Zagreb, February 2024

2024

16 February, Friday

My taxi driver from the airport was a bit like an older Peter Sellers. We got on well and soon he showed me a selfie video in which he introduced a passenger he didn’t meet every day. The camera turned to an amused Luka Modrić. 

From Hotel Dubrovnik I went and got something quick to eat, before moving on to Krolo until half past ten. At the counter I was next to three good-looking ladies who got quite a lot of drinks bought for them for being nice scenery. Eventually the dark one (very pretty) started glancing over, as if shots goggles were sharpening her vision. I too bought them a round, before I left, but I’d also given them a couple of bar stools earlier. They had to be persuaded to take them. The dark girl was willing to stand. She had an exquisite smile and a tasteful grey-green jacket. Nail extensions suggested hairdresser from among the caring professions. 

Of the familiar faces among the male patrons, the man with the rug adjusted it at one point. He was only on water. The old lad with glasses who gave me back my bar stool (2023) turned up on my left and I had a chat with him and got him a drink, as I did for the distinguished man with the shaved head at the end of the counter, beyond the girls. The gent of the joint. He was on white wine and looked important, as he had free access to the back of the bar. Some of these characters are visible in a photo I took on my first visit. 

The man of distinction bought the babes two rounds and laughed when, on my way to the gents, I said to him, U Irskoj, daju nešto malo natrag. Despite the little joke about reciprocity, the girls weren’t bothering anyone. They were just out to enjoy the night. Krolo isn’t a place for noses in the air. Their chief benefactor and I later exchanged a round. It’s a great pub. It sits next door to an undertaker’s.

17 February, Saturday

It turned out I was very tired, and I slept long, even though, after half seven, a wan burst in on me when I was spread-eagled under nothing but a t-shirt. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the entertainment. It must have been a cleaning lady making a mistake.

In the middle of the day, I went up to Grič. The sun was shining. I went up via Mesnička and soon got away from the crowds of the lower town. In Pod Starim Krovovima I had three ‘small’ ones. A grey-beard poetry session ended while I was there, and then, near the bar, a young man in glasses in his thirties started tipping away on guitar and vocals. I gave him a tenner as I left. He seemed genuinely surprised that I funded his jam.

I could have stayed up there longer but hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so it seemed wise to do that. Around four I headed down Radićeva and crossed Krvavi Most, where I spotted wedding snaps in progress.

I was on my way to Leonardo’s on Skalinska, which runs up from Tkalčićeva ulica, the Zagreb entertainment strip. The odrezak wasn’t crisp like the first time there (2022) but it was quick, and I got it into me without side effects.

Tonight, by accident, I came across the sheltered Pingvin kiosk on Teslina in the lower town and a non-greasy kebab meal there (with a drink and a small bag of chips/fries) did the trick once more. The big Croat inside with the two little Chinese women (there for the cooking) asked me for a euro to make the change easier (i.e. for a tenner back out of twenty) but I didn’t have any sitan novac, so I went, OK, pet natrag, je dosta, and I got a fiver back with a beam of success. But it was worth it. When I told him that before I left, he gave me the same knowing smile. I’d say he’d seen it all from in there.

18 February, Sunday 

At eight this morning, a man opened my door, again without even a knock. I guessed technician. I’m back from breakfast now at ten and, as I left the lift, a young Indian fella seemed to have just emerged from my room, again. Wtf is going on with them? Multiple intruders.

On a bench in the city centre park called Zrinjevac, killing time before heading to the airport, I overheard nearby three young people with a camera conducting an interview in Irish. The interviewee was a girl with her arm in a sling, an injury she got from Brazilian jujitsu. She had an American accent. When I spoke to them (“Maith sibh, agallamh thar barr…”), they were even more amazed at an Irish speaker turning up than I was.

Kinski reading Herzog’s version

‘Never believe anyone from the Balkans.’

