actually been dug for the passage of water. The people of Ulcinj originally made that tunnel because of a different enemy - one of flesh and blood. It led from the old fortress by the shore to half a kilometre inland, all the way to today’s promenade, where you find one boutique after another with second-rate Italian wares and jewellers peddling trinkets from Turkey.
At first, the tunnel served for the rapid evacuation of the residents of Kalaja, the fortified Old Town of Ulcinj, who, it should be said, were pirates. They had the custom of plundering Venetian cities, and it seems they particularly liked attacking Perast, a small, wealthy town in the Bay of Kotor, which was practically defenceless because its menfolk were valued mariners in the fleet of La Serenissima and thus were constantly sul viaggio. Therefore, from time to time the Doge would send the fleet to Ulcinj to take revenge. The Ulcinj pirates evidently considered a good plan of withdrawal no less valuable than a wise plan of attack: the secret tunnel they dug allowed them to flee from the superior Venetian forces. We can just imagine the bewildered Venetian soldiers wandering through the eerily empty Kalaja, where they were met only by starving dogs and seagulls. There was no trace of the corsairs because they had already reached the swamp in the town’s hinterland. They made their way through the water lilies and reeds in small, fast rowboats, rushing to Velika Plaža beach, where their ships lay hidden. From there, they would embark and launch a counter-attack. With a bit of luck, they would be able to approach the Venetian fleet from behind, while the infidels were still in the fortress, busy with plundering and getting drunk. If the Venetians had already left, never mind: the pirates were still alive, and what had been burnt and stolen they would plunder back again, inshallah. Today we’d say: the main thing is that merchandise changes hands and capital circulates.
People I knew told me that the tunnel was wide enough for a VW Golf to pass through it. I never tested the claim: probably because of the disdain I feel for empirical proof
In any other town, a pirates’ escape tunnel would be a tourist attraction. The fact that it was left to become a drain should not be ascribed to a conscious plan of the local authorities, but to their negligence – a unique blend of idleness, impudence and fanaticism – which is interpreted here as consistent non-interference in God’s will and His competencies. When Communism collapsed, the local population rediscovered God and started flocking to the mosques, and it became common to complain about dysfunctional municipal services at the local council and for staff to reply that the heap of rubbish that lay stinking in front of your house was there because God wanted it to be:
“If He wanted us to remove the dead horse from your parking slot, we would already have done it,” an official told me once.
“If who wanted you to?” I asked nervously.
“Out, get out!” he shouted.
As I hurried away down the corridor, fearing that I had involuntarily experienced proof once again that dialogue is the most overrated thing in the world, I heard the fellow banging the drawers of his desk and repeating to himself: “If who? Whaddaya mean If who??”
Searching for a path, the water found the tunnel – it was as simple as that. And then it worked its way out of the tunnel: it breached the fifty-metre tall Cyclopean walls of the Old Town and, true to Kant’s definition of the sublime as beauty we experience as fearful, surged into the sea in a mighty torrent.
It may have been a state of emergency, but there was no lack of alcohol in the shops and the black-market cigarette trade still flourished. In Sulyo’s crummy shop, where everything was twice as expensive as elsewhere, I was the only buyer anyway. When some local informed me that Sulyo’s stocks of Rubin white wine, brandy and Johnny Walker were, if not inexhaustible, then at least sufficient for me to drink for another year of floods, all cause for concern disappeared from my mind. I kept buying my cigarettes via the Tadić delivery system: you call them at any hour of the day or night, and the Tadićs bring you a carton of cigarettes within half an hour. The combined IQ of all the Tadićs did not exceed 200, but they had certainly organized a proper little family business: the father sold cigarettes at the market, while his sons darted about town on rattletrap Vespas, delivering them to bars and houses.
“For every four cartons you got a free Coca-Cola,” the youngest Tadić told me one evening around midnight as he slugged a litre bottle into my hand.
“Listen,” I said to him, “I see you got the idea of the free Cola from pizza delivery services, but if you think about it you would realise how absurd it is. Cola may go with pizza, but with cigarettes you need alcohol or coffee.”
He looked at me bluntly through the streams of sweat running down his face. He was computing inside.
“We can’t give away liquor. That wouldn’t pay off,” he told me after a pause for computation that seemed as long as the Peloponnesian, Hundred Years’, Guatemalan, and all the Punic wars put together.
“Alright, but how about a hundred grams of coffee?”
“Yeah, that would work,” he beamed.
“There you go! Do it like that from now on. But I’ll keep the Cola all the same – it goes with whisky.”
* * *
Now that I was provisioned with everything an honourable man could need, I gladly accepted Maria’s invitation to go to Bojana River for the May-Day holidays. That was typical of her and part of her charm that I found so irresistible: she thought it was perfectly natural and normal to leave a flood-stricken town and go to where there is even more water, just for a change of scene.
She, Goran and Radovan woke me before dawn, bursting into the house like a SWAT unit. Even before I could open my eyes, Maria was rummaging loudly in the kitchen trying to find a vessel to make coffee in, while the other two attacked what was left of last night’s Vecchia.
“Come on, get this into you,” Radovan passed me a glass of alcohol. “You know what they say: you have to fight fire with fire.”
Then Maria arrived with coffee in a Teflon frying pan.
“You don’t have any detergent, and this was the only thing that was clean.”
Goran found glasses beneath the armchair and the bed, and Maria ladled the coffee into them.
“The three-day rule applies here,” he said.
“Which is?” I asked.
“The same as the three-second rule: what’s been on the floor for less than three seconds or longer than three days isn’t dirty and you can eat and drink out of it,” was his reply.
Radovan came from some God-forsaken place in the Krajina borderlands. He claimed he was a close relative of a well-known Bosnian Serb folk-singer. Having a nationalist bard like that in the family opened many doors for him here. That’s the kind of time it was. Montenegrin ethno-fascism was comparable with the German variety in terms of its intensity. Its relative lack of coherence and effectiveness at killing can be put down to Montenegrins’ legendary laziness and incompetence in organization.
Radovan brought his wife, children and mother with him. His daughters were spectacularly ugly – prime specimens of negative natural selection – but they were not nearly as shocking as his wife. Even the budget of an average Hollywood movie would not have been enough to rectify her appearance. Such disfigurement is a rarity, even in the history of literature. At first she reminded me of one of Tolkien’s orcs, but later I realized what ought to have been obvious all along: that God created the woman not in his own likeness, but in that of Dorian Gray.
Radovan
