The Pillars of Hercules

“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.