The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  From the sixteenth century well into the eighteenth, Rijeka (historically called “Fiume” in Italian—both names mean “river”) was a free port city and a haven for a guerrilla group known as the Uskoks, who had a taste for piracy and a flair for the dramatic: adding their victims’ blood to their bread and collecting bags of Turkish noses.5 It had been a flashpoint border for centuries: militarily between the Austrians and Turks, and theologically between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. Between the world wars, the city had a colorful and violent interregnum while Italy and the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia disputed its control. Into the vacuum swooped the Italian “poet warrior”—and proto-fascist—Gabriele D’Annunzio, who invaded with a private militia and introduced a kind of commune dominated by his own cult of personality.6

  The Uskoks were finally suppressed by the Hapsburgs after they moved from helpfully harassing the Turks to annoyingly harassing the Venetians.

  Unsurprisingly, D’Annunzio is something of a hero and role model for Eduard Limonov. D’Annunzio’s vigilante freelancing in Fiume was an inspiration for Limonov’s scheme to foment armed revolution in Central Asia with his National Bolshevik volunteers. The plan led to Limonov’s imprisonment for two and a half years.

  In the fallout after World War I, the expansionist Italian government, collecting on what West (referring to the 1915 Treaty of London) calls “a bribe to induce the Italians to come into the war on the Allied side,” made an attempt at the Paris Peace Conference to undermine the nascent Kingdom of Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats in order to claim regional hegemony and Adriatic control—specifically, over the port of Fiume. Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando stoked the still-hot fires of Italian nationalism to pressure American president Woodrow Wilson to acquiesce to, or at least ignore, the move. Wilson, though, had developed a personal distaste for the Italian delegation that accentuated his political disagreement with their territorial demands.

  Enter D’Annunzio. Short, bald, mustachioed, and flamboyant, he was a parody of the Byronic artist-provocateur—womanizing, free-spending, ludicrous, but memorable in wartime. In The Balkans, Misha Glenny described him “charging Austrian trenches in the middle of the night with pistols and knives, dressed in a flowing cape.” Caught up in the paranoid nationalism of 1919 Italy, he and some units of the Arditi special forces decided that, rather than wait out the vacillations and negotiations of mere politicians, they would march on Fiume and solve the issue by force of arms, will, and the fate that favors the bold, naïve, and narcissistic.

  For the next fourteen months, the Free State of Fiume became, depending on one’s viewpoint, the “last of the pirate utopias,” an aesthetocracy, a proto-fascist testing ground, an anarcho-syndicalist dictatorship, or an ongoing orgy. The constitution declared, in Hakim Bey’s paraphrase, “music to be the central principle of the State.” Leaders resurrected the Uskok pirate tradition to fund the never-ending party. Bey, who idealized the Free State as an anarchist utopia—“very nearly the first” of what he calls “temporary autonomous zones”—described it as a magnet for

  artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists . . . fugitives and stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies (the uniform was black with pirate skull & crossbones—later stolen by the S.S.), and crank reformers of every stripe. . . . Every morning D’Annunzio read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then fireworks. This made up the entire activity of the government. Eighteen months later, when the wine and money had run out and the Italian fleet7 finally showed up and lobbed a few shells at the Municipal Palace, no one had the energy to resist.

  The Italian government had finally become wary of this charismatic rival power center.

  Mussolini’s Italy dismembered and swallowed much of Fiume. The border between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and fascist Italy ran through the middle of the city—along the river, right behind the club I was playing, in fact.

