Chapter 19
Adriatic Sea
The community of employees under our sales manager had been organizing tourist trips abroad every second year. The company bus had been given to the group free with driver, only fuel was to be paid for. It had been easy as the chief trade union activist of our general management was one of us, a woman with high ambitions and double-faced behaviour of a black panther.
That year a trip has been organized to the Dalmatian seashore. Per-head fee has been really low, even, when you counted that the whole family of that trade-union lady has been taking part free. Although we have found our house, and our financial situation has not been cloudless, I wanted to see places we had to avoid because of our short time and excess baggage on our route home the previous year.
The trip has been arranged to travel by bus to the town of Opatija in Croatia, a little to the west from Rijeka, a deep-sea harbour and former commercial port of the Austrio-Hungarian monarchy. Opatija, under name of Abbazia, had been the most frequented seaside resort place of those early years.
Final leg of the route to the sea has been beautiful through mountains. Great names of history – Croats have been in one country with us for about 800 years, as they had accepted the Hungarian king as their own monarch – as Zerin for our 16th-century hero of Szigetvar and his grandson the poet-commander from the 17th century. Or the castle of Frangepan – it means French ruler in the local Slavic language – overlooking the Fiume (Rijeka) port.
The sea was wonderful and we enjoyed ourselves. Of course, vendors offered us ivory bracelets made of plastic actually. They did not like my scraping goods and throwing the chips into flame. Real treasures of the sea were worth buying, as shells of sea urchins and Nautiluses.
People did not like us actually. They wanted our money, but not us. I have never sensed this negative hospitality anywhere else.
During autumn we organized our moving over to the house. We found the house by the help of one of my colleagues, Susan, a woman famous for solving her private troubles in official time by phone. She was alienated from everybody, but she liked me somehow. She found an ad in a daily and gave it to me. We found its text familiar with my wife, but anyway, we went to see the house. That far we had lost all our hopes to find something suitable.
That house was a flat-roofed one, new, but not very attractive. We rang, and a short man only in trousers – it was very hot in July – came out. He said:
"If you came to see the house, I can tell you the minimum price. I would not bargain. It costs so-and-so much .” He told the price.
It was half that we expected. Something had to be out-of-order.
"We should like to see it, if you are not against”, I said.
He led us into the house and later showed us the garden. The house has been new, not a luxury finish, but habitable. Almost a square, on the street side it had two windows, each of one room. On the right side from the street only three small illuminating windows could be seen. Entrance has been situated on the left. As the house has been built on an elevated level of three feet, this entrance could be reached by stairs to a small covered terrace. For this reason free space between the left side of the house and fence was reduced by this terrace, by about four feet.
Through entrance at the middle of the side-wall you stepped into a small room about 5 by 5 feet. It functioned as a sluice in cold weather. Over a second door of that room you arrived in the sitting room occupying the garden side. On the street side – right – a door led to another room symmetric with the sitting room. It had two windows, one to the street and one to the entrance-side neighbour.
The sitting room had only one window and a door on the garden side to the terrace. The kitchen on the right back corner from street had its access from the sitting room. The third room has been reached from the sitting room through a door opposite the entrance, and a corridor perpendicular to the street. The corridor connected the toilet, a small wardrobe closet, the bathroom and the mentioned third room to other places in the house. A door in the innermost corner of the kitchen led to the store.
Behind the house from the street the level of the house-floor continued in a terrace stretching along the back wall. Its width was eleven feet. Below the terrace space has been utilized for a two-room basement. The outer room housed the boiler for heating, the inner room contained a washing basin, a toilet and shelves for garden produce. The boiler could not make me calm. It was a home-made equipment similar to an oil-stove.
The garden behind house looked like a sandy desert. Some tomato plants, full of tomatoes, were resting on the ground. A castor-bean plant kept ripe seeds and enjoyed the dry environment. There was a shed on the rearmost part of the garden and a very old pear tree beside it. Only two pieces of fruits could be seen on the branches, eaten by worms. There were very young cherry and plum trees in two rows.
We agreed that we would come back and tell them our decision. Both my wife and me were keen to buy the house. It has only been two miles from our flat, a tram line connected our present and would-be house. We hoped that our phone line would be transferred there. It would not. Only 11 years after our moving would we get our new line. There was a good argument for buying it: if we did not, our money would loose its value or we would have to buy a week-end site and build a house there. Then our life would become a shuttling to and from.
The next day we went there again and agreed with the owners in everything. We did not have all the money and we would not, even, when our apartment would be sold. We agreed in a down-payment and a monthly payment for 20 percent of the price.
We agreed in a date, when they would make it available. It suited us because of our trip to Yugoslavia in the near future. After return we would move in.
We have organized whitewash and painting of the house after return, a young man from our housing estate has done it. Then every day with two big bags we rode the tram and prepared it for our moving.