Dubrovnik And My Aching Head
Walking down the Stradun two days before I thought I heard a puff of courtly Latin. That florid language was last spoken in Venice six hundred years ago, and I excitedly dipped through the columns of an old palazzo to find the incumbent time-traveller. All that I was greeted with was an old woman, dusting fish on a stall, who greeted me in goatish Croatian. I wandered home, dejected.
Now, this cafe, I believe, is where my mother met my father in 1933. It perhaps could have been one of the hundreds of pavement cafés littering the streets and side alleys of the old city, but what if it had been this one? And they had sat at that table that even now I only have a billeted view of, between two monstrous billboards shouting about ice cream. I flick salt at the rear of a child’s head. It doesn’t notice, and I feel like I am invisible, a terrifying monster that squats between the power lines.
The pharmacy where I buy codeine and rubbing liquor is the oldest continuous-serving pharmacy in the world, being first opened in 1317. However, I think I have been to one in Turkey where the owner said that his ancestors had served Alexander, though I believe he was quite drunk. Or at least insensible from Hookah, or sugared jelly. As I leave I am sure I hear Dalmatian, the ballad tongue that began to turn sour in the 11th century. The man is speaking Dalmatian, but is accompanied by an electric lute, and sings romantic hymns. I stop and watch, and he begins to praise me in his songs.
I turned onto Onophrius Street, so named for a Byzantine ascetic that wandered Egypt in the fifth century. It feels like he was a little late to the party; Egypt was a bit more exciting a few hundred years before. What a rip! Into the journal it goes, and hopefully will pop again in London, in a periodical sold in Notting Hill art galleries. Perhaps with a picture a woman draping a cat across her groin on the front. This usually denotes art of some kind.
I continue to search for my parents and their line with the Ravelin Gate, built in 1462, and so named for its fortification outside the city gate, separated so as to provide support in a siege. It seems a little unfair to place men outside their home city, with an invading army between them and their home. When food ran out, I assume that they just walked out, hoping, as in a film, the respectful enemy would let them return home for their bravery. But, then again, I suppose they didn’t have films, and would have crushed them under wheels and flung their kidneys over the walls into fountains and washing lines. Morality is fantastically enforced by films.
I remember my father, one day in 1960 (I remember this as it was the day the birds died) telling me about the walls, and running round the full length of a small bay so that he could see my mother in the distance. She was wearing a white dress, he had said, and the colours were unavoidable. This had always struck me as odd; why did he want to see my mother from far away? You see strangers from far away all the time. Often doing far more interesting things than wearing a white dress.
I walk back down into the old thallassocracy, a wonderful word, to look for things that have survived earthquakes. I cannot really tell what is new or old anymore; there is a wonderful sense that everything ugly has been sucked up by a huge, crumbling sponge. I walk past the Sponza Palace, built in the 16th century and now holds the national archives; my parents were never Croatian in any sense, though they wanted to be, and the building would not help me.
I keep wondering, though, if the sponge can find everything. I half expect to find a comically smoking shell-hole, a Verdun souvenir, or a Montenegrin sergeant ploughing his fist through a wall in frustration. I feel like doing the same. I see the tourist pictures, the new roofs from 2005, all of them wigs covering brain surgery. Bright red and beautiful, but below they are pockmarked, and somewhere, sandwiched, I think, not buried in Highgate, are a thin paste that was my Mum and Dad.
