The horror of the hornet

Slovenia, mid-August 2022

The pre-bed routine of showering and brushing teeth. Usually a calm, uneventful activity.

Not so this hot August evening.

Tija enters the bedroom from the hallway. Strips. Wraps a towel around his waist in anticipation of a shower.

I barely have time to appreciate the view before a hornet appears in the bedroom, attracted to the bright naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Now the thing to understand about a Slovenian hornet is that it’s the size of a small car. Or it seems so, when it’s within a metre of you in a confined space. You can see its wings beating. Its antennae twirling. Its mean eyes glaring at you. If you’re particularly lucky, it’ll even flash its stinger at you. It’s the size of the same small car’s exhaust pipe and points threateningly.

It is, quite simply, fucking terrifying.

We’re startled, obviously. Tija opens the bedroom door, turns the light off, beckons me into the safety of the hall, slams the door. We hope the hornet will be drawn from the bedroom into the neighbouring living room, where an open window leads towards the street lights glowing outside. 

Instead, the hornet sneaks out the closing door and joins us in the hall, where another bright bulb shines. Crap! Tija quickly reaches across the hall to shut the ajar kitchen door and we jump back into the bedroom, shut that door again and switch the light back on.

We pause to giggle with nervous relief. Whew. Success! He goes to fix the towel around his waist, which has loosened in the chaos. As he opens the fabric, the hornet rockets madly out of the gap and crashes straight into my forehead.

I shriek, and the two of us – the confused hornet and the confused me – take turns chasing each other into the darkened living room. 

I lose sight of it but hope it’s taken the hint and left via the open window. To be safe, we repeat the earlier process: switch off the bedroom light. Duck into the hall. Close the door.

We eye each other half-conspiratorially, half-desperately. We’ve finally outsmarted the thing and we’re unstung. But we’re now trapped outside our own bedroom.

It’s then that I look over Matija’s shoulder at the kitchen door, which he’d closed moments earlier. A livid hornet sits with two legs pinched between the top of the door and the jamb, its stinger extended nearly a centimetre from the ass-end of its abdomen.

Fuck. There are two hornets!

Opening the door will release the enraged creature upon us. We’ve no choice but to make the sad call to kill it swiftly with the base of a heavy glass bottle sitting in the hall. Sorry hornet!

After a few deep breaths, we finish our previous bed-readying. But there’s still the return to the bedroom to navigate. We apprehensively creep back in, hoping the towel-dwelling hornet number two has finally fled through the open window. I threaten to speak Slovenian to see if that scares it off, but I need not break out my rudimentary monosyllables: the room is silent.

It’s still a fitful night: we toss and turn on insect-infused dreams.

Bleary-eyed but unstung in the morning, the plot thickens with one more twist. I foggily get out of bed and stumble towards the living room. As I cross between the two rooms I look at the floor and jump! There, centred on the threshold of the doorway, is hornet number two. Dead.

There’s been a murder! How we know not. For despite the open window, allure of street lights and prospect of freedom, its flight – and life – has come to an end just a couple metres from where we lay, having night terrors about its presence.

We keep the windows closed that night.

Shared in translation

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?

Pavlovas, partisans and picking

Slovenia, early August 2022

We break an overcast, humid August day into distinctive thirds.

We start out making pavlova with Matija’s cousin and his partner; she’s an accomplished pastry chef but has yet to experience the magic of Australia’s national dessert. 

Matija is somewhat of a pavlova pro – and this knowledge deserves to spread to Slovenia to complement the existing array of delicious local desserts. They get cracking (the eggs) and in less than 30 minutes it’s in the oven. This is the slow part: it needs six hours to cook and rest. So what to do in that time?

– – 

We visit a nearby town with a nearly implausible combination of consonants and accents for this Anglophile tongue. The picturesque Dražgoše (pronounced “drazsh-gosh-eh”) is nestled on a hillside in the country’s north.

But it also holds a terribly dark history now memorialised by an extraordinary Yugoslav-era brutalist spomenik (monument) and tiled mural completed in 1976. The spomenik looks onto a serene valley where in January 1942 a valiant group of partisan fighters and dozens of villagers, including kids, were brutally slaughtered in a fierce battle with the occupying Nazis, who subsequently razed the town.

