We arrived on the edge of Tiska a few hours later. Tiska had been a provincial outpost even by Yugoslavian standards—the electricity was spotty, phone and television lines were few, most homes didn’t have hot-water heaters, and it was twenty-five minutes’ drive from the nearest real town. But what it lacked in amenities it made up for in clear air and sun and a cliffside view of the Adriatic.
As a child I had taken the summers for granted—a month’s vacation time was the country’s standard, and nearly everyone I knew holidayed on the coast. Now I considered how insane a month off would sound to an American. Jack could barely get a week away from the computer consulting firm where he worked, and even then he was constantly hassled by pages and phone calls from needy clients.
Luka and I had been debating whether or not the EU’s unified currency made economic sense, but now the sight of the vast beryl water on the horizon knocked me quiet and we let the conversation fade. Something new was burgeoning within me, a feeling different from the anxiety that had pervaded most of the trip: nostalgia, untainted by trauma, for my childhood. I’d learned how to swim in that sea, how to steer our neighbors’ unwieldy motorboat, to jump from the rock ledges without cutting my feet, to catch and gut and grill a fish. At night I’d sneak down to the darkened beach and talk, in a combination of broken English and charades, with the Italian and Czech children whose families had come for an inexpensive vacation.
“I hope it’s still there,” I said under my breath, an incantation. We rolled down the windows and let the salty air fill the car.
Down on the deserted beach, waves lapped against the roof of a red utility truck, capsized and rusting. The driver must have been going too fast on the road above and missed a turn. My fondness for the place was again engulfed by distress and a sense of purpose. Petar and Marina were either here or dead, and I was about to find out which.
—
There was a point, unmarked, that the road turned into a footpath. The road, which at its widest was only big enough for one car, had no guardrail and was bordered by the unforgiving rock of the Dinaric Alps on one side and the Adriatic on the other. A few meters too far and a driver might be forced to make the trip back up the mountain entirely in reverse. I parked the car on a patch of dirt before the road narrowed completely. It used to be a crowded parking spot, but now there were only two other cars and both were so old it was difficult to tell whether they were abandoned. We shouldered our bags and followed the muggy breeze into the village.
At first it was unclear whether the place was bombed out or just dilapidated. Though I’d stayed here for months at a time, looking at it now I found it hard to believe people had lived out their whole lives along the twisted innards of the Dinara, in a place so small and in such close contact with nature.
Petar’s grandfather Ante had moved to Tiska in the forties after finishing medical school in Sarajevo. He and his neighbors had built one another’s houses with concrete and mules. Decades later when I visited as a child, the village behaved as if Ante was still alive and well; our address was simply “The doctor’s house, Tiska, 21318,” the postal code of the next town over. Communal cement mixing, too, had remained a practice in the town—my earliest memories of the place were of my father and Petar hauling buckets of concrete alongside the rest of the village men to transform the path into sets of lumpy, hand-shaped stairs. The idea was that the stairs would be easier for the old people to navigate than the dirt pathways, which were slick in the smooth spots and root-riddled in others. But it had been easier to run along the pathways, and at the time I’d resented the stairs for slowing me down.
Luka and I came to the steps, descending at a jagged pace toward sea level, obeying the curvature of the mountains like a set of intestines. They snaked past the village’s single store and the stone monument to the workers of the Glorious Revolution. They swooped around the small church and to the schoolhouse, which was swathed in untamed vines. The school had been in disuse even when I was small, except where the old men had cleared the underbrush to expose the packed sand floors of bocce courts. The steps continued down toward the water, passing strips of fig trees and agave plants; the figs were soft and sugary, the agave thick and barbed, their contiguous presence a testament to the fickle soil beneath.