The Pillars of Hercules

“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.”