Holiday in the Sun
By Edwin Rozic
I don't wanna holiday in the sun
I wanna go to new Belsen
I wanna see some history
'Cause now I got a reasonable economy
–The Sex Pistols
In the summer of 1991 I didn’t know much about the Yugoslav wars, other than that they were happening and had been interfering with my vacation plans. I had been watching images of the war on TV in Prague, waiting for the borders to open so I could visit my grandparents’ house on the northern coast of the Adriatic Sea, or what had been their house while they were alive. Now, as the warm, airless bus snaked along the narrow cliff-side road, sometimes seeming to hang right over the Adriatic, I dutifully tried to conjure some image of them, some feeling, as a token of spectral gratitude. I had only seen them twice.
The first time, I was too young to remember. Upon news of the new baby they had begun to make arrangements to come across the ocean. Two years later they arrived. Such were the ways of the old world. There are two pictures from their trip: one at the zoo, the three of us standing in dour defiance of the camera, evenly spaced with our arms pinned to our sides, a caged gorilla looming behind us; the other, a candid photo of me crying in my grandfather’s lap while he held me like a moldy cabbage.
The second time was just a few years later here at their house by the sea. My parents had dressed me in a suit and black shoes to fly across the ocean. I could still remember leaning over the rail of the second-floor balcony to pluck figs from the tree, my grandfather holding me at the hips while my grandmother in her blue babushka smiled from the garden below. I could remember the red tile roofs tumbling down to the water’s edge and the riot of flowers that hung from the houses and the scent of sage and rosemary.
From the bus the blue-green waters of the Adriatic looked cold and lifeless, unbroken by waves, thick and still but for the quiet menace of the undulating swells. I had heard that the mackerel had all disappeared, that the sea here was empty. I closed my eyes and the sun warmed my neck. I was wondering who empty seas were for when the bus came to a stop.
Nobody rose from his seat, nobody reached for luggage. The passengers became restless and twisted their necks looking for some sleeping fool. “Hey, American,” the bus driver shouted. “Dramalj” and he pointed at the road side at an empty stone bench and a path through some trees that led down the steep hill.
*
Dramalj isn’t exactly a town, more just a switch-backing road that works its way down from the highway, past white-stuccoed houses with red tile roofs, to the rocky beach below. There was a small market about halfway down, just past the cemetery where my grandparents were both buried. I could have stopped then and paid my respects, dispatched my one duty, but I was hot from the ride, and now I was hungry as well. So, instead I filled a sack with tomatoes and tins of sardines, bread and beer, and a pack of cigarettes, and went looking for the address I had written in pencil on the map.
A shirtless man with a scar across his round, sun-brown belly was sitting in a folding chair beside a small rusting iron table, throwing what appeared to be fish heads into the garden. When he saw me, he hoisted a large green bottle of Karlovacko and waved me over to join him. I had been told that some uncle would be at the house when I got there, and I supposed this was him. I introduced myself in my halting Croatian. At a loss of what else to say, I pointed grandly with the back of my opened hand toward the house and said “tvoya doma moya Baka.” I knew, more or less, what I was saying, this house is my grandmother, but I didn’t know how to form possessives, and I hoped he would understand that I wasn’t insane, just monolingual.
He introduced himself as Bogdan, and I immediately recognized him as the Smirdlovy Bogdan of a hundred stories I had heard from my parents, a legend from their youth, a joker, a prankster, a seducer of women, a brash young man who --on a dare-- had once driven his motorcycle into the sea. He sat there now, on his steep tumbling descent down the slope of middle age, twirling his stubby finger through the sweat-moistened hair of his stomach. Smirdlovy meaning stinky, I immediately sniffed at the air, but could smell no further than the raw garlic and fish on his plate. Bogdan performed a brief and eerie mime show by arching his back and thrusting his fist over his shoulder before I realized his gesticulating was meant to make me put down my duffle bag. While I took it off, Bogdan reached into the garden to hoist up a folding chair that had toppled over. In a pantomime of effort, he smeared the dirt into the vinyl weave of the chair with one lazy brush of his fat hand and gestured for me to sit in the soiled chair.
We drank beer and smoked cigarettes. We ate bread, fish, and whole cloves of garlic and tossed the heads into the garden. We cobbled together a conversational shack, a wobbly, worm-eaten structure of single mispronounced words in German, Croatian, and English. Sun beautiful. Sea cold. Fish salt. The mountain. And when the words stopped, I tossed back the warm dregs of my beer and Smirdlovy Bogdan pointed his bottle toward the long balcony above.
