Under a Croatian Sun (17 page)

We went inside, took down the photo albums, and sat on the sofa to see. In fact, Ivana did look quite the part (very Ali McGraw in
Love Story
), but I had to admit, I did rather let the side down – more like Worzel Gummidge than Ryan O’Neal.

Flipping through the pages, Ivana gave one of her wifely sighs. ‘Why do you always have to look like you’ve just escaped from a prison camp? You’re even worse since coming out here. Just look at you!’

‘I’ll dress like Rab C. Nesbitt if I want to,’ I replied grumpily. ‘One of my earliest ambitions was to be a POW in Colditz and escape with Douglas Bader and his pals disguised as a Bulgarian
grandmother or a Dutch turnip salesman. My clothes might be slightly out of date, but I’m going to get a lot more mileage out of them. So there!’

‘You really are impossible! None of my friends have husbands who carry on like this. Whatever did I see in you? I should have married that nice Rafa who played polo and was so good to his mother.’

There followed more cross words and threats to burn my favourite corduroys (in perfectly good condition apart from the knees), but I let it ride. Since coming out here, that kind of psychological coercion and threats of banishment from the bedchamber had been falling on increasingly deaf ears.

‘Anyway,’ I answered defiantly, ‘the way I dress makes me feel at home with the guys at Zoran’s who have a similar taste to mine in practical attire and manly footwear.’

With a snort she’d learned from Karmela, Ivana left the room.

T
he ability to learn languages seems to be as natural to Slavs as it is unnatural to the British, but inhabitants of Vis, being islanders, were the exception to the rule. Some of the young ones and those like Zoran and Marko who had travelled spoke English, but, to communicate with anyone else, I had to speak Croatian.

The bar-proppers were surprised when I told them that Ivana wasn’t teaching me the language and repeated the oft-quoted adage that the best way to learn a language is in bed. What I didn’t tell them was that Ivana had started to teach me, but it was soon apparent that she was not made to be an ideal teacher, nor I an ideal pupil. Our lessons had rapidly turned into the most frightful arguments, and, for the sake of harmony in the home, I thought it best to stick to my trusty Croatian primer.

I actually spoke four other languages and considered myself a
fair linguist, but, when I started on Croatian, I realised I was not the linguist I thought I was.

But mistakes always gave me trouble. Trying to show how good I was to the crowd at Zoran’s, I told them I was off to fix a mechanical problem on the boat using the future conditional. I was greeted by a gale of laughter and snorts and told that I had just said I was off to copulate with the boat mechanic.

Another problem was not being able to tell if someone was joking. Deadpan humour is very much part of Croatian conversation, and unless someone laughed or smiled I never got it. I was getting better, detecting a slant of an eye, a movement of the chin, a deflection of the hand, but mostly I took what was said at face value and felt very silly when it turned out to be a joke. Then I suppose humour has always been the most subtle form of human communication – the dents in our kitchen wall from flying objects bear witness that, even after thirty years, Ivana is still able to misconstrue the tender affection hidden in my witty ripostes.

My improved Croatian also meant that I was now able to eavesdrop on conversations. One evening, when Grandma Klakic was sitting on the steps outside our door with some of her family, I heard her granddaughter, Mira, reading aloud from a magazine. It was about a mother who had caught her son wearing his sister’s underwear. The aunties were tutting and the teenagers were giggling.

‘I’d sort him out in no time,’ said Grandma K. ‘Send him down to me and after a week of working in my fields he wouldn’t want to be a girl anymore! Boys are just spoiled these days. With no men’s work to do around the house any more, all they do is look at fashion magazines and other rubbish! No wonder they don’t know who they are. Sister’s underwear! Pah!’

‘And what do children have to worry about these days, anyway?’ said one of the aunties. ‘Their schooling’s free and their parents do everything for them. All they have to worry about is buying the right clothes!’

‘That’s not fair,
Baka
[Grandma],’ said Mira, a nice-looking girl with a smiley face. ‘You don’t know what pressures we have at school these days. Anyway, I’m sure when you were our age you were always dressing up for the promenade so the boys would notice you.’

Grandma Klakic allowed herself a chortle (a rare occurrence). ‘You cheeky little Missy!’

‘I bet you did!’ Mira giggled. ‘I bet you wore one of those silly big hats and walked up and down in front of
Nonno
[Grandpa] hoping he’d notice you! And I bet you were always saying to Baka Zora, “Please let me buy a new frock! Please!”’

