A Split rainbow

Arriving in Croatia unscathed by climate change

Dateline: Croatia

Population: 4.13 million

Distance from Cape Town: 12 603km

Arrival date: 2 August 2023

Temperature: 31 Degrees Celsius

There were five hours between our arrival at Split train station on Wednesday morning and when we could check in at our ‘apartman’ (real Croatian word – the plural is ‘apartmani’). We walked towards the marina, and then ducked in through the cool entrance way of Diocletian’s Palace and out the back, where someone was taking wedding photographs in the gentle light of the sunrise reflecting off creamy marble. No one is getting married at 7am on Tuesday. This was probably just the shoot.

We walked past a gargantuan statue of a frowning, bearded wizard with a book in one hand and the pointer finger of the other looking like it was trying to zap god off his throne in heaven. ‘Grgur Ninski’, said the wizard’s plinth. Later I found out he was an unruly Catholic priest who demanded from Rome that the Croatian people be allowed to hear the word of God in their own language. Grgur has one enormous shiny big toe. People rub it for good luck. That seems like too vague a wish. More specific would be a toe rubbed shiny to request universal respect for language dignity.

Beyond Grgur’s zealous silhouette is Park Josipa, a tiny spot of respite. At its heart is a fountain. We sat down on a cool marble bench and tucked into the leftovers from two nights and one day’s travel on a train from Berlin to Munich, Munich through Salzburg to Villach in Austria, and from there to Ljubljana in Slovenia, and then Zagreb and overnight to Split. Sam had a roll left. I ate radishes and tomatoes and the second last South African naartjie I’d bought in Berlin the day we left, and the last of the bulger-wheat-and-chickpea salad Sam had made.

It was in this morning quiet in a state of exhilarated exhaustion that I became aware of the noise. Cicadas. Thousands. I have never heard them so loud. It sounded like a twenty sprayers all going at once. And since there were sprayers going, it took a while to work out that the sound was natural, not man-made. I realised then that I knew nothing at all about cicadas other than that they are the sound of heat. I should read up about them, I thought.

A man in a black vest and shorts came into the park with his pug on a leash. The animal strained towards the fountain and the man let go of the leash. Pugs never strike me as energetic dogs, but this one bounce-rolled towards the fountain and put its little legs up on its side and sniffed up at the water. The man picked the pooch up and put it into the shallow basin. It splashed there for a bit and then allowed itself to be lowered back to the path, and be tethered and led off through the other side of the park.

I thought of the Rainer Maria Rilke poem I learned in German at school about the Roman fountain. It starts with ‘Zwei Becken, eins das andere übersteigend’ (‘two basins, one staggered above the other’). I never understood what the poem was about. Was it merely a description of a fountain? I read the translation to Sam. He said it sounded like a bad translation. Maybe it is. But that’s it, I said to him, that’s what the poem says. That really is all of it. It’s called a ‘Dinggedicht’ in German. A poem about a thing. And Rilke made a thing I had never seen with my own eyes, growing up in Pretoria, very vivid.

By our third day in Split, I realised that a lifetime of learning songs and poems and reading books gives one an additional way of encountering the world. You have your own sensory experience, and then layered under it, the experience of writers and painters and artists going back centuries.

The coast is like the edge of a lake and little medieval settlements seem to teeter on the edge of grace here. PICTURE: Andries Samuel

When I turned and floated on my back in the salty Adriatic for the first time, the first thing that came into my head was the ee cummings’ poem ‘I thank You God for most this amazing’

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no 
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

When we got caught in a thunderstorm – the same one that partly obliterated two-thirds of the beautiful Slovenia we chugged through on Tuesday – the song ‘Lightning Crashes’ by Live stayed in my head for the rest of the day. I remembered the times I danced till I cried to this song with my Nia teacher Kathy Wolstenholme who knew how much I loved it.

On the bus, with the long wipers going swish-swish, I sang ‘the wipers on the bus’ to myself. When we drove through a particularly heavy cloudburst, I sang ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring’. We were wet and shivery and excited to drink coffee when we got back from our soggy excursion and when that was done, I thought ‘to bed, to bed, the old man said’, but I can’t establish whether that is a snatch of a children’s rhyme or something I made up.

I thought of another ee cummings poem when I sat at the edge of the teal-green sea one day sifting through the tiny pebbles to distinguish shells and seaglass from pebbles. Its final lines are: ‘…whatever we lose(like a you or a me) / it's always ourselves we find in the sea’.

I thought of all those books about people being ill and getting sent to the coast for sea air so they can get better. What an excellent remedy for just about anything. In Germany and France, you can still get sea air prescribed. Kind of.

One night, we walked the five minutes down to the edge of the sea. The beaches in this part of the country are thin strips of pebble. The waves are delicate undulations that slap softly. When you float with your ears under the water, you hear the pebbles rollings over one another, a sound hidden from the world. One you can only know exists when you discover it for yourself.

We went to see the full moon rising, but it was hidden by a copse of firs. I scanned the night sky and not a single star or constellation was familiar. No Southern Cross. I suddenly felt very disorientated. And foreign. Before that, I’d been feeling very at home with the mountains and big sky, the bougainvillea, canna lilies and oleander, and the dry heat.

We walked back and I sang (of course I did):

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time

You understand now why you came this way

‘Cause the truth you might be running from is so small

But it’s as big as the promise

The promise of a coming day

(‘Southern Cross’ by Crosby, Stills and Nash)

I don’t know whether it’s better or worse to experience the world ‘raw’ and without the fragments that filter down through cultural artefacts. But I do know that most of what I know about anything has been absorbed pleasurably through the artistic endeavours of others. I travelled long before I travelled.

The first night in our compact and well-equipped little apartman in Kaštel, I finished reading the novel Flipped by the South African writer Tracey Hawthorne. I read:

It starts with a single clck-bzz, and soon the copse of trees is alive with sound: two hundred and thirteen sun-loving male cicadas, simultaneously vibrating the drum-like tymbals covering the hollow chambers on their abdomen, calling for mates.

In the short adult phase of its life, just one of these thumbsized winged insects can make a noise that rivals that of a power saw. By the time the sun has cleared the horizon and the heat of the day is setting in, the shrill buzzing is so loud that it sounds like it comes from everywhere at once.

A few more paragraphs followed explaining the lifecycle of cicadas. I thrilled at the coincidence of just that day having thought I need to read up about cicadas.

Flipped is a short, powerful little novel that isn’t only about relationships, but the particular way relationships are set up by the place you live in. Hawthorne’s integration of the drought into the daily lives of her characters is so undramatic that it renders climate change more dramatic than any news story about how the weather is changing and what it means for us.

We are booked to go back the way we came but we can find no indication of whether the train can still go if so much infrastructure, including tracks, was damaged.

Sometimes it feels like travelling – like living – has become a game of climate-change dodgeball.

A rainbow lands in Split. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

I try not spend too much time panicking because if I do, I’ll forget to turn on my back, look up at thunder clouds turning the water to the colour of a pencil tip, and be thankful for most this amazing day.

Lots of love,

K.

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Books by Croatian (and half-Croatian, or Croatia-curious) writers I hope to read when I am buying books again:

• Invisible Woman and Other Stories (Slavenka Drakulić)

• The First Rule of Swimming (Courtney Angela Brkic)

• Mama Leone (Miljenko Jergović)

• Running away to home (Jennifer Wilson)

• Farewell, Cowboy (Olja Savićević)

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