A new/old fire..

 Life barreling along. Already almost a week post b-party. Still the dregs hanging around: errant softish balloons wafting about, the banner proclaiming a 4th birthday has arrived, the paper streamers wilting on the curtain rods, stale cake that needs thrown away, foil wrapped bowls that need emptying. 

Somewhere in one of the nights, I returned to an old persisent interest. Even a bit of a passion: I’ve returned to the village of my father’s birth. Well, in my head. And I feel that old urgent tug to writing again. I’ve begun researching again. I think it all started with reading my book club’s selection for this month, The Lost WIfe. Another WW2 novel, I sighed as I began reading. It’s a good book really. Sadly and fervently written. I found the thought driffting through my mind that everyone who lived through WW2 had a Story to tell. Everyone. Even those who sat terrified in their houses with their hands over their ears and their eyes screwed shut..just waiting and willing it to all be over..

Eventually, it was. But not without wreaking  a massive Devastation that touched every soul, good, bad and otherwise.

Then I read a passage from Jennifer Wilson’s "Running Away to Home". She’s a writer who lives in Iowa.  She’s actually related to me in a roundabout way. One day a few years ago, she packed up her little family and moved them to the small mountain village in Croatia my father came from…for a year. And wrote about it. All because her family emigrated from there about 100 years ago. She describes a community of 800 simple people who are (usually) drunk. I have yet to read the whole book. Not quite sure why I have been procrastinating but I have. But the other day, I read a passage about the family that bears my surname. About the bit of the war my father was born during..and which his mother died during. About good and bad ones. About a vicious militant group called the Ustashe..so vicious they scared the Nazis. And realized..I had a story to tell. Have always had a story to tell.

I have a time frame : 1939 to about 1945. I have a place: Mrkopalj, Croatia. I have a story: how a group of people in a tiny moutain village in a place when I was growing up no one in the Midwest had heard of. About how this tiny group of people weathered a huge tremendous wave of political unrest unheard of before or after in modern times. And how one tiny child was born from dubious, even (to me and mine) mysterious circumstances in those bewildering and terrifying days…and survived to such an extent that I sit here in my little living room now with mine.

A bit of a fire has been struck. In doing some of the research for my "story", I find I don’t know if I am strong enough to write about it. I’ve known for a long time my father’s family was involved with the Ustashe, including possibly his mother. She was not a spring chicken when she had her only child, my father. She was in her late 20’s..like being 40 and having a kid these days. I am fairly certain she wasn’t married, though both my parents had insisted she was until I was old enough to know better. My father’s father is the big mystery: He always wove a tale about a German soldier named Kautner. He said after his mother’s (mysterious) death when he was 18 months old, his grandmother, who raised him, changed his name to her surname to "protect" him. There might be a shred of truth about this since if he’d had a German last name he may have been killed. Yes, even a baby. Worse atrocities were inflicted on thousands of other babies and children because of their blood.

But in my research, I realized the German soldier might be a myth. The last name was difficult to find but I did find a German actor by that name who was quite popular during the height of the Nazi regime. Hmm. Plus, Mrkopalj was under strict Italian occupation during the period of time my father would have been conceived. Then there was the idea (told to me by my father’s gay cousin after my father’s funeral that it was rumored my father’s father was an Italian soldier). More hmm.

There is alot I don’t know. And even more I am reluctant to find out. These Ustashe…unbelievable. Their political ideas were loosely similar to those of the Nazis, esp concerning racial cleansing which is likely why the Ustashe were "allowed" to gain some power. But they took the ideas of racial extermination…and ran with it. Reveled in it. Adored it. Committed horrific terrifying atrocities so unbelievably cruel..they terrified Hitler. Who eventually ordered the Ustashe to be disbanded and all their concentration camps to be burned to the ground and the records destroyed.

All that is left are stories and some pictures that are enough to make one’s eyes bleed.

And in the midst of it, some biologic incident happened that caused my father to come into being…and thus me..and my children. What happened? Rape? Love story? Prostitution? Blackmail? Opportunism? Drunken incident? Doing whatever had to be done to survive?

It’s meaty bit of possibility. Rich and rife. I have alot of reading to do. I also need to go back to Mrkopalj with a good translator to sit in some smokey pubs and back porches with slivovitz and mull with the old locals over the old stories and myths…of those left who lived through it.This isn’t about my father. Not so much. He was an asshole. A not very nice person. I had little to no love for him. It’s mostly a relief he is dead. Except I wish I had listened a little more to his rambling stories better. If only to sort through the "what he really meant was.."

I know I won’t find the actual truth. What really happened…well, that has been dead and buried for a long time. Maybe since the ejaculation ended. For there was one. Sperm met egg and my father happened. He lived as a child through the terrible years. He heard things. He saw things. He tried a hat on from a closet  once that belonged to his aunt. And was slapped roundly for it. It was the hat from a Ustashe uniform. Never meant to be seen in public again.

He never met his father. Never knew who he was beyond speculation and rumor. Maybe even cruel ridicule and bullying.

Who killed his mother? Why? Who were these people? What was is like? Why?

Why?

Why?

Maybe I can answer this.

For me.