Grandma Klakic’s hatchet face splintered into a smile and she put an arm round her granddaughter to hug her. ‘Mira,
dusa
, you are my sweetest little pudding and I know you work so hard at school. We are all so proud of you.’

The hug made Mira drop the magazine and her gangly fourteen-year-old brother picked it up and started to read it. She snatched it back and whacked him over the head with it.

‘You’re not old enough for things like that!’

The brother pulled a face, but, not wanting to tangle with his older sister, moved two steps down and sulked.

The letter now prompted a heated discussion among the aunties about contemporary morality. I didn’t understand everything, but a summary of the findings of the select committee seemed to be:

By the end of June, I thought my Croatian was good enough to talk to a technician without Ivana’s help, and, when the rain started coming through the garden wall and turning my lawn into a pond, I went on my own to talk to Constantin, the engineer Marko recommended.

It was a glorious evening when I set off with my dictionary in my pocket. At this time of day, the winegrowers on their motorised wheelbarrows were wending their weary way home o’er the lea, and, the road being too narrow for overtaking, I had to follow behind at a stately ten miles an hour with ample time to admire my surroundings. The sun was lowering over the peaks and the heat haze rippled like gauze over the terraced hills. The view around me was a harmony of landscape and man. The greatest charm of the Dalmatian Coast is that, even though the hills and shores are wild, it gives you a sense that man has always been there. Everywhere you look there is something to remind you of our passing – crumbling farmsteads, abandoned settlements, ancient terraces. Quite moving really, if you’re that way inclined.

The sun was well over the hills when I left the car in the hamlet below Constantin’s farm and started the trek up. Looking out across the slopes to the sea as I walked, I realised that there was something else special about the Adriatic landscape; there were no grand towering mountains, sweeps of sandy beaches or unbroken
expanses of ocean, and there was always something for the eye to hold on to to give you a sense of proportion – a harbour wall, a tiny hillside hamlet, a monastery on a shore, a cluster of fishing boats in a cove – and it was all so welcoming.

Reaching Constantin’s yard, I saw a prize collection of rusty farm implements, metal pipes and bent sheets of corrugated iron, and at the far end, by a stack of old bedsprings overgrown with morning glory, was a dozing donkey, its head hanging down, and chickens pecking in the dust around it. The door of the farmhouse was open, so I knocked and went in. The single large room was dark and beamed, and every available surface was piled so high with books and papers that I didn’t see Constantin until he appeared from behind one of them. A slight man in his early forties wearing braces and a faded denim shirt, he had short prematurely grey hair that stood up brush-like, and a sharp alert face framed by pebble glasses. He came across the room with the precise, measured step of someone whose every movement was forethought.

‘Mr Anthony, I presume!’ he said in perfect English, and when I hesitated he said, ‘I believe you are supposed to reply, “Dr Constantin, I presume!”’

We laughed and shook hands.

‘I didn’t know you spoke English. I’ve been practising my drainage terms all the way up!’

His grey eyes twinkled behind the glasses. ‘Yes, Marko has told me about your problem.’

‘I can do some rough drawings of what I think is happening, and then you can draw in what you think we should do,’ I said, jumping ahead as usual.

‘No, no! Not so quickly. First we will talk, then we will go to measure, then we will draw. Come now. You must help me select the wine that we will drink while we talk.’

We went out into the yard and found the donkey now mooching disconsolately against the large barn door. Constantin pushed it aside and heaved the door open. The space was large and high-raftered with walls blackened by age and smoke. Against one wall was a stack of wine bottles and against the others were jars of pickled paprika stacked three deep. I’d never seen anything like it. Not even a Sainsbury’s supermarket depot could have had so many. It could warrant a mention in the
Guinness Book of Records.

‘What do you do with all this paprika?’

He looked at me over his glasses as if I had asked a silly question. ‘I eat it.’

‘But this is a five-year supply for a family of ten!’

‘Paprika is full of nutrition,’ he said and shrugged.

Back in the house, he poured the wine, sliced the bread, cut slivers from a large smoked ham, and we sat on the terrace to talk about the problem. When we had got as far as we could, I asked about his background. He told me he had been brought up on the island by fervent communist parents, and had joined the party himself when he went to university in Zagreb.

