Under a Croatian Sun (16 page)

Determined to better my last efforts, I trumpeted away, and I was just finishing off with what I thought to be some pretty impressive
basso profundo
when a group of four ruddy-faced yachtsmen in brightly coloured sailing gear appeared in the door. Seeing that they had blundered into a party, they started to back out, but Asija pulled them back in, saying they could eat and drink as long as they joined in the singing. Hearing the earbashing in English that Ivana was giving me, they introduced themselves as yachtsmen from Portsmouth and chatted with us until their food arrived – which they fell upon as if they hadn’t eaten since they left Dogger and Forties. When they finished, the music started up again, and they kept their part of the bargain by joining in. All of Asija’s friends sang mellifluously, as most Dalmatians do, which rather showed up our English male voice contingent, which sounded like Lee Marvin singing ‘I Was Born Under a Wandering Star’, but by that point I don’t think anyone noticed.

‘Everyone’s so friendly tonight. What’s got into them?’ I shouted across the table to Ivana.

‘They’re not islanders; they’re from Dubrovnik. That’s why!’

The music and the shouting was now deafening – like anywhere else on a Friday night, I suppose, just with more Xs and Zs in the words. One of the Dubrovnik men went over to Asija, lifted her up from her chair and whirled her around the room. Others followed suit and two of them whisked up Ivana, and she was tossed from one man to the other like a ragdoll, her feet off the ground, her hair flying and her dress swirling. The musicians were giving it their all and the screeching violins and throbbing balalaikas had worked themselves into a fever pitch. Those not dancing were singing and shouting as those on the floor spun faster and faster around the room, bouncing off the walls and cannoning into each other. I grabbed hold of a pretty, dark girl at the next table and whirled her dizzily around, my body feeling as if it could do anything it wanted to. Of course it couldn’t, but it didn’t matter as everyone else was tripping over each other and ricocheting off the walls as we careered around in circles.

Eventually, the band stopped and everyone collapsed back on to their chairs like marionettes with their strings cut.

The Portsmouth yachtsmen then thought they ought to contribute something to the evening’s entertainment and sang a sea shanty. Standing on their chairs, they gave a spirited rendition of ‘Bound for the Rio Grande’, and the musicians struck up behind them. They acquitted themselves pretty well and ended with a rousing let’s-give-the-krauts-a-kicking crescendo amid tumultuous applause. Just then, Asija came out of the kitchen, dragging an old woman wearing a black headscarf – the cook. She was the size and shape of an elderly Susan Boyle and was protesting volubly, but the protest seemed to be a token one, as, once on the podium, she took off her shawl and launched into a heart-breakingly soulful rendition of a
Svedlinke
(a kind of love song that always seems to end with
the death of both lovers). Huge applause when it ended, and for her encore she sang a song of gob-smacking lewdness about a cook who bonked anyone who came into her kitchen. Roars of laughter throughout and wild cheering when she finished. She retired back into the kitchen grinning from ear to ear.

‘Must be a lot of fun out here with parties like this!’ shouted one of the Portsmouth sailors. ‘Does this kind of thing happen all the time?’

‘Well… kind of… sometimes…’ I said, not wanting to admit that it was the first party we’d been to.

The Dubrovnikites were now doing a folk dance – one of those one-two-three-hop dances that go round in circles.

‘Interesting that folk dances in this part of the world always seem to go round in circles,’ said one of the yachtsmen to an elderly guest sitting next to us. ‘I’d have thought that one of your immigrations would have brought some criss-crossing variation or something that goes in lines.’

‘In Dubrovnik, the only immigrants have been the Jews, and they dance in circles, too,’ the old man replied.

It was past midnight when we left with the men from Portsmouth, and the musicians were still playing. After wending our way along the waterfront in a not very straight line, we left them at their yacht and continued on home. What a pleasure it was to come to a courtyard bathed in moonlight and look up at the ink-blue bowl studded with stars above us. We went up the silvery steps and I took Ivana’s hand and pointed. ‘Look. Can you see the Corona Borealis twinkling up there? Dionysus loved Ariadne so much that he put her bridal crown of jewels in the night sky for everyone to see.’

‘Well, I can’t remember you giving me any jewels for our wedding. All I ever got was that Magimix!’

