Korčula
The water was like glass as Dida Krila’s tender slipped over it, the putter of its motor breaking the silence of the morning.
Around Lloyd, the tiny islands were somnolent behind closed shutters and all was still, except for a mother and child on the shaded beach on Vrnik who were no doubt making the most of the cool of the day.
As he followed the curve of the shore, ahead of him lay Lumbarda, red roofs peeping from the tree-lined headland and the sun glinting from the narrow steeple that topped the church tower.
Slowing the engine, he nudged the tender between the fishing boats on the old village harbour before slinging the rope over a metal stanchion and mooring along the bay from Konoba Pecaros.
This was it. No turning back. But there never had been, not from the moment Natali had told him about Krasna’s message.
Pretending the energy of a much younger man, he jumped up onto the quayside then walked briskly towards his fate.
Pecaros was quiet at such an early hour, and Mirjana must have heard him climb the concrete steps because the kitchen door opened the moment he stepped into the restaurant.
Her smile was fleeting. “Good morning, Lloyd. Thank you for coming. It will be easier to talk in the apartment, I think.”
His brief glimpse of the konoba’s kitchen as they walked through revealed that a great deal of updating had been done, although the basic layout was much the same.
Stainless steel had replaced old wood, and the pizza ovens were twice the size, but none of this should surprise him. It had been so many years.
He followed Mirjana up the stairs and into the apartment, where she waved him through to the lounge.
“Take a seat,” she told him, “and I will bring coffee.”
Despite the instruction, he couldn’t settle.
Instead, he prowled between the orange-brown sofa and matching chairs.
Under an ornate mirror was a small table covered with framed photographs, and he stopped to look at them.
There was one of Krasna and a handsome young man with curly hair, which he assumed to have been taken quite recently; one of Krasna as a child of about nine or ten, standing between Mirjana and a portly man with laugh lines and little in the way of hair.
Her husband? Yes. Tucked at the back was a wedding photograph, which included Mirjana’s father but not her mother.
Hearing the clatter of cups from the kitchen, he made a dive for the sofa.
In front of him the coffee table boasted a small peace lily in a terracotta pot.
He hoped it was a sign. On the floor nearby stood a cardboard box, and his breath caught in his throat when he saw the photo on top: Mirjana, Kesten and himself in their konoba uniforms of white shirts and black trousers, arms linked in front of the bar.
He’d never seen it, but he recalled it being taken.
It showed Mirjana as he remembered her: round face, big smile, dancing eyes.
Not the same woman at all as the one in the pictures under the mirror.
She came in carrying a tray full of what was surely her best crockery, capped with a blue and white china coffee pot and a plate brimming with homemade spiced paprenjaci biscuits.
“I hope you still like them,” she said. “I used my father’s recipe.”
“Thank you. Thank you for remembering.”
“It is by way of an apology. I have caused you so much trouble by telling Kristina you were a thief, but I honestly believed it.”
“Believed?” He leaned forwards.
“Yes. Now I have discovered the truth.” She picked up the photograph from the top of the box. “It was Kesten, u klinac Kesten. I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but—”
“He’s dead?”
“Years ago. In the war. But that comes later. It’s part of the story. But god, I’m so angry, Lloyd. Even more angry than I ever was at you, and I didn’t think that was possible.”
Lloyd could barely grasp what this grim-faced Mirjana was saying. That Kesten would steal from his own family, and that he was dead. “But why would he do that?”
“For the same reason he lied to me about you the morning you left. He told me you’d taken an earlier ferry.
I never sent him with a message, Lloyd, and I can only imagine what he told you I said.
” Lloyd rocked back in his seat. Kesten had lied to Mirjana.
Lied to them both. Set them against each other. He passed his hand over his face.
“I have the strangest feeling … like everything I thought I knew about that day is unravelling.”
Mirjana rolled her eyes, and a glimpse of the girl she’d once been caught in the top of his chest. She laughed, but it sounded hollow.
“Tell me about it. These last few days … everything unravelled for me too. It is a very good word to use. That morning he ruined both our lives, Lloyd, and I’m so fucking angry.
