chapter twenty-five

Viktor Šepić kicked the gravel on Novi Varoš on his way home from school. The year was 1933. The time was noon. He was six years old and happy because he got to leave school early. His main job was not reading and mathematics, which was good because he was bad at them. Viktor’s main job was to feed his family’s six cattle and herd them through the field behind his house at the foot of Čelimbaša. When he turned seven, he would look after the horses, too.

Viktor sniffed the air. Soon it would snow. It snowed in Mrkopalj from October until late April, and it piled so deep that everyone in the village wore skis all the time, even to go to the mercantile to buy sugar, cloth, oil, and corn. Viktor’s family shopped Golik’s store across the street from the Radošević family. The Goliks were so rich from that store! The village got electricity in 1929, and the Goliks’ house was very modern in that way. But even they still had an outhouse.

Before the first snow, little Viktor had to go to the pilana and get a few scraps of wood to carve new skis that he’d attach to his old shoes with a belt. Viktor’s mama had been angry and had broken his old skis. It was worse than being beaten, the breaking of skis. He cut over to the pilana to look at the scrap pile. It wasn’t hard to find perfect wood in Mrkopalj. There were five pilanas in Mrkopalj and Sunger. When Viktor was a man, he would work in the woods with his tata. Maybe he could save enough money to buy a bicycle. Everybody wanted one, but no one could afford it.

Working in the woods was dangerous, but Viktor could not wait until he was old enough to do it. With as much as eight feet of snow on the ground every day, there were snowslides on the mountain. Men would climb the mountains for wood anyway. Sometimes they cut themselves on their axes. Viktor knew three men who died when logs rolled over them. Because Mrkopalj had no doctor, one worker died of a burst appendix because nobody knew what was wrong with him.

The men in the šuma worked for six months, then the pilana closed and fired all the workers each year. Viktor’s family and their neighbors, all with at least five children, had to work very hard on their farms to make their small bags of pilana money last so that nobody would starve. There were five thousand people in this village now! Still, lots of children would die from fras, especially in winter. When a baby had fras, it would be so hot and it would shake. Viktor had seen it. Babies died from fras, but grown-ups and kids died from tuberkuloza.

Viktor did not find good wood in the pile on this day, and so he walked home. His mama had served the usual breakfast—polenta with milk—and it was now time for lunch. Viktor got the lumberman’s lunch of one piece of bread and one hunk of slanina, or raw bacon. For supper, Viktor would have polenta and milk again, and he hoped this was enough food to make him grow taller someday.

A group of woodsmen sang “Malo po Malo,” the song of Mrkopalj, at the edge of the forest. Viktor’s chest swelled with pride. Their village was the best village! The people sang all the time! When they were hungry or bored or worried about family who went to America. But Viktor did not remember seeing any people leaving for America, so he did not know this to be true.

“What? How could you not remember something like that?” squawked a heretofore quiet Manda Šepić from under a black babushka to her husband, Viktor.

Immediately, we all snapped out of the last century. It was a Sunday night at the end of August. Stefanija, Manda, Viktor, and I were sitting in the Šepić kitchen together. Viktor, in a white cotton button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and wool pants, firmly tapped a box of mints against his kitchen table. This was the only indication that Viktor ever gave of being rattled about anything.

The difference between Stefanija interpreting and Robert interpreting was the difference between taking a smooth ski lift up a mountain and trudging up the thing wearing shoes with no tread. Being able to talk freely and ask questions was such a heady feeling that I felt nearly drunk, and I would have felt this way even if we weren’t drinking gemišt made with a bottle of green wine labeled with tape and a marker-scrawled date.

Viktor and Manda met when she was the cook for the priest in Slunj, where she grew up. That priest was Viktor’s brother, who noticed that both Viktor and Manda were single, so Viktor’s brother picked him up from the pilana one day and drove him straight to the church, where Manda was waiting at the altar. They married and that was that. There were no children.

Manda motioned to Viktor. “He complains all the time. His brother never complained,” she said. “If his brother didn’t like what I was cooking, he’d just say he wasn’t hungry.”

And she could not believe Viktor didn’t remember people leaving for America. “Each of us had somebody in America,” Manda said, through a mouth full of handsome dentures. Her eyes were the brightest blue I’d seen.

“Why did they go?” I asked. “Why would my relatives leave a happy Mrkopalj?”

“They couldn’t work here,” Viktor said. “There weren’t enough jobs.”