  While some contemporary anarchists, influenced by Bey, look to the Free State as a model of a temporary autonomous zone with what he called a “shared air of impermanence . . . [where] no-one was trying to impose yet another Revolutionary Dictatorship,” the judgment of history has been more damning. Bey himself admits that “D’Annunzio, like many Italian anarchists, later veered toward fascism,” but in fact Italian fascism took its aesthetic cues from D’Annunzio. Glenny quotes Michael Ledeen: “Virtually the entire ritual of Fascism came from the ‘Free State of Fiume’: the balcony addresses, the Roman salute, the cries of ‘aia, aia, alala,’ the dramatic dialogues with the crowd, the use of religious symbols in a new secular setting, the eulogies to ‘martyrs’ of the cause and the employment of these relics in political ceremonies.” Mussolini, an early supporter of D’Annunzio, later came to see him as a threat. Il Duce was first implicated in an assassination attempt against the poet—he was pushed from a window—and then chose to bribe him into retiring from an active role in Italian politics. West, who has both a dog’s nose for the barest whiff of fascism and a feminist distaste for its cult of male power, dismisses D’Annunzio with ad hominem contempt for his “singular example of male privilege . . . I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald woman writer. . . . Here in Fiume the bald author had been allowed to ruin a city: a bald authoress would never be allowed to build one.”

  It wasn’t until after World War II that Fiume, renamed Rijeka, finally passed from Italian control into that of nascent Yugoslavia,8 but it retains a strong Italian influence. Cosmopolitan and relatively prosperous thanks to tourist money, it boasts a strong café culture, and “ciao” is heard everywhere.

  In post–World War II Yugoslavia, the vast majority of its sizeable Italian population “self-deported” under pressure.

  “D’Annunzio was interesting,” judged promoter Damir, who greeted me with a warm hug, “but ultimately he was a complete failure.” He pointed out that the poet’s grand vision, regardless of the riffraff who were drawn to it, had a strong component of ethnic nationalism. He compared it to the Republika Srpska in Bosnia, the northern province of ethnic Serbs who favor political integration with Belgrade. “He wanted to create an Italian state from Venice to Libya. It was a utopian idea, a free city of culture—there were concerts and shows every day—but only for Italians. Like Srpska, you can’t ignore the other people around you without some kind of violent cleansing.”

  Damir was serious and full of idealistic energy—a college student studying cultural theory. When I first met him the year before, he had just returned from a weekend at a DIY festival—hardcore, postrock, krautrock—in Romania, by the Serbian border. He and an American girl had hitchhiked there from Zagreb—she was amazed, since hitchhiking isn’t a thing that people do much in America anymore. He’d started booking shows back in 2003 because he “had friends who were into hardcore, and nothing was happening. We cleared out a basement, did fifty shows in the first two years. Then we saw there was another, bigger, empty room in the same building and expanded into there. Not many U.S. bands come because the currency is weak, and you can’t make any money. Not like in Germany, where you can easily get three hundred euros a night.”

  He wore a black T-shirt with the illegible crust-punk font that looks like a hairy and poisonous centipede performing sex acts on itself. He had half-inch plugs in his earlobes and wore thin wire-rimmed glasses. He was concerned—unnecessarily—that his English was Russian-accented, and spoke in an intense flood of words, eyes scanning the walls.

  “Jucifer”—an American guitar-and-drums duo notorious for its wall of guitar amps—“is here next week. Last year they came and played a big room—four to seven hundred capacity—to seventy people. This year they’ll come back, we’ll have them in this small bar, they’ll load in all those amps, and . . .” He mimed the roof exploding.

  He liv
ed in an apartment building that, like most of Rijeka, required a heart-racing uphill walk to get to, and he set a pace that left me breathless. The flat that he shared with his girlfriend Ray was divided by long, diaphanous curtains. The chandeliers were yellowed, and the wallpaper was peeling and archaic. Ally McBeal, subtitled in Croatian, played on their small television. (Many of his friends learned English from American television reruns, Damir told me.) There was no heat in the building. They had a couple of space heaters, but the electric bills made them prohibitive to use. “Next winter,” Ray said, “we have to find a way to cut a hole in the wall and put in a woodstove.”

  “The landlord has announced his presence tomorrow,” said Damir. “We are always running late with the rent. . . . He is a nice guy though.”

  “He must be,” I said.

  “He is always referring to himself in third person, like, ‘Zdrako tell you last time . . .’”

