Is the story real? Maybe. Did I invent it? Possibly. Have I heard it? Definitely.
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” A. Camus
Before I started going into the world, the world used to come to me, or at least so it seemed during those long and hot summers spent in my grandparents’ house. They were both born in the early 1920s, and their long and vivid memory brought many second and third generation emigrants to their door. In a way, they were the story keepers of their small coastal village in Middle Dalmatia. Since my grandfather used to work as a registrar, his social circle was just huge and he was well acquainted with family relationships in our county. He seemed to know everyone and everyone seemed to know him, including people living thousands of miles away. I’d always wondered how all those coming from Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Bolivia, or Chile always came to him. Just as if their ancestors told them to look for Bore if they ever decided to visit the old country. Finally, dide did know everything they were interested in – he regularly guided them to their ancestors’ birth houses in the old village which had been abandoned after the 1962 earthquake, drew family trees and told numerous old anecdotes. As he knew neither English nor Spanish and emigrants’ Croatian was usually quite poor, there was a constant need for a translator. Grandchildren on their school-break were the perfect fit for that job. Being one of those tiny translators, I had a chance to hear so many stories both about their ancestors’ lives in Dalmatia prior to emigration and the lives following the moment they embarked on a ship to their new homes. Most of them eventually built decent lives for their families, but that wasn’t always the case. Anyway, I’d never taken those stories too emotionally. Listening to them mostly felt like reading a novel – you sympathize with the characters, but you’re also well-aware of the distance between your life and theirs. It is just a story – at least until it happens to you or to somebody really close to you. Ours revealed itself back in 2008, coming here in different fragments and put together due to mere coincidences. There was no need for a translator. This story only needed listeners.
That late July evening dide’s old friend Ado paid a visit. That’s the only time I can recall him sitting with dide in front of our house. With the village being quite small, they usually talked to each other in the streets. Talked, yelled, argued – everything always seemed so public – making you believe that there was nothing left to know about them. But that particular evening Ado came, just as if he knew that the conversation would bring up a secret he kept for decades and give him a chance to clarify one’s life story. The two old men enjoyed their pizza and beer, things they didn’t even hear of in their youth, when they were interrupted by my uncle who normally lived in Melbourne. After a polite hello, uncle sat down and reprimanded dide once again:
“I still can’t believe you’ve never told me about your older sister having a daughter in Australia.”
Dide cringed, while Ado coughed and asked “How do you know? Who told you?” Uncle was surprised that Ado seemed to know what he was talking about. However, dide was surprised even more.
“Aunt Jelka’s daughter in Australia, you know of her?!” uncle asked Ado.
“Yes, Marin told me. And he told me how her father died. It was back in the seventies when he said that to me. Who told you of her now?”
“She did. My cousin. Aunt Jelka’s daughter. She sent me a letter.”
“What?! It can’t be!”
The daughter sent my uncle a letter. She was looking for her biological parents for more than 40 years, feeling that her background somehow differed from the Anglo-Saxon one she grew up in. “I just felt my origins were different from that, I felt I was different,” she confessed to my uncle. After years of searching, she finally managed to get her original birth certificate as well as her adoption documents. They contained her mother’s name and the name of the man she thought to be her father. Their place of origin was also stated, so she decided to check if there were any other Despots from Zaostrog residing in Australia. To come across my uncle’s name wasn’t that hard since he owned a restaurant in Melbourne, and occasionally promoted his old country and its recipes on social media. Careless as he is, he almost lost the letter.
“It seemed like one big nonsense mentioning the name of my late aunt. I didn’t read it carefully and I tossed it away, like I do with most of my papers. However, later that night I had a dream with aunt Jelka in it, and thought that I was going crazy. To dream of my aunt who died last year, what could that possibly mean?”
“And what happened later on?” my mother asked.
“I recalled the words from the letter and searched for it in my pile of papers. After rereading it, I phoned our dad. He declined to speak with me about that.”
