“Hey there, we’re here,” Tanja said and waived at me from a low stone wall in front of a local establishment of an ingenious name – “The Adriatic.”
And so she was sitting on that little wall like a bushwhacker siren exposed to UV-rays, and behind her, at a table in the shade of the terrace, gathered the rest of the writing-hiking expedition.
Wells Tower, an American accidentally born in Vancouver, the author of a collection of short stories translated into all major and several minor world languages, exhibited friendly and well-meaning attitude from the very beginning. The Velebit adventure, as he admitted later when we hiked to meet the mountain, did not fit into his two-month-long European tour, but he gladly accepted the invitation to visit Blaž Perković and spend a couple of days away from the civilization. In many things, Wells reminded me of one of Cartoon Network characters.
There were all kinds of rumors going around about Maruša Klemen, a Slovene poet of a younger generation. The best known was the one about a well-known Slovenian poet who, publicly, in front of numerous witnesses, at some poetry evening, declared that he no longer had a heart because she, Maruša, broke it, cut it into little pieces, coated it in flour, fried it in a pan with onions, bell peppers and some seasoning, and then hungrily ate it. After this he had to go to Switzerland where in place of his heart they installed a nightingale in a small, golden cage. During that little time we spent together I saw nothing heart-devouring in her. A golden haired girl with grey-blue eyes, funny, tolerably pretty and yes, very well built, no question about it, but there was nothing about her that I could link to the fatal girl from the legends that, as I said, were going around about her.
The last member of our five-member mountain-hiking-writing company was the Israeli writer Etgar Keret. A quiet, good-natured and always smiling, a guest welcomed everywhere. With his two books of short stories he conquered the whole world. Numerous awards, translations and films didn’t turn him into an eccentric prima donna as is often the case, especially in the world of literature. Etgar remained a humble, normal guy just as he had been when I’d met him, a couple of years before, in Zagreb when he’d been promoting his first book of short stories, the first one translated into Croatian.
“Soldiers, to your feet, it’s time to go!” Tanja shouted, grabbed her backpack, threw it on her shoulder and went.
We had to walk about a mile and a half to reach the last stone houses under Velebit. Not even halfway there, everyone had a walking stick in their hands, everyone but me. As they walked, they stabbed those sticks into the ground, waved them about the brush, and along the way pointed at this or that part of the landscape, so I too wished for one. I looked around but I couldn’t find anything suitable. In the end, Tanja found me an almost perfect stick. She just glanced to the side of the path and saw it.
“En garde!” I tested several fencing moves waving the stick about in the air.
The stick fitted my hand nicely, which for a couple of moments made me feel good.
***
Tanja leading the way, we trudged our way to the house made of white stone and surrounded by several tall cypress trees. Perhaps those were not cypresses, I’m no expert, nor is it that important. Friendly hosts met us, as the saying goes, with their arms wide open. They told us to sit down at a large table on the terrace and then hurriedly started bringing: prosciutto, cheese, olives, home-baked bread the size of a satellite dish, which they baked themselves in their old-fashioned oven, homemade wine, and, on top of that, a drink similar to kefir.
Our hosts, Lela and Jan, well in their sixties, seemed as if they had that very moment fallen out of Procol Harum’s or Jefferson Airplane’s music video. In other words, a couple of hippies past their prime that today one can see only in documentaries about the 1960s and almost never in person: their faces somewhat disfigured from all the smiling, with bracelets made of thin, worn-out leather and necklaces made of seashells or corals, who would know exactly what, she wearing a wide dress with Indian decorations, her graying hair free-falling to her waist, and he, dried from the sun like a cod, in a washed-out sailor’s t-shirt and jeans shorts, balding, but with a ponytail at the back of his head and a vein threateningly pulsing on his forehead. They survived drugs and civilization and then finally moved here, to the foot of Mt. Velebit, and, I suppose, found pleasure in this semi-wilderness in the ways I’d never be able to.
Not caring about prosciutto, cheese and that super healthy drink similar to whey or kefir, I decided to stick to bread, wine and olives.
“Oh, yes, yes…” in her broken English Lela explained to Wells. “This is prosciutto, you know, from pig’s leg.”
Jan added that they, of course, were not very much in love with prosciutto or any other kind of meat, but they could understand the pitiful love of an average carnivore for such a delicious treat.
Etgar kept breaking the bread into pieces, smelled them and then threw them into his mouth pouring wine over them. He declared that he’d never tasted bread of such quality, which was met with general approval.
“Why don’t you try this…” Tanja took a slice of prosciutto and offered it to the Israeli.
“Ah, no, no, thank you, I don’t want any, really,” Etgar declined politely, but then Wells joined in.
“You must, at least a bite, I insist.”
“Ah, not even a morsel, but I’ll try an olive or two…”
A possibility of all of this escalating into an international kosher-incident was brought to an end by a grotesque figure that was coming down the path from somewhere on Velebit and approaching us. A spectral figure of an old man bent under a huge bundle of sticks and branches seemed to have just come down from the cover for Led Zeppelin IV. As he walked down the path towards us, the voices at the table died out. We observed him as if the whole day we’d been waiting for nothing else but that bundle of branches and sticks and now finally it was here and we impatiently cheered him on to cross those remaining thirty or forty feet. From the way Lela and Jan helplessly stared at the man, I realized that they’d never seen him before. An old man, however, paid no attention to us, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his step not faster than that of a turtle, which is, truth be told, slow, but it always reaches its goal. And when it already seemed he would pass by as if none of us were there, neither us nor the house, as if we were just part of the landscape – brush and rocks – he paused, took out a large handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
“Hello, would you like some water…” This was Maruša Klemen. She gave out a shot that tore the silence wide open and she was already grabbing the jug from the table in order to, in an act of purest mercy, water the chance traveler.