Bouquet

You don’t expect to find beauty amid blight, never plan to visit a place you think of only in terms presented by the media—hatred, war, atrocity. You finance your trip with an unexpected winning streak at the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo. Although you have the money you needed for a ticket home, you travel east instead, to see the remnants of a world that passed into history. You are not the only American peeking behind the iron curtain. You meet your third-grade teacher on a tour for retired nuns in Krakow, dine on pork-fried fruit in Budapest with a horrified vegetarian, and flee Prague when a woman from your native city staggers up to you, slurs, They put something in the beer here, man, and vomits on the only dress you aren’t sick of wearing.

You shift back west, to Italy, but change your mind in sleepy Ljubljana, where you hitch a ride to Sarajevo on a humanitarian aid truck. You aren’t a convert to good deeds, just bored with the all-day train ride to a place you’ve already been. A coffee stop conversation with the British driver is all it takes to change your mind.

Sarajevo links to a round-cheeked boy with cartoon eyelashes who rewarded you for stopping a soccer ball with your face during gym class in junior high. You saved the game and his pride and he gave you a finger puppet of Vucko, the mascot from the Sarajevo Olympic Games, before his parents moved him away from the field where his chapped lips were the first to meet yours. You want to live inside the innocence of your memories for a few days, but Bosnia is a poor choice for this. You find a statue of Vucko with his face blown off, identified by letters carved into a sturdy marble base in front of the stadium complex you watched on television years ago, now a mound of cracked cement and tortured metal. Like most of the city. As you search fruitlessly for a place to spend the night, a former university student, living in the shelled-out remnants of a luxury hotel, asks, Do you think the tourists will come back to us?

You hitch a ride on the next departing aid truck headed for Croatia, where you can cross the Adriatic by ferry. You kissed plenty of Italian boys, too, and Venice is a safer place to indulge nostalgia. In Zagreb a woman you meet riding the streetcar offers you a room. As you walk with her up the cobblestone street, she points to a church riddled with bullet holes and says, I call those the flowers of the war. In Pula her words echo in your ears as you let the ferry leave without you.

You travel south slowly, hitching your way along the coast whenever the bus line leaves you stranded. Sometimes the roads are pitted with ditch-sized potholes, and as the drivers reverse directions, they warn you never to leave the shoulder. What do you think made these holes? they ask. You never once answer, I don’t know.

The military trucks and jeeps pass often, both UN troops and the Croatian army, willing or able or just crazy enough to pick their way through. They can’t take on passengers, but they stop for a while, wait with you for the next NGO supply truck to come along. The local men give you pointers, islands off the coast to visit or avoid, places to spend the night, usually extra rooms you rent from hard-looking old ladies draped in black. Everyone is good to you. They share meals, refuse to take your kuna, and always, always, shake off questions about the war. Look, this is beautiful country, they say. Tell your friends, what we once were, will be again.

You believe them. You pass road crews working with shovels, rakes, and pickaxes, watch facades of buildings being painted when the bomb damage inside goes unrepaired. You ask a man with only one arm why he bothers painting a house with no roof. He shrugs, his pinned-up sleeve jerking to the rhythm of the roller. The roof is beyond my help. You watch him finish from a café table down the street, and three espressos later you twitch in your chair, partly from caffeine, mostly because you never asked to help.

You like riding in the supply trucks best. The main road hiccoughs along the coastal cliffs, and the seats are high enough to see the shoreline down below. The start-and-stop motion of the groaning diesel engine fuses with the hard slam of water against stone. In Dalmatia, Croatia’s southern coast, land meets the Adriatic abruptly. The border between them is as violent as the recent history, like a splintered mountain range hammered into the sea. The islands, some too small to be inhabited, are lush tree-green tufts littering the blue expanse.

The shore is unpredictable. Dark, sharp rock cuts into the rubber soles of your tennis shoes. Sometimes you scramble over the rocks and follow an almost path to the waterline. The formations create natural pools where you splash around with turtles that snap at the air between you and then recede into their shells. Rock-colored frogs startle you with their croaks, and schools of small fish swim as one. You love the pristine wildness, the sea smell that is briny but not abused. Everywhere you stop, you search for other travelers. What you see is always yours to enjoy alone.

The road ends at Croatia’s southernmost tip, at the walls of a fortress city built into the sea. Stari Grad, the old town, is protected by a shimmering white curtain of stone built in the 13th century. It reminds you of stories of Camelot. Dubrovnik was bombed for eight straight months, calling attention to what was previously a brutal, unobtrusive war. In all your travels you have never seen a place more steeped in a fantasy image of the past. You circle the wall and admire the town from a vantage twenty-five meters high. You poke around in towers, stand upon ramparts, and stare down as waves merge with the white stone. The steep-cut stairs, cobbled streets, tiled roofs, and marble squares create an atmosphere that fills your head with images of jousting knights lumbering down the placa atop armored horses. Your fantasies are all about rescue, although in real life you prefer to fix your own messes. By the time your stroll ends, Paris is your second favorite city.

