A roadtrip commences with five people who would not ordinarily be in the same room with each other, but have somehow decided, heedlessly, to undertake a roadtrip through the Balkans. Lucrezia and Ludovico are a couple (barely); Roberto—the book’s hero—and Claudia are a couple (barely); and Mira, a humorless young woman from Holland, is along for the ride. The Slovenian part of the adventure begins as Lucrezia, a former supemodel, is chasing after cats for an idea she had for a coffee-table book.
Lucrezia saw a cat. Her project had evolved: who cared about the provinces of Italy when the book could go international! International Cat, she pronounced, was the new title. She would make up little stories about each cat, who would have a name in the language of the country featured. Children will love this book, she assured Roberto. A clean, well-cared-for orange-and-white tabby was preening in the sun near a postcard tree in Pirano, and Lucrezia gave pursuit. Here, kitty- kitty . . . Soon Roberto was directed to block an alley and corral the cat back toward Lucrezia. But the mission failed as the cat energized and fled inside a nearby café, presumably its home.
Ludo emerged from the newsstand with a Michelin map of Istria; Roberto looked over his shoulder at the peculiar geography of Slovenia. This all used to be the kingdom of Venice, then it became the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then the Italians were allowed to keep Trieste on a narrow finger, with the amalgamated country of Yugoslavia owning the Istrian peninsula . . . until its breakup, which led to its being subdivided again, between Slovenia (which got a twenty-eight-mile sliver of Adriatic coast) and Croatia, which got the lion’s share, most of the Roman ruins, the seaside resorts, one of the world’s best truffles by the metric ton. For those who thought crossing borders, collecting passport stamps, paying for toll stickers every few hours was “tres internationale”, the Istrian peninsula was the road trip for you.
“You done playing with your cat?” Ludo asked, without interest. “Where are Mira and Claudia?”
They departed Milan the afternoon before, deciding to cross Northern Italy and call it quits here for Night No. 1 in Pirano, Slovenia. Lucrezia and Ludo got to ride in the two-seat roadster though Ludo said he wanted all the other participants, in rotation, to keep him company as the days wound on. Roberto longed for his turn in the gorgeous car with the gorgeous AC again . . . while the other car, Mira’s Golf, tightly held Mira and Claudia in the front, and a very compressed Roberto in the narrow back seat, sealed off from all air circulation. Mira drove haltingly, a combination of the decrepitude of the model and her lack of finesse in gear shifting on hills. “I am a girl of the flatlands,” she reminded him; there was barely a hill to practice on in Holland. There was talk of renting a larger car for greater comfort, but it was too much expense (and even steeper when one declared you were taking the car to the Balkans, insurance-wise), and so to keep the trip from collapsing, Mira had said okay, sure, they could take her car. Roberto assumed Claudia would change her mind about coming along given the travel conditions, but she was surprisingly serene.
Once everyone was rounded up, the party drove their two-car caravan up from Pirano to the ragged white Karst mountainscape of interior Slovenia, en route to Hrastovlje—a Roberto request, seconded by Mira— with one of Europe’s best-preserved danse macabre, or a plesno grozno in Slovenian, which was more fun to say.
Predictably, Ludo would speed ahead and take the curves like Michael Schumacher at the Nürburgring; Mira would chug along on four cylinders and find Ludo idling at an intersection turn he didn’t want her to miss.
Again today, Mira and Claudia were in the front, and Roberto was stretched out awkwardly in the back seat. The women went on about the baroque nature of German professorships—one had to have a national and a regional appointment, an impossible political chore for a foreigner . . . Speaking of teaching, Roberto decided that perhaps it was time to dust off his antiquated CV. Roberto had worked up a several-week conversational English class, the sort of thing one sees on flyers in coffee shops where you tear off a tab with the phone number. Everyone who had been taught by him seemed to like their instruction, his en- ergy and commitment. Maybe that was a skewed sample. He ended up sleeping with every woman and two of the men he had taught. Maybe he would ply his trade in Malta, in Moldova, that Norwegian outpost above the Arctic Circle—an excuse to explore somewhere new, a region on his map yet to be checked off.
The tiny village of Hrastovlje was a few buildings, a big oak in what passed as a plaza (Roberto knew that hrast, in the village name, meant “oak”); one café, one restaurant, which seemed closed; and a winding path up to a walled fortification. There was a woman reading at the gate who was so startled that she dropped her book when they approached, losing her place. After the group contributed several euros and received a lecture in Italian about not photographing the frescoes, they were let in the late Romanesque church.
