Under a Croatian Sun (2 page)

T
he morning mist was evaporating off the slopes of the hills by the time we set out for the village market. Silhouetted against the sky, the cypresses on the green slopes trembled in the rising heat and the village basked in the sun. So compact, so vibrant, so enchanting. I don’t know why, but the sight of clustered terracotta roof-tops never fails to gladden the heart. What is it about Mediterranean villages that makes them so appealing? Maybe that’s just what happens when you’ve got stone to build with instead of bricks and there aren’t any gardens to separate the houses.

It was ten o’clock and the bay was still as calm as a pond. The sunshine glinted off the water and a handful of fishing boats were coming in from the open sea, their engines chuntering and with flock of gulls swirling like a cloud behind them. The gulls wheeled in perpetual motion, swooping down and soaring up, their wings angled against the wind and hovering before they
dived again. The flight of a gull is something of extraordinary beauty. If gulls were rare, people would travel across the world just to watch them.

The morning ferry was rounding the headland, blowing out a lot of black smoke (someone ought to see to those piston rings). It glided across the bay towards us and the captain put it into a sort of aquatic ballet, weaving the bulky shape with surprising elegance between the fishing boats. Arriving at the dock, it towered above the village like a colossus, its engines growling and churning up the water. While seamen ran up and down its decks, shouting frantically and heaving heavy ropes over the side to men on the dock. Then with a hideous grinding of metal the bow began to yawn open, and the quiet waterfront was suddenly transformed into the same frantic turmoil of yesterday, with people, bikes, cars and lorries jostling for position. We tried to make our way through, but had to jump smartly sideways to avoid being run over by a Lada pickup driven backwards at speed by a wild-haired man with the inane grin on his face of Keith Moon driving a Rolls-Royce towards a swimming pool. Until, with a sickening crunch, his trajectory was halted by an iron gangplank. This brought shouts of abuse from the deckhands, but the driver clearly had a talent for living in the moment, and continued to grin around seemingly unconcerned about the damage he’d caused to his van. Was this kind of thing normal? I wanted to ask.

The village was in full swing when we got to the market. Cafés were full, vans were delivering and fishermen were off-loading their catches. The market itself was a scene straight out of a child’s painting book; stone slabs piled high with brightly coloured fruit and vegetables, jars of honey and cheeses. To the side were wooden trestles sagging under the weight of the hundred and one alcoholic concoctions they make from grape
leftovers in this part of world, and, behind the stalls, wrinkled-faced women in black cackled to each other in shrill voices as leathery-skinned men wearing shirts with no collars heaved boxes about, muttering oaths to no one in particular. In between the stalls, village housewives were bargaining and gossiping and clouting their chickens or their children, whichever were nearest at hand. There was no queuing; people just elbowed their way in, squeezing tomatoes, prodding lettuces, sniffing melons, snapping carrots and complaining loudly when they came across anything substandard. The stallholders gave back as good as they got with raucous references to the miserly habits of the customer and the last two generations of their family.

The women all seemed to be shopping for a regiment and baskets were being put against a wall where a group of men, whom I presumed to be husbands, were waiting to carry them home. They sat on the wall puffing at cigarettes held between first finger and thumb (the lighted end in the palm, mean hombre style), while they made their mid-morning snack. Goat’s cheese and tomatoes were sliced with penknives and spread on to long crusty pieces of bread, and in between the bites and the puffs they swigged from a bottle of red wine that seemed to be held in common.

We filled our baskets and made our way out though the stallholders’ vans parked behind in a somewhat haphazard manner (that is from the standpoint of someone accustomed to parking in the supermarket car parks of South West London). Most of them looked as if they had assembled from a do-it-yourself car kit bought at a street market in Bled. Many had novel open-space designs in the front instead of passenger seats, and their wings seemed rather over-reliant on gaffer tape to keep them in place.