Flowerless pots, cracked and filled with hard, dry dirt, lined the concrete stairs that clung to the side of the house and led to the second-floor guest rooms. I followed Bogdan’s heavy drunk steps which chipped little leaves of gray paint from the lopsided stairs. He squinted at a metal hoop filled with keys he had pulled from his pocket while I tried to remember the room I had stayed in as a child. I had just conjured the room’s heat and amber glow, its sun-beaten shutters, when he shouldered open the door to a dim dusty hall.
We walked into the cool dank air, and Bogdan pointed above to a bare unlit bulb. “No electric” he said laughing, and then pointed to an unhinged door tilted against the open bathroom with a sad and somehow gleaming toilet. “voda good, piss, shit okay, nichts zu trinken.” He perched his heavy hand upon his lip then thoughtfully wagged a single finger, “und kein heiss.” I nodded my head at the prospect of cold showers and looked over the guest-rooms. There were four doors, all slightly ajar and leaking faint threads of light, and one whose gloom seemed even deeper than the hall. Bogdan put his hand on my shoulder and steered me to what he considered the nicest one. “Lijepa, schön, very much” he assured me as we walked into the dim shuttered room.
There was a narrow, bare mattress with some mouldering sheets and a blanket folded on a dusty chest at the foot. The room smelled of faint rot, of damp hidden corners, but with a rattling whip, Bogdan yanked open the shutters, and the room was glowing. He opened the door to the balcony and the air rushed in bringing the scent of the sea. “Look” he said, and I followed him onto the balcony. The branches of the old fig tree had worked their way through the corroding iron rails. A single rusting chair, its contours lost beneath old leaves, had been set in the corner by forgotten hands.
The fig tree was filled with its first crop of small fruit, teeming in the branches, so close I reached to pluck one. “Nein, no.” Bogdan barked at me and waved his finger. He seemed to be puzzling something together, but just shrugged his shoulders and said “gorko” pursing his lips in disgust. We stood there in silence for a moment looking down the slope, over the red roofs and stone pines, down to the water when a rumble like distant thunder shuddered along with the breeze from the sea. I looked at Bogdan whose hand covered his mouth for a moment, then opened, palm up, to the cloudless blue sky above, “bomba?”
It could’ve been a bomb, but the fighting wasn’t supposed to be anywhere close to this far up the coast. Still, what did I know about the sound of bombs? Bogdan laughed again for some reason and slapped me on the back. “Good, good, okay. Du schlaffst jetzt? Good? Sleep?” and he left the room. The sun was still high in the sky, but I was tired and the echo of thunder had passed, so I kicked off my shoes on the balcony, left the door open, and lay on the bare mattress with my eyes closed as the breeze came in from the sea.
*
I had no timetable, no schedule of events. I had finished my teaching contract in Prague, but was told I could come back at any time. I had been accepted into a graduate program in the Great Plains of America which began in the fall, but I wasn’t certain I wanted to go, and I could defer my enrollment for another year if I chose. There was also a vague promise of employment in Istanbul, which I was vaguely considering. So, I moved with slow leisure through the tourist-depleted town, a young man with options and no obligations.
I’d have breakfast with Bogdan beneath the pergola each morning at the huge concrete slab of a table. Who knew what loneliness, what dawn-light despair, drove his morning industry, but each day I’d walk down the stairs and see the table covered with bread and sausages, lard and jam, honey and cheese, green bottles of warm sparkling water and a thick, black Turkish stew that he insisted on calling coffee. Plovers and shore birds would dart up from the sea as we would chew and point at things and try to learn a few new words. The word for lard is maslo, for example, and the word for disgusting is grozno. Afterwards, we’d clean the table together and Bogdan would beg the excuse of his arthritic knees and wave me down to the sea.
I had found an old copy of Rebecca West’s 1000-page tome on the Balkans in one of the guest rooms --a train-ticket bookmark wedged in the early pages-- and carried it dutifully down to the rocky beach each day. “To my friends in Yugoslavia” read the epigraph, “who are all now dead or enslaved.” Yeesh.
The uncertainty had spooked the tourists and the Dramalj beach was mostly empty. There were old men in trousers who would walk the wobbly stones in their sandals, hands in their pockets, muttering at the sea, a few thick and wrinkled bakas minding baskets of food while lonely grandchildren who had been sent from the cities splashed by themselves in the cool waters. I would bring a large bottle of Karlovacko and sit on the smooth concrete of the pier, mostly not reading my book. When I got hot enough I would dive into the water from a height of modest heroism, swim ashore, towel off, and head back up the hill.
