September 29 (Day Seventeen)
The Tartini breakfast is the first one on our trip that I consider worth eating without adding outside food—lots of cold fish and fresh fruit. Afterwards I get a new code for the computer and do email while Lindy drinks tea and reads a book.
After breakfast we agree to take separate time in the piazza. I pay 320 tollars for three postcards at a stationery shop and strike up a friendship with the clerk. In fact, with no other customers, he comes outside to continue our conversation. As he lights a cigarette, I circle out of the way without attitude or comment, a skill I am developing in Europe’s smoking culture.
He is a young bearded guy from Croatia, likes Piran especially for its intellectual activity during the summer, has been in this shop for seven years. What is surprising to me is that he never learned English either in school or from any formal teaching, simply picking up bits here and there from talking to strangers. He brushes off my compliment by saying that his fluency is a mirage, he knows only a few hundred words and is good at bluffing; yet he knows at least the words to communicate that concept, and our conversation is seamless to me. As we continue to discuss languages and I admit my inability to speak any other than English, he figures he can do French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Flemish, and German at about the same level as his English. His real fluency understandably is in several different dialects of Serbo-Croatian, including Slovenian, and Russian.
Multilingualism of this sort is an improvisational ability I envy, a totally different route to words, syntaxes, and cross-cultural semantics than formal study that almost no one gets to explore or develop in the States. What this self-educated guy has is really different from the mastery of individual tongues. It is a general fluency with language itself—or at least the European branch of Indo-European—that allows him either to talk with anyone or begin to cultivate that possibility when a stranger speaks an unknown language. I wonder how he converses with someone at the raw beginning when he wants to learn their language. I imagine they could pick another tongue they both know at least rudimentarily.
We discuss Slovenian authors, Miha in particular (whom he has read and thus is surprised I know and am going to Bled with tomorrow); he tells me some others I should look up, but I didn’t write them down. From there we move to international politics and seasonal differences in tourism in Piran. He explains to me how one would travel down the coast into Croatia from here. Although the border is near, I should drive at least forty-five minutes to reach anywhere interesting. lament that this will probably have to await another trip.
Lindy sees us standing there and joins our talk, remarking idly that there are still police all over the place. “Police state,” comments the clerk. “The cops were out at 6 in the morning, guarding NATO.”
He gives us some useful tourism information, pointing to a street that we can use to ascend through the city. After the conversation we enter its dark alley and begin winding up. The path is incredibly attenuated, like a tunnel. At a couple of spots it seems like a dead end with nothing up ahead and then, as we arrive, it bends around stone into another alley.
We emerge into a courtyard with churches on opposite sides. Though neither are obviously marked, from the guidebook we guess that these are the cloister of the Church of St. Francis Assissi and Our Lady of the Snows. A woman is kneeling at the entrance to the former, turning her rosary before candles, a large clamshell next to her for donations, so we depart her sanctified space and cross the courtyard into the other church. Its ample anteroom holds, surprisingly, an exhibit of modern art, modest and playful in the form of a giant gameboard that invites inquiry. There is no guard protecting works made up of separate small, quite stealable pieces. In fact, there is no one at all. The exhibits simply sit exposed, flaunting the possibility of theft. One is a plastic map of abstract puzzle pieces coming apart in representation of former Yugoslavia. Another is a pile of little round, smooth stones of various sizes. Another comprises objects of the same irregular oval shape in different scales, colors, and materials: pottery, wood, stone.
We leave and continue up the moebius of cobblestone. A vine with clusters of tiny yellow aromatics fills the air like a sweeter Queen Anne’s Lace. Soon we reach our primary goal, the old city walls. Entries lead into steep stairways rising to parapets connected by deep narrow aisles—stone tunnels without a ceiling. Access to different levels of these walls are through the tight winding stairs such that one has to duck several times and emerge around a curve before gaining a place at the next outlook in a parapet or along a thin corridor between towers. The whole structure has a Gothic chessboard feel that is difficult to classify. There are seven crenellated towers of a structure that, according to the guidebook, once ran all the way to the sea. Now only 200 meters in the hills remains intact. Each of the four corners of each tower is itself a miniature tower rising to a fin-shaped summit, the spaces in between the subtowers yielding the crenellated look. The passageways between parapets are likewise marked by rows of stone pillars that rise triangularly to archlike apices.
