After a minute, as though he could feel my eyes on him, he turned and gave me a long-lashed Italian stare over his shoulder. Now, I’m no great beauty—I’ve got the deep-set brown eyes, thick wren-brown braid, and long runner’s legs of a million other people from my ancestors’ part of the globe—but I’m slender and makeup free and come across as calm and non-neurotic, and I think that men, or a certain kind of man, must be drawn to that. This one seemed to be. I sent him back enough of a glance to let him know that if he could manage to park Grandma somewhere, I might be interested, and it was the old thing all over again. He began to slow, pointing out interesting shrubbery to the dour little widow and keeping an eye on me. This was my cue—and then I remembered Rikki. It was a damn shame, but there it was. “We’d better get in the passing lane,” I said, “or we’ll never make it to your precious temple.” His cheeks heated up—he’d apparently seen the whole pregnant interchange—but he took me by the upper arm and towed me around the group of chattering relatives. I felt the Italian shrug as we passed him on the left.
Temple IV was a slog indeed, most of it on a steep trail through cleared but unleveled earth with a number of immense tree roots acting as foot and handholds. The highest section of the climb involved a vertical ladder that seemed to lean out backward over the jungle below. At the top of the ladder, there was a bit of a scramble to get safely parked on the flat limestone slabs at the summit of the pyramid, and then we were sitting together, our backs against what was left of the roof comb, staring out over one of the last real rainforests in the world.
“People sneak sleeping bags up here sometimes,” Rikki said. “That’s the thing—to watch the sun come up from the top of Temple IV. The guards usually chase them out, though.”
“Have you done it?”
“My mom and I, when I was eight. Totally cool.”
It crossed my mind, then, that there was no woman in the picture, no wife of Jan or mother of Rikki. Now Rikki spoke of her as though eulogizing a dear departed. Poor kid. I knew enough not to ask, I wasn’t going to ask, and then he said, almost offhandedly, “When we’re done here, we’re heading up to Palenque for a while, so you’ll get to meet her.”
“I will?”
“You’ll like her. She’s great.”
I turned back toward the panoramic jungle scene and said, carefully, “Will your dad be with us?” which was code for “So they’re still married?” and he winced and said, “Of course.”
“Rikki,” I said, deliberately changing the subject after an appropriately long pause. “What’s up tonight? What am I shooting?”
“A tomb in North Acropolis. He doesn’t want to do it until all the tourists are out.”
“Is it going to be as exciting as last night?”
That got a smile out of him. “Better,” he said.
“Something to do with the famous Ah-Cacaw?”
He turned to look me in the face. We were sitting two feet apart in the shade of the roof comb, with the sun, just behind the massive blocks, backlighting his head. One of his ears, the one closest to the sunlight, looked translucent, like a baby’s ear or the ear of a very young animal. His lashes were thick as fronds. But he’d be grown up soon enough, out in the world like all the beautiful ones, playing the same game as the Italian on the trail. “You really don’t care about this stuff, do you?” he said.
“You mean about your precious Mayas?”
Silently, in the way his father might have done it, he put his arm out flat, palm down, and ran it over the scene below us.
I pushed him harder, payback for them keeping me in the dark. “This is all life and death to you two, right? Figuring out what happened here, why they abandoned their big cities? But hey, they’re all dead and gone now, so what’s the big deal?”
“I know,” he said. “I know.” But for a moment he looked startled, as though this were the first time the thought had ever crossed his mind. And I thought, poor kid. Sixteen, and still totally enslaved to his parents. For all our differences, Stefan and I were completely on the same page with the whole filial devotion thing. We’d both blown the family nest at the soonest possible opportunity.
Chapter Three
Weirdly enough, Stefan was not the first of my relatives to disappear. And in neither previous case was the outcome good. For a long time I assumed that my family was just unlucky, that we walked around under a curse, like the Kennedys, another tragic Catholic clan, if not nearly so rich and famous. My pregnant grandmother, for example, went missing a week before her thirty-second birthday. She’d gone to visit a friend in another village, which required a strenuous walk through a gloomy forest—this was Croatia in the early thirties, and being the peasant she was, she would have been walking—and just by chance or maybe through divine intervention (what Stefan would say), she had left my dad at home with my grandfather that morning. Bruno was eight. The Serbian king over Croatia had been assassinated six days before, allegedly by the Croatian Ustaše, hardcore nationalist militants who were willing to wreak any amount of havoc for the sake of independence, and in the usual Balkan way, the reaction was immediate and murderous.
Apparently, she walked straight into a village marked for retaliation. Nobody knows for sure what happened, just that the twenty-five or so people in town that day, mostly the usual collection of old men, women, and children, were marched deeper into the mountains and shot at the edge of a gorge. My grandfather never got over it. Neither did Bruno, who knows, if ever a man did, how to hate with a passion.
Though all I have to go on is Bruno’s version of the story, Milo, my grandfather, did a good job of raising his motherless son. Several years later, when Germany invaded and the Nazis struck their famous bargain with the founder of the Ustaše and then-ruler of newly independent Croatia, Milo did what he needed to do, choosing to help run a camp for kids to keep young Bruno by his side rather than volunteering for the front lines as he so mightily desired.
When the war ended in 1945, Milo and Bruno, with the help of some friendly Franciscans in Rome, escaped the general massacre at the hands of Tito’s “godless Communist Partisans,” as my mother so affectionately refers to them, and wound up at St. Silvan’s in Chicago. There, they found a community of true believers. Not, I have to say, in God—though of course they didn’t not believe in him—but rather in the superiority of the Croatian culture, which, at least in a certain percentage of Croats, is marked by its intense and self-sacrificial loyalty to the Catholic Church. Milo ate it up. Bruno, with his immense capacity for hate, loathed everything about it. Both of them got jobs in the steel mills, wherein they found a lot of second-generation Croatian immigrants, virtually all of them as starry-eyed as Milo about the beauty, truth, and goodness of the “old country,” which none of them would ever see again.
Milo told Bruno to find a wife. St. Silvan’s had plenty of candidates. So he married Hana, daughter of one of those immigrants, in 1954. Stefan was born a year later. I showed up in 1959. And that, despite Hana’s absolute devotion to the Church (which meant no artificial birth control), was all they wrote in terms of kids.
Here’s what I remember. Stefan, who looks exactly like me only taller, skinnier, and with big horn-rimmed glasses, is eight. I am a self-satisfied four. We are marching in the Velika Gospa procession in honor, as the priest keeps reminding us, of “Our Lady,” as we do every year in August, as Croatians have done since who knows when. Despite the fact that Stefan and I live in America and have always lived in America, he is dressed like a nineteenth-century peasant boy, and I am wearing a traditional old-country village costume, which at this age looks mighty cute on me: big, poofy white sleeves, a long white skirt, a multicolored apron, a funny little embroidered headdress, all assembled by that eminently loyal Croat, Hana. Afterward, we’ll glut ourselves on barbecued lamb, mostaccioli, rizot, sarma, strudels,