Bogdan had shown me a trick with the long garden hose. He would leave the hose coiled in the sun all morning and through the afternoon, and when I came back from the beach it’d be filled with reasonably warm water. He hung the nozzle-end from a post by the garden and in a hanging wire basket he had set a sponge and a thick bar of acrid pink soap. I’d get wet enough to lather up, stop the nozzle while I scrubbed with the sponge, and then I’d have about 30 seconds of warm water to rinse before a cold shock came out of the hose.
As handy as Bogdan was at gutting or decapitating a fish, he made no effort to feed himself at dinner, and I made even less. Instead we would knock back a shot of slivovic together and walk up the hill to the House of a Thousand Tetas. The Tetas were gray and lumpy, stunted by old wars, but still committed with solemn industry to the tasks of the home. They were a blur of babushkas, tending to a kitchen filled with gurgling pots, scouring the floors of their unoccupied guest rooms, sweeping dried pine needles from between the cracked tiles of the garden court. There were probably no more than four of them, possibly five, but they would only sit singly, or sometimes in pairs, nodding slowly with faint smiles as Bogdan shouted and raised his hands to the heavens, sometimes tearing off discreet bites from a heel of bread before one would rise and another would enter with the same round, wrinkled face, the same sun-browned hands with blue veins. They all spoke to me in Croatian though I would only answer with nods and dumb smiles. They would usually mention my baka with sad frowns and sighs, and then unfold their hands up the hill toward the cemetery and look at me with questioning eyes. When, when, came the question. “Mozda za veceru,” I answered, thinking I was harmlessly lying about perhaps visiting the cemetery tonight, and found out only later that it was closer in meaning to how about dinner? So, the Tetas sucked in their faces and came back with salads of tomatoes and onions, fat loaves of breads, and plates of spicy sardines lolling in oil. Bogdan would lean back in his chair and pat his fat belly, lighting a cigarette while he waited for a bowl of lamb stew. And I did the same.
Sometimes after dinner the Tetas would pack themselves into a single chair at the table, two sitting on the edges, one leaning over the flimsy creaking back. There were other chairs, open seats where they could let their old and burdened bodies puddle for a lazy hour, but they seemed to prefer a provisional posture. Sure, they were sitting, but just for a moment, and they were ready to answer the call of a whistling kettle, or set down a saucer of cream for their mewling cat.
The Tetas were gracious, attentive, and generous, but it must be mentioned that they were stingy with the booze, and once it was clear they had stopped pouring drinks Bogdan would clap his hands and bark idimo, let’s go. We would go back to the downstairs apartment where Bogdan was staying, where the bright kitchen lights glared through the windows into the black Mediterranean night.
There was a small, pink box of a television on the kitchen counter, which wobbled as Bogdan adjusted the rabbit ears. The images were broken and jittery, snapping into a steady stream of fat, black and white pixels just for a moment, before the horizontal hold let go again. But the voice was steady, a pleasant Balkan burble as comforting and ignorable as my parents’ old nighttime whispers. I listened and watched as Bogdan poured us a couple sloppy shots of slivovic. Each glass overflowed as he took the two short steps to the table, and he sucked the excess from his fat fingers as he sat down.
Zhivjeli!
Zhivjeli!
And we knocked back the stinging brandy as the man on the television talked about Zadar, just a hundred miles down the coast, where they had apparently begun to build bomb shelters.
*
I was awakened in the morning by the convulsive mechanical bleating of a motorcycle in the garden. I went out on the balcony in my boxers and looked down at Bogdan, already shirtless in the long-shadowed morning, already drinking, and now talking to a guy on a Harley who had the long black hair of a heavy-metal guitarist and an American flag sewn onto the back of his black leather jacket. Bogdan flexed his thick arms in a muscle-man pose as the man revved the throttle. When the engine noises dwindled, Bogdan noticed me on the balcony and waved me down, pointing at the guy on the motorcycle.
“Cousin” Bogdan shouted over the still sputtering engine, “you cousin.”
Cousin turned his chin past his shoulder and gave it a slight jerk up toward me. “What’s up?”
Cousin and Bogdan were sitting at the table when I came down, Bogdan washing down his breakfast board of bread, meat and cheese with his morning beer, Cousin ashing his cigarette into an oily plate of fish bones. Bogdan introduced my cousin as Vlado, but was immediately corrected in the accented English I recognized from my family back home. “Val” he said. “You can call me Val, like Val Kilmer.”
I asked the boring questions one asks in these situations and learned that Val had spent a couple summers in Detroit and Milwaukee visiting other cousins and developing his language skills. The rest, he explained, he had learned from movies and rock-n-fucking-roll.
