NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Hundreds were killed, as many as 250 civilians in that siege alone, and the destruction was enormous. Anita Lazo survived. Mr. Lazo drove me to a point overlooking Lapad Harbor, showed me the burned-down freezer plant, the ruined buildings, the rubble, the boats that had been shelled and sunk, still lying dead in the water as hulks. This was the newer part of town, not a priority; about half the roofs had been repaired.

  “They didn’t come closer. They bombed. But to take the city—to capture it—that is very difficult,” Mr. Lazo said. “We had Kalashnikovs and other guns. We could defend it, man to man. But still the bombs fell.”

  The siege lasted three months—tension, noise, eerie silences, rumors; no water, no lights. Not long before they’d had as many as seventy thousand tourists in a season. Now they had—how many?

  “We have you,” Mr. Lazo said. “Ha!”

  We went to Slano where there was hellish damage and more sunken boats.

  “It will take ten years to go back to normal,” Mr. Lazo said. That seemed a popular number; many Croats mentioned ten years, and I was wondering whether they were quoting someone. “Even then there will be big differences. We are of the West. Croatia had nine hundred years of Austro-Hungarians, Serbia had five hundred years of Ottoman Turks. They have the Eastern Orthodox, like the Russians. We have Rome—we are Catholics.”

  That meant, for example, that on the third of February, the Feast of St. Blaise, they went to the church in the Old Town and a priest placed two lighted candles against their neck and said a prayer, because among other things St. Blaise was the patron saint of neck ailments. I knew that from my childhood in Boston: the smell of beeswax, the flames warming my ears.

  I avoided the theology of warfare and asked him why, after fifteen years in Germany, he had come here, to be bombed.

  “I came home. Because home is home.”

  In a year of Mediterranean travel it was one of the most logical statements I heard.

  “Tell people to come here,” Mr. Lazo said. “We are ready.”

  True, Dubrovnik was open for business, and like its women, war had given it a gaunt beauty. But it was a city that had been traumatized and still looked patched up and fragile. My hotel was $18 a night, quite a bargain, even with the resident refugees and their manic war-nerves. The traffic in town was mainly the modern equivalent of camp followers—Mother Courage and her children: U.N. Land Rovers, Red Cross vans, “Caritas” trucks, vehicles of various U.N. agencies. The beaches were foul. The casino was closed. Many hotels were shut. It was not possible to count all the broken windows, nor had much of the broken glass been picked up from the ground.

  The clearest sign that it was still a city of refugees was that laundry hung from every window and every porch and balcony, the sad scrubbed and faded clothes fluttering like battle flags.

  I stayed a few more days in Dubrovnik, to catch up on my notes and for the pleasure of walking along the coast, the only tourist in town. One day I met an Italian taking a shipment of Red Cross medicine to Mostar. It was a day’s drive from here. He had a Caritas truck.

  “Mostar was very badly bombed, but there is no fighting in town now,” he said. “A bit outside the town there is shelling.”

  “I’d like to go there, just to see.”

  “I can’t take you, because of the insurance.”

  “I wanted to see the famous bridge.”

  “It’s fallen,” he said. Caduto.

  On the way back to Split, the bus broke down at Slano. So while the driver made a mess of replacing the fan belt—hammering the bracket with his monkey wrench, struggling with rusty nuts—I had another chance to examine the bomb damage. Then I sat beside the road, with the grumbling soldiers, and the bus driver swore at the limp fan belt.

  I now understood why, the moment the bus had gasped to a stop, an attractive young woman had dashed out the door and run into the road and begun hitchhiking. A few cars went by her, but within five minutes she had a ride. She was on her way and we were sitting at the edge of the broken road with a clapped-out bus. She exemplified another axiom of war: don’t wait for your vehicle to be mended—just use your initiative; flash your tits and take off. It may be your only chance.

  Back in Split I went to the Albanian ferry agency. The ferry for Durrës was scheduled to leave tonight.

  “Sorry. It was canceled,” the young woman told me. “I cannot sell you a ticket.”

  “How do I get there?”