Once in the bedroom, while Ivana rustled around the
bathroom, I dropped my clothes on the floor and tumbled on to the crisp, cool sheets, thinking how wonderful it would be if we could live here for ever. Surely, with more evenings like this, it would all turn out well. Surely the community would accept us one day. The moonlight flickered through the shutters and on to the wall as I lay listening to the murmur of the sea mingling with the sound of the fishing boats creaking gently at rest, and drifted off to sleep.

I
n June, our friends Richard and Sophia came to stay. They had bought a house on the neighbouring island, and I had been over to help them buy it, but they were now having problems getting their title to it registered. As was often the case on the islands, their house had been abandoned around 1900 after
Peranospera
, the dreaded vine disease, had wiped out the vineyards of the Adriatic. It had created such a famine that nearly three quarters of the island population had been forced to leave the lands they had tilled for centuries and emigrate, mainly to the west coast of America where vineyards and fishing fleets needed men. Within ten years, the Vis population had reduced from 10,000 to 2,500, and a hundred years later the descendants of the owners of the abandoned houses often couldn’t be traced. This, of course, threw up no end of problems when it came to conveyancing. Richard had paid for the house, but he couldn’t register his ownership and the sellers couldn’t pocket all the
money until the missing branch of the family was found. Richard and Sophia had come over to Vis to meet the member of the family who was trying to track down the missing relatives.

As I sat on the terrace the next morning, munching my cornflakes and waiting for Richard, I felt an almost childish glee at not having to grab my breakfast and rush off to work. For the past thirty years, I’d never had time for a proper breakfast or to chat with Ivana or the children. It was my own fault. I’d always been in such a rush. Looking back on it now, I realised I’d neglected to do an awful lot of things I should have done. I now feared that perhaps this lifetime of neglect was going to haunt me. I was already missing the children terribly, even though we rang them regularly (and they rang us often, too, to check that I hadn’t lost their mother at sea). Ivana would talk to them first, to make sure they were OK for underwear, and when she’d finished I’d have long chats with them, but it just wasn’t the same as seeing them.

My thoughts were interrupted by Richard coming out with his bowl of cereal. He sat down next to me and looked thoughtfully out to sea. ‘Are you sure I won’t get bored out here?’ he said, almost to himself.

‘I used to worry about that, too, but so far I haven’t been bored for a moment.’

‘Hmm. It’s just that I do find it quite difficult to take things easy.’

‘So did I when I arrived, old chap, but taking things easy seems to be my strong point these days. Maybe it always was, and I’ve spent my last thirty years in denial!’

Richard laughed, but he didn’t look too convinced.

After breakfast, we went over to Marko’s to meet the member of the family who was in a great state of excitement. The missing cousin had died some years ago, having had no children, he
announced. Of course, Richard and I summoned up our suitably serious faces and began to express our condolences, but he threw up his hands, laughing. ‘Now I am such happy man! Now I have all of money!’

Richard, being both a worrier and a lawyer, was hugely relieved, and, after downing a celebratory coffee with the man, we went off home. Passing the square by the Town Hall, we saw a crew of men pulling up flagstones and putting up a wooden construction and stopped to look. As usual, a collection of villagers were standing around telling the men how they should be doing their jobs, and Marko was among them. ‘They say it will be an open-air café,’ he told us, ‘but how can a café pay for all this work? It would take ten years for my café to pay it off.’

‘Look at that bar top,’ said the local carpenter. ‘That’s polished Slovenian oak, a fortune’s worth of wood!’

‘And it’s so wide you could dance on it!’ said someone else.

‘Maybe we’ll have dancing girls on our island at last?’ said the carpenter. ‘I’ve been telling you for years, Marko. What you need to jazz up your old café is girls with no…’

Marko frowned and indicated the presence of Karmela and two other grannies, but Karmela hadn’t heard the carpenter and was pointing to a sign that read ‘Men at Work’.

‘
Men
at work! Pah! There ought to be a sign outside every house in the village saying “Women at Work”. That’s all we ever do, while our men sit around and talk!’

‘Be fair, Karmela,’ said Bozo, who had joined the gathering. ‘Look how I put up with my mother-in-law and help Nora with her whenever she’s with us.’

Not accustomed to being challenged in public, Karmela shot him one of her eagle looks. ‘Putting up with a mother-in-law once in a while, are we? Hah! Well, putting up with an awful lot all year round is all we women ever do!’