It was simple as that. Mrkopalj lived off the land, and land could only support so many. Because of this, Mrkopalj experienced waves of emigration at the turn of the last century, then after both World Wars.

Manda rose to walk to her stove. Her kitchen was a pretty shade of aqua that was popular with the vintage hipsters back home. When I told her this, she put a hand to her cheek. “This old kitchen?”

“It’s a beautiful kitchen,” I said. Compact, with a linoleum floor and shelves lined with pretty canisters for tea, flour, and spices. Rosaries were draped above the table.

“Would you like tea?” she asked me.

I said yes, though I was also drinking with Viktor.

After World War II, Manda said, there wasn’t much of anything to put in a kitchen. The shelves at the mercantile were bare, so the people of Mrkopalj culled their closets and drove in oxcarts to Rijeka, where they traded clothing for sea salt. Then they’d get back in the oxcart and rumble the seventy-five miles to Karlovac, where they sold the salt to buy corn and staples.

An easier, but less reliable, source of money came from relatives abroad. “When someone went to America, everyone was happy,” Manda explained. “Now they would send money.”

Well, most of them would. I told them about Franjo and the Katarinas, how their fathers had abandoned them.

“Only men could work at that time,” Viktor confirmed. “It was a terrible time for the woman, because she must be home then. Nobody wants a woman for a worker. Many, many women lived like that in Croatia.”

“A woman managed how she knew,” Manda said. “She sells milk from cows. She works in garden. She fights to save her children from starving.”

“Did people think poorly of the men who left?” I asked.

Manda thought for a moment. “Anyway, it wasn’t good,” she said, finally. “The worst was for the children.”

We sat and drank for a while, me double-fisting it with both tea and wine.

“What did it look like, when someone was leaving for America?” I asked. “Were they walking down the road with suitcases and everyone waving, like in the movies?”

Viktor chuffed a laugh. “No suitcases,” he said. “A few clothes. Maybe some food. But they are walking. Walking all the way to Rijeka.”

“My great-grandfather didn’t even have fifteen dollars when he left,” I said. “How could he have afforded a boat ticket with that?”

Viktor let out a long “Pffffff!” and slapped his hand in the air. Manda threw her head back and laughed.

“Nobody is paying on that ship!” Viktor said. “They were hiding on that ship! They hide for four or five days. If they are found, ship turns around, they go to prison. They wait in prison. They come out. They run back to ship again.”

I said I remembered Aunt Terri telling me that there had been some strange family rumor that Valentin had been a pirate. “That’s probably the thing,” Viktor said. “He got caught. He was in jail. He had to try a few times.”

Once a stowaway successfully hid for half the transatlantic journey, he’d present himself to the crew and they’d usually let him stay on. “They have to pay for the ship crossing somehow,” Viktor said. “He does work on ship nobody wants to do, maybe. Or when he get to America, he work on the dock and first pay goes to government because he was sneaking on the boat.”

“Surely some people crossed legitimately,” I said.

“Yes,” Viktor nodded. “Then they need passport.”

“That probably cost money, too,” I said.

Viktor let out another bwah-ha-ha laugh. In those days, Croatian people bought their cattle from Germany. Germany issued cow passports—no photo, just the name and lineage of the cow. Each family from Mrkopalj with a German cow had this version of a German passport.

“They were running then!” Viktor said. “Oh, they were running! Your family was running, too! All the families run to America! Running with their cow’s passport!”

“You people with your cows.” I smiled.

“My friend was running. He worked a while then sent another friend his passport,” Viktor said. “One cow sends so many men to America!”

“Did you ever try to go to America, Viktor?” I asked.

“Never,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, amused.

“Because”—he spread his hands before him—“I like it here.”

At that moment, Pavice rapped on the kitchen window. She came around through the side door. Stefanija explained that Viktor and Manda were telling me about old times.

“If you ate just a piece of bread back then, you’d eat it happily!” said Pavice. “Now we are different. Now we throw away the crusts.”

Stefanija rolled her eyes.

Pavice had news for me.

“Yenny, what is the name of your granny?” she asked.

“Jelena Iskra,” I said.

“Uh-huh!” Pavice nodded once, with gusto. “Josip’s sister married an Iskra man. Her mother was Jelena’s sister! They live in Germany now. Everybody in Iskra family is gone from Mrkopalj.”

“See?” Stefanija said. “Pavice knows everything.”