  She shrugged. She did not know.

  But I had a suspicion that if I took a ferry back to Ancona in Italy I could get one from there, or possibly from Bari, where I had been told there were regular departures. I bought a ferry ticket to Italy on tomorrow’s sailing, feeling that I would reach Albania eventually, even if it meant crisscrossing the Adriatic. But it seemed a waste: in Dubrovnik I had been just two hours by road from Albania; but the trip was impossible. I was now faced with a four-day journey.

  The point about atrocity stories, especially here, was that everyone told them. For a week I had been listening to stories about chetnik fanaticism; but, killing time in Split until the day the Ancona ferry left, I met an aid worker from Canada who told me about the Croatian fanaticism.

  “Didn’t you see them?” he said. “Weren’t you here a few days ago?”

  “I was in Dubrovnik.”

  “There were groups of Ustasha soldiers in the bars here in Split, all singing Nazi songs—the ‘Horst Wessel’ and all of that.”

  The Ustasha were Croatian commandos, much like the Serbian chetniks. They modeled themselves on the Nazi SS and wore black shirts and a “U” insignia. Their ruthlessness and racism dated to the fascist Ustasha regime which had governed Croatia with Nazi help during the Second World War and off its own bat, without Nazi control, had operated its own death camp. Serbian “ethnic cleansing” was now well enough known to be universally condemned, but this policy of Croatian “purification” was new to me.

  “So what’s going to happen here?”

  “In ten years”—that magic figure again—“things will be quieter,” he said. “And there will be a greater Serbia, a greater Croatia and a smaller Bosnia.”

  On the quay, having just bought tickets to Italy, was a family of refugees—a hollow-eyed man and his painfully thin wife and his child. The little boy looked robust, the parents half-starved, and so it was easy to conclude that the child had been given the parents’ rations.

  “We were airlifted by helicopter from Tuzla,” he said, and since Tuzla was in Bosnia, the family obviously had been through the wringer.

  They had escaped from Sarajevo, leaving their parents and their house and everything they possessed. All they had were two small suitcases, and a pram for the child (who was too heavy for them to lift), and a bag of food. This family had been sponsored by a French organization, Solidarité, which had provided the helicopter getaway.

  The family’s story was not complicated, but in its simplicity it amply illustrated the despicable nature of this civil war, which was a border dispute fueled by ancient grievances (the assassination of the Croatian King Zvonimir in 1089, for example), wartime collaboration and score-settling, racism, and religious differences.

  “I am a geologist,” he said. His name was Dr. Tomic; he was probably in his mid-thirties but his haunted look made him seem much older. “I am from ex-Yugoslavia. My parents are Serbian, but I was born in Bosnia, so I am a Bosnian. Sarajevo is my home. My wife is a Muslim. That’s the problem.”

  Mrs. Tomic gave me a wan smile and shrugged her skinny shoulders.

  “For eight years I had been at the university in Sarajevo, specializing in the geology of the area,” Dr. Tomic said. “Then my colleagues began to ask me questions as though to test me. Finally they said, ‘We have lost confidence in you.’ ”

  “Did they say why?”

  “No—they couldn’t. My geology is very local, just the thing that is studied there,” he said. “My neighborhood was next. My neighbors began to make pro
blems. They were blaming my wife for things. They know she is a Muslim. It got very bad.”

  “How bad? Give me an instance,” I said.

  “Dangerous—threats,” he said, and seemed so shaken by the memory that I did not press him.

  “We considered fleeing to Slovenia,” he said. “They have camps here, but we don’t qualify. They have Serbs in one camp, Croats in another, Muslims in a third. We don’t fit in, because we are mixed.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Go to France,” he said. “Take the ferry to Italy, then the train to Paris.”

  They were leaving everything behind, most of all abandoning hope for their country. It interested me that they had only two small bags and this folding pram; I imagined it to be the little boy’s clothes, and a change of clothes for themselves. The average tourist in Italy on a short holiday—they would probably be sharing the train with many such people—had ten times this weight in baggage.

