...Stara Evropa is a single story from being complete.
In May 2013, I toyed with a 'table of contents' in a Symposia post 'all hands on deck'. Part of me likes the fact that three more stories are complete; another part of me wonders why the pace slowed so much. More care in the process, I hope. This has been demonstrated with 'Twilight and Dusk' and 'Cymbaline', if not as much with 'Pyrrhic Victory' and 'Mixed Messages'. I've boldfaced the titles I think will anchor the set, though that's up to a readership.
1) Cymbaline [Slovakia]
2) Glassworks (Gone Old) [Czech east]
3) Pyrrhic Victory [Albania]
4) Bud' jako Bach [E. Germany]
5) Moment in the Shade [Moscow]
6) Rain, Rain, Go Away [Hungary]
7) Snookered [Bucharest]
8) Preying on Malchus [Moldova/Spain]
9) [Bulgarian story--working title: Tipping Point]
10)
11) Side-swiped [Czech Prague/north]
12) We the Pharisees [Bosnia]
13) Twilight and Dusk [Lithuania/Poland]
14) The Golden Horn [Istanbul]
15) Babi Leto, Babi Yar [Ukraine]
And as a different editing note (hoping the format problems of my last post won't reoccur here): The story that follows is hastily assembled and admittedly silly, partly to paste over the 'Vanushka' story that strikes too close to home. Maybe for that reason, I launched my fictional expat family from familiar Park Ridge with absolutely zero resonance to anything biographical. In other words, I wanted a quick suburban reference point of departure--now departed to a quick exposure of 'stara evropa'...
Mixed Messages
For her 9th birthday,
because of all the S and G and VGs in her report card, Nicole got a smartphone.
She was a leap year baby and wisely, her dad had decided, she’d be gifted twice
to compensate for the dearth of real birthdates: February 28th would
be something to surprise her (and a smartphone was that) and March 1st
would be something she’d come up with herself: a sleepover, a trip to Six Flags
(near warmer Dallas, where her uncle’s family lived), an aquarium that
inevitably her brother would set up and maintain. He was an avid swimmer,
anyway, and so didn’t feel guilty that he deprived her of the mandate to “be
sure to take responsibility for such a gift.”
They lived in upscale Park Ridge,
between residential Chicago and O’hare. Dad was a Caldwell banker commuting to
the Loop, and Mom worked at ‘The Headache Clinic’ in an adjacent suburb. Tim,
the brother, was earning varsity status in his freshman year at Maine South
high school, and Becky, a year older, was starting to drive. She also, to her
parents’ worry, worked too many hours at the Burger King, mainly because she
liked some of the guys. The food’s not bad, either, she said.
Nicole’s grades didn’t tank in 4th
grade—there was still a VG in cursive writing—but the school had begun to
implement smiley, straight, and concerned emoticons in the report card for what
administrators called ‘dispositions’. These would be things like ‘care shown in
work’, ‘cooperation with others’, ‘timeliness in tasks’, ‘listening to
instructions’, and all of those faces were level straight. Nicole had a smiley
for ‘sense of humor’. Indeed the smartphone may have helped with this, but she
also was called in a week later for cyber-bullying when she posted photos of
classmates looking like goofs without their permission. Dad took the phone away
for a day, and Mom had her write in proper cursive apologies to those kids.
For her 10th birthday—an
actual leap year—Nicole unwrapped a complete set of J.R.R. Tolkien books and an
ice cream maker. She said ‘thank you’ for them but really missed the March 1st
part of the deal. “Can’t we go somewhere nice, like Disney World?”
“Or Hawaii,” Tim chimed in, “where
we can surf!”
“Even better,” Dad offered, and
eyeballed Mom as if the time was nigh. “We’re going to Croatia! The home of
Tolkien! Plenty of seacoast.”
“Huh?” Becky grunted, “when?”
“Middle of August.”
“’Til when?”
“Well, honey, that’s a good
question.”
“Huh?”
“Your dad has a job transfer to
Zagreb, the capital of Croatia—”
“Which is where the hell where?”
“Listen, Becky, let’s watch our
language—”
“I’m gonna be a senior; there’s no
way I’m going!”
“Well, we thought about that—it’ll
be hard for your brother and sister to switch schools, too.”
