No Matter How You Slice It...

Meeting the first of the Village People opened the floodgates. Of course, there couldn't be much of a flood in a village of fewer than 200 souls. Still, that long day with Joze marked the beginning of my integration into Goce. People started waving to me on the street and exchanged "dober dans" with me. I wasn't yet an insider, nor would I ever be a native. I was just happy that people here seemed willing to accept an American neighbor -- even one who couldn't speak Slovene.

I really wanted to meet the family living next door. After all, we were within three feet of their front door every time we left the house. Their house is what Running Man (RM) calls "renewed," with crisp white stucco covering the stone, a new tile roof, and a stone-studded concrete paver patio stretching the length of the front of the house, shaded by a vine-covered pergola and filled with dozens of flowering potted plants. It's a cool and colorful place and the inhabitants spend many hours sitting there while a little girl plays on the patio and on the asphalt of the street that meets the concrete. Their house starts one of the "spokes" from the heart of the village that concludes with the end of my house that overlooks the vineyards and valley. Their house is connected to another old and crumbling stone house and barn where chickens strut in the walled yard behind large iron gates. That house and barn is connected to my barn which is connected to my house. The stone wall perpendicular to the right side of the old farm's gate, and the backside of another old farmhouse, form the tunnel-like passage that leads to my gates. That's what makes my courtyard so private. Since that passage is part of my property, that's where RM usually parks the van. We can't come or go without this neighbor noticing.

It appeared that the household comprised an older lady, two younger women, one blond and one brunette, a younger man and the darling little girl with huge blue eyes who looked to be about three. The older lady was the one who had been the keeper of the keys to my house, no doubt taking care of things since the former owners rarely stayed here. She's petite, with short, dark hair and those stylish eyeglasses. She makes multiple trips to and from a garden on the hill behind my house, traveling the dirt road that runs behind it. From the looks of the thriving garden and the colorful patio, she must possess a very green thumb.

I still hadn't been able to determine the times for Mass at St. Andrew's Church in the middle of the village. RM and I had checked at different times to see if Mass times were posted or if the church was open, but neither of us had been successful. With the weekend approaching, I suggested we ask "the lady next door" to find out. We walked over and found the front door standing open, which is common in the village. RM stuck his head in and shouted a greeting in Slovene that brought the lady out into the central hallway. She smiled, replied to RM and waved us into the house. Her name is Maria and she introduced us to her brunette daughter, Andreja, and the charming little girl, Spela (pronounced "shpay-luh"). Maria invited us to sit down in the kitchen where Spela was curled up on Andreja's lap watching a cartoon on the television, her big, expressive eyes moving back and forth between RM and me and the cartoon. RM and Maria chatted for several minutes before he stood to leave. I uttered "me veseli" and "nasvidenje" (nice to meet you and goodbye) and we walked our few steps back home with RM recounting their conversation. We'd broken the proverbial ice with a little small talk.

Two days later, my back was making small talk with me. The air mattress had to go. I hadn't shipped any of my possessions to Slovenia and I didn't have the money to go out and buy new things. Instead, RM had I had been quite inventive with all of the furniture the previous owners had left behind.

When I bought the house, there were five large daybeds in it. Each of them had faux wood, laminate-covered backs and sides, a big humped upholstered seat and two large drawers for storage underneath. RM and I now looked at the four we'd moved into the barn, trying to figure out how to construct a bed from two of them. After a bit of discussion, we decided we could take the arms off one of them and use the back and seat as a headboard and half of the mattress, then remove the back and arms of another one, push the two together and leave the drawers of the backless one facing outward for storage. Clever, huh. But we faced one big problem -- how to remove the pieces that needed to come off. They weren't attached to the base with screws or nails. In fact, even after we moved them out into the courtyard and turned them upside down and inside out, we couldn't figure out how they were assembled. We needed a saw.

The house had also come with several very old saws of various types. RM tried a couple on the laminate-covered material but couldn't get any teeth into them. We needed a power saw.

RM had met Maria's son, Rado, the day after we'd gone to their house. He and his wife, Kristina, and their daughter, Spela, live there with his mom and sister, in the multi-generational way many families live in Slovenia. Rado had a factory job down in the valley and a bull in the barn that he raised for slaughter. He also cut and sold firewood and, of course, owned vineyards and made wine. Surely, he would have a saw we could borrow.

RM headed next door and I went back into the house to continue cleaning, sorting and organizing. All of the sudden, I heard the unmistakable roar of a chainsaw. I rushed out into the courtyard and saw RM holding onto the back of one of the daybeds while a young burly guy with short-cropped hair wielded a chainsaw, slicing off the side of the daybed amid a cloud of flying sawdust. RM was smiling. The other guy, whom I assumed was Rado, looked seriously focused on the task at hand.