   Dubrovnik’s sidewalk cafes are filled with modern-day knights; peacekeepers and health workers and soldiers of all nations. After six weeks alone, Dubrovnik is a hard place to feel lonely. You sip espresso with a few Doctors without Borders on a weekend break from Tusla. The one from Bulgaria grasps your hands and says, America. Great, great culture. John Wayne—bang bang, Pearl Jam, Las Vegas. You search for somewhere to focus your grin and notice the columns across the street have three faces carved into the mouldings on top. The central figure looks like Shakespeare. It’s easy to drown out the background chatter of aid programs and reconstruction and simply believe this is an elaborate stage, a place designed to indulge anyone who wants to shrug off life for a while. The walls have already proven they can outlast any siege.

Outside the old town gate, the past greets you at a makeshift soccer field. Mijan is memory twice reflected. You know him from Mickey’s, a bar back home where you flirted with him, a mono-syllabic busboy, over the protests of your work friends. Not that it mattered. He ignored you then. He’s still as round-cheeked as your lost boy. Mijan’s eyes are green, not blue, but the eyelashes are the same, and so is the intensity of his game.

You sit on the sidelines and cheer until he scores the winning goal. You expect this and tell him so after the game. You ask, Do you remember? Lina? From Mickey’s? Part of the HBO crowd?

He says, Of course, although it’s clear he doesn’t. He invites you along to a celebratory fish fry in the back of a friend’s restaurant. Mijan’s English is much improved and he fires off questions about the bartenders and the regular bands as he teaches you to de-bone the whole fish you are served. Best time of my life. Best bar in the city, he repeats to you and the others, drinking to the prosperity of his adopted home and reunited friends. He is as anxious to get back to your country as you are content to stay put in his. You mistake this mutual enthusiasm for common ground.

You say goodbye to Fatima, the last in a line of widows with spare rooms, and stay with Mijan, who maintains the resort he helped rebuild. There are no guests, just a few locals enjoying the sundeck and the volleyball nets strung up along the beach. You watch every sunrise and sunset with Mijan and life feels idyllic. After two months, the words marriage and visa finally register as more than playful teasing. The whole town thinks you’ll be returning to New York together. You don’t know how to tell him you’ve been planning your return even longer than he has. You think maybe he’s the man to cure your ambivalence. The prospect of leaving Europe for love is appealing. Completing the circle would be a sort of progress.

Still, you try to distance yourself from Mijan and do some exploring on your own. Everywhere you walk, the locals stop and redirect you. Mijan is playing soccer, go, go.  Mijan is making pizza at Arturo’s, hurry back now. Mijan borrowed his cousin’s boat, meet him down by the dock behind the Pile gate. You don’t understand why he wants to leave this life in order to bus tables in the States. When you ask, he reminds you, How very American you can be.

You slip out the gate and hop on a waiting bus before anyone corrals you. It’s a local, and you like seeing where the real folks live. Within a half-hour you are in the suburbs of the city, driving past typical communist-era apartment complexes, ten-story green-gray boxes arranged in an H formation. The crippled buildings surprise you. The rubble is usually carefully swept and boarded over, but these pre-fab monstrosities aren’t built to last. You respect the Croats even more for recognizing what isn’t worth saving.

The route ends at a high ridge above the shore. You file out with the other passengers, already peeking through the windows for a way to hike down. You spent the past few weeks watching Mijan play and are tired of being idle. You walk in the opposite direction from the others, and the bus driver begins to shout at you. You wonder if Mijan has radioed around for you, and when this heavyset woman leaves her bus and sets out in your direction, you ignore her. You pick up the pace when you hear the heavy breathing behind you, but she tackles you at the waist and knocks you down. Your bag flies out ahead of you and explodes on impact, sending sharp rocks and pebbles over you both. You throw your arms up to protect yourself, and they are burned from the heat of the explosion, along with most of your hair. You are the lucky one. The bus driver, Viorica, isn’t as fortunate. Her body covers most of yours, and her left leg is broken in three places.

At the hospital, you are given your own room and treated with extreme care. A fidgety man in a worn Italian suit confesses the American Embassy has not been informed of your accident. You shrug, fall asleep, and wake up beloved for shielding them from bad publicity.

People visit as you mend, the conversations focused on better times ahead. Nobody ever blames you. A few merely ask, How come you didn’t listen when she told you to stop?

Mijan always answers, explaining that Americans don’t like to be told what to do. He is a steady presence in the folding chair closest to your bed, but he never mentions the future any more. On your last day you ask, Why do you keep that minefield there?

His eyes grow cold as his face heats up. Because the war will come again. It always comes again.