by Paul Theroux
I assumed it was an agitated state induced by the uncertainties and violence of the war that they had all experienced in some way, even if it was only hearing the thunder of artillery shells. They were returning to parts of Croatia that had been under fire. The Serbs had made their presence felt almost to the edge of the shore, and even many coastal towns had been shelled or invaded. The children were so hysterical at times that I expected that one of them would succeed in tipping another over the rail and that we would then spend the rest of the night searching fruitlessly for the body.
The war mood was a species of battle fatigue, depression with brief periods of hyperalertness. And it was as though, because the adults said nothing—only murmured and smoked—the children were expressing their parents’ fears or belligerence.
I went into the cafeteria of the ship to escape them, but even there teenagers were running and bumping into tables and overturning chairs. No one told them to shut up or stop.
“Those kids bother me,” I said to a young man at my table.
He shrugged, he did not understand, he said, “Do you speak Italian?”
He was Croatian, he said, but lived in Switzerland, where he was a student and a part-time bartender in a club in Locarno, just over the Swiss border at the top end of Lake Maggiore. “I hate the French and the Germans. They don’t talk to me anyway.” Girls hung around the club—from Brazil, from Santo Domingo and the Philippines. “You could call them prostitutes. They will go with a man if the money is right. I am not interested in them.”
He was on his way home to the island of Brac, across the channel from Split, for a long-delayed holiday.
“I didn’t come last year because Serbs and Croats were fighting in the mountains, and there was trouble in Split. It is quiet now, but still no people come, because they are afraid of all this fighting they hear about.”
“Are there good guys and bad guys in this war?”
“Look, we are Croats, but last year my father was robbed of almost five thousand U.S. dollars in dinars, and the robber was a Croat!” He laughed. He was busily eating spaghetti. “Serbs are Protestants, Croats are Catholics, Bosnians are Mussulmens. Me, I can’t understand Slovene or Montenegrin or Macedonian. It is like French to me. Bosnian and Serbian and Croat languages are almost the same. But we don’t speak to each other anymore!”
Having finished his meal, he went to the cafeteria line and bought another meal, more spaghetti, salad, french fries and a slab of greasy meat.
“I’m hungry,” he explained as he put this second tray down. “I’m a swimmer. I’m on the water-polo team at my school.” He resumed eating and after a while said, “This food is seven dollars. Okay, maybe this isn’t such a wonderful place, but it’s cheap.”
I went back on deck, where the youths were still running and shouting, and many people were bedded down in the open air, sleeping: stacks of bodies in the shadows. But even at nine o’clock there was some dusk left, a pearly light in the sky that made the water seem soapy and placid, and far off to the west floating fragments of the sunken sun.
There were tiny lights on the coast, and fewer lights showing on the offshore islands. Soon I saw the timed flashes of what could only have been lighthouses and we drew into a harbor that was empty and poorly lit, just a few men awaiting the ship’s lines to be thrown to them.
This was Zadar, and it was midnight, and I alone left the Liburnija and went down the gangway. I saw a light burning at the shipping office, where there were a woman and man shuffling papers and smoking.
“I just got off the ship,” I said. “I am looking for a hotel.”
The man shook his head. The woman said, “There are just a few hotels and they are full with refugees.”
“You mean there is nowhere to stay?”
“It is so late,” the woman said. “Maybe the Kolovare Hotel. They have refugees but they might have a place for you.”
“Where is it?”
She pointed into the darkness at the end of the quay. “That way. Two kilometers—maybe three.”
In fact it was more than a mile. The distance and even the late hour did not deter me from walking there; it was the thought of walking alone in a strange town that was twelve miles from the Bosnian-Serb lines. Only someone looking for trouble would walk down these dark streets at that late hour.
“It is possible to call a taxi?”
“No taxis,” the man said.
“Thanks.”
But as I turned to leave, he said, “When the ship leaves, I will give you a lift.”
So I waited on the dark quay at Zadar. It was like a quayside scene in a De Chirico painting, just as bare, just as bewildering. There were no cars, no people, nothing stirring: it was the abnormal silence full of implication that is more typical in a war zone than noise, for war is nothing happening for weeks and then everything happening horribly in seconds.
The Liburnija did not leave until almost one-thirty. I thought: Is it any wonder I travel alone? I had no idea what I was doing. I seldom knew from hour to hour what my plans were. That trip to Opatija was a sudden decision, like the decision to plunge into Pivka and abruptly leave; ditto Rijeka. And now it seemed I had drawn a blank at Zadar. It was unfair to subject another person to this impulsiveness and uncertainty. I had started the day in Rijeka, had lunch in Opatija, had bought the ticket back in Rijeka, and had been sailing since late afternoon. Now, well past midnight, I had no place to stay, and my bag felt like a boulder. I would have been apologizing like mad to a traveling companion. Actually I was pleased. You’re in Zadar, buddy, and that was something, still in the Mediterranean after all this time!
“See the holes in the buildings,” the man from the agency said, greeting me and yawning after the ship departed. He spoke English mixed with German. His name was Ivo, one of many Ivos I was to meet in the next week or so.