"Oh, my gosh," I thought. "What in the heck is that going to look like when he gets done?" "A chainsaw?" "Really?"

I could do nothing but stand in the doorway watching Rado sweep the heavy chainsaw through the air and through my furniture, a la "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." When he finished, he shut off the saw, mumbled something to RM then abruptly left the courtyard. He moved like a small bull with his broad shoulders hunched forward, muscular arms curved away from his torso, head down, taking long strides, each foot landing with purpose and authority.

"You couldn't find someone with a circular saw?" I asked RM as the dust settled, a slight bit of irritation in my voice.

"No, darling," RM said, his "darling" sounding like "dahhhling," as usual. 

"Can you believe it?" RM said. "Rado did the work eins, zwei, drei!" he said, making a dusting motion with his hands. (That's "one, two, three" for those of you who don't speak German.)

It was like he'd brought a cannon to kill a fly. I walked over to take a closer look at the beds, my heart filled with fear. But amazement replaced the horror I had anticipated. The cuts were straight, clean and smooth as if made by a surgeon.

"Okay, that guy should be one of those people who sculpts statues from tree trunks using a chainsaw!" I said to RM.

"And, we can buy wood for the stove from him for the winter," RM said with a smug look of satisfaction.

All of the sudden, Rado the bull strode back into the courtyard. This time, RM introduced us to each other. Rado doesn't speak English but told RM his wife does. At least I'd be able to communicate with one person in my neighbor's house.

Apparently, Rado had come back to help RM move the heavy daybeds, or what was left of them, into the house. How nice for me. All I had to do was tell them where to put the two pieces then run the vacuum over them to clean up the sawdust.

When they finished, RM told me that Rado had invited us next door for, of course, a glass of his wine. What a country. He comes here to do us a favor then invites us over to share his wine. Rado's wife, Kristina, was home so I was able to converse with someone other than RM. She apologized for her English as has every Slovenian I've met who speaks English. I told her that her English was far better than my Slovene. She actually speaks quite well.

Everyone in the household was there in the kitchen, sharing food and wine with us. Little Spela, who I found out was not quite three years old yet, started talking to me, her high-pitched little voice expressing words I couldn't understand. Like me, she was learning Slovene, although with far greater ease, I'm sure. She laid a little book in my lap that had pictures of animals and the Slovene word for them underneath. She pointed at a picture of an owl and said, "sova." I repeated it, trying to pronounce the word correctly. Then, I said "owl, English" and when we looked at each other and simultaneously said "hoo-hoo-hoo," everyone burst out laughing. Animal sounds are a universal language.

You never know what kind of neighbors come with a house. But it's a great feeling when you know that the people next door are warm and gracious people you can count on. This is especially true when you're thousands of miles away from home, and even if the neighbor uses a chainsaw to make furniture.

I still didn't know what time Mass was on Sundays. No problem. I'd go next door on Saturday and ask.

The Village People

Running Man (RM) and I continued to clean the house and the little piece of property that came with it. We invited our friends from Lokve, Edbin and Tatijana, to come to dinner. They were very anxious to tour the house. We also spent some time with RM's brother, sister-in-law and their teenage sons. Other than that, we laid low and stayed close to home, except for our frequent trips to the library in Nova Gorica for wireless internet access. The telephone company was out of fiber-optic capacity for high-speed internet in Goce, satellite dishes or antennas aren't available, and because I didn't have a full-time employer in Slovenia, I wasn't allowed to subscribe to a service that would allow me to use a USB key to connect to a tower on Nanos that I could probably get a signal from given the position of the house. The situation posed a significant problem for my ability to work on client projects. But after several attempts and some arm twisting, RM finally managed to get a USB key and monthly plan for me.

Naturally, I was curious about my new neighbors but worried about the fact that I couldn't speak Slovene. Instead of venturing out to meet them, like I'm sure I would have had I bought a house in the States, I observed. I am a people-watcher, and I had a great place to do it.

There's a little road that runs right behind my house and around the corner between the house and the vineyard. When I say "right behind" I mean within a foot of the house wall in some places. On the other side of the little road is an open hayfield that meets the vineyard beside the house. The road isn't much more than a path but it has a lot of traffic.

Everyone traveling the road walks or drives small tractors behind the length of the house, rounding the corner and disappearing over the hill beyond. There's the small dark-haired lady whom I recognized as the next-door neighbor. She would travel the path a few times a day, sometimes pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure to deposit in the compost heap next to her little garden and sometimes with handfuls of flowers, herbs or some other produce. Then, there's the blue-haired lady who usually carried an empty pail over the hill and one full of lettuce or onions on the return trip. Although I never saw them together at the same time, I was struck by their incredibly stylish glasses in sharp contrast to their attire. The dark-haired neighbor would wear boots and cropped pants and bright blouses while the blue-haired lady always wore a long apron. Peasant attire with designer eyewear. I loved the irony.