“Will they have a swim team?”
“I think they might!”
“Think?”
“The bank’s helping with all the
details—we’re going to have a great package.”
“This sucks!”
Nicole ran upstairs and posted as
many sad face variants as possible. She wished she had never been born—on leap
year, at any rate. Then she began reading The
Hobbit and lost herself in that nether world.
Summer flew by without a trip to
Dallas or anywhere else: there was a feeling that they’d never enjoy Park Ridge
life again. Becky moved up to drive-through, Tim worked as a lifeguard at
Centennial Park, Mom, who had quit ‘The Headache Clinic’ a year ago, launched a
website with ‘Dear Abby’ style of advice on migraines, especially.
Notwithstanding the time zone difference, this online venture would keep her
busy in Croatia, too. Dad spent more time at the office than usual, leaving as
early as 4am to communicate with his Central European Time colleagues. Nicole
read all of Tolkien twice and let all her tropical fish starve to death.
Mid-August meant searching for a new
place to live, and, after failing to find what they wanted in lower or upper
Zagreb, they took a bed-and-breakfast in Samobor, a bit west and disconnected
from the city. The bank had given them an SUV, encouraging weekend adventures
and whatever distance they wanted to be from things. The international
school—without a swim team, to Tim’s outrage—was near enough Dad’s office, so
that made for one less complication. Samobor, Dad reasoned, was that much
closer to the Adriatic, and yes, they’d go there as often as possible to swim
and make sand castles, unaware that pebbles defined the shore. Becky was
depressed that none of the promises of her Park Ridge friends to ‘put her up
for a year’ panned out. She threatened to drown herself in the sea, but slowly
she started to warm up to this European scene after Mom talked through the difference
she’d have in experience: not just a Burger King life, but food and boyfriends
from all over the world.
The bed-and-breakfast owner, in very
broken English, insisted in showing the family pictures from almost twenty
years ago of his war-torn hometown of Vukovar. It featured in LIFE magazine and
dozens of local periodicals and framed photos he displayed around the
cedar-paneled breakfast room. Vukovar, he said, was where he grew up, and where
he and his wife wanted to raise their son.
“Where are they now?” Nicole asked.
The man perhaps didn’t understand
the ten-year-old, so when he excused himself to their privacy, Dad uttered
“middle earth” and the rest of breakfast was rather silent.
They found a house to rent that
afternoon, with a pool one-fourth the size of Maine South’s (not bad, all
things considered). The man at the bed-and-breakfast hugged them on this news
and promised he’d learn English better. Mom rejoined that it was on them to
learn Croatian, a prospect nobody believed would seriously happen.
The international school, it turned
out, had many of those same dispositions, and not only for Nicole’s little 5th
grade. Becky was, predictably, the only new student in her class and would not
have the same baccalaureate load of her peers, who began that curriculum as Tim
would, in 11th grade. Instead, Becky would study for a menu of AP
exams, a decent SAT result, and straight-faced dispositions, more or less. Tim
would go with the flow; there were four others new to his grade, and one was a
very pretty girl from the Philippines. Naïveté loved company.
Nicole made friends quickly and it
so happened that two others in her class lived in Samobor. They loved the pool
and the attempt at making ice cream (Mom had the real stuff ready), even into
the late weeks of October. When the
weather was not so nice, they’d play inside and try out some variant kitchen skills.
The oven was off-limits, unassisted, but they were just as happy to eat unbaked
cookie dough, especially with butterscotch chips shipped in from the US.
Mom taught her to make calzones one
day, and with a positive reception from the family, she imagined possibilities
for her upcoming birthday. “Let’s make everything Italian!”
“Calzones?” Becky raised her
eyebrows, “and?”
“Godfather,
Part II,” Tim put in.
“A trip to Naples—and Mount
Vesuvius,” Dad said.
“What did you want, Nicole?” Mom
turned it back to her.
“Yeah, like that—we can have
gangsters and Italian ice and stuff like that.”
“Al Capone’s Calzones!”
“Too cliché.”
“Why gangsters, honey?” Dad asked.
“Just like ’em. I miss the
Sopranos.”
“I
thought you wanted a Tolkien theme.”
“Sarah did that already. I was born
too late.”
“Nonsense. No such thing.”
They planned it out from there.
