Robert Gibbons

Venice Via Hell & Belgrade

Mere mention of Venice calls up memory fragments of just getting there. I was twenty. On the bus in Munich--Charlotte Appleton's hair flashed like a stoplight. Avoiding another's clutches she sat down next to me. We slept that night fully clothed in a park under honeysuckle. She was from California, had an abortion earlier in the year, sent to Europe by her parents to forget. The first girl I ever met on the pill. She was headed to Greece. What coincidence! Travel together, down the Adriatic, hitchhike our way through Yugoslavia.
       "Passports! Passports! Passports!" The chorus of armed soldiers ringing above drumming boot heels after crossing the Austrian border by train at Ljubljana. Darkness a palpable force. My heart a vessel of trepidation. Disembarking at Rijeka. Who told us we could make it to Split for $5 sleeping on the deck of the mailboat? Twelve hours later, the Adriatic at Split miraculously clear where we waded. From the promontory cliff we witnessed the circular turn of celestial time, full moon rising opposite setting sun. Earth one huge room.
       My immense ignorance knew it was four or fourteen hours by bus to Belgrade. Fourteen hours to Belgrade. Turn-of-the-last-century sights along the way: wooden ploughs; faggots stacked high on a man's back permanently bent; homemade clothes; the modern world a rumor. Between bus & train station, truck depot, we found the only room in town. $1.25 a night overlooking a soccer field where workers gathered to play in the afternoon, & once a man emerged from the door in the concrete bleachers with his family, their home. With eight single beds in the room, we waited for the other guests who never showed.
       Every morning for over a week we walked to the outskirts of town, thumbs out, only to be mocked by fingers mimicking scissors cutting hair. Stuck in the cul-de-sac of Belgrade, surrounding states of Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, black holes in the constellation of nations. Darkness, an ominous force. Too much truth in the dog-eared copy of Fromm's Escape from Freedom. My heart breaks at the recent atrocities, told & untold rapes, less-than animal cruelties at Omarska, Srebrenica, Tulza. Viscera eviscerated. I'm not sure an ounce of courage existed without the presence of Charlotte.
       Which way to turn, but up? Sky, the luxury. Let's say it was $37 for two one-way tickets to Venice, the quickest way out, Belgrade clinging like a caul to the stillborn artist & Charlotte Appleton of California. We walked all day to the airport. Slept all night in the terminal. Thirty years ago, can't recall boarding. The relief of air--feet off the ground. One stop, a last, brief look at Dubrovnik, its beautiful walled-in orange roofs. Then Venice, all aboveboard. Canaletto, spatial contemporary of Fitz Hugh Lane. Venice, nothing but light. Charlotte made it to Greece from Rome.
       Venice, contrasting light, vivid as freedom, or being alone.