Under a Croatian Sun (4 page)

A
t least the fisherman’s reaction made Karmela determined to see us accepted by the community and the first thing to do, we were told, was to be seen regularly in the cafés. So we chose Marko’s as our ‘regular’. Marko’s was in the main square and, set against a background of the Venetian façades, his wicker tables and chairs made a charming tableau. It was also a prime position, as sitting there you could watch the activity on the waterfront and look out over the bay at the same time. Marko could have charged extra just for the view.

At first, we thought it was the setting that had made it the focal point of the village, but it was Marko himself who made it the ‘Café de Ville’. An ex-naval officer with a square chin and a steely eye whose speech and bearing spoke of quiet command, Marko presided over the square as if it were his quarterdeck. His battleship-grey hair was never out of place and his shirt and trousers were as well pressed at three o’clock on a hot afternoon
as they were in the morning. Even the way he moved was precise and economical, and, although the coterie that hung around him were a pretty garrulous lot, Marko spoke quietly and chose his words carefully.

When I first introduced myself, he told me in his slightly stilted English that he was the Hon. Sec. of the Vis Anglo-Croatian Military Society, which he had formed five years ago with the British officers who used to come up from Bosnia and Kosovo during lulls in hostilities.

‘Why did they come to Vis? I asked.

‘To visit all the British military sites and cemetery, of course.’

‘
British
military sites?’ I said in surprise.

Marko looked at me in equal surprise. ‘But you occupied our island on two occasions. We were the base for your Navy when you were fighting Napoleon, and again in World War II.’

‘I thought we just passed through on our way north.’

‘You were here for nearly two years and our harbour was full of your ships. You even built an airfield up in the valley. In the Napoleonic war, you were here for ten years. That big fort over there is called Fort George, after your King, and that little island there is called Hoste Island after your Sir William Hoste, the captain of the fleet. Do you know the family?’

‘Er… I don’t think I do.’

He looked disappointed.

‘I’m afraid I had no idea about all this,’ I said. ‘It certainly wasn’t in any of our school history books.’

‘Please, I did not mean to give offence,’ he said quickly, clearly embarrassed at showing up my ignorance. ‘Please do not feel that you should know such things. We were also not taught about it in our schools. We were only told about the brave deeds of our fearless Comrade partisans who fought with their bare hands for our freedom! He gave a wry smile. ‘The brave deeds
of the British were never mentioned. It did not suit our Glorious People’s Revolutionary history. And I am sure that in England there were more important campaigns for school children to learn about.’

A practised diplomat.

When I got to know Marko better, I discovered he was also a practised master of the inconspicuous question – but, by the time I found that out, he’d already got all there was to know out of me.

After a week, I discovered that he acted as the village Citizen’s Advice Bureau. He had an ability to put people’s problems into perspective and explain how the outside world worked. Every day villagers came to ask for his guidance – how to write a letter to the Ministry, how to get legal advice, how to find out if they can get a grant, how to get their son a place at college… and, whoever they were, Marko would invariably sit them down, offer them a drink and chat about this and that before asking why they had come to see him. Most of the questions, he told me, were about how to deal with the authorities, and added that, because the same people that ran the country under communism were still in charge, dealings with the authorities were as Byzantine as they had always been.

Marko’s counsel was invariably down to earth. ‘No, I really wouldn’t ask them about it yet,’ I heard him say to one of our neighbours. ‘If you do that, they’ll have to inform the Fisheries Department, and that’ll put a stop to everything. You’d do much better to talk to Kristo in the Port Office and let him have a word with his brother in the Tourist Development Office. Once
they
give their approval, no other department will dare to object.’

Another time I heard: ‘Don’t even mention it to your mother-in-law or she’ll be at your poor pa-in-law with the frying pan
again. Just go ahead and do it, and, when she’s here having coffee with her cousins after church, get your cousin Nada to tell her about it. She won’t want her smart cousins to see her getting angry, and she’ll think it was Nada’s side of the family who engineered it rather than you and your pa-in-law.’

