chapter twenty-three

On the Monday of the last week of August, I was at Helena’s house, where she, her sister, Cornelia, and her mother were translating a recipe for želudac (ZHEL-oo-dots), a haggis-like dish that meant “stomach.” We were at an impasse. My grandma Kate and I made it during Holy Week—Grandma used a pressure cooker, but she swore her mother cooked it in a sheep’s stomach.

“It had cornmeal, raisins, ham, eggs, and green onions,” I explained. “We had to wait until midnight on Good Friday to eat it, because we were fasting.”

Helena translated. Her mother shook her head vehemently.

“My mother says you are describing Sunger želudac,” Helena said. “We can’t understand how you have Sunger recipe in Mrkopalj family.”

In the one-kilometer distance between Mrkopalj and Sunger, the recipe for želudac morphed from the savory loaf of my grandmother to a culinary superfund site that required forty eggs. I could feel my arteries hardening just talking about it.

“I am not from Sunger,” I said. “I might not be the best genealogist, but I’m positive I’ve got the right village.”

My cell phone rang. Jim was on the line, in a tizzy.

“Come home,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.”

It was a good excuse to pack up.

I rolled open the dorm door in late afternoon as Jim was putting the finishing touches on a pencil sketch. Photos of the Book of Names were pulled up on my laptop screen in front of him.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He stood and held up the drawing: a color-coded family tree. “I think this’ll make things a little easier for you,” he said, grinning.

He’d spent the whole day decoding the chicken scratches in the Book of Names, using my computer to magnify the photographs of the pages, then copying down what we’d found, translating my family history into a legible (and pretty!) family tree that even I could read.

“You rock!” I said, putting on water for tea as Jim examined his drawing, pleased with himself. “Now we can at least trace the lineage properly, and see if I might have some direct relatives here in the village.”

“That’s right,” Jim said. “And I’ve got news for you: If the information I found in the Croatian phone book online is right, then your grandma Kate’s first cousin lived in Lokve. And if he’s lived as long as the old people around here, he might still be alive.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, looking over his shoulder.

“I think she might have a few more cousins in Rijeka,” he said. “Grandma Kate’s first cousins, Jen. Those are the closest relatives we can hope to find.”

The chance to meet Grandma Kate’s first cousins meant seeing my grandma—if only a hint of her—for the first time in ten years. I hugged Jim.

We hustled from the dorm in search of Robert. We found him in the second-floor rooms, napping. In another Mrkopalj miracle, the rooms were nearly finished. We hadn’t known it.

“Oh, hey, Jenny. Hey, Jeem,” Robert said, stumbling forth. “I am now sleeping.”

“I see that,” I said. “Looks like these rooms are really coming along.”

“Maybe you move in, two or three days,” he said, scratching his head. “Or maybe you stay on third floor. Whatever you like.”

Jim and I glanced around. In the red-tiled bathroom, the one with the time machine, the sink shelf held several toothbrushes and somebody’s retainer. The kitchen counter was piled with food. Blankets and pillows were heaped on the couch in front of a television set. The Starčevićs were moving in instead of us. Well, I’ll be.

“What’s going on, Robert?” Jim asked, suppressing a laugh. “Looks like someone’s been living here.”

Robert shrugged. “Is good rooms,” he said. “Maybe your family come here. Maybe they like instead to stay on third floor. With good window. Nice bed.”

Jim and I tried not to laugh. Every person in Mrkopalj had heard me complain about the futon. I walked with a limp thanks to the damage it had done to my coccyx.

“You guys might as well just stay here,” Jim said, looking at me for confirmation. “We’re settled in the dorm now.”

“Is okay? Is not a problem?” Robert asked. “I feel bad. It takes many weeks to finish rooms. And now we stay! I am sorry for this.”

His words were those of a sheepish man, though Robert didn’t seem all that sheepish. He stretched with a mighty inhalation of what would have been Mrkopalj air, had the architecture of the second floor not sealed it off from the outdoors.

