The Heart of Hell

by Alen Mattich

  He stepped back into the stairwell and locked the door behind him. He wondered whether he’d miss the place if he never came back.

  He drove south to the stark tower blocks of the city’s modern suburb.

  Anzulović must have been sitting at a window waiting for him, because he got down to the front of the dirty concrete building before della Torre had parked the car.

  “First time ever I haven’t had to wait for the lift. Seems everyone’s fucked off to the country,” Anzulović said.

  “What about your family?”

  “Wife, one of my daughters, and the dog are going to the cottage, for as long as they can bear being more than a couple of tram stops from the shops. But they’re waiting for tonight. By then the traffic will have dispersed a bit. Give them a chance to break down in the dark.”

  “Exodus.”

  “Well, let’s go, Moses. At least in Istria the air’s good and the wine’s better,” Anzulović said. “If nothing else, we’ll chalk it up to a holiday.”

  The Citroën was a pleasure to drive, a dash of French elegance. Traffic heading out of town crawled, even though it was just after midday. Zastava roofs were stacked with mattresses and cupboards. Buses and taxis were full to capacity. But once they made it out of the city, the slow pace didn’t seem to matter so much. Beech leaves had turned colour and the skies were overcast; fine drizzles came and went, but that only softened the scenery.

  They made slightly better progress on the highway through the Sava plain down to Karlovac, where there were a number of military checkpoints. Breakaway Serbs supported by the Yugoslav National Army, the JNA, had taken vast swathes of Croat territory, moving to within a few kilometres of the main road that joined Zagreb and the hinterland to the coast.

  Della Torre skirted the area, taking small roads through the hills to the Slovene border, but he didn’t cross to the other side.

  The roads wound through narrow valleys, and it didn’t take much to slow them to a crawl. Della Torre and Anzulović encountered a tractor-pulled wagon piled high with logs for the winter. Elsewhere, two cars had stopped side by side, blocking traffic in both directions while their drivers chatted. Farther still, where the roads fed back towards the highway, more police roadblocks were set up.

  As they drew towards the pass in the chain of mountains that separated inland Croatia from the coast, broadleaf trees gave way to achingly tall pines with moss and lichen strung between their branches. Rolling hills collapsed into steep valleys. The drizzle had stopped, and wisps of fog bent and folded slowly in the air.

  They had been on the road for the better part of three hours. It was afternoon now, and della Torre was hungry. They stopped for lunch at the roadside restaurant where della Torre’s father had always broken the drive from Zagreb to Istria.

  The restaurant was almost empty — no one was spending money, the proprietor said. Della Torre and Anzulović sat on benches at a rough table covered in stained oilcloth and drank watered-down wine. The food was good — pork kebabs grilled over an open fire, with fluffy flatbread soaked in the meat juices, chopped raw onions, and a homemade roasted red pepper and eggplant relish.

  They didn’t linger. Back on the road, they were held back by trucks grinding their way through the gears as other drivers passed on blind corners and through patches of fog.

  “I sometimes wonder if Yugoslavs drive like that to make Italians look cautious,” della Torre said.

  “Italians are amateurs,” Anzulović replied. “Our cars don’t have brakes, and the passenger compartments are designed to crumple. Saves on hospital costs.”

  The landscape became more scrubby, white rocks showing through the earth like the fallen teeth of ancient giants. They crossed the watershed dividing the broad Danube basin from the narrow coastal strip. There the skies opened to a broad vista, and in the distance they saw a glint of the blue Adriatic Sea.

  They skirted the port town of Rijeka, a narrow stretch of dock and tower blocks clinging to the hillside. Eighty years before, the city had been the subject of a dramatic nationalist gesture by a mad poet. Outraged by the fact that this once-Italian city had been handed over to the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia in a postwar redrawing of boundaries, Gabriele d’Annunzio had invaded Rijeka in 1919 with a modest band of idealists called the Fascisti, among whom was a great-uncle of della Torre’s. D’Annunzio held the city for four years, in the face of international outrage. The Free State of Fiume, he called it. Now only a few historians remembered that this was the birthplace of fascism. Twenty years after the seizure of Rijeka, Tito’s Partizans fought the German and Italian fascists from the mountains that della Torre and Anzulović had just passed through. The Partizans brought their own inflexible ideology: Communism. Now the region was again in the throes of nationalism. It was like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another, cleaving innocent heads with each pass.

