Neither Here Nor There (32 page)

The bus was crowded – buses in Yugoslavia always are – but I found a seat three-quarters of the way back and gripped the seat bar ahead of me with both hands. When Katz and I had crossed Yugoslavia, it had been nothing if not exciting. The roads through the mountains were perilous beyond words, much too narrow for a bus, full of impossible bends and sheer falls from unimaginable heights. Our driver was an escaped lunatic who had somehow talked his way into a job with the bus company. Young and handsome, wearing his cap at a rakish angle, he drove as if cheerfully possessed, passing on blind bends, driving at break-neck speed, honking at everything, slowing for nothing. He sang hearty tunes and carried on lively conversations with the passengers – often turning around in his seat to address them directly – while simultaneously sweeping us along the edge of ragged roads on the brink of sheer-sided cliffs. I remember pressing my face to the window many times and being able to see no road beneath us – just a straight drop and the sort of views you get from an aeroplane. There was never more than an inch of shoulder standing between us and wingless flight.

Katz and I were sitting at the front, and the driver, taking a sudden liking to us, decided to amuse us with some visual jokes – pretending to nod off for a few moments, then jerking back to consciousness just in time to avoid an oncoming truck or acting as if the brakes had failed as we hurtled down a more or less perpendicular incline at the sort of speed usually experienced only by astronauts, causing Katz and me to try to sit on each other’s laps.

In the afternoon, after many hours of such bouncing excitation, the bus crested the mountains and began a steep descent into a broad valley of the most inexpressible lushness and beauty. I had never seen such a charmed and dreamy landscape. At every town and village people would emerge from houses as if our arrival were a kind of miracle and trot along with the bus, sometimes passing little bags of cherries through the windows to their friends and the driver and even to Katz and me.

We arrived in Belgrade in the early evening, found by some miracle a cheap and lovely hotel high on a hill, and dined on a rooftop terrace as we watched the sun sink over the Danube and the lights of the city twinkle on. We drank many beers and ate the last of our cherries.

It had been a nearly perfect day and I itched to repeat it now. In a strange way, I was looking forward to the dangers of the mountain road – it was such an exhilarating combination of terror and excitement, like having a heart attack and enjoying it. The bus laboured through the streets of Split and up into the steep, cement-coloured mountains at its back. I was disappointed to discover that the roads had been improved in my long absence – in many places they had been widened and crash barriers had been installed on the more dangerous bends – and that the driver was not obviously psychotic. He drove with both hands and kept his eyes on the road.

Clearly any drama I was to find would come from the landscape, though of this there was plenty. Most people are unaware of the richness and beauty of Yugoslavia’s interior. It is as green as England and as stunningly scenic as Austria, but almost wholly untouristed. Within an hour or two of leaving the baking coastline, with its teeming resorts and cereal-box hotels, you find yourself descending from the empty mountains into this lush, lost world of orchards and fields, lakes and woodlands, tidy farmhouses and snug villages – a corner of Europe lost to time. In the fields people cut and gathered hay by hand, with scythes and wooden pitchforks, and crossed their fields behind horse-drawn ploughs. In the villages the elderly women were almost all dressed in black, with scarves around their heads. It was like a picture out of the distant past.

Seven slow, hot hours after leaving Split we rolled into Sarajevo, capital of the republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina. I truly was in another world now. There were minarets everywhere and the writing on shops and street signs was in Cyrillic. Sarajevo is surrounded by steep hills – the 1984 Winter Olympics were held there – and bisected by a narrow, swift, very straight river, the Miljacka. The street along one side of it, connecting the new part of town near the bus station with the old town a mile or so away, was the scene of Sarajevo’s most famous incident, the assassination in June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

I got a room in the Hotel Europa, a dark and faded establishment still clinging to a hint of former grand-ness. There was no television in the room and only about fourteen watts of illumination with all the lights on, but the bed looked comfortable enough and the bath, I noted with a sigh of gratitude, issued steaming water. I had a long soak and, much refreshed, went out to see the town.

