The Pillars of Hercules

Most of the bomb damage had been repaired. Dubrovnik was a prettier place by far than Rijeka or Zadar or Split, or any of the other coastal towns, but there was something spooky about a preserved old town, one of the most venerable on the Mediterranean shore, that was totally empty. It was like Venice after the plague. Just after the Black Death, in 1345, when most of its citizens lay dead, Venice was begging outsiders to settle, and this queen of cities promised citizenship to anyone who became a Venetian: it must have looked something like Dubrovnik, with its empty streets and scarred walls and its air of bereavement.

But Dubrovnik was putting on a brave back-to-normal face and that made the whole place seem odder still, because it was empty—empty and handsome. Some stores were open, some cafes, even some restaurants. Art galleries sold pretty pictures of the town, sprightly oils of the glorious stone buildings and the harbor; watercolors of church spires, pastoral scenes of sweetness and light.

None of war, none of damage, nor emptiness: no despair, no soldiers.

“Some artists came after the fighting and did sketches of what the bombs had done,” a gallery owner told me. “They went away.”

I asked a question about the siege.

“No,” the woman said, and turned away. “I don’t want to think about it. I want to forget it.”

It was only twenty-odd miles from Dubrovnik to the border of Montenegro, the smallest of the improvised republics, then maybe another sixty or so to Shkodër in Albania, and that was—what?—a couple of hours.

No, no—not at all. Although these distances seemed in American newspapers to be enormous, the pronouncement “We journeyed from the Republic of Croatia to the Republic of Montenegro and then to the Republic of Albania” described a two-hour jog in a car, a mere piddling jaunt, with plenty of time to stop and admire the view. Geographically it was nothing, politically it was something else. It was, in fact, a political distance, like the eighty miles that separate Cuba from Key West, or the few miles that divide Mexico from California. You could not get there from here without the danger of physical harm.

Montenegrins had allied themselves to Serbia and both had designs on Croatia. So the border was closed. It was impossible to tell whether the Albania-Montenegro border was open: probably not. My hope lay in a ferry from Split to Albania, but even so I looked for someone willing to take me to the checkpoint on the border.

I found a taxi driver, Ivo Lazo, a friendly man who had worked for fifteen years in Germany and who spoke German and managed some English.

He would say, “So the Serbian chetniks take the—was ist Messer?”

“Knife.”

“—take the knife and—” And Mr. Lazo passed a finger across his throat to indicate how the chetniks slit them in their fanaticism.

“Can you take me to Montenegro?”

“Ha!” Mr. Lazo exclaimed, meaning “ridiculous!”

“What about to the border?”

“Ha!”

“Maybe just to look at it?”

“Ha!”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“I will show you something interesting,” Mr. Lazo said.

Passing a sign reading DUBROVNIK on which was scrawled To HELL, Mr. Lazo drove me to the upper road, on the mountainside behind Dubrovnik, near where the Serbian artillery had shelled the city. This was quite a different perspective from the one I had had within the city itself. From this high position I had an aerial view of the bombardment’s effects—about a third of the roof tiles were new, in great contrast to the old gray tiles; the repairs to the walls were still visible, the new stucco work was large pale areas. Perhaps in time the colors would blend and the stone would be uniformly mellow. At the moment it was a city wearing patches.

“Five hundred to seven hundred bombs hit it—you see?” Mr. Lazo said.

“Where were you at the time?”

“Over there,” he said, and pointed to the newer part of Dubrovnik, in the Lapad district, near the other harbor.

“Did you have any warning?”

“The first indication we had was from the Serbian families here,” he said. “Four thousand of them—yes, many. The men started to go away, little by little. The old women stayed. They knew something.”

“How did they know?”

“How did they know! How did they know!” Mr. Lazo threw up his hands, and then began to explain the network of Serbian whispering, the foreknowledge of the attack.

He did not hate the Serbs, he said. He had lived with them almost his whole life. The chetniks of course were a different matter.

“They have long beards, they are dirty, they are—so to say—fundamentalists. They are like the Gestapo. They don’t just kill. They torture. Women, children, all the same.”