Across the square, there was a steady trickle of fishermen
heading from the quay to the bars to brace themselves for the day, and at the far end of it I spotted the unmistakable figure of Nano the bus driver’s aunt – still in the same Miss Marple hat but now using her umbrella to calm down some scrapping dogs.

Over the next few days, we noted that most of the boxes on the stalls were empty, and, wondering why, Ivana, who speaks Croatian quite well, asked the bearded, bear-like stallholder who was a cousin of our builder.

‘The early bird wipes its beak and the late one wipes its bum, like they say,’ he replied, grinning and revealing some frightening gold dental work. ‘It’s the nuns; that’s who. They’re here the earliest so they get the pick, don’t they? Not that they eat much themselves by the look of ’em, but they feed all the old ’uns in the old folk’s home, and come early to get all the best while the likes of you are still in bed.’

‘Any chance of putting something on the side for us?’ I asked tentatively, not wanting to start a vegetable turf war with the local gang of nuns in our first week.

He gave a throaty laugh. ‘You’ll get no special treatment here. The way things are going with my ex and my kids, I’ll be needing a whole coach-load of nuns to put in a good word for me at St Peter’s gate, if I’m ever going to get in!’ (Our builder had told us that his cousin was in disgrace ever since he’d run off with a neighbour’s daughter half his age.) ‘But if
you
got out of bed at five in the morning to say your Matins and Lauds,
you’d
be here in time to buy the best, too!’

We made do with the remainders.

Actually, I’m an early riser, but Ivana will happily sleep on until kindly hands bring her a cup of tea. (In fact, without her morning tea and a fair time to brood on life for a bit, she’s not
up for much.) So, leaving her sleeping, I’d slip out of bed at the first glimmer of dawn – and that was something worth getting up for. Opening the kitchen shutters I could watch the sun creep up over the hills behind us and unleash itself with awe-inspiring splendour over the bay. The fort on the headland, like a loyal sentry at the gates of the sun, was the first to be touched by the burning shaft and the radiance would flood down the slope, illuminating the translucent layer of mist over the water and making the fishing boats look suspended above the surface. The light then spread along the hillside, suffusing the village roofs with its glow and making it stand out like a theatre façade against the backdrop of the hills. The air that blew gently in from across the bay was tinged with burning wood from kitchen stoves, and in the distance I could hear crowing cockerels and barking dogs.

I don’t know why, but the dawn in South West London never seemed to have the same effect on me. Somehow, looking out of my bedroom window in London I’d never managed to get that enthused about the mystical properties of daybreak over Fulham Broadway – but here, it took my breath away every time.

Nothing ever happens the way you plan it, I mused as I lay in bed watching the moonlight filtering through shutters and listening to the sea soughing gently to itself on the other side of the courtyard. We had lived in London for thirty years without a thought of ever leaving, and here we now were in the middle of the Adriatic. But then, does any amount of planning ever prepare you for the next bend in the road?

Twenty years ago, I set up a company to sell the work of contemporary British artists to galleries overseas – which is hardly a disagreeable way of earning a living I know – but, after I turned fifty, the strain of running what had become a
multinational organisation had begun to tell. When I started the company, I’d been under the impression that, once you had built up a successful business, it would just tick over nicely; but what in fact happens is that you have to work even harder to maintain its success than you did when you built it up in the first place. So, by the time I hit fifty, I was travelling constantly and my problems were getting bigger and bigger – more difficult clients, more irascible artists, more stubborn bank managers and more 3 a.m. wake-up calls brought on by letters from the Inland Revenue. Before long, I found myself sitting at my desk planning my escape like Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs; dreaming of places where the sun shone brightly, where food and wine were plentiful, and where we could enjoy a good life without needing a Goldman Sachs-like salary to fund it.

As usual with my grand plans, the idea stayed stubbornly in the land of fantasy, but, when the war broke out between Croatia and Serbia and Ivana started running relief convoys down to the refugee camps, a location was played into our hands.