It sounded as if there were many in the village who had been saved from the frying-pan treatment thanks to Marko – although there were those who were not fans of his, and Karmela was one of them. But, for her, Marko was something of a rival, both of them being in the information-distribution business. ‘That Marko expects everyone to ask his advice about everything,’ she told us. ‘About jobs, houses, cars, donkeys, children and mothers-in-law. And, if you don’t ask his advice, he tells the whole island that whatever you’re doing is wrong.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘Oh yes he does! And that’s not a good thing in a village as small as this. We have a saying: “Teeth are hard, but they soon fall out. The tongue is soft, but it lasts forever!”’

I felt like mentioning the pot, the kettle and the colour black, but my Croatian wasn’t quite up to it. Anyway, perhaps there was something in what she said. Marko was somewhat proprietorial. Whenever we hadn’t been in for a few days, the next time he saw us he’d say in a slightly disapproving voice: ‘Oh! I was wondering where you’ve been,’ as if we had been straying away from his protective network. But I appreciated his concern and I was grateful that he was always quick to notice if any of his customers didn’t respond when I tried to talk to them. Whenever he saw this happening, he’d come over to start a conversation and include me in it to show I was a friend of his.

I had found a Godfather.

The best place for meeting people was, in fact, the ferry. Everyone had to go over to the mainland at some point, and being at sea seemed to create a kind of camaraderie that made it easier to talk.

The ferry journey to the mainland was a trip back in time. At daybreak, we’d climb the iron companionway past the evil-smelling engine room and rancid latrines and up to the smoke-filled cafeteria where everyone gathered. The scene there resembled an old French movie. Crew members stood at the bar with the truck drivers knocking back shots of
rakija
(the local vodka-like gut rot), gnarled fishermen in berets sat with their drinks, playing cards and smoking Walter Wolf cigarettes (an oddly named but favoured brand in this part of the world), Town Hall officials huddled over their papers, and at the back an old granny or two skulked in the gloom with a live chicken in a basket.

On our first journey, I went into one of the minuscule toilets and was in the process of unzipping when the door banged into my back. Damn, I hadn’t shut it properly. I quickly tried to push it shut with a foot, but I was flattened against the urinal. Craning my neck round, I saw an agitated bearded face, and given that the square footage of the toilet was that of a phone box, we eyeballed each other at six inches. At school, I’d always practised the paralysing karate chop that I’d give to anyone trying something on in a public convenience, but, squashed against the porcelain, I couldn’t even secure a first line of defence by doing up my zip, let alone delivering a paralysing chop.

‘Oprostite, Gospodin!
’ stammered the intruder, and, seeming to recognise me, he continued in English. ‘Please, Sir, I must hide myself from some person!’

Scenes from spy movies flashed through my mind. He must
be an agent on the run. What if the Stasi or a KGB hit man were after him? Innocent bystanders like Michael Caine and Harrison Ford were always getting caught up in situations like this, and then spent the rest of the movie escaping from the hit men themselves. (But, as somewhere along the line they’d get to persuade someone like Nicole Kidman to take off all her clothes, it usually turned out OK.) I began to panic. This was what was happening to me right now
sans
the Nicole Kidman bit.

‘What’s going on?’ I said, trying to put a gritty Michael Caine-like edge into my voice.

‘I must hide myself! Someone they look for me!’

Oh my God! A man toting one of those guns with big silencers!

‘Who is it?’ I trembled.

‘Grandma Dragulic!’

The Richter adrenalin scale level dropped by fifty points as the pictures of men with big silencers were replaced by black-clad grannies wielding umbrellas.

‘Oh, really!’ I said, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

‘Yes. For many days, she is waiting for my answer, but in this case I do not have answer for her!’ the man said, the words tumbling out in staccato. ‘She is on ferry and, if she find me, she shout at me and all will hear!’

My fear turned into self-consciousness. I was conducting a conversation squashed between a stranger’s stomach and a urinal and I now remembered where I had seen him – at the Town Hall signing some of our endless paperwork. (The Croatian civil service system still hadn’t changed since the fall of communism, and the amount of paper we had so far acquired must have been equal to the amount of paper needed to tie Great Britain into the European monetary system.)

