AT THE END of their visit to New York, Thomas and Monty boarded a Yugoslav freighter that would carry them across the Atlantic and make stops in North Africa and five European ports. In the days before giant container ships became the norm, freighters often carried passengers, many for a fraction of the cost of a standard ocean liner or going by air. Scandinavian freighters were the most luxurious and costly. The Yugoslav line was barebones, this particular ship carrying thirteen passengers. For every meal they would gather in the officers' dining room to be served a dull, repetitive fare of bland meat balls, boiled potatoes and over-cooked vegetables.
Their fellow passengers included three young Mormon children and their parents headed to a missionary assignment in West Africa, all seemingly cheerful and innocent, like characters out of the 1964 film Mary Poppins. Also going to Africa was a young black man from New York, with a marked resemblance to James Baldwin in voice and demeanor, his exact sexual orientation however remaining a mystery. "No mystery to me," Thomas said to his lover, twisting his smile knowingly.
Equally enigmatic was a retired teacher who had lived most of her life in the Virgin Islands, where she had acquired a hacking cigarette cough and a deep rum-imbued voice; no one, including her, seemed to have a clue where she was going. Each evening, like a scene in a Chekhov play, she strolled the deck arm-in-arm with a kindly Yugoslav man, a retired engineer who had long before emigrated to the United States. He was on his way to visit his brother in Sarajevo, who he said was a high-level judge.
A Chicago painter and his Hungarian wife, both in their fifties, completed the passenger list. They were going to Tuscany for a year of "art." They took great pleasure in displaying their ill-mannered pretty two-year-old "miracle child," as they referred to the girl with curly black hair who'd been so late born to them. When Monty said in jest near the end of the Atlantic crossing that he would like to marry the girl when she grew up, the wife pulled the infant away and hissed, "I wouldn't let my daughter marry a Jew witch." Stunned by her words, Monty later thought how ironic it was that only a day earlier she'd bitterly derided the Communist dictatorship she had fled from after the 1956 Hungarian uprising had been crushed by the Soviets. "A bunch of narrow-minded bigots," she'd called the regime.
Other than verbal encounters – inevitable when strangers find themselves confined for many days in a shared space – the Atlantic crossing itself went by smoothly. There were none of the awesome storms Monty had actually looked forward to. Within limits, like survival and no injury, he enjoyed experiencing nature's overwhelming power. As a child in LA he was thrilled by the city's propensity for natural disaster. Earthquakes could feel liberating, like floating on the rolling ocean. The night sky would turn beautiful when fires blazed atop the nearby Santa Monica Mountains, consuming the mansions of the otherwise untouchably rich and famous. And once when a dam broke, wiping out whole neighborhoods, it could be seen happening live on TV, shot only blocks from where he lived. Yes, disasters could be menacing and thrilling.
The voyage across the Atlantic was in its own way also menacing: not because of waves or weather, but for the tempestuous atmosphere that enveloped the ship’s crew. It was rumored that the previous captain, in trying to set a record crossing, had nearly sunk the ship after steering it through the center of a powerful storm. The stern new captain had evidently been ordered to run a taut operation and exercise strict discipline, which seemed to explain the hostile and gruff atmosphere aboard the ship. Decades later, after the outbreak of the civil war that tore Yugoslavia apart, literally Balkanizing it, Monty figured the crew probably had hated one another on purely ethnic and religious grounds. In running his ship so severely and suppressing internal strife, the captain was merely copying what Tito performed on a bigger stage, repressing ethnic differences so Yugoslavia would stay united. The captain was treating his lessers as he himself was no doubted treated, bullying those below him as he was bullied by his superiors. Much of European history – the feudal order, the rise and fall of nation states, the formation of competing empires and dynasties – can be understood by looking at the crime world, at how bullies and gangster kingpins emerge, behave and battle for supremacy. Or look closer to home, at school bullies or workplace relationships or the dynamics of couples and families.
