style="font-size:15px;"> Apparently, she walked straight into a village marked for retaliation. Nobody knows for sure what happened, just that the twenty-five or so people in town that day, mostly the usual collection of old men, women, and children, were marched deeper into the mountains and shot at the edge of a gorge. My grandfather never got over it. Neither did Bruno, who knows, if ever a man did, how to hate with a passion.
Though all I have to go on is Bruno’s version of the story, Milo, my grandfather, did a good job of raising his motherless son. Several years later, when Germany invaded and the Nazis struck their famous bargain with the founder of the Ustaše and then-ruler of newly independent Croatia, Milo did what he needed to do, choosing to help run a camp for kids to keep young Bruno by his side rather than volunteering for the front lines as he so mightily desired.
When the war ended in 1945, Milo and Bruno, with the help of some friendly Franciscans in Rome, escaped the general massacre at the hands of Tito’s “godless Communist Partisans,” as my mother so affectionately refers to them, and wound up at St. Silvan’s in Chicago. There, they found a community of true believers. Not, I have to say, in God—though of course they didn’t not believe in him—but rather in the superiority of the Croatian culture, which, at least in a certain percentage of Croats, is marked by its intense and self-sacrificial loyalty to the Catholic Church. Milo ate it up. Bruno, with his immense capacity for hate, loathed everything about it. Both of them got jobs in the steel mills, wherein they found a lot of second-generation Croatian immigrants, virtually all of them as starry-eyed as Milo about the beauty, truth, and goodness of the “old country,” which none of them would ever see again.
Milo told Bruno to find a wife. St. Silvan’s had plenty of candidates. So he married Hana, daughter of one of those immigrants, in 1954. Stefan was born a year later. I showed up in 1959. And that, despite Hana’s absolute devotion to the Church (which meant no artificial birth control), was all they wrote in terms of kids.
Here’s what I remember. Stefan, who looks exactly like me only taller, skinnier, and with big horn-rimmed glasses, is eight. I am a self-satisfied four. We are marching in the Velika Gospa procession in honor, as the priest keeps reminding us, of “Our Lady,” as we do every year in August, as Croatians have done since who knows when. Despite the fact that Stefan and I live in America and have always lived in America, he is dressed like a nineteenth-century peasant boy, and I am wearing a traditional old-country village costume, which at this age looks mighty cute on me: big, poofy white sleeves, a long white skirt, a multicolored apron, a funny little embroidered headdress, all assembled by that eminently loyal Croat, Hana. Afterward, we’ll glut ourselves on barbecued lamb, mostaccioli, rizot, sarma, strudels, povitica, fritula, the whole while being serenaded by an endless string of old men playing the tamburitza. I know these guys, if vaguely, from all the time I’ve spent in the local tamburitza bar with my tata and my djed, Bruno and Milo.
They take me to the bar with them at the end of their long work weeks because I tend to ham it up in front of an audience, plus I like to sing and dance. They lift me to the shiny top of the bar counter. My shoes are shiny too—Hana polishes them as if they were the nonexistent family silver—and I like to fling myself around in time to the peppy folk dance music, all of which seems to please the heavy-lidded men. Most of them look like my tata and my djed: serious, even tragic, with their high cheekbones and abundant hair combed straight back, and their eyes that tell you almost nothing, except when they weep, which they often do while they are drinking their šljivovica, their powerful plum brandy. Hoping to cheer them up, I sing a bird-like, four-year-old’s version of the Croatian national anthem, “Our Beautiful Homeland,” and, with a tremendous snuffling and clearing of throats, they all join in.
I love these sad-eyed men, their cigarettes and their šljivovica and their impassive, male faces. I love their smells, which are exactly like the male smells of my tata and my djed, and I feel safe and whole with them. But where is Stefan? Why isn’t Stefan ever along? Even at four, I know they have rejected him, Bruno and Milo. They have cast him out of the family, or would if only Hana let them.
Here’s what else I remember. I am seven and my brother is eleven and we are taking a bus by ourselves to some place in the city I’ve never been, which is really most of Chicago since our family rarely strays from the neighborhood around St. Silvan’s. It’s late in the day and we are both wearing our gray and blue Catholic school uniforms. Stefan seems nervous, probably because I’m along. For several years now, ever since he got his paper route, he’s been making private excursions to who knows where, and I’ve been bugging him for quite some time to take me too so I don’t have to rattle around the house alone with Hana. Which is what happens on most weekdays after school since Tata and Djed only take me to the bar on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. Hana, who is always messing with my hair and giving me lectures about being more ladylike, drives me nuts, so I’m in constant trouble with her these days, a thorn in her otherwise impervious flesh, which makes Bruno appreciate me all the more.
Stefan has finally succumbed to my pleadings, no doubt with trepidation; if anything happens to me while we’re out and about, he knows what our father will do. Hana thinks I’m spoiled (of course I am), but my beef with her is nothing like Stefan’s with his tata. Bruno can barely stand to look at him, except when he’s got an excuse to take off his belt. Stefan has learned to stay out of his way, which means out of Milo’s way too. The two of them are like peas in a pod, Milo simply a smaller, older, and somehow more ominous version of Bruno, though with a lot less English at his disposal. I, who am still so full of charm, so childishly untroubled by any notion of justice, remain perfectly at ease with all three of them.
But more than anything, I love being alone with Stefan, whom I call “Brat,” which means brother in Croatian, a term I think completely hilarious. I give him a complacent glance and pipe, “Brat, where are we going?”
Sunk in his own worried thoughts, he’s been staring out the bus window, but now he looks down at me in his kindly, abstracted way. No matter how hard I push him, no matter how I swashbuckle around the house when Bruno and Milo are there to watch my back, Stefan loves me like nobody else does or ever will. Even at seven, I recognize this. He sees something in me that’s not simply funny or cute or entertaining, but instead hidden and valuable and mysterious, something that even now, at thirty-four, I’ve never yet had a single glimpse of no matter how hard I’ve hunted.
He slings an arm around my narrow little shoulders. “I’m taking you to the art museum,” he says. We spend the next two hours in the Art Institute’s photography collection, and when we emerge into a chill wind off the lake, I am in a state. I have never seen anything so glorious, not in church, not in the interminable Croatian festivals we go to, not in books. Riding the buses home in the dark, suddenly understanding what a price Stefan’s going to pay for this adventure of ours, still and all, I am happy. Silent, entranced with what I’ve seen, I cling to my brother’s hand.
Here’s what I remember. It’s my birthday, I am eight, and for once, everybody seems relaxed. I have agreed without a battle to wear the frilly dress that Hana sewed for me, have even allowed her to put ribbons in my hair. Bruno and Milo are smoking celebratory cigars, a practice normally forbidden within the confines of my mother’s domain. Stefan’s hanging around in the background, looking bashfully pleased with himself. I open my gifts—a light-up Virgin Mary from that eminently predictable Catholic amongst us, a chocolate bar from my silent grandfather, a little green jackknife with a satisfyingly sharp blade from my abnormally boisterous tata. Then Stefan’s, which to my joyous surprise turns out to be a camera, my very first, a Brownie 127 bought with his hard-earned paper route money.
Here’s what else I remember. Milo, my taciturn djed with the give-away-nothing eyes, becoming fixated overnight on fourteen-year-old Stefan. Suddenly wanting to talk with my brat, the same sweet and skinny boy he’s always been, though much taller now, taller even than Bruno. My grandfather standing guard on the porch until my brother appears at the end of the block in his too-short Catholic
