After this weekend, Benjamin’s will be closed through Easter. This afternoon I went to the restaurant to make sure it would be opened this evening. Benjamin and Milica Pahović assured me it would be. By way of explanation of my anxiety, I told them a story my mother had told me many years ago. In a village close to Pazin, where she was born and raised, there was a feeble-minded man everyone knew and liked. If my memory is not playing tricks on me, his name was Kito. He roamed through the countryside unmolested. After the grapes were picked one year, he was spotted picking the remains in someone’s vineyard. There was plenty to pick still. “Eat, Kito, eat,” he was heard urging himself as he chewed and chewed, “you won’t have it for long.” Benjamin and Milica laughed. No prize for guessing where I will be eating through the end of this weekend.

Addendum (January 9, 2007)

Benjamin and Milica were quite revolted when they learned through the grapevine that not a single café would be open in Motovun for a good part of January. “If we got together,” Milica kept repeating, “we would have come up with a schedule such that at least one place remained open at any one time.” Indeed. But this is not how things are done in our town. Getting people together is not only difficult, it is also almost impossible. And so Benjamin and Milica decided to take things into their own hands. They turned the bar of their restaurant into a café and hired one of their temporary waiters to tend it for the few critical weeks. On their instructions, he also gets the fireplace going every single morning. “We will not make any money,” Milica kept repeating, “but we will not lose any, either.” Bless them both, not least for that fireplace.