The Pillars of Hercules

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.

This was Zadar, and it was midnight, and I alone left the Liburnija and went down the gangway. I saw a light burning at the shipping office, where there were a woman and man shuffling papers and smoking.

“I just got off the ship,” I said. “I am looking for a hotel.”

The man shook his head. The woman said, “There are just a few hotels and they are full with refugees.”

“You mean there is nowhere to stay?”

“It is so late,” the woman said. “Maybe the Kolovare Hotel. They have refugees but they might have a place for you.”

“Where is it?”

She pointed into the darkness at the end of the quay. “That way. Two kilometers—maybe three.”

In fact it was more than a mile. The distance and even the late hour did not deter me from walking there; it was the thought of walking alone in a strange town that was twelve miles from the Bosnian-Serb lines. Only someone looking for trouble would walk down these dark streets at that late hour.

“It is possible to call a taxi?”

“No taxis,” the man said.

“Thanks.”