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surging night. The hill by the bay was girdled by medieval ramparts, which because of their length and breadth, up and down around the mountainous fortress, was called the Chinese Wall (of Ston). This wall now seemed close to where we were. It was the same with the row of spruce on the saltworks dam farther away, on the other side of the hill. The trees’ needles rustled, and the heaps of salt at their feet glistened; a tipped-over wheelbarrow was covered with salt, except for the rusty wheel.
    And meanwhile on the gleaming cobblestones of the Stradun, the main street of Dubrovnik, the local residents were still promenading, with the place to themselves now in winter. For the participants in this regular evening corso there was an invisible demarcation line toward both ends of the broad street—or square?—at which every stroller who had not yet done so would pivot. In the course of this parading back and forth by the population, not at all casual but downright energetic, no one continued on to the ends of the Stradun, unless he disappeared completely from the mass, heading home, or elsewhere. But anyone who kept parading made an abrupt turn at that demarcation line, swerving his entire body, leading with the shoulder. The majority swerved long before, those who were arm in arm swerving all at once, as if on an inaudible command, heading back in the opposite direction; even groups taking up the whole width of the street turned this way, magically. The few who continued on to the end seemed for those few steps like sleepwalkers.
But at the last moment, within a hair’s-breadth of the imaginary boundary, even the solitary stroller or scuffer would wheel around like a swimmer at the end of a lane. The city elders joined the procession, calmly and deliberately, and the most relaxed and dancerlike ones were the children; they had the pirouette at the turn in their blood. In these hours leading up to midnight no one made a false step, none of those strolling up and down missed the turning point. Several people in uniform mingled with the crowd, also a Catholic priest, sailors, an idiot, whose siblings held him by the hand; and not even he lagged behind in the loop. Down by the harbor the cars came rolling out of the belly of the last ferry from the islands. On the night plane to Zagreb sat a Croatian basketball team, almost the only passengers, after their training camp in Dubrovnik. The tallest of the players, also the team captain, sat next to his Serbian wife, who years before had been Miss Yugoslavia.
    The waitress and cook of the Ston restaurant had gone home and had left the back door open for us; it would lock by itself. What distances could be opened up simply by such a going to a door in this Yugoslavia. The night light was sufficient for us. The taxi driver was asleep outside in his Mercedes, bought with his factory earnings when he was in Germany. When we finally climbed in, someone roused himself way in the back of the car. It was one of the workers from a construction company with branches all over Yugoslavia that was building a hotel on the bay. He had just been informed that his father had died, far down in the south, in a village in the mountains of Montenegro, and he asked to be allowed to go with us to catch the first bus from Dubrovnik to Titograd. Along the way he told us his father had died suddenly, of a heart attack, a construction worker like him, forty years old. Since the son did not seem that much younger, he was asked his age. He was twenty-five; when he was born, his father had barely started his apprenticeship, and his mother had still been in school. We said nothing all the way to the dark, locked-up bus station outside the city walls. The buses parked around the barracklike station would stand there empty and inaccessible for hours. Their marker plates, with two letters for the place they came from, bordered by the little five-pointed star of the partisans, ranged from MO for Mostar,