It’s sobering and hard to comprehend. If it had been 20 kilometres further north, it could have been Matija’s family. And it’s one of so many monuments to citizens who fell defending their communities. Yet it’s also a story of hope: here we stand in a living village that has rebuilt and continues to share its story and lessons of history.

– – 

On our way back we stop at Matija’s cousin’s dad’s place to pick blueberries from two laden bushes and taste a pre-pavlova appetiser: fresh blueberry and ricotta strudel. For every berry we pick at least two are eaten straight from the branches. But there are plenty left for the top of the meringue waiting at home and for our breakfast the next few days. 

How lucky are we that we can enjoy these moments?

A guide to insufficient time transiting through Lisbon

Lisbon, mid-September

14 hours transiting through Lisbon. A 90-minute flight to Lisbon delayed by 3 hours. Make that 11 hours transiting through Lisbon. One bag taking 10 minutes longer to appear on the carousel. Make that 10 hours transiting through Lisbon. A person “helping” us with the metro ticket machine by cancelling and restarting our transaction, then asking us for money, causing us to miss our 12:50am train and wait for the next (and final) one. Make that 9 hours transiting through Lisbon. Walking up broken escalators to arrive on a deserted, rain-soaked street as the metro guard rolls the shutters closed on the station entry behind us. A one-person shoebox hotel elevator that turns off if you touch the wall. Which my companion does, resulting in a rescue by the night manager. Make that 8.5 hours transiting through Lisbon. Our hotel neighbour snoring through our shared wall (of tissue paper?). A futile 2am walk scouring the neighbourhood for food, but having its magical, dark expanse to ourselves. Make that 8 hours transiting through Lisbon. Falling into bed listening to an impassioned debate on the street below and awaking insufficient hours later to the sound of an incredible deluge (with sun!) out our open window. Make that 4 hours transiting through Lisbon. A hotel shower so narrow you turn the water off with your ass when you reach for the soap…A city of confined spaces? Make that 3.5 hours transiting through Lisbon. Racing out during a break in the rain to walk the gorgeous, tessellated black and white paving stones and coloured frescoed and tiled building facades. Who got tasked with that labour-intensive skill? Several many custard tarts for breakfast. Make that 3 hours transiting through Lisbon. Back onto the steaming humidity of the metro (without ticket assistance) and admiring the colourful and cavernous subway station interiors from the train window. Make that 2 hours transiting through Lisbon. Changing out of a sweaty t-shirt at the airport and jumping right back onto a plane. Make that 0 hours transiting through Lisbon.

Tri one’s luck

Slovenia/Italy/Austria, mid-August

We drive up to Tromeja: the “triborder” where Slovenia, Austria and Italy bump corners atop a gorgeous alpine outlook, unfenced and unassuming save for three different monuments that ambiguously define where the exact meeting point is.

To be triply sure, we stroll around each monument. We think how weird (and privileged) it is to hop unencumbered between countries with each step (and pee from one into another), when once these borders were so physical. And when so many people cannot move so freely.

A couple days earlier, we go to the Slovenian coastline. There’s exactly 46.6 kilometres of it, kissing the Adriatic Sea and wedged between Italy to the north and Croatia to the south. Gazing either direction, again across invisible borders, the landscape and the buildings look remarkably indistinguishable. And, as we gaze at the sameness of the surrounding terrain but think of the differences in each culture, we ponder both how much and how little borders define.

A raft of climate challenges

Slovenia, late August

The signs of drought are everywhere.

Fields of corn, a normally plentiful crop for livestock, look thirsty and the ears droop on the stalks. Everyone owns small household garden plots, and they’re stunted: apples are dwarfed in their growth, and plums drop to the ground before they are ripe. There hasn’t been rain for about six weeks.

Three weeks prior, as much of the continent simultaneously suffers through some of its worst-ever wildfires, there’s a giant blaze in Slovenia’s coastal region. It’s with a touch of irony that the country is hosting the 2022 Firefighting Olympics at that exact moment.

In late August it should be the start of wild mushroom season in the normally temperate Slovenian woods. As Tija’s aunt leads us into her secret patch of forest not far from town, we’re not expecting to find much. And we don’t. The forest floor is a dry crackling carpet of brown leaves and pine needles. The trees hiss with gusts of warm breeze. There’s not a mushroom in sight.

