Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Three
November- December 2025
Sprinkle My Ashes Here, story by Lincoln Jaques.
Sprinkle My Ashes Here
On our last trip to Zagreb in 2018, we stayed in a small apartment in the Ravnice district in the Maksimir Park area to the east of the city centre. Covid was just around the corner, but we had no idea of that and were enjoying a warm October just before the winter winds came and the first frosts of November would settle on the grass in the park.
We would awake early in our little apartment and make a Turkish coffee on the burner in the kitchen while the sun would start to filter through the curtains and the open windows. It was a very small apartment, just one room with a bed and a couch, a tiny entranceway like a doll’s house where you hung your coats and where several religious icon stickers gifted by visiting priests were fixed to the front door. A bathroom and a kitchen. The kitchen was a good size – enough to put a decent table and chairs and still room to move, and off the kitchen was a covered balcony enough to fit 2-3 people and the balcony would serve well as a Russian fridge in the harsh Zagreb winters. The lounge was a little dark but the kitchen was full of light and became our favourite place to sit in the mornings as the water boiled slowly in the pot and we listened to the city come alive.
We were up on the 12th floor, and our side of the building faced out to a school and playing grounds below, a restaurant where we’d go for lunches and sometimes dinner, and the view extended to the new parts of Zagreb with the Lego-blocks of modern apartment complexes and villas of the middle classes. Beyond that were the jagged lines of mountains to the north.
The gas burner on the stove soon warmed up the kitchen and we’d spoon the coffee granules into the džezva, a traditional coffee pot with a long handle. The water would bubble and froth and almost boil over, but my wife was an expert so this never happened. She would turn the heat down at just the right moment, and the granules would settle into a low simmer. We would chat about our day, what we’d do, where we’d go and what we’d like to eat. Normally something fresh from the many bakeries surrounding Ravnice. These are the small pleasures in life that one misses terribly, and later looks back fondly at those times when you’re in a European city far from home (although Zagreb is my wife’s homeland, but by this time she hadn’t lived there for many years).
Anywhere other than home always seems to be ‘better’, or at least more exotic, which of course isn’t really the case, but Zagreb always seemed to connect with me on a deeper level and I felt at home there and that I could finally be in a place that all Europe offered. The plazas and the baroque buildings and the wide boulevards, the shopping streets and the cafés and statues of dead statesmen.
And of course the parks. Every morning, after our coffee, we’d pull on our shoes and walk to Maksimir Park. To get out of our apartment block was itself a little tricky, though. The staircase was a long way down and by the time you reached the bottom your legs weren’t up to all the walking needed to get to the park. There were 2 sets of lifts; one a regular lift, that could house 2 bodies at most, but more often than not 3-4 people crammed in, and we were all uncomfortably squashed and if you didn’t think about it as you got in (ie you sensibly backed your way in) you could end up facing each other, almost touching noses. The other lift, hidden around the corner, was a service lift, although it wasn’t much bigger and I have no idea how anyone would get a couch or bureau or a double bed inside, so I gather some unfortunate souls carried all the furniture up the staircase. (As a side note, later, when covid came, these lifts in apartment buildings became a death trap – and I could understand why. You only had to be inside with another infected person for a few seconds and you were doomed. In fact this is how covid spread rapidly in apartment-living cities like Zagreb.)
We had to walk through the streets of the small village of Ravnice, every street laden with parked cars, many half-up on the curbs or on the grass verges where the tyres had worn the grass down to the mud. Some of the cafés had started to open, and you could see the elderly men who couldn’t sleep come out to grab their morning espressos and read the Vecernji list newspaper and smoke their cigarettes. But often we went too early and the bakeries were only just lifting their roller doors, and we followed the smell to our favourite little place that sold fresh slanac, salty bread sticks, perec, the Croatian equivalent of pretzels, or my favourite burek od špinata, a cheese and spinach filled pastry.
The walk to the main road was a little way, and we had to pass through some small green parks. I’m always amazed at the number of these small parks scattered through the city, breaking the monotony of the heavily built-up areas and providing green spaces for kids to kick a football around or for families to rest and picnic under the old oaks. The University of Zagreb’s Landscape Architecture and Forestry and Wood Technology faculties were based in and around Maksimir Park and Ravnice. You could see the students coming in on the trams to attend early lectures and if you peeked over the walls, often students were already busy digging in gardens or nurseries.
Finally you would come out of the cluster of streets onto the main Maksimirska cesta, the thread of morning traffic and trams and buses like a sudden cyclone. We’d emerge opposite the Zagreb Zoo, but we didn’t enter there, as usually the morning traffic was too heavy. Rather we’d walk down past the main entrance to the Maksimir Stadium, where the big rock acts play and home to the Dinamo football team, and cross at the lights and enter a smaller gate where the Prvo Jezero lakes are located. As we’d walk down the stone path the noise of the Maksimirska cesta would slowly fade and you could start to hear the birds in the trees and the wind blowing through the leaves. The city dropped away and you wouldn’t know you’re in the middle of Zagreb if it wasn’t for the distant sound of the trams ringing their bells and the rollers clanking in their tracks. We’d find a spot where we could overlook the calm lake and waited for the swans to sense we were there. They would come elegantly paddling across the water, leaving a widening V wake that rippled across the surface, reflecting the morning sky.
