The Fracture Zone (14 page)

And indeed it was. We drove through Igalo, past where Marshal Tito once had a lavish villa, and down to the edge of the gulf—surely one of the loveliest inlets of water on any coast anywhere, with the bluest of seas surrounded by meadows draped with forests, and by an infinity of hyacinth-pale mountains and
white cliffs laced with waterfalls. We stopped in a café at Herceg-Novi, and drank a couple of reinforcing beers. A boy offered me a piece of candy, which I noticed was called, for no apparent reason, a Negro.
^*

Three policemen came up and shook our hands. They spoke little English, but offered their view that the Serbs were up to no good. I held my tongue: Some opinions were best kept to oneself, even at risk of seeming stupid, as all foreigners everywhere are naturally assumed to be. They motioned to a large white van and showed us some sacks we could lie beneath. On top they piled guns, and as we set off I had the stock of a very large machine gun jammed into my stomach. The women, we assumed, were behind us, the escort vehicle ahead.

We sped along the road for five minutes or so, and then we slowed to a crawl. I heard the window open, and one of the policemen hushed us to make sure we didn’t move. I held my breath. Someone opened the front door, there were some guttural exchanges:
“Dobre din. Zdravo.”
Check?
“Niz naiu. Hvala.”
And then the door was slammed.

“Pravo,”
one of the soldiers said—drive on. We accelerated again. The car went around a right-hand bend, and then one of the young policemen whooped with delight. “Is okay now. You safe.” The policeman added that he knew a quick and easy way to tell a Montenegrin reservist from a regular Yugoslav soldier—the reservists were able to go home at night and wash, while the regulars could not, and so always smelled. “And those boys on the barricade—they smelled, I can tell you!”

The Montenegrins, according to my now-dog-eared 1918
National Geographic,
are “of tall, large and erect figure. Their characteristics are those of liberty-loving mountaineers who have lived apart and distrust strangers. Their women are brave, loyal and as implacable as themselves. The word of a Montenegrin is never broken.”
^*

The first man we met in Montenegro, though he may well never have broken his word, was in all other ways very different from the
Geographic’
s confident description. He was short and stooped, had interestingly protruding eyes, lived in a household swarming with people, adored strangers, and—unlike most Montenegrins, who belong to the Orthodox Church—was a Roman Catholic priest and—
very
unlike most Montenegrins, who are steadfastly loyal to their genes and their hormones—was unashamedly flamboyant. He was called Don Branco Sbutega, and I was given his name in European cities from London to the Golden Horn as one of the most agreeable of people one could ever want to meet. A Pole I knew in Zagreb had insisted that I have tea with Father Sbutega, though cautioned that I would find he was “not a friend of this reality,” whatever that was likely to mean.

He lives beside his church in a small waterfront town called Dobrota three miles north of Kotor itself. An aged housekeeper and an immense Airedale terrier named Hook live with him—the latter, he explained, was the son of the resident dog at the Russian embassy in Belgrade. When we called, in midafternoon, his housekeeper insisted he was asleep. But there came a roaring from an upstairs bedroom, a demand to know who we might be, and, on hearing we were British, he came partly dressed to
the window and bellowed down: “Come up immediately. I worked for the BBC. I will give you strawberry jelly.” We could hear him chortling, “This is too wonderful, too wonderful.”

He was extravagantly theatrical, not at all priestly, and once were we assembled in his living room, seemed a little tipsy. He reminded me of Anthony Blanche, or at least the Nickolas Grace version of him, in
Brideshead Revisited;
I thought he might stutter and roll his eyes, and refer to the Serbs as “wuffians” or “hobbledehoys.” He certainly called me “dear boy,” and praised Rose’s beauty endlessly. He was somewhat suspicious of Dali and Vesna, because they were from Belgrade, but warmed to Vesna when she admitted to being Montenegrin. “Then you are most beautiful, too,” he said.

His father had been a Croat, and he himself, he said, was descended from the Montenegrin royal family. “So I cannot be anti-Serb really—for it was Serbs who largely peopled this place. But anyone who might be an ally of that madman in Belgrade—he or she I could not abide.”