‘Come to Nicole’z Calzone Party’ is how the invitation would read, though Tim
said the truer anagram should be ‘Nacole’z Calzone’ or ‘Nicole’z Cilzone’—“that
sounds pretty gangster to me.”
“Let’s keep it ‘Nicole’z Calzone’,”
Mom decided, “but if you want your friends to make them, where would that take
place? We don’t really have kitchen space for that.”
Dad attended to that detail and,
because he held a personal investment in the idea, found a pizzeria in upper
Zagreb, near Tolkien’s House (which remained on their to-visit list). They’d
rent out the former in a low hour of the afternoon, then scamper over to the
latter gangster- and elf-style. In the swag bags would be plastic machine guns,
cryptic brass rings, atmospheric maps of the area, fake beards, dark
sunglasses, gummy worms, candy cigarettes, and apples for good measure. They’d
transport the whole 5th grade from school in a couple of limousines.
Then, after sunset and kids all picked up by their parents, the family of five
would fly off to Naples for their own taste of Italy for the very first time.
It was hard to keep any of this
secret. Nicole and her mother concentrated on the calzone-making part: on a
brief visit after school, they talked things over with the restaurant manager,
who said the ingredients would be available but had no clear sense why they’d
have kids making the food in the first place. Mom explained that this was
something cultural: workshop-based parties, where fun mixed with learning. The
manager shrugged her shoulders and showed where they could prepare. “But kids
no oven,” she emphasized, and Mom completely agreed, affirming that was her own
house policy as well.
Dad ordered all the swag and then
telephoned Tolkien’s House to put in the reservation—he wanted to practice his
Croatian, but the manager didn’t understand what he had in mind and had him
clarify in English.
“You want a reservation?”
“Yes—for a birthday party.”
“Name?”
“Nicole—she’s the birthday girl.”
“Gotcha. February 28?”
“Yes, from about 5:00-6:00.”
“One big table?”
“More, maybe—we’re expecting about
25.”
“Like an office party? Have you been
here before?”
“No—but I got your number from an
office colleague who said you run a nice place.”
“We do. We’re smallish, but… Ok, I
think we can reserve you 25.”
“Great! Expect us in costume!”
“Umm…”
“Oh, and do you make birthday
cakes—something like a Frodo shape?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Mind if we bring our own then?”
“Not as long as you order our
drinks.”
“10-4 on that. Thanks so much.” He
rattled out his contact number and hung up.
He had planned on swinging by later
that week with that recommending colleague, but the timing didn’t synch—busy
days at the office. He copied down the address to at least put it on the
invitations, as parents were to pick up their kids there, 6pm sharp.
While Sarah wasn’t enamored with the
this semi-repeat of her birthday theme—her folks had rented out a theatre to
watch the newest Lord of the Rings—she
relinquished her jealousy for the general buzz and even helped hand out the
invitations. Limousines to Nicole’z Calzone party! End up at Tolkien’s House!
Nicole was on top of the world with this plan. She even recorded more smileys
in the weekly self-assessment profile, and her teacher didn’t disagree.
The Naples part of the plan, in
retrospect, was quite unnecessary. Christmas Break had pulled them back to
Chicago, but otherwise Croatia had interested them sufficiently. The cascades
of Plitvice and the Sava River, weekends to Ljubljana and Split and the island
of Hvar all underscored Dad’s good judgment and Mom’s research. If there was a
place they hadn’t done enough with, it was Zagreb itself, besides the grooved
trek to work and school. Samobor was a pleasant refuge, with an ambulatory
community that frequented the forest stations of the cross. Becky was studying
easily, glad not to be distracted by fast food. Tim realized a swimming
scholarship was lost, but became interested in a bevy of clubs he’d never
conceive of joining at Maine South. Mom’s headache advice had more hits now
than before: migraines spoke a universal language. Dad also would have liked to
wake up March 1st to a long weekend in Samobor, but what the heck—cap
this calzone adventure in style…
On the birthday afternoon, Mom held
the post at the restaurant and prepared for the first limo to stagger in. Dad
directed things from school the minute the last bell rang. “Your swag bags are
in the limo—don’t lose anything! And your parent is? Ok, and 6pm at the Tolkien
House—you have the GPS? Yes, good—see you there!” Nicole piled in with seven of
her peers and they were off. Before the last limo was full there were already
selfies posted of 5th grade gangsters and Gandolfs and elves in dark
glasses with rings on their fingers and around the barrels of their machine
guns. Generally, the buzz was happy.