Lumps of stucco had been blown off the walls, some of the walls had crater holes, and many windows were broken.
“From grenades,” he explained. “The Serbs were in ships, right there, shelling us. This”—where his old car was parked—“was a crater. They filled it up. But the rest we still haven’t fixed. The town is worse than this.”
We got in and he drove, very slowly, like an elderly man uncertain of his route.
“All was dark. The whole of Zadar,” he said. “And I was so afraid, and even now—”
He laughed in an urgent mirthless way.
“I am very nervous now,” he said. “My nervousness is serious. Look—holes, holes, holes.”
We were passing blasted buildings and low ruined walls and potholes in the street.
“Do you think I should be nervous?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” he said. “For me it was terrible. No water, no electricity. All dark. And it is still not over.”
Not more than one hundred and twenty-five miles across the Adriatic, at Ancona, Italians, their bellies full of pasta and good wine, were sleeping blissfully; and all this Croat spoke of was bombing and war.
“Many people used to come here,” Ivo said. “Now there is no one. They are afraid.”
We were still traveling through the dark city, and I was grateful for this ride. It was hard to imagine my being able to find my way through these dark streets to the hotel.
“Now—only you,” Ivo said.
“The last stranger in Zadar, that’s me,” I said.
“I hope they have a space for you,” Ivo said, as he swung into the driveway of the Kolovare.
All I saw were sandbags. They were stacked in front of the entrance, two bags deep, eight feet high. They were stacked in front of the ground-floor windows. There was a wall of sandbags along the driveway. Some dim lights burned behind them. There were definitely refugees here; the unmistakable sign was laundry hanging from every balcony and most windows, so that the front of the hotel looked like a Sicilian tenement. All the doors were locked.
Ivo roused an old woman and said something to her. He bade me farew
ell and disappeared behind the sandbags. The woman gave me a key and showed me to a back room. I tried to talk to her.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” she said.
Zadar had been seriously shelled—there were signs of damage everywhere, and it was obvious that it had been hit from up close and vindictively: the ancient main gate of the old town, a Roman relic, had been shelled—for what reason apart from malice?—and chunks blown out of it. The Serbs had set up machine guns and howitzers in a nearby park, where they were dug in; and these marksmen shelled the high school that was sixty feet away. The high school was now in session, students chatting in the playground, but the front door was sandbagged, so were most of the lower windows, and many upper windows were broken. The entire front of the school was cicatriced by shells. There was major damage around the window frames, misses from their attempts to fire into the windows.
I talked to some of the students. Yes, it was fairly quiet now, right here, they said. But there were roadblocks not far away. I asked about the shelling of the buildings. What was the objective?
“They wanted to kill civilians,” a young boy said.
“Students?”
“Kill anybody,” he said. “If they kill ordinary people in Zadar they think they would make us afraid.”
But life went on. The old town of Zadar was not large, and it was contained within a high wall—shops, cafes, restaurants, a theater, some churches. The churches and most other buildings in the town were sandbagged, up to fifteen or twenty feet; but they were also damaged. There were many gun-toting Croatian soldiers in the streets. They were unkempt, they had long hair, many wore earrings, some of the soldiers looked middle-aged, and none of them was particularly healthy. They were pale and harassed, like the Zadar civilians.
In the Hotel Kolovare refugee families killed time in the lobby—there was nowhere else to go, and this was now everyone’s parlor. They looked without curiosity at me. Old men dozed in the lobby chairs, children chased up and down the corridors. They were overexcited, they were crazed, ashamed. The room doors were left open, so I could see women doing their laundry in the hotel bathtubs, and dishes in the bathroom sinks, and ironing boards and household goods stacked in the bedrooms. There were whispers, and shouts. Life went on, but the moods were strange.
There was a cluster of small shops and cafes in the residential part of town, about fifteen minutes from the hotel. “Residential” gives the wrong impression, though. The houses were dilapidated; many were scrawled with graffiti, or had broken windows. Some attempts had been made to grow vegetables in the yards. The apartment houses were in the worst shape of any. I walked there to look for a newspaper, but found nothing to read, though there were girlie magazines hung from clothespins along with comic books.
At a cafe I ordered a cup of coffee. A rock song was playing.
Take your bombs away
So we have today
“Is that a local group?” I asked the young woman behind the counter.
“It’s English—must be American,” she said, and handed me my coffee.
It was none that I recognized, and they were wartime sentiments.
“You’re American?” she said.
“Yes. And you’re from Zadar?”
“No. My town is Zamunike,” she said.
“Is that very far away?”
“Twelve kilometers,” she said, and sounded rueful. “I can’t go back there. I am a refugee here in Zadar.”
Twelve kilometers was only about eight miles. Still, her house was behind Serbian lines, and that was another country, with a sealed and dangerous border.
“The Serbs are there.”
“In your house.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s awful.”
It amazed me—the nearness of everything: of war, of shelling, of nastiness, of dislocation, even of comfort, for the Italian shore was just across the water, and the stately solemnities of Trieste just up the coast. Zadar was a town which had been besieged and then abandoned. But the enemy was only a few miles away. Refugees had fled here, and no one really knew where they were or what was coming next.
