Hrvoje

Hrvoje is Rob Peace’s Croatian friend and one of the few people able to see both the ease and the menace in Rob’s restless life. Their friendship links Newark to Pula, Croatia, giving Rob access to a landscape of beauty, hospitality, and apparent safety while also exposing how difficult it is for him to escape the habits, obligations, and danger associated with home. Hrvoje’s importance lies less in controlling Rob’s choices than in recognizing their implications before Rob is willing to do so himself.

Identity and Background

Hrvoje had grown up in Pula, a Croatian coastal town whose beauty concealed the violence and economic collapse that had spread across the rest of the country. Those conditions had prompted his relocation to Newark, where he maintained a connection to his homeland through a Croatian-based shipping company. He lived with his wife, Marina, in Union, New Jersey, roughly forty-five minutes west of East Orange, and his job allowed him to return to Croatia regularly.

Although Hrvoje was ambivalent about life in New Jersey, he remained attached to the neighborhood and to the people he had come to know there. From time to time he drove to Smith Street after midnight to spend time with the Burger Boyz, despite knowing that the half-mile journey back to Interstate 280 was unsafe. His familiarity with the area taught him how to maintain the right kind of awareness, and his willingness to accept that risk made him more than a distant immigrant acquaintance. He understood the attraction of Rob’s neighborhood even while recognizing its dangers.

Friendship with Rob Peace

Hrvoje and Rob first connected through a conversation about progressive rock, and their friendship developed through repeated informal visits rather than through a single defining incident. Rob often went to Hrvoje’s home in Union, where he drank grappa with Hrvoje and Marina, asked about Croatia, and eventually fell asleep on their couch. Those evenings gave him a temporary escape from East Orange and helped generate the idea that he might accompany Hrvoje on one of his trips home.

The relationship was grounded in mutual familiarity and contrast. Hrvoje knew about Rob’s drug dealing, but he also knew the relaxed, curious version of Rob who could sit at a kitchen table, listen to stories about another country, and allow himself to be carried away by the possibility of elsewhere. In Pula, Hrvoje watched Rob absorb the coastline from the bow of his father’s small skiff. Rob wore shorts, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops, leaned forward like a child trying to move ahead of the boat, and seemed visibly loosened by the rocky cliffs, aquamarine water, and mild weather. Hrvoje had traveled that coast many times, but Rob’s response restored something of its wonder for him.

That friendship also gave Hrvoje a position from which to challenge Rob. When Rob later spoke ominously in a bar about “movements” that would lead him to his next opportunity, Hrvoje immediately understood that he was discussing more than ordinary employment or graduate school. He asked Rob what he was doing and told him that he did not have to continue with such activity. Rob deflected the warning, smiling, drinking from his beer stein, and returning to his familiar disarming manner. Hrvoje’s intervention was direct but limited: he could identify the danger, but he could not force Rob to abandon it.

Croatia as Refuge and Projection

Rob’s visits to Pula became some of the most relaxing weeks of his life. Hrvoje’s hometown had ancient stadium ruins at its center, a population of about sixty thousand, and a public culture that Rob experienced as unusually open. Because Pula had very few Black residents, Rob could go for days without encountering another person of color; instead of treating him with suspicion, many local residents approached him out of curiosity, wanting to talk, exchange stories, and hear about him. Rob interpreted the town as lacking the fear, territoriality, and hostility that shaped so much of his life in Newark.

The contrast was powerful because Pula did not merely offer scenery. It offered Rob a temporary identity unburdened by the histories attached to him in New Jersey. There he was not primarily known through his father, his neighborhood, his drug business, or the expectations of friends who understood his past. The absence of familiar racial and territorial tensions allowed him to imagine that another version of himself might be possible. Yet the refuge remained dependent on his visits and on Hrvoje’s hospitality; it did not resolve the pressures that awaited his return.

During his first visit, Rob told Hrvoje that he would move to Croatia someday. He began discussing a proposed business selling ice makers because, in his view, no one in Pula seemed to have them. The idea revealed both his entrepreneurial imagination and his tendency to convert every new environment into an opportunity for reinvention. Croatia became not only a place of rest but also a projected future, another possible exit from the unstable life he had built in Newark.

Rob’s attraction to Croatia was strengthened by Lana Kasun, Marina’s cousin, a Croatian fashion model who became, loosely, his girlfriend. The language barrier made their days feel simpler, and Rob valued what he saw as her independence and her lack of possessiveness. She knew little about his background and approached both the world and Rob in a day-to-day manner. At taverns she could drink alongside him, perform small pirouettes, and fall into his lap with her arms around his neck. Through Lana and through Hrvoje’s family, Croatia offered Rob intimacy without the immediate weight of his history.

Recognition of Danger and Later Separation

The limits of Hrvoje’s refuge became clear when Rob returned to more threatening forms of activity. In a bar near Pula’s city center, Hrvoje saw an ominous intensity replace the serenity he had observed on the coast. Rob’s talk of “movements” suggested plans that Hrvoje did not want to know more about, and Hrvoje responded by refusing the invitation to become involved. His refusal was not a rejection of Rob himself; it was an attempt to establish a boundary around the consequences of Rob’s choices.

By the final period of Rob’s life, the friendship remained part of his network of temporary shelters, but Rob was increasingly difficult to locate. He sometimes stayed at Hrvoje’s home, and when Lana visited New Jersey he slept with her on Hrvoje’s couch. Their sex was loud enough to wake Hrvoje and Marina’s infant son, after which Rob was told that he could no longer stay there. The incident was domestic and almost comic on its surface, but it also marked a practical boundary: Hrvoje’s home could not continue to absorb the disorder surrounding Rob.

Rob then spent the first two weeks of May sleeping in his car in random parking spaces around East Orange, partly to keep violence from reaching the homes of people he loved. The contrast with his earlier nights on Hrvoje’s couch was stark. Hrvoje’s house had represented hospitality, family, and a possible route outward; the car represented concealment, isolation, and the narrowing of Rob’s options. Even so, Rob continued to carry the wider map of his life with him, moving among memories of Chapman Street, Smith Street, Yale, international travel, and the homes of friends. Hrvoje’s role in that map was that of a trusted host who offered escape but could not provide permanent rescue.

Narrative Significance

Hrvoje functions as a threshold figure in Rob’s story: he opens a passage toward another country and another social identity, but he also guards the boundary against the criminal schemes Rob brings with him. His Croatia is not simply an exotic backdrop. It is a counterpoint to Newark, a place where Rob experiences curiosity instead of suspicion and beauty instead of territorial fear, then attempts to turn that relief into a permanent future.

The friendship also sharpens the book’s recurring conflict between choice and circumstance. Rob possesses the intelligence and mobility to imagine businesses, graduate study, travel, and new relationships, and Hrvoje helps make those possibilities tangible. Yet each imagined departure is shadowed by the same unresolved pattern: Rob moves toward safety, begins planning a new life, and then returns to actions that place him and others at risk. Hrvoje sees the pattern clearly enough to ask what Rob is doing, but Rob answers with diversion, confidence, or the authority of his past achievements. In that sense, Hrvoje becomes one of the witnesses who understand that Rob’s education and travel have expanded his horizons without necessarily freeing him from the forces that continue to pull him back.