It was true that we liked the dorm now. People saw our windows thrown open night and day, and commented that Americans didn’t have the sense to shut out the cold. But we didn’t have air like this back home, so fresh and pungent as it circulated down from the mountains.

I nodded. “We actually like it on the third floor. We’ve had plenty of time to adjust, it having been two months and all.”

Robert lit up a cigarette and shrugged.

“Hey, Robert, can we ask a favor?” Jim began.

“What is favor?” Robert said, leaning toward Jim, cigarette dangling, ready to rumble.

“Do you know a Franjo Crnić in Lokve?” Jim asked.

Robert plucked his cigarette from his lips and rubbed his hand across his mouth. He looked toward the ceiling and exhaled smoke.

“Franjo Crnić,” Robert mused. “Is father of Boris?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said, looking at the family tree he’d drawn. “I didn’t draw those branches yet. Can you come upstairs and check with us?”

“Yes, I come,” Robert said. “In one, maybe two minutes.”

“See you up there,” Jim said.

We headed up the steps and waited. The kids came in for a snack, then went back out to play. An hour later, Jim went back downstairs and found Robert sleeping again. Jim sat on the second-floor couch and waited him out. When Robert woke again, Jim dragged him up the steps. Together we studied the computer images of the Book of Names. Sure enough, Franjo Crnić was the father of Boris.

“Boris, he work in pilana in Lokve,” said Robert. “Yes. I know.”

“Is his father alive?” Jim asked.

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “I think.”

I rubbed my face in excitement.

Jim picked up the phone and handed it to Robert. “Can you call his house for us? If he’s alive, then he’s Jen’s closest relative in Croatia.”

“Yes, of course,” Robert said.

Robert dialed the number Jim found on the computer. He spoke fast Croatian into the phone. He explained that Franjo and I might be related. At least that’s what I think he said. I should’ve asked Stefanija to do this for me.

I heard a woman’s voice talking excitedly on the other end of the line.

Robert listened for a second, one hand on his hip. Then he said, “Hvala! Bog!”

He turned to me. “Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah what?” I asked.

“Is Franjo still alive?” Jim said excitedly.

“Uh-huh,” Robert said, grinning.

I stood up and hugged him. He smelled like a recycling center.

“Franjo is alive?” Jim asked again.

“Mm-hm,” Robert said. “But no remember Valentin.”

Valentin had been in America for twenty-four years when his nephew Franjo was born.

“Grandma Kate’s first cousin is alive,” I marveled.

“Yes, first cousins, Kate,” Robert said.

“So that’s first cousin, twice removed, to you,” Jim said.

Robert and I stared at Jim blankly.

“First cousins, twice removed,” Jim said. “You know. Twice removed?”

Robert and I continued to stare.

Robert broke the silence. “Okay, I ask Franjo, one day we go into Lokve.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” I said. “Let’s do it now!”

“I ask,” Robert said, picking up the phone again.

Jim stayed silent, rubbing the back of his neck as Robert arranged a visit the following day. When Robert was through, he had a question for Jim.

“What does this mean, removed cousin?” Robert asked.

Jim, who gets loud and insistent when he’s excited about something, showered Robert with complex sentences in English.

“Twice removed means you’re cousins, just two generations away,” Jim said. “Jen’s mom, Paula, and Jen’s aunt, Terri, would have been Franjo’s first cousins, once removed.”

Robert poked an index finger in the air. “First cousins, Franjo and Kate. Second cousin, Aunt Terri and Paula and Boris. Jenny and children are Boris’s three cousins,” Robert said to me. “Franjo and Kate. Kate is your grandmother. Is good speak Croatian?”

“Um,” I said. Genealogical dyslexia settled like mist over my brain.

Jim read the definition from the computer. “Your first cousins are the people in your family who have the same grandparents. Second cousins are people who have the same great-grandparents. Third cousins share great-great-grandparents. The word ‘removed’ means that two people are from different generations.”