“I can`t believe it. To keep such a secret for so long…”
“Yes, I know…Anyway, I met the daughter later that month.”
She told him her story. Uncle found it hard to tell her that Jelka, her mother, died less than a year ago in a small village in Istria. Even though the daughter didn’t really expect that her mother would still be alive, finding out that she lived 90-something years and just recently passed away somehow didn’t seem fair. Yet, it was comforting to let her know that she had two older siblings who were doing just fine.
“And what with my father, Marin Despot?”
“Who?” my uncle was surprised.
“His name is in the orphanage documents. He was the one who gave a written consent to give me away.”
“Marin Despot? He wasn’t your father… If my memory serves me well, he was your grandfather. Your father died back in the forties when they were in Australia, and then Jelka went back to Yugoslavia.”
What my uncle didn’t know was that Marin wasn’t her grandfather. He assumed that the daughter was, just as two older Jelka’s children, his granddaughter. After all, dide never mentioned Jelka’s daughter. In his eyes, she must have represented trauma and shame. She was an illegitimate child, and even worse, he was told that her real father committed suicide, leaving pregnant Jelka alone in a foreign country.
“He shot himself somewhere in the Australian mines,” dide said. “Who would ever want to talk about such thing? For a young man to kill himself like that…you know, he was also from the village.”
“Here from Zaostrog?” uncle asked.
“Yes. Jelka first left for Australia with her husband, the father of her older two children. He died due to an illness, something to do with the conditions in the mines, I think. Then she fell in love with this other man, and had his daughter only a year later. They never got married as he killed himself. That’s why Marin had to take care of her and give the child away. Back then he was also in Australia.”
“Bore, it wasn’t like that at all,” Ado replied. “He told me, Marin told me what he did.”
Neither dide nor uncle could imagine what Ado had to say. Apparently, old Marin was in love with Jelka, and after the death of his son he wanted her for himself. She was a young widow with two small children, unprotected and alone in a distant country whose language she wasn’t familiar with. She must have seemed as an easy prey. He didn’t expect that she would resist him, and moreover, fall in love with another man. He couldn’t bear her rejection and stand the two of them happy. So he decided to take their destiny in his hands – his bloody hands.
“Marin killed him, Marin killed the young man. He confessed that to me before he died, smiling at the way he made it look like a suicide. He put a gun into the young man’s hand after he shot him. Australian authorities didn’t really deal with the case. After all, the young man was just a poor Slavic immigrant. The old bastard then forced her to give the daughter away and go back to Yugoslavia. So she went back, and knowing that he would return to Zaostrog, she decided to settle down in Istria. Or he made her go there because she knew what he did, I’m not really sure.”
And that’s how Ado told the secret he kept for more than thirty years. A couple of days later, uncle asked my mom whether it was hard to believe that things could turn out that way. He wasn’t only referring to the story, but also to Ado’s death the very next morning. Just as if he lived long enough to tell the truth when the right moment presented itself.
“Now I realize why she always seemed so sad,” my mother said.
“Well, who wouldn’t be,” I replied. “And in spite of all the people and things dide knew, he had no idea what actually happened to his own sister. Imagine that. I mean, could he talk to her about it?”
“Those were different times. We can’t understand it.”
“Do you think the daughter will ever come and meet her siblings?”
“Who knows?”
“Right… But it’s quite a story, you know.”
“Yes, you should write it down someday.”
I guess I fulfilled my mom’s wish now. And even though the story is written down, I still wonder if I’ve got all of its pieces. The daughter never came to my grandparents’ place, however, I’ve heard that in the meantime she came to Croatia and met her siblings. Too bad that the land destined for children is not always destined for their parents, and that their life stories have to be taken from different times and places to make a whole. With people I’ve met and stories I’ve heard years later while travelling and living on my own in foreign countries, now I see something that dide simply couldn’t. Emigration is not just going out there in the world – it is a world of its own. It brings its perils and promises, and sometimes it plays by the rules we just can’t comprehend. Just like a novel.