  Rijeka was at the northern end of a deep bay; the southeastern shore became the Dalmatian littoral, while the southwestern coastline, the one they followed, formed one edge of the Istrian peninsula, once one of Venice’s wealthiest provinces.

  They drove past the imperial Austro-Hungarian resort town of Opatija, where, as a small boy and scion of a soon-to-be-obliterated nobility, Vladimir Nabokov had bathed. The road rose high along the cliffs past the fortress village of Mošćenice, from which they could see the stony white and green islands Cres and Krk fading into the distance.

  Della Torre turned inland and drove through the verdant plains of central Istria. They passed row upon row of vines, leaves falling onto earth so rich with iron oxides that it looked like living flesh, skinned, scored, and damp with blood. White oxen with great wide horns, high-backed and as pale as the stone that broke through this earth, stood melancholy, their Slavic eyes watching them pass.

  Stands of tall bamboo stood as windbreaks at the edges of hamlets, while every hill seemed to be crowned with a village marked with the virginal campanile of a church, an accusing finger pointing towards God, built by people terrorized by pirates five centuries earlier and bled by the Venetians for even longer before.

  It was early evening when they finally arrived.

  Della Torre followed a gently curving road, recently asphalted and without markings, through yet more vineyards, peach orchards, and copses until they saw on a small rise a white stone house with a red-tiled roof, its lower storeys obscured by a series of outbuildings that formed a broad courtyard.

  “Home,” della Torre said.

  He stopped at a tall iron gate. It wasn’t locked, so he swung it open and then drove into the grounds, pulling into an open-sided garage next to his Yugo, which had broken down during his last trip here and was apparently still unrepaired.

  Anzulović got out and stretched, taking in the faint smell of sour wine, of engine oil from an old tractor, of a distant wood fire and the rich earth. The courtyard was broad and paved with smooth white Istrian stone. The house was built from the same white blocks. A vast pair of arched doors led to the massive ground-floor wine cellar, while the living quarters started at the top of a flight of steps, worn smooth like soap, that ended at a broad terrace overhung with a canopy of vines supported by stone columns and wrought-iron bars.

  Della Torre climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

  “Dad?” he called in English. He usually spoke to the old man in English, an artifact of his American youth, though of late it was increasingly interspersed with Serbo-Croat. Sometimes they reverted to Italian for a change, his father reciting the great poets to him in all three languages, translating as he went.

  The old man wasn’t in. Della Torre unlocked the door with his key. Anzulović followed him in. The house was shuttered. His father really only lived in three rooms: his bedroom, his study, and the kitchen. The rest of the big house had been given over to memories and ghosts.

  Della Torre opened shutters as he pass
ed, showing Anzulović to a slightly dusty guest room farther down the hall.

  “It’s like this to keep asthmatics at bay,” della Torre said by way of apology.

  “As long as there isn’t a piss-yellow dog crapping in my shoes, I’ll be all right,” Anzulović said.

  After he’d organized their rooms, della Torre went into the cellar and tapped a barrel to fill a tall metal pitcher with his father’s wine. He set it on the table on the terrace under the vines, together with cured ham he’d found hanging in the cellar’s back room, cheese from the pantry, and what bread he could find.

  The house had been built by a branch of the della Torre family two centuries before, on land owned by the della Torres since around the fifteenth century. His father had bought the house from the estate of a spinster cousin who’d let it slowly crumble around her. No one in the family had wanted the ruin. Della Torre and his father had restored it themselves, though once again it was settling gently into dilapidation.