Here I chuckled. I knew Jim wasn’t going to let this go. He couldn’t bear it when people didn’t understand things exactly as he did. Robert coughed uncomfortably and lit another cigarette.

“So,” Jim concluded, “Franjo is your first cousin twice removed. Boris is your second cousin once removed.”

“Second?” Robert said. “Boris?”

“Yeah,” Jim said.

“Franjo and Kate is the first cousins,” said Robert.

“Right. But to Jennifer, he’s still a first cousin. He’s just twice removed. Two generations away.”

“Yeah, two generations,” said Robert, grappling with the English. “Hoa! No first! Who is first cousins?”

“These two, Franjo and Kate,” Jim tapped the family tree on the table. I poured a cup of tea and sat back. “So that means Franjo is still Jennifer’s first cousin, but twice removed.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Robert said, as Jim rambled on. Jim talked some more. Something about space and time and chaos and string theory. Or maybe about cousins.

“I don’t know,” Robert said, trailing off, defeated.

Jim talked on. Twenty minutes later he concluded the conversation by announcing that in the family-tree department, he was “lining ’em up and knockin’ ’em down!”

Which confused Robert further, so Jim began an exhaustive lecture about American slang and its subtler meanings.

The next day, we wound through the mountains toward Lokve. Jim and Robert were hunched in the front seat of the Peugeot while I warded off carsickness in the back. Goranka, realizing the gravity of the meeting, loaded up Roberta and Zadie and Sam in the Kangoo for an afternoon playdate at Goranka’s mother’s farm.

The old masonry two-stories of Lokve hugged the road in a march of pastels. Robert directed Jim to pull over on a winding back road that followed a slight rise toward the mountains. Robert gripped a piece of paper bearing Franjo’s address in one hand, a cigarette in the other. As he walked far ahead of me, I noted that he was broad in the shoulders and small-waisted. I hadn’t noticed much about Robert’s physique before, since his front was dominated by a broad beer belly. But if I squinted, I could see the young rocker in him who’d snagged the babes after the final encore of “Layla.”

An old woman pushed open the shutters of an upper-story room and leaned out the window to watch us pass. The street was so quiet that the rocks grinding under Robert’s huaraches echoed off the smooth faces of the houses. When I turned to look at Jim, he was smiling up at the sky, ambling slowly. I walked halfway between Robert’s rush and Jim’s stroll, wondering how all this would turn out. Would Franjo Crnić seem like family to me, considering I hadn’t known he existed until yesterday? Would he look like Grandma Kate? Meeting this man would be my very first contact with a flesh-and-blood ancestor. This was why we’d come so far. My heart beat against my chest as I prepared for the branches of my family tree to come together again after having parted so long ago.

We turned a corner, and Robert disappeared through a small gate. We followed him into a tree-filled courtyard in front of a two-story stucco house where a short, squat man stood on a step, staring blindly into a sky as blue as his eyes.

Franjo turned toward us as we ascended the steps of his walkway. Slowly, with a certain sadness, he put out his arms to me. I stood before him, and he kissed both my cheeks. I searched his face, looking for my grandmother, finding traces in his high cheekbones and wide chin. We stood there like that, looking but not smiling, for a long time, an unabashed Croatian stare between lost relatives.

He had a wife, Vera, a soft powdered woman in a flowered shirt and a gray skirt who fluttered close by and hugged me and kissed me. The murmurs of greetings filled the courtyard around us.

“It’s good to meet you,” I said.

Franjo just nodded.

Vera led us into a drawing room right inside the door. She seated me at a large table covered by a tatted cloth, across from Franjo and Robert. Jim sat next to me. Vera took her place at the end of the table, near the doorway. She rose and went to the kitchen periodically. We’d asked Robert to tell Franjo that we’d worked so hard to find him, and here we were at last, face-to-face with family I’d never known.

I started my tape recorder. Robert spoke.