“Now you understand!” Pavice slapped me on the knee, hard. That would leave a mark. “Now you understand what it was like for them!”

Viktor leaned a cheek on his hand. “With most of them running on the passports of cows.”

I filed away Pavice’s revelation and turned back to Manda and Viktor. How could Jelena have had so much money for her passage—$100 according to the ship manifest.

“Usually people from America send money for their woman,” Viktor said. “The man was running, but the woman gets money sent to her family. Later, the man had money to pay for that ship.”

I asked them what life had been like for those who stayed in Croatia, those who’d lived through the poverty and chaos around World War Two, when the Communist secret police terrified everyone, and the Ustaše built concentration camps. They said it had been a nightmare.

“First was Italians, then Ustaše, after that Partisans,” said Viktor. “They all march in to Mrkopalj, and people must decide what side they are on. You change over time.”

Each new political alliance was suspicious of the others. During the 1940s, the Fascist Italians actually fenced in the village with chain link topped by barbed wire, a barrier that ran the length of Mrkopalj, from Stari Baća westward.

As Viktor had told the story of his life, now Manda spoke. Her voice, which I’d barely heard before that day, emerged loud and full of passion: a wailing. She told me that many small villages were forcefully overtaken as the Communist Partisans fought bitterly against the ultra-nationalist Ustaše for control of Croatia. “During World War Two, everybody left my village,” she said. “Partisans tell everyone in Slunj we must go. With nobody to look after the houses, they were ruined. Where I lived, there were seven villages. Seven villages were abandoned.”

I tried to imagine what it would feel like if the entire county where I grew up suddenly emptied out. The closest I could come was the deserted feel of when the Maytag factory closed down. Still, my people moved by choice. This was a whole different ball game.

Manda continued. “In that war, from my family, four people died,” she said. “Father, brother, sister, uncle.”

“The Ustaše killed them?” I asked.

Manda shook her head. “Partisans.”

She was eighteen when her father was shot. After a skirmish with the Ustaše, the Partisans counted up their losses and killed ten civilians for each of their dead soldiers. “They were innocents, but never mind.”

“Her sister was killed behind her own house,” added Viktor. He tapped his mints.

“Fifteen years, she had,” Manda said, looking straight at me, eyes full of tears.

Those who survived in Manda’s family ran for a full year, sheltered by churches or other sympathetic souls. For weeks they lived in a ruined and roofless house, where they were perpetually rained on. Once, she’d been herded into a group of people as Partisan soldiers prepared to shoot them all. Manda held her breath, waiting to die. But a man rode up on a horse bearing a white flag for reasons she never knew. He saved all their lives. They ultimately waited out the war in Zagreb, where Catholic families adopted many refugees.

Manda had spent a vast portion of her life peeking from windows—at first too scared to go outside, then, finally, too old to venture out.

“Moj meni,” Manda said. “Who could even say all that has happened to me.”

I covered her hand with my own. I didn’t know what to say; I was humbled by her hardships. Pavice had gotten up and left somewhere along the line. I hadn’t even noticed.

“I don’t know which side was worse, Ustaše or Partisans,” Manda said. “They were all doing against the people.”

I held up a hand. “But I thought the Ustaše were the bad guys.”

Much of Mrkopalj, Viktor and Manda and Stefanija agreed, had sided with the Ustaše.

Wait. What? My ancestral village on the side of Nazis and Fascists in World War Two? This isn’t the kind of uplifting revelation one likes to make when researching family history.

“Partisans were Communist,” Stefanija said. “Ustaše were from the people.”

“Italians were the best,” Viktor opined, holding up one bony finger. “At least the Italians were feeding us. They were chickens, actually. They fenced us in because they were scared of us. Partisans were just schmucks. And the Ustaše: They were fighters!”

It surprised me that Viktor would feel this way. Especially after what he told me next: The Ustaše, a bizarrely disorganized bunch, had nearly destroyed Mrkopalj entirely. In fact, I came pretty close to having no ancestral village at all, thanks to the Ustaše.

It all started, Viktor said, when somebody reported to the Nazi Germans and Fascist Italians that Mrkopalj was full of Partisans. They told the Ustaše to burn the houses along Muzevski Kraj and Stari Kraj. Italian forces set fire to the village of Tuk, razing the whole place.

“Funny thing is, all those houses belonged to Ustaše families,” Viktor cackled, shaking his head. In 1944, the Germans bombed Mrkopalj on Good Friday, destroying the Catholic church that once stood at the crossroads of the town. The villagers used the rubble to build a stone fence around the cemetery at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows. The fence was still there.