– Robert Perišić, Naš čovjek na terenu

Born Werner Stipetić to a Croatian mother in 1942, Werner Herzog with his hypnotic voice remains a peculiar mixture of the German lack of knowing when to stop and the Balkan love of westerns (i.e. tall tales). When he remade F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) with Klaus Kinski in 1979, he could not shoot in Wismar, which was in East Germany, so he moved the production to Delft. The authorities there refused to let him release 11,000 rats in the city but in nearby Schiedam they weren’t so fussy. Biologist Maarten ’t Hart was hired by Herzog as rat adviser but, as the Dutchman told the story in Granta magazine in July 2004, he got a bad feeling about it on the way to the engagement.

Starving white rats were imported from Hungary and they started to cannibalize each other on the way. Herzog then insisted that the vermin had to be dyed grey for cinematic effect. This meant dunking them in cages into hot, coloured water, which killed half the creatures. The survivors then licked off the dye, as the biologist had predicted, so, in the (apart from Kinski) soporific finished product, the rats look kind of beige, at most. By the mass makeover, Maarten ’t Hart no longer wished to be involved. He later implied in Granta that the other, more cuddly animals used in the production were also treated cruelly.

Herzog made five (mostly jungle) films with Kinski, who was undoubtedly a headcase. After the latter died in 1991, it didn’t take Herzog even a decade to spin his revenge, which is of the shoulda, woulda, coulda killed Kinski variety. Nevertheless his documentary Mein liebster Feind (1999), which translates as ‘My Best Enemy’, didn’t convince every critic. It has been the subject of at least two screen parodies, the more astute of those being a fly-on-the-wall-style episode of the US comedy series Childrens Hospital in which the director explores his troubled relationship with one of the cast. Thereby it gradually becomes obvious that the insane director is responsible for many of the actor’s troubles.

The South American jungle masochism of Herzog is immortal thanks to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) but it also recalls a very different German who appeared in a 1993 documentary by Britain’s Channel 4. Therein, Charles Nicholl follows the path of Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, along the Orinoco. Upriver he encounters this man with a German accent, who, when asked what he is doing there, explains what Venezuela means for him.

I can realize myself. I could shoot somebody in the street and I would get out of jail because this is a country you can really do anything you want. You just have to have the right connections, maybe a little bit of money and you can do what you want.

Stressing that he was not an explorer or a survival nut, though, he answered another question, about the space and the “mind or… the mood of the place” [sic].

The land is immense but maybe the people don’t want to live in the jungle. I think the Venezuelans, they don’t, they prefer to live in the city, they prefer the comfort we always had in Europe, eh, the electricity, the television… I don’t go into jungle to get bitten by a snake. I have enough bugs at home.

This German (“Lobo”) appears after 16:39

Zagreb 28 March 2023

2023

28 March, Tuesday 

AM 

The eight o’clock flight didn’t take off until half past nine so flying faster and shaving half an hour in the air didn’t achieve a whole lot. The taxi man was older and bigger than me and when I stuck out my hand, he squeezed it like a Balkan bear. A man of few words, he drove up to the hotel door, ignoring the pedestrian zone at the late hour. He only smiled when I gave him a tenner. Having given the docket to the night porter, he did it again when saying good night. I wonder how many inhuman fares give these guys nothing, given the damage goes on the hotel bill. In the airport car park, I’d asked him could I sit in front, and he said, no, no, but it was only on the empty road that I copped that the front passenger seat was where he stored all his sh*t. Between the seats I could see a cable and what not. I’m glad I chose a bit of comfort here at the Hotel Dubrovnik. The room has two doubles and a minibar. I’m not sure which of the beds I’ll sleep in.

4 PM 

Got lunch (goulash) at Mali Medo after walking the parks horseshoe; then had a nap. The waiter smiled at the nationality (iz Irske) of the tipper. I was gladly paying extra for any practice. I’d made it to the hotel breakfast before ten but then briefly gone back to bed. A waitress had told me at the coffee machine that I was a good boy to have learnt some Croatian, unlike most visitors. I think I’ll go up the hill to Grič now for a while, though I’m not thirsty. There is pleasant sunshine, though the morning was a little cold. The Croats are not loud. They look human as they pass. They don’t have alien expressions on their faces. 

