The Pillars of Hercules

Traveling from Split to Dubrovnik on a bus the next day, I was thinking: What is Croatian culture that it gathered all these people into one nation? The food was a version of the worst Italian cooking. The language was the same as Serbian. What Croatian nationalism amounted to was fanatical Catholicism as a counter to the orthodoxy of Serbian Protestantism, and both sides had terrorist groups and secret societies. Croatians had abandoned the designs they had for annexing parts of Bosnia, because they had border problems of their own—most of the places on the Croatian map were in Serbian hands.

Yet with all the talk of Republika Hvratska, and all the nationalistic graffiti, and the flags and the soldiers and the empty nights in their cities, it seemed to me that they had ceased to be individual. Driven by war and religion, they had dissolved their personal identities into the nation, and so they seemed spectral.

The ruined villages along the coast road looked like work-in-stoppage, and even the landscape had the look of a building site: whirling dust on windy bays, dry soil, broken boulders, crumbling cliffs. Half the passengers on this bus were chain-smoking soldiers who looked unfit for active duty.

We entered Bosnia. True, it was only the few miles of it that reached to the coast—Bosnia’s only shore—but thirty miles inland, up the Neretva River, was Mostar, city of atrocities and continuous shelling—it was being shelled today. After 428 years of being admired by invaders and locals alike, intact through two world wars, Mostar’s single-span bridge over the Neretva, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, had recently been blasted apart by mindless Serbian artillerymen.

We soon came to a checkpoint, with Bosnian soldiers, and some policemen who entered the bus and bullied civilians, denouncing them for carrying doubtful-looking identity papers. There were Croatian checkpoints, too, at Omiš, Makarska and Podgorje: the same routine. Usually the victim of the policeman’s wrath was a squirming, cowering woman. In this sort of situation the cop had absolute power: he could arrest the poor woman or boot her off the bus, or send her back where she came from.

We reached Slano, farther down the road. You did not need to be told that Slano had been the front line. The house walls were riddled with bullets, many of the roofs were missing, some of the houses were bombed flat. This was where the Serbians had dug in for their attack on Dubrovnik. They had shot at everything. There was not a structure on the road that did not have at least a divot of plaster missing. Some had bright patches of tile where the roof had been mended, and many windows were boarded up.

Welcome To Dubrovnik was repeated on a signboard in four languages, and written across it in large letters, almost obliterating the welcome, the Croatian word HAOS!—chaos.

Dubrovnik was famous for its beauty and its bomb craters; but it was another empty city, with no traffic and no tourists, and even Lapad harbor looked peculiarly bereft: no ferries running, no fishing boats, no anglers. It was a gray day, the low sky threatening rain.

I hopped off the bus in the newer part of town with the soldiers and the nuns and the others. The soldiers laughed and stayed to talk while everyone else scuttled away. That was another characteristic of the war: no one lingered anywhere—people arrived in a place and then vanished. Apart from the groups of soldiers, there were no street discussions or any public gatherings. As the only non-Croatian on the street I was wooed by taxi drivers, but it would not be dark for a few hours and so I decided to walk around the port, from hotel to hotel, to check the prices and get my bearings.

Red Cross vehicles, U.N. Land Rovers, and official cars of charitable agencies filled the parking lots of the first three hotels. The desk clerks said, “We have no rooms.”

This was not happy news. I kept walking. An aid worker, probably Canadian, judging from the maple leaf on his lapel pin, sat in the lobby reading a paperback book. The woman at reception told me her hotel was full.

“Wish I could help you,” the Canadian said.

The book he was reading was Pride and Prejudice.

Afterwards on the street, in a sharp attack of what the French call “stairway wit,” I realized I should have quipped to him, “Is that a history of Yugoslavia?” He might have laughed and thought: What a witty fellow!

Two more hotels were closed and looked damaged. The next hotel that was open had been entirely given over to refugees. But I eventually found one on a backstreet that had a spare room. It also had refugees. It was not a very good hotel. I was beginning to comprehend another axiom of war: in a time of crisis the do-gooders get the best rooms—five-star hotels to the U.N. and the charities, one-star hotels to the refugees and me.