Bozo knew better than to argue back, and Marko, always the diplomat, quickly moved the discussion back to the construction work.

Richard and I left the discussion and continued on our way. At Dinko’s, the town’s newsagent and stationer, we went inside to buy a paper. Coming in from the bright sunshine, we couldn’t see too well at first and didn’t notice her, but, as our eyes got accustomed to the gloom, we realised that an exquisitely beautiful girl was behind the counter, the kind of dark-eyed, raven-haired beauty you see in perfume adverts standing in front of tropical waterfalls with a flower behind her ear. For some reason, she smiled at us, and the effect was instantaneous. It was as if the sun had burst from behind a cloud; it was the kind of smile that could make a traffic warden tear up a ticket or put a grin on the face of Gordon Brown – or even Boyana. It certainly stopped two late-middle-aged Englishmen dead in their tracks. Flustered, I took a sudden great interest in a magazine rack consisting entirely of car, truck and muscle-building magazines (men do tend to be rather uber-blokey down here), and from that vantage point I observed her surreptitiously. She had that pouty-lipped and slightly sulky expression common in those under twenty, but when she smiled her face was transformed into the face of a mischievous Botticelli angel. (Sexy, I suppose, is what I’m really trying to say.)

Richard stood there with his mouth open, and the girl, thinking something was amiss, asked if he needed any help. He stuttered something incomprehensible in English and I quickly mumbled something about forgetting my wallet and we left. We were back within the hour with a lot of urgent photocopying that needed to be done.

One of the benefits of being over fifty is that you can start up a conversation with a pretty girl without making them feel
uncomfortable, and, over the swish and clunk of the photocopy machine, Tanya told us that she had finished university in Zagreb, but, as she hadn’t been able to find a job, she was back with her parents again. The trouble with that, she confided, was that all the interesting young men on the island had gone to the mainland and the ones left behind were pretty limited. She also confided that she was worried she was taking it out on her father whom she adored. Richard and I made suitably avuncular noises and she gave a shrug of her delicate shoulders and pouted at us so delightfully that my knees almost gave way.

On the way home, we saw Ivana and Sophia talking with Marin on the quay.

‘There’s someone in the photocopy shop, who you’ve just got to meet,’ I said to Marin.

‘Oh, really?’ he replied in an oddly off-hand way.

‘She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,’ added Richard.

‘Maybe I’ve seen her already. I can’t remember.’

‘You’d remember if you saw this one!’ said Richard. ‘She looks like Penelope Cruz and she’s got…’

Sophia shot him a look that stopped him in mid-sentence.

‘I’ll introduce you,’ I said smugly. ‘I’m on quite good terms with her, I think.’

‘Thanks, but don’t worry,’ he said diffidently. ‘I’ve probably seen her around already. You don’t have any matt varnish, do you?’

‘Er, I think I do somewhere. I’ll have a look when I get home.’

He smiled politely, picked up his tool bag and left.

Our wives rounded on us.

‘How could you both be so insensitive?’ said Ivana.

‘Couldn’t you see the look on his face when you were going on about her figure, Richard?’ said Sophia. ‘How can you be so dense?’

‘Um…’

‘Poor Marin. He looked so embarrassed. Wasn’t it obvious he was already keen on her? Couldn’t you see he was trying to change the conversation?’

‘Er, no, not really.’

The wives went off, tutting to each other.

‘Are we really that insensitive?’ I asked Richard.

‘Hmm, I always thought I wasn’t entirely without emotional awareness.’

‘Maybe the know-how fades when it’s not your bag anymore?’

‘Well, as no one’s fancied me for so long, it probably has,’ sighed Richard.

‘Oh, I don’t know. As late-middle-aged men go, we still cut quite a dash, don’t you think? There must be some out there who still find the weathered Sanders of the River type something of a turn-on.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly got the right baggy shorts, but I must say that I’ve always put you down as more of a Graham Greene colonial-seeking-solace-in-the-bottle type.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But we shouldn’t delude ourselves. We might think we’re wearing pretty well, but, as the saying goes, we’re just about invisible to anyone we might fancy.’

‘Suppose you’re right,’ I said. ‘Here I am thinking I look like a slightly jaded version of Ralph Fiennes, but what I really look like is a silly, sad, old sod.’

