Page 14 of Slanting Towards the Sea

THIRTEEN

THE OLIVE OIL MANIFESTATION is held in one of Split’s biggest hotels, nestled on the beachfront, with a dizzying labyrinth of floors, amenities, and conference rooms. People roam about, most of them men in their fifties or sixties, typical olive oil producers I’ve become accustomed to meeting during the milling, eyes drunk with Dalmatian melancholy and self-significance, voices booming when they talk to one another all knowledgeable and important, and just so dismissive toward females that you can’t quite call them out on misogyny because it’s all jest and banter.

I don’t care, I’m not here to mingle. What interests me is the lecture by the Italian scientist, whose exciting research innovates ways of turning the olive pomace into a valuable cosmetic and food resource, rich in antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals as it is.

Although I expect it to be full, the small conference room where the lecture is to be held is half-empty. I take a seat in the middle, not too close, but near enough to be able to hear everything.

When the scientist enters the room, my breath hitches.

She is so young. I can’t imagine she’s a day over thirty.

Her tiny stature and short, boyish hairdo only add to the impression of childlikeness.

But when she starts talking, in decent but heavily accented English, she commands attention.

Her every sentence is a light-bulb moment.

I’m swept inside the world of Florence-based labs, research, and making the world a better, cleaner place.

I feel, for the first time in a very long while, the energy of life pulsing through me.

This , I think with a pang, could have been me . Had the beans scattered in a different way, had I been born somewhere else, or just a decade later, I could have been the one giving this lecture, enticing people’s minds with these valuable concepts.

It’s only when I glance around that I notice that other people aren’t as impressed.

Their heads are bowed as they scroll through their phones.

Given their age, their English is likely too rudimentary for such a sophisticated topic.

Or they couldn’t care less about the pomace or where it ends up.

Whatever the reason, they’re not paying attention, and that’s probably why the scientist is making eye contact with me as she speaks.

After the lecture, the attendees are ushered into the hotel bar to mingle.

The bar has been converted into a refreshment zone for the duration of the Manifestation, with a buffet table showcasing finger-food versions of the best Croatian sweet and savory dishes featuring olive oil from various olive varieties.

I haven’t gone inside yet, didn’t feel comfortable entering alone, standing aloof in the middle of the room, but that’s exactly what I do now.

When the crowd around the scientist dissipates, I walk over to her and thank her for the inspiring lecture. She gives me a pointed look, a dash of recognition in her eyes, then offers me the seat next to her. “You were one of the rare ones who listened,” she says. “Tough crowd.”

And I tell her, “Right. Welcome to Croatia.”

We talk for what feels like hours. She tells me about the project, where the idea first came from, how she was lucky to be backed by an institute she worked for, how she got EU funding and has spent years doing this research.

I’m enthralled by her youth—she’s in her late twenties—and by her knowledge.

I wonder, though of course I don’t ask, about her private life.

If she’s married, if she wants to have children.

A part of me can’t help feeling that women can never have it both ways and are always forced to choose one at the expense of the other, when men, doing the exact same thing, don’t.

When she asks me where my passion for the topic of pomace comes from, I tell her about my grandma’s olive grove that I now tend myself and also mention my education as a biological engineer.

I relay that sadly, by the time I’d finished college my hometown no longer had job openings in my field.

She dwells on this as she swishes the wine in her mouth, and then asks, “Why didn’t you go someplace else? ”

I take a swig of beer to steal some time.

Sure, it looks easy now to simply pack up and leave.

But back then, Croatia was a clenched fist, you couldn’t leave just because you wanted to.

No point in explaining that, though, so I shrug, but at the same time I’m afraid that acting casual paints me in the worst of ways, like someone who didn’t care, who lacked the ambition, or even competence, to aspire to greater things.

We talk more about the pomace, polyphenol oxidase, and hydroxytyrosol, and I don’t think anything about it at first. But at the end of the evening, when we hop off our stools to go our separate ways, she tells me she’s applied for more funding, and if it goes through, they’ll be able to scale the project.

“We’ll be hiring if that happens,” she says.

“I don’t know how you feel about moving to Italy, but we could use someone as passionate about the project, and as qualified, as you.