Sarajevo was a wonderful surprise, with lots of small parks and leafy squares. In the centre of town is one of Europe’s largest bazaars, a series of alleyways lined with tiny shops selling hand-worked brass and copperware. But because there are no tourists, there are none of those irksome little gits tugging at your sleeve and thrusting goods in your face as you find in the more famous bazaars of Istanbul and Tangier. Here no one paid any attention to me at all.

I took a steep walk up into the hills, where old, sometimes tumbledown houses were packed together in a dense and picturesque jumble along roughly cobbled streets that were sometimes all but vertical. It was a strenuous climb – even locals could be seen pausing for breath, a hand against a wall – but the views from the higher points were memorable and exotic, with the setting sun crowning a skyline of minarets, and the muezzins’ tortured calls to prayer echoing over the rooftops.

I returned to town in time to join the nightly promenade along the main street – the only time, it appeared, the Yugoslavs get cheerful. I examined restaurant menus along the way and settled on the dining-room of the Hotel Central, which had much the same faded grandeur of the Europa, like a stately home inhabited by an impoverished aristocrat. I was the only customer. Yugoslavia was going through a period of economic upheaval. Inflation was in the hundreds of per cent and the dinar was being devalued daily, sometimes two or three times daily, to the almost embarrassing benefit of the tourist and the detriment of the locals. A generous dinner of soup, steak, vegetables, salad, bread, beer and a coffee cost just $8, and yet I was evidently the only person in town who could afford it.

The service, as everywhere in Yugoslavia, was indifferent – not so much hostile as just past caring. The waiter dribbled my soup across the carpet and tablecloth and disappeared for long periods between courses, leaving me to stare at empty bowls and plates, but I couldn’t entirely blame him. The difficulty with being a visitor in a place where you can live like a prince is that your wealth makes a menial of everyone you deal with. In Split, I had noticed some Germans tipping a waiter as if it were play money, almost teasing him with it, and I trusted he had had the sense to add some spittle to their meal. I just hoped that this wasn’t what was keeping my waiter now.

In the morning I returned to the station and tried to find out about a bus to Belgrade, but the girl behind the information window was having such a delightful conversation with someone on the telephone that she was clearly not going to answer any enquiries. I waited for many minutes, and even said a few words to her through the mouth-hole in the glass, but she just looked at me blankly and carried on talking, curling the flex around her finger. Eventually I trudged off and found a bus by asking around among the drivers.

The trip to Belgrade took eight hours, and it was even hotter, slower, duller and more crowded than the bus the day before. I sat beside a man whose concern for personal hygiene was rather less than obsessive and spent much of the day wishing I knew the Serbo-Croat for ‘Pardon me, but your feet are a trifle malodorous. I wonder if you would be good enough to stick them out of the window.’ Gradually, to escape the smell, I fell into the mindless oblivion that seemed more and more to sustain me on these periods of getting from place to place, and patiently awaited the appearance of Belgrade through the front window.

I stepped off the bus in Belgrade feeling cheated. The trip had taken two days and had offered none of the reckless speed and adventure I had been hankering after. I found a room in an old-fashioned hotel called the Excelsior, rather expensive but comfortable, and immediately embarked on the usual business of acquainting myself with the city. I spent two days wandering around and found I remembered almost nothing about Belgrade. For old times’ sake, I tried to locate the hotel where Katz and I had stayed, thinking I might dine on the rooftop terrace if it was still there, but I soon realized the quest was hopeless. I didn’t remember enough to know where to begin to look in such a sprawling city.

Still, I was rather taken with Belgrade. It is the quintessential Mittel European city – long avenues of stolid, gloomy, five- and six-storey buildings, interspersed with parks and monumental buildings with copper domes. There was a certain indefinable sense of the dead hand of central planning everywhere, but alongside it a refreshing shortage of Western enterprises – McDonald’s, Benetton and the like.

