The Bandit of Dubrovnik

It’s the first Sunday in April when I finish exploring Athens with Mike Simonds and begin driving the VW north on a barren road with two Oxford University stowaways, Lynn and Anna, who want a ride to Dubrovnik. On the way out of Greece, the women and I visit Delphi and the monasteries at Meteora. The monks there give me no clues about the difficulties of traveling in the mountains.

At the border, I head northeast until we reach Skopje. Once I turn the car toward the remote town of Peć, the route degenerates to a dirt road filled with potholes and stones. It’s a hot, dusty ride and slower than I expected.

In Peć, my pale British riders refuse to cough up the price of the mountain town’s one hotel. Our cheap alternative, says a badly dressed and suspicious tourist office manager, is an abandoned building that was formerly an agriculture school. He rides with us to the building and says he’ll sleep with me in a dormitory room that has dusty bunk beds. The women can occupy a different dormitory. Some of the cement floors have collapsed, and there is ancient excrement in the abandoned toilets. I don’t touch anything except my cot, and I sleep in my clothes as does my roommate, who wears a thread-bare sports coat, and trousers that reveal pajama bottoms sticking out around his ankles.

The next morning, the women and I are bumping along the mountain road again, sharing a round loaf of fresh bakery bread that must weigh five pounds. Lynn and Anna talk about the idiosyncrasies of our Peć tour guide.

Anna says, “I don’t trust any man who wears pyjamas under his clothes.”

I say, “Is wearing pyjamas a seductive behaviour?”

Anna says, “It’s an idiosyncrasy — a sign of instability.”

Lynn says, “We braced a chair against the door of our room.”

I say, “Weren’t you worried about me having to be in the same room with him?”

Anna says, “We were quite sure he wasn’t a homosexual.”

I say, “He might have slit my throat while I was sleeping.”

Anna says, “Not likely. It would be bad for tourism.”

I say, “But you implied he was unstable and might not want tourists up here.”

Anna says, “If Igor didn’t want our tourist dinars, he probably wouldn’t have allowed us to stay at the four-star agricultural academy.”

We spend an exhausting day in the mountains, finally reaching a winding macadam road around dusk and the outskirts of Dubrovnik about midnight. I drive along a dark residential street that parallels a trolley line, squinting for any street sign that points to a guidebook wonderland called Lapad. Seeing the lights of an isolated café, I stop. Three young men sit at a round table in front of the café. I roll down my window and shout, “Do any of you speak English?”

The three come and gather around the car, making me nervous. One of them says, “Yes, we speak it. Where do you go?”

“Lapad.”

The speaker has a rough face and a square jaw. His rumpled slacks and T-shirt give him a disheveled look. He grins and sticks his head against the window to scrutinize the women. The other two circle the car, making me nervous.

The speaker says, “Lapad. You are here. Where do you go in Lapad?”

“How do I get to the International Center?”

The speaker uses a long-nailed finger to scratch his messy mop of brown hair. “International Center does not open until May.”

“Is there another place?”

“My mother. You stay with her. She has an extra room. You take your first left and go to the top of the hill. She lives next to the International Center. I meet you there.”

I start the car, and the speaker sprints off. By the time I drive up a short hill, he’s standing in front of a stucco bungalow with red roof tiles. The house is dark.

We get out of the car. The speaker says, “My name is Misha.”

I shake his hand and introduce us. I point to an unmarked gate and a high wall that seems the perimeter of an estate. “Is that the International Center?”

Misha nods, walks to the iron gate and shakes it, causing a dog to bark. He shakes it again, and the agitated dog barks louder, as though through a canine microphone. “See? It’s closed.”

“If your mother has room for the women, I can sleep in my car.”

Misha walks to his mother’s front door and plucks a key from the sill above it. He motions for us to come inside. As we do, a light comes on. A slight, round-shouldered woman appears in her nightgown. Misha speaks with her. Then he says to us, “Friends of mine are welcome here any hour of the day or night.”

Anna and Lynn bring their belongings inside, while I fold down the VW’s back seat to make a flat space to spread my sleeping bag.

Misha says, “You can sleep in there?”

“I can stretch out if I sleep at an angle.”

“Are you all English?”

“I’m American, they’re English.”

He scratches his head with a long-nailed finger. “That’s interesting. Well, I have some night business. I see you tomorrow.”

Misha disappears into the dark. I settle into the back of the VW. I’m too exhausted to wonder about his night business.

