“And this is my grave. What do you think?”
“It’s nice,” I said admiringly of the sizable structure of polished stone.
“It’s big enough for the whole family. And look at the view.”
We turned together to admire the valley, rugged and dramatic. It was a fine panorama to lure and reward surviving family to come visit my cousin after he died.
I visited my living cousin twice in the 1970’s. He passed in the early eighties. Panorama notwithstanding, I never made it back to admire his grave once his body had taken up residence.
Pete Zarko was my father’s name. It was also the name of his first cousin who lived in California’s Santa Clara Valley for twenty years beginning in 1909. Both my father and his elder brother Tony adored Cousin Pete. In family circles, he was the stuff of legend.
Tony (aka Bill) and Marian, world travelers by disposition, went to Herzegovina in 1967, I think it was, to see Pete. Bill (aka Tony) could talk of almost nothing else for a year.
Petar Zarak – as he received his mail in Ravno – returned to Yugoslavia in 1929 to find a wife. The economic crash probably kept him there. He found a good partner in Stoja, however, and when I first met them in 1972, they radiated contentment. I had connected up with their son in Dubrovnik, and together we took the train to Ravno. The name of the town means “flat”. It’s a joke. The town clings to the side of a mountain.
In Ravno, we were invited to snack with other cousins, to whom I was related in ways too complicated for me to retain, then we went to a little park where a trail into the mountains began. The trail wound through the rocky landscape for about a kilometer, then it turned to a slightly beaten track, and finally it disappeared. At that point you had to have someone with you who knew the way, for no path could form on such terrain.
I had written Pete from the United States saying that I was going to visit “sometime after Easter”. It was now mid-July, I think. Technically, my estimated time of arrival was still correct, but there was no reason he should have been expecting me at that particular time. I had just contacted his son a couple of days before, and my cousins of unknown provenance had mentioned that Pete had not been to Ravno in almost a week. So it was that our group of three rounded the last bend in the invisible trail to the tiny village of Gaic, and there in its first of six houses, stood Pete in his front door and Stoja at the door to her summer kitchen.
“Well, now,” he said in perfect English, “who the devil might this be?” Stoja, to whom all English was jabber, and probably profane, wrapped me in an embrace made complex by the shawls and aprons she always wore. She smelled sweetly of wood smoke. She treated me to an embrace every few minutes the whole time I was there. By sunset I understood why Uncle Bill had made the trip, and why Pete was so adored.
Gaic nights were dark in 1972. There was no electricity, few people. The sky showed more stars than I thought were visible. The sound of silence was intense. Pete lit a lamp in the winter kitchen, and Stoja prepared a dinner of fried cheese preserved in olive oil, salad, and a kind of sausage. Pete sat with me on the sofa and asked questions.
“Is that vineyard still there, the one on Stevens Creek and Stelling?”
“No, that’s a community college now. In fact, I went there my freshman year.”
“That was the Beaulieu Winery, very beautiful place. I worked there sometime. Is Le Petit Trianon still there?”
“It needs restoration, but it’s still there. Behind the library.”
“Library?”
“It’s a college?”
“Oh yes. And there was Seven Springs Ranch, Bubb’s place, they’d hire me to prune. Wow, such a beautiful valley. Perfect conditions for agriculture. Spring water everywhere, rich soil, ideal climate. What a paradise.”
“Things have changed in the last twenty years.”
“That’s what Tony said. Hard for me to imagine.”
“For me, too.”
“And the winery on… what was it? They had a fire in October, 1923.”
And so it went every evening until we could remain awake no more. When he would run out of questions, he’d tell me stories from the Old Testament until a memory appeared, then ask more questions. Most I had no answers for. His knowledge of the valley was perfectly preserved from twenty years before I was born.
“Who do you speak English with? Someone else in Gaic, in Ravno?”
“I subscribe to Time Magazine. By the time it arrives, the news is a month old, but it tells me how the language changes, and helps me to remember it. Those were wonderful times. Your father and uncle, wonderful boys. Your grandmother, my goodness, the best cook in the world…” then, in case Stoja had somehow understood, “…except for my girlfriend, here,” and Stoja pretended to be annoyed and, in Croatian, accused him of swearing.
“Swearing! Hellfire and damnation! There, that’s your swearing!” and he laughed, and she laughed, and so did I.
I stayed four or five days that time. There are so many astonishing memories from that short visit, and I will parse a few out in subsequent posts. I returned in the spring of 1975 and stayed another few days. Electricity had arrived. There was a road in the village, vehicle-worthy, but a short way out of town it lost itself in the ruggedness of the terrain.
“They didn’t ask if we wanted to go anywhere,” mused Pete, “and they didn’t make it possible for us to go, even if we’d wanted to.”
My first trip to Europe in ’72 was largely by thumb, though I also took trains, planes, and boats when needed. My second in ’75 was spent mostly in Firenze, and I dropped down to visit family for a month towards the end. When I departed on that second journey, I left my Uncle Bill quite ill with cancer. He had been in the hospital for awhile, and when I saw him at home to say goodbye, I was convinced that we would not meet again in the flesh. As I was leaving, he called after me.
“You’ll see cousin Pete, won’t you?”
“I’m going to try.”
“See him. Tell him I said hello.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“And I want a hello back. Bring one back with you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
I left home in late February, saw Pete and Stoja in May, returned to California in June. Uncle Bill called hours later.
“When you coming over to see me?”
“Tomorrow, maybe later today?”
“Right now, okay?” I could hear my aunt in the background, “He’s just off the plane, you know what that’s like, let him come tomorrow.”
“Okay, I’ll be right over.”
He looked good that day. He was dressed, and met me in the little unused, unfinished stump of Iowa Street that abutted their property to the north. The weather was beautiful. I imagined that he’d recovered. We shook hands, he smiled. “So, tell me all about cousin Pete,” and he took me into the backyard where we could sit, and I told him what I could remember while he asked questions.
A day or two later, he died.
Photo: amazingly a search on Gaic yielded a photo! The two levels of red roof to the far right was Petar and Stoja’s house. The road to nowhere was obviously extended and changes the look and connectedness of the entire village, but Gaic is essentially as I remember it.