  He was telling Anzulović about the history of the house when a small new Mercedes saloon pulled in.

  Della Torre went down to the car and brought back a good-looking middle-aged man with a broad smile and a military haircut.

  “My cousin Angelo Brnobić,” he said, introducing the two men.

  Brnobić was equipped with a square briefcase of worn black patent leather. His hand was broad, a farmer’s hand.

  “Had you arrived earlier, you could have gone to the funeral,” Brnobić said as he accepted a glass of wine.

  “Funeral? Who died?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Brnobić said. “Libero. Your father’s with old Piero at the wake.”

  Piero Brnobić was Angelo’s uncle, a retired priest who shared not only his Christian name with della Torre’s father but also the occasional glass of wine, or six, as they philosophized and argued late into the lonely evenings.

  “I only made an appearance at the service. Just enough to be civil. If you wanted to, you could spend three-quarters of your life toasting the dead around here. It’s all old people these days.”

  “What happened?” della Torre said, shocked at the news.

  “He went to bed and didn’t wake up in the morning. You wouldn’t believe it, but he was over eighty. Fit and working one day — he was here helping your father prune the vines — next morning, well, looks like he was pruned himself. Doctor said old age, but . . .” He paused.

  “But what?”

  “It just seemed strange.” Brnobić shrugged. “Ask your father when he gets back. He’ll tell you. I just got it second-hand from him, and I’ll probably muddle what he told me.”

  Brnobić wasn’t to be drawn out, so della Torre left it, though an uneasiness accompanied his sadness. Libero had long been more than just his father’s workman. He’d been a welcome, if taciturn, daily companion.

  “You know, I never realized how old he was,” della Torre said.

  “Funnily enough, everyone’s been saying how young he died,” Angelo said, and then, turning to Anzulović: “We’re long-lived, us Istrians. People say it’s because we don’t like to give up anything easily, our land or our money or our lives.”

  “I guess you got my message,” della Torre said. “Did you mention to Dad I was coming up? I couldn’t get through to him.”

  “I didn’t. The church was crowded and afterwards I slipped away. I didn’t feel like going to the graveyard and then getting dragged off. I’m trying to lay off the booze. My liver’s acting up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anzulović said to della Torre. “Do you want to go to the wake? I’d be happy to stay here.”

  “No,” della Torre said, shaking his head. “It would be awkward. Too many people I only half-remember, reminiscing about someone who I hardly really knew. When Libero and I talked, it was about vines or making wine or tractor engines. Mostly he liked to keep his counsel. Libero wasn’t what you would call a garrulous man. Though I remember one time, we’d been working late, and he said, ‘They tell me people have been up there, walked on the moon.’ When I confirmed it, explaining all about rockets and how long it took and basic physics, he just stood there shaking his head, as if I’d gone mad along with the rest of them.”

  “That was Libero, through and through,” Brnobić said. “Had a hell of a war, though, not that you’d ever hear it from him. Italians tried to kill him, Germans tried to kill him, and then at the end the Communists gave it a go too. Still not sure how he survived, though he was as tough as they came. Speaking of war, it seems the Yugoslav air force finally took an interest in Zagreb.”

  Anzulović gave him a rundown of the modest physical damage but deep psychological wound the capital had suffered from the bombing.

  “Right. If I were a proper Balkan we would sit here and chat into the evening before we got around to business. But for Istrians, time is money. Even when it’s not,” Brnobić said. “You wanted to know how to get through the blockade to Dubrovnik.”

  Della Torre poured him some of the strong yellow wine his father made.

  Brnobić held up his hand. “I have brought with me charts and my brain. If I drink any more, the charts will still be here, but not the brain.”

  Della Torre cleared the table and Brnobić spread a waterproof chart of Dubrovnik and the islands on it. And then, using a grease pencil, he traced a circle around the city on the landward side.