We’d sit on a bench under a poplar and listen as a woodpecker sounded out its rhythmical rapping against the bark somewhere high in the treetops above. Occasionally we could hear the faint roar of a tiger from the zoo on the other side of the lake. The sun would rise higher and fall on the baroque statues of the Mother Mary that surrounded the edges of the water, her skin glowing and a slight halo forming around her head, as if she were about to come alive. We would chew on the still-warm burek and sit in silence, although there was never really a silence between us; we were just connecting and sharing the moment as we always did, soaking in the park and surroundings and waiting for the sun to rise higher and shed its warmth on us.
I have many fond memories of Ravnice. In the afternoons, my wife would go and visit cousins or old school friends and I would be left alone in the apartment. The sun would stream through the kitchen from the small balcony and I would sit and draft some poems or short pieces and drink too much coffee or eat too many sweets purchased from the Kraš factory nearby. I’d watch old re-runs of Murder She Wrote or Monk or Criminal Minds, and at 5 o’clock they would put on Little House on the Prairie. Then the news started on RTL Televizija and I would try to decipher the political upheavals without following the Croatian.
Sometimes, though, I would leave the apartment and go explore Ravnice on foot. In the late afternoons in early October the summer heat still hung in the air and a warm breeze came up from the concrete like walking over warm coals. Often there were people coming and going from a rest home nearby. The dim lights of the hanging chandeliers in the ground-floor lounge room glowed to outline the residents’ faces looking out with longing at the afternoon sun. Local kids kicked a ball around on the streets or played basketball in the courts adjacent to the school. Shoppers came in and out of the SPAR supermarket that had no carpark so the cars would pile up outside haphazardly. But generally, as is always the case in European cities, the locals came on foot and carried their groceries home.
A favourite spot of mine was a small shopping centre with an open plaza that had seen better days. Normally at that time of the afternoon the few shops that surrounded the plaza were closed, except the Zabrebačka banka whose fluorescent bulbs streamed light out from beneath an overhanging walkway. Tufts of grass grew out from the bench seating and between the cracks of the pavers. Apartment blocks were built above the shops, the air-conditioner units clinging on the sides like robotic bugs. It all had a run-down, industrial look, but I enjoyed the place. It wasn’t busy and I liked to sit and think for a while among the decay. I remember an accomplished artist had painted Egyptian scenes on some of the walls like the tombs in the Valley of the Kings; others had graffitied nude scenes and support for football clubs. Messages of hope and despair. But it was a good, quiet spot to sit in the afternoons, as the sun fell behind the buildings and the women walked through with their trolleys or shopping bags on the way to the SPAR.
When my wife came home she was tired, but also peckish for something sweet, so we’d go down to the local slastičarna. There we’d sit and order Illy coffees and kremšnita, a puff pastry filled with custard and meringue and topped with powdered sugar. If we were very hungry we’d add šampita (a whipped meringue with an egg-yolk crust) or kesten pire (chestnut puree). I liked this particular slastičarna as the waitress spoke some English and we sat for a long while, watching the families come and go and the kids devouring their treats and the odd table of students from the Forestry Faculty sneak in for smoothies and cigarettes before catching the tram home.
One time we were there, after we ate our fill of kremšnita, which is a very sweet dessert, my wife went across the road to buy some items from the Ljekarna, or pharmacy. While she was there the pharmacy assistant offered her a free blood sugar test. Of course, after such a heavy-duty lunch, this was very daring, but to my wife’s surprise her blood sugar was ideal. I have rarely seen my wife so happy, and to celebrate, I remember our visits to the café increased.
If we went for coffee earlier in the afternoon, and if my wife didn’t have any previous engagements, afterwards we’d walk down Maksimirska cesta to the Kraš factory. The Kraš factory is a famous chocolate factory – in fact Croatia’s most famous – and it sits off Maksimirska cesta in in its own parklands half obscured by trees, resembling Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory from the classic novel in every sense. A little mysterious, a lot magical and wholly enticing is a small factory outlet shop that sits next door. We would spend some time in there, loading up on Bajadera, a hazelnut and almond filling sandwiched between chocolate layers, and Dorina milk chocolate bars, and my favourite Bronhi liquorice and anise toffees.
I remember that time with great affection. We lived in a simple one-room apartment and we shopped at the local markets and ate at the local bakeries and restaurants and drank coffee at the café every day and we walked through parklands to get to the tram which took us all the way into Ban Jelačić Square. It reminded me of our time in England, where we lived in a cramped studio apartment in a converted Victorian mansion and had everything we ever needed, which wasn’t much. At other times I’ve had a lot more than I deserve, but I’ve never been as happy as those moments when we lived simply and wanted for nothing more, having the world at our fingertips.
As I write this, the covid pandemic has been sweeping through the world for two years. In Zagreb alone there have been 112,000 cases and over 3,000 deaths. For a country’s population of less than five million. But at the first chance, when this virus loses its grip, I’d go back, and I’d stay in Ravnice near the Maksimir Park and I’d get up early and go walking through the trees and sit on a bench and eat a slanac stick, and in summer I’ll watch the sun sprinkle itself across the grass like a stretching cat, and in winter I’ll trudge through the snow that covers everything and freezes the lakes. I have an affinity with the place that I can’t explain, like I do with Split and Dalmatia. I’ve been here before, in another life, I’m sure of it. Don’t think me a crackpot. My only request is, and promise me this, sprinkle my ashes here, and let the leaves cover me and the wind take me up into the trees.
© Lincoln Jaques
Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki makaurau Auckland based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in collections in New Zealand and internationally, including Landfall, Live Encounters, Shot Glass Journal, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Anti-Heroin Chic, Blackmail Press, Mayhem and Takahē. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards and has been selected for the 2025 International Best Small Fictions anthology from Alternating Current Press.