The danse macabre. An art subject found throughout Europe where death leads the locals on a jolly New Orleans-style parade to the afterlife. No one is immune, the merchant, the farmer, the pope and his prelates, kings and queens, all must follow the leering, mocking skeletons toward the waiting grave . . .
Roberto was thrilled to see Glagolitic script labeling the frescoes. He sneaked a few photos when the complacent attendant went back to her book at the front gate, but she had returned with a watchful eye. He took out a pen, but there was no paper—no one had any. He contented himself to feast his eyes. People attribute the Cyrillic alphabet to Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in the 900s, but what they invented was the Glagolitic script, which, through the centuries, became recognizable as the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Balkans and Russia today. One could sort of see how the Ⰱ became the Б, the Ⰴ became the Д, but many letters remained unclear to the greatest scholars, and it was a fanciful set of characters to say the least: Ⰷ, Ⰺ, Ⰶ . . .
“We didn’t have breakfast,” Claudia said, popping his backside. “We must go eat!”
The cat photographic mission had been a success; the cat associated with the town’s one restaurant proved pliant, and Ludo had taken the picture of Lucrezia holding it next to the Slovenian signs for the tavern. Where the dance of death had made her nearly cry, the success of her cat-picture project had her giggling and throwing her magnificent head of hair back, nearly breaking into song.
They were the only customers of this family establishment; the tall, good-looking son, Žan, introduced himself. First, there was wine soup, with some meat stock, garlic, onion, and shallot, but all you could taste was the musk of the red wine. Claudia said it was like vinegar, but contin- ued to eat; Lucrezia said she did have breakfast, her excuse for her habitual self-starving, but she tried a spoonful of wine soup from the others. Two pans of bread were brought out; the bread had crackling bits in it, and rather than butter, meat grease was brought to the table in a tub. Roberto thought: One nice thing about sampling restaurants with his European rather than American friends, was that no one in the party would dream of going, “Ewwww,” or turning up their nose at animal parts, offal, organ meats. Which was good because in addition to the vast plate of Carniolan sausages and the prleška tünka (minced bacon and lard and garlic) came the bujta repa, the blood sausages stewed in a crock with turnips . . .
Ludo had ordered a Slovenian malvazija, one of the famous orange wines of the Julian Alps, the wines that looked like orange Kool-Aid and tasted like the inside of a clay pot. “Of course, I prefer the orange wines of Friuli,” Ludo said patriotically, before savoring the glass of minerals, perfect for cutting through the lards and fats and suets and congealments.
Mira and Lucrezia turned up their noses and decided to order something else .. . maybe a local drink of some kind? Žan the waiter said they had fruit drinks, then he brought them some, then more; the count of fruity concoctions was lost track of. No one needed one more thing to drink or eat, but the elderly mother emerged from the kitchen to see if her work was satisfactory, and the table heaped praise on her . . . and this resulted in her directing Žan to put his tallness to use and take down a brown bottle, blow off the dust, and pour shots. Ludo and Roberto glanced at each other; maybe they should pass? But it was obviously a special bottle that this family-run gostilna wished to share with their best customers of the autumn—maybe their only customers. So they all threw back a shot of what had to be pure isopropyl ethyl wood alcohol paint thinner . . . the grandmother had poured herself half a glass of it and knocked it all back without a wince. Žan tried one too, and he had the reaction of his guests—an expression one might have if hit by lightning.
Roberto, feeling suddenly gifted in Serbo-Croatian, mangled a compliment to the grandmother. “Vrlo dober obled, gospo . . . um, gospa . . .” The grandmother said speaking Italian was fine. Later, sober, he would realize he did not compliment her meal but rather commented on her being washed out and faded, unable to land properly on the word objed (meal). In Italian, he questioned the famous Slovenian national soup: How did the wine soup retain the flavor of wine once the alcohol was cooked out? It appeared the alcohol was in no way cooked out—they had consumed several bowls of red wine. The local fruit cordials that Mira and Claudia had had, one after the other, were slivovka (plum spirit) and then višnjevec (cherry spirit), not really cordials but 40 percent liquor; the industrial solvent at the end was brinjavec, a juniper berry moonshine—all homemade in her bathroom, the grandmother reported. (Which meant that they would all go blind before the evening was out, thought Roberto.)