  “After you telephoned yesterday, I took the liberty of calling some friends down in Pula,” he said. “The situation at the navy base there is confused, to say the least. It’s still held by the Yugoslav forces. Plenty of Croat officers are waiting to step over to our side, but even the ones who aren’t are being marginalized by the command structure. That’s not to say they don’t know what’s going on, though their responsibilities are being stripped away. But they still hear things.” He pointed on the map to the area south of Dubrovnik. “Here we have the JNA land forces. They have taken the territory up to Cavtat, and I think that’ll also go before long. A week, maximum. In the north they’ve cut off the Dubrovnik littoral from the rest of Dalmatia here, just below the Pelješac peninsula, though they haven’t taken the peninsula yet. Inland they’ve taken Mount Srđ, so they’re effectively right on top of the city. They’ve mostly been shelling the suburbs and villages farther north and south. There’s not a lot our people can do to defend against artillery that close and on such favourable ground. But it means there’s no way of getting into the city from the landward side. There have always been smugglers’ routes — goat tracks and stuff — through the mountains, but the Serbs are pretty densely packed on the other side, so it’ll be hard to sneak through, not to mention the risk of being shot by somebody on our side once you’ve managed to get through all that enemy territory. Not that I believe their numbers, but our press is full of stories that the Serbs have got thirty or forty thousand men back there, just like theirs says we’ve got thirty thousand mercenaries in Dubrovnik.”

  Anzulović shook his head, disbelieving. “The propagandists have been busy. We’ve got between five and eight hundred defenders, depending on whether you think they need to be armed to count. Mostly police and volunteers. Best guess is that the Serbs have somewhere around ten thousand, three-quarters of them regular troops and the rest militia and Chetniks.”

  The conflict had started with the Croats’ desire to break the Yugoslav yoke. But the desire for self-determination soon gave way to a virulent nationalism. Croats had resurrected the red and white checkerboard shield that had been the most dearly held symbol of their fascist predecessors, who’d allied with the Nazis and ruled in those dark years with a thirst for Serb and Jewish blood. And for their part, the Serb nationalists had renamed themselves after the Chetniks, who’d started the war fighting against the Nazis and finished up fighting for them against the Partizans, perpetrating their own atrocities along the way. Tito had bound them all into one happ
y family by being equally ruthless in wiping out Chetniks and Croat nationalists.

  Brnobić nodded. “I figured it must be something like that.”

  “The numbers don’t matter as much as the fact that the JNA and the Chetniks got plenty of heavy artillery, as well as wire-guided rockets, not to mention jets and naval guns,” Anzulović continued. “They don’t seem to be coordinating terribly well between the various branches. The navy takes the occasional potshot, and so far there hasn’t been much bombing. Mostly it’s field guns from high ground doing the damage. But that’s not to say the navy is dozing. They’ve raised a very effective cordon.”

  Brnobić now drew some circles on the blue parts of the map. “This is where the Yugoslav navy is concentrating its ships to make sure no one gets in or out. You get a few very fast pleasure boats, including a couple of Italian smuggling boats, running the blockade. They go all out at fifty knots, in groups of two and three. Twenty to twenty-five boats in all, taking supplies back to Dubrovnik. Water, food, medicine. A few arms. They were pretty successful until recently. But then the Yugoslav navy figured out our tactics and started sinking the fast boats with infrared-guided fire. So now our heroic blockade breakers are having to do some rethinking.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Brnobić shrugged. “The blockade running is being put on hold. There’s talk the navy’s got submarines in the area — the big pens aren’t far away — and are laying mines. They’ve sent out Wasp-class missile boats and guided-missile boats. Even the most foolhardy of our people have been scared off. One or two smuggling boats still operate, but they go south into enemy territory. We figure they’ve rigged up some deal with the naval commanders, who turn a blind eye to backhanders as long as military supplies and people aren’t being transported. One or two speculators with connections to the Montenegrin smugglers are said to be making a killing in Dubrovnik. If you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Della Torre thought about the newspaper article Grimston had shown him. “So the best way into Dubrovnik is to go down to Montenegro and hire one of the smugglers,” he said.