Under a Croatian Sun by Anthony Stancomb Read Free Book Online Page A

local vodka-like gut rot), gnarled fishermen in berets sat with their drinks, playing cards and smoking Walter Wolf cigarettes (an oddly named but favoured brand in this part of the world), Town Hall officials huddled over their papers, and at the back an old granny or two skulked in the gloom with a live chicken in a basket.
    On our first journey, I went into one of the minuscule toilets and was in the process of unzipping when the door banged into my back. Damn, I hadn’t shut it properly. I quickly tried to push it shut with a foot, but I was flattened against the urinal. Craning my neck round, I saw an agitated bearded face, and given that the square footage of the toilet was that of a phone box, we eyeballed each other at six inches. At school, I’d always practised the paralysing karate chop that I’d give to anyone trying something on in a public convenience, but, squashed against the porcelain, I couldn’t even secure a first line of defence by doing up my zip, let alone delivering a paralysing chop.
    ‘Oprostite, Gospodin!
’ stammered the intruder, and, seeming to recognise me, he continued in English. ‘Please, Sir, I must hide myself from some person!’
    Scenes from spy movies flashed through my mind. He mustbe an agent on the run. What if the Stasi or a KGB hit man were after him? Innocent bystanders like Michael Caine and Harrison Ford were always getting caught up in situations like this, and then spent the rest of the movie escaping from the hit men themselves. (But, as somewhere along the line they’d get to persuade someone like Nicole Kidman to take off all her clothes, it usually turned out OK.) I began to panic. This was what was happening to me right now
sans
the Nicole Kidman bit.
    ‘What’s going on?’ I said, trying to put a gritty Michael Caine-like edge into my voice.
    ‘I must hide myself! Someone they look for me!’
    Oh my God! A man toting one of those guns with big silencers!
    ‘Who is it?’ I trembled.
    ‘Grandma Dragulic!’
    The Richter adrenalin scale level dropped by fifty points as the pictures of men with big silencers were replaced by black-clad grannies wielding umbrellas.
    ‘Oh, really!’ I said, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
    ‘Yes. For many days, she is waiting for my answer, but in this case I do not have answer for her!’ the man said, the words tumbling out in staccato. ‘She is on ferry and, if she find me, she shout at me and all will hear!’
    My fear turned into self-consciousness. I was conducting a conversation squashed between a stranger’s stomach and a urinal and I now remembered where I had seen him – at the Town Hall signing some of our endless paperwork. (The Croatian civil service system still hadn’t changed since the fall of communism, and the amount of paper we had so far acquired must have been equal to the amount of paper needed to tie Great Britain into the European monetary system.)
    ‘Maybe she’s already passed by and it’s safe now?’ I suggested.
    ‘You go look? Yes?’
    ‘But I don’t know what she looks like.’
    ‘She small and wide and she wear black!’
    Like any Vis granny then. There were at least a dozen of them on the ferry. But my worry was that the granny might have rumbled us and was waiting outside with leg of ham and ready to clout me over the head with it. I put my head out gingerly. The threat had passed. A small but ominous black shape was disappearing down the corridor. I relayed the information to my companion who squeezed himself out, thanked me profusely, and hurried off in the opposite direction.
     
    As the village was so small, we thought that patronising one café was enough, but Karmela considered that slacking. How were we to get a true perspective of anything with only Marko’s gossip to go on? Why, with only his view, we’d never get to the bottom of any story.
    I was quite happy about this as I’ve always found the concept of a café society rather appealing. Drifting in