Under a Croatian Sun (18 page)

Karmela said that, despite his political past, Constantin should be in the Town Hall. ‘They wouldn’t be doing all those stupid things they do if he was there. He’s the cleverest man on the island, that young Constantin. But he was such a weak child when he was little. All skin and bones he was. But his mother fed him well, even though they were poor. She had to borrow the money to do it, but she made him egg custards and strained meat to make him beef juice. And he always studied so hard at school, he did; unlike that fat, lazy sister of his who never gets
off her sofa except to go and buy herself cakes at the corner store. Pah! And he never wasted his time running around after silly girls in Split like those cousins of his – that fool Josip and that lying toad Simeon who went to prison last year for stealing his mother’s car. No, Constantin was always studying or helping his mother. I can’t think why he’s still not married.’

‘Hmm. Don’t you think he might be a kind of a Switzerland where relationships are concerned?’

Karmela gave me a funny look and scuttled off into the garden.

I
was now spending a lot of time on my Internet cooking course, but I still hadn’t found premises. I thought I’d found one some weeks earlier when an old fisherman agreed to let me have his place if I gave him a year’s rent up front, but, after some covert investigation (I didn’t want to lay myself open to global ribbing from Ranko quite yet), I found that no restaurants were allowed in that part of the village. The crafty old codger had known that all along and was just trying to get the year’s rent out of me before I found out. I confronted him about it, but all I got was a gap-toothed grin and a shrug.

In need of some sympathy, I went home to tell Ivana, but as she wasn’t there I told Karmela instead. But I should have known that Karmela wasn’t in the business of dispensing pity, and what I got instead was the most frightful fustigation for ignoring her advice about doing business with fishermen. When she’d finished, she pointed a knobbly finger at me and said,
‘And you make sure your children never marry anyone from a fisherman’s family. Danilo Matusek let his girl marry a fisherman’s boy last year and he’s never seen a cent from all the money he gave them for a share in their laundrette. Not a cent!’

I promised to watch the children vigilantly, but she hadn’t finished with me.

‘And I just don’t know what’s going to happen when Marin and Tanya get engaged. That mother of hers is such a mean one. When the school went swimming, she never even let my grandchildren borrow her daughters’ rubber rings. There’ll be precious little she’ll part with when it comes to the marriage settlement, I can tell you.’ She gave one of her snorts.

‘Don’t worry, Karmela. I’ll be Marin’s coach when it comes to that.’

Karmela sniffed and went off to bang some pots around in the scullery.

Still trying to get Ivana enthused about my restaurant idea, I was talking about it in the car when she suddenly sat up in her seat. ‘I know! We should start a vineyard, not a restaurant! Look at all the vineyards around us! That’s what they’ve been doing here since time began – making wine; not cooking!’

‘Steady the Buffs! We don’t know anything about winegrowing.’

‘I’m sure we can learn.’

‘Did I hear you say
we
, my sweet pea? I don’t see you with a jaunty red kerchief tied round your pretty head tossing around pitchforks of vine leaves or bouncing baskets of grapes about on your none too ample hips. Are you assuming that
I’ll
be doing all the work?’

‘I’m sure we could hire someone.’

‘Well, as fishing seems to be the only other island occupation
and I don’t want to end up with a complexion like a fisherman, I suppose it’s a vineyard then. There’ll certainly be enough land for sale. Marko says no one wants to farm these days.’

I warmed to the idea as I drove towards the village, picturing myself leaning against farm gates with gnarled fellow winegrowers on warm summer evenings, complaining about leaf spot, grape droop and the weather.

‘And having a vineyard will be a great way of fitting into the community,’ said Ivana. ‘Much better than running a restaurant!’

By the time we got home, I was picturing myself striding down my vineyard rows on dewy morns wearing Polo Ralph Lauren britches and one of those Harrison Ford hats, and by the evening I saw myself sitting on the harbour benches with the other seasoned winegrowers exchanging wise words about the future harvest and knowledgably discussing sugar content and acidity levels. And what about the movie with Joaquin Phoenix playing Zoran, the rough and ready
patron
with the heart of gold, Colin Firth playing the understanding priest, and a guest appearance by myself as the slightly jaded but still winsomely attractive winegrower who is secretly fancied by the Mayor’s daughter?

