NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (36 page)

“No tokens,” the young woman said. Her name was Marta. She spoke English.

“I am a stranger here. I want to visit Pivka. Tell me, what is the best thing to see?”

“There is nothing,” she said.

She was wearily wiping wet glasses with a dirty rag. She sucked her teeth. She pushed a loose hank of hair behind her ear.

“And the winter,” she said.

“What is it like?”

“Bad.”

“What about the summer?”

“Too hot.”

“But there’s no fighting here.”

“No, that’s—” She waved the rag to the east, slopping water on the bar’s mirror. “There.”

The men in the bar, drinking beer, smoking heavily, did not acknowledge me. Through the unwashed window I watched a dirty yellow engine shunting on Pivka rails. I thought, as I frequently do in such places,
What if I had been born here?

Leaving my bag with the stationmaster, I walked into Pivka proper, which was a narrow road lined with empty shops. The town was sooty, just peeling paint and impoverishment, but it was not littered, simply fatigued-looking, like the people, like Marta at the bar. Now and then a car, always a small one, going too fast, sideswiped me as I walked down the narrow pavement of Koldvoska Cesta. A rusty Wartburg, a Zastova, some gasping Yugos. It was like being attacked by weed whackers. I could hear their whirring engines and frayed fan belts, the sputter of their leaking radiators. But even these little cars proclaimed their nationalism. One had a sticker
Slovenia
, the rest were labeled
SLO.

Walking along, I heard a child crying inside a house, and a woman scolding; then a slap, and the child crying louder, and more scolding. Scold, slap, screech; scold, slap, screech.

I looked for a place to eat, I asked people—made eating gestures—“Station,” they said. That horrible little bar? So I went back to the station and saw that there was a train in an hour or so for Rijeka. I talked to Marta again. She urged me to go to Rijeka, even though it was in the foreign country of Croatia. I sat in the sunshine, reading, catching up on my notes, and listening to the dusty sparrows of Pivka until the train came.

This two-car Polish-made train of Slovenian Railways was about twenty years old, filled with rambunctious schoolchildren on their way home. They shrieked at each other for a while, then shut up. There was a sort of hysteria here, probably something to do with political uncertainty and recrimination. Soon they all got off. There were now about eight of us remaining in the train: seven old people and me. And it was interesting that the countryside looked as seedy as the town, as bedraggled, not like nature at all, but like a stage-set designed to symbolize the plight of the country:
thin rather starved trees, ragged discolored grass, wilting wildflowers. There was a six-thousand-foot mountain to the east, Veliki Sneznik, but even that looked collapsible.

“Bistrica,” the conductor said, clipping my ticket and motioning me out the door.

At Ilirska Bistrica a youth in a baggy police uniform flipped the pages of my passport and handed it back. That was one of the irritations of nationalism—every few miles, a passport check, just a ritual, at the frontier of another tinky-winky republic.

The train jogged on to a small station building with wisteria clinging to the walls. We sat there awhile, the old folks muttering while I tried to engage one of them in conversation. There were no talkers.

“Just tell me where we are.”

“We are leaving the Republic of Slovenia,” an old man said. “We are entering the Republic of Croatia.”

There was no sarcasm in his voice, yet the bald statement was sarcasm enough. We had gone—what?—about twenty miles from Pivka.

“You will require a visa,” a policeman said.

This was Sapjane, the frontier of the Republika Hvratska (Croatia). It was a place much like Pivka or Bistrica. When a country was very small even these tiny, almost uninhabited places were inflated with a meaningless importance. A breeze was ruffling the weedy tracks, and soughing in the pines; a cow mooed, its bell clinked. More sparrows. Customs! Immigration! You will require a visa! The officious but polite policeman laboriously filled in a form (“Father’s name? Place of birth? Purpose of visit?”) and stuck a pompous-looking Croatian visa into my passport, a scrupulous operation, taking fifteen minutes. I was the only foreigner. God help them when they had four or five foreigners on the train.

We were all ethnically approved: one American, seven Croatians. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia the train would have raced through this station at eighty miles an hour. But I did not complain about the delay. This was all an experimental travel. If I had flown to Croatia from Italy I would not have been privileged to witness this sad farce.

Having done his duty, the policeman became pleasant. His name was Mario, he was from Rijeka—he commuted to this outpost—and he was a
mere twenty-three. I remarked on the farcical bureaucracy—after an hour we were still at the station, waiting.

“Yes, there are delays, because we are all separate now,” he said. “Slovenia. Croatia. Serbia. In Bosnia you have Musselmans.”

“They’re different, are they?”

“Very much. You see, Slovenian people are much more like Germans or Austrians.”

That became quite a common refrain: We are big bold Teutons, they are dark little savages. But in fact they all looked fairly similar and Slavic to my eye, untutored by Jugland’s prejudices. I soon learned that a former Jug could spot an ethnic taint a mile away. Here comes a Bosnian! There goes a Slovene!

