A Writer's World (56 page)

But it did not make me in the least homesick. The receptionist was right. I rang for a bottle of wine, and we sat there on our balcony in perfect contentment, while hell’s traffic snarled convivially below.

I can think of few more suggestive situations than to be lurching through the winter night, half-way through the 1990s, in an inadequately heated minibus from Sarajevo to the Adriatic – the only way we could get out when its airport was closed and the evening plane from the north had flown in, had a look and gone back again.

The snow in Bosnia-Herzegovina was deep that night, the road was unpredictable, every now and then we were stopped at road-blocks in the middle of nowhere and the awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us dark and dangerous. Sometimes we clattered across a temporary iron bridge beside a blown-up original. Sometimes, shadowy in the night, an armoured vehicle stood guard beside a road junction. The only
other traffic on the road consisted of huge tanker trucks labouring up to Sarajevo from the coast, their headlights showing far, far away on mountain curves.

Most disturbingly suggestive of all, sometimes I saw through my window scattered ruins passing dismally by – house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a melancholy fire burning in a brazier.

These were not the usual ruins of war. They were not compact villages knocked into general shambles by blanket bombing, street fighting or concentrated artillery bombardment like villages of France, Germany or Italy in the Second World War. They were generally strings of detached houses, well separated, each one of which had lately been individually and deliberately destroyed. In the same way, Sarajevo does not look in the least like those cities of Europe which were bombed in the world war. It is not a wasteland of burnt-out shells and skeletonic blocks. But there is hardly a building in the city centre which has not been specifically targeted, sometimes half-collapsed in a mess of beams and boulders, sometimes just pitted all over with snipers’ bullets.

All this gave me an impression of particular and personal hatred. It seemed such a spiteful sort of destruction. Bosnia had been ravaged, it appeared, not by ignorant conscript armies clashing, but by groups of citizens expressing their true emotions – a display of viciousness different in kind from the campaigns of ‘Bomber’ Harris. A. J. P. Taylor once wrote that the Great War had begun as the most popular of all wars, but I have a feeling that the War of the Yugoslav Secession was undertaken even more genuinely from the human heart. And what did that say, I could not help wondering, about the human heart?

I had spent the previous Sunday in Zagreb, a fervently Christian Croatian city, and was astonished by the congregations that packed its churches, passionately praying, singing, kneeling and receiving the Eucharist. Even market-men at their stalls, I noticed, crossed themselves when the Angelus sounded. In particular I was touched by a young couple I saw praying together before a miraculous Madonna within the stone gate that leads into the Upper Town, and falling into a sweet and grateful embrace when their devotions were done. Outside the gate a pair of beggar children, one on each side of the path, set up a wailful cry of mendicancy whenever somebody emerged from the shrine. When the young lovers walked out, arms entwined, faces shining, they stonily
ignored the appeal: and a moment later I caught myself, too, rummaging for a coin insignificant enough to give the brats.

I remembered the moment with a blush, as we lumbered towards the coast, for if we all behave equally shoddily in small things, might we not, if the occasion arose, be just as unpleasant in big?

The week before I had been in Mostar, with a Croatian acquaintance from Dubrovnik, and was taken aback to find the Christian side of the city, on the west bank of the River Neretva, in a condition of lively if dubious prosperity. Scores of cafés flourished. The streets were full of shoppers. Mercedes and BMWs abounded. Nothing seemed to have been damaged by the war, and nothing looked particularly shabby or deprived. But on the Muslim side, the east bank, all was drab misery – buildings toppled, shuttered shops, poorly dressed people scurrying along muddy pock-marked streets. And where the beautiful Turkish bridge over the river had been, the pride of Herzegovina’s Muslims, there was only a bouncy temporary suspension span, over which shoppers hurried with their eyes down.

My companion was embarrassed by all this. Many bad people, he murmured, had done quite well out of the Yugoslav war. When I asked him who had destroyed the bridge, one of the supreme treasures of the old Yugoslavia, he prevaricated. It might have been Serbs, he said. It might just have been renegade Muslims, out to get foreign sympathy, perhaps. Could it not have been Croats? Well, yes, it could have been Croats, but not true Croats, not Croats like the Croats of Dubrovnik – not Croats like him, in short.

Later I went with him to Medugorje, the hill-village where, since 1981, the Virgin Mary has been appearing to visionaries, and the sun has danced for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. My Croat was rather embarrassed here, too. He was a devout Catholic, but he could hardly help being slightly repelled by the tinsel opportunism of it all – glittery shops selling sacred souvenirs, pizza stalls, bed-and-breakfast signs everywhere. We went to the Hill of Visions, where a long line of pilgrims plodded beneath their black umbrellas up the track to the holy site, but the rain poured down in torrents, and even for the most credulous the sun did not dance that day. Did he really believe in it as a token of the divine mercy, I asked my friend? He wasn’t at all sure, he admitted; but he was frightened of God.

Cynicism laces the air of this country now. The confused condition of the place, with its pockets and enclaves of Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Serbs,
Croatian Bosnians and Muslims, all entangled with the multinational force whose slow convoys crawl this way and that across the shattered land – the condition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is virtually inexplicable to the outsider, lends itself to the profitable scams that are spawned by every war, and curdles the milk of human kindness. Would we be very different, I wondered, if it had all happened to us?

