PULA

The last port we came to in Yugoslavia was Pula, which was Italian until the end of World War II, and which had been the chief naval port for the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to the Treaty of Versailles. Three spick-and-span destroyers were tied up on the other side of our dock, and the waterfront was bustling with dashing-looking young naval officers. Pula is a thriving shipbuilding center, and large freighters in various stages of construction stood on the ways around the harbor.

In a park on the waterfront there is a large, once-grand hotel that was built to make Pula bearable to the officers of Franz Joseph’s fleet and their ladies. It still serves dinner from an impressively French menu on its flowered terrace facing the harbor, but the ghosts of old flirtations are swamped and the echoes of golden Viennese gossip silenced by the voices of English ladies who have come a long way on conducted bus tours that start in London and make heroic leaps across the continent and who sit at the tables of the vanished admirals and ask each other, “Do you think this fish is really haddock?”

Tito’s private island of Brijoni lies a little to the north, but it is unapproachable. His picture, however, is everywhere, in banks, shops, customs offices, in the windows of photographers’ shops and in newspaper kiosks. After being subjected to the same phenomenon in Spain, with Franco’s bland, retouched features taking the place of Tito’s heavy, fatherly glance, it occurred to me that if I were the dictator of a country, I would put a severe limit on the number of photographs of myself in public places. Because it is there all the time, overlooking almost all the activities and petty annoyances of daily life, the photograph and the man behind it become inevitably the focus of all the boredom and discontent going. It soon loses its intended quasi-religious function as an ikon and degenerates into a convenient target and incitement to rebellion.

In Pula I met a young man who went to the University in the winter and worked in Pula in the summertime. He was bitter about his wages, which were too low to maintain life for any prolonged period of time, and bitter about the regime, not because it was communist, but because it was not communist enough. He echoed, in difficult, school-English, the criticisms of Djilas, who is still in prison for his books attacking the formation of a sheltered and pampered managerial élite in the goverment.

The young man was also bitter on the subject of the Italians, who were given Pula after World War I by the Allies and were only driven out during World War II. In the time they were there, they went to excessive lengths to Italianize the city, including forcing Slavic families to take Italian names and forbidding the teaching of Serbo-Croat in the schools.

There are still many Italian families in Pula and the bitter young man proudly pointed out the comparison in treatment accorded them by their one-time victims now that the tables were turned. Nobody asked the Italians to change their names, and they have a large building which is devoted to Italian culture in one of the main streets of the city.

Still, there are incidents, demonstrations, broken windows, all of which would have been sternly suppressed under Mussolini.