Ivana was right again. It was so obvious. The islanders were winegrowers. How would they not accept us once we were fellow winegrowers? A new path had opened up, and it could be a lot of fun. Why hadn’t we thought of it before?

The next day, I drove up to Constantin.

‘That’s just the kind of project I was thinking of,’ he said, screwing the top on to yet another jar of pickled paprika.

‘I was hoping you’d say that. I know absolutely nothing about winegrowing.’

His eyes glittered behind his specs. ‘The conditions here are
ideal for strong wine. The sun provides the heat to warm the rocky soil and the porous limestone absorbs the rain and stores it up for the roots to suck up later. Before the
Peranospera
blight killed our vines, the island was covered in their terraces. Half of them have been here since the time of Christ, and we were producing more wine here than in any other place on in the Mediterranean. But after the blight, with most of the population gone, we’ve only cultivated the low land. It’s about 25 per cent of what we used to grow.’

He poured me some wine and we drank to our new venture. ‘With the few acres I’ve got here and a few more on richer soil, together we’ll make some really good wine! And we should make it organic. That’ll make it something special and we’ll get a better grant from the EU. You need a grant to start a vineyard these days, anyway. A new vineyard isn’t commercially viable without one.’ He gestured to the Renault. ‘And, by the look of your car, you’re going to need as big a grant as you can get!’

So the plan was laid and we had our partner. All we needed now was the land and the grant, so the next day Ivana rang the Ministry of Agriculture about the grant, while Constantin and I went off to scout out some suitable land.

Ivana had no luck with the Ministry, but discovered that they were shortly sending a fact-finding mission to Vis. I went round to the Town Hall to see if I could arrange to meet them, but the Mayor wasn’t too keen. However, when I heard him telling one of his men that he didn’t have enough transport to take them up to the farms, I quickly offered the services of the Renault, and got his agreement.

As soon as the delegation arrived, we set off for the hills in a cavalcade of two – the one municipal mini-van that was in working order and the Renault. Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the farm of Old Sime, a local veteran farmer and
winegrower. His farmyard could have been mistaken for the stage set of a punk opera. Its walls were so covered in dung that it looked like someone had applied it with a trowel, and in the middle of the yard was a car, a washing machine and a muck-spreader that seemed to have collided together to form the kind of sculpture you see at the Tate Modern. Further along was a collection of rusty Ukrainian tractors leaning drunkenly against each other with vertical exhaust pipes sticking forlornly into the air as if trying to intercept messages from outer space. Behind them was the sheep pen where Old Sime, whose face bore evidence of a lifetime of toiling under the sun and behind a flock of farting sheep, seemed quite unconcerned with our arrival. He went on squelching about in his boots and left the delegation to range themselves gingerly around the pen trying to dodge the splashes and asking questions. He grunted his replies to them over his shoulder and continued shovelling.

Twenty minutes later, I was driving back to the village squashed into the Renault with four baffled functionaries and a disconsolate Mayor. The Mayor, who had been counting on Old Sime to toe the line and say what subsidies he and other farmers needed, was apologising profusely for his lack of cooperation. Old Sime’s indifference puzzled me, too, but that evening, after the delegation had left on the ferry and the cabal gathered at the bar, Zoran put the matter into perspective.

‘You can’t expect a man knee deep in sheep shit, and knowing that’s where he’s going to stay for the rest of his life, to take much interest in men in suits talking about some new legislation that’s only going to be changed again when the next lot get voted in.’

‘Yes, he’s seen it all before,’ said Zvonko. ‘He knows that, once they’ve done their bit of championing the Croatian farmer
today, they’ll be back in Zagreb tomorrow with the Croatian farmer forgotten and worrying about the down payment on their next Mercedes and their wife’s Botox treatment.’

‘But surely it would be better for Old Sime if they got the policy right, even if only for a year or two,’ I interjected.

‘What do you care? You don’t belong here,’ came a voice from the end of the bar. I’d seen the man before, a foxy-faced chap with one of those pudding-bowl haircuts you see in forties war movies.

Ivana turned on him, claws fully extended. ‘My family have lived in this country for as long as…’

Zoran stepped swiftly between them and ushered Ivana outside. Coming back in again, he went over to the man. ‘That was damned rude of you, Bruno. You should be ashamed of yourself. How can you talk to your neighbours like that? That’s not
kulturni
!’ (The word ‘un-cultured’ was a grave insult in Communist days.)