We’d normally expect to find three delicious local favourites. There’s the small, bright orange lisička (literally “little fox”, better known as the chanterelle) and the portly brown jurček (or porcini). Both are wonderful in soups or fried with eggs or pasta.

We have to settle for buying them from the supermarket.

Then there’s the prized marela. It erupts from the ground looking like a xylophone’s mallet then unfurls into a miniature parasol. Its giant disk of delicate gills lasts for about 24 hours before it starts to decay: a tiny window to pick it, crumb it, fry it and eat it as an insanely tasty vegetarian schnitzel. We found them in droves this time three years ago. But there’ll be no schnitzel this year.

Instead we walk across the dry pasture of Tija’s aunt’s tiny farm. A dozen tiny grasshoppers spring up with each of our disruptive steps, leading us through the tall grass and back to the car.

Later that week we go rafting on the Sava River with Tija’s cousins, one of whom has been a rafting instructor. Halfway through our trip downstream some errant steering beaches us on a partially submerged giant log – albeit surrounded by metres-worth of open water. 

We laugh hysterically as we try to dislodge our inflatable boat from its surprise pedestal. But it’s also a sign of the greater climate impacts: the river is low and its white pebble banks kick up dust in the hot wind. The dam upstream is closed, which does make the rapids more kind to us novices. But it’s also the drought: there’s far less water running from the melting alpine peaks to feed the web of river tributaries across the continent.

When rain does come the day after we raft, it’s not everything that’s needed: there are intermittent showers of fat drops that dry before they soak in properly. We can only hope for more steady drizzle to offer some relief soon.

A sheepish descent

Slovenia, mid-August

We drive into Italy and ascend 1900 winding metres back into Slovenia to get to the start of the hike of Mangart, Slovenia’s third-highest peak. 

At 7.30am we carefully apply the handbrake on the side of a precipitously winding road, squeezing in next to an unsurprising large number of other cars: hiking is a national sport.

We set off into the sunrise towards the peak that looms far above. Squinting, we can just pick out tiny stick figures moving further up the trail. That could be us in a couple hours, but it isn’t: we end our walk 250 vertical metres short of the summit when vertigo sets in. Despite being passed by a confusing parade of adults in helmets and harnesses, unrestrained sneaker-wearing small children, and even dogs, we decide the alpine views here – varied like a frenzied line graph – are stunning enough!

On our descent we pause to chat to a group of young Austrian doctors. In one of those bizarre halfway-around-the-world-but-close-to-home moments of serendipity, it turns out one went to high school in the neighbouring New Hampshire town to the one we’ve come from and where we’re returning to next month. 

We continue down, our steps accompanied by the clanging of collar bells on the sheep herds grazing on the slopes below. The bells work: we drive down the curvy road back home, passing three times as many cars parked precariously on the gravel shoulder as were there on the way up, and stop at the farm.

On stable feet we buy three-year-old sheep cheese. We’ve earned the snack.

Apricaught up in the taste of tradition

Slovenia, July 2022

One of the first things my partner Matija and I bonded over was our Eastern European roots, and notably shared or similar food favourites.

While our families hail from neighbouring countries with different languages – Austria and Slovenia – cuisine doesn’t always follow boundaries. And so it was with great delight that we discovered one of our mutual childhood nostalgias was the same humble apricot dumpling: Marillenknödel in Austria and marelični cmoki in Slovenia.

The premise is simple: Wait eagerly for stone fruit season. Take a small, ripe apricot. Wrap it in dough. Boil it. Fry it in breadcrumbs and butter. Drool. Serve with sugar, cinnamon or for some, cream. Demolish. Repeat steps with as many apricots as possible. Freeze a sizable batch to satisfy year-round cravings.

The recipe is also simple. But families have their own tried and true recipes.

My time-frugal grandmother Gerti’s version was a more express version. The dough consists of flour, oil and water, takes five minutes to make, and, depending on how many stomachs you’re catering to, another five to ten minutes to wrap around a pile of apricots.

Matija’s father would take a more laborious, lengthy and breadier approach to the dough: boiled and ground potatoes, mixed with flour and egg. Gerti whipped this recipe out about once every five years.

