Under a Croatian Sun (5 page)

It wasn’t long before the subject of Croatia joining the EU came up.

‘I’m told you guys in the EU have towns you “twin” with. Right?’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure my hometown has a twin. I don’t think too many European towns were queuing up to twin with Fulham.’

‘Mebbe now that Croatia’s gonna join the EU, I could set up a nice little suicide pact between your Fulham and our Solin?”

We had been to Solin and it was a place so crushed by its heavy industry that it made Dagenham look like an area of outstanding natural beauty.

‘I could get you a nice little trade goin’ with Solin,’ Zoran continued. ‘You send ’em your pork pies an’ they can send you their goat-hoof fritters in return. They’ve also got an industrial landscape down there that could be a great inspiration for your poets, an’ there’s enough pollution goin’ on to keep your conservation lovers busy for years.’

Zoran drank steadily throughout the day. It was a mystery how a man could absorb so much alcohol and still be able to function. I sometimes thought he might have developed some sort of resistance to the substance. A side benefit of his drinking, however, was that sometimes it made him drop his guard enough to talk about himself. ‘When those goddamn Serbs invaded us,’ he said to me at the end of a long evening, ‘I gave up my job in Texas, sold my house an’ came back to fight them. But once we’d got the bastards off our back and I came here to Vis full of ideas of what I’d get goin’, it only took me a week to see that nothin’ new was gonna happen on this little island of ours.’ He pulled a long face and stubbed out a half-finished Walter Wolf. (At Zoran’s, no one, including the proprietor, paid much attention to the new smoking regulations.)

‘It’s the old communist thick-necks we’ve still got runnin’ this country; that’s the problem. It’s still the same goddamn clods that ran the show under communism. The only difference now is that they can line their pockets from it. These days, politics sure pays a lot better than crime!’ He pulled another award-winning scowl.

I made condoling noises.

‘And with that flabby-arsed lot we’ve got in our Town Hall,’ he continued, ‘nothin’s ever gonna happen. As the gypsies say: “They keep such a tight hold of the reins, the horse can’t move.”’ (Much of Zoran’s conversation was peppered with these
kinds of aphorisms, the meaning of which sometimes took me a moment to work out.)

‘But it must be a lot easier now you’re free,’ I ventured.

‘Not here it isn’t. Those Town Hall bastards love their goddamn horse so much, they sit on its goddamn head!’ He paused. ‘I’m just tellin’ you this so you know what kinda place you’re livin’ in. It’s tough for a free-thinkin’ man who’s got his own ideas. A place like this can bend iron.’

More upbeat news.

O
ne morning we were sitting at Zoran’s when we heard the clump of his boots and he barged in brandishing a local broadsheet. ‘Look what the stupid bastards have come up with now!’ he shouted, thwacking the paper on the bar. ‘They’re so far up their arse with this heritage stuff, we can’t change a single bollard. How the hell do they think we can get a tourist industry goin’ if we can’t get any more moorings put in? Jesus! What a load of dumb-asses! God knows when I’ll get the goddamn permit for my pontoons now.’ He sat down beside us, scrunched up the paper with a large fist and threw it on the floor. Then he heaved himself up and paced round the room, his bulky frame contorted in anger. ‘Crap, crap, crap! That’s all I ever get from that flabby-assed bunch of idiots! And you know what else? At the same time as they won’t allow me to get my business goin’, they say they need more employment. Assholes!’

He circled the room and sat down heavily. ‘Sometimes those
damn bastards really get me down. I’ve wasted months on this!’ He glared at the crumpled newspaper for a moment and got to his feet again. ‘I think I’ll go and walk around for a bit. Maybe I’ll feel better.’ He shouldered his way out of the door and clumped off down the waterfront, his curses and the scrunch of his boots dwindling away in the breeze.

When I got to know Zoran better, I found that, although he was always dreaming up new projects, he seemed to have lost some of his fight. Had he been a bit younger I think he might have thrown more of himself into his schemes, but most of his time seemed to be spent presiding over the big-bellied coterie that hung around the bar. I once asked him why he thought his clientele spent so much of their time there and he replied that this was how the islanders kept their fingers on the pulse – not only about whether the grape harvest was going to be early, the prices of olives and the movements of the anchovy shoals, but also about whose wife had been seen in the car of somebody who wasn’t her husband. He said he liked his bar being used as an agricultural forecast office, a Stock Exchange and a neighbourhood watch rolled into one.

After a few weeks, I was getting on quite well with some of the regulars, but there were several who were still uncomfortable in my presence. Shaking hands and saying hello to everything that moves usually does the trick, I’ve found, but it didn’t work at Zoran’s. Even Zoran, who could have majored in insensitivity, noticed their hostile attitude – not that I got much sympathy from him.

‘This is Croatia, not Italy or Spain. You won’t find any friendly grinnin’ locals aroun’ here. Not in my bar you won’t. A few centuries of bein’ invaded by all you foreign bastards hasn’t made us the world’s most friendly nation.’