11 PM 

The lad behind the counter in Pod Starim Krovovima had a beard and a shaved head. He said he thought my accent or way of speaking was Slovenian. Did he give me the one on the house just because I was the first in? I didn’t quite catch that bit. The bog-of happened when I ordered a second drink. He put up two pints for the price of one. I left before dark and down the hill ducked into Krolo, which was dark and busy, though I got a counter stool and soaked up the scene. I left there before nine, thinking I’d get some grub at the Submarine, but by then Croatia was playing on TV and I was reduced to crisps from a kiosk and the minibar. Now I’ve been here twice, I’m a veteran, so to speak. I’ll be back again, with better flight times. 

Chats About Old Zagreb

In 1971, the great Croatian actor Relja Bašić (1930-2017) fronted a black and white documentary in which he talked to some remarkable elderly characters about what Zagreb was like before 1914, when German (i.e. Austrian) and Hungarian influences were more pronounced in the vocabulary and habits of the capital. For example, it was the Hungarians who seem to have introduced tennis and ice skating to the Croats.

At any rate, I’m not well-versed in the language but I do have an interest in it and the more I watched, the more I understood. One of the Croats in the YouTube comments remarks on how beautifully they spoke. That must aid the watcher. No names are given for the characters so I’ll tag them otherwise. The timestamps are included if anyone wants to hear their actual voices.

The first conversation takes place with the Deaf Man, mostly about the changes he has witnessed on the central square, Trg bana Jelačića. This square is also known as Plac, which is the Croatian spelling of the German word Platz. When asked if the great increase in noise since the tišina (‘calm’) of the old days bothers him, the Deaf Man says at 0:45

‘It bothers me so much that I don’t hear it.’

The Demo Man

Demo Man is tagged thus because he talks about pre-war demonstrations, such as the one on the occasion of the visit of Franz Josef in 1895, when some students burned the Hungarian flag on Plac in protest against an unpopular Hungarian governor. At first, though, he gets asked about what had been on the site of the post office on Petrinjska ulica, near the central park called Zrinjevac (4:29 to 4:34).

‘There it was a common dump and a public toilet.’

More dramatic is his memory (6:26) of the panic in the streets caused by the double Zagreb earthquake (potres) of 17 December 1905 and 2 January 1906, while youngsters like himself were wondering would any building collapse like they had been told about in school (re the big one in 1880).

The Lady Gymnast

She is asked about the Hrvatski Sokoli (‘Croatian Falcons’), a nineteenth-century nationalist movement encouraging physical fitness through gymnastics, a bit like the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded 1884), though without the native ball games that still keep the GAA so successful among the Irish. But that’s another small, circumspect country on the edge of Europe, with a similar sense of humour, built on sarcasm and bathos.

(11.23 – 11.39)
‘Madam, what did you with the Falcons?’
‘Well, running and jumping. I was a leader… one of them jumped down, I had to catch her, but she knocked me into a heap. Angela Dajčova.’

The Man of Fashion (see 14.22 to 15.03) is interviewed beside the bandstand in Zrinjevac.

‘The korzo [promenade] was just on the northern side of Ilica [the main shopping street]. It was enough [for them] to walk up and down, up and down… then another time there was a korzo here [he indicates streets around the park]… ah, what I mean, it was then [he smiles ironically] that it was no longer provincial, it was big-city… an official town. An official town.’

The lady with the old dear whom they call Omica (see below), which is presumably a diminutive of the German Oma, or granny, corroborates the route of the Ilica korzo and at 15.35 explains what it was all about.

‘A little looking at the boys, they looked back a little, but we weren’t allowed to get together.’

The same lady at 37.01 states that music was the main element of the social life of Zagreb at the time, in public spaces and in private homes.

The Man of Fashion reappears at 16.19.