The man looked sheepish and mumbled something into his beer.

Ivana came back inside and smouldered on the other side of the room. I went over to the man, who was now as embarrassed as I was, and tried to explain that it was as natural to take an interest in your local politics as it was in your local football team. I think he got my point – at least I got a grunted half-apology – but he evaded any further discussion by retreating behind his beer and a screen of Walter Wolf smoke. Ivana was glaring at him as if he was an insect pinned to a board, so I thought it best to take her home and leave Zoran to pour oil on troubled waters.

‘That man was incredibly rude. I felt like hitting him,’ she said as soon as we were outside.

‘That was fairly evident.’

‘And he only lives in the next street; so it isn’t as if he didn’t know who we were.’

‘Yes, that was the worrying part. But you needn’t have gone at him like that. You must try to control yourself. We can’t afford to antagonise anyone.’

‘Well, he was rude to us first, and we shouldn’t put up with that kind of thing. We should stand up for ourselves.’

‘That’s just what we shouldn’t do, for heaven’s sake! That’s just the way to start a conflict. They’re standoffish enough as it is, without you starting a war.’

‘You shouldn’t be so ingratiating. People take advantage of you.’

‘Well, I’m only nice to people I need to be nice to,’ I said crossly.

‘I call that ingratiating.’

‘Call it what you want, but, like it or not, that’s what we’ll have to do until we’re accepted.’

‘Well, if they’re going to take that kind of attitude when all we’re doing is taking an interest in what’s going on,
I’m
not going to turn the other cheek, and you shouldn’t either!’

By the time we arrived home, the argument had petered out. Our arguments seldom came to any particular resolution. Like most people who have co-habited for a long time, our arguments usually faded away and, by the time they recommenced, both of us would have slightly shifted our viewpoints.

Karmela, who had seen us talking with the delegation, arrived the next morning with her granite faced etched with concern.

‘I’m sure it’s not the same with your politicians in England, but, whatever our politicians promise, they never do. Don’t you believe a word of anything they tell you.’

I refrained from saying that it wasn’t really that different back home. I didn’t want to spoil the image they have here of well-dressed, polite Englishmen sitting around in Westminster smoking pipes, drinking cups of tea and earnestly deliberating how to make the world a better place. I think we ought to keep that image going.

That afternoon, Ivana rang the Ministry on the number the delegation had given me, but the man she talked to was curt and unhelpful. Before they would even look at an application, he said, we had to belong to the Croatian Winegrowers Association, and, because we were foreigners, the British Government would have to vouch for us. ‘This will involve several different departments,’ he said with evident pleasure, ‘and, as we are accustomed to applicants who already have vineyards and you don’t, how can we process your application with no production figures to back it up?’

We rang off and looked at each other in despond. Without a vineyard, we couldn’t get a grant and, without a grant, we couldn’t get a vineyard. Another Catch 22 situation.

That afternoon, determined to start some kind of ball rolling, we went to the Town Hall to apply for membership of the Vis Winegrowers Association. But even that wasn’t easy. We first had to belong to two other associations, we were told by a woman who looked like an unbaked loaf, before she slapped some forms on the counter. By the end of an hour’s form-filling, I realised we were no match for the Croatian Civil Service. It looked like it would be some time before anyone would be suffering a hangover from Stancomb Pinot Noir.

Would any of our ideas ever see the light of day?

And yet another week had gone by and still no sign of Luka the cricketer.

It was hot that night as I lay in bed worrying about the lack of progress with any of my projects. I tried to focus on the good side of island life – the beauty, the food, the boating, the fun and the few friends we’d made, but I kept coming back to the surly faces of Boyana, the fishermen and the unbaked loaf. Hearing Ivana turning over, I said to the ceiling, ‘If the bloody village is never going to accept us, maybe we should go back home and look for something with a few acres in the Home Counties?’

Ivana murmured something about things looking better in the morning and slipped back into sleep while I continued to fret.

I was still fretting as we walked to the market. ‘If I don’t get started on something soon, it’s going to get me down,’ I said peevishly. ‘And, if only I had something to get on with, I’d have someone to moan to. I used to have my cricket mates to moan to on weekends, but the only person I’ve got now is you! I’d have had a captive audience for another twenty years if I’d carried on playing cricket.’

‘Rubbish! You won’t be playing much longer. Look at the trouble you’ve got with your shoulder, and what about your knee?’