More encouraging news. When was the fun going to stop?
Some days later, seeing another of my attempts to converse falling on stony ground, Zoran put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry, my friend. You jus’ kiss the hand you can’t bite. Like I said, they’re not used to outsiders here, so you jus’ keep on tryin’. They’ll get used to you sometime.’

‘Sometime? And when do you think that’ll be?’

He gave me one of his infuriating grins and disappeared behind the bar.

Hardly reassuring, but I felt that I had found myself another Godfather – albeit one who looked more like Big Chief Sitting Bull on a bad hair day than Marlon Brando.

One afternoon, Zoran clamped an arm round my shoulder and said, ‘It’s about time you got yourself a car.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that.’

An’ we’ll have none of them English Jaguars or Range Rovers. A car of the people is what you gotta get.’

‘I don’t care what you say. I’m not having a Skoda or a Wartburg. Our children will laugh at me.’

Zoran raised a hooded eyebrow and gave a dismissive shrug.

‘You don’t have kids. You just don’t know how mean kids can be to their ageing fathers when it comes to matters of taste. It’s bad enough when it’s just a matter of my ties.’

‘Don’t you worry; I’ll find you somethin’ decent. An’ if you don’t like the image, you can always beef it up with tiger-skin seat covers an’ matchin’ suitcases.’ He looked at me with the twinkling eyes of George Clooney and the heart of Al Capone.

What kind of car was he thinking of?

The favoured form of island transport was a sort of motorised wheelbarrow with handlebars on the front – you see a lot of them in Spain and Italy. (I had rather fancied myself on one of
those, but I went for a ride on the back of our builder’s one and found it the most painful way of travelling known to man. They must be popular with men who don’t want their wives to go into town with them.) The next vehicle in the island pecking order was the Renault 4; the oblong box on wheels with the pull-push gear lever on the dashboard – and that’s what Zoran had in mind. ‘Tito did some deal with the French back in the sixties,’ he said. ‘We made Renault 4s under licence and sent the French container loads of pickled gherkins and tractor tyres in return.’ He gave a snorting chuckle. ‘I think we came off best outta that deal.’

By the end of the week, Zoran had found a suitable model and we were sent to Split to buy it – a twenty-year-old Renault 4 belonging to an elderly man who (surprise, surprise) turned out to be a cousin of Zoran’s. However, the old man had plainly cherished it for twenty years and spent nearly an hour telling us about all its eccentricities. I couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror, but I’m sure there were tears in his eyes as he watched us driving it off into the sunset.

Ivana was consumed with guilt as we waited for the car ferry. ‘He was so sweet. Do you think he noticed I was bored when he showed us everything? He must have thought me so rude.

‘It doesn’t feel right; just rolling up like that and buying his most precious possession with obviously no hardship. His life’s savings probably aren’t much more than what we’ve just given him.’ She was silent for a minute. ‘I hope he thought I liked his car and I’d look after it. Do you think he did?’

‘Yes, my sweet,’ I replied, as I usually do when I’m not quite sure what she means. Ivana has never so much as raised a car bonnet in all our years together, but perhaps she meant that she’d do it if she had to – which she probably would. She’d drive to Bulgaria and back in an old banger if she had to, as she did
to the camps with the convoys, yet, if asked to perform the simplest of mechanical tasks, she gets the vapours. I’ve never quite got my head round it. Our children say their mother is a curious mixture of Xena Warrior Princess and Margot Fonteyn in
Swan Lake
, and she does, in fact, look something like a combination of the two. (As you can imagine, this combination does make for a slightly unpredictable home life – but at least she’s never learned kickboxing.)

Three hours later, we clattered off the ferry in our four-door wheelie-bin on wheels and, after dropping Ivana home, I took it over to Zoran’s. After pulling up in front, I dusted off my trousers like Clint Eastwood hitching his burro to the saloon rail, and swaggered into the barroom as happy as the day I brought my first car home to show my brother and sisters.

The bar trooped out to inspect my purchase, tyres were kicked, teeth were sucked, and a lot of knowledgeable nodding went on. My confidence had a slight wobble when someone lifted the bonnet, but he looked up to say, ‘Engine’s clean. Someone’s looked after it all right.’

‘No sign of rust on the sills, either,’ said Filip the tax collector.

Zoran opened the driver’s door and looked inside. ‘Seats a bit worn. Better order up some of those tiger-skin seat covers.’

The others looked puzzled.

We went back inside and regrouped around the bar. ‘And now,’ said Zoran, clamping a hairy arm around my shoulders again, ‘we’re gonna find you a boat.’