‘As you can imagine, it came as a surprise when it all suddenly ended. After all those years of being told what to do and what to think, it was something of a shock when we suddenly found ourselves free of everything. Just as children can’t imagine life outside the schoolyard, it was difficult for us to think of our lives without it. We’d never thought of a world outside the system. It was like being without an umbrella. In that way, communism solved a lot of problems.’

He took a sip from his glass and looked across the hills. The green vines contouring the slopes had deepened in the evening mist, the swallows dipped in and out of the peach trees in the
fields below us, and in the distance the sea stretched out a silvery-grey expanse with faint shapes of other islands on the horizon. We sat in companionable silence listening to the rustling of the fruit trees and the bees buzzing on their last evening foray in the lavender. A cracked bell in the hamlet church struck eight.

Constantin broke the silence. ‘But we really did want to make it work, you know.’

‘Make what work?’

‘Communism, of course. Oh, how we all waved our little red flags. We loved the colour so much, we almost wore pink underpants!’ He laughed. ‘And now it’s all gone. Pouf! Just like that!’

He took another sip and I made sympathetic noises.

‘But the greatest blow was to realise that, all the time we’d been waving our little flags, our Glorious Comrade Leaders had been focused on their next Mercedes and the stripper they’d set up in a flat in Dubrovnik.’ He let out a long sigh and got up to fetch another bottle. We had eaten all the bread and ham that he’d cut, but he was too lost in thought to think about cutting any more. I eyed the loaf, badly in need of something to underpin the amount of wine we were getting through.

‘But, you know what?’ said Constantin, sitting down again. ‘It felt good to be part of a great ideal. I really miss that.’

I felt I ought to say something encouraging. (A few glasses of someone’s wine never fails to give me a particularly warm feeling towards them.) ‘I think the same feelings must have been going through the mind of Piers Ploughman when he looked out over the Lincolnshire vales… a yearning for the old days… a welling of emotion for how things had been… a feeling of confusion…’ But I realised I had lost my audience. Constantin was gazing into the distance.

‘Bastards! And all that time the party chiefs had just been working the system for themselves!’

I made more mumbling sounds.

‘Did you have any political heroes when you were a young man?’ he asked.

‘Well, we don’t really take our leaders too seriously in England, but I once saw Michael Foot speaking and that was pretty stirring. With his shock of white hair, he looked like an Old Testament prophet, and there was something about him that touched a chord. He gave you the feeling that he was bringing the tablets down from the mountains.’

‘Did you ever see any of the Americans speaking?’

‘Only on TV, but all that “I had a dream…” and “Ask not what your country can do for you…” stuff was quite impressive even on TV. All we’ve got in England these days are blokes like Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. Have you seen them?’

He shook his head.

‘Nice boys, but who’d follow men like that into the trenches?’

We spent the rest of the time discussing the problems of the world and mourning our lost ideals – and got steadily more sloshed. But there on a terrace overlooking the Adriatic on a warm summer evening, all was well in the world for an ex-communist Croatian and a woolly English liberal.

By midnight, we had settled most of the world’s problems and come up with a raft of projects that we’d do together. Constantin suggested that I spent the night on his sofa, and given the amount I’d drunk I considered it, but knowing that Ivana would be lying in bed imagining Bozo in a killer Skoda coming down the road towards me hunched like Mr Toad behind the wheel, I thought I’d better get myself back home.

I stumbled down the hill and, after blundering into various
gorse bushes, managed to locate the car and, having eventually found the right place to insert the ignition key, I lurched off down the track. Luckily, at that time of night, there weren’t any other cars on the road when I got to it, but I do remember feeling rather anxious about the width of the tarmac.

Why weren’t there more people like Constantin on the island? I asked myself, as I weaved unsteadily down to the village with my befuddled mind trying to piece the evening together. The answer was obvious, even at that time of night. Constantin belonged to a new generation who knew something of the world and weren’t frightened by outsiders. But they had all gone to work in the cities, and the island had been left with an aging population of grouchy old stick-in-the-muds (people like me, come to think about it).

The next day, I asked around about the special nutritional properties of pickled paprika, but no one seemed to know anything about it. I was going to have to do some further research. I rather liked the idea of the pickled paprika business with Constantin. I could see us strutting around international pickled paprika conventions posing as pickled paprika magnates and pontificating about the finer points of paprika pickling. It could be a definite goer.