A man and a donkey know more than a man, we say where I come from. The symbolic meaning of it is obvious – everyone can learn something from anyone. But, sometimes, just sometimes, along come a man and a donkey who both know shit.

I spent the summers of my early childhood in my grandmother’s house on an island in the Adriatic Sea. It wasn’t just me. Her sister was there, too, and the scores of my uncles, aunts and cousins, who would come and go all the time. It was not a big place, four rooms in all spread over three floors, and a little camping cabin underneath the fig trees, but we managed to pack a cool dozen or more into it, various curtains serving as additional room dividers when the night came. Whenever I describe my childhood to someone, I get that look as if they think that I grew up in a commune. Perhaps they are right.

I’d spend an entire summer there, as well as the end of the spring and the beginning of the fall. We had a three-month summer break in the school, but I’d also leave class early and come back late, adding a couple months to it, courtesy of my good notes and my grandmother’s promise to work with me on whatever was taught during my absence.

When I moved to Germany years later, my biggest culture shock was neither the concept of recycling stations, nor the existence of timetables for the buses and the trams that actually worked, but the fact that it was not only prohibited to leave school early, but also enforced to the point of police patrolling the airports a day before the school break started, in search of renegade children and their abetting parents. And yet, we kicked their asses in math Olympiad every year, long summer breaks and all.

My father had a sailing boat, and my uncle had a motor one, but there was also a third one, a plastic, four-meter open-hull dinghy with a pair of oars and a three-horsepower outboard motor, that belonged to us, the children. It stayed in the storage room on the ground floor over the winter, and when enough of my cousins would arrive, we would take it out, marking the official beginning of the summer. Our house was at the foot of the biggest hill on the island, about a kilometer from the village harbor. We would lift the boat on our shoulders and start a procession to the sea with it, barefoot and shirtless, blocking the only road and making the few cars that happened to be on it join our parade.

It was an old house, with no amenities as they are defined today. We didn’t have a TV. In the evenings we would gather on the terrace and count the stars as they emerged, and then around 9:20 we’d start counting the cars that passed on the road below our home, on their way from the ferry landing in the north to a bigger town in the south. We’d huddle around the radio, listening to the greetings and the songs we wished for our neighbors working on the faraway ships.

Each of the kids had a piece of the terrace wall that we could paint to our liking, and a patch of land next to the house where we could plant something. My cousins went for a wide variety of beans, flowers and herbs, but I always stubbornly stuck to rosemary, something that stayed with me for my whole life.

We also didn’t have a bathroom. We had running water in the house, but no shower and no toilet. We solved the former by leaving a big plastic tub filled with water on the terrace during the day, which would then be warm in the evenings and ready for our manual shower, the one you had to keep stepping on with your feet to press the water up. The toilet was outside the house, to the right of it and down the curved stone steps, in the middle of the blackberries field.

Blackberries and figs are still two of my favorite fruits. I would pick the fresh ones in the mornings, careful not to fall of a fig branch or get scratched by the thorny blackberry bushes, and nothing ever tasted sweeter.

The Croatian coast and its islands are mostly stony terrain. In order to make the land arable or at least passable, these stones are picked in a long and backbreaking process and then stacked on each other. Such heaps are used to mark the side edges of the roads or land property borders. But mostly, you just have to do something with them, so you form walls. Dalmatia is the land of stone walls, labyrinth upon labyrinth scattered on every single island. We had a stone wall on the edge of our land, we had one alongside the stairs to the toilet, we had one separating the blackberries from the figs and at least a dozen others with no practical purpose whatsoever. That is, unless you count us kids playing catch while running on them.

Perhaps you already sense where this story is going to, helped by the fact that I mentioned both thorny blackberry bushes and the stone walls within them more than once. The stone walls I liked to run on, remember? Well, I didn’t sense what would happen back then. Not for the lack of useful advice or open threats describing in detail what would happen to me if I were spotted running on them ever again.

Finally, on a sunny morning, Humpty Dumpty had his great fall, dressed in nothing but swimming pants. I slipped. I flew. I landed in the thorns and fully submerged, faster than Red October. The rescue operation was a tedious one, I was told. There was no easy access to the crime scene, and my uncle had to clear several meters of blackberries to get to me. All the while I was dying of pain and my cousins of laughter. Neighbors saw me – well, for sure they heard me – which made the aftermath just as painful. Long after all the scratches had healed, as well as the memories of a monumental spanking that immediately followed my rescue, I was still the stupid kid who fell into the blackberries. The jury of my peers cared little for a long list of mitigating factors, like the fact that the wall was there in the first place, and that if the wall is present, it must, simply must be run on. Or even the fact that, as my new moniker clearly stated, I was the stupid kid, and that the data unequivocally shows that our youngest citizens better not be trusted with important decisions.

Towards the end of that summer, the village was probably ready to let it go. A kid in the neighborhood got bit on his head after he smeared his hair with butter and then kept pushing his dog’s muzzle to see if its teeth would slide over the butter. It turned out they wouldn’t. It turned out, I might not be the stupidest child on the island, after all.

But then, the donkey came.

It really came out of nowhere. It wasn’t ours, nor the neighbor’s. It walked a long way, and then it must have thought – you know what, how about I climb that wall at the edge of the blackberry field? Turns out, intellectual capabilities aside, that the donkey was not a superior athlete, either, as it slipped not far away from where I did. Opinions are still split about who of the two of us was louder while being pulled out of the thorns.

Our common feat was so much more than the sum of its parts. You know how people sometimes tell you that you are as stupid as a donkey? In my case, they now had hard, factual evidence to support their thesis. Each one of us individually falling into those sweet, tasty blackberries was a decent story on its own merits. But united in our incompetence we rode into the sunset forever, etching our names deep into the lore of our island’s most infamous idiots.

I bought a hoodie in Germany a few years ago. Stitched on the inside is a patch named “Poet’s Corner”, and underneath it, the wisdom of a man and a donkey, with no reference to its Dalmatian origins. For a long time, I couldn’t decide whether I felt profiled (“does everybody get the same saying?!”) or mad at cultural appropriation. So, I went to the market instead, bought me some organic blackberries that tasted like water, and sat down to write a story.