  After that, whenever I read about troop maneuvers or politicians grandstanding or mortar attacks on cities or the pettiness and terror of the war, I thought about this skinny man and wife, each one holding a bag, pushing their little boy down the quay at Split, their starved faces turned to the Mediterranean, waiting for the ferry to take them away from here.

  The next day I saw the refugee couple on the ferry Ivan Krajc standing in the rain by the rail watching the Croatian shore recede from view.

  The rest of the passengers divided themselves into groups—Italian truck drivers who joked and sang and ate, Italian pilgrims who had just come from Medjugorje and were still praying (dozens of them, standing on deck in the rain and chanting the rosary out loud), Croatians like the Tomic family, looking furtive and anxious; and aid workers down from Bosnia, with a few days to spend in Italy.

  “We drove down from Zenica today,” an aid worker told me. Zenica was about forty miles northwest of Sarajevo. “Last year it took us ten days to drive from Zenica to Split, because of roadblocks and fighting. Today it took eight hours. Maybe things are improving!”

  He was an Australian, traveling with his American wife, who was also an aid worker. She had a neighborly manner, and he was upright, mustached, and had a military bearing—he later told me he had been a soldier in South Africa. He was in his mid-forties, with the charity World Vision. His name was David Jennings. He and Theresa were making their first-ever visit to Italy, as a break from their aid project in Bosnia.

  They asked me what I did for a living.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Journalists are a pain,” David said.

  “They all cover the same story—four guys in four separate cars go to the same place,” Theresa said.

  “They come for the big stories, when they can get their face on the camera, with shooting behind them,” David said.

  “I’m not a journalist,” I said. “I don’t work for anyone. I’m just looking around.”

  “I went back to Australia for about ten days last January,” David said. “I looked at the paper, flipping the pages, and there was nothing about the war—nothing. I called the editor. I said, ‘Hey, mate. I’ve just come back from Bosnia, and I’ve got some news for you—the war’s still on!’ ”

  “What sort of thing do you do?”

  “I’m a logistician,” he said. “But I do everything. I mean, we all do. We have heart specialists driving ambulances.”

  “Isn’t logistics about making things happen?”

  “Yes. I coordinate shipments of food and equipment. My military background is useful for that. It takes patience, though. I mean, like waiting for six hours at a checkpoint because some jumped little guy pretends there’s something wrong with my papers.”

  The problem was that all the borders were so blurred. Serb, Croat and Bosnian lines were close and continually shifting.

  “Because I’m working in Bosnia they see my work as helping the enemy,” he said. “And they’re fussy too. In my office I have a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat and a Serb. They get along fine. But my interpreter was dealing with a freight forwarder in Zagreb over the phone. After a few minutes my interpreter handed the phone to me. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to me.’ The woman in Zagreb suspected—from the interpreter’s Serbo-Croatian accent—that he might be a Muslim. I asked the Zagreb woman for a reason. She says, ‘He is not speaking my language.’ ”

  “I was thinking of going to Mostar,” I said. “But I was warned that it was dangerous.”

  “You might have hit it on a bad day,” he said. “Hey, I was standing talking with some U.N. Protective Force (UNPROFOR) guys at Tuzla airport the other day. I felt a tug in my chest—a hard poke—and heard a bang and saw a slug spinning on the floor. Someone had fired at me.”

  “But it bounced off?”

  “I was wearing a flak jacket.”

  “Who was the sniper?”

  “Might have been anyone,” he said. “Probably thought I was UNPROFOR. They all hate them. They suspect them of helping the enemy, whoever that might be.”

  Theresa said, “They try to demoralize people. That’s how they think they’ll win.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “Each side,” she said.

  “Demoralizing” took the form of being beastly and unreasonable in uniquely horrible ways.

  Later, in my cabin on the Ivan Krajc at midnight, twiddling my radio, I found an FM station broadcasting from Split in English, for the benefit of aid workers and U.N. soldiers. It was a war report, and it sounded as bland as a stock market update.