‘Sad, yes. Old, yes. Silly, certainly,’ said Richard, laughing. ‘Look at the two of us! Two sad old gits in our M&S “Blue Harbour” summer wear still thinking that someone might fancy us. What could be sadder than that?’

We went home to get a drink.

As usual in these matters, the wives were right, and during the week I noticed that Marin was spending most of his time at the café beside Dinko’s stationery shop rather than at Marko’s, his usual haunt. But Marin had competition. The word had quickly spread that Tanya was there, and a steady stream of young men were coming into the shop and they didn’t look the sort who were too interested in stationery products.

A few days later, the four of us were sitting at Marko’s when Marin came up to ask if I needed any odd jobs done during the winter.

‘It seems such a long way to come for very little money,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t really be worth your while coming down from Sarajevo.’

Richard agreed.

As soon as he had gone, our wives rounded on us again.

‘How can you always fail to see anything? Isn’t it obvious he’s got another reason for coming here in the winter? What’s wrong with you men? Honestly! How did you two ever manage to make a living?’

‘Well, we’re both action men, not cognitive conceptualists,’ I answered huffily. ‘Names like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood rather than Graham Norton and Sigmund Freud come to people’s minds when my friend Richard and I are mentioned.’

Richard and I went off to console ourselves with some of Zoran’s beer. I do find beer such a help when it comes to understanding matters beyond my usual ken, and over two of Zoran’s
Karlovacs
we came to two conclusions. One – that we were perhaps a bit slow on the uptake when it came to matters of the heart. Two – that our wives seldom missed an opportunity to point out our failings.

Despite the smoke-screen of insensitivity that he habitually deployed, Zoran didn’t miss much, and he quickly spotted that
something was up with Marin. I caught him in the street outside Dinko’s pretending to adjust his bicycle seat but surreptitiously peering inside. I came up quietly behind him and said, ‘I saw you!’

Zoran jumped, but quickly regained his composure. ‘Just checkin’ what Marin’s gettin’ himself into,’ he drawled. ‘She was a little stringy thing goin’ off to college last time I saw her, but she sure looks OK today!’

Bozo was coming across the square and Zoran beckoned him over. ‘Have you seen Dedo and Draga’s girl?’

‘The skinny one who went off to Zagreb, you mean?’

‘Yes. That’s the one. Take a look in the shop.’

He went inside and emerged a moment later to give a low whistle and say the equivalent in Croatian of ‘Cor stripe me pink!’

Marin’s rivals still trailed in and out of the shop, but he stepped up his presence as if staking out a territorial claim, and every few days he asked our advice. We found ourselves watching the progress of his suit with certain vicarious pleasure. Their youth, their affection and Marin’s plans for their future together made us feel quite parental – a mixture of happiness and concern – and in a funny way it gave us our first feeling of belonging to our new community.

I had given a lot of thought to the matter of ‘belonging’ since arriving here. Strangely enough, the house never gave me a sense that it ‘belonged’ to me. I might have renovated it, given it a new roof and rebuilt the sea wall, but I never felt I possessed it. It felt more as if it was keeping an eye on me. The stones I had laid, the pillars I had erected, the balconies and porticos I had rebuilt were just watching me while I eked out my time here, and it gave me rather an eerily existential feeling. I know that London
has been around for just as long, but somehow it never gave me the same sense of mortality and continuity of life – it certainly didn’t in Fulham. But, standing here on the terrace, wherever I looked there were reminders of the passing centuries – outlines of settlements, Roman ruins, terraces of ancient vines, remains of fortifications – and, when the traces of life’s continuity are so omnipresent, it’s hard not to feel that you have a place in the continuum, whether your name is Stancomb or Stankovic.

Late in June, we were on the balcony watching the sun go down when we saw Marin and Tanya walking along the promontory. With the lowering red sun behind them, they resembled cut-out silhouettes; Marin so tall and broad-shouldered and Tanya so slim and lissom. It was as if they were taking part in a Biblical play about the love of Ruth and Boaz and the awesomely beautiful surroundings were just there to provide them with a backdrop.

‘Now, there’s a union that must have been destined,’ said Ivana, as Marin bent to kiss Tanya’s forehead. ‘Do you think we looked as romantic walking hand in hand down the Kings Road in our flares?’