Vanessa had to almost trot to catch up with him; his legs were longer than hers. “Why not?” she demanded when they were level again.
He stopped short—so short that she took an extra step and a half past him and had to turn back, feeling foolish. He was angry. No, he was furious. She needed a couple of seconds to realize how furious he was. Unlike hers, his rage burned cold. “The people who run that place, they are not Serbs. They are Croats,” he said.
By the way the last three words came out, they might as well have been They are baby-butchering, carrion-eating filth. Vanessa didn’t get it. “So?” she said. She knew just enough about the old, deceased Yugoslavia to recall that almost everybody in it had spoken a language called Serbo-Croatian. If both groups had used it—and they must have, or they wouldn’t have given it their names—how different could they be?
She proceeded to ask Bronislav that very question. He stared at her for close to half a minute with those disconcertingly sharp eyes. At last, he said, “You are an American.” He spoke softly and with great care, as if reminding himself. Vanessa got the feeling that that was just what he was doing.
It pissed her off, because the way he said it meant You don’t know jack shit. “You are, too,” she reminded him—he’d already told her, more than once, that he was a U.S. citizen, and that he was proud of it. “What’s so awful about Croats?”
He patted his left arm with his right hand. “They gave me this.” Then he stretched out his right arm so his cross-and-four-C’s tattoo came all the way out from under his sleeve. “If I go in there and they see this”—he tapped the tat with his left forefinger— “maybe we just fight. Or maybe they kill me, or I kill them.”
He spoke as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about the chances of rain tomorrow. That made what he was saying more scary, not less. “Why?” Vanessa asked. She wasn’t used to feeling out of her depth, but she sure did now.
Bronislav gave her why, in great detail. He hated Croats with the bitter passion someone could only feel for a close relative. She tried to imagine hating her little half-brother that way, tried and felt herself failing.
Bronislav had no trouble at all. He hated the Croats because he was Orthodox and they were Catholic. He hated them because they used the Roman alphabet and he used the Cyrillic. He hated them because he used hard vowels while they used soft ones.
“Say what?” Vanessa asked—that one meant nothing to her, not as a reason to hate and not at all. Nothing. Zilch.
“For milk, they say mleeyehko.” Bronislav said the word very slowly, and looked as if he wanted to wash his mouth out with soap while he did it. “We say mlehko. You see the difference? You hear, I mean?”
“Yes, but—”
He talked through her answer: “Mleeyehko. Peh!” He spat on the sidewalk in disgust. “It is how fairies talk.”
That was even less PC than her old man. Then Bronislav talked about how, during the war, the Croats had jumped into bed with Hitler with open legs. They’d tried to murder everybody they could reach who wasn’t a Croat, and they’d done a damn good job of it. If you listened to Bronislav, the Croat irregulars, the Ustasha, had been vicious enough to horrify the Gestapo.
“And the Croats, they still have Ustasha today,” Bronislav said. “They are as bad as their grandfathers were, too. I fight—fought—them in Eastern Slavonia. It is part of the Serb homeland that the Croats stole when they ran out of Yugoslavia. They always steal everything they can grab, Croats.”
“What would they say about Serbs?” Vanessa asked, perhaps incautiously.
With great dignity, Bronislav replied, “I do not know. I do not care. Whatever it is, it would be a lie.”
They didn’t eat at the Croat-run restaurant. Where there was one, though, there were bound to be more. Vanessa wondered if she’d already seen some and assumed they belonged to Serbs. Did all the Serbs and Croats in San Pedro feel about each other the way Bronislav felt about the people from the other side of the tracks or the border or whatever you wanted to call it?
She didn’t ask him. She didn’t think she wanted to know badly enough to put up with another frozen explosion. And he’d intimidated her. She didn’t realize that till she was riding home on the bus the next morning. Even after she did realize it, she didn’t want to admit it to herself. But it was true.
XIX
Even these days, sometimes you really wanted a car if you could possibly get hold of one. Colin didn’t care to think about taking Kelly to San Atanasio Memorial on his bike when she went into labor. Bringing the baby back that way didn’t seem any too practical, either. The bus also wasn’t the best bet. Talk about jumping on the kid’s immune system with both feet!