“And what about you? You one of these Eurorail guys?” Val smirked at an acute angle, forcing words out of the high corner of his mouth as if they were marbles. “You wearing a backpack and walking around in fucking hiking boots like Europe is some National Park of America? You don’t have a Canadian flag on your backpack, do you?”
I shook my head and explained that I didn’t have a backpack at all, but rather a duffel bag. A fact that made no difference to Val, but which I suddenly felt was an important piece of exculpatory evidence.
“Good, because every Canadian I ever met was a big fucking pussy. The only worse pussies are Americans pretending to be Canadians. Right, Strić?” he said to Bogdan, and Bogdan answered with a chuckle and a raised bottle of beer. “Americans are dicks, big, fat dicks. It’s the only interesting thing about Americans, and when you’re a big, fat dick, the only thing to do is wave it around, baby. You don’t tuck between your thighs like Canadian pussy. You wave that fucking sausage around. Right here, Europe! I got your big fat American sausage right here!” Val was shouting and pointing at his crotch while Bogdan kept chuckling and drinking his beer. “All of Europe been chewing on that sausage since World War Two, but nobody wants to admit it.”
That seemed to be as much cultural analysis as Val felt like conducting, so he lit another cigarette and started asking me questions about the L.A. club scene. Sunset Strip, The Roxy, The Whisky? Had I seen Guns’n’Roses yet? I told him that I was from Cleveland, not Los Angeles.
“But you been to L.A., right?”
The truth was I hadn’t. I’d been to London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, but never L.A.
“Then why you come to fucking Croatia?” He grimaced in honest consternation.
I explained that I was on vacation, that I’d been teaching English in Prague, and Croatia was more convenient than Los Angeles.
“Oh,” and the smirk returned, “so you’re one of them.”
This was clearly an accusation, and one I was naïve enough to think I could defend myself against, so I made the mistake of challenging Val.
“One of whom?”
This got Val to raise an eyebrow.
“One of those sensitive-poet-expatriate guys, teaching English to people who already know English instead of snorting piles of cocaine off a big blonde’s fat tits backstage at the Roxy.”
Turns out I didn’t have an answer ready and Val laughed to fill in the pause.
“You sure you don’t have Canadian flag on your backpack? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a backpack. I can get you a flag. You can sew it on right there,” he said, pointing at my crotch. “It can cover up your pussy.”
Val had sized me up and found me wanting, so he gave up the attack and gave me a playful smack in the shoulder. “I’m just busting your balls, man. Sometimes you Americans are so polite.”
He said something to Bogdan in Croatian and the two of them shared a laugh as he got up from the table.
“I gotta go, but we’ll hang out later, maybe go to a café and drink tea, stare out the window together while the rain falls.”
He laughed again as he hopped on his motorcycle and kicked on the roaring engine.
*
I wanted a beach chair, so Bogdan gave me the key to the windowless storage shack built into the slope behind the house. He blew a throaty bomb noise into his splaying fists and then pointed to it, and I realized it had probably been used as an air-raid shelter during World War II. It certainly looked old enough. The corrugated aluminum face was discolored and greening with moss and crawling ivy. There was a pattern of rusting holes suggesting the absence of a sturdier door than the ill-fitting, slatted wooden gate that stood there now. A door that couldn’t even hold out the scent of mold and wormy decay.
The wooden gate whimpered on its hinges as I opened the door. There was a whispered rustling of bugs as a tattered spray of sunlight flitted through the stone pines, dust and webs, and lit the dull aluminum legs of a listing stack of grimy beach chairs piled against a long and rotting wooden bench. Opposite the chairs, was another long bench covered with a sad plastic heap of limp and deflated floats. A surprisingly neat path split the benches and reached to the back of the shack where a metal rack was filled with dark wooden crates emblazoned with faded Cyrillic stencils announcing supplies of some dark, forgotten Balkan purpose. I wondered if the bombs had ever fallen here. Had these benches ever filled with trembling bodies? Had my grandparents stared across the gap and seen their own blank terror in the faces of their neighbors? I wondered, but I did not ask. Wondering required no answers.
The road down to the beach was quiet and wound past low stone walls and shuttered homes. The little fruit stand had a graffitied metal grate pulled over the window, and the owner of the small market was sitting at the picnic table outside, smoking and playing a game of solitaire. The air was still and the sprawling oaks cast no shadows against the sunless sky.
It was a day of clouds and cold water and the sea was vacant. I wedged the beach chair into the wet rocks and listened as the receding tide slithered through the stones. I had brought two bottles of beer and Rebecca West too. Wearing a hooded sweat shirt and with my bare feet in the surf, I sensitively noted the color of the yellowing pages, the way the dark, warped edges fanned like the gills of a mushroom. I sensitively noted the scent of sorrow and cabbage and suntan oil that wafted into the air with each turned page.
