Here, everywhere you turn, are to be found kinsmen and kinswomen extending outwards in ever-increasing circles, like ripples on a pond when you throw a stone into it until, in the end, rather like the family of Queen Victoria which covers over two pages of small print in Whitaker’s Almanack, almost everyone is your kin.
This village could have been the prototype of any village in the Kras. Its stone houses, huddled together as if for mutual protection, had walls feet thick, most of them hidden away in walled courtyards behind heavy oak doors under high, carved stone archways. These courtyards, havens in which the owners and their animals shelter from the rigours of the climate and modern Yugoslavia outside, are full of flowers in summer, something about which Slovenes are quite dotty. (My mother-in-law once, at the age of eighty, brazenly took cuttings inside one of the temperate houses in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew which did very well in her garden in the Kras.) Overlooking the courtyard, at the upper storey, a wooden balcony runs the whole length of the front of the house with an outside staircase leading up to it, and this balcony and the staircase leading up to it are also full of flowers – asters, dahlias, pansies and geraniums, mostly displayed, as are the ones in the courtyard, in old tin cans with their lids cut off.
The bedrooms look out on to the balcony. The old-fashioned ones are furnished with big dark wooden or iron beds some of which weigh up to three or four hundred pounds. They stand on scrubbed wooden floors and the walls are hung with photographs of immediate ancestors that look as if they have been taken as well as framed by the local undertakers. Younger married people now have flashier furniture, wardrobes and beds with veneer and lots of mirrors, but the women, young or old, unless they are Party members, will have hung a print of the Virgin above the bed as an insurance against misfortune and, perhaps, excessive high jinks.
In the centre of the village is the church, with a white bell tower rising above it to one side and sometimes with the bell rope swinging in the breeze under an arch at the foot of it.
Nothing that the Government or the Party could do after the war, when Yugoslavia became officially communist, to stop the people, particularly the women, in these villages from going to church, was even remotely successful. In the years from 1945 onwards, when priests were forbidden to wear vestments and say mass, they went to the church just the same and simply stood inside it in a silent gesture of defiance and disapproval. When transport to distant places of pilgrimage to which they were accustomed to go was denied them, they set off for them on foot.
Wanda’s kinswoman worked as a waitress in a gostilna, a village inn. Its courtyard was shielded from the sun by a trellis of vines so thick that those sitting beneath it were in perpetual twilight. Under it men were playing cards, slapping them down on the tables and making a great deal of noise. One of the characteristics of the Slovene language, at least up here on the Kras, is that those who speak it often sound as if they are engaged in a violent quarrel when, in fact, they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. Also under the vines there was a bowling alley made of rolled earth. In such a place the only woman on view is usually the waitress. The gostilna is like a London club, a man’s world.
From the terrace of the inn, long, stone-walled expanses of rock with a bit of earth in them masquerading as fields, and interspersed with windbreaks of young trees, swept up to the foot of the mountains, the Nanos, and the Javornik. The Nanos with its bare, high summit covered, as it often is, with what looked like a wig of white cloud; the Javornik, to the south of the gap through which the road and railway run eastwards to Ljubljana, covered with dense forest which still harbours within its fastnesses red deer, wild boar, wolves and what are some of the last European brown bear.
Marija, Wanda’s soi-disante kinswoman, was a widow of indeterminate age, good-looking, if not positively sexy, in a black, widow’s-weedy sort of way. She took us into the building and sat us down at a table in a pale, austere room of which the only other occupants were four fierce-looking young men in blue overalls, who looked as if they might be off duty from a filling station and were playing the same game that was being played on the terrace, a form of whist, slamming the cards down on the table as if they were practising to cut it in quarters with a karate chop, making the rafters ring with cries of what was either rage or triumph.
In one corner there was a big white-tiled wood-burning stove with a long, silver-painted metal pipe extending up from it and across the width of the room and then out into the open air through a hole in the outer wall, which would ensure that the room was always stiflingly hot in winter, however cold it was outside. Old-fashioned lace curtains effectively obstructed what would have been the same view from the windows that one could enjoy outside on the terrace, and the walls, which had been stencilled with a pale apple-green pattern on a white background, rollers being used for this purpose, were hung with the stuffed heads of various sorts of small game, game that were now completely extinct a few miles away over the border in Italy. (It is a paradox that the enthusiasm of the communist apparat for the chase organized on capitalist lines, to the exclusion of the hoi polloi, has led in many communist countries to a positive proliferation of species that in many capitalist countries in Europe have long since become extinct.)
There was also an astonishing profusion of what can only be described as Victorian potted plants, aspidistras, castor oil plants and such, all standing on rather wobbly whatnots. It was all terribly melancholy and over everything hung a faint but palpable, slightly acid smell, compounded of Slavonic cooking, cigarettes, drainage and other elements, difficult to identify, let alone describe, but once inhaled never forgotten. It was a room that was the prototype of a room in a village inn anywhere between the one in which we were now sitting near the eastern shores of the Adriatic, and the Volga.
Here in the Kras, in spite of the heat and the vines heavy with black grapes, not more than twenty miles from its shores, one felt the Mediterranean world receding, could sense that people were no longer looking to it either for sustenance or inspiration, but to Middle Europe.
Having seated us at the table Marija hurried away and after a bit returned carrying a tray on which there was a litre bottle of red wine, a plate of the local ham called pršut, so thinly sliced that it was almost transparent, and a kind of flat, crusty bread called pogača, which she proceeded to cut up, meanwhile making pantomime gestures of eating and drinking to me, reinforcing them with little cries in Italian, which she had somehow got it into her head I was unfamiliar with, of ‘Bere! Mangiare!’, using an infinitive form commonly reserved for cretins, monoglot soldiers of invading armies and infants still at the breast. The pogača was hot from the wood oven, which was outside in the back yard. The pršut was delicious, a rare delicacy. The smoking of this sort of ham is usually carried out in late autumn or in winter and the process of preparing it is only commenced at the time of the full moon. At any other time an inferior product will result. Like many other peasant communities around the Mediterranean, and also elsewhere, the inhabitants of the Kras are still to a great extent governed by the moon in their everyday life. No one used to be surprised, for instance, when one of the apparently robust wooden bedsteads, bought by a newly married couple, disintegrated if it was purchased at the time of the new moon. No other fate could be expected for it. But that was in the past. Now, in the 1980s, bedsteads disintegrated whatever phase the moon was in.
To prepare this ham it was first kept in salt for a week, then it was put in what looked a bit like an old-fashioned letter press for another week, the pressure being increased daily. It was then hung in a chimney to smoke over a fire of ash wood and after that it was hung for anything from seven months to a year in a dry place, having been previously sprinkled with pepper as a protection against flies which, together with dampness, were its principal enemies. By the time a pršut reached Trieste, a good one was about as expensive as smoked salmon.
The wine was Teran, the product of a close circle of about a dozen villages north of the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana, between the Nanos range and the present frontier with Italy. It is a deep purple colour, almost black, with a taste that some people, when they first try it, compare to that of rusty
