The Pillars of Hercules

Again, as in Zadar, and on the Liburnija, and Split, I was among rambunctious children and dozy parents—locals and refugees: more war nerves. The children played loud music and chased each other and yelled. They raced up and down the hotel corridors, they congregated noisily in the lobby. Given the fact that they had been severely bombed, they remained indoors and seemed to have an obvious and perhaps understandable aversion—not to say phobic reaction—to being in the open air.

I had no such aversion. But before I could walk very far, the rain began, first as a series of irregular showers and then as drizzle interrupted by thunder and lightning. I sheltered inside a grocer’s shop that was so small I had to excuse myself and step outside when a customer entered.

Business was terrible, the grocer said. His glum wife agreed, shaking her head.

“Dubrovnik depended on tourists,” the grocer said. “Now there are none.”

That was the strange thing about a tourist resort without tourists. The town had been adapted for people who were not there. The hotels looked haunted, the restaurants and shops were empty, the beaches were neglected as a result and were littered and dirty. Few of the shops sold anything that a native or a townie would be likely to need or could afford. So the place was inhabited by real people, but everything else about it seemed unreal.

Apart from the shellholes and the closed hotels and the bullet nicks on buildings the city was in good shape. The shattered roofs had been repaired. I had not yet seen the famously lovely old town of Dubrovnik, which had been heavily bombed, but I was told it had been restored.

“We have no income,” he said.

The stormy sky descended and darkened the town and a while later the streets were black, the storm having obliterated the transition from day to night.

The hotel was so hard-pressed that for simplicity, there was only one menu available, the refugee meal. I sat with these hundred or so people, mainly women and children, and had my refugee meal. It was one of the hours in the day when, stuffing their faces, the children were quiet. Elsewhere—but not far away—just across the mountains that hemmed in Dubrovnik, in Bosnia, food was being dropped from American planes or tossed out of the back of U.N. trucks; yet there was famine all the same. These refugees who had gotten to the shores of the Mediterranean were the lucky ones.

After dinner I began talking with a man in the lobby. First the subject of the weather—rain. Then business—no tourists. Then the war. He was aggrieved that America had not done more to help.

“Help who?” I asked.

“Help us in our struggle,” he said.

I said, “Tell me why American soldiers should get killed in your civil war.”

He did not like my tone.

“No one cares about us,” he said.

“Everyone cares,” I said. “No one knows what to do, and I don’t blame them, because so far it has all looked so petty and unpredictable.”

“Clinton is weak,” the man said.

It irritated me very much that a tribalistic Croatian on this bombed and squabbling coast, with its recent history of political poltroonery, not to say political terror and fratricide, should criticize the American president in this way.

“Who told you that, Tudjman?”

Tudjman, the Croatian president, was noted for being a fanatical nationalist and moralizing bore and an irritant generally.

“He’s very strong, isn’t he?” I said. I could not keep my eyes from dancing in anger. “You’re so lucky to have him.”

The old fortified town of Dubrovnik in sunshine lived up to its reputation of being one of the loveliest in the Mediterranean: a medieval walled city, a citadel on the sea, with an ancient harbor. It was the Republic of Ragusa, so prosperous and proud that even when its buildings were destroyed in an earthquake in the mid-seventeenth century it was scrupulously restored, and has been so well preserved that the oldest paintings and etchings of it show it as it is today, unchanged. The town is listed as “a treasure” by UNESCO.

The worst damage since that natural disaster in 1667 had happened just recently, between late in 1991 and well into 1992, when as many as thirty thousand Serbian and Montenegrin shells hit the city—there were cannons firing from behind the city, on the heights of the mountain range, and more cannons on warships just off shore, as at Zadar. There was no reason for this. The capture of the port meant almost nothing from the military point of view. The Serbian assault was rightly termed “cultural vandalism.”