“I had come to Yugoslavia” I read “because I knew that the past had made the present and I wanted to see how the process works.” That was the answer I should have given Val. That’s why I was here, to see the raw stuff of history, to see it on the hoof before it’s been ground into ink and paper, to see how the process works. I looked out to the sea, no café windows for me, and watched a gull swoop down to the water and skim over the low, rolling waves. Down the beach just a bit, a man in a wet suit was struggling to kite-surf through the windless sky. I was watching the process. I would tell Val that the next time I saw him.
*
I wore a vintage Sex Pistols T-shirt to the Tetas for dinner that night, the “Pretty Vacant” T with two empty busses in pink and black. The Sex Pistols were way cooler than Guns-n-Roses, right? There was actual blood on it too, and a long tear from when I had wiped out on my Vespa during a radical, campus-wide, scavenger hunt. Bogdan stuck his fat finger right against my chest on the word sex and chuckled.
Val was already there when we walked into the garden, sitting at the stone slab where he was thoughtfully surveying the long neck of a bottle like an engineer. With angles observed and the math all calculated, he placed the tip against the edge of the table, held his hand above with the steady heft of construction equipment, then dropped it down, knocking the cap off, and releasing a spout of foam that he noisily sucked from the bottle. When Val saw me he leaned back in his chair, threw open his arms and started singing O, Canada! I threw up my hands in surrender. What was I going to do, make fun of Mounties?
The Tetas had put in extra work for Val and made rabbit stew fresh from their own bunny hutch. I looked over Val’s shoulder at the twitching whiskered noses of the survivors, wondering if they could recognize the scent wafting from the table while Bogdan licked the savory bits from the wispy edges of his drooping moustache.
We sopped up the last bits of our dinner with a thick, crusty bread, and when Val was done he pushed his chair back from the table and brushed the crumbs from his chest on to the ground at his feet. “Those old bitches can cook!”
I chuckled politely. Val turned to Bogdan and presumably repeated the phrase in Croatian which didn’t elicit a laugh but rather a solemn and thoughtful nod. Da, da.
The Tetas brought us slivovic in thick-bottomed crystal glasses, and with our cigarettes lit, Val asked me about Prague. I told him that it was an interesting time to be there, historically. I may have mentioned the word history a few more times because Val interrupted me impatiently.
“What? You have no history in America? Oh, that’s right.” He quickly filled the silence, “in America, history is only for export.”
He vented a geyser of smoke from the corner of his mouth, giving me time to process the metaphor. “You just exported a couple shiploads to Iraq this winter, no? Here Sadam, have some fucking American-made history you fucking camel fucker.” He laughed at his own joke and Bogdan laughed along, repeating the word camel fucker, his accent as sweet and slippery as candied plums.
So, I told him about Prague, about the spirit of the city, as if I knew what that was, that I thought it was most pleasantly embodied in a rock club/art gallery that had opened inside the plinth of the old Stalin monument in Letna Park. In a space that had once supported the concrete mass of Stalin, resonant with his gulags, his purges and murderous famines, now came covers of the Ramones!
Val nodded along with a drunken snake of a smile, his squinting eyes coiled and ready to strike. “I know a guy who lives in Prague now, Croatian guy, from Zagreb. He sells pieces of the Berlin Wall on Karlovy Bridge.”
I had seen that guy, or rather several of those guys. They usually set up close to the guys selling furry Soviet military hats, hammer and sickle T-shirts, or really anything with the letters CCCP on it.
“You know where he gets these pieces of Berlin Wall?” Bogdan asked. “On the south of the city, in Jizni Mesto, where the shitty Stalinist apartments are falling apart. He goes every morning with a sack, spray paint, and sledge hammer.” Val swiped his hands together, up and down, and then opened them like a magician. “There’s your Berlin Wall. There’s your history.”
He pointed at my shirt and sang in his best Johnny Rotten voice “I’m gonna go under the Berlin Wall, gonna go under the Berlin Wall.” Bogdan laughed and pointed at my shirt too. “Sex Pistol, no?”
The Tetas came out in a clouded black mass, stripped of their aprons and ready for a funeral. Of course they had names, and I even occasionally remembered them, but –like clouds—one easily morphed into the other, and as soon as I was ready to name one a fox, it changed into a bunny. So, the Tetas cast their dark shadow over Val as they rained complaints down upon him. Their voices spun and twirled around each other, rising into high-pitched excitement and crashing into low confidential whispers. Finally, Val waved at them dismissively and snapped in English, “Ok, shut up already.”
