The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

Corsica is famous for having its own fragrant odor—the herbaceous whiff of the maquis—lavender, honeysuckle, cyclamen, myrtle, wild mint and rosemary. After he left Corsica as a young man, Napoleon never returned to the island, but exiled on Elba—which is just off the coast of Italy—he said he often savored the aroma of Corsica in the west wind. It smells like a barrel of potpourri, it is like holding a bar of expensive soap to your nose, it is Corsica’s own Vap-o-rub. The Corsican maquis is strong enough to clear your lungs and cure your cold.

At a cafe I ordered a cup of coffee. A rock song was playing.
Take your bombs away
So we have today
“Is that a local group?” I asked the young woman behind the counter.
“It’s English—must be American,” she said, and handed me my coffee.
It was none that I recognized, and they were wartime sentiments.
“You’re American?” she said.
“Yes. And you’re from Zadar?”
“No. My town is Zamunike,” she said.
“Is that very far away?”
“Twelve kilometers,” she said, and sounded rueful. “I can’t go back there. I am a refugee here in Zadar.”
Twelve kilometers was only about eight miles. Still, her house was behind Serbian lines, and that was another country, with a sealed and dangerous border.
“The Serbs are there.”
“In your house.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s awful.”
It amazed me—the nearness of everything: of war, of shelling, of nastiness, of dislocation, even of comfort, for the Italian shore was just across the water, and the stately solemnities of Trieste just up the coast. Zadar was a town which had been besieged and then abandoned. But the enemy was only a few miles away. Refugees had fled here, and no one really knew where they were or what was coming next.
We talked awhile more, then an odd thing happened. When I gave her money for the coffee she refused it. She put her own money in the cash register.
“It’s a little present,” she said.
She did not let me insist. And I was moved. Since beginning this trip months before in Gibraltar it was the first time that anyone had given me anything that could be described as a present. Most of the time I was hardly noticed. I had passed through the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur, and Barcelona and Marseilles and Monaco. Nothing came my way. I had to travel here to find a token of generosity, from a skinny woman in a cafe, in a town full of shell holes, in the shadow of a war. Perhaps war was the reason. Not everyone was brutalized; war made some people better.

Zadar had been seriously shelled—there were signs of damage everywhere, and it was obvious that it had been hit from up close and vindictively: the ancient main gate of the old town, a Roman relic, had been shelled—for what reason apart from malice?—and chunks blown out of it. The Serbs had set up machine guns and howitzers in a nearby park, where they were dug in; and these marksmen shelled the high school that was sixty feet away. The high school was now in session, students chatting in the playground, but the front door was sandbagged, so were most of the lower windows, and many upper windows were broken. The entire front of the school was cicatriced by shells. There was major damage around the window frames, misses from their attempts to fire into the windows.
I talked to some of the students. Yes, it was fairly quiet now, right here, they said. But there were roadblocks not far away. I asked about the shelling of the buildings. What was the objective?
“They wanted to kill civilians,” a young boy said.
“Students?”
“Kill anybody,” he said. “If they kill ordinary people in Zadar they think they would make us afraid.”

I remarked on the farcical bureaucracy—after an hour we were still at the station, waiting.
“Yes, there are delays, because we are all separate now,” he said. “Slovenia. Croatia. Serbia. In Bosnia you have Musselmans.”
“They’re different, are they?”
“Very much. You see, Slovenian people are much more like Germans or Austrians.”
That became quite a common refrain: We are big bold Teutons, they are dark little savages. But in fact they all looked fairly similar and Slavic to my eye, untutored by Jugland’s prejudices. I soon learned that a former Jug could spot an ethnic taint a mile away. Here comes a Bosnian! There goes a Slovene!