Ivana was actually Croatian by blood – hence her ability to speak the language. Although born and brought up in Argentina, her parents were Croatian and taught her to speak it. They also sent her off to Croatia when she was twenty to discover her roots, but that was a journey never completed. She had stopped off in England, been taken by a friend to a May Ball, and it was there I spied her dancing on a college lawn in the light of the moon; her sylph-like figure sheathed in a sequinned gown and her dark eyes and sparkling smile flashing in the moonbeams. Luckily, in the obscurity, she couldn’t see that my dinner jacket had spent the previous night stuffed under my flatmate’s bed and that the trousers didn’t quite match the jacket, and, by the time she’d discovered my congenital scruffiness, we were already an item.

So that was it, and for the next thirty years she was imprisoned like a dark-haired Rapunzel in a tower of long winters, cold houses, woolly clothes, frosty in-laws and fish fingers for supper. Who could have predicted that, instead of reaching the sun-kissed shores of her homeland, she’d end up in an Edwardian terrace off the Fulham Road with a dog-eared Englishman and a couple of tousle-headed children?

At least that was the case until the war between Serbia and Croatia broke out and the hitherto little-known corner on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain was suddenly beamed into everyone’s sitting rooms with unsettling proximity. But what she saw on the screen was nothing like the sunlit homeland she had imagined. What she saw were anxious women, angry men and scared-looking children; children who looked much like our own – and, instead of a dream waiting for her on an idyllic coastline, Croatia suddenly turned into a cause. Within a month, she and some friends had assembled their first convoy, and for the next two years she rattled up and down Europe in a collection of battered Ford Transit vans with supplies for the refugee camps (with me tagging along whenever work allowed).

And finally, the link with the land of her forefathers was made.

A
t the end of our first week, a terrifying-looking woman, dressed as if she was going to a Queen Victoria impersonation competition, appeared on our doorstep. In her sixties and with a face like a weathered block of granite, it looked as if someone had given her some bad news in 1958 and she was still chewing on it. She announced that she had come to be our house keeper.

Taken aback, we started to say that we were managing OK on our own, but she cut us short with a disdainful snort. According to Lenko, the builder, our belongings were still piled up in unidentified heaps and we were clearly incapable of looking after ourselves. Slightly shaken by the summary judgement, we thought we had better ask her in. Once upstairs, she perched on the edge of the sofa as if she knew something unclean was lurking beneath the cushions, and, instead of waiting for us to ask the first question, she fixed us with a glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and began her interrogation.

‘Why have you come to live here? Why haven’t you cleaned the house yourselves? Why have you done all this building work? Why did you put in so many bathrooms? When are you going to finish it?’ And all this in a voice that could have boned a herring at twenty fathoms. Even Ivana looked somewhat cowed – and that’s saying something, given that Ivana is the fiercest person I’ve ever known (except for her mother that is).

Not having the courage to say we’d think it over, we lamely agreed that she could start the next day.

That night, Ivana hardly slept that night but once they started working the next day, they found they had a lot in common – in particular, an ultra-Thatcherite attitude to other people’s working habits and a deep distrust of anything suggested by men.

With black eagle-like eyes and a hawk-like nose, Karmela’s face resembled one of those fierce-looking Medusa masks you see on wall-mounted fountains in garden centres of the Home Counties, and I, like Perseus, soon began to feel somewhat cautious around her. Nor was it only Perseus and me. Any man who came into the house was pinioned by the glare of a crocodile that had just spotted its lunch, and the look followed them around like a wartime searchlight until they had left.

Cantankerous and stubborn, and with extremely intolerant views about the world in general, Karmela would have been very much at home at the Basingstoke Women’s Institute circa 1950, and, if I had a bent for cross-stitch, I could have created a sampler a day of her best aphorisms. But, to us, her observations were pearls of a new kind of wisdom, and we listened in awe to her lectures about the dangers to our health that lurked round every corner. The most common directives were:

Never stand in the sun between ten and four – it addles your brain.