And they did shut up, but they did not leave. Instead they stood there in a line, tallest to smallest like the world’s saddest nesting dolls, each a doleful and completely unsurprising iteration of the last. They stood with their hands folded in poses of pelvic humility, looking at Val waiting for him to speak, to me. Val released a spitting plume of smoke into the air and lifted his hands in resignation. “The old bitches want you to pay for your dinners. Tourism is down, and I guess they been feeding you dinner like every night.”
They had, and dumb as I was, I hadn’t even thought to offer them some compensation. The word teta made me into a child, and I had acted accordingly. I blubbered an apology at Val, and told him to tell them I’d be happy to pay whatever they thought was fair. Val puckered his face at the word fair, and then with the talent for shrugging that seemed to be the national heritage he grinned and spoke a few dense and guttural syllables that landed like body blows, forcing gasps and low moans from the Tetas as well as a yelp of laughter from Bogdan.
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them you said General George Fucking Marshall paid for your dinner 50 years ago.”
“Stop fucking around, Vlado. Tell them I’m happy to pay whatever they think is a fair price.”
He stared at me incredulously, but with a sort of professional amazement, like an ER doctor discovering still another novel expression of human pain. He pulled back his thick, black rock-n-roll hair from his face and then spat off some more bullshit to the Tetas which this time struck with more electrical force. Arms and hands flailed violently, voices snapped and crackled, and Bogdan slapped the table laughing, rattling plates and silverware. Finally, with exasperated sneers and stamping feet they retreated back into the kitchen from whence they came.
“What the fuck did you say to them?”
“I told them you said you’re not paying for shit and they should suck your big, fat American sausage. How you fucking don’t speak Yugoslavian?”
The Tetas had scattered, black wings to the wind, while Bogdan was now gasping in sharp breaths, his laughter had been so convulsive it had constricted his throat into a silent choke while his face purpled.
Val, on the other hand, was composed. He cupped his hand `around a wooden match and lit his cigarette. “Seriously dude, can you speak Czech at least?”
I was taking classes. The classes were not going well. “A little bit.” It was a crippled bug of a response, a legless and spinning retort that Val squashed with a single scoffing snort.
“I mean what the fuck are you even doing over here? It’s all like Euro-Disney for you guys, right. Vaclav Havel walking around in big fucking Mickey Mouse ears while you sit in cafes reading Milan Kundera in English translation. Just go home, man. Go to L.A., learn to surf, fuck some blondies between their big American titties. There’s nothing here for you. Fuck, there’s nothing here for me.”
Bogdan had wiped his face back into stolidity with the back of his hand and raised one of his fat and hairy fingers toward the doorway where the smallest of the Tetas stood, full of woe, like an agonized saint, arms down, palms out. Her hands rose and fell on invisible swells of sorrow as she spoke.
“She wants me to take you to the cemetery to see Baka - Deda too - I guess, but she don’t mention him.” Val pushed away from the table, the wooden legs squeaking across the tile. “Anyway, we better go.” I got up and walked past the woman’s sulking scowl, past the faint scent of garlic and labor and ancient perfumes wafting out of the black folds of her frock.
“And probably” said Val “it’s better you don’t come here for dinner tomorrow night.”
It was still a summer night by the sea, and the air smelled of lemon and roasting lamb. The sky was dark and cloudless, but somehow wet with stars. Val put his arm, sheathed in black leather, across Bogdan’s bare and sprouting shoulders, and I followed them down a sloping cobblestone path back to Bogdan’s kitchen.
Bogdan groped in the dark for the light switch as I looked out the window at the dark silhouette of bending trees, but once he found the light the trees were gone, replaced by our own watery reflections and the bright austerity of a bachelor’s kitchen, a trail of brown drips along the counter, and a sink cluttered with dirty dishes. Bogdan reached into that sink, wriggling his eyebrows in discernment, and pulled out three glasses and rinsed them under the faucet. I watched as he rubbed at the golden spots with his dirty thumbs and wondered why he didn’t just use the soap. There was an entire bottle just beside the sink.
“Zhivjeli!” said Bogdan, hoisting the tallest and cleanest glass.
“Zhivjeli!” We responded, and clinked our glasses above the empty table.
The evening hour of joking and stories had apparently passed, and Bogdan turned on the television. There were tanks at rest on a green and sloping hillside, a rocky blade of mountain cutting into the blue sky behind them, a nervous policeman smoking in an empty square, straightening his beret and looking over his shoulder. There were soldiers in mismatched camouflage walking down the middle of a two-lane road past a line of abandoned vehicles, doors open, tires on the grass. The rifles dangled loosely from their hands, except for one man who turned back to the camera and hoisted his above his head.
