Under a Croatian Sun (10 page)

(Sometimes, the island’s signal did tend to wander off for a few hours.)

‘Damn! Well, put it on the next ferry.’

‘It is still on the ferry.’

‘That’s fine then. I’ll be at the dock when it comes in this evening.’

There was an embarrassed cough at the other end. ‘I am very sorry, sir, but the ferry has continued on to Dubrovnik and it is not returning to Vis for another four days.’

‘What! But you could have rung the ship’s Vis office and asked them to keep it for me. They would have told us they had it.’

‘But there was no signal. We could ring no one.’

‘Blast!’ The sweat was now streaming down my temples.

‘I am so sorry, sir,’ the man said, sounding genuinely sympathetic, ‘but you will have to wait until Wednesday morning when the ferry returns to Vis.’

Grinding my teeth, I nevertheless made myself put the phone back carefully instead of banging it down, and I went to find Ivana. She was in the garden reading in the shade.

When I had finished venting my spleen, Ivana put down her book and said, ‘Now you really must stop getting yourself upset like this, darling. That’s not what we’ve come out here to do, is it?’

She was right. It wasn’t. I went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and stood in front of it to cool down and console myself with some of Marko’s chilled white wine.

E
arly the following day, I was woken by a terrible crashing and banging outside. Thinking it might be Mr Samka and his sanitation experts, I got out of bed and looked out. But it wasn’t Mr Samka, it was Boyana, our grumpy, jam-making neighbour who lived on the other side of the garden wall and who bore a distinct resemblance to Marjory the Trash Monster in
Fraggle Rock
. She was loading her empty jam jars into the back of her car and making the most appalling din with it. I looked at the clock. It was only six o’clock, for God’s sake! Maybe she didn’t realise what a racket she was making. I’d better go down to tell her.

The few people in the square looked surprised at the sight of me in my striped pyjamas, but, with the clenched jaw and the no-nonsense step of an Englishman undaunted by circumstance, I strode across the square. Boyana’s broad beam was protruding from a back door like a life raft accidentally inflated in a confined space, and, thinking it impolite to address
her in that position, I made a discreet cough. She heaved herself out like a hippo extricating itself from an African mud hole and turned to face me. Red-faced from the effort, she now looked more like Les Dawson playing Widow Twanky than Marjory the Trash Monster.

‘What then?’ she snapped.

Undeterred by this less than cordial greeting, I gave her a winning smile and started on the Croatian version of my well-practised John Le Mesurier
Dad’s Army
routine that had served me well on many other occasions. ‘I say… sorry to bother… but would you mind awfully not making such a frightful racket? It’s only six o’clock in the morning… and, if you could just wait a couple of hours, I’d be glad to give you a hand… we could polish the job off in no time at all if we did it together.’

She looked at me witheringly. ‘If I want to rattle my jam jars at six o’clock in the morning, I’ll rattle them, and I’ll do so on my own, thank you very much. And I’ll be doing the same every Tuesday and Friday until the jam-making season ends.’ She crossed her arms defiantly.

I searched for inspiration but drew a blank. ‘But it’s just… the noise… so early… I’m sure there’s some way I could help…’

She gave the kind of snort that said there was little chance of us ever exchanging Christmas cards, and got back to work.

My
Dad’s Army
routine hadn’t done the trick and clearly no amount of arguing was going to bring her round. Passers-by had stopped to watch us and standing there in my pyjamas I was feeling rather vulnerable (the stiff upper lip was beginning to wobble a bit), but, moulding my face into a suitably inscrutable mask, I retreated across the square to the door with as much dignity as one can when wearing striped pyjamas.

During the promenade that evening, our neighbour with the roof-rack sheep came up to us to say that he had heard about
the incident. Putting a sympathetic hand on my shoulder, he said, ‘No worry, my friend. She do same to all in village. When I say please not put car at my door, she shout at me like she shout at you.’

So at least we weren’t being singled out; not that that gave us much comfort. Anyway, there wasn’t much we could do about it. At this stage, the last thing we wanted was a row with a next-door neighbour.

That afternoon, Karmela told us that the jam-making season went on until the winter.

Ivana, of course, saw the cheery side. ‘No one likes Boyana. Think of all the villagey conversations we can now have with everyone about difficult neighbours. Best of all would be if we could somehow find a way to win her over. Then everyone would see we’re the sort of people who try to get on with their neighbours however difficult they are. That would really impress them. We ought to work on Boyana together – like a tag team.’