He clapped his hands for the old black-clad woman who had been his housekeeper for twenty years, and she brought out a dish of dew-fresh strawberries, a bowl of red gelatin dessert, a large number of bottles of beer, and a young man with whom Father Sbutega had been spending the afternoon. He was tall, handsome, dark-haired, and muscular—very much the Montenegrin—and in his late thirties. The two spent much of their time with us continuing an earlier conversation in Montenegrin about various foods and the degree to which Turkey had influenced their making. It was possible, both agreed, to buy good halvah and baklava in Montenegro, as well as a divine
cevapcici
—the perfect blend of East and West, North and South, and all in a place that had never been subjugated by any outsider.

His interests in the current war, he said, were only humanitarian—and indeed, some days before when I had tried to telephone him, he had been off helping French aid workers take a
convoy of food to the refugee camps that had been opened just over the Albanian border. “But they are inside Montenegro,” he said. “Isn’t that too strange? People are coming in as refugees from Kosovo to Montenegro—in the same country. We’re a part of Yugoslavia, for heaven’s sake!—and yet other Yugoslavs are asking us to take them in and look after them. But there are VJ units everywhere here, and lots of the people here are Serbs. How can they feel safe?” He harrumphed with disbelief.

“I guess they know we’re Montenegrins first, and we won’t put up with any nonsense. But it makes this war seem even crazier than it is.”

He positively
loathed
the war, he said. He would rather talk instead of civilized things. Like London, for example. How was his old friend Cardinal Hume? (Not good, I had to tell him—and three weeks after I left Basil Hume died, which left Don Branco “devastated,” as he put it.) He had come to know him when he filled in at a small church in Brixton, at a time when he was doubling working for the BBC Russian Service at Bush House in London. “Tell my friends there. They will remember me.” He still listened to the BBC faithfully, every day. Except that he was very busy. “I have eighty parishioners,” he said. “Very demanding people. I have far too much to do.” And he waved his hand wildly and put on a panic-stricken expression.

Then he brightened. Would we care to come and look at his chapel, to see the work he had done? And so, joined by Hook, who bounded along merrily ahead of us, we trooped through a low door into an immense Aladdin’s cave of wild mosaics and gold trim and rich red carpeting: the new Chapel of Dobrota, Don Branco Sbutega’s legacy for the Catholic people of the Montenegrin coast. It was an extraordinary place, bizarre, vulgar in the extreme, a fantasy chapel that might have been in Las Vegas, or at Portmeirion, or on the set of a Hammer film. Don Branco sat and happily played the organ—“The Wedding
March,” “Silent Night”—while we stood, awestruck, looking up at ornate single eye under the apex of the dome, which gazed down coldly at the congregation below.

Outside, on a bus shelter, was the Serbian cross, and a vulgarism denouncing the Catholic Church. Beside it was a swath of graffiti, the reminder that this territory, like Kosovo, was “Serbia forever.”

“That’s what they think,” growled Don Branco Sbutega. “But let them ever dare to try and take on the Montenegrins. They have good reason to be scared. Not of people like me of course—I’d just run away. But the people up in the hills. All they know up there is guns and fighting. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. And they always win.”

Before climbing up the hills to the desolate karst plateau, I had a small mission to undertake down on the Adriatic coast, at a seaside town called Petrovac. I had heard something of the place—a tidy little resort, though not quite so fashionable as the near-islet of Sveti Stefan, where film stars used to pay thousands of dollars a night to be housed in perfect Adriatic peace, in a jumble of houses and cypress trees on the sea five miles away. Petrovac was much less assuming than that, a pleasing seaside mix of the acceptably new and the delightfully ancient. A friend in London, a well-known magazine editor, was married to an architectural writer who had come from Petrovac, and both he and his brother, now a lawyer in Scotland, wanted to know how their old family house was getting along, and how their neighbors were, from whom they hadn’t heard all through the war, and about whom they now were a little worried.