Bogdan muted the television and shook his head but somehow couldn’t make himself turn it off.
I asked what was happening and Val shrugged as if considering how much to tell me. He turned to the silent screen. “That” he said pointing at the column of tanks “is Yugoslav People’s Army” And then the screen switched to a crowded room of nervous people, fretting bakas in babushkas, wiry and snarling preteens, worried men in dark, wrinkled jackets, “and those are Yugoslav people.”
They all looked familiar, their Slavic faces. They looked like my cousins, my brother. They looked like me.
“Anyway,” and I could see immediately that Val was lapsing, his body and being sliding --for a moment at least—into earnestness “things are getting worse, and probably you shouldn’t be here.”
Vlado shook his empty glass at Bogdan who poured a new round.
“Zhivjeli!” This time I led the cheer, but Vlado and Bogdan just knocked back their glasses in silence.
“So, what you going to do now?”
I still hadn’t decided, but it wasn’t a decision that was weighing on me. I would go some where. I would do something. Months, even years, seemed like pennies in my pocket. “I dunno” I began dreamily, like I had weeks before on the Metro at night in a nearly empty car while a foreign voice announced the station, talking to a pale, dark-haired beauty who pulled at her split ends, a little bit tired and a little bit drunk, who wasn’t sure what she was doing next either, “maybe going to Istanbul.”
“What’s in Istanbul?”
“I don’t know,” and I ran my splayed fingers through the fine curtain of hair I had cultivated, “I guess I’m going to find out.”
“Find out?” Vlado was serious now, his black eyes dense with undelivered sermons. “I’ll save you a trip. You know what’s in Turkey? Bunches of fucking Turks. That’s it. Go home. Go back to America. Europe stinks like dead fish, like an old whore, all of it.” He repeated this last bit in Croatian, one of the few phrases I had learned from my father, and Bogdan nodded his head heavily, weighted as it was with sweat and booze, with fear and remembering. “Anyway, how you gonna get there. Look at that!” He pointed at the TV where now a single fighter plane was drawing dark circles against the pale blue sky. “That’s what’s between you and Istanbul. You think you’re taking a bus through that shit? Look at those guys.”
I looked at those guys, young men with murdering smiles, holding their guns like hard cocks. What else did you need to know about war? “See those assholes? They’re like you.” There was something sharp and brittle in Vlado’s voice that I hadn’t heard before. “They want history. Their fucking balls are bursting with it. They want to jizz history all over Yugoslavia. Me?” and he leaned back now into his wobbling chair, “I want vacation.”
“Vacation” repeated Bogdan, his voice thick and sweet in dreamy incantation, and he poured out another round of drinks while we watched the rolling tanks.
*
“Only part of us is sane” wrote Rebecca West. “Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us.” I Googled the whole of the quote just now. I have the book (that same copy I threw in my duffel bag as I packed to leave), but it is in the library, way down the hall, and my knee is aching.
When I first read it I was shirtless on the rocky beach, and I clipped the page with the sharp edge of my thumbnail as the spray from the low surf spattered the bottom edges of the book. “The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
Yes, it seemed very wise, and I clapped shut the book, let it fall onto the skin of my lap, and lit a cigarette to better wonder at its wisdom as I looked out over the sea.
Vlado (Val was never likely and had somehow now become impossible) came up to me with a cigarette in his mouth. I could hear the splash of his boots in the water, the wet rocks slipping across each other beneath his weight. I was wearing my swim trunks; Vlado was wearing his motorcycle jacket.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” said Vlado with exaggerated politeness, though he immediately dropped the pretense into the water along with the smoldering butt of his cigarette.
“It’s just fucking water man. That’s all it is. But all of Europe comes here, Germans, Italians, English, Austrians. They come down here with boats and jet skis. They kite-surf and paraglide. They scuba dive in an empty sea.” He winced at his own words, and I couldn’t tell whether he was disgusted by his poetic turn of phrase or the indulgences of an indolent continent.
“You know how you can tell a Croatian at the sea? He brings cigarettes, man.” Vlado tapped his chest, perhaps hinting at a pack of hidden cigarettes, or maybe just signaling his love of smoking Croatians. “That’s it, fucking cigarettes. Anyway, I got you a ticket to Istanbul if you want it? Just two hundred bucks.”
“Istanbul?”
Frankly, I knew nothing about it. I imagined it as a city of minarets and traffic. I imagined open markets with bins of spices, and black crowded streets with standing pools of foul water. I imagined a glorious river and for some reason turbans.