I wasn’t so certain, but over the next week I tried to engage her in conversation – at the corner store, outside the church, at the ferry, on the benches. But she was as stubborn as they come. The first time, she looked at me as if I were trying to sell her holiday timeshare apartments in Bulgaria; the second time, she said she was busy; and the third time she just ignored me.

And Ivana didn’t fare much better.

I had already resigned myself to being treated as a pale-faced Englishman for some time, but I had thought that by now they would have been treating Ivana as one of their own. She was Croatian, after all, and she spoke the language – albeit with a funny accent. But it wasn’t until the end of May that we made the breakthrough discovery.
They just didn’t like anyone who
wasn’t from their own village
. And another strange thing – the people they disliked the most were those from the island’s only other village – Komiza – and they’ve inhabited the same island for over two thousand years.

Our first inkling of this was when we were walking down a dark alley one night and bumped into someone putting a large, mewing sack into a van. Embarrassed at being caught
in flagrante,
the man told us that several times a year he rounded up the stray cats that gathered in his alley and dumped them in Komiza. ‘I don’t feel bad about it,’ he said, ‘as they dump all their stray dogs on
us
. Haven’t you noticed all the starving dogs around lately? They’re not from here. We feed our dogs properly in Vis.’

(Being the island ‘capital’, our village is also called Vis – as in New York, New York.)

Gaining confidence, the man put the mewing sack down. ‘And rumour has it that they’ve started to send all their dogs with diseases over to us. Just like Castro did when he sent everyone in prison to America. That’s just the kind of dirty trick you might expect from Dog Town!’

Like the Hundred Years’ War, the Vis Dog/Cat War was evidently a slow-burning one.

Komiza, a tiny village even smaller than Vis, on the other side of the island is only five miles away, but, surrounded by steep cliffs, it was unreachable until recent times, except by sea. Cut off from the rest of the island, until the government dug a road into the rock face, hardly anyone ever left it, not even to come over to Vis. The only time they left it was to fish, and being so isolated for so long they developed their own language – Komisese, which is still spoken today. There’s even a Komisese dictionary.

One morning, we were at the market talking with Karmela and some other village grannies when a family came past speaking Komisese.

‘When your children come out,’ Karmela hissed to Ivana, ‘you make sure they don’t hang around with any of those young people from Komiza!’

At the word ‘Komiza’, the others weighed in.

‘Yes, you make sure you keep them well away,’ said Grandma Gokan. ‘In Komiza, all the young do is lie in bed all day and take drugs all night!’

‘And you make sure your children never marry any of them,’ said Grandma Gokan with a dire expression. ‘They make bad wives and bad husbands. No good in the home or in the fields.’

‘They just sit in the cafés all day drinking,’ echoed Grandma Draginov. ‘Why, half the village can’t even swim. They’re too lazy to walk the twenty paces to the sea!’

‘And they’re no good at sports, my nephew says.’

‘And they’re bad losers, my grandson says.’

‘Too much inbreeding,’ said Karmela, giving me a significant look.

We assured them that we’d watch our children like hawks from the moment they arrived, and went back to the car. We got in and looked at each other grimly. If that was how they felt towards their fellow island inhabitants, what chance did we have?

A few nights later, we were on the terrace when we heard raised voices coming from the recess outside the courtyard wall, and looking down we saw the struggling shape of a neighbouring teenager being hauled out of it by her mother and grandmother. She was in her vest and knickers and they were pulling her by her hair and shouting at her. It was in dialect I couldn’t make out
anything except the words ‘Komiza *!!x*!’, but Ivana got the gist of it. Someone had spotted the girl canoodling in the recess with a boy from Komiza and had alerted the Home Guard.

The grandmother was holding a pair of jeans, so it looked like some heavy petting had been going on, but more ominously she was holding a large wooden spoon. Had she rushed straight from the kitchen; was it to beat off the boy, or was it for later? – in the eyes of the village a very suitable punishment, I’m sure, for the kind of girl who goes off snogging with a boy from Komiza. That kind of thing had to be stamped out!

