Yugoslavia is Communism with a human face . . . and bad teeth. Yes, and you could stick a lit cigarette between those teeth. (“We smoke cigarette more because we have problem more,” our cabdriver in Ljubljana said.) The indoor part of Yugoslavia smells like a 15-hour poker game. Landscape outside is big and raw-boned. Mountain, coastline, plain—it all has the look of an enormous fossil carcass. Big, raw-boned people, too. Take any five Yugoslav men, three at least could play power forward. I like Yugoslavia, but it made me feel short.
My hotel bathroom as synecdoche. Our john in Dubrovnik, like Yugoslavia itself, was Flash Gordon futuristic— which is to say, super-sleek, high-tech, and about half a century out of date. The modish, abstract faucets were so mis-set that pressure above trickle-speed filled my watch fob pocket with water. Our toilet, too, had an antic disposition. The mechanism ran on this ungrippable flipper—and produced tsunamis that wet seat, feet, and tile. Ho, I thought, they forgot to invent the shower curtain: no wonder there’s a drain at mid-floor. Wrong. Yugoslavian health law requires shower-curtain overhaul after each guest has left. Fastidious enough, but, for one day, the next occupant is Aquaman in his undersea fortress. Best, though, was a marvelous razor-tooth gadget that cut toilet paper off. Only some six-commissar committee for modernization could have come up with this breakthrough. It bit, ate at, and, most often, avoided the paper entirely. Amid all that future shock someone had put a candle beside my tooth glass in case of power failure.
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