I said this in a polite form to Mario.

“That is because we married each other before,” he said. “But we don’t marry each other now.”

“What a shame.”

“Well, you see, it was Marshal Tito’s idea to have one big country. But maybe it was too big.” He was digging a big polished boot in the railway gravel. “Better to have our own countries, for political freedom. Maybe like America. One government in Washington and every state is separate.”

“Mario, we don’t need a passport and a visa to go from New York to New Jersey.”

He laughed. He was intelligent, his English was good enough for him to understand how I had shown him the absurdity of what he had proposed. And after all, the war was still on.

“Will I have a problem going to Montenegro?”

“I think, yes,” he said. “And Serbia is a problem. Where do you come from?”

“Boston.”

“Kukoc plays for the Bulls,” he said. “Divac plays for the Lakers. But I am for the Bulls.”

“They’re not doing very well.”

“They won last night,” Mario said.

Here, in the farthest corner of Croatia, on the wrong side of the tracks at Sapjane, among mooing cows, the latest NBA scores.

“Michael Jordan,” Mario said. “He is the greatest player in the world.”

The Slovenian train had returned to Pivka, and at last a Croatian train arrived in Sapjane from Rijeka, to take us on the return trip. I got into a conversation, speaking Italian with a Croatian. I remarked on the complexity of the republics that had sprung up.

“It’s all shit,” he said.

Rijeka had a reputation for being ugly, but it did not seem so bad, another Adriatic port city, rather steep and scattered, with an air of having been forgotten. Many people still spoke the Italian they had learned when the city was part of Mussolini’s empire, and named Fiume (meaning “river,” as the word Rijeka also did). “Fiume is a clean asphalted town with a very modern go-ahead air,” James Joyce wrote in a letter in 1906. “It is for its size far finer than Trieste.” Within minutes of arriving I changed a little money and left the money-changer’s a millionaire, in dinars.

Earlier on this trip I had read Nabokov’s vivid memoir
Speak, Memory.
He had remarked on his childhood visits from St. Petersburg to a resort, Abbazia, much frequented by Russians at the turn of the century. I had inquired about the place while I was in Italy (Abbazia means monastery), but there was no such place on the coast. But I saw the name in parentheses on a Croatian map, and I realized that just a few miles away, down the coast, the penultimate station on the line to Rijeka, was Abbazia, in its Croatian form, Opatija.

“There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid sea water,” Nabokov wrote of the place, “and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire pools.”

It was 1904, Nabokov was five, he was with his doting father and mother. His family rented a villa with a “crenelated, cream-colored tower.” He remembered traveling to Fiume for a haircut. He described hearing the Adriatic from his bedroom: “The ocean seemed to rise and grope in the darkness and then heavily fall on its face.”

This was my excuse to stay in Rijeka that night, eat another pizza, sleep in another bargain-priced hotel, and to go to Opatija in the morning. The seaside resort was deserted. It retained its elegance, though, and looked like a haunted version of Menton. An old man swept the broad promenade with a push-broom. The boardinghouses looked abandoned. The restaurants
were closed. The day was warm and sunny, the sea lapping at empty beach.

“People come on the weekends,” a Croatian woman at the newsstand told me in Italian.

Returning to Rijeka, I made inquiries about the train to Zadar, which had recently been under heavy Serbian shelling.

“Ha! No trains these days!” the woman at the hotel said. But she took charge of me.

“You want to know the best thing to do? Leave this hotel right now. Go straight to the port. You can’t miss it. In two hours the ferry leaves.”

It was the coastal ferry to Zadar and Split.

“You think I’ll get a ticket?”

“Ha! No problem!” she said. “No one comes here anymore!”

I snatched up my bag and hurried to the port and within fifteen minutes was in possession of a five-dollar ticket to Zadar on the ferry
Liburnija
, with a hundred or so Croatians, and soon we were sliding past the islands of Krk, Cres, Rab, Lošinj and Pag in the late-afternoon sunshine, and I was happy again, on the move.

There were half a dozen German tourists on board, who were taking advantage of the bargains created by the war—desperate hotel-keepers and empty restaurants, unlimited beach umbrellas, cheap beer. The rest were Croatians. I had the only ticket to Zadar; everyone else was going to Split.

The effects of the war were evident on the
Liburnija
, too: the chain-smoking adults, looking shell-shocked, the children, in their mid-teens, a great deal more manic and aggressive than any I had seen so far—and I had seen a large number, since they often took trains home from school. These Croatian children acted crazed—they swung on poles, vaulted barriers, punched each other, screeched and wept—this was at eleven at night off the Dalmatian coast—and well into the night kept trying to push one another over the rail into the Kvaneric channel.

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.