At the gas station, all the women looked like Melania Trump. It was uncanny. We’d just left Hungary by car, had crossed into Slovenia, and had stopped for gas and food. In Hungary, the women had broader faces, softer features. But now the gene pool had pivoted. The women’s features were sharp, their cheekbones soaring.
I’m part Hungarian, and my husband, kids, and I had just spent a week in Budapest trying—without much success—to track down where my family came from. We were now on our way to Italy. As my husband pumped gas, an idea occurred to me: we hadn’t had luck on this trip finding my ancestral home, but maybe, now that we happened to be in Slovenia, we could find Melania’s.
I got out my laptop and we circled the gas station searching for a Wi-Fi signal. Finally, I got a weak one. “Sevnica!” I announced. “She’s from Sevnica!” I went into the convenience store and bought a map of Slovenia, but the town was so small that I couldn’t find it. Back in the car, I programmed Sevnica into the G.P.S. and learned that it would take us five hours to get there. It wasn’t on our way to Italy, but it wasn’t in the wrong direction, either.
I’ll admit it was a loony idea. Like many Americans, I had spent the long months since the 2016 election asking questions like “What happened?” and sometimes “What the fuck happened?” I also wondered about the woman who had married Donald Trump. Melania entered the White House as the most sphinxlike First Lady in modern times. She was the first ex-model to occupy the White House. The first third wife. The first Slovenian. And, though she’d been little more than a punch line or occasional fashion news item for years, as First Lady she had begun to assert herself in small, endearing ways. Every time she swatted away Donald’s hand, every time she chose to travel alone to a ceremonial event, we found ourselves cheered by the visible ways she could deny the sexual predator she’d married.
We drove on the immaculate highway for another half hour, paid a small fee to a high-cheekboned woman in a tiny toll booth, and exited onto a smaller, windy road. Soon we were in farmland and old-growth forest. Slovenia was a beautiful country, we agreed, almost like Switzerland, with its rolling hills and A-frame houses. The grass was an unusual hue—a pale chartreuse so bright and rarely seen in nature that I removed my sunglasses to make sure I was viewing the color correctly. The kids were in the back seat taking photos of the scenery, and then of each other.
Two hours into the car ride, my eight-year-old son piped up: “Wait, where are we going again?”
We explained that we were going to find Melania Trump’s childhood home.
“But why?” he asked. “Is it because we like Melania Trump so much?”
His confusion was understandable. Usually when we spent long periods of time in the car, we were going to see someone, a relative or friend, for whom we had deep regard.
“Not exactly,” I told him.
“Then why are we driving so far to see her house?” he asked.
It was a valid question, and one that I couldn’t readily answer.
“Don’t tell your teachers we went to Melania’s town,” my eleven-year-old daughter instructed her already confused brother. “They’re definitely going to get the wrong idea.”
A Slovenian oldies station was playing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”—“Yeah, they got you where they want you / there’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?”—and blue lightning awakened the distance. As the G.P.S. took us through smaller and smaller towns, and as the road followed a creek through valleys and farms, I seized the opportunity to teach the kids about Dolly Parton, a very different kind of woman from a small town.
I half expected a large sculpture of Melania to greet us at the entrance to Sevnica, or maybe a banner that read “Welcome to the Home of Mrs. Trump.” But, when we finally arrived, Sevnica was a quiet, modest town by the Sava River that made no mention anywhere of its connection to the First Lady. There was a railroad running through it, a maze of narrow roads extending up from the valley floor and into the verdant hills. The houses were average-sized, and most were yellow or white or peach. The rooftops were brick red; the church steeples were green copper. By the river stood a large sculpture of a shoe—a possible Cinderella reference and nod to Melania’s journey to the White House? No, Sevnica was home to a large shoe factory. This factory town was not so different from the places in the U.S. that had voted for Trump.
I had read that Melania’s mother had worked at a state-owned textile manufacturer in Sevnica. Melania’s interest in modelling had apparently been piqued by the international fashion magazines her mother would share with her. Down by the train tracks, I spotted three long-legged teen-age girls waiting on the platform. The bags that hung from their narrow shoulders were large and full. These girls, I thought, were not so different from Melania, who had left Sevnica as a teen-ager and attended an arts high school in Ljubljana, the country’s capital. I imagined that these girls, like Melania, were looking for a way out.
It was just after five in the evening and our children were hungry. We tried to find a restaurant but instead found cafés that only served coffee and alcohol, or ice-cream parlors with outdoor misters cooling their patrons. We walked past a bakery (closed) and a pharmacy (closed) and a bright-green bowling alley (just closing). I picked up a tourist brochure informing me that Sevnica was once called Lichtenwald, which is German for “forested mountainside village.” The brochure showed the area’s many hiking opportunities, but didn’t mention Melania.
