The Pillars of Hercules

But as I turned to leave, he said, “When the ship leaves, I will give you a lift.”

So I waited on the dark quay at Zadar. It was like a quayside scene in a De Chirico painting, just as bare, just as bewildering. There were no cars, no people, nothing stirring: it was the abnormal silence full of implication that is more typical in a war zone than noise, for war is nothing happening for weeks and then everything happening horribly in seconds.

The Liburnija did not leave until almost one-thirty. I thought: Is it any wonder I travel alone? I had no idea what I was doing. I seldom knew from hour to hour what my plans were. That trip to Opatija was a sudden decision, like the decision to plunge into Pivka and abruptly leave; ditto Rijeka. And now it seemed I had drawn a blank at Zadar. It was unfair to subject another person to this impulsiveness and uncertainty. I had started the day in Rijeka, had lunch in Opatija, had bought the ticket back in Rijeka, and had been sailing since late afternoon. Now, well past midnight, I had no place to stay, and my bag felt like a boulder. I would have been apologizing like mad to a traveling companion. Actually I was pleased. You’re in Zadar, buddy, and that was something, still in the Mediterranean after all this time!

“See the holes in the buildings,” the man from the agency said, greeting me and yawning after the ship departed. He spoke English mixed with German. His name was Ivo, one of many Ivos I was to meet in the next week or so.

Lumps of stucco had been blown off the walls, some of the walls had crater holes, and many windows were broken.

“From grenades,” he explained. “The Serbs were in ships, right there, shelling us. This”—where his old car was parked—“was a crater. They filled it up. But the rest we still haven’t fixed. The town is worse than this.”

We got in and he drove, very slowly, like an elderly man uncertain of his route.

“All was dark. The whole of Zadar,” he said. “And I was so afraid, and even now—”

He laughed in an urgent mirthless way.

“I am very nervous now,” he said. “My nervousness is serious. Look—holes, holes, holes.”

We were passing blasted buildings and low ruined walls and potholes in the street.

“Do you think I should be nervous?”

“Maybe. I don’t know,” he said. “For me it was terrible. No water, no electricity. All dark. And it is still not over.”

Not more than one hundred and twenty-five miles across the Adriatic, at Ancona, Italians, their bellies full of pasta and good wine, were sleeping blissfully; and all this Croat spoke of was bombing and war.

“Many people used to come here,” Ivo said. “Now there is no one. They are afraid.”

We were still traveling through the dark city, and I was grateful for this ride. It was hard to imagine my being able to find my way through these dark streets to the hotel.

“Now—only you,” Ivo said.

“The last stranger in Zadar, that’s me,” I said.

“I hope they have a space for you,” Ivo said, as he swung into the driveway of the Kolovare.

All I saw were sandbags. They were stacked in front of the entrance, two bags deep, eight feet high. They were stacked in front of the ground-floor windows. There was a wall of sandbags along the driveway. Some dim lights burned behind them. There were definitely refugees here; the unmistakable sign was laundry hanging from every balcony and most windows, so that the front of the hotel looked like a Sicilian tenement. All the doors were locked.

Ivo roused an old woman and said something to her. He bade me farewell and disappeared behind the sandbags. The woman gave me a key and showed me to a back room. I tried to talk to her.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” she said.

Zadar had been seriously shelled—there were signs of damage everywhere, and it was obvious that it had been hit from up close and vindictively: the ancient main gate of the old town, a Roman relic, had been shelled—for what reason apart from malice?—and chunks blown out of it. The Serbs had set up machine guns and howitzers in a nearby park, where they were dug in; and these marksmen shelled the high school that was sixty feet away. The high school was now in session, students chatting in the playground, but the front door was sandbagged, so were most of the lower windows, and many upper windows were broken. The entire front of the school was cicatriced by shells. There was major damage around the window frames, misses from their attempts to fire into the windows.

I talked to some of the students. Yes, it was fairly quiet now, right here, they said. But there were roadblocks not far away. I asked about the shelling of the buildings. What was the objective?

“They wanted to kill civilians,” a young boy said.

“Students?”

“Kill anybody,” he said. “If they kill ordinary people in Zadar they think they would make us afraid.”