‘How was the fashion? How were the women?’
‘I don’t know if it’s for fashion but I was looking at their legs.’
‘You looked at their legs? Do you like legs?’
‘A little bit, a little bit. Sometimes very little. A centimetre…’

Then he indicates what little might have been visible over their shoes. As they move on to discussing the headgear once popular among women, he sings a verse of an old song that jokes about their huge hats.

The Theatre Lady has a minor Parkinson’s shake.

From 17.56 she explains that Zagreb fashions were two years behind Vienna and Budapest. She recalls being in Vienna with her mother for a stage adaptation of Anna Karenina and thinking she was the epitome of style for it. They got tickets for the first row in the circle, everything was wonderful, until she got told she would bring shame on her companions at the theatre. With a horrified laugh of remembrance she seems to use a canine simile that’s roughly akin to the English phrase, a dog’s dinner.

“A ja sam mislila, ja sam tak elegantna.”
(‘And I thought, I’m so elegant.’)

The Two Sisters

The one sitting next to Relja responds a little flirtatiously to his charm. It seems she has been noticed by military officers in her youth but she admits to having been a very good dancer, especially at waltzes (23.30). On the topic of clothing materials (e.g. silk), and cleaning and caring for them (25.22), she quips

‘We were not enlightened like people are now.’

At 38.02 her sister behind the table refers to her father ordering confections from Vienna at Christmas. This recalls Orson Welles on the topic of Viennese cakes (from 3:30 in the following link). Welles, as it happens, filmed some of The Trial (1962) in Zagreb.

It’s at 38.45 that the first sister starts talking about public transport. After describing what the trams used to be like, when the conductors counted everything but enjoyed casual delays that were obediently accepted by the passengers, and the trams still made money, she contrasts that state of affairs with the unprofitable trams under public ownership and the fact that the Uspinjača [the funicular to Gorni Grad, the Upper Town] wouldn’t take them (at the time of speaking). I had to look up that last bit. The funicular was closed 1969-74 for repairs.

The Soccer Man

Interviewed outside the National Theatre, the Soccer Man appears several times throughout and talks knowledgeably about numerous subjects, including the first cars and planes seen in Zagreb, and the construction of said theatre, but from 32:38 his sporting memories stand out most, as rather poignant.

‘I was a witness to the first street football games. [Then he names where they took place.] I saw absolutely brilliant exhibitions given there. I’d be out until it was almost dark but we were wild. Later, reports came from England that there were rules and, well, I didn’t go there anymore.’

The aforementioned Omica is the one with the really well-off background. Inclined to pepper her speech with German words and phrases, she seems to have lived in a Schloss. When asked to describe her carriage horses for the theatre (21:28) she simply goes, “lijepi, žuti, mladi” (‘beautiful, yellow, young’). At (35.35) she explains her husband that was very old so she couldn’t go to dances, as he’d have been worn out by them.

Hers is the last word, an ambiguous return to German to explain why she would never go to Gorni Grad again.

“Wenn man alt ist, hat niemand mehr Interesse.”
(‘When one is old, no one has any more interest.’)

Zagreb, March 2022

2022

4 March, Friday

I got lost trying what seemed the quickest way from the bus terminal and found myself at the main station, the Glavni Kolodvor. Going there first would have been simplest, on an L-shaped route. At least I then saw the crisp three parks between the apartment block and the trains.

After a kip and a shower I wrapped up in my new scarf and went to get something to eat. A burger and chips (fries) are the regulation first rations wherever one storms ashore. I found a small table and a blanket at The Submarine on Bogovićeva in the lower town.

Two bottles of Grička vještica (‘Witch of Grič’) later, I headed for the hill of her name. Radićeva is really steep in part and I missed the Kamenita vrata (gate) on the way up in the dark. It’s the site of some works. Anyway, I made it via some stairs to Pod Starim Krovovima, the oldest pub in Zagreb.

There I requested a veliko pivo (a bottle of Zlatorog was served up) before I got the small table near the door. It’s in this pic I found online, minus the red tablecloth.

The place was buzzing, in a nice way, in which no hammered patron got messy, but the smoking ban is just for lolz. Pizza deliveries peppered the night. I like to prepare for events, dear boy, abroad, and so proved able to read a message in biro taped to the door of the gents. The guys had to share the one for the dolls. I left shortly before the midnight closing time.

