Under a Croatian Sun by Anthony Stancomb Read Free Book Online

about.’
    A practised diplomat.
    When I got to know Marko better, I discovered he was also a practised master of the inconspicuous question – but, by the time I found that out, he’d already got all there was to know out of me.
    After a week, I discovered that he acted as the village Citizen’s Advice Bureau. He had an ability to put people’s problems into perspective and explain how the outside world worked. Every day villagers came to ask for his guidance – how to write a letter to the Ministry, how to get legal advice, how to find out if they can get a grant, how to get their son a place at college… and, whoever they were, Marko would invariably sit them down, offer them a drink and chat about this and that before asking why they had come to see him. Most of the questions, he told me, were about how to deal with the authorities, and added that, because the same people that ran the country under communism were still in charge, dealings with the authorities were as Byzantine as they had always been.
    Marko’s counsel was invariably down to earth. ‘No, I really wouldn’t ask them about it yet,’ I heard him say to one of our neighbours. ‘If you do that, they’ll have to inform the Fisheries Department, and that’ll put a stop to everything. You’d do much better to talk to Kristo in the Port Office and let him have a word with his brother in the Tourist Development Office. Once
they
give their approval, no other department will dare to object.’
    Another time I heard: ‘Don’t even mention it to your mother-in-law or she’ll be at your poor pa-in-law with the frying panagain. Just go ahead and do it, and, when she’s here having coffee with her cousins after church, get your cousin Nada to tell her about it. She won’t want her smart cousins to see her getting angry, and she’ll think it was Nada’s side of the family who engineered it rather than you and your pa-in-law.’
    It sounded as if there were many in the village who had been saved from the frying-pan treatment thanks to Marko – although there were those who were not fans of his, and Karmela was one of them. But, for her, Marko was something of a rival, both of them being in the information-distribution business. ‘That Marko expects everyone to ask his advice about everything,’ she told us. ‘About jobs, houses, cars, donkeys, children and mothers-in-law. And, if you don’t ask his advice, he tells the whole island that whatever you’re doing is wrong.’
    I raised my eyebrows.
    ‘Oh yes he does! And that’s not a good thing in a village as small as this. We have a saying: “Teeth are hard, but they soon fall out. The tongue is soft, but it lasts forever!”’
    I felt like mentioning the pot, the kettle and the colour black, but my Croatian wasn’t quite up to it. Anyway, perhaps there was something in what she said. Marko was somewhat proprietorial. Whenever we hadn’t been in for a few days, the next time he saw us he’d say in a slightly disapproving voice: ‘Oh! I was wondering where you’ve been,’ as if we had been straying away from his protective network. But I appreciated his concern and I was grateful that he was always quick to notice if any of his customers didn’t respond when I tried to talk to them. Whenever he saw this happening, he’d come over to start a conversation and include me in it to show I was a friend of his.
    I had found a Godfather.
     
    The best place for meeting people was, in fact, the ferry. Everyone had to go over to the mainland at some point, and being at sea seemed to create a kind of camaraderie that made it easier to talk.
    The ferry journey to the mainland was a trip back in time. At daybreak, we’d climb the iron companionway past the evil-smelling engine room and rancid latrines and up to the smoke-filled cafeteria where everyone gathered. The scene there resembled an old French movie. Crew members stood at the bar with the truck drivers knocking back shots of
rakija
(the