The Pillars of Hercules

That was an exception. It was a solemn and even dull place, but with the most attractive women I had seen so far, taller, more angular, brisker and better dressed than elsewhere, not the duck-butted women of the Marches. Trieste’s food was not highly flavored, but it was hearty, mussels and spaghetti, fruit and fish, and the fine wines of its region, Friuli. I began to understand why Joyce had decided to live here and engage in the stimulating monotony of writing a novel.

Leaving Trieste meant leaving Italy, where knowing the language with reasonable fluency I had been happy—well-treated and well-fed. Now I was boarding the train into the unknown—the new nation of Slovenia and its neighbor, the crumbling republic of Croatia.

11

The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

            My destination today was Pivka, “somewhere in Slovenia” (so I was told), reachable on the Budapest Express by my getting off very quickly at a thirty-second halt after about two hours’ traveling from Trieste. It was a sunny morning; I was dozing in the midday heat. The border formalities brought me fully awake.

Until now I had hardly shown my passport anywhere, but leaving the European Community for the hastily improvised republics of former Yugoslavia meant that I was now under scrutiny. High in the Carso plateau that formed the Italian frontier, Italian officials stamped my passport and looked through my bag. A few miles farther down the line, at Sežana on the Slovenian border, there was another search, but a stranger one. The Slovene customs man ordered me outside, into the corridor, and then kicking my bag aside, he set his sights on removing the seats from the compartment. He fossicked in the crevices where I might have hidden lawyers, guns or money. He found nothing but dust. He jammed the seats back into the racks and said good-bye in English. In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss; like a tiny cop directing traffic.

It was such an empty train. Obviously no one wanted to leave Italian abundance for the relative deprivation of Ljubljana or Budapest, or any of the desperate little stations in between. For example, I was the only passenger to alight at Pivka, a railway junction.

After all that traveling and trouble I was nowhere. Yet I had to admit that it was a satisfaction being on this tiny platform, among unreadable signs, particularly after the celebrated places I had passed through. The pathetic name Pivka seemed curiously belittling and joyless, like a nickname for a dwarf. But because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.

It was like one of those remote junctions you see in depressing East European movies where people in old-fashioned clothes commit meaningless murders. It was now the middle of a hot afternoon.

I walked into the station bar, feeling like a conspicuous stranger, and ordered a cup of coffee. It was dark inside, and shabby, and the air was dense and stinging with the smoke of cheap cigarettes. I had no Slovenian currency, but Italian money was good enough—probably better. Citizens of these new little nations were forced by circumstances to be accommodating, and to speak English. I handed over a small Italian bill and received a wad of Slovenian money in return, with the newness and inkiness of inflated currency. I calculated that the large cup of coffee had cost me thirty-five cents, the cheapest I had drunk in fifteen years.

Pasty-faced men with greasy hair chain-smoked and muttered. I wanted to make a telephone call from the rusty phone on the wall, but no one could sell me the token I needed to make the thing work.

“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?