NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  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.

  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 b
ombed 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.”

  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.”

  The chetniks were famous for their daggers and their muddy boots and their long hair, and there was something about their filthy faces that made them seem more ruthless and frightening, like the Huns and Visigoths—their distant ancestors—who had raped and pillaged their way through here at the end of the fifth century. Chetniks also were driven by the worst and most merciless engine for violence there is—religious crankishness.

  In October 1991, the Lazo family in Lapad became very anxious, noticing that by degrees their Serbian neighbors had crept away. Soon the shelling began and lasted through November. They cowered in their house, twelve of them, Ivo and his parents and wife and children and some cousins. The shelling continued. It was now December. Many people had died, many houses had caught fire. The water was cut off. “We carried water from the sea to use in the toilet.” They shared a well for drinking water. There was no electricity. It was cold; some days it snowed.

  In a horrible and pitiless way it is interesting how gutless and patient soldiers can be, even when they have their enemy pinned down. The war all over the former Yugoslavia was—and still is—the epitome of this sort of cowardly onslaught. In almost every siege, in Sarajevo and Mostar and twenty other places there has been no forward motion. The attacking army found a convenient position on a mountain or a road or at a safe distance at sea, and then for as long as it had artillery shells it bombarded the target, pinning the people in their houses.

  This was why the war seemed endless: instead of infantry attacks or guerrilla fighting or even aerial bombing, it was a war of sieges, like the oldest Mediterranean warfare. Every coastal town or port in this sea had been under siege at some point in its history—Gibraltar had fourteen of them, Malta had known even more—Turks attacking crusaders in Valletta harbor, British attacking French during
the Napoleonic war; Phoenicians, Romans, Goths, Vandals, Turks, Nazis, the U.S. Marines and my American uncles had all made war in these Mediterranean ports. But there was a significant difference between invaders and besiegers. Siege was hardly a military art; it was a simple method of wearing down and starving and demoralizing a civilian population. It was a massive and prolonged insult, carried on by a merciless army with a tactical advantage.

  The Serbian army had massed their tanks on the north side of town, on the road, near Slano, where I had seen the bomb damage. That was the forward line, the little villages of Trsteno and Orašac, where there were holiday homes and time-share bungalows built by Germans and British people in happier times.

  There were also tanks on the road south of Dubrovnik, around Cilipi where the airport was—half an hour by road from Montenegro; and more tanks on the eastern heights that Lazo called Jarkovitze Mountain (it was not on my map). The ships were a mile or so west, off shore. So Dubrovnik was completely surrounded, and shells were falling from the four points of the compass.

  “My daughter Anita was very worried,” Mr. Lazo said. “I said to her, ‘Go to the Old Town. You will be safe there.’ ”

  There was an almost mystical belief in the sanctity and inviolability of the Old Town. Because of the enormous walls, ten feet thick and four stories high; because of the beauty of the town; because of its historical importance—its association with Venice; its great trading history, site of the oldest apothecary in the Mediterranean; because, most of all, of the town’s religious connections—St. Blaise had lived and died here, St. Nicholas was its patron saint—for all these good reasons, the Old Town was a refuge.

  Anita Lazo fled there with a number of others, and on the sixth of December, the Feast of St. Nicholas—the timing was deliberate—the Old Town was shelled.

  “I looked up and saw the tanks on the mountain,” Mr. Lazo said. “They were like matches lighting—the fire and then whouf—the bombs.”