‘Maybe she’s already passed by and it’s safe now?’ I suggested.

‘You go look? Yes?’

‘But I don’t know what she looks like.’

‘She small and wide and she wear black!’

Like any Vis granny then. There were at least a dozen of them on the ferry. But my worry was that the granny might have rumbled us and was waiting outside with leg of ham and ready to clout me over the head with it. I put my head out gingerly. The threat had passed. A small but ominous black shape was disappearing down the corridor. I relayed the information to my companion who squeezed himself out, thanked me profusely, and hurried off in the opposite direction.

As the village was so small, we thought that patronising one café was enough, but Karmela considered that slacking. How were we to get a true perspective of anything with only Marko’s gossip to go on? Why, with only his view, we’d never get to the bottom of any story.

I was quite happy about this as I’ve always found the concept of a café society rather appealing. Drifting in from the street to order a tonsil-numbing liquor or a coffee so strong it almost dissolves the spoon and then striking up a conversation with anyone around is something I’ve wanted to do all my life. You couldn’t do that kind of thing in Fulham – or, at least, you’d get some very strange looks if you did – but out here the cafés were full of people willing to reciprocate.

Marko’s was more of a coffee place than a drinking place, but it seemed that Western coffee culture hadn’t yet filtered down this far, so on the Vis waterfront there were no cinnamon lattes, decaf macchiatos or skinny mocha Americanos. Here, coffee was either small and black or large
and white, but at least it meant one didn’t have to waste time making up one’s mind.

Acting on Karmela’s advice, as our second ‘regular’, we chose more of a watering hole – Zoran’s, a small rundown place near the front. It was more of a bar than a café, in that it attracted more of a bar-type clientele (that is, men), and its décor certainly wasn’t chosen by someone in touch with their feminine side. The interior was largely taken up by a bar and the remaining space was filled with a shabby collection of mismatched café furniture. There were also some chairs outside, but they looked as if they had started a fight and been sent out into the street to finish it, and were rarely used. Zoran’s regulars were largely impervious to the beautiful surroundings and preferred to stay in the dark interior where they could drink unobserved and weather down Zoran’s paintwork with the nicotine from their Walter Wolf cigarettes.

Zoran had been born on Vis, but he had left for Texas in his twenties where he had picked up a Texan swagger and an addiction to wearing boots, and had added an American drawl to his gravelly voice. With his hawk-like features, meaty lips and wavy, long black hair, he looked like a bad-tempered Red Indian, but there was always a glimmer in his hooded eyes that hinted that a quip or a sardonic comment was never far away. He had sharp-tongued opinions about everything and everyone, but he rarely talked about himself, and, if he did, he would shroud it in humour. Usually, it takes me a while to get people into focus, but I soon had Zoran in sharp definition and I warmed to him – in particular, his way of treating the whole world as a joke that had somehow gone a bit wrong.

On weekends, Zoran’s was full of people from the mainland, most of whom Ivana suspected of being skippers of smuggling
boats or mercenaries on leave – at least she was sure they looked as if they had just come in from killing someone or something. Zoran loved the weekends. There was a lot of shouting and
rakija
drinking, and he could hold forth like a compere on a TV show. Standing at the bar, he’d thump the top with one arm and wave the other, which sported an eye-catchingly large Rolex. Cushioned in a thick bed of arm hair, Zoran’s watch looked particularly unattractive. I must say, I do think those big chunky watches must be the most unbecoming male fashion accessory since the codpiece.

We tended to avoid the weekends and saved our visits for the weekdays when his minion, Dragimir, did most of the work and Zoran could spend his time holding forth to the cabal of large-bellied men of the village, who, having nothing better to do, hung around his bar for most of the day conducting their conversations in a somewhat curious way. Like in a Greek classical play, Zoran and his bar-proppers didn’t so much discuss things, as make speeches to each other, and this did make exchanges of opinion a rather more protracted experience than usual. It certainly filled the hours, though.