5 March, Saturday

Sleeping in segments until I had enough recouped, I didn’t wake fully until one and didn’t leave the apartment for another hour. I needed lunch. I got it at a place called Leonardo’s on the sloping Skalinska. It was a good, crisp Zagrebački odrezak (in this case, breaded chicken schnitzel, stuffed with ham & cheese) when I needed it.

While there I watched a grizzled hawker push trolley after market trolley up that street. For a while he had an assistant with one hand on a front corner, like a navigator, but soon even he vanished. Each time, the Sisyphus used to pause for a rest (a holding position) on the path across from where I sat.

Up on Grič I wandered around the old streets in the dusk. Much renovation is underway. The square around St. Mark’s is fenced off, with lots of cops on the scene. Navy blue overalls and black boots.

A small wedding party headed down to Pod Starim Krovovima to warm the cockles but I wasn’t having any drink today. My last task was to find a supermarket. I tracked down a Spar with my phone. Being able to ask for a plastic bag in a local language is a mark of integration. Such also allows a tourist to approach the tills with un-weighed bananas and calmly explain, Stvar kaže, kraju papira (‘The thing says, the end of the paper’), without earning a ‘ffs’ eye-roll in response.

Zagreb is cheap, safe and easy on the eye.

Krleža … A Stoppage in Zagreb

Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981) may be the first writer I’ve found to stress, really stress, the idea that taste is a form of morality; that vulgarity and immorality are often the same thing.

Set in Zagreb, his 1938 novel Na rubu pameti (‘On the Edge of Reason’) is a fantasy about a legal pillar of society who, of a pleasant September evening, listens to a rich client bragging on and on about the time in 1918 he defended his wine cellar by shooting, in the back, four trespassing peasants.

Something finally snaps as the listener turns the stem of his wine glass. The unfulfilled and unnamed narrator, in an almost out-of-body experience, suddenly decides to

(a) stop playing the game;

(b) speak his mind on the sordid and even murderous crooks who are his peers;

(c) smack the face off some of the agenda-riddled pests who will stick an oar in.

Nevertheless, he is not quite suicidal. This first expression of dissent (“it was all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity”) does not go down well at all with his host, the one he already knows has form, on home ground.

As soon as I noticed a revolver glittering in his hand, I overturned the table, jumped over all the bowls, lamps and glassware, and disappeared into the night.

The scandal then becomes a matter for the courts. Here the narrator uses the opportunity to turn over more rocks. He ridicules a prosecutor by unveiling further early gems from the plaintiff’s real CV (“a common embezzler” and “a Sarajevo police informer”). He also exposes a biased judge as a failed, despised suitor to one of the defendant’s daughters.

The occasional poetic flights over the interior tend not to go on too long and the story and dialogue are usually tight but the novel pulls up with the narrator twiddling a radio knob after hearing unwelcome news of Jadviga (a tragic, Alma Schindler-like figure) from Vienna.

Jadviga and the narrator hook up when he moves out of his home to the hotel where she lives. This liaison lasts until he first gets locked up. In that time, they have a mob of respectable rubber necks following them around Zagreb cafes and bars like paparazzi. Long an expert in the receipt of anonymous letters, she tells him the ones he is getting are from his wife and her pals.

Jadviga is an outcast from respectability, like his cellmate Valent Polenta, a poor man who defended himself by winging a forester while poaching. Polenta is kind to him and in return is grateful to learn that an individual may be a human being despite being a man of learning.

By the end we know that the hero – expelled from Italy after smacking another malevolent bore, in the Sistine Chapel – will face many more court cases but it’s clear too that he’s never been short of money. Maybe that helps explain the touches of nineteenth-century melodrama, like the reminiscence of his lost wartime romance.

