NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (39 page)

“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.”

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 problems. 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.