As the ship approached Casablanca, its first port of call, the distinctly sweet, fragrant, moldering aroma of North Africa, a mix of camel dung and spice imagined Monty, wafted across the sea. He looked forward to seeing exotic sights and sampling strange foods. After the ship was nudged into its berth by tugboats from a bygone era, swarthy longshoremen, many turbaned, began the slow process of unloading the freighter’s upper load of cargo. This consisted primarily of giant crates of light bulbs and jumbo-sized bales of multi-colored tightly corded rags, the latter destined to be transformed from North American fashion rejects into all sorts of native dress. The Third World practiced recycling long before it became politically correct in the West.
Monty and Thomas set out to tour the city in company with the James Baldwin character and the Virgin Islands lady. Inadvertently they headed directly into the crowded serpentine alleys of the Arab souk, into a world totally alien from anything any of them had ever experienced. Mound after mound of spices, grains and beans – red, yellow, blue, black – spilled out onto the narrow roadway. Hunks of lamb, whole heads and joints, hung from hooks, freshly killed, dripping blood, flies buzzing around freely. A child poked a stick at a tethered baby goat likely destined for imminent slaughter. Arab women walked in pairs, their heads covered with long bright scarves, a few in full-body burkas, the narrow slits of their eyeholes turning to stare at the foreigners. Blond and taller than his compatriots, Monty felt himself scrutinized from all direction.
After two days in port the ship sailed to Valencia, where machine-gun-toting Guardia Civil stood stiffly at nearly every street corner, a sight as culturally shocking in its way as the Arab market had been. Next, in Genoa, a great mass of timber was unloaded from the freighter’s lower holds, so emptying the ship that on the next, relatively short leg of its voyage, south to Naples, it stood so high in the water it heaved violently up and down when it passed through a moderate storm. Climbing the ship’s narrow stairwells became a major challenge and using the squat toilets, even more intimidating than before. Having read the Odyssey’s vivid accounts of fierce Mediterranean storms from a strictly literary perspective, Monty could now identify palpably with the horrors faced by Homer’s heroes. He loved it.
From Naples the ship headed back across the Mediterranean to the port of Sousse, Tunisia, which they learned had been cut off from all land contact for nearly two months, following devastating floods. As the ship entered the large all-but-enclosed circular bay, the sweet musky smell of North Africa again came their way. All the passengers and nearly all the crew came on deck to watch in awe as a languid sunset encompassed the sky, mirroring itself in the still water. It was like gliding into a slowly metamorphosing pastel sphere. Even the stern captain came to watch, standing however at a discrete distance from his mistress, who’d quietly slipped aboard in Genoa.
THE TWO LOVERS left the ship at Trieste, weary of the increasingly stale food and excited to visit nearby Venice before heading down the Dalmatian coast to their ultimate destination, Greece. Venice was cold and wet but pleasantly devoid of tourist hordes. From there they traveled to a small shabby resort on Yugoslavia’s Istria peninsula, where they made contact with the assistant director of an American film in production there. They had met his girlfriend in New York – she also danced with Martha Graham’s company – and she’d given them the man’s name and number. Monty and Thomas arrived just in time to attend a giant wrap party held in the gaudy ballroom of the town’s only modern hotel, for which all the food – pineapples, hams, cheeses, turkeys, rich desserts – had been flown in directly from Hollywood, local provisions presumably being suspicious.
During dinner a famous American comedian made the rounds from table to table, gossiping and issuing forth non-stop dirty jokes. When he reached Monty and Thomas’s table he sat down to ogle as closely as he could the half-exposed breasts of their tablemate, an aspiring local actress whose blouse looked more like a scarf. Later they attended an after-hours strip show in the basement bar. Invited by a Canadian movie star, they watched a troop of women who’d been flown in specially from Budapest (had Yugoslavia no strippers of its own?) two-step their way across the stage, dressed in scarves even more scanty than that of the hopeful starlet. After they’d removed their upper scarves, they danced around a solitary man sitting in the center of the stage, wagging a six-foot-long white plastic dildo.
