Croatia is one of the few places in Rob Peace’s travels where he experiences sustained relief rather than merely novelty. The country’s Adriatic landscape, the welcome he receives in Pula, and his relationship with Lana Kasun create a temporary world without the suspicion and territorial anxiety he associates with home. Yet Croatia’s importance is ultimately double-edged: it offers Rob a convincing vision of another life while also showing how quickly that vision becomes another scheme, another departure, and another postponement of responsibility.

Setting and First Encounters

Croatia enters Rob’s life through Hrvoje Dundovic, who lived with his wife, Marina, in Union, New Jersey, and periodically returned to his homeland through his work for a Croat-based shipping company. From evenings at Hrvoje’s kitchen table, where Rob drank grappa, asked about Croatia, and sometimes fell asleep on the couch, grew the idea of accompanying him there. Rob had already been traveling extensively, including trips to Rio de Janeiro, South Korea, and other destinations, but Croatia acquired a particular imaginative pull because it seemed connected to a friend’s actual home rather than to a passing tourist experience.

The first Croatian setting presented in the narrative is Pula, Hrvoje’s coastal hometown on the Istrian peninsula. During one visit, Rob spent a day on Hrvoje’s father’s small skiff, moving along a rocky coast where tall, jagged cliffs descended into aquamarine water. Hrvoje steered while Rob, dressed in shorts, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops, leaned forward in the bow, his loosely bound dreadlocks spreading across his back. The scene registers a physical release that is unusual in the account of Rob’s adult life: his muscles gradually loosened, and his expression became serene as he absorbed the landscape.

Pula itself is described as a town of about sixty thousand people, with ancient stadium ruins at its center and a culture that seemed embedded in its natural and architectural surfaces. Its recent history included the violence affecting the wider country and the collapse of its currency, circumstances that had helped drive Hrvoje’s relocation to Newark. Against that background, the town’s apparent calm is not presented as innocence but as a striking contrast to the instability surrounding it.

A Place Without Suspicion

Rob’s experience of Croatia was shaped as much by its social atmosphere as by its scenery. Unlike the ethnic diversity of Rio de Janeiro, Croatia offered him a setting in which he could go for entire trips without encountering anyone of color. His presence in Pula therefore attracted attention: residents treated him almost as a celebrity, approaching him to talk, exchange stories, and hear about him rather than responding with fear or suspicion. The account emphasizes that they did not want to call the police when they saw him wandering; they wanted contact.

For Rob, this openness produced an extraordinary sense of safety. He perceived Pula as largely free of the negativity, territoriality, and hostility that structured many of his experiences in Newark. He found people curious, self-sufficient, and generally happy, and he was struck by the absence of crime and antagonism he encountered there. Considering the country’s recent history, he was especially impressed by the energy of a place that seemed to have emerged without reproducing the hostility he expected from a troubled past.

Croatia thus becomes a counter-space to the institutions and neighborhoods that have shaped Rob elsewhere. St. Benedict’s Preparatory School had tried to protect boys from violence and disorder by controlling their time through classes, color groups, songs, meals, and collective routines. Trenton State Prison represented the opposite extreme: a fortified, anonymous world in which nineteen hundred inmates were enclosed behind massive walls. Yale University offered cultural and educational privilege but also exposed Rob to class contempt and racialized social distance. Croatia does not remove structure from his life, but it gives him a social environment in which he feels less watched, challenged, or required to defend his place.

Lana Kasun and the Idea of Staying

The attraction of Croatia intensified when Rob met Lana Kasun, Marina’s cousin. Lana was nearly six feet tall, a fashion model with an angular face, tan skin, and sun-streaked blond hair. She became, in the loose terms used by the narrative, Rob’s girlfriend. Their relationship was easy partly because of a slight language barrier and partly because Lana seemed to embody qualities he valued but found difficult to sustain in relationships back home. He saw her as independent, day-to-day in her outlook, and free of the manic possessiveness he associated with many women in Newark.

Lana’s manner gave their time together a buoyancy that contrasted with Rob’s habitual restlessness. At taverns she performed little pirouettes before falling into his lap, wrapping her long arms around his neck. She could not quite drink Rob under the table, but she could keep pace with him. Her limited knowledge of his background also mattered: in Croatia, he was not immediately defined by his father’s imprisonment, his neighborhood, his Yale identity, or his drug business. She encountered him largely in the present tense, the same temporal register that seemed to govern her own approach to the world.

Only a week into his first visit, Rob told Hrvoje that he would move to Croatia someday. The declaration quickly acquired a commercial form: he began imagining a business selling ice makers because, as he perceived it, no one there seemed to have them. This impulse captures the recurring pattern of his travels. A place could first appear as refuge, then become a field of opportunity, and finally be reorganized into a plan that promised independence. Croatia was not merely somewhere Rob wished to remain; it was somewhere he could imagine becoming economically self-sufficient on his own terms.

Return, Escape, and Unfinished Possibility

Croatia remained part of Rob’s wider pattern of movement. Friends in East Orange knew that he had traveled to Seoul, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, and other places, and he sometimes disappeared for two or three weeks without telling anyone where he was going. He was generally most peaceful before these journeys and most restless and uneasy after returning. Croatia belonged to that cycle of departure and reappearance, but it held a distinctive emotional charge because it offered both a concrete relationship and a plausible alternative home.

The contrast between Croatia and Rob’s later circumstances sharpens the limits of escape. His friends saw him repeatedly postpone graduate school, shifting his hoped-for start date to the fall of 2009. Real estate remained his preferred subject when the future came up, yet few of his travels had much to do with Peace Realty. His relationship with Ina Sideros also puzzled those around him: she had visited Smith Street more than once, and they considered her exceptionally compatible with Rob, but he continued to undermine the relationship while pursuing movement elsewhere.

The narrative does not treat Croatia as a cure for Rob’s divided life. Its beauty and welcome provide genuine relief, but they do not resolve his attachment to Newark, his obligations to family and friends, or his attraction to risky schemes. In Croatia, he can imagine a life organized around calm, intimacy, and commerce; after leaving, the promise remains unfinished. The country’s lasting significance lies in that tension. It shows that Rob was capable of recognizing and entering a less hostile world, while also revealing how difficult it was for him to convert a temporary experience of freedom into a stable future.