There was not a great deal to do in Belgrade. I strolled through the main shopping streets to an inner-city park called Kalemegdan, built around an old fortress and neatly arrayed with trees and benches and statues of Yugoslavian, and more particularly Serbian, heroes. Most of the benches were taken up with men hunched intently over chessboards, each of them with a congregation of onlookers freely offering advice to both players. At the park’s edge was a high terrace with an unobstructed view of the city and of the spot where the Sava and Danube rivers flow together to make one truly monumental river.

One afternoon, I walked some distance out to Hajd Park, a wooded and rolling estate where Tito had his executive compound and where he is buried now. A long paved path led up to his mausoleum. I was the only visitor and there wasn’t much to see. Tito was not, as I had hoped, preserved in a glass case. He was safely hidden beneath a marble slab covered with scores of fresh wreaths and flowers. A lone soldier, looking desperately young and bored and uncomfortable, stood at attention beside the tomb. He was clearly supposed to stare straight ahead, but I could see his eyes following me around the room, and I had the terrible feeling that my visit was the high point of his day. ‘Mine too,’ I mumbled.

I went outside and felt the sudden weight of not knowing what to do with myself. Before me lay a panoramic view of a city I had no keen urge to explore. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in a park by a playground watching young parents pushing children on swings. I kept telling myself to get up and go do something, but my legs wouldn’t respond and anyway all I wanted to do was sit and watch children play. I was, I realized at length, homesick. Oh dear.

I woke the next day in a better frame of mind. Today I would fulfil a little dream. I was going to take a first-class sleeper from one European capital to another. This had long seemed to me the very pinnacle of luxury, and I breakfasted in the dining-room of the Excelsior with the serene composure of a man who knows his time has come. My plan was to buy the ticket directly after breakfast and spend the day going around the museums before heading to the station in the evening to take my place among the dispossessed duchesses, Hercule Poirot look-alikes and other exotic characters I presumed still travelled by first-class sleeping carriage in this part of the world.

The concierge told me not to buy my ticket at the station – ‘It is hysterical there,’ he said, shaking his head sadly – but to go to the main office of Sputnik, the state-run travel agency, where I could make a reservation in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity.

The Sputnik office was orderly but unfriendly and full of sluggish queues. First I had to stand in a line to find out which line to stand in. Then I had to stand in a line to reserve a sleeping compartment, but these, I was told with withering disdain by a nasty-looking piece of work masquerading as a middle-aged woman, were booked solid for weeks and no amount of money could secure one for me now. Well, there goes another dream whooshing down the sluicepan of life, I thought bleakly. The woman directed me to a third line where I
might
get a seat ticket if I were lucky, but she gave a wave of her hand that told me this was unlikely. She was right.

Without even a seat on the train, I returned to the first line to see if there were any other lines I could usefully stand in. The girl in the first line, who happened to be the only nice person in the place, told me that I should stand in the airline line because flights across Yugoslavia were nearly as cheap as the train. I went and stood in the airline line, which was exceptionally long and slow-moving, and discovered when my turn came that it wasn’t the airline line at all – ha, ha, ha – that the airline line was one more line to the left. So I went and stood in the airline line and eventually discovered that there were no airline seats available either, not that day or the next.

A sense of helpless frustration was overcoming me, with weepy panic nipping at its heels. I had been here for nearly two hours. I explained to the girl as patiently as I could that I
had
to be in Sofia the next day on account of my visa. She gave me a look that said, Well, why on earth do you expect me to give a fuck?, but she said she would put my name on the standby list for the evening flight and told me to come back at four.

I went to the bus station, hoping by some miracle that there would be a bus to Sofia. The station was absolute chaos – throngs of people bunched around every ticket window or sitting on piles of suitcases, waiting listlessly or erupting into little localized riots whenever a bus arrived. The babble of a dozen tongues filled the air. All the signs were in Cyrillic. I examined the timetables on the wall, but had no real idea what Sofia would look like in Cyrillic. Suddenly the idea of being innocent and free in a foreign land didn’t seem so exotic and appealing. I couldn’t even tell which was the information window. I was as helpless as an infant.