad because nobody’s picking you up for coffee in the morning.”

  He had me there.

  “You’re right. I know you’re right,” I said, swallowing hard.

  “This is our dream trip, Jen,” Jim said, shaking his head. “C’mon.”

  “It’s just not how I pictured it would be,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I thought Helena and I would hang out, but she just had her baby, and you know how overwhelming it is when you have your second kid. I just feel like I’m falling into this black hole of nothingness. No one needs me. It’s lonely.”

  “You’ve got plenty to do, Jen,” Jim said. “Get out there and ask questions about your family. That whole process is just another way of meeting people, right?�
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  I took a big breath. “I’m not sure how to talk to people,” I said. “If I speak English, I’m pretty much demanding they do things my way. But what’s worse? Speaking asshole English or offending them with my awful Croatian?”

  “You’re overthinking it,” Jim said. “Just march into a situation and be part of it. Stand there and smile. Learn more Croatian words. Like verbs. Maybe a few phrases so that you can say something funny.”

  I took a sip of juice.

  “Okay. It might be hard for you to say something funny,” Jim said. “You’re not a very funny person.”

  “People liked me better back home,” I said. “Partly because I’m funnier in English.”

  Jim raised an eyebrow. “You keep thinking that.”

  “You know,” I said, “I study that damned grammar book. But nothing in my language history prepared me for Croatian. It sounds like something Steve Martin would make up for a comedy routine.”

  “That’s an excuse,” Jim chuckled. “You’re closet shy, aren’t you? Never would have guessed that.”

  “And you’re a closet extrovert,” I said, pointing at him.

  He stood up and offered me a hand. “Let’s go upstairs and say hi to the workers,” he said. “Betcha they’re not any more finished than they were yesterday.”

  “Or the day before that,” I said. I wound my fingers around his, nestling my palm against the warm, calloused dryness I’d loved for twelve years.

  We walked up the cement steps on the side of the house. Inside, the second floor exhibited its usual state of chaos. Someone had brought in an old kitchen table and it was littered with Ožujsko and Karlovačko bottles—the Coors vs. Budweiser rivalry of the Gorski Kotar. Most were half-filled with cigarette butts. There was a box of white wine and green bottles of sparkling water for gemišt. A little halp-halp to get everyone through the day.

  Robert was splayed on the floor. Tomo was setting a countertop and Robert was underneath, helping to level the cabinets. Tomo looked up when we came in and wiggled his eyebrows as if to say Watch this, then gave an order to Robert. Robert wormed his body to the left and raised one side of the cabinet slightly. Tomo gave another order and Robert scootched back over to the right and raised the other side. Tomo issued another order, and Robert heaved himself over to dial down the first side. Tomo barked; Robert moved to lower the opposite side. The cabinetry tilted up and down like a funhouse prop until Robert groaned loudly with the effort. Tomo crossed his arms over his polyester sweater and his shoulders shook with silent laughter. Robert pulled his head out to see what was taking so long, and Tomo inadvertently ashed his smoked-to-the-nub cigarette into Robert’s hair.