There were always guests at our house. Everyone coming into the village or to the cooperative store from the direction of the scrubland and the Narančić stream would take the path that ran behind our house rather than the road leading to the school and around the cistern. Someone would always stop by, knock on the doorstep, and say hello.
The person who stayed most vividly in my memory was Mileva, Makseta’s daughter-in-law and the mother of Dane and Perica. She was frail and delicate, and her face reflected the hard life she had endured quietly and patiently within herself.
Ljubiša would also sometimes come by, the “village fool,” who could never get enough cigarettes or rakija and who was not quite right in the head.
Grandma took great pride in her garden, which she had cultivated beside the old homestead. She took every opportunity to work in it, and it showed. The garden was full of everything, and the produce was plump and bursting with life.
There were cucumbers and tomatoes, beautiful peppers, onions and shallots, beans, carrots, parsley… It all required hard work.
The hardest thing was getting water when the rain failed during the dry summer months. Every drop of water Grandma carried from the pit behind the house, on the site of today’s cistern, slowly—one bucket at a time, one step at a time.
There, beside the pit, in front of the side of the house, Grandma had planted irises, asters, and other flowers that flourished and of which she was very proud.
That was another side of Grandma altogether—much gentler and more noble than the one she showed in the harsh reality of peasant life.
On her way to the cooperative store, Nada, the daughter-in-law of Uncle Vaća, Grandma’s brother, would sometimes stop by. They would chat, and sometimes have a coffee.
Father liked going to Uncle Vaća’s, so sometimes we would go there together, to the Narančić stream.
Their house was opposite Makseta’s, directly across the road. We would pass through the yard, crossing a stone slab laid over the stream.
I never asked Grandma, and I do not remember Father ever telling me, what had caused the rift between them, but they never spoke a single word to each other for the rest of their lives.
Once or twice, we would also visit the Ciga family.
My aunt Milka had married into that house at the far end of the village, toward the mountain, marrying Nikola, Ciga’s son.
They too would come to the village in summer, as we did, and later they would come with their children, Milica and Đuro, who were the same age as my brother.
But their stays were a real ordeal. It was the wealthiest household in the village, but the work was exhausting, so they always looked forward to leaving with a sense of relief.
I did not particularly like going there. What bothered me most was the enormous swarm of flies, which could not be avoided. After a while, however, our defences would give way; our tired hands could no longer keep swatting them away, and so the return home was always welcomed as a relief.
Grandpa Đuro, old Ciga, was a striking man, powerfully built and dark-complexioned. That was presumably why he was given the nickname Ciga, comparing the colour of his face with the complexion of the Roma people who occasionally passed through the village begging and sometimes stealing, before later settling at the entrance to Gospić, beyond Bilaj.
At Ciga’s there were animals everywhere—in the yard, the barns, and the pens.
Perhaps ten cows, which had to be milked twice a day; horses; several hundred sheep; later, a herd of about fifty mountain goats; and there was no end to the poultry.
Everything had to be tended to, and there were never enough working hands.
That was why there was always some “servant” or farmhand living in the household.
And besides livestock farming, there was also extensive agriculture, with several dozen plots of hay meadows, arable land, and forest.
Later, when the village had begun to recover somewhat after the war, enterprising Grandpa Ciga took up crushing stone and producing concrete blocks for house construction.
He ran his little empire with an iron hand, while Grandma Milija, or Milica, kept order among the women of the household.
Everything was subordinated to work, and his sons—the one who remained at home and my uncle—had little say in anything. Their job was simply to work.
Željko Narančić