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Brotherhood and Unity on the Slovenian border, in a hilly region of northeastern Croatia known for the sharp tang of its white wine and the disputatiousness of its people.
    Kumrovec was preserved as in one of the socialist newsreels I used to see in the Belgrade cinema in the 1950s. The sun was shining. The apple blossom was shimmering in the spring breeze. Peasants rolled through the village on hay carts. Outside the whitewashed farmhouse, there was a bronze statue of Tito as partisan hero, in his greatcoat, striding ahead, deep in thought. Inside the house where the great leader was born, to a Croatian father and Slovenian mother (the perfect Yugoslav parentage), I inspected the maize-filled mattress where he may have slept; his report card in an Austro-Hungarian school; his photograph as a Cominternagent during the 1930s; his fake Swedish passport used during the partisan war; his field glasses, his splendidly vain white partisan uniform, with red-and-gold epaulettes; the map of his wartime campaigns, which showed how much of the partisan campaign was fought where the Bosnian war rages now; his postwar “travels for peace” as head of the nonaligned movement: each capital visited was rewarded with a red star. Some places, like Cairo and New Delhi, had a dozen red stars each; other remote places, like Santiago, Chile, or Ottawa, Canada, only one.
    I was shown around by the local schoolteacher, a small, disappointed man with the red-rimmed eyes and broken veins of a drinker. When I asked his name, he made a small, nervous bow
    â€œIvan Broz.”
    â€œSo you are a relative?” Tito was a nom de guerre. His family name was Broz.
    â€œA distant cousin,” said Ivan, poker-faced. But later, when he was showing me the marshal’s partisan uniform, he whispered, “Once we took it out of the display case for a dusting, and I tried it on.” He looked about furtively, smiling and showing his stained yellow teeth. “It fitted perfectly.”
    Had he ever met Tito in person? Once, he said, when Tito took President Nixon to see his humble beginnings in Kumrovec. Ivan, then a schoolboy, was chosen to present a bouquet to Pat Nixon, while a girl was chosen to present flowers to the American President. For weeks, they were drilled in their bow and their curtsy, and then when the great moment came, it was over in a flash. “Afterward, the girl received a pen set and a signed autograph from the President. I got nothing. Such is life.”
    But Tito?
    Ivan remembers the dictator’s eyes trained upon him. “He was a politician. You never knew what he thought.”
    Did people still come to visit here, I wanted to know. Oh yes, Ivan assured me. But the place was empty. There were no coaches in the parking lot, no families picnicking in the park, no one but me poring over the exhibits.
    In one of the cases, there was a photo of Tito at an international conference, sitting behind a little sign reading: “Yugoslavia.” Someone had violently scratched out the name of the country with a ballpoint pen.
    Why, I asked. Ivan shrugged his shoulders. “It is not a popular name now in Croatia” was all he would venture.
    â€œDid you always feel more Croatian than Yugoslav?” I asked him. “Always,” said Tito’s sad cousin.
    B ACK ON THE HIGHWAY of Brotherhood and Unity, I soon became aware what an odd highway it is. First of all, the green destination signs have all been painted over. I stop at one of them and take a closer look. The highway sign says I am headed toward Lipovac, but when I peel back the Lipovac decal on top, the word Belgrade appears beneath. The highway still does go all the way to the Serbian capital, but as far as Croatia is concerned, that destination has disappeared. Officially speaking, therefore, I am on a highway to nowhere.
    About forty kilometers past Zagreb, the Croatian traffic begins taking the exits, leaving the highway to me. Soon I am the