Ragusa, Brad Field [digital e reader .TXT] 📗

725 wds.
RAGUSA
by
Brad Field


Polly and I sat outdoors over drinks on the terrace of a café just north of the gates and walls of the fortress of Dubrovnik--in those day still a tourist gem, one of the prettiest on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. We could see the shady walls and turrets of the fortress to the south of us, the bright sunlit white stone walls of another fort on a hill to the north. Slow tides of tourists ebbed and flowed along the street to the east between bus-stops and the bridge over the castle moat. To the west, the Adriatic showed intensely blue, framed by the walled city on one side, the precipitous white cliffs of the fortified hill on the other. Now and then, at sea, stunningly close, a huge white cruising ship would appear like a soprano on an opera stage, make her slow and dignified cross, exit on the other side of the Adriatic scene. Around us from other tables came waves of happy chatter, in British and American, French, Italian, German, and any number of accents of Serbo-Croatian, the common language that even back then divided the Serbs and the Croats.
This was years ago, before the big bust-up of the old Yugoslavia. Any foreign phone call was hassle there, and the mail was erratic at best. In Venice I had won a Success, with Money suddenly, and the Promising Future to match. I couldn’t get in touch to brag about it to Polly. She was teaching English in Osijek, but I knew that she was scheduled to be in Dubrovnik for a teachers’ conference. So I just came over from Venice on the ferry to find her there, to take up our old affair, to propose.
But she had guessed that I might come. When I said that I loved her, could afford to get married now, I didn’t make many waves. She told me about this other guy in a way that took the wind out of my sails.
So I sat at the café table across from pretty Polly. Her calm and half-regretful smile, half-relieved as well, left me feeling as if I had lost my paddle.
Beyond her and above her loomed that huge stone fortress, white as a sail on its hill. It's an extra fort, built long after Dubrovnik had completed the city walls behind me. They built that extra fort in one year, back in the days when the Venetians called the place Ragusa. In those days the Venetian galleys controlled almost all the trade on both shores of the Adriatic, and also down into Greece, Crete, and Cyprus. Ragusa was one of the few competitors to stay independent of Venice. One fall day at the end of galleys’ safe navigation season, the Venetians rowing by on their way back to harbor for the winter, noticed an empty hill-top just to the north of the city walls of Ragusa. They noted too that if they could get a well-placed set of the new long-range cannons-–ones that had just been developed in Ferrara--on top of that hill, they could reduce Ragusa's northern city walls to gravel in a matter of weeks. After that they would not even need to storm the place; an agreeable treaty--agreeable to Venice--could, with patience, be negotiated.
Someone in Ragusa noticed that they noticed--probably had spies in Venice, one of the greatest armories in the West at that time--and Ragusa took steps. When, at the opening of the next spring’s rowing season, the Venetians arrived with their galleys loaded with war material, they found that hill not empty at all, but fortified, that very fortress that sits up there still.
I leaned back in my chair in the café, looked away from the fort to Polly's charming face, then at our empty glasses, and then out at the Adriatic, empty too. Polly's preparation to conclude--not continue--our relationship made me realize how the Venetians must have felt all those years ago when they first spotted that fortress on the hill, as they let their oars drag in the water to slow the galleys, then to row again, slowly and sluggishly to turn, all the way around to the north, to carry their guns and siege-gear back to Venice again.

The End

Publication Date: 11-05-2009

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