The Pillars of Hercules

There were not many passengers, the usual Croatian soldiers and nuns, some elderly people, a few youths. When the bus stopped, as it frequently did, the soldiers hopped off and smoked. At Biograd I attempted a conversation with a group of soldiers but was waved away. Rebuffed, I looked at the Kornat islands offshore, an archipelago of a hundred or so uninhabited and treeless lumps of stone in the sea. The whole landscape was stony and the odd thing was that it had been demarcated into football-sized fields that served as goat pastures or great stony rectangles enclosing fruit trees.

I got off at dry windy Šibenik for lunch—a cup of coffee and a slice of cold pizza—and to look at shell holes. It had been more lightly bombed than Zadar, but it was obvious from the random shelling that Serbians had no scruples about bombing civilians. Like Zadar, like many of the towns on this coast, Šibenik wore a wounded expression and seemed to wince. I looked at these places but they did not look directly back at me. That was an effect of war, too.

The bus to Split took over an hour, though the place was only thirty miles away. I decided to stay here, to get my bearings. It was an industrial port, rather horrible-looking, enclosing the tiny ancient town of old Split in a maze of streets, with a temple of Jupiter and a cathedral and a nearby market. All over the seafront of Split, and at the ferry landings and near the bus station (near another defunct railway station) there were old women plucking people’s sleeves and offering rooms and nagging in German.

I saw those old women as my opportunity, and decided on a likely one and gave her the thrill of believing she had talked me into a ten-dollar room about a fifteen-minute walk from the ferry landing.

“Good room, cheap room,” she said in German, and she made a “follow-me” gesture by flapping her hand.

The room was on the third floor of a large seedy apartment house, but I did not regret it until it was obvious that this old woman and I did not share any language in common. She could say “room” and a few other words in German and Italian, and was of course fluent in Croat. She lived alone. She was the envy of some other old women in the apartment house, because she had snared me.

I would not have minded being trapped there if we had been able to talk, but there was no conversation, I was not able to poke through the other rooms in my nosy way, the pictures of crucified Christ and suffering saints on the walls depressed me, and I never found out her name. Some of the religious paraphernalia in the dark apartment—pictures of the Madonna and shiny rosaries—were, I later realized, souvenirs of Medjugorje, not far away, which the Madonna had been visiting fairly regularly to inspire the Croatians in their own religious nationalism.

“One week, two weeks?” the woman asked me in German.

“One night,” I said.

It passed quickly, I fled in the morning to the greater comfort of the Bellvue Hotel, and tried to find a ferry south to Dubrovnik. None were running. “Forget Dubrovnik—go to Hvar,” a ferryman said. Hvar was a nearby island. Instead, I wandered in the market, watching people selling some of their earthly goods in the Croatian version of a flea market—but these people were refugees. In desperation I looked at the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, and then I decided to make more travel plans. It seemed you could go almost anywhere from Split—to Ancona, to Rijeka, even to Albania. The one place that was unreachable was Montenegro. The border was only ten or fifteen miles south of Dubrovnik, but it was closed. And there was no ferry traffic out of Dubrovnik. But I could bypass Montenegro by taking a ferry to Albania.

“We go to Durrës once a week,” the young woman said at the shipping agency.

Since this Albanian ferry was leaving in a few days, I could go south to Dubrovnik, then come back here and catch it.

Split seemed aptly named: it made me want to split. The Bellvue was on a noisy street. After dark the streets of Split emptied. Most of the restaurants had no diners—no one had any money to eat out. I sat eating foul mussels and overcooked pasta. Even the wine was slimy.

But one of the pleasures I experienced in Split was entering a phone booth, inserting my plastic Croatian phone card, and then dialing an access code, my calling card number, and the phone number I wanted—thirty-one numbers altogether—and hearing a sleepy voice, Hello, darling. I knew it was you. I’m so glad you called. I was worried—three in the morning in Honolulu.