Never sit in a draught – it damages your liver (particularly men’s).

Never sit on cold stone – it affects your ‘parts’ (particularly women’s).

Although, in fairness, we were given the same dire warnings by other village women – particularly concerning draughts and men.

Now, I had been raised by a mother with a bad case of wartime penny-pinch and thought I was about as frugal as it comes, but my childhood training was eclipsed by Karmela, who had been recycling long before the Greenies turned it into a new religion. By the end of each day, anything surplus to requirements was stripped from the house with Germanic fervour – vegetables to the neighbour’s pigs; bread to her cousin’s chickens; tea slops to someone’s compost; sheets of paper used on one side only whisked out of my wastepaper basket and taken to the school. Likewise, every scrap of clothing was reused; frayed cuffs snipped off and turned into dolly dresses or dusters.

Another task that Karmela quickly took upon herself was to warn us about our neighbours. We were taken down to the square outside and shown the houses that harboured criminals or were cursed with bad luck and so were similarly to be avoided.

‘Beware of those ones there!’ she said, indicating a building. ‘She’s a witch and he’s no better. And, as for those in that one beside it; a well-coloured lie counts for the truth in that household, I can tell you. And you be very careful of anyone who comes out of that broken door there.’ She pointed a bony finger. ‘If you’re not careful, they’ll be in your garden stealing your potatoes the moment your back is turned. Their youngest son got arrested for trying to rob the garden centre in Split last
year and their eldest waters down the milk he sells us in the market. He thinks we don’t know, but we do. Terrible people! Don’t even talk to them.’

We were also told who not to do business with.

‘Now, a farmer you can trust. Give him your left arm and he’ll return it with interest, but don’t you ever lend money to a fisherman. He’ll drink it or forget where it came from. My husband, God rest his kindly soul, gave some money to that Grubic family when their boat sank in a storm – and did we see any of it back? Did we ever! “We thought you gave it to us in return for the wine we gave you at Christmas,” they had the cheek to say a year later! As if we didn’t have perfectly good wine of our own to drink. Pah! You save a dog from drowning and that’s the one that bites you! May their fish rot in their van before they get it to market!’

Like most of my countrymen, I’m more likely to enter myself for
Strictly Come Dancing
than let my fellow beings know what I think of them, so I had a sneaking admiration for the way Karmela came straight out with what she thought about people. I would have thought that in such a small community this ultra-direct approach would have got her into trouble, but Karmela was clearly above such concerns.

We had barely finished unpacking when Karmela told us it was time for spring-cleaning. She then set about flinging open windows, scrubbing floors, sluicing steps, polishing flagstones and hanging bedclothes out of the windows. On the second day, she began to lug our furniture outside, and I was about to tell her that she shouldn’t when I saw that our neighbours were turning the square outside into what the inventor of the car-boot sale must have visualised when he first dreamed up the idea.

‘But we really don’t need to put everything outside,
Karmela,’ I said, gesturing to our prized collection of tastefully distressed French Provencal. ‘We’ve only just unpacked it.’

But, like Balaam’s ass (with whose edifying tale the reader is doubtless acquainted), Karmela wasn’t to be dissuaded. ‘Ha! What that all needs is a good painting. Look at the state of it. The paint’s come off everywhere! But a good dose of sunshine should do it a power of good all the same.’

Once almost everything was out in the courtyard, the news of its lacklustre quickly spread and the village came to see if what they had heard was true. We stood at the back of the balcony watching the shaking heads and listening to the tutting – ‘Nice linen, but all that awful old furniture…’

Communism had brought a novel approach to interior design. Wood had given way to Formica, carved Venetian windows to plastic ones and big old doors that creaked replaced by snappy-looking MDF pairs with frosted glass. As for colours, ever since a team of Soviet psychologists in Omsk during the 1950s had discovered that the colours purple, orange and a particularly frightening shade of green induced a mood of gaiety in gerbils, the landscape of the Eastern Bloc was never the same again. Assuming that humans would react in the same way as gerbils, the politburos had scaled the theory up, like doubling up a cake recipe, and the unfortunate combination of purple, orange and bilious green has been blotting the landscape from Plovdiv to Vladivostok. In the New Dawn of socialism, bright colours and new materials were milestones on the highway of progress.