In the morning, Misha kicks the car tires and tells me to wake up. I follow him inside. He says, “My mother’s already at work, and my sister’s at school.”

Anna and Lynn are up. Misha finds dry cereal in his mother’s cupboard and milk in her refrigerator. We have breakfast at his mother’s kitchen table. Then I drive the four of us a couple miles from Lapad into Dubrovnik.

Talking like a tour guide, Misha walks us through the cobblestone streets of old Dubrovnik, a quaint walled town and one-time fortress beside the sparkling Adriatic Sea. Then Misha and I help Anna and Lynn board a bus heading north. Misha says to me, “If you stay in Dubrovnik for a while, you can stay with my mother.”

“I’d like to stay for a few days if it’s okay with her.”

Misha introduces me to Vlaho and Rina, a married couple living in a makeshift apartment beneath the grandstand of a tennis stadium, and Darko and Ivica, who tend to socialise around a small dining table there. I enjoy learning about their lives until Misha borrows my VW and side-swipes a tourist bus, crunching the left front fender. Vlaho says he has friends who can fix the fender. But the work drags on while I transport the friendly Slavs to various destinations in a car with a missing fender. I suspect banging out a fender and repainting it can take weeks and might be a deliberate plan to keep my car available for transporting stolen building materials at night from government construction sites. (“It’s not stealing,” Misha and his friends say. “It’s socialismus. What belongs to one belongs to everybody. We take only a little for Vlaho’s apartment and Darko’s house.”)

When I say I have to take the ferry to Bari in Italy to meet a woman there, we drive a fenderless car to the ferry terminal, only to discover that the sea is too turbulent for the ferry to leave Italy. Misha says he’ll send a telegram to the youth hostel in Bari, instructing my woman to come to Dubrovnik when the ferry leaves Italy.

Three days pass while Vlaho’s friends work on my car’s fender. Has Hilde received the telegram? If so, has the sea calmed down enough for the crossing from Italy?

I’ve almost given up hope and have driven my fenderless car with Misha and his friends to a hill town, where Vlaho arranges for some gravel to be delivered to the tennis stadium. When we return, Vlaho’s wife emerges from their apartment under the tennis stadium. She says something that makes the men laugh. Misha says to me, “You have a visitor.”

My slight, brown-haired frau appears then, walking toward me with her tight Mona Lisa smile. We embrace. I say, “I’d almost given up on you.”

Hilde says, “You don’t get rid of me that easy.”

“Did you have any problems getting here?”

“A few. Germans need a visa to come here. I don’t have one. I am here illegally.”

Misha says, “Don’t worry about the visa. Rina’s brother knows everyone in customs. He can fix it.”

Rina and Vlaho leave us alone in their apartment at night for what they see as romantic reasons and return in the morning to make us breakfast. But even though Rina speaks a little German and takes her shopping, Hilde is sad that we are with strange people and not alone on our vacation. Three days later, I become impatient because the damaged fender still isn’t painted. I tell Vlaho and Misha that we have to leave the day after tomorrow. So Vlaho has his friends replace the unpainted fender the next day, and the following morning, Hilde and I say goodbye to our Dubrovnik hosts and drive north along the coast road toward Venice.

It might have been more romantic for Hilde and me if it had not rained in Zagreb and Venice and on our all-night drive to sunny Naples. But she’s happy to leave Dubrovnik to the quirky thieves. Our week together has come to an end, and I drive her to the train station in Rome so that she can travel back to her home and two young daughters in Munich.

I head for Florence then to see Michelangelo’s statue of David. At the Academia rotunda, I walk around the statue for a long time, trying to memorise it. I’ve reached a goal that touches some deep place, not like the Greek dance, more like an awakening. Occasionally, I wonder what thievery Misha is into now.

…

Kurt Schmidt is the author of the novel, “Annapolis Misfit,” (Crown Publishers) and chapbook memoir, “Birth of a Risk-Taker,” (Bottlecap Press). As cancer survivor with PTSD, he overcame anxiety to fly in a small plane piloted by his newly-licensed son, who previously crashed a dirt bike and Mazda Miata at various race tracks and now races a Porsche and flies his own plane (crashing neither hopefully). Their flight story appeared in The Boston Globe and the Rock Salt Journal and can be viewed among others at www.kurtgschmidt.com. Other nonfiction has appeared in The Mersey Review, The Examined Life Journal, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.

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Yours with mischief,

Alexandra