“How, when?”
“Well, not Istanbul as such, but Patras, in Greece.” Vlado bent down and reached into the shallow water by my feet where he pinched something fine between his fingers. Still squatting, he held it first close to his nose and then held it out for me to see, a sharp and rusted screw. “Kids play in here man, kids.” And he threw it out to the deeper water where it would await the tender foot of a fat and sunburnt foreigner. “Anyway, you can get to Istanbul from there, pretty easy.”
Vlado explained things to me while I folded my beach chair and packed away my book. He explained that the bus routes into the interior had all been suspended, that no trains were running, that the only way out was north and that the border might be closing again soon “depending.” The ferry to Patras was the only way to get south, and it was leaving tonight.
I could hear Bogdan and Vlado talking out on the patio while I packed up my few things and peeled off $200 from my thin roll of bills. Their conversation was agitated, no more laughing, just the low rumble of Bogdan’s complaints, and the firecracker snap of Vlado’s answers.
Vlado was already on his motorcycle when I came downstairs, an envelope sticking conspicuously from the pocket of his leather jacket. “Istanbul is that way” he said as he pointed up at the hills. “I’m going that way” and he pointed across the narrow sea, but I knew he meant someplace much farther than the denuded island in front of us. I handed him the money, and he waved the two bills like a fan to his face. “Benjamin Franklin, still America’s greatest ambassador. See you in L.A.” he said as he handed me the envelope, “if you ever get smart enough to go there.” He twisted the throttle and spun the tire, spraying gravel into the air which fell down like hail on the wrought-iron table, and I watched the American flag on his jacket grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared around the corner.
There were back slaps with Bogdan, and of course one last shot of slivovic. He handed me a small brown sack filled with ripe, purpling figs he had plucked from the tree. “Figs good now, eat good now,” he said as he nodded his head. “For sheep,” and it took me a moment to understand that sheep, of course, meant ship. “Hvala lijepa,” I said with a frozen smile of foreign gratitude, and I turned to walk up the hill.
I walked right by the Tetas, broomed and aproned and working the yard. They paused their industry to form a frowning phalanx as I waved good-bye to them. Tvoya baka, I heard one last time from behind me and had to imagine the shaking hand that sent it climbing up the hill.
And the cemetery was right there, separated from the main road by a stand of leafy oaks, bound on the low slope by a short stone wall. The Tetas had told me with what seemed to be pride that half the cemetery was family. The gate opened onto a gravelly path that forked into three more paths splitting the headstones into orderly rows. It wouldn’t have taken long to find the plot. But it was hot. My back was already burning from the uneven weight of my pack, and the next bus to Rijeka could come by any minute. Plus, what did it matter? I could always say I went.
So, I walked past, up to the road, where I sat on a bench in the shade of the same trees that blocked the cemetery from the sight of traffic. I plucked a sweet fig from the sack and was wondering about the purposes of cemetery walls –whose minds are meant to be eased by them anyway—when a short convoy of military trucks drove by, heading south. Each had a flat cargo bed with two empty benches covered by a canvass canopy. They looked like transport trucks, but there was nobody being transported. Perhaps if they were going the other way, they might have transported me. A soldier in the passenger’s seat of the last truck turned and looked at me as they passed, just the suggestion of a face, young and gaunt, but blurred by motion and lost to the wind.
*
As it turned out, there was no ship in Rijeka. Well, that’s not exactly true. There was in fact a rather large ship in the harbor, a hulking slab of empty decks and small unpeopled portholes, but it wasn’t going to Patras, and I didn’t have a ticket to board. Several people had shrugged or frowned –one openly laughed– at the little booklet of tickets I waved at them, but there was no help, only confirmation. I reconciled myself to the fact that I’d been swindled by Vlado and headed to the train station with the hope of getting back to Prague.
On the train, I thought about what was waiting in Prague. I thought about Istanbul and Los Angeles too. I thought about the green grass and red bricks of my Midwestern campus. I closed my eyes to the cabin and felt the buoyance of the train, relieved of concerns, duty suspended, focus diffused. So much nicer than cars or planes, the train allowed for an expansiveness of imagination. So, I allowed my imagination to expand through the cabin to the rattling tracks, to the hum of the engine, to the black breadth of Europe outside the night windows.
*
Edwin Rozic received his M.A. in English Literature from DePaul University. He teaches English to people who already speak English and lives in Chicago with his wife and son and a menagerie of furry and scaled beasts. His work has been published in McSweeney's, Glimmer Train, The Matador Review, SalonZine, The Ekphrastic Review, and after hours.