Under a Croatian Sun (6 page)

I
n the end, it was Karmela who set us off on the right path. As there was no hospital on the island, Ivana had brought out enough medical supplies to kit out a frontline field station, and, when we eventually unpacked it, Karmela picked up a carton and glared at it. ‘Ha! Made in a German factory I see! And what do they know about our illnesses and accidents? I ask you. Now, if you ever have an accident – and here we see so many terrible accidents – Grandma Gokan will give you something much better than all these chemicals.’

‘Are the roads really that dangerous?’ said Ivana, her eyes widening as she no doubt imagined me upside down in a Renault 4.

‘No, it’s the fishing, not the roads!’ replied Karmela.

Ivana exhaled. The life-expectancy rate on the roads of Vis was not somewhere in between Mogadishu and Helmand Province.

‘What with all their knives and their hooks, our fishermen have the most terrible accidents! Such dreadful wounds I’ve seen, and, as nothing ever heals in the salt water, they can turn into gangrene and we lose another of our sons.’ She crossed herself. ‘Oh yes. God might give us the sunrise every morning and the flowers in springtime, but that doesn’t seem to stop him taking our sons from us whenever he feels like it!’

Seeing the fishermen on the quay every day, I had noticed that a surprising number of them had missing body parts. Ears, eyes, fingers, toes and sometimes whole feet were often absent; not that your average fisherman looked the picture of health even when whole. Years of being sandblasted by the elements had clearly played havoc with complexions and no one on the island seemed to be pushing skincare products too hard.

‘Well, as I don’t want to join the fishing fleet and end up like them,’ I said, ‘I don’t think we’ll be troubling Grandma Gokan just yet.’

‘Ah, but the roads can be dangerous!’ responded Karmela, as always a glass half-empty person. ‘Look at the state of our vans and our drivers! That Bozo Sanda is the worst of them. He drinks too much and drives that dreadful van of his so dangerously. They shouldn’t allow either him or his van on our roads. He’ll wipe out half our congregation one day, you mark my words! If you’re not careful, you’ll be rounding a corner one day and you’ll find that Bozo coming straight at you on the wrong side of the road.’

I hadn’t met this Bozo yet, but several times I’d had an unnerving awareness of my mortality brought on by the antics of other island drivers. Back home, that kind of driving was largely restricted to shaven-headed people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five in cars with spoilers and alloy hub caps, but here it was the preserve of middle-aged men looking
like Mr Toad behind the wheel of their Skoda vans with dangerous glints in their eyes.

‘Several others make cures as well as Grandma Gokan,’ continued Karmela, ‘but you be very careful who you buy from. Some are getting too old and they forget which herbs are which.’

By the time Karmela left, Ivana was humming with ideas and pacing up and down the kitchen.

‘I’m going to visit all medicine-making grannies. Most of them live with their families, and it’s a wonderful excuse to get to know more people.’

‘You can’t just knock on someone’s door and say: “Hello, do you have a granny at home and does she make medicines?”’

‘Oh, I’ll tell them you’re suffering from something. They’ll never think that I’m making it up. Karmela says that everyone thinks you’re so thin and straggly that you must be ill. I’ll tell them about your back – or, even better, I’ll talk about our family illnesses. Everyone over sixty likes talking about illnesses, and it’ll make us lots of friends, I know it will. We’ll get to the village through the grannies. See if we don’t!’

The next evening, Ivana marched me off to Grandma Gokan’s and knocked on the blackened door. A pleasant-faced girl opened it.

‘My husband has a bad back and I wondered if…’

‘Come in, come in! You want my grandmother. She’s out the back killing chickens. I’ll go and fetch her.’

‘Killing chickens!’ I whispered to Ivana as the girl went out.

‘Now don’t you dare spoil it,’ she hissed back.

I looked around. In the middle of the low dark kitchen was a large wooden table, and on the floor underneath were baskets of oddly shaped roots. Along the walls were shelves lined with strange-looking jars and the light from the window gave their
murky liquids an eerie, alien glow. Were they for drinking or for rubbing on to the affected area? From what we’d heard about grannies getting their potions wrong, you wouldn’t want details like that to be lost in translation.