Both recipes are delicious. Both were seminal to our development.

Both our families would consume them in earnest, often challenging each other to eat the most.

My family’s knödel tended to be served a couple times a year and rationed because they were the closing act of a multi-dish Austro-Hungarian meal that usually included vegetable soup (served with dried bread), wafer-thin schnitzel (fried in breadcrumbs), potatoes (fried in breadcrumbs), red cabbage or sauerkraut (without breadcrumbs) and salad (without breadcrumbs). 

Gerti would also make exactly two knödel per person, and only very occasionally would I luck out and get a third if somebody else didn’t want all of their ration. There was also a rumour amongst my siblings and cousins that Gerti had a freezer hidden under a trapdoor in the kitchen, where she kept an allocation of frozen knödel, arranged on shelves by year: the dumpling version of a wine cellar. This allowed the occasional surprise of being served out-of-apricot-season knödel.

Matija’s family’s cmoki, I learnt, tended to be easier to eat in bulk, though were strictly limited to summer only: he would request them for his birthday, and his father would roll dumplings all day and serve them as the entire meal: appetiser, main and dessert.

So his record for number consumed in a sitting was significantly and safely higher.

We once tried to fuck with tradition after Matija found a discounted box of softball-sized peaches in a Melbourne fruit shop. His siblings and I dutifully made the potato dough, wrapped the heavy parcels and put them into the boiling water, where they proceeded to remain at the bottom of the pot like cannon balls, largely uncooked, as the dough dissolved around them.

After that unmitigated disaster I’d made many apricot servings using Gerti’s recipe, but never returned to potato (or peach). 

Fast forward to July 2022, and we stand around the counter of Matija’s cousin’s kitchen in Slovenia contemplating 68 apricots and 5 kilograms of potatoes before us. A few hours later, we’re again contemplating: this time a pile of breadcrumb-and-cinnamon-dusted apricot stones on each of our plates. We’ve successfully mastered the potato dough cooking and eating process. The satisfaction borders on bellyache but we have no regrets.

A couple months down the road, now in a kitchen in New Hampshire, my nine-year-old nephew is hoping to learn the family secrets. But it’s September: no apricots are to be found. I revert to an emergency trick Gerti employed only a few times when the desperate need for knödel called bullshit on the existence of any hidden supply in the freezer: dried Turkish apricots soaked all day in warm water to plump them up.

My nephew and I stand over the stove, hoping the little bundles of dough contain their rehydrated centres as they first bounce in the boiling water and then sizzle in the frying pan of butter and breadcrumbs. I think of being the same age and making them with my grandmother. It’s nice to be passing on the tradition. 

We’re hungrily delighted that they are a rip-roaring success. Matija and I each eat as many as possible. There are no pits to officially count, but I think I win.

Goulashed without a map

Slovenia, late July

We drive into the mountains with friends for a short walk through the forest to some cousins’ “kotča” (a cosy unpowered timber hut in what has become a national park; they’re highly prized as they can no longer be built).

Our instructions and Google Maps land us at a green metal gate blocking the forest road, where we’ve been told to park our car, walk for about 20 minutes, and then enjoy a homemade campfire goulash lunch and good company.

2 hours and 20 minutes later, having walked past several additional green gates, scaled the steep side of a well-forested hill, desperately eaten wild blueberries in case we need strength, and been unable to reach the others on the phone, our “coo-ee” cries into the forest are answered and our fears of a Slovenian search and rescue party discovering our bear-ravaged bodies weeks later abate.

We are starving.

The psilent psyllium

Paris, late August

We stop into a little health food shop on the hunt for psyllium (“silly-um”) husk – a good counterbalance for digestive systems struggling with a sudden switch to an all-cheese, all-croissant diet.

We ask a person stocking the shelves: “Vendez-vous la cosse de psyllium?” (“Do you sell psyllium husk?”)

They pause: “C’est quoi? Qu’est-ce que c’est, psyllium? Je ne sais pas.” (“What is it? What’s psyllium? I don’t know.”)

They ask their manager, who is even more emphatic: “Non.”

We find it in the next aisle and show it to them.

“Oh, puh-syllium! Mais bien sûr!” (Oh, puh-syllium! But of course!”)