Essays After Eighty (4 page)

He shrugged and told us, “There is only one road in Yugoslavia.”

 

It was not long after our wedding. When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date. When my college roommate asked his fiancée to fix me up, she asked, “How tall is he?” Kirby was pretty, intelligent, classy, and six foot one. I was only an inch taller, and found her height exotic. We had a good time together, sophomore and senior, and dated again, and again, and again. One thing led to another. When I spent a year at Oxford we missed each other. We wrote letters back and forth, and by mail arranged to get married.

From London I flew to New York, seventeen hours on a Lockheed Constellation with its triple tail. My return was happy and then frantic with preparation. After the September ceremony we had no time for a honeymoon. We visited my grandparents in New Hampshire—my grandfather's heart attack kept them from the wedding—then took passage to Southampton on the
Queen Elizabeth
. As a wedding present, my Connecticut grandfather Hall had ordered us an English automobile, a tiny green Morris Minor, which we were to pick up in London and, after Oxford, ship back to the United States. From the dealer's, we headed out into heavy traffic. I drove for the first time on the sinister side of the road, which was terrifying. Kirby stiffened beside me, while I concentrated to stay left until we reached Oxford and the Banbury Road flat we had rented. College terms were eight weeks long, followed by six weeks off. I spent the autumn taking notes for my B.Litt. thesis at the Bodleian, in Duke Humfrey's Library, the oldest and coldest section. Kirby had the day alone, and spent much of her time reading Trollope or exploring our neighborhood of small shops—apothecary, fishmonger, butcher. In the evening we attended Oxford's continuous party. For Kirby these gatherings were composed of strangers who did not notice her. When I had time at the flat, I attended to my poems.

 

By the end of term I had done my research and figured to begin my thesis when Oxford started again in January. What would we do for our six weeks' vacation? Another American gave us the answer: we should motor across Europe and down Yugoslavia to Greece and Athens. It was a simple drive, we were told, and the weather agreeable. We would take the honeymoon we had missed. So in mid-December we departed Oxford for a Channel port, leaving after supper to catch an overnight ferry. Shortly we encountered the dense, gray-flannel air of a London fog. I drove at ten miles an hour with my left wheels in the barely visible gutter. (Traffic, sensibly, was light.) At every crossroad the gutter disappeared, and Kirby left her seat to walk a foot in front of the Morris, cautiously scanning left and right for headlights. I crept forward behind her. Shakily, we drove the car onto the ferry, slept across the Channel, and descended to France in a dawn without fog. It was comfortable to drive on the right side of the road, as we scooted by stately poplars, past cafés where workers parked bicycles to sip the first cognac of the day.

We entered Germany and spent one night on our way to Vienna. It was only seven years after the war, and the innkeeper was in his thirties, thick-necked and brawny. I could hardly look at him. Vienna was still a four-power city, and we found our hotel in the American sector. The first morning we visited the Soviet embassy for the documents required to exit Austria through the Russian zone to Yugoslavia. We bided our time while the people's bureaucracy bided
its
time. Vienna was restful. I worked on poems. It was the moment of the Orson Welles film, and at every café Kirby and I heard the
Third Man
theme played on a zither.

Kirby had turned twenty-one the month before, and I was twenty-four. It was the era of early marriages, often brief ones. We had told our parents about our excursion, in letters they would receive only after our departure. We were children trying adulthood out, and we did not want to deal with their worries. After a week of Vienna we received our papers, gassed up, and left the city through the bleak Soviet zone. The bridges were guarded by uniformed teenagers armed with tommy guns. During the drive from Vienna to the Yugoslavian border, I have no memory of stopping to fill up with gas or to eat—which we must have done—until we came to the border and the man directed us to Zagreb.

We drove in the early December darkness into a crowded city and registered with InTourist, a government bureau that required travelers to report their movements. Dinner throughout Yugoslavia was fried indistinguishable meat (maybe mutton) accompanied by fried corn and fried peas. We woke to a cold morning, put on the heavy sweaters Kirby had packed, and set off for Belgrade, traveling from Croatia to Serbia without knowing it. In 1952 the murderous ethnic divisions that would lead to the fracture of the country already existed. We only knew that the nation was arbitrary, created by Versailles largely out of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Yugoslavia during the second war, I remembered, two armies of anti-Nazi partisans fought each other as much as they did the Germans, one force led by Mihailovic ´ and the other by Tito. After the war, after Yalta, Yugoslavia belonged to Marshal Tito and the Soviet bloc.