The farmer who lived in the street behind us had a Renault 4 of a similar vintage, and I was looking at it for rust spots (being by the sea brings them on like a rash of measles), when I noticed small black pellet-like objects on the roof. I was curious to
know what they were, but the owner was a terrifying-looking fellow with a crushed purple strawberry of a nose and a mat of hair that stuck out in every direction, and I didn’t want to show I was ignorant of something that was obvious to a local.

A week later, I was looking down from the window when I thought I saw something move on his car roof. I couldn’t work out what it was at first, as one doesn’t quite associate animals with car roofs, and it wasn’t until it moved again that I realised that two sheep were tied on to the roof rack. Our first visitors, a cousin of mine and her two boys, were staying with us for the half-term, so I called the boys over to look and they quickly scampered downstairs. Sheep that didn’t run away when you tried to pet them were a rare commodity, and by the time I got down they were in deep conversation with them. Just as I arrived, I saw the Renault’s owner lumbering out of his door; a terrifying hulk of a man, he looked as if someone had dug him up by the roots. As he came barrelling towards us shouting something unintelligible, I felt what an English piker must have felt like at the battle of Bannockburn.

He came to a halt. ‘Hah! You English people!’ he said in loud, guttural English and grinned at us, revealing a startling row of brown multi-directional teeth. ‘Always English like animal! Why Englishman so like animal? Croatian man, he like girl!’ He roared with laughter at his joke.

Being of an age at which animals are preferable to girls, the boys looked perplexed.

‘Why are they on your roof rack?’ the older one asked. ‘Are you going to sell them at the market?’

‘No, no! These are my bad sheep. These two they make much trouble. If I leave them when I go in town, they go jump wall and run in road – and all other sheep they follow – like sheep!’ He laughed loudly at his joke again.

‘Don’t they miss their friends when they’re on your roof?’ asked the younger one.

‘I give them sweet food when they go on roof, so they like.’ He cuffed one of them over the head and ruffled its ear. ‘This one my best friend. I call him “Hrabo” (Brave). He go fight dog and sometime he go fight man if he no like.’

One of the sheep was casually chewing at the ear of boy No. 1 and the man noticed. ‘But look! He like you. You come see my farm. You see all of sheep and you help give food and water. Yes? You bring Uncle too. He come drink my new wine.’ He winked at me.

Watching his Renault bounce away down the cobbled street with the two sheep, I realised I had just received our first island invitation. Had there been a sea change in local attitude? Maybe the predictions of Karmela and Zoran were wrong?

‘Maybe the locals aren’t so standoffish after all,’ I said to Ivana as she made us knock the sheep pellets off our shoes before we were allowed back inside.

But my optimism was short-lived. Hearing reports of a storm brewing up at the end of the week, and seeing that the floating jetty attached to our wall looked ready to jump ship at the first strong wind, I thought I’d ask the fishermen what to do about it. So the next time I went by Marko’s and saw four weathered salts sitting there in a range of assorted nautical head-gear that you’d never find at Harvey Nichols, I squared my shoulders, straightened my back and approached them. (It’s astonishing how much a ramrod posture can do to your confidence.) Seven eyes and an eye patch turned towards me as I hastily explained my problem, and one who had a face that looked as if it had been carved by a second-year sculpture student looked up to say, ‘There’s no difference how you tie it. Whatever you do, if the wind’s strong enough it’ll break it loose.’

The one beside him, a sunken block of a fellow, grunted in agreement. ‘You’ll learn soon enough.’

There are many times in my life that I’ve wanted to pull out a gun, point it at someone’s head and say,
Go on, punk, make my day!
Or, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, make some witheringly witty remark while flicking a speck of dust off my lapel. But, unable to think of anything suitable to say, I pretended I didn’t feel at all slighted and walked away trying to look as nonchalant as I could. But I don’t think it fooled them one bit, and I could feel their watery, mocking eyes on my retreating back as I went down the front.

I got home to find Ivana on the phone to the children (as usual checking they were OK for underwear), but, seeing my expression, she told them their father wasn’t looking quite himself and rang off. She then joined me on the sofa for a bit of fond arm stroking and head shaking while I held forth about our neighbours’ blatant unhelpfulness, plain rudeness and lack of common courtesy, and the unfairness of life in general.

‘But just think of all the other things we have now we’re here,’ Ivana said soothingly when I eventually ran out of steam. ‘Why don’t you go and get yourself a drink and we’ll sit on the terrace and watch the sun go down while we think of other ways of thawing the neighbours out.’

I poured myself a large gin. Such a comfort in times of trouble, gin. No wonder it was the Queen Mum’s favourite. Must have been such a help to their Royal Majesties during our national emergencies and their own family ructions.

We sat on the terrace with our drinks looking over the bay as the light began to soften, turning the hills hazy blue and the water into a limpid pool of gold. Sometimes the combination of sunlight, sea and warm air can do something quite narcotic and sometimes it can lift you on to another level entirely – but, by
the time the sun had disappeared, we still hadn’t thought of another way of thawing out the neighbours.

We did feel a lot better, though.