How to proceed with many of the party too drunk to drive? Maybe, since it was the Mediterranean, you might risk it, but there was an international border with Croatia, and the passed-out passengers would be investigated and the driver would come under suspicion.
A drunken plan began to take shape: Ludo would drive his Audi to Poreč, Croatia, an hour away. He would take Mira, the drunkest, in the passenger seat. Given her Dutch drinking skills, she would be the least likely to be sick in his car. That settled, she stumbled to his passenger seat and promptly passed out in the sun.
Claudia was sobriety-wise all right to drive, but couldn’t—no license, never learned how. Well, Ludo, concluded with a clap on his shoulder, Roberto could drive the Golf!
“I don’t drive a stick.”
This finally got a rise out of the unflappable Ludo: “You don’t drive a manual?”
“I never learned. We have automatic cars in America.”
Lucrezia had consumed hardly any food and had already been sick from her drinking, once subtly at the restaurant bathroom, and then not so subtly against the lovely town-symbolic oak in the main square. No one suggested Lucrezia drive or operate any machinery. Maybe Ludo would take Mira and come back . . . but no, he could only drive one of them at a time in his two-seater. They would be at it for hours. Was Hrastovlje big enough to have a taxi? No. The only solution was to hire someone local to drive the Golf (with Roberto, Lucrezia, and Claudia) to Poreč.
Roberto concurred, suggesting, “And then we’ll give him bus fare back to Hravolso . . . Hrasovtoj . . .”
Ludo: “If you, the language master, cannot pronounce this godforsaken place, then don’t look to me for help.”
Žan was quickly petitioned back at the restaurant, but in the intervening time, he had gotten drunk too—trading shots with his grandmother. Jakob was turned up by Claudia, an old man sitting in front of his shop, half- asleep in the heat. He would be happy to drive them, but he did not have a license. No need to have one for local driving up in these hills, but he could not cross the border . . . Next was his grandson Jaka, who looked fourteen but assured them that if he could drive the tractor on his father’s farm, the Golf would prove no difficulty.
“Why don’t we simply push the Golf over the edge of that cliff ?” Ludo mused, looking up at the Karst walls that surrounded Hrastovlje. “It will be faster.”
Lucrezia, staggering, giggling, turned up a man in the only other business of the village. Nik seemed agreeable, but it dawned on everyone that he might be . . . simple, developmentally challenged, and spent his days in the watchful eye of his mother, who presided over the coffee shop—the business they had not selected to patronize, although now they repented and ordered strong Slovenian coffees for everyone. This chance to drive the Golf to Poreč had now consumed the village, and soon a volunteer came forward, Anže, a prematurely balding thirtysomething, who had tired of watching sports and came from his home, ready to make a little weekend money. He demonstrated complete mastery of the stick shift in a circular demonstration up and down Hrastovlje village’s main street.
The plan was to take a little boat out to one of the innumerable islets off the coast of Poreč, the otočići. A boatman would take them out, over the choppy harbor, into the swells, then pull up against an otočić and with the boat pitching and rolling, they would hop out on their own island and their own beach, to be picked up again at sunset. A picnic basket would have delicacies, and there would be prosecco . . .
None of that happened. Everyone lay in bed until noon. If they got up, it was to be sick or to think better of it and return to the bed. The idea of a bumptious boat ride upon the sea proved unpopular. Ludo texted everyone that he had secured a second night at the hotel, even though a day’s delay wrecked the tight Balkan itinerary.
Around noon, Roberto abandoned the possibly dead Claudia in their bed, which smelled of alcohol sweat, and staggered from the hotel into the white polished limestone streets of Poreč, each boulevard a solar reflector. It seemed to Roberto the sun itself was making too much noise. Every sound of this Croatian resort made its way to Roberto’s headache—the Jet-Skis, shrieking teenagers in swimwear, the Vespas, the shrill laughing devil-children, someone’s loud radio blasting Yugo pop. Roberto was at that stage of gastrointestinal delicacy that anything—coffee, water, air— would only make things worse. He saw the steeple for St. Eufemia. He would throw himself on the mercy (and natural air-conditioning) of the old church from the 500s. After his insistence on seeing the church at Hrastovlje, he knew he would be overruled in his church-mongering from here on out, so he made the pilgrimage privately, to sit in the cool, to take in the glimmering mosaics.