The men who used the road were usually driving small tractors to their fields, gardens or vineyards. I wondered where they lived in the village, what crops they tended and what they all thought about the American woman who had moved to town. Surely they were as curious about me as I was about them.

The weekend after my experience with burja was incredibly warm and sunny for the end of October and above all, still. I was scheduled to fly back to the States in three weeks to spend Thanksgiving with my family, work on my residence permit and tie up some other loose ends. On this Sunday afternoon, RM and I had wandered through the wine cellar and out the back door to survey the house from the back and side and to take in the exhilarating views of the countryside. The grapes had been harvested and the vineyards and forests were just beginning to turn yellow, red and orange.

It was while we were enjoying our panoramic view that we met our first Village Person. He was walking with a black dog from the hayfield behind the house, back toward the road when he and RM exchanged a friendly "dober dan" (good day) and he stopped to talk. His name was Joze (prounounced yo-zhuh) and he spoke no English. The dog's name was Beno and he followed Joze everywhere. Joze was average height, tanned, mustached with dark hair peppered with gray. I listened as he and RM talked, then watched RM motion Joze down the alley and around the house.

"He has invited us to his wine cellar," RM said. "We're going to meet him around front."

It was our first invitation into the famous wine cellars of Goce. How exciting.

We walked quickly through the narrow streets to a building at the front edge of the village. Joze had restored the old building with its ancient wine cellar below, like the one in my house, and put another cellar above. Both were filled with large stainless steel casks. He welcomed us in and poured a glass of something that RM told me was his homemade vinjak (veen-yok) which is the local equivalent of cognac. We drank a shot, then another as we stood outside looking up toward the ancient church that sits atop a peak above Goce. The church is called "Maria Snezna" (pronounced shnez-nuh) which translates to "Mary of the Snow." With the spotlights on at night, you can see it for miles, statuesque among the forests and vineyards high above the Vipava Valley. RM and I had been planning to walk up to see the church but hadn't made it yet. Apparently, Joze was going to drive us there.

He opened the back door of the car outside the cellar, pushing papers and plastic bottles from the seat, and motioned for me to get in. RM got into the front seat and Joze walked around and sat behind the wheel. I was a little nervous because I could tell Joze was a little tipsy. You don't have to understand Slovene to figure that one out. And he'd brought along a full bottle of his vinjak for the journey so as he navigated the narrow, twisting rock road to just below the church, I wondered what the trip back down would be like. 

We walked to the top of the hill with Beno who had sprinted all the way up the road behind us. The view was absolutely amazing. RM had his camera with him, of course, so he had to shoot me above Goce.

There was a young couple from Ljubljana there, sitting on the wall around the Church, and a middle-age couple from Piran taking photos of the valley. Three of the four could speak English so I could make small talk with them, but most of the conversation was in Slovene. Joze was passing around the bottle of vinjak and everyone was partaking. I was reminded of snorkling the year before in February while in Mexico for my brother's wedding. My Dad, older brother, two sisters, brother-in-law and niece had taken the excursion one morning. There were about 20 people on the boat, including three local guides who passed around a bottle of tequila and only two glasses among all of us. Just as I thought in Mexico, whatever germs the strangers around me might have, the alcohol would no doubt take care of.

Joze rattled back down the mountain road, Beno running behind all the way to the wine cellar. Apparently, it was now time to sample some of his wines. The ones in the casks above were from the recent harvest and wouldn't be ready until St. Martin's Day in November, so we ventured down into the ancient cellar to sample his chardonnay, rebula and merlot. We were joined by Joze's wife, Nada, and neighbor, Tomaz. None of them spoke English so I listened closely and RM translated on the fly so I could understand some of the conversation. Nada left then returned with a heaping plate of homemade prosciutto, sausages, cheese and bread. Local fare but delicious.

After what seemed like hours, RM told me we were leaving. I thought we were going back home but instead, we walked a few yards down the main street of Goce and were waved down into Tomaz's wine cellar to sample his wines. His sons, Jan and Blaz, came down for introductions. Both could speak some English although neither wanted to. Blaz brought down a small accordian to play, which I learned is actually a harmonica because it has buttons rather than a keyboard. It was a dark red color with mother-of-pearl inlays of edelweiss. He started playing Slovenian folk songs and everyone in the room sang along, including RM who probably hadn't thought of them in years. I just sat on the bench, sipping wine, petting Beno and smiling at the warmth and friendliness of my new neighbors. It didn't matter that I couldn't speak Slovene. This experience was universal.

It was late and dark when we left Tomaz's cellar and wandered back to the house we'd left hours and hours ago. The next day, I had a bit of a headache but a wonderful memory of the somewhat surreal day before as I pondered how my liver would ever survive the Village People.