  Ray was from Šibenik, a seven-hour bus ride south down the coast toward Split. “Everybody’s fucked up there. They are still fighting the war in their minds.” She was tall and lanky, with a lip ring and black dreadlocks, sporting a red-and-black striped sweater. She struck me as the sort of heavy-hearted girl often drawn to vigorous, principled young men like Damir, for comfort and propulsive optimism.

  “I must be honest,” she said. “I don’t like America.”

  She’d been kicked out of school and started working at a local indie rock club. She joined a collective: “It’s very expensive” to live in Croatia “because we have to import everything,” their friend Leo told me. “So we organize between each other and exchange what we can, use cash only when we have to.” Their “infoshop”—the kind of leftist-activist organizing hub, marginally capitalist bookstore, zine-distribution center, patch and sticker vendor popular in Germany and the Pacific Northwest—and “riot folk collective,” organized with someone named Ryan from Boston, eventually suffered the diminuendo common to collective activism: “People lost interest,” Leo said.

  Ray’s real name is Ivana, said Damir, “but I think only her mother calls her that. Everyone calls her Ray, after a character in a manga book—not the porn kind, a dystopian story.” She claimed to have not been able to find work in ten years and sighed. “When I look at a map, I think I’ve never been anywhere. Which is true.”

  Damir, by contrast, has lived in the United States and seemed to work at least three jobs amid countless other projects. He had been sent to Atlantic City on a work/travel program, first as a busboy, then as a dishwasher, then pushing wheelchairs on the boardwalk. He lodged in a house with a half-dozen other Croatians, and they sat up at night comparing notes on their experiences. One was working as a casino security guard and happened to be near a table where a man on a winning streak tipped any staff in sight with hundred-dollar chips. “He made as much in half an hour as I made all month. . . . I had to not think about it.” In general, though, “when I travel, I want to travel; and when I work I want to work. But we’ll see, after we join the EU—better a dishwasher in the U.S. than a bankrupt cultural theorist in Croatia.”

  Back in Rijeka, he did some manual labor for two euros an hour—not too bad, he said: “My friends in Macedonia are working eight-hour days for 150 euros a month.” He ripped tickets at the local art house theater. He booked shows at a handful of local clubs and worked in a vague way for Radio Rijeka. We stopped by the radio station (which had a balcony where they hold annual concerts), located on the main pedestrian mall, so he could have a brief argument with a patron. He wore a pin bearing the image of a Molotov cocktail and the slogan “Keep warm: burn the rich.”

  He was thinking of moving to Zagreb to work at the squatter complex Medika. “Better to have a bad job in Zagreb than be out of work in Rijeka. Since I’ve been a student it’s been OK—they have a student job office, they pay money to the university, and the university pays me. But when I’m not a student . . .” Croatia was set to enter the EU in June, and there was a general low-level panic about prices. “Everyone is worried. Prices are going to go up. Small farmers have to bring their operations to European standards, and they don’t have the money to do it. Rijeka has one in four or five out of work already.” The government was giving out money, a hundred fifty to three hundred euros a month, to blunt the effects of the unemployment. “Everyone is depending on the seasonal tourist work, when the drunk English people come.”

  There were some reasons for optimism, though. Damir and Ray’s friends were planning a gay wedding after nine years together. “They are big metalheads, tattoos and everything. I am so happy about it,” Damir said.

  He took me to Tunel, the club I’d be playing that night. Tunel was just that: an arched stone tunnel under an active railroad bridge. It had been a jazz club for three years under previous owners, and then was taken over by the guy who runs the town’s biggest rock club. The next show after mine was the Kilaueas, “the only surf band in Serbia, from Belgrade. A surf show is easy, like hardcore, people just like it and they will come.” They did acoustic Tuesdays—“so that made sense, since you are an acoustic fellow.” The bartendress, Zuna, poured shots of local rakiya. The first shot was flavored with olive and almond; the second, “made from red wine,” tasted like port. Smoking is officially illegal in bars in Croatia but, Damir complained, everyone has found loopholes, and the smoke in the club was as fog-thick as in any Chinese or Serbian dive. It was another rowdy and superb show, and the black cowboy hat I passed returned loaded with coins, paper, and a couple of cough drops.