Of this, there was much to tell, Franjo began. He spoke stoically, his eyes wet with tears.

Why was he sad? Jim and I, who’d spent the last year of our lives with the goal of this very moment in mind, waited for Robert’s translation.

We waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Robert carried on an intense conversation with Franjo Crnić, which from the sounds of it was nuanced and passionate. I say “from the sounds of it” because Robert translated maybe twenty words from the entire experience, pausing only to brush me off when I tried to squeeze in a question. I suspect this had to do with Robert’s not knowing as much English as he liked us to believe. He wanted to help us, but he couldn’t quite, and by the time he realized it, he was in over his head.

But Robert knew how to put on a show. He played the part of the genealogical sleuth in a way that made this meeting in which Jim and I did not comprehend a single thing seem absolutely revelatory. The clock in the room ticked loudly as Robert learned about my family, making the occasional exclamation of surprise and casting knowing looks at us. Jim butted in with a question here and there, stubborn in his pursuit of filling out the family tree he’d drawn, but I just sat there, once again lost in the talk between men as Franjo Crnić peeled back the layers of time.

The only reason I can relate any of what happened in the fancy room of a modest house in Lokve, Croatia, is that I later turned the tape of the interview over to Stefanija, who coaxed from its raspy recording the spoken timeline of my family in Mrkopalj. Robert relayed only the most basic of details on that day, so I had just a rough idea of Franjo’s story at the time.

When I walked into his courtyard that day, Franjo had been waiting for me. In fact, Franjo had spent his entire life waiting for family. I was the first relative who had cared enough to come back for him since the day he was deserted as a very little boy.

Franjo slid on a pair of thick glasses that didn’t quite wrap around the backs of his ears. He dug out from his Camel cigarettes wallet a piece of paper that had been folded and refolded so many times that it had grown soft like a petal. This was his parents’ marriage license, which he reverently smoothed out over the tablecloth, then presented to me with gravity. He had carried the only remaining physical evidence of his parents with him since he was a boy, perhaps for comfort, and clearly it was a treasure to him.

Twenty years after Valentin Radošević left Mrkopalj, his sister Ana married a man named Anton Crnić. They had two children. When Ana became pregnant with the third—Franjo—Anton Crnić abandoned his family to find work in Canada. Eventually he remarried. “When my father left in 1928, I wasn’t even born yet,” Franjo said.

“Did he ever come back?” Robert asked.

“No,” said Franjo. “Never.”

Before Franjo was two years old, his mother died of tuberculosis.

“My mother is buried in Mrkopalj,” Franjo said. “But for a father, I don’t know.”

Franjo was bounced around among his grandparents, then went to an aunt, who gave him away to people outside the family. An uncle heard about this and retrieved him, giving him back to his grandmother. Then this grandmother also died, and another batch of relatives took him in. There was more shuffling around until he grew to be a young man in a house in the fields between Mrkopalj and Tuk. But as a child, Franjo barely got to know the last home before he was moved to another.

Franjo stopped here, not weeping, but tears fell. I thought of my own children, and my heart hurt for this old man. Vera stood.

“Would anyone like something to drink?” she asked. “Some juice or beer?

“I would like some beer,” Robert said.

“And you?” Vera asked Jim.

Jim looked over at me, recognizing the word for beer.

“You can have one,” I told him.

Robert rolled his eyes, then said to Franjo, “He must look at his wife first.”

“First she has to say yes,” Franjo joked.

Vera brought drinks and heaped the table in front of me with food: cheeses, meats, an enormous plate of cookies. It dawned on me that I was an honored guest here. It meant so much to me to see Franjo, this blood relative I hadn’t even known I had, a connection that had pulled me across the clear sea. But I hadn’t given any thought to what it might mean to Franjo. He was frail and near the end of a life spent waiting for someone to care enough to come back for him, which had happened at last with my arrival. I hadn’t expected this at all.

“What do she and her husband do for a living?” Franjo asked Robert.

