dining rooms.
The hotel stood in what had been a windswept square when I was last there, for although it was already spring down on the Adriatic, 2100 or so feet below, up here at Cetinje, which is invariably snowed up for five months of the year from October until the end of February, there was still snow on the ground.
Now, on this really foul, wet night, we looked forward to the hot baths which could usually be had in it, sometimes to the accompaniment of alarming clanking noises from the plumbing system; to the big drinks, the scalding hot lamb soup we planned on ordering, and the great gobbets of Montenegrin pork, all brought to the table by ancient servitors; and after that to retiring to bed in one of the large and shabby but clean bedrooms. All things I remembered about the hotel with pleasure from my previous visit and of which I had spoken enthusiastically and perhaps too frequently to my fellow traveller. I could even remember the way to it, through little streets lined with lime and black locust trees, the latter a form of acacia.
By the time we reached the square in the centre of the town in which the hotel stood a thick mist had descended on it and as it was ill-lit I got down and set off on foot to look for it, leaving Wanda in the vehicle.
There, at the southern end of the square in which I remembered it as standing, I was confronted with what looked like an enormous pancake but on closer inspection turned out to be a mound of yellowish rubble. There was no sign of the hotel.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to a passer-by who had halted, curious at my interest in a heap of rubble, speaking in Italian, which sometimes serves in these parts of the world. ‘Do you happen to speak Italian?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Can you please tell me the way to the Grand Hotel?’
‘Grand Hotel,’ he said. ‘That is the Grand Hotel,’ pointing at the mound of bricks and plaster.
‘But what happened?’ I asked.
‘It was the earthquake,’ he said. ‘The great earthquake of 1979. It destroyed not only the Grand Hotel. It also damaged and destroyed a large part of the city.’
‘Is there another hotel?’ I asked him, remembering that back in the sixties although the Grand Hotel had been the only one of any consequence in Cetinje, there had been some talk of another hotel, although whether it was built or about to be built I could no longer recall.
‘No,’ he said, ‘there is no other hotel. The Grand Hotel was the only one. Tourists are no longer allowed to stay in the town. In fact there is no longer even a Tourist Office.’
I told Wanda. At first she thought it was funny about the hotel, especially as there had been no loss of life when it collapsed, although there had been elsewhere in the city. Then when she realized that it meant another night in the van and, if the police found us, probably a long drive all the way back to the coast at Budva, where the nearest hotels and camp sites were, her vocabulary was immense.
In spite of the drizzle and the fog it was the hour of the passeggiata in the main street, which although many of its buildings had been badly damaged was either being rebuilt or had already been built in their original, old-fashioned form.
Young, tall, dark and incredibly handsome men, moustache-less and pistol-less, and equally beautiful girls wearing jeans and as upright as if they had been brought up to carry pots and heavy weights on their heads, as they probably had, walked up and down in little bands past the lighted shop fronts of the pleasant, pale-coloured buildings I remembered, talking animatedly, smoking cigarettes like chimneys and eyeing one another. Apart from the two of us there was not a tourist in sight and the Tourist Office, as my informant had already told me, was closed, with a notice in the window to that effect.
We dined well on the sort of huge pieces of pork we would have been offered at the Grand Hotel if only it had remained standing, quantities of bread – there were no vegetables of any kind on offer – a delicious pastry stuffed with figs, a sort of baklava, but softer than the Greek variety, and drank copiously of a robust red wine of the region called Vranač Plavka in an effort to banish the thought of another night in the open, in a restaurant which resembled a brick-lined bier-keller, except that it was on the ground floor. The waiters, who were all well over six feet tall, wore white shirts and black trousers and black waistcoats. Male guests drank oceans of beer straight out of the bottles, spurning glasses; and old men of the sort I remembered with moustaches like racing bicycle handlebars kissed one another before settling down, as I had remembered them doing, to speak nostalgically, according to Wanda who could understand some of what they said, of what had been until quite recently an almost unbelievably violent past.
‘He who revenges himself is blessed,’ was one of the dicta of family life in a country where male children used to have loaded firearms placed in their hands before they could even stand on their two feet, let alone fire them, in order to prepare them to be good Montenegrins, worthy members of the only Balkan State that was never subdued by the Turks. For Montenegro, until the Second World War, was a man’s country in which a woman’s lot was to perform menial tasks such as agriculture, beget as many male children as possible to make up for the constant death roll among the men, and attend the funerals of their lords and masters when they failed to survive a ceta, one of the predatory raids they spent so much of their time either planning or taking part in. The results of such expeditions were subsequently recorded for posterity by guslari, minstrels, many of them blind, who used to accompany their recitals of these bloody doings on the guslar, a one-stringed instrument rather like a lute, made of wood, or clay, or copper, sometimes even of stone. Some of the ballads, which the guslari knew by heart, were anything up to seventy thousand words long and are still recited today in some parts of what is the smallest Yugoslavian republic. Now these feudal practices were ostensibly no more in Cetinje.
After dinner, having ascertained that there was no official camp site in Cetinje and therefore no camping, which put us in a rather difficult position, we drove hurriedly away and hid the van and ourselves with it behind one of the walls of what had been the royal park, outside the Crnojević Monastery, otherwise the Monastery of the Virgin, so named after Ivan Crnojević who built it in 1484. This original monastery, which he surrounded with a moat and heavily fortified, was razed to the ground by the Turks in 1692, again in 1712 and again in 1785. Above it on a hill, when I had last been in Cetinje, there had been a round tower called the Tablja which the Montenegrins used to decorate with the skulls of Turks, emulating by so doing the Turks who built the Celé Kula, the Tower of Skulls, at Niš in Serbia which they decorated with a thousand Serbian skulls, a few of which are still in position. Whether the Tablja was still standing or whether it had fallen a victim to the earthquake it was impossible to say because it was dark, and the following day, with the fog still persisting, we forgot to ask.
What with earthquakes, the Turks who had set fire to it and destroyed it three times, and the Austrians, Italians and Germans, who had each consigned it twice to the flames, it was a wonder that there was anything left of Cetinje at all. One of its proudest possessions, now in the Treasury of the Monastery, is the skull of the Vizier Mahmut-Pasha Busatlija of Shkodër in Albania, one of Montenegro’s greatest enemies and the last Turkish leader to fight his way into Cetinje and destroy it and the Monastery, in 1785, who was killed in a great battle with Petar I Njegoš in 1796.
There, behind the wall, we spent, as we anticipated we would, an awful night, which not even the good red wine of Vranač Plavka we had drunk alleviated. Soon after we arrived some policemen drove up in a car to the Monastery, obviously in search of us, and we only narrowly escaped discovery.
Meanwhile the rain, which had become torrential again, drummed on the tinny roof of the van making sleep impossible. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, when the rain had finally ceased and we had at last succeeded in dropping off, we were besieged by a pack of savage dogs, one of a number of such packs that infested the park and which had already made the night hideous with their barking and fighting. Why they chose to surround our van was a mystery. Perhaps they could smell a salami that we had hanging up in it.
There were still several royal palaces at Cetinje. The Old Palace, otherwise known as