He didn’t want to be too explicit about his father, but a generic ‘distant relative’ tended to put people at their ease.
The fisherman studied him for a moment, then struggled to his feet, putting one hand on the ground. ‘Come on. I’ll take you to someone who lives there.’
The place was like the valleys of Comacchio, but wilder and dense with trees. A maze of water and land. Lakes, canals, hidden inlets. A stagnant bog and a river.
They always had the sea ahead of them, and yet another island breaking up the horizon.
‘Neretva rijeka, the Neretva river,’ Stjepan had said in reply to Pierre’s unspoken question. ‘I was born nearby, in the village of Bacina. You know, during the war, here, there were fascists. They want to put my family in the Lager. An Italian save us.’
Pierre hadn’t had to ask twice, and soon he was hearing stories about the man they called ‘Diavolo’ — the Devil — the army in Abyssinia, Albania, Greece and finally Bacina, the Italian army base.
‘He helped everyone. He spied for our partisans. He warned you when they come to put you in the Lager. He carried bombs and guns.’
In the long run, he had been discovered and imprisoned. Then Stjepan and some others had got the guards drunk, and he had escaped barefoot, his wrists tied together, joining the rebels the following morning.
‘Smrt fasismu. Sloboda narodu! ’ the lorry driver had concluded, pulling up to the right. The road branched. The signposts said Dubrovnik 94, Mostar 57, Sarajevo 193. The journey had taken a few hours.
The two men muttered something to each other. The Istrian said, ‘Frane’s leaving at eight for
Sipanska Luka. He can take you. You have money?’ Pierre rummaged in his bag. ‘Not much,’ he replied, and took out
the roll of notes, still intact from the day before.
‘Half of that will be fine,’ commented the Istrian.
‘About 1,000 lire?’
‘Fine.’
An hour passed. Pierre had started walking.
The lorries were in a hurry, they showed no sign of wanting to stop, and three out of five were taking the road for Mostar. Only two cars had passed, one a police car, and fortunately Pierre had noticed in time, had lowered his arms and sat on the roadside looking uninterested. No sign of a motorcycle. Bicycles passed by, laden like donkeys, full shopping baskets hanging from the handlebars, and often with a passenger sitting sideways on the crossbar. Some people travelled on foot.
Walking, Pierre covered five or six kilometres an hour. He had calculated his speed years previously, when walking along the Via Emilia between Bologna and Imola. A bet that he had lost with the musketeers, and those thirty kilometres to pay as a forfeit. The rest of them drove along behind him in a friend’s car, laughing their heads off at the new Zatopek.
In a few days, he might get as far as Dubrovnik. It would take at least two. The sun, having just emerged from the mountains, began to grow warm.
Pierre returned to the wharf at a quarter to eight. He had eaten and slept, lying in the meadow just outside the village.
Frane saw him and waved. He sorted out the last few tangles and hoisted the anchor. The blue-green fishing boat was ready to set sail.
Another two hours had passed, three lorries, two tractors and a cart driven by some bastard who wouldn’t stop. Pierre’s gestures were growing more disheartened and less enthusiastic.
But the third car of the morning had stopped anyway.
‘Grüss Gott,’ the woman had said by way of greeting. ‘Wohin gehst du denn?’
Pierre didn’t know a word of German, but giving the reply ‘Dubrovnik’ had struck him as fair enough.
The woman had said something and nodded to him to get in.
‘Wartest du hier schon lange?’ her husband had asked with a big smile. To which Pierre had felt obliged to explain, in English, ‘Sorry, I don’t speak German.’
But the Austrians spoke English.
Tourists on their honeymoon. From Vienna to Greece. A nice, rather eccentric couple.
Pierre had told them the story of his distant relative, adding a few details, and the newlyweds were delighted. Not least because Pierre, in the confusion of the moment, had used the English word ‘parents’ when he meant relations.
When they reached the village of Slano, the woman had spread out a map and shown Pierre that the island of
Sipan was a stone’s throw away, much closer than Dubrovnik. If he was after a crossing he would be better off searching there rather than elsewhere.
Pierre had been persuaded, although Darko had talked about Dubrovnik. He had asked them to wait for him, and headed straight for an old fisherman who was sorting out his nets.
Some church bells had been striking one.
The journey had taken half an hour.
*
Pierre heard the engine starting. He looked after the wake of the boat, as far as the coast, which was gently getting further away.
Halfway across he felt as though several hours had passed. They had been on the sea for fifteen minutes.
That sensation was reversed immediately afterwards. A faint gleam of houses emerged from the darkness of sea and sky. For a moment he forgot everything, Gramovac, Darko, Stjepan and the two Austrians. He forgot the visions of water and land that had accompanied him so far. He forgot Frane.
Telemachus was going to meet Ulysses.
Chapter 41
Sipanska Luka, Sipan, 19 April
The cheesemonger had smiled. Behind him, the man at the fish stall had confirmed the idea, slicing the air with the side of his hand: ‘Ah, talijanski drug!’ The woman selling vegetables had tapped her finger to her temple with a strange expression on her face. Finally a customer had nodded, paid quickly and dashed off to point towards a paved alleyway leading up towards the church and the hill overlooking the bay. He had waved his hand up and down a number of times, as though stroking the top of the mountain. Pierre deduced that the ‘Italian’ lived on the other side. With a similar gesture, fingers climbing over an obstacle, he made it clear that he had understood. The guy nodded and repeated his gesture from the start.
After the first bend, the alley turned into a path. It climbed steeply between the last bright houses, passed the drystone walls of the tiny gardens and plunged into the dark green of the gorse bushes.
Pierre started sweating. His suitcase wasn’t the easiest kind of luggage to drag all the way up there. He kept switching hands, and wiped his forehead with his shirt cuff. The night spent on the wharf had left a sticky deposit all over his body. He had slept enough to set off at a marching pace the moment he arrived, but the fact that the village was deserted had made him postpone his departure.
His mind was blank. His eyes looked at the sea, but didn’t enjoy the view. They looked for a house in the middle of the wild-west cacti and the mastic bushes. He couldn’t distinguish individual sounds, there was just a single droning noise in his ears, a dissonant chord of birds, cicadas and the wind. He changed hands again. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t smell anything. Just the weight of the suitcase on his fingers, sweat trickling behind his ears and the pain of his feet, crushed by shoe leather.
The path reached the top. Pierre saw the green scrub descending uninterruptedly to the sea. He saw the ruins of a building that had once been a church. He saw bare patches of land dotted with white sheep. He saw a brighter plot of land in the midst of the shrubs and the holm oaks, and a stone house on the edge of the plot.
He changed hands again and braced himself for the descent.