Thirty years later … and still it makes me—” She took a deep breath.
“But I need to explain. Coffee?” Suddenly she was back in polite hostess mode, but if that was her way of dealing with this, then fine.
He didn’t even know how to feel himself.
“It was Saturday, Victory Day, and I walked up to the church. Oh, you know I am not religious, but I do it every year, just to stand by the flag for a few moments and place a bunch of rosemary beneath it to remember Kesten. And I suppose, because Krasna had met you and had told me your story, I was thinking most especially of that last morning as I walked back home. But something didn’t fit and it bugged me. ”
“Ah, the time of my ferry.”
“Exactly. What you told Krasna sounded so precise and I began to wonder why you would bend the truth in that way. You know, to make it sound as though you’d waited for me.
But then I realised that if you had left earlier, as Kesten told me, how would you have known that I hadn’t been waiting for you on the steps as we’d agreed?
And if I had, it would have exposed what you said as a lie, so why would you have mentioned it?
“You see, that day, Kesten came to the konoba quite early. I was devastated you’d gone, but Tata had promised to take me into town to say goodbye so we were hurrying through the prep.
Not that we expected many customers, but still there were jobs to be done…
” She paused, gazing at a spot on the wall above Lloyd’s left shoulder.
“Then Kesten arrived, and said that he’d seen you get on an earlier ferry with some other English people so I’d be wasting my time going into town. ”
“But why? Why would he say that?” Lloyd was aghast.
“Because he was in love with me. Only, that bit comes later.”
Lloyd had worked with Kesten all summer, drank with him, joked with him. So how come he’d never guessed? Was it that self-absorption again? Had he and Mirjana been too wrapped up in each other to see what was under their noses?
“So he came into town instead of you to lie to me as well? To tell me you never wanted to see me again because I wouldn’t take you to England with me? Oh god, Mirjana, why didn’t I see through it? I should have known you’d never—”
She twisted her fingers together, white patches appearing where the tips dug into the backs of her hands. “It’s the same for me. Exactly the same. My lack of faith… It’s been eating away at me these last few days. I didn’t even stand up for you when we discovered Mama’s jewellery had gone.”
“But why did he need to take that as well?”
“To make us believe how bad you were. To make sure I’d hate you. He confessed it all in a letter to me. If your Croatian’s still up to it, you can read it for yourself.”
“So if he put it in a letter, why accuse me now?” None of this was making sense. Was it the coffee zinging around his head? He reached for another biscuit to try to mop up some of the caffeine.
“Because I didn’t read it. Not many weeks after you left, Kesten went away to the war.
He wrote to me, telling me he loved me. Of course I didn’t want to know.
I’d never felt that way about him, not in all the years I’d known him, and besides, I was so hurt by you that there was no way I wanted another man in my life.
So I replied, as a friend, asking him not to mention it again.
“But he persisted, and after two more letters I did not open any more. I had this grand idea, you see, this big dramatic gesture, that when the war was over I would hand them back to him still all sealed up and tell him to piss off in no uncertain terms. Except he was killed, and then I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away so I hid them in a box.
” She smiled weakly. “You have no idea how long it took me to find them. All that crap I didn’t throw out after Tata died, all stacked up in the old chicken shed. ”
“W-what happened to your mother?”
“She never got the surgery she needed, so she had a heart attack. She didn’t even make it to Christmas.
And I added that to the score against you, blaming it on the shock of what you’d done, and then I got angry, and love turned to hate.
” She handed him the letter and stood. “I need to talk to my chef. I’ll do that while you read it. ”
The stillness settled around him, the bands of sunlight from the half-open shutters slanting across the room.
The paper was cheap, and Kesten’s writing cramped, but Lloyd recognised it from countless restaurant orders scribbled out that summer.
Despite everything he’d learnt this morning, he still felt sad for the life so brutally snuffed out.
It was all there. Not that Lloyd could understand every word, but he knew enough to get the gist. to understand that it was a confession because Mirjana’s mother was dead and Kesten wanted to return her jewellery.