  After the show, I met a bespectacled young man from the consonant-challenged island of Krk who was taking on the (perhaps fruitless) task of bringing punk shows to the island.9 He’d just found out that Nikola Šarčević, the Serbian singer of the Swedish skate-punk band Millencolin, was vacationing on Krk for a month, and he was petitioning Šarčević’s management to let him promote a Šarčević solo show there. But the price they quoted was prohibitive. “Maybe it’s because he’s Swedish,” he speculated. Swedes, because of the strength of their currency, have a reputation around Europe for extravagance. “They expect big guarantees—they don’t know” such amounts are impossible here.

  Maria and I once spent a day off in Krk (the name is from the Roman “Curicum”) near the remains of a Soviet-era resort that had become a burnt-out and collapsed shell of 1970s tiles and insulation. Ivy had overtaken the outbuildings and moss the tennis and bocce courts, and you could just about read the remains of the sign “Please Help Us to Make This Park Even Nicer!” in three languages. The water was crystalline, impeccable, and impassive.

  Krk is home to an odd style of a capella sung in two parts, following an un-tempered, six-note scale. Howled at top volume, in wavering pitch, it sounds like the improvisations of a pair of drunks.

  It would be a short drive to Ljubljana the next day, and Damir and I went for a sightseeing hike in the morning. Easter was a few days away, and he pointed to a supermarket (this one operated under the Orwellian name Konzum) and said that it was “full of old people buying young onions” for Easter dinner. “You have this tradition in the U.S., the long, young onions?”

  We climbed the 561-step path up the sheer cliffs behind the city to the restored ruins of Trsat Castle (“This is anti-Turk castle”). Damir had ambitions to mount an outdoor film festival there, under the aegis of the theater where he worked as a ticket taker. The castle, which West described as “a huddle of round and square towers, temples and dungeons and dwelling-houses,” was the home of the Frankopan ruling family in the Middle Ages, though some of the fortifications are Roman. In West’s time it was overgrown. Now it has been restored just to a state of picturesque disrepair, enough to hold a small restaurant, tourist barriers, and perhaps, if Damir’s plans came through, films projected on the old walls. From the tower one, like West, could still see “Sushak”—now incorporated into Rijeka—“lying brown by the blue sea,” and across “the dark ravine that runs up from the town to split a mountain range
on the high skyline” were the bleached white tower housing projects of the suburbs. Damir pointed out a factory in the valley, beneath the suspended viaducts that ferry traffic to and from the inland, which in socialist times was the world’s third-biggest producer of cigarette papers. Now it was fashionable, out of financial necessity, to buy loose homemade tobacco, in half-kilogram plastic bags, from old ladies in the market.

  We left the castle grounds and climbed the next higher hill, to the south, along a path prowled by Franciscan monks that wound between statues marking the twelve stations of the cross. (Real pilgrims do the 561 steps on their knees.) West described a myth associated with this hill, that it was “the site where the Holy House, in which the Virgin Mary and Jesus and St. Joseph lived at Nazareth, rested for three years and seven months, from the year 1291 to 1294. . . . The picture of the little house floating through space is a lovely example of the nonsensical function of religion, of its power to cheer the soul by propounding that the universe is sometimes freed from the burden of necessity.” Damir had never heard the story and shook his head in bemusement. “I used to smoke weed here,” he says—it was cheap in the 1990s, smuggled in from Bosnia and Albania.

  He wanted to show me his favorite spot in the city, the old cemetery. We crossed through the town center to the facing hills, past D’Annunzio’s balcony and the home of the British industrialist Robert Whitehead. The latter’s invention of the torpedo in the 1860s laid the economic foundation for the development of the city. Damir said it was “like [Moriarty] in the last Sherlock Holmes film”: an independent fortune built by a private war profiteer, selling his proprietary technology to all comers. But Whitehead used his money to build the modern Rijeka (then still called Fiume), and the lawn around the city museum displayed the rusting husks of his torpedoes.