“Even then, nobody changed their minds about the Ustaše?” I asked.

Viktor harrumphed, his blue eyes squinting. “No,” he said. “All Mrkopalj was in Ustaše. There was just a few that wasn’t. Hundred fifty Ustaše from Mrkopalj were killed, all of them married with three or four children. So they were getting theirs anyway.”

“A lot of widows,” Manda added, wringing her hands.

“The history books say the Ustaše were Croatian Nazis,” I said. “Is that how they were viewed here?”

“Partisans call it that way,” said Viktor. “But the Communists were even worse than the Ustaše.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “They were fighting against the Nazis and Fascists. Where I come from, that’s a noble cause.”

Manda smiled gently. “If you weren’t there, you couldn’t imagine it. Catastrofa!”

(I asked historians about this later, and the point remains murky to me. Apparently, the actual number of Ustaše fighters in Croatia was quite few. It would have been unusual—and highly unlikely—for such a small village to have a large population of Ustaše soldiers. One historian also told me that the Communist Partisans had a tendency to label anyone who opposed them as “Ustaše,” so there may even have been some misunderstanding locally, and indeed some of the villagers insisted later that being Ustaše simply meant you wanted Croatian independence. Many more men throughout the country enlisted with the Croatian Home Guard, known as the Domobrani, whose main job it was to keep war out of the villages. It’s my best guess that if Mrkopalj truly did lean Ustaše politically, it was because this was the one of its two rotten political choices that seemed least likely to endanger their beloved Catholic Church.)

When Germany lost the war, the Communist Partisans in Mrkopalj stepped forward. Neighbor turned on neighbor, informing about anyone who’d opposed the winning party. People disappeared in the night. Viktor and Manda hid in their house most of the time, wanting nothing to do with any of it.

“There is one hole here in Mrkopalj. Fifty people died in there,” Viktor said. “Partisans killed them.”

“Fifty men and one girl,” Manda corrected. “That girl was killed because they couldn’t find her husband to kill him. This left four children without their mother. But we couldn’t say anything! You must be frightened of everything.”

Viktor nodded and tapped his mints.

“We had an expression, ‘The night will eat you,’” said Manda. “The church keeps us all together and keeps us strong. But the Communists are killing the priests and they want to destroy our church and our religion.”

This sense of lawlessness remained in Croatia until about 1947, Viktor said. At the end of World War Two, Mrkopalj was bombed out. Tuk was burned. Partisan soldiers dismantled wooden houses and sent them to Serbia by train as rewards for soldiers there. After Marshal Tito took power, his men set up secret police and they acted as judge and jury for anyone whose politics were suspect. Which, my hosts told me, was most of Mrkopalj.

“If you went with them,” Manda said, “you didn’t come back. Ever.”

“It was a violent time,” I said.

“Yes, it was,” Viktor agreed. “If you were on this side, it wasn’t good. If you were on that side, it wasn’t good,” he said. “On any side, it wasn’t good.”

“These days, the truth is in the middle.”

Stefanija breathed out, hard. “I have to smoke,” she said, rooting around in her giant purse. She found a pack and lit up shakily, pulling so hard on a cigarette that her face nearly went concave. “This was very disturbing for me.”

No wonder people were still arguing in the bars about World War II. It had ripped this village apart.

“Are Croatians done with war now?” I asked Manda.

“They say that Croatians will not go to war anymore, but who knows,” she answered.

“There will be war, definitely,” Viktor said.

“Why?” I asked.

“We usually fight for our land. Our territory,” Manda said. “To be Croatian.”

“Italians want part. Slovenians want part. Serbians want part,” Viktor said. “We have the sea. They want the sea. Not for anything else.”

“And you have all the good-looking women,” I said.

“And some who are not,” Manda tilted her head to the side and lifted her eyebrows. “Good and bad and smart and stupid. We have every kind.”

“I am sorry for your troubles,” I said.

“It is past, it is past,” she said, patting my hand. “What you have passed through in life, you must forget.”

But they hadn’t forgotten. No one in Mrkopalj had. It was their blessing, and their curse.

I was desperate to know one thing before I left.

“Were the bad people, the ones who killed others in the night, were they Iskras or Radoševićs?”

Viktor thought. “Radošević people, there are good and bad ones.” He laughed a slow, rumbling laugh.

“Which Radošević are you?”