One of our neighbours, a middle-aged lady of a decent size, had a sofa of livid orange, which she hauled out into the square and, after whacking it for a bit, left it for everyone to admire – which they did. Our collection of furniture, on the other hand, failed to attract a single appreciative comment.

On the third day of spring-cleaning, I noticed an ominous group of female seniors gathering around Karmela, and, pretending to be absorbed by a problem with my Black & Decker, I moved in to eavesdrop.

‘What can Mrs Ivana have been thinking of, spending her money on such rough-looking things?’ said one with a face even more hatchet-like than Karmela’s.

‘No good housewife should ever have spent her money on such peasant-looking furniture!’ said another, accompanying her words with an impressive display of face pulling.

‘And as for those rugs!’ exclaimed one with the figure of a Russian shot-putter. ‘It looks as if they were made by a tractor driver!’

‘It all looks suspiciously second hand to me,’ said the fourth, who looked like a well-upholstered armchair.

‘And they look like they could well afford to buy themselves something new,’ said the Russian shot-putter.

I couldn’t hear Karmela’s reply, but, when I brought up the subject later, she glared at me. ‘And they’re quite right too! Hard wooden benches were all our parents and grandparents ever had to sit on, and, now that we can get all those nice, easy-clean Draylon sofas in our shops like in the rest of the world, we should buy them.’

Unable to spot a flaw in the argument, I stood in mute assent, as if I was back in the study of my primary school headmistress.

‘And why you’ve brought out all this old furniture with you, I just don’t know,’ she continued. ‘It’s so difficult to clean, and look at all the extra work I have to do because you’ve taken up that perfectly good linoleum and left me with all these terrible floorboards. They’re old and ugly and they let the dust get everywhere! You should put the linoleum back; that’s what!’ She pointed her bony finger at me for emphasis.

Karmela pointed her finger at me a lot and I did find it rather disconcerting. I’d had it instilled in me by my mother that pointing at people was rude, and I had assumed that other mothers had done the same, but, once again, Karmela was above such conventions – as was another great user of the pointed digit: Margaret Thatcher. And, as Mrs T’s ex-colleagues can testify, being the subject of a pointed female finger can be somewhat intimidating.

I did see Karmela’s point, though. Our old furniture
was
more difficult to keep clean and the old floorboards
did
let the dust in – and I dare say that, if we had lived here all our lives, we too would have chosen practicality over perceived notions of elegance and left the floorboards covered over. But please… not with lino!

Trying to display the suave indifference of an Englishman in total control of his manor, I made as if I had something important to do and retreated to the study feeling like a pageboy ticked off by Queen Elizabeth I.

It’s a sad day when a man is no longer the master in his own house.

Karmela said that during the winter the entire village had come to see the havoc we were creating and had criticised every stage of it. It had been a black mark against us, she said. What had appalled them most was that we had restored the rooms to their original sizes. This would mean fewer rooms than before! What kind of people could we be? And as for leaving all those old rough beams and stone exposed… Why, the whole thing was as perverse as that place in Paris where they put the pipes on the outside! Some things were just meant to be covered up!

Karmela also said that no one could understand why we had bought such an old building and then had to spend as much
money on it again, when for that amount we could have bought ourselves several really nice new apartments. But, when one considered that most of our neighbours struggled to make ends meet (even now few of them owned a car), all this was understandable. Island life revolved round sheep, goats, fish, wine and olives, and the kind of money we were spending was more than many of them would earn in a lifetime. That the same amount of money would only have bought you a garage in Fulham was not the point. They didn’t know that.

This was going to need some careful handling.