We are a bit like children, exploring this massive play structure, peering over railings and between pillars, checking the different views. We can see, as through a wide-gapped picket fence, the spread-out city and sea below.
Piran reads visibly as what it is: a thin peninsula of intricate and densely packed stone buildings twisted every which way. The ancient habitation juts like a perfect finger into the vast bay. Different sounds arise from its labyrinths: the voices of children, an accelerating motorcycle, a hammering, a single cat cry. In the far distance a ferry is arriving from a distant hazy coastline, trailing a broad fan of ripples behind it as it approaches the cross-rippled waters of the harbor, towers on either side of a narrow passageway it will enter to the pier. Sailboats and motorboats also move slowly though at different speeds across the enormous mottled aqua skin, as if in different dimensions from one another.
During the time we are watching from here, we will see the boat arrive, the passengers leave, cars depart from the lot, and the ferry turn and head back out to sea, its wake reversed. Chestnuts and grapevines hang over the fifteenth-century walls, and small plants grow out of most of their crannies. Now and then a lizard suddenly shoots ninety degrees up the stone and disappears in a crack.
We finally come to the highest parapet with its cramped viewing booth. A family is occupying it: two adults, a roughly eight-year-old boy, a young girl of about six. Her face set in the opening between two arches, she is singing, very slowly and methodically like an incantation, “Good morning to you. Goodh morning to you….,” over and over like an imp putting a spell on the city or really just a little girl saying good morning to everyone at once.
We continue along the hillside to a large cemetery flanking what is probably the Cathedral of St. George. The array of tombstones has a Greek Orthodox look, big slabs of highly polished marble with raised gold leaf and attached photographs of the generations of deceased in hexagonal frames, or at least this is the twentieth-century representation of an entire family Jurisevic. Next to them Lelas has a sparer look, crosses on pale stone, lots of sunflowers, two photographs attached in oval frames.
Many of the plots have little tended gardens of live multicolored flowers, pansies and daisies.
From any spot the markers of the dead have a somber but carnival-like appearance, stretching to the end of the densely populated crosses and monuments where a spacious ballfield begins and ancient stonework meets modernity with its fencing and floodlights.
We come back to the Tartini, pack, put our bags in storage behind the front desk, and then head out for the third recommended restaurant along the bay, Gostlilnica Tratttoria. Lindy is not much for swimming in bodies of water even in the best of circumstances, and this setting is too brusque and wild for her, so she feels a bit taken for granted in that I have my bathing suit on under my pants and am carrying a Tartini towel. She thinks I am being childlike in my enthusiasm to swim again, especially since we are really headed to lunch. My desire for even a quick second splash in the Adriatic makes her irritable. Yet I want to experience the proximity of the restaurant to the staircases into the sea. I can order my food, swim, dry off, and get back to the table in time for the meal. Lindy’s look says: “And I’m supposed to just sit there alone while you play the child.” What she does say is: “I don’t want to have to watch you, okay?”
“Don’t watch me. I’ll be quick.” In fact, I spend less than five minutes.
Out in the water I have a different appreciation of the city. I look up into the hills in which we have been walking, then down to the colorful umbrellas of the dining area. Ducks bob and disappear on one side of me and come up on the other. Cats watch me from the boulders. Large boats pass the distance. I feel safer with Lindy present, even reading a book instead of tracking me, so I go farther out, farther into history, into my own imagination.
My mind suddenly lands on the computer, now blank, a dead object to tote for the next few weeks. I recall Ram Dass’ soliloquy about his first LSD trip. First he realized he had no social identity, then no personal identity, then no body, but he still existed. The sea is just so large.
We walk along the shoreline to the car. Chastened by the experience in the garage back in Trieste, we have each memorized our license, in fact slightly differently but close enough (we didn’t have a pen handy), and we find the vehicle quickly. However, once we are seated, Lindy cannot get the key to turn. After a while I give it a try with the same results. It is the kind of thing that you assume you will solve if you keep at it long enough but, after fifteen minutes, we finally have to admit that we are stumped. We just hope the car isn’t the problem. Various options gradually occur, all of them expensive or time-consuming or both, so Lindy hails what-turns-to-be a German couple. The man comes over, takes a look at our car, and says drolly, “Alpha Romeo, best of Italy, pride of Italian technology; let’s have a look.” He slides into the driver’s seat and in two seconds has it running.
