The Pillars of Hercules

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.”