 

The road was two-laned, the landscape dour, as gray as the skies. Belgrade was sophisticated, dense with promenaders, and large enough to confuse a driver. We had no idea where we were, and it was difficult to ask directions because of our defective Serbo-Croatian. (A second language in Yugoslavia was German.) Parked and desperate, I spoke English words and French at random among the walkers. Finally I found a Yugoslav who spoke French as badly as I did—Kirby's was better but she stayed in the car—and we talked in sign language, with an occasional “
tout droit
” or “
à gauche
.” Finally we found InTourist and our hotel, which was comfortable enough, with huge bolsters on the bed. In the morning we checked out of our hotel with a clerk who had English. We told him we were driving to NiÅ¡, pronounced Neesh, and his face collapsed. “From Belgrade to Kragujevac there are second-class roads,” he told us. “From Kragujevac on”—he paused a foreboding pause—“there are
third-class roads!
”

We drove to Kragujevac over a hilly landscape, icy patches on the road but no snow. We bought more
benzine
and headed toward Niš. Our route became a grassy track winding among obstacles. We struggled through shallow streams. Sometimes we saw nothing like a road ahead, but glimpsed two ruts that emerged from a lumpy valley. Once, as we chugged through a field of mud, our Morris sank to its hubcaps and would not move. Five men working with shovels came to our aid, lifted the car and carried it to firm ground. We remained excited by our adventure—and by being wholly alone for the first time.

We climbed hills, shifting down, then braked as we descended. We caught glimpses across the way of an unfinished sturdy superhighway running parallel to our rutted path. Concrete pylons stood elevated on each side of a river, no bridges yet constructed. We saw in the distance mountains green with fir. One cliff resembled a profile, a chinless Old Man of the Mountain. Mostly we ignored the landscape because our passage consumed us. All day, as we bounced and teetered in the direction of Niš, we drove without encountering a vehicle, not a car nor a truck nor a bus. When we passed through a village, dense with small houses, we were greeted like an army relieving a siege, everyone cheering as we steered carefully through. Kirby and I waved at boys with bicycles who accompanied us until we left town for the wilderness ahead.

We exclaimed at crucial moments of our journey, but otherwise I don't remember that we talked a great deal, and we never quarreled. It was as if we were not yet married. Between our college dating and our wedding, there was a year of separation, with our contact only by mail. Kirby was younger than her years, not in intelligence but in experience. In the fifties it was rare for a girl to be six foot one, and her height separated her from her classmates at Miss Fine's School and at Radcliffe. She was shy, with crushes but without boyfriends. I had the usual girlfriends, but our greatest difference was my single-minded literary obsession. I required a wife who remained passive in the face of my determination.

When we passed through increasing clusters of buildings, InTourist directed us to our hotel in Niška Banja, a spa town of thermal waters surrounded by lavish, empty hotels. A man checked us in at the desk, and the same man served us fried dinner in the empty restaurant, then at breakfast brought mush and coffee before we started out. We headed in the direction of Skopje, a city that approaches Greece and has become Macedonian. A pedestrian stuck out her thumb and turned into a hitchhiker. She talked all the way to her village, friendly and unintelligible. She wore five skirts—Kirby counted—and while we were driving she extracted a small pouch from somewhere and handed us strange, delicious cookies. Kirby detected chicken fat and honey, and added that she had never before encountered a peasant. We drove through postwar Europe as privileged offspring of the American Century, 1945–1963, RIP. We did not speculate about how Yugoslavs lived. They might as well have been unfinished concrete highways.