Making calzones was a little like
art class, minus much art. The lump of dough was already pre-kneaded and kids
were more interested in punching and twirling and shaping their lot than making
a pocket ready for filling. Mom was mindful that the second and third limo
needed space to do the same, so she hustled the process along. She showed them
how to spoon the tomato sauce smoothly onto the flattened surface, and pointed
out the various fillings, realizing, when the question came up, that no one
could be sure which calzone out of the oven would go to whom. Nevermind, as long as we don’t overdo or
underdo the olives, ham, mozzarella, mushrooms, spices and such. It was on
this advice that Nicole had her own idea that she whispered to her group when
Mom left to meet the incoming limo: “quick, everybody bury your ring into your
calzone but don’t show anyone—let’s see who can get back their own!”
For the disposition ‘care shown in
work’, most here would merit a straight or concerned face, though kids were all
smiles in handing them over to the bemused chefs. Most needed reinforced
pinching to keep in their pushed ingredients; some needed open-heart surgery.
Nicole greeted each limo-load differently than her mother: “be sure to hide
your ring inside before it cooks—that needs to be our secret!”
“Sort of like making us invisible?”
“Sort of—just shhh…!”
The waiting time between shifts of
calzones was spent in eating butterscotch cookie dough—also malleable and,
against Mom’s admonishment, flingable. There was too much to supervise, even
before the dormant machine guns would come to life.
As cooked calzones came out to the
restaurant tables, kids forked them like wardens would a cake. It was
conspicuous how few rings were salvaged from the sauce and set out to
cool—Nicole insisted that hers wasn’t part of the first eight and demanded to
know why. The manager demanded back, “how you could know?”
“Because I dented my calzone with a
heart shape, like my diary handle!”
“Go back to tables, maybe she’s
still in oven.”
“But all of our eight came out. You
threw mine out.”
Mom came over to apprehend the
problem, but succeeded in driving the manager away. Nicole started to cry, but
made it to the restroom before too many could tell. Sarah, of all chums, ran
after her. The boys began a butterscotch brawl and Mom called Dad on the phone
to get his ass over here, quickly. He was just now taxiing the Frodo cake over
to Tolkien’s House, getting his first gander at its hanging sign: ‘Cocktails /
Presents • Gifts / Beer • Whiskey’. Bewildered by what this place turned
out to be, there was no time to question things as he slid the cake onto the
nearest table and said to nobody in particular, “back in a jiffy.”
The cabbie was rather confused by
Dad’s new request to drive to the nearest pizzeria. His English now sounded
patois, mixing what he thought were local cues and inflection, and competing
with the taxi’s navigation system did not help. By the time he arrived, the
final round of calzones were in the oven and any food fights were replaced by
more palatable machine gun fire. Sarah had counseled Nicole back to her throne,
so to speak, and the mystery of missing rings was clarified by an gruff
announcement from the chef, which the manager loathed to translate: “ring can’t
fall in calzone—we throw away whole calzone.”
As if by power of suggestion, one of
the boys chomping messily began to choke—his buddy asked, “is it a ring?” The
choking boy clutched at his throat and began to purple.
“The Heimlich!” Dad ordered, as if
anyone else there should respond. The manager ran over and performed it
gloweringly, and the boy ended up swallowing the obstruction before spitting
out a slew of red sauce and crust. The noises in the restaurant ranged from
gross-out groans to whimpers that perhaps he hadn’t been the only one to
swallow a ring. A few boys were laughing and a few more girls were crying.
Tim and Becky, just now on the
scene, looked incredulous. “Anything we can do?” the latter asked Mom.
“Find some Syrup of Ipacac—see how
that jibes with the local apothecary!”
As the manager produced five rings
from trashed calzones, and most kids hadn’t stuffed theirs in to begin with,
the rough account was that only the choking kid must have swallowed a ring. For
his part, he was embarrassed but determined to tough it out—“it’s bound to pass
in a day or two,” Tim assured him on the basis of his biology coursework.
