DUBROVNIK

We set out at sunset the next day, sliding across the satiny pale green sea which still had enough swell left from the wind to bring out the bottle of Bonamine for my son. A shark’s fin off our port side kept us company in the luminous twilight while we dined on deck. We did not swim that evening.

Early next morning we entered the small fiord-like harbor of Gruz, which serves as a port for the city of Dubrovnik. The Captain of the Port, who came down in person to inspect our papers, was a ruggedly handsome man who had been the master of his own vessel and who had put into New York many times. When he opened my passport, he stood up and shook my hand, and told me that he was a reader of my books and would have had the town band to greet us as we docked, if he had known in advance of our arrival. Since the only greeting I usually get when I arrive in my native New York is a suspiciously thorough examination of my bags by the customs inspector and a close questioning about where I bought my wristwatch, this Yugoslav devotion to literature naturally influenced my subsequent reactions to the rest of the country.

My memories of Dubrovnik are somewhat confused, due to the fact that we met a group of our friends there (three writers this time) who insisted upon celebrating our reunion all the four days we remained there. We moved into the Hotel Argentina, in which they were staying. This is a pre-war establishment, beautifully appointed and situated on a cliff above the sea, with a view of the walls and towers of Dubrovnik from its terraces and from the rocks below the hotel, from which we swam in deep, cold water. The food was superb, the service perfect, and my friends had discovered, as writers will, a faultless white Yugoslavian wine called Zsalevska, to which, as un-ugly Americans, we paid generous homage.

Aside from its other attractions, the hotel boasted of a tennis court. It was not regulation size, the alleys being at least a foot narrower than they should have been, perhaps to remind the local population that even under communism the world was not perfect and that there were still future goals to be striven for.

While we were playing tennis one day a friend of ours arrived and said, in a loud voice, “Dammit, more Americans!” My son, with the blind patriotism of his eleven years, was all for hitting the man immediately, although he was considerably outweighed and would have had to give away at least six inches in reach. When I explained to him that the man who had said the offending phrase was a friend and an American and was joking, my son refused to be reconciled. “I don’t care who he is,” my son said. “He shouldn’t say things like that in Yugoslavia.”

When we were not playing tennis, we swam or took huge hampers of food aboard the boat and visited along the coast and watched one of our friends fish in the clear waters with aqualung and speargun above the sunken ruins of the lost city of Epidaurus. Since this particular friend was preparing a piece on underwater fishing and exploration for a magazine, he made me promise not to write anything about these expeditions, and I shall honor my word. I do not imagine his editors will complain if I reveal that we had fish chowder due to his efforts and feasts of grouper steaks and moray eel, and that a few years before arriving in Dubrovnik he had written a book called From Here to Eternity.

He made his underwater excursions in company with one of the champions of Yugoslavia and a young Serb college teacher. The champion, who like a good many athletes had a moral sense not quite as finely developed as his muscles, had been denied permission to represent his country in the world competitions that summer because he had been caught on a previous trip trying to smuggle watches across the border. His case had not as yet been settled, and it looked as though, as further punishment, he was going to be inducted into the army. He took all this like a sportsman, as part of the game, with the stoicism of an offensive tackle caught flagrantly holding on the line, philosophically watching the referee pace off the fifteen yard penalty.

The college teacher had been head of his department but had given up the position, since, not being a member of the Communist Party, he was excluded from the weekly meetings of the three or four communists in his department. Quite rightly, he refused to be responsible for the functioning of the department if he couldn’t know what was going on in it. He was not penalized for his resignation-nor for the fact that he had recently been married in church. There is no law against being married in church, but he had discreetly gone to another town for the ceremony and had kept all celebration down to a quiet minimum.

We dined together every night, and the party was likely to continue on a lower terrace, where a small band, composed mostly of personable young men who for the rest of the year were students at the University in Belgrade, played good American jazz. The music and our voices often combined in lively harmony that no doubt could be heard through the balmy midnight air out on Lokum, the island a half mile or so off the coast where Richard the Lion Hearted had once built a shrine and on which Prince Maximilian and Carlotta had summered happily before being called to the New World and the Mexican firing squad. Neither Richard the Lion Hearted nor Maximilian was in any condition to be bothered by the band’s version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” or by the shouted literary opinions emanating from our table, but a surly American voice from the hotel occasionally told us to go to sleep, and we heard later from the maître d’hotel that one of the guests had called the nearest American consul and had complained about us. We supposed it was all neatly entered in all our dossiers in Washington, and we made a pact that if, at some time in the future, we were called up before some congressional investigating committee (it has happened before and it can happen again), we would all denounce each other by name and inform the committee that everybody mentioned was indeed in Yugoslavia between such and such dates and that everybody was quite certain that Yugoslavia was under communist domination at the time.

Dubrovnik, which was called Ragusa before it was incorporated into Yugoslavia, is a city where the Latin and Slav civilizations met, the line of juncture being a marshy channel which divided the Latin island of Ragusa from the forested mainland. The channel has now been paved over, but it is easy to follow its old course down the Stradone, the main street of the city. Dubrovnik is a city that manages to be all of one piece, despite the ups and downs of history, which have been particularly violent here, and despite the different styles and periods of architecture that are incorporated within its thick, protective walls. The grayish white stone that is used for all its buildings as well as its walls almost gives you the impression that the city, with its palaces, ramparts, statues, shops and dwellings, was built all at one time by a single intelligence. Architecturally, all is in order in the city, and the sense of ancient beauty it gives off is preserved by the immaculateness of its streets and the complete absence of advertising signs and motor traffic.

A festival is given each summer of dance, drama, and music. The ramparts and sculptured courts are put to good use for productions of plays, Hamlet being the star attraction, as backgrounds to folk dances from the different racial divisions of Yugoslavia, and for excellent concerts. The one jarring note in the entire town is a modern nightclub, set near the moat, where, incomprehensibly, a fat German woman in black performed a clumsy striptease twice nightly. The local girls, none of whom could be imagined going through this particular kind of public performance, have an almost austere, unflirtatious, dark-eyed dignity about them, and you are a long way here from the summery cuddlesomeness of the French Riviera. Many of the girls are strikingly beautiful, and one has the feeling watching them stride proudly and unsmilingly through the sunshine of their hard stone city that they would make the best of wives for a lifetime, but rather awe-inspiring dates for an evening.