The journey from NiÅ¡ka Banja to Skopje—as on the day before—never revealed another car. There were no gas stations, but someone had given us instructions. Halfway between the villages there was a military dump where we could find gas. I stopped the car, got out, shouted “
Benzine!
Benzine!
” and children pointed to a pitted track. Bicycles led the way. Out of town a mile or so, we came to a fenced-in compound thick with rusty barrels, odds and ends of metal, and one or two collapsed trucks. It did not look military. A middle-aged man opened the gates and motioned us to enter. While Kirby stood and stretched her great height, I unscrewed the cap of the gas tank. The caretaker nodded happily, as if excited to have visitors. He rolled a barrel to the car, fitted a funnel into our gas tank, heaved the barrel up, and poured in
benzine
. I screwed the cap back on and pulled dinars from my pocket. Perhaps the price was seventeen hundred dinars; I have no idea. He scratched a figure in the dust on the trunk of the Morris. I handed him, say, two thousand-dinar notes. He shook his head and pointed at the figure. I gestured for him to accept the difference. He thought I didn't get it. He wrote “2000” over “1700,” drew a line, and wrote “300.” I had no words to tell him that I didn't carry the right change, so I pointed at his inscribed “300” and gestured that it was a tip. He looked agitated, he looked pleased. Kirby and I drove back through the village escorted by bicycles.

At Skopje's InTourist we heard familiar questions. Where had we driven from? I said we came from Belgrade through NiÅ¡. The face in front of us looked stricken. “But that is impassable!” he said. An omnibus, he told us, had failed to make the journey two weeks before. “It is impassable!”

“We know,” I said, “we know.”

 

When we approached the Greek border we found ourselves driving on an identifiable two-lane road, with bridges across rivers. Friendly, dilatory Greek officers at the border brought us cups of strong coffee as they filled out forms. We talked without language, and proceeded into Greece. The road became lavish with pavement and gas stations. We had arrived at the Marshall Plan. Many houses were painted blue, to signify royalty, since a red army had so recently retreated north into Albania. Walls were still pocked with bullet holes. The day was warm and we took the convertible's top down. Halfway to Salonika we stopped to buy lunch from a street vendor. Sign language provided us a loaf of rugged bread and a wedge of sharp white cheese.

We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if it posed for its picture. Kirby stood up in our open Morris, tall as an Ionian column, and took a Kodachrome. I felt a poem coming. We drove to our destination, a bed-and-breakfast, from which we set out each morning to perform our pilgrimages. We explored the Parthenon, the surrounding Acropolis, and the agora below. Archaeological pits stood open in winter, and Kirby picked up a loom weight, a small terracotta cone with a hole through the top. We visited Tiryns, Mycenae—and drove to Delphi on a day when there was only one other visitor. We stayed overnight near the oracle's habitat.

In Greece every moment brimmed with ruins and history. Our joy in the ancient world was dogged by one shadow. Maybe this time our route back through Yugoslavia would be truly impassable. Would we take the wrong track and spend Oxford's winter term starving on the margin of a fourth-class road? Then we heard at American Express of an alternative that was amazingly cheap and took only half a day. In Piraeus, Athens's port city, we hoisted the Morris onto a boat and crossed the Adriatic to Brindisi, at the heel of Italy's boot. Early in 1953, we replaced Yugoslavia's one road with Ravenna's mosaics, and continued north through Italy, at first with the convertible's top down. We stopped a few days in Paris, with George Plimpton and other
Paris Review
companions. We crossed the Channel in clear air to Banbury Road.

 

The marriage lasted fifteen years, ending in 1967. Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. I grew up in a comfortable 1920s suburb. Kirby's family raised sugar cane on a plantation in Jamaica. Our tastes in daily life diverged as much as our backgrounds. My literary ambition did not fit with Kirby's reserve. These differences, at first exotic, turned noxious and destructive. Years later I remarried, and in 1975 moved with Jane to my old family farm in New Hampshire. Kirby never remarried. After her own psychoanalysis, she became a psychotherapist, highly regarded in Ann Arbor, where I had taught. She became independent, active, and political. We kept in touch until our two children grew up. Kirby left Michigan in 1991 and settled in the East, to be near our son and daughter, who had come to New England for college and work, and near our grandchildren. Although we lived not far apart, over a dozen years we never saw each other. When a child or a grandchild had a birthday, there were two parties.