The bus first reached the coast at Zadar. There were few signs of life as we arrived at the outskirts of town, the grey stone block houses stood mutely behind green yards. Only a few of them were in ruins, and they seemed just as peacefully sleepy as the others. One might imagine that they had fallen to ruin through mere neglect, rather than such organized evil. The sun was bright and the summertime lovely; war seemed to be the least likely reason that anyone would be in this Adriatic town.

      I stepped off the bus in the station, a perfectly normal looking place, well before the town center. Not knowing anything about Zadar, I proceeded into the station building. There I was relieved to find an information counter, open for business and staffed by a lady seated in a comfortable chair. She did not attempt to escape before I reached her.

      "Hello, I need some tourist information."

      "I need information about hotels in Zadar."

      "Hotel Kolovar. 200 meters that way." Her eyes indicated to the left.

      "But there must be other ones, too."

      "Yes, Hotel Kolovar. You can take a taxi."

    "Besides Hotel Kolovar. What other hotels are there?" "There are no other hotels."

      "In the middle of town, there are no hotels?"

      "No."

    "Do you know the price of rooms at Hotel Kolovar?"

      "No."

      "Do you know the phone number?"

      "Of what?"

      "Of Hotel Kolovar."

      "Yes, one moment." She looked in a worn, long ledger book and at a page long list of handwritten names and telephone numbers. She found Hotel Kolovar and copied the number. I peered at the ledger book and tried to read upside down, but I couldn't make out the writing.

      "Surely there are other hotels in Zadar."

      "No, there aren't." She closed the book with a slap and handed me the slip of paper. Then she immediately began to turn away.

      "I need some other information about the town, too."

      "You must go to tourist information office."

      "Where's that?"

      "In town."

      "Where in town?"

      "Everywhere."

      "What do you mean everywhere."

      "I mean anywhere. Travel agencies, tourist hotels."

      "But wait a minute. You said that there are no other hotels in Zadar."

      "That's right."

      "And now you said that I could get information at tourist hotels."

      "Yes,...." she said, waiting for me to make some kind of point.

      "Well, if there are no hotels, but there are tourist hotels, that doesn't make any sense. That's not logical."

      "Nothing is logical."

      She said it flatly, as though hoping to finally make me see the light. I didn't, but I gave up anyway. Perhaps I would have more luck on the phone with Hotel Kolovar.

      "Where is there a phone?"

      "Outside." She motioned slightly to the front of the building. I stepped outside and picked up the receiver. The line was dead. I went back in to the information lady. She looked at me as though she had never seen me before.

    "This time I would like to know where there is a phone that works."

    "On the other side of the building," she said vaguely. When I finally found it, it had no receiver.

      I walked along the curbsides where the buses swing in, and looked at the ticket offices and small shops that faced them. I was hungry, and I walked into a pizzeria. There were no customers, just a young woman standing behind the counter, looking at me with surprise.

      "Do you have any pizza?" I said, thinking it sounded like a stupid question.

      She hesitated, then she turned and called into a large opening in the wall. A man in a cook's apron was standing there in the kitchen and she was relaying the question to him.

      "No," came his reply.

      "No," she said to me.

      I went to the toilet. It was down some stairs and had that intense stench of stagnant sewage. At the sink I tried the taps but no water came out. The attendant looked in at me and came up with a soda bottle full of water. I cupped my hands over the sink and she poured out a small ration.

      "No water here," she said resignedly.

      Back upstairs, I stood by the curbside, and pretended for a few moments to be sitting at an outdoor cafe, watching the people pass by. I noticed that the mix of military camouflage was different here. There seemed to be so many loud, sunburnt soldiers with battled faced and articles of black in their dress: a black tee shirt, or black pants or a black beret; and on their sleeves, the black patch of the HOS, the Croatian Defense Association, the paramilitary arm of Paraga's extremist Party of Rights.

      By now August 2 had passed, and the HSP Party of Rights had only won five percent of the votes in the elections, but that had done nothing to dampen their belief that they represented Croatia's destiny: and the HOS was determined to fight and win Croatia's war through any form of terror or butchery available. I had seen them before, strutting defiantly, laughing with that feverish intensity that echoed back through the Balkan centuries. They scared and fascinated me at the same time, and I thought what an exceptional photo a group of them would make. I took out my camera and began focusing on buses and rooflines, innocuous stuff, at the same time noting the sudden silence in a nearby group of HOS soldiers. Then when I slowly panned my viewfinder around to several black bereted men with automatic weapons slung lazily at their sides, they began to wave their arms angrily and shout to me. I turned my camera away and took a picture of an abandoned news kiosk instead. They continued to watch until the camera was safely away, obviously wanting to be sure that no war crimes tribunal would ever identify them on evidence from this roll of film.

      I stood for a few more minutes in the same spot, not knowing what else to do in this station. I didn't seem to recognize this Dalmatian coast at all. A man walked up to me and said quickly. "Get out of Zadar! Take the next bus out." Then he hurried away.

      I followed his instructions.

 

© Copyright 2007 Dominic Ambrose. All Rights Reserved.