At home in Wales we have a bridge not unlike the one at Mostar. It is a single-arch, pack-horse bridge over the Taf at Pontypridd, an old favourite of water-colour artists. We have our ethnic prejudices too, and our mountain villages, and even our religious zealots. I had no difficulty in imagining, as we plodded on through the darkness that night, that the miseries of Yugoslavia had befallen Wales – the lovely old Taf bridge collapsed into the river below, the villages of Gwynedd and Meirionydd wrecked, all our old bigotries, so long suppressed, rampantly in the open. I know plenty of people who would be running BMWs upon the profits of villainy, and probably a few at least who would not have hesitated, if there were English settlers on the other side of the stream, to aim a mortar at them – but not real Welsh people, mind you, not the Welsh of Llanystumdwy, not Welsh like me …

There were four other passengers in the mini-bus that night – a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. Behind us a second busload was following us through the darkness. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snowdrifts. ‘What’s happening?’ said the Englishman in front of me. ‘What have we stopped for?’ The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly around his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. ‘Who cares?’ he said. But he may have been joking.

I checked in at the main hotel, a dowdy high-rise that was built in Soviet times, may well be still Soviet-owned (nobody seemed to know) and has doggedly stuck to the old ways: which is to say, streaked concrete, no heat, abandoned telephone booths, dismal food, receptionist muffled in greatcoats, a Moscow chat show on the television and a notice on the wall quoting different rates for Lithuanian citizens, citizens of the former USSR and the rest of us. Just what I wanted, said I to myself as the terrifyingly jerky lift carried me in spasms to my room.

It was almost as though Lithuania had never achieved its independence and was still in the Soviet Union. I felt quite disorientated when I went out for a morning walk, and thought I might be in some relatively prosperous township of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ten years ago or so, except that there were no statues of Stalin or Lenin. Everything else was there. There were the monumental square office blocks of state overlooking spacious squares with parks in them. There was the statutorily ornamental pedestrian highway running through the city centre, with various cultural institutions on it, and many benches for the well-earned refreshment of happy workers, and babushkas selling bananas. The crowning church of St Peter and St Paul, with its tall polygonal steeple, had been handsomely rebuilt – as a museum of atheism, perhaps? – and there were many manifestations of the whimsical humour that was meant to give a human face to Soviet communism, like funny statues of rabbits, a stone shoe on a pillar and a cat museum.

Most of the factories, on the outskirts of town, seemed to be disused, deprived of their Soviet markets and left to languish. The former air base was, I was told, being turned into a Free Economic Zone, but it gave me a shudder nevertheless, as I wandered among its shabby half-dereliction, its hangars, officers’ quarters and abandoned guardhouses, to imagine what kind of reception I would have had if I had strayed through its barricades in Stalin’s time.

For the communists had been very nasty in Siauliai. They were nasty throughout the Baltic republics, deporting hundreds of thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, importing hundreds of thousands of Russians: but they were symbolically unpleasant here because in the sweeping countryside just outside the city is the greatest sacred site of all
Lithuania – Kryziu Kalnas, the Hill of Crosses, which they naturally detested.

It is the strangest place. Since the early nineteenth century at least, and probably far longer, people have regarded it as holy. Over the generations they implanted its mound with a tangled forest of crosses, of wood, of iron, of stone, tall carved crosses, crosses made of old pipes, crosses exquisitely sculpted, crosses in rows, crosses in clusters, crosses piled and stacked there in an indistinguishable jumble. Around almost every cross hundreds of lesser crosses are hung, together with tangled masses of rosaries, and between them all little alleys have been trampled by the pilgrims who come here in an endless flow from every corner of Lithuania. The whole hillock looks molten, as if all its myriad symbols have been fused together, leaving jagged protrusions everywhere.

As a pantheist pagan myself I honour this place more for its abstract holiness – it has an overpowering sense of mystic primitivism – than for its Christian meaning. The communists loathed it either way. They rightly saw it as a focus of patriotic as well as religious loyalty, and did their surly best to put an end to it. They bulldozed away some 6,000 of its crosses. They forbade the erection of any more. They put a guard upon the place, like the guards I imagined scowling out at me from their sentry-boxes at the airfield.

Of course it did them no good. Patriots and pietists crept in there at night and planted new crosses anyway, and in the end, at the Hill of Crosses as in Siauliai itself, the Russians gave up and went away. Thousands of new crosses have gone up since they left, spreading out across the meadows about the mound, many of them commemorating the Lithuanian multitudes who were deported into Russia; even as I stood there thinking about it all, on the banks of the little reedy stream which runs near by, I heard on the quiet pastoral air a hammering from somewhere in the thicket of crosses, as yet another was put up.

So it is in Siauliai itself, and throughout the three Balkan republics now accustoming themselves once more to independence. The Soviet presence is there in horrid memory, and sometimes in reality – hundreds of thousands of Russian residents complicate the political scene, many a functionary of the KGB is still in a position of power – but gradually, very gradually, these little states are finding an identity again. They are hammering the crosses in! Here and there along that pedestrian highway in the city, among the resting places for grateful workers of the state, very different institutions are arising.

You can get cappuccinos on the street now. Rock music blares from boutiques. Foreign businessmen eat expense-account lunches at smart new restaurants. You may pay for things with a credit card. Ravishing Baltic girls in mini-skirts will never grow up to be babushkas. There is a bowling alley in the basement of No. 88, and you can get quite a decent hamburger at No. 146. The Universaline department store still looks a bit Stalinist, but as the Business Advisory Centre’s
Siauliai
at
Your
Fingertips
indulgently suggests, it is ‘a good place to visit for nostalgic reasons’.