Loved up or not, Krleža’s own military CV in the Austro-Hungarian Empire reads more as bloody farce than romance. Having attended two officer cadet schools in Hungary, he kindly offered his services to the Kingdom of Serbia (twice) but was rejected by the Serbs as a possible spy. On his return to Croatia, his original army took him back but demoted him to a grunt for going missing, twice. When the Great War kicked off, they packed him off, like Švejk, to Galicia on the Eastern Front. Poor health limited his time in the trenches and he spent most of the war in hospitals and spas.

In the late Thirties he was expelled from the Communist Party for unorthodox views on a range of matters. Krleža himself seems to have rarely backed down from a political or artistic row. During the second war he remained in Zagreb. Though he turned down the jobs and honours offered by the fascist regime, his refusal to join the Partisans still left him in grave danger in 1945. Only his pre-war friendship with Tito saved him but he was fully rehabilitated once Yugoslavia left the Soviet embrace. The building where he lived is home to a well-known Zagreb pub called MK Krolo, in his honour.

PS

Hitting the Right Pitch

Hitting the Right Pitch

In thinking about buying the English version (Our Man in Iraq) of the Croatian novel Naš čovjek na terenu (‘Our Man on the Pitch’) by Robert Perišić, my mind was made up (in favour) by the number of Britons and Americans who complained in online reviews that, to their surprise and disappointment, it wasn’t really about Iraq.

There is of course an understandable economic reason for Anglo-America being too often deemed in need of a lagging jacket of cultural familiarity in translations. Moreover, given that media types are central to this novel and that they are, in their souls (or lack of them), essentially the same everywhere, the temptation to impose a globalized sheen on this text must have been irresistible.

On the other hand, if the reader is from another small and more circumspect country, such as Ireland, one can maybe read more easily between the lines to get the Croatian flavour. A bit of online research only adds to the impression of what’s going on here. A Master’s thesis (2014) by Marinela Lovrić reveals some amusing examples of where the wheels come off this translation.

Where the narrator drinks a local liqueur called pelinkovac, this is rendered as “I drank vermouth” (“It does not have a lot in common with vermouth” – Lovrić). Vermouth is a joke of a drink, not least to American martini lovers, so I imagine it would be laughed out of the Balkans.

Other instances include a reference to Hello (“…it is highly unlikely that celebrities from… Zagreb… would give statements for a British magazine”) and one to a London club (in the context of “a popular night club in Zagreb which could be seen as an equivalent to The Blitz… But again… the reader knows that the book is set in Zagreb”).

Why the translator used a Scottish idiom in places is a little uncertain. Will Firth is Australian and although certain informal aspects of Australian culture are similar to that of the Irish – 40,000 Irish were given a free cruise there between 1790 and 1840 – others are far more British.

Falco for one was amused but a little baffled by all the peculiar British symbols he witnessed on a trip to Australia in the Eighties. Furthermore, Scotland is distinguished from Ireland by the harsher climate, the swift conversion of the majority to Calvinism, and, despite its whiskey fame, the generally inferior quality of its popular drinks.

The key Croatian phrase iz zafrkancije on the other hand seems interchangeable with the Irish phrase for the craic. Love and hunger may rule the wider world’s motivations, with the probable addition of malice or revenge, but over here, saying or doing something for the craic is a fourth ruling impulse.

The Croats, like the other small central European nations, also tend to be tickled by the golden rule of thumb among the Irish for avoiding misunderstandings on the European mainland.

Imamo zlatno pravilo, za izbjegavanje nesporazuma kada smo u Europi: recite da niste Englezi i niste Amerikanci.

P.S.

As our man in the Balkans for The Economist, Tim Judah was in a good position to flesh out the media background to Perišić’s novel. In an otherwise interesting and consciously amusing review for the magazine Critical Mass, he nevertheless at one point failed to look where he was going and produced a sentence that, in aviation terms, is a controlled descent into terrain.

He has a good job in Zagreb and a girlfriend ogled by other men with whom he has an exciting and imaginative sex life and with whom he is planning, somewhat reluctantly perhaps, to settle down.

Translation: how many men, again?

PS

Krleža … A Stoppage in Zagreb