” She takes the receipt and writes down her email and phone number on the back, then gives it to me. “Let’s keep in touch.”

Back in my hotel room, I tuck myself into bed. Behind the floor-to-ceiling window, the sea in the Split Channel roils. The rain splatters against the glass in loud thuds, muffling every other sound but my thoughts. Why didn’t you go someplace else?

What a simple notion, to go. How stupid it seems now, to have stayed.

I could’ve told her that it was difficult to leave, almost impossible, because Croatia wasn’t in the European Union, and getting a work visa for any place was a bureaucratic nightmare.

That even if you wanted to leave, information as to how was hard to come by.

Google was rudimentary, there were no Instagrammers or bloggers to follow like there are now, showing the way out.

But the truth is, I did have the opportunity to leave. I just turned it down.

Back in my fourth year of college, while I was doing lab work in parasitology, Professor Toma?ek came to inform me I had gotten a perfect score on my midterm exam.

He was taking a team of students to a competition in New York, and if I was interested, I had a place on the team.

“It’s a great opportunity,” he said. “Many top-notch research labs monitor this competition and recruit students to intern for them after graduation. One of my students from last year’s competition is working in Basel now, and a couple more from previous years are in Germany and the UK.

It could be a good starting point for your career. ”

Even back then, I knew career opportunities like these didn’t present themselves often, not in Croatia. This was my chance.

But as I walked back to our apartment, my thrill tapered off with each step.

Fears crawled out of their hiding places, growing steadily and inevitably, like mold.

I had never been separated from Vlaho, except when we went home for the summer, and even then, we were never apart for more than ten days at a time.

What would it mean, if I took off to New York—New York!

—for two whole weeks? If I got on that plane, and visited another country, another continent without him?

Reticence gave way to something heavier.

The place I didn’t like to visit, but that still lurked within, even though he had loved me so well, so fully for more than three years.

He’d never given me a reason to doubt him, but it was still there, that disbelief that he continued to choose me day after day after day.

And the fear that something could snap him out of whatever kept him tethered to me.

If I went to New York, would it make him itch to travel too?

Without me? Would he start looking for opportunities to go somewhere as well?

How long, then, would it take for our bond to snap?

Far from sight, far from heart , my mom always said.

I unlocked our apartment door. The February drizzle clung to my coat as I hung it over the rack. I unzipped my boots and went into our living room. Vlaho beamed at me, the way he always did when I entered a room.

I lingered there, taking him in. They say that being in love fades after you’ve been together for three years.

I’d often wondered if we too would become as mundane to one another as a pair of scissors—the way couples do when the initial spark dims. But standing there, I couldn’t help thinking that people just forget how to be present with one another.

They forget to really look at the other person, see them the way they used to, in the beginning.

And what I saw that day from the doorway, beyond the ?al?a-stained, wrinkled T-shirt, and socks that revealed we should clean our floors—was everything. Everything.

I wasn’t aware of it then, but that was when my decision was made. I wanted a career, I did. But I wanted him, what we had, more. I wanted to make a family together, add more people, our own tiny people, to this bubble of ours.

I put all my money on that, and lost.

And if I had taken time with this decision, if I’d known that it would turn out to be a pivotal one in my life, I would’ve really dug deep into what each of those things meant, and if I could, somehow, have both.

I would have questioned the very premise of out of sight, out of heart , and why the hell I feared it so much.

I would have imagined who I could have been if I had gone.

Someone stronger perhaps, more self-assured, someone who had the courage to keep Vlaho in her life.

Now in the darkened hotel room, I rub the receipt with the scientist’s email and phone number between my fingers.

She put the offer of leaving Croatia on the table again, like Professor Toma?ek had years ago.

I laugh into the darkness, marveling at the fact that the only job interview that has ever gone well for me was the one I wasn’t even aware was happening.

I imagine myself in one of the labs she talked about, the centrifuges, spectrophotometers, fermenters, flow cyclometers as far as the eye can see. I feel the hardy fabric of the lab coat pressing against my chest, the pressure of the protective eyewear behind my ears.

But then a letdown, a sense of free-falling.

Of course I can’t go. Who would take care of Dad?