“She is writer, he is architect for buildings,” Robert answered.

“Well, Robert, you speak very good English!” Vera congratulated him.

Robert shrugged. “Not really.”

“What did Franjo do for a living?” I asked. I wanted to conduct an actual interview—I had so much to ask Franjo—but Robert literally cut me off every time I tried to steer the conversation even the slightest bit.

So instead of relaying my question to Franjo, Robert turned to me. “I told you in car, he was cooking the bread. He was a pekar.”

Jim laughed quietly.

“Why you laugh?” Robert asked Jim.

“Because pekar in English is slang for something else.”

Robert turned back to Franjo and continued his conversation. As for Valentin Radošević, no one heard from him after he left Croatia. It was as if he’d disappeared. “I didn’t even think about him,” Franjo said. “He didn’t write to anybody.”

“But to whom could he write?” asked Vera.

“From my family I didn’t hear from nobody,” Franjo shook his head. “There was nobody from my family.”

“Do you know where Petar Radošević is buried?” Jim asked Franjo.

“Petar Radošević?” Franjo harrumphed, as if startled. “Who is that?” Then he thought a moment. “Oh. He is my grandpa.”

“Do you know where his grave is?” asked Robert.

“At the cemetery is only my mom,” said Franjo.

Vera pointed at me. “Jennifer looks like his mother,” she said. “You can see the picture on her grave.”

Of course, I was oblivious to this bomb at the time. Robert wasn’t translating. But it probably would have freaked me out.

“Before, our graves, the Radošević family, are very nice. All in one line, near the pathway,” said Franjo. “But over the years, they just vanished. Disappeared. There was nobody out of our family who would care for those graves.”

Vera passed Jim the cookies. “Take some,” she said. “You aren’t fat at all.”

“Do you remember anything about where your grandparents are buried in Mrkopalj?” Jim asked Franjo again.

Robert translated to Franjo. Franjo sat up, surprised. “He says there is something wrong,” Robert said.

“Did anyone ever talk about your grandfather?” Jim asked.

Franjo jumped again. “Who?” he said, alarmed. “Who has been talking?”

Franjo rubbed his eyes. I thought he was crying. He said something to Robert that I assumed was an emotional soliloquy about his family home.

The reality: “You know, I’m eighty-one years old. That’s a lot of years. I’ve got heart problems, lung problems. And they sure ask a lot of questions.”

Mercifully, Franjo and Vera’s son Boris came in, breaking up the static of confusion. Boris lived upstairs, and he and his parents described where we could find the grave of Franjo’s mother—Ana Radošević Crnić, the one who looked like me. I think to help his father, who was looking worn out, Boris suggested we walk to the tourism office and meet his daughter, Diana.

I hugged Franjo and Vera and thanked them for the honor of the visit. Before I left, Franjo wanted to tell me something else: He had two sisters.

“Josipa in Zagreb. Katarina in Rijeka,” he said.

“They are living?” Robert asked.

“Yes,” said Franjo. “Josipa is widowed and in frail health in Zagreb. She cannot have visitors. But Katarina is healthy and living with her son’s family in Rijeka.”

Valentin’s brother, Matej, also had a daughter living in Rijeka. She, too, was named Katarina.

“You have two more cousins in Rijeka,” a smiling Robert told me, the benevolent interpreter now.

I pressed a hand against my cheek. I touched Franjo’s arm. “Really?”

Not only would they like to meet me, they were expecting us the following day.

I hugged Franjo again, and we posed for family pictures. In them, Franjo is staring off into the sky, a look of satisfaction on his face. His family had come back for him, at long last.

We drove in uncharacteristic silence to the cemetery in Mrkopalj to find the grave of Ana Crnić, each of us overwhelmed by our own emotions—Jim and I from having finally made contact with such a close relative, Robert from thinking about the facts of Franjo’s story that he never did pass along to us. The meeting had ignited in all of us a sense of urgency to track down the graves of my last relatives who had lived in Mrkopalj. If Franjo recalled his people being buried in a tidy line near the grave of Ana Crnić, then the Radošević family, including Valentin’s parents, must be nearby.