Everyone in the dusty outskirts of Petrovac knew the family—“The boys did very well, went to England, you know,” said one old man I met in the street, who was leading a donkey on a string. He gave directions, and we found the house, part of it now turned
into a butcher shop, part a warehouse. It was built of limestone, weathered, substantial, and still in good shape. The neighbors lived behind it, and were sitting in a courtyard drinking Turkish coffee. They sat us down immediately, assured us they were fine—but that the telephones, run as they were by an administration in Belgrade, were not working too well. So I called Scotland on my cell phone, and within minutes there was a babel of Montenegrin passing across the ether, and to celebrate the moment someone broke out a box of
lokum,
the gummy and flower-fragrant sweetmeat that elsewhere is known as Turkish delight.

The neighbors, grateful for the contact with the outside, then seemed to feel it their duty to tell us stories—did we know, for example, that there were families of black people living farther down the coast at Ulcinj? The coast had fallen to the Turks for a while, and back in the sixteenth century the bey of Algiers brought African slaves to the walled port city they built at Ulcinj and made them work with the corsairs, who, with the official blessing of Topkapi, were then trying to wreak havoc among the trading ships of imperial Venice. The slaves had in time intermingled with the local Montenegrins. Part of Ulcinj town, they said, remained noticeably African in appearance, “rather like the
souk
in Djibouti.”

We whiled away the warm afternoon in the sunshine, listening to the stories, hearing waves crashing on the pebble beach, idly watching the fishermen stocking their lobster pots or sorting through their hauls of oysters, and gazing up at the mountains we would soon have to climb. Both of the capitals of Montenegro were somewhere up there, in the sea of rocks of the karst lands.

One was the present capital, the unlovely socialist-realist city of Podgorica that had until the late eighties been known by its temporary honorific of Titograd, and that spread out into a wide river valley at the southern edge of the mountains. The other, the old capital, was high in the mountains, remote and unreachable, and
said by all to be one of the most curious capital cities in all the world.

It was called Cetinje, and it had been founded in the fifteenth century around a huge and isolated monastery. For nearly five centuries it was the seat of power of a series of regal (but popularly elected) Orthodox bishops—all of them, after 1697, coming from the same family, nephew-bishop succeeding nephew-bishop. In 1910 the then ruling bishop, Nicola Petrovic, declared himself King Nicholas, and reigned for eight years before the Austrians deposed and deported him. The capital itself, confused by war and turmoil, lived on as the administrative center of the tiny country—by then absorbed ignominiously into Serbia—until 1948, when the heads of state and government moved across to the duller and less romantic commercial center at Podgorica.

Cetinje stands in curious and glorious isolation in a basin of rocks just below the holy Black Mountain, Mount Levcen, where there is a mausoleum to one of the more revered of the bishop-princes, but which it is now impossible to visit because the Yugoslav army has a radio and radar station on its summit. But getting to the capital itself was interesting enough: You may go by road from Podgorica itself, or still by the old way, from behind the city walls of Kotor and up the cliff face via a dizzying switchback of a track, called the Ladder of Cattaro, that is more suited to mules than for the kind of passengers—diplomats, bureaucrats, and the like—that a capital city ordinarily attracts. The track, though it has been widened and metaled in recent times, still has the capacity to scare.

I must make sure I went to Cetinje, Father Sbutega had said, for more than mere historical amusement. While there I might find the answer to a matter that had recently been intriguing him—but a matter in which he, as a Catholic, had no direct and vested interest. If, he said, the Montenegrin people were overwhelmingly of the Orthodox faith, then at which Orthodox church were they supposed to worship? Because as he had heard
on the ecumenical grapevine, there were now
two
Eastern churches in Montenegro, both competing for saints and competing for sinners. And as he had heard tell, battle royal was currently breaking out between them.

The mountains around the old capital are bone dry, the limestone too porous to hold water after rain. The fields are tiny, crops do not thrive, the trees are stunted—there is a lunar bleakness to the place that makes one wonder why anyone lives there. In every fold of rock, they say, there are six kinds of snakes—the poisonous
sharka
is the worst, but the
boskok,
which according to improbable local lore leaps from trees and strangles passersby, is also less than endearing. But nevertheless, and however harsh the landscape, there are small stone houses, patches of scrub, a wizened lemon tree, a donkey or two: Somehow people manage to eke out a living.