Slovenia, late August 2022
One hot August night we crowd around a giant oak barrel that doubles as a table at the wine bar across the square from our building. We share a glass of local booze with the lovely middle-aged couple who live next door.
One glass turns into several, alongside an implausibly huge platter of Slovenian charcuterie and cheese that never seems to end.
We chat in two tongues – Slovenian and English – about politics, the economy, the arts, history, the faulty plumbing in our apartment, family heritage, culture, our two countries, borders, sports.
They exchange enough words in English with me that we can connect and appreciate one another’s ideas and opinions. And I pick out enough keywords to know the general topic when they delve into a flurry of Slovenian with Matija. I lose all detail and nuance, but I enjoy listening to a dialogue that’s become so much more familiar in sound, even if not in understanding.
Stuffed with enough salami that we could become one, we head back to our building. Standing outside is the tenant from the downstairs apartment, her tiny Jack Russell, Pluto, on a leash at her feet. We’d first met awkwardly weeks ago, when a late-night knock on the door alerted us to our shower dripping through her ceiling.
Ana is Ukrainian, and with her two teenage sons and dog has fled Kyiv, leaving her husband back home fighting for their country. She’s been in Slovenia for four months and is already talking about going back to Kyiv while leaving her sons here, in relative safety.
Our neighbours invite us all up for a nightcap. We sit, five of us, around the kitchen table, Pluto sniffing at our feet. Over glasses of homemade cherry schnapps and a plate of pickled red capsicum, we again speak in hybrid fragments: this time Slovenian, Ukrainian, English, gentle dog growls and Google Translate.
Somehow it works, a cobbled-together dialogue that is unremarkably normal even with the circumstances that have brought us together.
Here we are, enjoying the privilege of travelling freely across the globe on a holiday.
Here our local neighbours are, living in this quiet town.
And here Ana’s family is, out of the desperate necessity of survival.
We can’t understand in any depth the difference of their experience. Yet we can all sit together and share: a laugh, a sobering chat, a schnapps, a sense of decency and humanity. Maybe it doesn’t move mountains but these moments of connection count for something.
We’re back in Melbourne now, safe, secure, comfortable, as fairly certain about what tomorrow might bring as anyone can be in a place that is easy to take for granted.
I wonder where Ana, her boys, her husband, her dog are. Are they safe? Are they together? Do they worry about what happens tomorrow?
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