Monty and Thomas made their way next to Rijeka, a grotty port in the north of Yugoslav, where they would catch a bus traveling overnight down the Dalmatian Coast. Monty ate a bowl of tomato soup in the depot’s dirty cafeteria, a mistake he regretted throughout the night as he made a hurried stop at every filthy toilet along the way. “The bus is leaving!” Thomas shouted in front of the toilet stop in Split, where a bright moon illuminated the stunningly handsome bay and coastal islands. Still hitching up his pants, Monty rushed aboard the bus. Peasants crowding the other seats pointed at him and laughed so uproariously a few chickens fell off their laps onto the floor.
At the end of the bus trip they stopped for two days to rest in the sunny, relaxed Medieval walled city of Dubrovnik. Thomas wanted to take a ship from there directly to Greece, but Monty insisted they go inland instead, to Sarajevo. “It’s only a couple of hours by train from here,” he said. “World War One started there. It’s history. We’ve got to go.” Thomas agreed without expressing his own doubts.
Along the way, in the town of Mostar – whose historic bridge across the Neretva River would be destroyed during the civil war twenty-some years later – a derailment up ahead forced the train, already over an hour late, to stop for another two hours. By the time they arrived in Sarajevo it was past midnight, the air was frigid and snow was quickly piling up. A man who got off at the same time pointed out which way to head to find a hotel. Nearly an hour later, trudging through the snow along darkened streets, bearing the weight of their heavy backpacks, their hands freezing, they still hadn’t spotted a single hotel.
Eventually a cab driver took pity on them and drove them to his taxi company’s small office. There, in broken English, he explained that the next day was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the republic; every hotel in the city was fully booked, he said. Tito and Yul Brynner were arriving on a special train the next morning to mark the occasion with the opening of a film, starring Brynner, portraying the historic struggle against the Nazi occupiers in the Battle of Neretva. The driver called a number of hotels and finally found a room in the Hotel Europa – every major European city seems to have a Hotel Europa – an ungainly once-elegant heap of a building in the city center.
When they finally got into their room it was nearly two in the morning. Anxious to defrost their hands, they turned on the hot water faucet in a sink placed oddly in the middle of the room, only to discover that the hot water was turned off. Giving up, the two went to bed and fell sound asleep. Three hours later the night manager and two assistants banged on the door and stormed into the room. The hot water had been turned back on and boiling cascades of it were pouring over the sink onto the parquet floor. (Who would have known that faucets in Yugoslavia operate in the opposite direction, or at least the ones in this hotel?)
“Turn them off,” barked the manager to his underlings.
“You’re in big trouble,” he warned the Americans. “The manager will see you in the morning.”
Promptly awakened at six-thirty, they were marched down to the lobby, where a red-faced sweaty man informed them crews were rushing to repair two rooms below theirs that had been badly damaged and had to be ready in time for arriving dignitaries. Could it be for Tito himself, Monty mused, at first laughing to himself and then, realizing the gravity of the situation, fearing that they could be jailed or have their passports and all their money confiscated. “You must pay twenty US dollars for each damaged room,” the manager solemnly declared, much to the Americans' relief.
A few hours later, having lost interest in visiting the site of the Austro-Hungarian archduke’s assassination or any other of Sarajevo’s “must-see” historical sites, they boarded the Athens Express to get to Greece as soon as possible. When the train stopped in Belgrade near midnight, they got off and walked briefly toward a large plaza in front of the station. Hordes of drunken men celebrating the republic’s anniversary danced wildly in large circles around huge crackling bonfires, flinging empty bottles of beer and liquor, seemingly directly at the Americans. The two quickly made their way back to their train compartment.
The next morning, when the train crossed the frontier into Greece, everything seemed to brighten: the landscape turned from dreary grey to sunny shades of sienna and olive; the new crew who’d come aboard overnight smiled rather than frowned; even the food tasted fresh, bright and cheerful. Relieved to be leaving behind the drab, dark Communist country, with its narrow-minded peasants and grossly inefficient services, Monty and Thomas looked forward to the sunny promise of spending the winter, spending their lives perhaps, in Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, freedom and democracy, where, like in the 1960 film Never on a Sunday, they would dance on top of broken dishes, dance with other men, free spirits all.
© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.
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Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
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