We talked awhile more, then an odd thing happened. When I gave her money for the coffee she refused it. She put her own money in the cash register.
“It’s a little present,” she said.
She did not let me insist. And I was moved. Since beginning this trip months before in Gibraltar it was the first time that anyone had given me anything that could be described as a present. Most of the time I was hardly noticed. I had passed through the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur, and Barcelona and Marseilles and Monaco. Nothing came my way. I had to travel here to find a token of generosity, from a skinny woman in a cafe, in a town full of shell holes, in the shadow of a war. Perhaps war was the reason. Not everyone was brutalized; war made some people better.
• • •
My map showed a railway line that went south to the coastal city of Split. It went farther than that, continuing through Montenegro to the Albanian border and beyond, deep into Albania. But a map was not much good here—maps are one of the casualties of war, the single purpose of which is to rewrite them. This was especially true here on the fuzzy border of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was in fact occupied by Serbian soldiers who were attempting to capture and so obliterate Bosnia-Herzegovina. They had tried and failed in Croatia: the shell holes in Zadar were proof of that.
There were many more shell holes in and around Šibenik, which I reached on a bus, because none of the trains were running, for of course they passed through Serbian lines. The bus left Zadar and stayed on the coast road, the choppy Adriatic on the right and pale gray boulders and cheese-white cliffs on the left. Soon we were in a landscape that resembled the Corsican maquis, low fragrant bushes and an intense litter of big stones, some in piles, some forming walls, the whole place weird with them.
There were not many passengers, the usual Croatian soldiers and nuns, some elderly people, a few youths. When the bus stopped, as it frequently did, the soldiers hopped off and smoked. At Biograd I attempted a conversation with a group of soldiers but was waved away. Rebuffed, I looked at the Kornat islands offshore, an archipelago of a hundred or so uninhabited and treeless lumps of stone in the sea. The whole landscape was stony and the odd thing was that it had been demarcated into football-sized fields that served as goat pastures or great stony rectangles enclosing fruit trees.
I got off at dry windy Šibenik for lunch—a cup of coffee and a slice of cold pizza—and to look at shell holes. It had been more lightly bombed than Zadar, but it was obvious from the random shelling that Serbians had no scruples about bombing civilians. Like Zadar, like many of the towns on this coast, Šibenik wore a wounded expression and seemed to wince. I looked at these places but they did not look directly back at me. That was an effect of war, too.
The bus to Split took over an hour, though the place was only thirty miles away. I decided to stay here, to get my bearings. It was an industrial port, rather horrible-looking, enclosing the tiny ancient town of old Split in a maze of streets, with a temple of Jupiter and a cathedral and a nearby market. All over the seafront of Split, and at the ferry landings and near the bus station (near another defunct railway station) there were old women plucking people’s sleeves and offering rooms and nagging in German.
I saw those old women as my opportunity, and decided on a likely one and gave her the thrill of believing she had talked me into a ten-dollar room about a fifteen-minute walk from the ferry landing.
“Good room, cheap room,” she said in German, and she made a “follow-me” gesture by flapping her hand.
The room was on the third floor of a large seedy apartment house, but I did not regret it until it was obvious that this old woman and I did not share any language in common. She could say “room” and a few other words in German and Italian, and was of course fluent in Croat. She lived alone. She was the envy of some other old women in the apartment house, because s
he had snared me.
I would not have minded being trapped there if we had been able to talk, but there was no conversation, I was not able to poke through the other rooms in my nosy way, the pictures of crucified Christ and suffering saints on the walls depressed me, and I never found out her name. Some of the religious paraphernalia in the dark apartment—pictures of the Madonna and shiny rosaries—were, I later realized, souvenirs of Medjugorje, not far away, which the Madonna had been visiting fairly regularly to inspire the Croatians in their own religious nationalism.
“One week, two weeks?” the woman asked me in German.
“One night,” I said.
It passed quickly, I fled in the morning to the greater comfort of the Bellvue Hotel, and tried to find a ferry south to Dubrovnik. None were running. “Forget Dubrovnik—go to Hvar,” a ferryman said. Hvar was a nearby island. Instead, I wandered in the market, watching people selling some of their earthly goods in the Croatian version of a flea market—but these people were refugees. In desperation I looked at the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, and then I decided to make more travel plans. It seemed you could go almost anywhere from Split—to Ancona, to Rijeka, even to Albania. The one place that was unreachable was Montenegro. The border was only ten or fifteen miles south of Dubrovnik, but it was closed. And there was no ferry traffic out of Dubrovnik. But I could bypass Montenegro by taking a ferry to Albania.
“We go to Durrës once a week,” the young woman said at the shipping agency.
Since this Albanian ferry was leaving in a few days, I could go south to Dubrovnik, then come back here and catch it.
Split seemed aptly named: it made me want to split. The Bellvue was on a noisy street. After dark the streets of Split emptied. Most of the restaurants had no diners—no one had any money to eat out. I sat eating foul mussels and overcooked pasta. Even the wine was slimy.