Mermaid's Trail

cicada

Mermaid's Trail

Dubrovnik August, 2006

The bus from Belgrade to Dubrovnik costs 4700 dinars for a return
ticket, and takes 13 hours one way. It goes through Bosnia,
Republika Srpska, and stops in several former-Yu war sites, such as
Mostar, where the famous bridge was destroyed and recently
rebuilt. Mostar's old face was blown away and it has a new face.
Except for shrapnel and craters, it has a happy look.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/24/jasmina_tesanovic_me.htmlyachts

The border crossings are easy, a busywork of transfers and
passport-stampings, inflicted on all passengers just alike and done
without a word of explanation. The foreigners look scared, but
everyone else just does it. The bus stops too often, and people get
on and off without schedule. Strange black packages are unloaded
from the bus and delivered into private cars in the middle of
nowhere. Some Americans in the bus seem troubled by this, but all
the locals sleep peacefully.

On our arrival in Dubrovnik, local grannies are waiting with
signs about private rooms to rent. I pick the one with mustache, no
teeth and a fake smile. She speaks English and tells me she does not
like renting rooms to Italians. I reveal that I am a Serb and my
friend is American. Now that's nice, says Granny with her fake smile:
Serbs and Americans!

We come across a Croatian monument talking about Serbs as
aggressors here. I speak with my heavy Belgrade accent, but no
hostility is in the air. My American pal is suspicious about Granny:
is she really going to shelter us without any American-style
paperwork? I say, that how we do it around here: if she is not a
serial killer, it should be all right.bike

Her chatty husband drives us to the port the next day: how is
life in Belgrade? I heard you folks have great night life! You
always knew how to live, you Serb guys... not like here in Dubrovnik,
where people are always grim and always want more.

On the way to Mljet island, I see that the ferry still has the
same captain from three years ago. The captain looks Italian and
speak Dalmatian Croatian. He's a handsome blond guy, aging now, and
besides his big boat he also runs a local restaurant in the town of
Polace, which used to be called Palazzo. All full, says the tourist
agency. Polace has no place to sleep.

The granny renting the bicycles at the shore catches my
sleeve. ROOM, she says, in bad English. Yesyesyes, I answer in good
Serbian. The ever-skeptical American and I get a beautiful
upstairs room crammed with tools and construction rubbish. Its
balcony overlooks the beautiful bay for a decent price of 100 kunas
per person. We even have a bathroom.

The woman who cleans the place is from Sarajevo. Jasna, she
says, offering me a cigarette. Jasna tells me: I used to come here
for holidays many years ago. Now I have to clean rooms to stay
around here. Here I am anyway. Jasna seems to take a lot of
leisurely breaks for smoking and bathing. I can tell that Jasna
used to be a beautiful woman before the wars. She is still
beautiful, but no longer knows it. Jasna and Jasmina: Jasna is my
Bosnian replica.

My bicycle landlady says: All foreigners! I used to have
tourists from all over the country, the best people, but now OUR
people cannot afford it. As if it ever mattered who is Muslim who
Orthodox who Catholic.

In the Mljet restaurant at evening are four young couples
from Belgrade, yuppies, who all arrived on the same boat with their
hired captain. A thin girl in her early thirties tells the
captain: I live in Vracar. That's a fancy place in the city, it has
no ciganija. She is lying, because Belgrade has plenty of gypsies,
but she is trying to shoo away the prejudices of nationalistic
Croatians, who often call Serbs gypsies. She has to insult gypsies
in an effort to deflect the captain's scorn, not that this yacht
captain cares: he's in the tourist business and simply talks of
money constantly.

I am searingly offended by this: why do Belgrade Serbs have
to lie about gypsies? My American friend asks: why would Croatians
even want call Serbs "gypsies"? He has seen gypsies all over the
world, and gypsies don't resemble Serbs.

I don't know. I really don't know what to tell him.

I feel so clean after one day on this island. No night
life, just the life of a body in the sun under the starry sky. We
just swim, we hike, we hire bicycles: a whole day for ten euros. We
plan to circle the island, which seems simple enough on a map, but
the maps lie and the road signage is mysterious. After miles of
bicycling we are lost on a road leading us somewhere we clearly don't
want to go... We ask a French couple on bicycles, and they show us
their own map, which is even weirder than ours. All they can do is
wish us good luck.

We-take a shortcut through the footpaths, walking our bikes.
It is noon, the road gets and more more narrow and steep... Soon we
are literally carrying the bikes on our backs. At a certain point
we realize we are approaching the top of a mountain. We have a
epiphany: we drop our bikes right there and walk to the top. At the
peak is an abandoned Yugoslav military base, where empty buildings
tells their story: ZIVEO Drug Tito is written on the wall in
stencilled letters.

The lonely buildings command an awesome view of the Adriatic,
but the foreign invaders are all here buying lunch in restaurants.
The military buildings have many grafitti inscriptions with dates
from 1974 to today. I have a sudden flashback: in 1977 the island
was a national park and a military reserve. Foreigners were simply
not allowed to visit it. My old friend, the man who first brought
me to Mljet, was a Belgrade guy. As a drop-out type, he was
punished by being forced to serve the army in this remote place. The
soldiers were all in the middle of nowhere, young men from Serbia,
Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, stationed in the Croatian sea facing
Italy, that potential enemy from the other coast of the Adriatic.
That enemy never came, but the defenders fought the war among one
another.

My friend enjoyed enormously his punishment on Mljet: he spent
his hard years in a blue and green paradise, smoking marijuana and
dropping acid. As soon as he got out of uniform he brought his
hippie friends, me among them. After 29 years, I am here again,
counting the bullet-holes in the walls, the mermaids in the sea, the
stars in the sky, the dead among my own people.

And I am not even sad. That's life.