Bistro Luka

In The Death Seat

We left Orebić, and the inevitable breakdown of our association took place in the car at high speeds on the winding highway. I have been of the conviction that I would die in his company numerous times in the last week, the majority in the car. Between narrowly avoiding head-on collisions and scarcely getting the best of hairpin turns on high coastal mountain roads, the hours spent in this car have been time aplenty for reckoning with the impermanence of life. But it appears that everyone drives like maniacs in Croatia, and fatalities on the road are common. A few days ago, while Franziska and I buzzed around Trogir and the surrounding villages on a scooter I rented, Ivo took Aneta to photograph sponge divers on the island of Krapanj. When they returned Aneta looked a bit pale. Later she told us they’d seen two badly mangled bodies about fifty meters from a smashed up car and scooter. I sensed the cosmos folding in on itself, trying to tell me something in code.

Yesterday the girls started whistling random melodies together in the back seat. It was a simple, chaotic little concert, and a perfect understatement of the pure madness and loathing in this vehicle. From the death seat I could see Ivo’s knuckles whitening and face reddening while the speedometer impersonated the second hand of a watch. Silent rage darkened his face with frothing blood, skin and tissue billowing to engulf facial features and eyeglasses like a lava swell from a sulfurous pit. I became concerned that his head might explode, leaving us without a driver, then added a third improvisation to the deformed whistle symphony. The air stewed and thickened, and I half expected the stench of burning flesh to take up residence between us.

We were surrounded by Heaven on Earth. The topography whispered that we had left the planet and entered a paradise realm. To look upon the heartrending glory of the Dalmatian coast is to look directly into the eye of God, and we were four people who might very well dismantle each other if we didn’t die in a fiery wreck. We saw Paradise from within a dark, windowed corner of Hell on wheels.