We didn’t catch sight of the Lothario. Maybe he had seen the advancing granny-and-spoon combo and had high-tailed it back to his side of the island. But, if I knew anything about the island telegraph, another utensil-wielding granny (his) was lying in wait for him.

By the following morning, the incident was front-page village news and Karmela made her opinion clear when she arrived. ‘A terrible going on it was, and only stopped just in time! Pah! When
will
those dreadful Komiza boys stop buzzing around all our girls? It’s always the same story. A quick wedding before the baby is born and the boy then runs off leaving another wretched girl to bring up a child on her own. That’s what you get from Komiza!’ She paused for the requisite disapproving sniff. ‘And their girls are no better. Not that I’m saying that most girls these days don’t throw themselves around like I don’t know. Look at that daughter of the Ragostas. She might have gone to university and can speak four languages, but it seems she doesn’t know how to say “no” in any of them! Pah!’

‘But Marko says that, despite the centuries of enmity, the young of Vis and Komiza started to fraternise the minute the road was built,’ I said.

Karmela’s eyes swivelled in my direction like twin gun
turrets, and I faltered. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard of Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist,’ I continued hesitantly, ‘but her findings showed that, despite the views of their elders, the younger members of rival tribes were usually interested in forging links – particularly with the more attractive ones of the opposite sex. Don’t you think we ought to encourage the young to get to know each other and relationships might improve?’

‘Pah!’ (Karmela’s anthropological studies had clearly been learned in the field.) ‘I’ve never heard of the woman, but it sounds like she should have found something better to do with her time than writing such nonsense.’ She gave me a withering look as if daring me to contradict her.

I didn’t dare.

‘Anyway,’ she went on in a slightly less belligerent tone, ‘inbreeding has never been a problem in our village. We’ve always had enough merchants and seamen passing through our harbour to stop that sort of going-on. Unlike that Sodom and Gomorrah of Komiza, where it’s been going on like an epidemic since time began. Those people! Pah!’

She scuttled off like an angry beetle.

When I asked the bar-proppers at Zoran’s about the Komiza/Vis two-thousand-year war, Bozo, the fattest member of the coterie, reckoned that, because both villages could now abuse each other on Facebook and Twitter, the conflict would probably run for another thousand years.

‘The conflict hasn’t gained official recognition by the UN yet,’ added Filip the tax collector, ‘but it won’t be long before a motion is tabled.’

I hadn’t got to know Bozo well, but there was an appealing air of wistful resignation about him; the look of a benevolent alien who had been dropped into a world he didn’t really
understand. Even his appearance was slightly out of kilter with the others. Most of the group had a fairly universally bashed-up look to them, but everything about Bozo was soft and spherical. His chubby face was dominated by an attention-grabbing Viva Zapata hedge-growth, but above it were a button nose and kindly, round brown eyes, and below, a rounded chin. The rest of him was a bulging tummy that stuck out like an advance guard of a royal procession and underneath that were two stumpy legs.

As well as having the largest moustache on the island, Bozo also had the largest konoba, and he was respected because of both attributes. The konoba was a prime spot and Bozo had recognised its potential as soon as the first tourists appeared. Walking along the promenade, they passed in front of it, and its wine barrels and stacks of bottles attracted curiosity, and, now that the weather was warm, Bozo took up position every evening in front of it on a backless chair. Unshaven and with his belly sticking out from under his vest, he looked very much the
patron
– and, should anyone stop to look, he would rise munificently to extol the wonders of his wine.

I was sitting with him one evening when a hefty-looking woman suddenly burst out of the side door and came barrelling towards us. I got up to introduce myself, but, ignoring me completely, she put her hands on her hips and gave Bozo a terrific bollocking. It was in impenetrable dialect, so I couldn’t understand, but after a minute she flounced off in a flurry of skirts and slammed the door behind her.

Bozo looked at me and blinked.

‘Well, what was all that about?’ I asked.

He tugged his moustache (he always did that when nervous) and mumbled, ‘Oh, nothing really. Nora was just telling me something about the house.’

The virulence of the bollocking didn’t quite bear that out, but I left it at that.

A few minutes later, the door banged open again and this time Nora marched straight past us without even a nod. The alien-on-the-planet look came over Bozo’s face as he sank back on his chair, his sad brown eyes drooping like a forlorn spaniel, and looked dejectedly out to sea.

What was going on in that household? I’d better ask Karmela.