  —and three artillery shells fell just outside the city of Tuzla today. There were no casualties. Small-arms provocation was reported in Bihac lasting thirty-five minutes this afternoon. Twenty-five people are still listed as missing in Sarajevo. Two shells struck a house in Gorazde—demolishing it. No one was injured. Two mortar bombs exploded in Travnik. It was agreed that the left bank of the Neretva River in Mostar be officially reopened after six P.M. tomorrow. One member of UNPROFOR was critically injured by sniper fire in—

  The soporific drone of the ferry’s engines mercifully eased me to sleep. I slumbered all the way across the Adriatic, and in the morning I was back in Italy, looking for a way by ship to Albania.

  12

  The Ferry Venezia to Albania

  It was not until I was on board the ferry Venezia, among dowdy women wearing long trousers under their thick skirts and grizzled cheese-paring men in cloth caps and frayed track suits—both men and women had the faces of fretful tortoises—that I realized that I was at last on my way to Albania. I had rehearsed it all mentally with such thoroughness that the whole business seemed inevitable. I had bought a ferry ticket from an agent in Ancona. The ferry was leaving from Bari, two-hundred-odd miles down the coast. I went by train to Bari. Returning to a city I always retraced my steps. In Bari this meant the same hotel, a certain laundry, a certain restaurant, a certain bookstore, a stroll down the Corso to the port. The women at the laundry remembered me, and one said, “We think you’re an artist of some kind.” That was nice. But they expressed amazement that I was going to Albania, which is regarded with horror by the Barese.

  Another man in Bari was franker. “Albanians are the filthiest,” he said. Sporchissimi. “And the poorest.” Poverissimi “Stay here!”

  No argument could detain me. I was beyond being determined; I was programmed for Albania. I had my fifty-dollar ferry ticket. My clothes were washed. I had a stock of books and batteries for my radio. I even had a map of the place. I did not want to listen to any Italian’s opinions about Albania—none of the ones I met had been there. But it was only on the deck of the Venezia as we headed east out of the harbor that I remembered that I had no visa for Albania, I hadn’t the foggiest idea where I was going, or why. All I had done was offer myself as a passenger. I had merely shown up and said: Please take me.

  But where? The importance of getting to Albania had preoccupied me to such an extent that I had forgotten why I was going. O
n board, I wanted to ask people what their intentions were in Albania, thinking that it would offer some clue as to why I was going. No one was very conversational. The passengers were seedy but calm. The Albanians muttered in Geg or Tosk and ignored me. They crouched over little paper parcels of food, sinister-looking scraps of meat and crumbly crusts of bread and mousetrap cheese. There were not many children, though one family with two children had among its possessions, packed into cardboard boxes, a rocking horse with green fur glued to it.

  The decks of the ferry were crammed with stolen cars. I had been told by people in Bari that the cars on the ferry to Durrës had been snatched from streets all over Europe, given new documents, and exported to Albania, where they would be sold on the black market and then vanish down dusty roads. There were the usual aid workers and the vans from various charities making their weekly food and clothing run. But Italian aid workers were the opposite of solemn—they were truck drivers, smokers, shouters, practical jokers, goosing each other and laughing. They sprawled in the cafeteria, mocking the awfulness of the food (wet spaghetti, soggy salad, inky wine) and yakking, then one would say, “You recognize this song?” and would begin singing something sacrilegious in a falsetto voice.

  I had the feeling that I was the only one on board who was just going for the ride. On deck I tuned my radio and listened to the news. “The trial of Ramiz Alia, former prime minister of Albania, started in Tirana today,” I heard, and told myself that my trip was timely, yet knew that I was kidding myself. I knew nothing of Albania except that for fifty years the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha had allowed few foreigners to enter and no Albanian to leave. Albania, cut off from everything, had a reputation for being one of the strangest countries in the world. With the great shakeup brought on by the Soviet collapse, Albania had changed—hadn’t it? It must have, because here I was, en route to the coastal city of Durrës.

  The moon was up, the ship passed parallel to the shore, along a sea-level string of lights that were the streetlamps of the coast road south of Bari. Then the ship swung east, into the darkness.