“You did it!” Lindy exclaims.
“You have to push the key in a little more at the end,” he shows her with an exaggerated twist.
We drive back, repeat our entry at the Tartini with an hour ticket, collect our stuff, and head out.
Motorcades accompany us all the way back to Ljubljana. As it turned out, our visit to Piran coincided exactly with the NATO meeting. Yet we really came to different dimensions of Istria, and our overlap was as irrelevant as it was incidental. I am sure neither of us made any progress on Afghanistan or were able to decode Bushian geopolitcs if they could be dignified with such a name. I wonder to what degree they had to play “the emperor’s new clothes,” these serious soldiers across the table from Mr. D.Rum.
Outside Ljubljana we manage to make exactly the same mistake as the first time and end up in a suburban village rather than the city. This time we remember enough to poke our way in without further misstep and even to find the Hotel Park on our first try. We get one of the six parking places by the front door again. Obviously few of the occupant tourists drive there.
The dormitory is like “old home” for us. I stand on one of two long lines to reestablish our interrupted reservation. People must wait at the desk for everything—obviously to check in and out, but also for directions to town, to raise the gate to let people in and out of the traffic circle onto Tabor Street, to answer general questions for people speaking many languages, and to provide computer codes from a little machine that spits them out like credit-card receipts. There are three computers for guest use in the immediate lobby, and the hotel gives fifteen minutes of free online time per guest per day. After that they charge.
There are never enough clerks for the 300 or so people in this establishment. When my turn comes, the guy on duty tells me, by way of apology when it turns out they have lost our reservation and rented our room, so have to give us the adjacent one—in fact (whew!) the last vacancy left: It’s no accident. They try to overwork us and make us quit; then they hire a young guy for less money.” After providing my outrage and sympathy, I get a code from him. I have a cute response to last night’s email:
“I’ll look forward to talking with zou when zou return. Well, I have to go now, I gotta take my daughter to the yoo. She reallz likes the yebras. (OK…so it was a stretch to get some z’s in my e-mail, but I’m sure zou get the point!)”
As we return to Preseren trg. through the early evening by Miha’s original route, I realize that the landscape has become familiar and registers in me at a deeper level. Things are not so novel and strange. I understand the place better and process more normally: the avenues, the shops, the movements of people and things, their relations to each other. The statue of Preseren and Triple Bridge are not something any longer to stare at but to be recognized automatically as landmarks on our way to Chez Erik. Ljubljana is softer and more intimate, almost commonplace. Its texture and layers of internal experience and cohesive phenomenology are beginning to take over from exoticness or caricature.
I like it here. I understand how you could live your whole live here undeterred.
It occurs to me that this is how people take the first baby step toward living in a place. The landscape sinks down to a comforting, subliminal level. Leaving for a day or two and returning has begun that feeling in me.
The staff of Chez Erik are happy to see us again, and we engage in new conversation. Our waiter tonight worked in the States doing catering for a cruise company for two years and had to speak English all that time. That’s the only way you learn another language and get to think in it, he explains. You speak it because there’s no other choice. He says it got so that it was hard for him to remember Slovenian when he phoned his mother.
After dinner we cross the bridge and discover a concert on the temporary stage before the Ljubljanica. This one is less interesting: ten clean-cut young people playing instruments and singing polkas.
Every night all through central Ljubljana, workers and vehicles are cleaning the streets of the city like a dream making everything fresh for the morrow. There are men with hoses, brushes, street sweepers with floodlights working their collective way over the cobblestone. It is a remarkable commitment to scrub a place this thoroughly every day. The crew moves along with a determination and even a pride that is rare in the West, certainly the U.S.
We stand and watch for a while and then head down a side street on a variant route toward the Park.
After a while our route is quite deserted, but we feel safe, even walking down dark alleys. I am not sure if this is delusion or reality, but I don’t question my basic feeling. My paranoia level is unusually low.
Eventually we reach the student area and the shops. Lots of teenagers are out, playful, razzing each other. The scene has a light energy, sort of like the fifties or sixties in the States. The only English sounds come from a few boomboxes. It is otherwise all Slovenian. Faraway we see the sign “Hotel Park” high up on the side of its giant building, our beacon.