The pendulum clock on the wall ticked unnervingly loudly and a blackened pot on a thickly encrusted stove at the back of the room bubbled ominously. The smell coming from it suggested pig’s face boiled in grease. Was it too late to do a runner? Then a clack-clack-clack of footsteps came down the corridor and a tiny old black-scarfed woman with a fearsome expression appeared in the doorway. Her voluminous black skirt made her look almost as wide as she was tall, and I was alarmed to see white feathers clinging to the skirt.

Without introducing herself, she pointed at Ivana. ‘Is it you?’

‘Oh, no!’ said Ivana, momentarily flustered. ‘It’s my husband. His back is really bad.’

I gave her a ‘let’s not exaggerate’ grimace.

‘Well, it’s not that bad, I suppose,’ she faltered. ‘It’s more of a dull ache.’

Damn. I shouldn’t have put her off the script.

‘Lie here!’ said the granny, pointing to the kitchen table. With no obvious exit at my disposal, I got up and stretched out on my front. She hauled up the back of my shirt, yanked down the top of my trousers and prodded me fiercely at the top of my bottom. I whimpered. I’m a pretty accomplished actor when it’s a matter of just ‘appearing ill’, but, when it’s the real thing, I can be very realistic. She now stopped prodding and I heard the clack-clack-clack as she moved round the table to my head. I tensed. Was she about to yank my neck about? She bent down to peer into my face and for the first time she smiled. She must have recognised a nervous patient.

‘Artichoke root, birch bark and egg are what it needs,’ she
said over her shoulder to Ivana, ignoring me completely. I remained face down and listened to the screech of metal steps as she dragged them over to the shelves, and then I heard the clink of the jars. The footsteps returned to the sink and there was the sound of cracking eggs and whisking as she beat away at what I presumed was the ‘root in viscous’. The footsteps then came back to the table and a bowl was clunked down. It gave off a strange, pungent smell and I looked round to see her scooping up a dough-like substance and slapping it on to the small of my back. I stiffened, but it didn’t hurt.

‘There! That’ll pull the inflammation out of you in no time at all,’ she said, patting my bottom in what I considered to be an over-familiar manner. ‘I’ll strap it up later,’ she said, clack-clacking over to Ivana. ‘You make sure he keeps it on until tomorrow, and don’t let him have a bath or he’ll get a bad burn. We’ll go and sit next door,’ she said, and turning to me she raised a finger, Barbara Woodhouse style. ‘Now you stay where you are and keep still!’

‘Yes. You stay there and be good!’ said Ivana, grinning.

It was the knobbliest table I’d ever lain on, but in case they came back I lay there with my chin out like an obedient Golden Retriever. The poultice was cold and clammy, but for some reason it gave a strong sensation of heat and the small of my back began to feel numb. Despite the knobbliness of the table, I must have dozed off and was in the middle of a dream involving chickens when I woke to find a terrifying vision from a science-fiction movie six inches away – a wrinkled face with a toothless mouth. I jumped in fright, but bony fingers grabbed my thigh in a vice-like grip and a sharp command was barked. I didn’t know what it was, but I froze.

‘She’s telling you not to move,’ said Ivana, as the granny cackled something else.

I looked up.

‘She’s asking if you were dreaming about flaxen-haired maidens,’ said Ivana, laughing.

The granny fumbled about my middle with a bandage, hoiked up my trousers, and patted my rump again as if I were a child on potty training.

Ivana giggled.

As soon as we were outside, Ivana started to laugh. ‘You jumped like a rabbit when she woke you!’

‘Well, at close quarters she looked like the Bride of Darth Vader – and you saw what she does to chickens!’

‘You were very brave, darling.’

‘Was I really?’

‘Yes, I was very proud of you.’

‘I didn’t look silly, then?’

‘Well… I have seen you to better advantage.’

‘Oh…’

‘Anyway, it was all a great success, even though there weren’t any other family members to make friends with. But she told me all about her family and I told her all about ours – about the illnesses, I mean. She loved it. We’re going to visit all the others that Karmela told me about and we’re going to make lots of granny friends, you’ll see!’

‘But do I really have to be the patient every time? Why don’t you go on your own and just tell them what I’m suffering from?’

‘Maybe that’s not such a bad idea. They might not want to talk with you around. Look how Grandma Gokan only told me what she did when you weren’t there.’