No one had been hungry anyway, as
school lunch was still digesting. They all left the pizzeria a vile mess and
walked with pattering gunfire toward Tolkien’s House. Most left their route map
and other swag at the restaurant—the tacit collective thought was to wing it
from here anyway. It had been Dad’s plan to split up the groups into three, led
by him, Tim, and Becky, to follow three equidistant-but-winding routes through
the neighborhood, rattling their machine guns with easy plastic triggers. Because
safety suggested it shouldn’t be a race, he had arranged another task: to sort
out the jumbled letters on each of four rings: ZCOLANE, INLOCE, KSNATH,
OVERYNEE, the incentive being that the first slices of cake would go to the
group that puzzled out the resulting phrase. The gunning down of pedestrians
became the choice game, however, in spite of honks from a patrol car that
rolled to each gang. “Dovoljno!” the
cop shouted, which Dad interpreted as a call to freedom, albeit strange in
tone.
Almost like clockwork, they all
piled into Tolkien’s House and ogled the bottles and placards liquor, far
surpassing the bric-a-brac they recognized from the movies. The place was tight
and it shouldn’t have taken minutes or raised voices to corral the kids to the
reserved tables. The bartender barked at the sight of candy cigarettes, saying
it was a smoke-free room, so kids snuck away in klatches to smoke them in the
jon. The barmaid popped open lukewarm bottles of Coke and 7-UP before fetching
a cake-carving knife and dozens of little plates, which would nothing to
prevent crumbs and frosting from grinding into the floor. Machine gun barrels
knocked over many of the bottles, and the popular reorder became caffè
lattes, adding new puddles to the table stick. Fart jokes ensued but it was the
lame birthday games Dad tried to lead that hurried the peripheral customers out
the door. “You’re driving out my regulars!” the bartender snarled. Dad slipped
him a Ben Franklin as a mid-party tip, which he scrutinized, pocketed, and
registered as grist for more gripes.
Mom, sitting in the SUV with a
pounding head, hung up on Tim’s update of the party. She had parked several
blocks away on a side street no parents would use as they gradually made their
way to this unlikely destination. Dad and Becky stood outside to answer
confused drivers—“yes, this is it.” They anticipated some flak about invariable
Instagram evidence of the calzone debacle, and they dreaded owning up about the
Heimlich boy, even as he had more than revived.
“CALZONE NICOLE THANKS EVERYONE,” he
hollered, having worked it out with Tim. Some parents came into the bar,
grimaced or forced a smile, reminding their kid to wish Nicole a happy
birthday.
“It’s actually tomorrow, kind of.”
She repeated, knowing it ceased mattering. She played hostess better as the
crowd seeped away. A couple parents even took a drink at the bar to let their
daughters enjoy the wind-down of the party, sans the silly stuff like machine
guns. Dad joined them for a drink and handed the bartender his credit card. At
the risk of a debrief, one parent asked how Nicole enjoyed her gifts.
“Oh, drat—we forgot them at the
Pizzeria!” The last thing he wanted to consider was going back to that kilzone.
He’d have to settle the bill anyway, even though they had arranged to do after
Naples. He called his wife to say they were ready to go, but needed to zip over
first to the pizzeria to have them secure the presents, backroom storage or
something. “Yeah, I know—we should have thought that detail out.”
The pizzeria was in no mood to
accommodate. The bill was not so bad, and even an extra Ben Franklin tip was
refused—“dovoljno” again, whatever
that meant. They had to take twenty-two boxes of board games and hex bugs and
cosmetic sets and vampire books and nerf toys on their laps as the SUV, already
packed with suitcases, raced away from Gornji Zagreb, just in time to make the
evening flight.
A rising moon lit up the places
where streetlights wouldn’t, and from Nicole’s window seat, she could see its
reflection on the fiberglass cover of their swimming pool. She elbowed Tim, who
was nodding off, then left him alone to enjoy the greater shine of the Adriatic
for herself. She calculated the hours before the beginning of her 12th
year, a European alternative she learned to declare one’s age. Mom’s headache
had subsided, naturally, and she slept next to Becky, who was immersed in a
book. Last, she looked across the fuselage at Dad, who was staring absently,
fiddling with one of the castaway rings. She wished him a smiley face and, as
fate would have it, he closed his eyes and smiled.
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