When we arrived, the three of us waded through weeds and stones, and we quickly found the tall white pillar of Ana Crnić’s marker. An old cameo photo of her, young and pretty, stared out at me. High cheekbones, a bow of a mouth, a prominent chin—there was a resemblance. I passed my hand over the letters of her name. At that time, I still had only a scant idea of what Franjo had said or what any of it meant; I only sensed that something powerful was shifting within me.

“Valentin and Jelena’s parents must be in here somewhere,” I said to Robert and Jim.

Robert patted my shoulder. “Is okay,” he said. “Baby steps, right?”

On the drive home from the cemetery, Robert leaned over to Jim.

“What is ‘pekar’ in English?” he asked.

“The word pecker is slang for this,” Jim said, indicating his crotch zone.

Robert cackled. “Is dick? Is cock?”

“And also pecker,” Jim said.

Robert mused. “I like this word. This pecker.”

“Me, too,” Jim said.

They drove in thoughtful silence. Though they were radically different men, Jim and Robert had been kindred spirits from the start, and unequivocally loved each other in that dude kind of way. The two of them together lightened up a situation, and I was grateful for them on a day that was turning out to be pretty heavy.

I stared out the window. I had found a living relative—as close as I could ask for. The whole landscape of my family had changed in an instant. It was surreal.

At bedtime, usually reserved for my own thoughts or late-night talks with Jim, I had the deep urge to cry, but I couldn’t. I thought about the little boy Franjo, my own flesh and blood, being passed from person to person in Mrkopalj. He’d grown up to be a good man anyway, though he spent his childhood adrift, his mother dead and his father gone.

It struck me that Franjo had been searching his whole life for the same thing I was: a solid and reliable family. But as I had roamed to find my own answers, he’d struggled to simply find home. Of course we were blood, expressing in polar ways the very same need for love, for family. He’d been searching just as I was. He just had a lot less to start with.

It made me reconsider what I did have. My mother—Grandma Kate’s daughter, Valentin’s granddaughter—seemed trapped in her housewife existence. She wasn’t equipped with the sensitive New Age vocabulary that might have communicated her isolation. My mom had never gone to college; she’d barely completed high school. She married my dad and moved to a small town. Dad went to work at Maytag; Mom raised four kids. She stayed home all day, every day. Sometimes nights, too, as Dad labored through years of night school. She kept an immaculate house. She managed a lean budget. She picked through garage sales so we had nice things and stocked up every week at Aldi’s with off-brand SpaghettiOs and five gallons of milk.

From the time I was seventeen years old, I’ve been traveling. With my first detasseling check, I bought a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., to visit the capitol. From that time forward, I built the life I wanted. Even by the time I was born, times had changed significantly from my mother’s era. Bras had been burned.

If my mother’s blood runs through my veins—I look like her; I sound like her—what sort of life was hers? How cooped up and trapped did she feel? She must have fought it all her life, until finally, she just gave up and never really left the house at all. In Des Moines as a young woman, she’d worked as a department-store model and a telephone operator. Then she met my dad and her own life ceased and ours began. My life and my choices had been different from hers, and yet I’d felt traces of the same isolation when my own family was forming.

How many times had she been tempted to run?

She could have abandoned us the way Franjo’s father had abandoned him. But I always had a home with two parents in it. When Maytag shelled out the yearly Christmas bonus, Mom stood in line for my first Cabbage Patch doll. It might not sound like much—mere presence does not a healthy family make. But I knew the urge to roam. And it’s no small task to stay.

I was sure, lying in the dark in Mrkopalj, that my life would have turned out much differently if she hadn’t. As it stood, I have a very good one. My mother had some part in that outcome, no matter how mangled the process might have been.