‘Good plan.’

The following evening, Ivana went off on her own to the next medicine maker, and over the following two weeks she worked her way through the rest of them. And she was right about family illnesses. They were the best possible talking point, and not only did she hear some wonderfully gruesome stories in eye-popping detail, but she also gave good value in return. Apparently, all our old family favourites went down a treat; in particular, Uncle Sidney drowning in his bath when under the influence and Great-Aunt Lydia being trampled to death while trying to defend her herbaceous border from her herd of prize bullocks. What also went down well was Uncle Arthur dying from a heart attack while on top of Aunt Mavis and Aunt Mavis spending the rest of her days trying to cover it up.

The only downside was that Ivana now came home with strange concoctions to dose me with, and, without exception, they all tasted revolting. Funnily enough, though, most of them seemed to do the trick.

The most successful were:

Coughs – Boil nettle leaves. It certainly dealt with an itchy throat.

Diarrhoea – Mugwort and angelica. Boil in vinegar and drink. It would persuade anyone’s bowels to shut up shop.

Colds – Elderflowers with all their leaves. Boil and drink. This one even tasted quite good.

Insomnia – Lemon juice and honey before bed. I added whisky.

Cuts – St John’s Wort. Crush until a paste and put on the wound.

There was also a potion for blood pressure – one dessert-spoon every morning of lemon, onion and sugar mixed in equal measures. I didn’t think it was working, but Ivana was adamant it was. Without a doctor at hand, it was hard to prove either way,
but Ivana has never been one to let things like that get in her way, and I was made to keep taking it.

Ivana’s infiltration of the aged underbelly of the village continued, but, although I was let off the hook on many occasions, I still found myself spending more evenings than I would have cared to on people’s kitchen tables, wondering how fate and one’s wife could bring a man to such a state of indignity. Wives and grannies never treated their men like this back home, but I suppose Health and Safety probably clobbered the last healer to the ground sometime in the reign of George V. It was just my bad luck to have ended up in one of the few places left in the Western Hemisphere where potions were not only legal, but also family sized and Triple X strength.

I was then struck by a really terrifying thought. What if Ivana took an interest in potion making herself and started brewing up with my bowels in mind? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Matters of health were by far the most common subject of all village conversations, even among the middle-aged, and the most common form of salutation was
Zdravi Bili!
(Be Healthy!). This salutation was not only exchanged when taking your leave, but it was also a greeting. There was, however, a downside. While islanders were naturally reserved, once they started on the subject of health, natural propriety was cast to the wind and it was open season. This meant that no one had the slightest compunction in laying bare the personal intimacies of their family members in public – and, as someone who blushes at the mention of any bodily function, I found it excruciatingly embarrassing.

I was queuing at the corner store one afternoon when an elderly lady came up to me and without any preamble said, ‘What happened to you after your meal at Jacov’s on Sunday?
We were there having my Dina’s birthday lunch and we all had terrible wind for the rest of the day. It’s those chickpeas Jacov puts with everything he cooks. I know it is. I was making such terrible noises I didn’t dare go to evensong. Were you the same?’ And she waited for an answer as if she’d asked me the way to the bus station.

Bereft of speech, I stood there like a ventriloquist’s dummy propped up against a wall with its mouth open.

The same happened at the market. ‘I always buy my Pero these beetroots,’ a septuagenarian neighbour said to Ivana as we were choosing our mangold. ‘He’s got such a problem passing water these days. Does yours have the same problem yet?’

Ivana was chatting with the next stallholder and didn’t hear, so the old lady turned to me. ‘Does it sting when you do your pi-pi?’ And she fixed me with a gimlet-eyed look that required an answer.

I felt my face reddening as I tried to attract Ivana’s attention. ‘Well, um… yes, beetroot is really good for you…’ I stammered. ‘Yes, it’s such a good vegetable…’ But Ivana was still steadfastly refusing to look in my direction and so I burbled on. ‘And tomatoes are really full of good things, too, aren’t they… Just look at those ones there… Magnificent specimens…’ I willed Ivana to look up, but obdurately she still wouldn’t pick up on my distress signals. Mercifully, a stall holder then said something to the old lady, and, seeing her momentarily distracted, I made a quick escape.