We ended up at a restaurant with no name, only a sign that featured images of cutlery. The shades were pulled down because the summer sun, still bright and hot, was slanting toward the restaurant. Inside, it was absurdly busy compared to the empty streets of Sevnica. Middle-aged couples hunched over shared entrées while twenty-something women leaned back, their plates pushed aside, smoking cigarettes. Everyone in Slovenia seemed to smoke, and people didn’t smoke absent-mindedly, the way many people smoke in France. No, in Slovenia they smoked with purpose.
The English-language menu was laminated, with photos. We flipped it open and there, on the top of the second page, we saw the words “Top Shit Burger.” Under “Desserts” there was a strawberry-and-cream concoction called “The Melania.”
Our waitress approached the table. She was in her late twenties, with a beleaguered disposition and impossibly high cheekbones. She asked if we had any questions about the menu.
“Yes,” my husband asked our waitress. “The Top Shit Burger—is that grass-fed?” The waitress didn’t know what he was talking about. We asked if its name had something to do with Trump. She wasn’t sure.
“What about the dessert?” I asked. “Is that named for Melania Trump?”
“Yes,” she said. I watched her face to see if I could discern any feeling for Melania. I couldn’t. “And people here like Melania?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said.
I studied the waitress’s face, wondering if she, too, had dreams of a different life.
Perhaps it was because we’d been away from California for a while, or maybe the photos of the Mexican dishes on the menu looked particularly good, but the kids and I ordered Mexican food. While we waited, I studied the little succulents that had been placed around the restaurant. I touched the leaves of one to confirm it was real—it was. The succulent trend had even come here, to Sevnica.
My son looked antsy. “Do you have to pee?” I said, and sent him to the bathroom. Then I shared a fact about Donald Trump and Melania’s first meeting that had been puzzling me. Trump had shown up at a Fashion Week party in New York with a date. When he saw Melania, Trump sent his date to the restroom so he could get Melania’s phone number. We talked about how an adult was able to convince another adult to go use the restroom. My son returned to the table just as the food arrived.
My black-bean salad was an island of what looked like mouse droppings surrounded by a red lake of canned beet juice. To prevent the juice from spilling over the edges, piles of wilted lettuce had been placed around the perimeter of the plate like sandbags. Every Mexican dish was, for lack of a better word, wet. Each sat in a half inch of fluids—green, red, yellow. But there is no reason to continue describing Mexican food made in Sevnica. My husband’s Top Shit Burger, on the other hand, was delicious.
I had no appetite for dessert, even one named after Melania. I went in search of our waitress with fresh euros in hand. I paid the bill, and, as she was making change, I asked if she knew where Melania grew up. I did not expect her to know, and, if she did know, I assumed that she might not tell the first stranger who asked. But she readily wrote down the street, Ribniki, and gave me directions. She could picture the house but didn’t know the number. She told me that it was on the right side of the road, but she couldn’t remember which numbers were on the right. She thought that it was No. 11, but maybe . . . She gave me two possibilities.
I rushed back to our table, proudly holding a paper with the street name of Melania’s childhood home as though it were the combination to a safe. We returned to the car and programmed the street name into the G.P.S. The air was now pixellated with gray dots of dusk. We drove less than a mile and pulled over and studied both addresses on the sheet of paper. We picked the house on the right-hand side of the street.
“That’s got to be it,” I said. We didn’t want to make a scene, only take a few photos, so my family stayed in the car.
I approached the house, which was set back from Ribniki Street in a quiet neighborhood. Near the front door was a large trampoline, the kind with netting around its perimeter. As I snapped photos on an old Pentax, two figures stood up on the trampoline: a mother and a son. I hadn’t seen them resting there. I did an abbreviated wave with my hand—a gesture of “I come in peace.” They must be used to Trump supporters coming here, I thought. They stared at me without waving back.
I returned to the car and told my family about the mother and son. I felt bad about disturbing them but I did feel a sense of accomplishment: I had found Melania’s home. I understood nothing new about the Trumps or the state of American democracy but figured that somewhere in the ensuing days, this Rosebud moment would reveal hidden truths. We started the car and programmed Ljubljana into the G.P.S.; it was about an hour’s drive to the capital, where we would spend the night before continuing on to Italy. The next morning in Ljubljana, in a sweet shop by a river, we bought chocolates sculpted into swans and gargoyles. The saleswomen, with their long legs and Melania cheekbones, placed the chocolates in a white box and tied an elegant ribbon around it.
Later, during our travels, I told a Czech friend of mine about Sevnica and how it was a shoe-factory town. “That’s funny,” he said, and told me that the Czech city where Ivana Trump had grown up was also home to a famous shoe factory. If we wanted to know who the next Mrs. Trump would be, he said, we should focus on shoe towns.
Back in California, I searched and found an article about Melania’s childhood home. It was on Ribniki Street, just as the waitress had indicated, but it was white with three windows on the front of the house, with a garage to the right. The house on Ribniki Street that I had photographed was peach-colored and set back from the street, with a garage to the left.
We had driven all the way to Sevnica and found the wrong house. And when I opened the forgotten box of chocolates, the gargoyle and swan of Slovenia had melted and forged themselves into a gruesome embrace. But this had no metaphorical significance whatsoever.