And she stepped up when I needed it most. When Sam was born, I was inconsolable. There is perhaps no greater life change for a woman than having a child. Some women thrive on it. I had friends who lived and breathed for their La Leche League meetings and spent hours shopping for the latest baby slings. I loved Sam from the moment I peed on the stick, but one small nub of my soul felt this was a setback of sorts. At thirty, I was just coming into my own power. Then along came motherhood and the sleepless nights and that cooped-up feeling and the endless worry that somehow I wasn’t doing things right. The realization that my life was no longer my own hit hard. My career was just gaining momentum—I’d moved from rock writing to city news to travel writing, and I was exhilarated by all of it. I worried, as I spent whole days watching Sam coo and breathe and nurse, that my life was over before it had even really begun.

Then my mother knocked on my back door, walked in, took my son in her arms, and became his Grandma Kate. She adored him immediately and without reserve. For the first two years of his life, my mom came to our house regularly to sit with him while I desperately wrote stories, hunched over the dining room table, sometimes with a breast pump attached to my chest. They sat for hours on the couch in our tiny house. She talked to him quietly all day, pointing out neighbors, pushing away our huge dogs when they’d sniff him too much. The dogs triggered her allergies to the point that she looked as if she was weeping when she left.

And maybe she was weeping. It’s a great gift for a mother to have a worry-free break from her kids. I’m not sure she had that from her own.

Things faded for us again when I had Zadie. She’s not the uncomplicated kid her brother is. Zadie is inquisitive and intense and independent. In other words, she’s like me. Plus, Mom was getting older. Keeping up with two kids was tough. She receded from the picture. But I never forgot what she did for me during my initial growing pains as a mother.

I had met families in Mrkopalj shot through by the self-absorption of alcoholic fathers. Kids who lived at home well into their thirties, adrift in a bum economy where $2,000 a month was rich-man’s money and $300 was usual. I’d seen put-upon mothers leaning on church and neighbors for comfort. And yet they all lived together in messy harmony in Mrkopalj. In addition, for all our American advantages—jobs, industry, good malls—they felt sorry for me. No one in Mrkopalj could fathom what it must have been like to not even know my great-grandparents. To have to sleuth down clues about my relatives. I tried to explain that this was the norm in America. People barely knew their own grandparents. But Mrkopalj understood what we’d lost, and the gravity of it was dawning on me, too.

Sometimes, as a bar trick, Robert would make Jim recite our combined lineage. “Jeem,” Robert would begin, “tell my friends which country your family is from.”

Jim would patiently repeat the same thing he always said. “On my Dad’s side, from the fjords of Norway. On my Mom’s, from Alsace-Lorraine and Germany.”

“Okay,” Robert would say, pumping up his audience. “Now tell where Jenny family from.”

“Dad’s side, Ireland and England and some Cherokee Indian. Mom’s side, Croatia and Italy.”

Robert would hold up both hands, the big finish. “Now tell me, what country is blood from Sam and Zadie?”

“Norwegian, Alsatian, German, Irish, English, Cherokee, Croatian, and Italian.”

And the drinking men would shake their heads in disbelief.

“American families,” Robert concluded with a squinty-eyed philosophical face. “Like United Nations, but knowing none.”

But we were trying to know. Everything we’d been through in Mrkopalj so far was part of that knowing. What I was finding in Mrkopalj wasn’t as simple as good herbal remedies for cramps, or my kids learning how to shoot pool in the bar, or the best way to milk cows. I was finding gratitude for what I had, rather than a low simmer of anguish over what I didn’t. I missed my family back home with a basic longing, missed that familiarity, that mysterious connective tissue. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost something important. You feel free, sure. Americans like the lone-wolf illusion. But you also feel disconnected from something primal and essential.

If I doubted any of these revelations, I had only to think of Franjo Crnić, standing blind and alone in his courtyard, looking up at the sky and waiting for family he didn’t know and couldn’t possibly remember.