Twenty-one years ago, I got a job washing dishes in a hotel on the Croatian coast, in a small resort town called Crikvenica.
It was 1996; I was 18 and still in the first six months of living away from my hometown in Santa Barbara county where I had spent all but three years of my life. I could drive, do my own laundry, load a dishwasher, get myself to class and back, and hold a part-time job at a local coffeehouse on Friday nights. When I graduated high school, I was finally trusted to return home safe from a three-day road trip up to San Francisco with my best friend, as long as we stayed a pre-approved lodging. In other words, traveling Europe for the first time was also combined with just learning how to live independently.
And it worked out, to the relief, I’m sure, of my parents, who waited on calls from payphones and postcards week to week. I made friends and bought Hungarian and Czech language books while traveling through Eastern Europe with a group of Canadians I had met in Austria. When they easily got visas to Turkey while my status had a delay, I turned around and took advantage of the month-long train pass that also, magically, covered all rail travel in Great Britain, where transport was most expensive. I spent New Year’s at a youth hostel in Cornwall, going on my first hike by myself. The first hotel room I ever had on my own was in Paris. I was surviving, I would tell myself, watching the buildings of cities I spent my senior year of high school dreaming of visiting glide past my window on the trains that became like second homes that month. I felt that if Europe was a test on entering adulthood, I was acing it.
Until I arrived in Crikvenica. It’s pronounced “Tza-kren-itz-ah” – and it was my first true settling point in Europe. The job was for three months in a hotel that had been bought by a church group, who were using it to temporarily house refugees from the Balkan war.
It was February, dark and wintry. The common language was Russian. The hotel had balconies that looked out to the sea but the building itself had a utilitarian Soviet Bloc feel to it. Until this time, I had only been around kids around my own age who were also traveling on their own for the first time, all of us from countries where English was the first language. Most of us were also from the same socio-economic backgrounds, which I would describe as above comfortable.
I was aware of the world from books and the evening news, but I didn’t understand how people who have been through trauma move forward. It was all women in the kitchen around me who were chopping and cooking– none spoke English. The hotel was run by former refugees, serving other refugees from Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, who came with their families to have a two-week break from the camps they had been placed in, some for years. The hotel offered hot meals, space and counselling services. While the war had ended with a peace agreement two months before, an estimated 2.2 million people had been displaced by the armed conflict that had killed about 100,000 people. In the kitchen, my favorite was Marta, who was thin and tall with blonde hair, always tied back in a high, tight ponytail. She wore boots, bracelets that jangled around her wrists and a thick jacket with a fur-lined hood that she would hang up in a hook outside the kitchen, before slipping on her apron. She would always bring a radio that she would turn on and place above the sink and try and get the older women to dance with her. To me she was sophisticated and intimidating. Marta never spoke to me. Later, someone told me Marta fled with her family from Sarajevo during the siege, by escaping through the sewer system that finally led them to the 800-foot underground tunnel out of the city. The siege had been ongoing since 1992; towards the end, they’d been living on flour and water mixed together. I’d watch her sometimes while I was washing dishes and try to imagine all this happening to her, and I couldn’t reconcile it.
At some point in my time at the hotel, someone decided that I should see the war zones myself. These memories are so absurd and surreal, I had to drag a photo album down from a top shelf tonight to make sure I didn’t make it all up. I was sent with three other Canadian guys, who had come to help with maintenance, on a 12-hour bus trip to a church in Mostar, in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where gunfire could still be heard when were dropped off near the city square. We asked to use the phone at a shoe store that existed in a shell of a bombed building. We dialled the number given to us. A friend of a friend who spoke English picked us up and gave us what can only be described as a tour of everything that had been destroyed. We stayed with him for four days and each day was a road trip to a different razed town or city. Often we were escorted by soldiers who walked along with us, smoking and pointing out where land mines had been identified. There are times when I think back and wonder if I’ve confused all those memories with war movies I’ve seen. I look at the photos I took – a tank on a dirt road stopping for cows; piles of books in a shelled school, with holes in the wall that looked out to a landscape of levelled buildings – and clearly it wasn’t.
If anyone in the hotel kitchen needed me to do something, they’d call out “Hey Santa Barbara” because they couldn’t pronounce my name, but they recognized where I was from immediately. The soap opera by the same name had been cancelled in the U.S. for years. But every day at 4 p.m., the television room filled up with women in bathrobes and slippers who had just showered after work and settled into their favorite chairs to watch characters named “Eden” and “Flame” live their lives in the gilded world that I’m sure many assumed I had come from. They were never unkind to me – at the end of my time, one of them offered to read my future in cooled coffee grains from the stove-top percolator – but nothing about me made them feel like I knew what they had been through.
And I didn’t. I didn’t understand war and how healing happens. I was young and I thought it would be dramatic and obvious, like it was in the movies. Not dancing in a kitchen or taking hot showers and curling up in a chair to watch a show that makes to happy for a little while. I toured the bombed towns without connecting this to anyone’s history, especially the women I worked with. It felt like a movie set to me. When I look back at that first February abroad, I think about how lonely I was. It was the first time where I was in a place that was so foreign to me.
Spring came and I went on to Italy, then England and Ireland and finally back to California, just in time for my 19th birthday. I returned to friends and family who were just like me. Life in Santa Barbara went back to being easy and comfortable for awhile. I always thought I would go back to Crikvenica someday, maybe in the summer. But I didn’t and it has became one of those places that end up in a photo album that I pull out every few years, when I try to trace how I’ve become who I am now, at 39. It’s like following breadcrumbs. Why do I think what I think? Why does this make me angry? It’s hard to see when I am being shaped by a place, while I am there. Even for three months. But years later, when I look through photos of towns like Crikvenica – places that must have impacted me in some way that I didn’t realize at the time- and who I am now makes more sense to me.