The directions we were given: Go straight, turn right, then follow the narrow winding road where local drivers come hurtling around sharp bends.
The directions sounded easy enough. That is, until we reached the fork in the road. On our right were three diverging paths and on our left was one. Psh and I repeated the directions we were given, quite certain that the “right” hadn’t been qualified. No first, second, or third right. Just right. We peered into the distance from the windscreen of our tiny rental car. There were no hurtling local cars flying around bends. Any of the rights could be wrong.
What we did know about Lovcen National Park, where we were heading, was that there was a mausoleum at the top of a hill.
“That seems to go up a hill,” said Psh.
“What about that — ,” I said, but we were already hurtling around a bend.
The white paint dividing lanes on the old paved highway petered out as the car began the climb. Soon, the paved highway petered out to a large clearing blocked off because of a rockfall. The mountains of Montenegro aren’t very high but they have a specific geological formation. Dark, craggy rocks that seem to have rolled into tribes gathered in groups across the landscape, some rising into hillocks, others into sturdy, old hills. These were the rocks that gave the country its name, however politically-incorrect the name may sound today.
***
A battered blue Volkswagen came hurtling around a bend and almost hit us. Psh was shaken enough to honk. Having honked once, he gathered courage to honk again and began to use the honk around bends and soon, the honking grew frequent even when there was no bend. Psh’s childhood ambition was to become a conductor in a truck on Nepal’s narrow highways. His idea of the job’s duties being to ride in the back of the truck and tell jokes to keep the driver awake. To Psh, the job of the driver is to honk a lot. Yes, to warn other vehicles, but mostly to distract the driver himself (most truck drivers were men) from thinking about the narrowness of the highway or the steep fall that is only a few millimeters away from the road’s eroding edges. Some semblance of this idea must have woken up in Psh as the Montenegrin road grew narrower and rockier because the blare of the car’s horn became more constant. That is, until a white van pulled up next to a precarious area and its driver signaled us to stop.
“Zdravo,” he said. One of the few Slavic words we knew.
“Zdravo,” we said, proud of the fact that we had understood and could reply his greeting. The driver, encouraged, launched into a conversation, occasionally banging the van’s side with his palm. We strained our ears as if straining would unpack the foreign language and allow us to grasp its meaning. The string of unfamiliar sounds continued with its march. We nodded and smiled, hoping that it would reflect our drowning feeling of incomprehension. The man seemed not to notice. He only saw agreements in our nods, and spoke even more passionately, waving his arms and pointing in various directions. We followed the movements of his hands to find clues, unlock the meaning of his words via gestures but they seemed to be as incomprehensible. One moment he was pointing at a tree, another moment at the vast expanse of cloudless sky, before his pointing finger caligraph-ied into a fist and he struck the side of the van again. Was he talking about the weather?
Read also: Broadside: In-transit design
Psh stepped on the accelerator to signal the end of the conversation so the van would allow us space to pass it by. The subtlety of the loud engine noise was lost. It was as if the man had finally found listening ears along the lonely, old highway. Only when a small, red car came hurtling around a bend, screeched to a halt, backed up, as if to gain more momentum and crash into us, the man stopped talking for a second. Psh honked loudly to let the red car know we were there. The van’s driver almost started a steady flow of words, frowned, as if annoyed by the interruption, then finally waved and drove off.
What had he been talking about?
“Maybe he was trying to warn us about the red car, I think,” said Psh.
“Or maybe he was trying to tell you to not honk so much,” I said.
We both sat silent as the narrow road wound around opening up a vista of landscape we hadn’t seen before. The hill with the mausoleum stood in the distance and it was nowhere near the direction in which we were headed.
A little further off, on the side of the road was a bungalow with a car parked outside. While Psh tried to connect to a weak 3G network, whose loading signal — the circle — circled more than we had circled around the city of Cetinje, I went to knock on the door. There was no doorbell. Nobody answered. The car parked outside had two wheels missing. The windows were bolted. The place was abandoned. An arrow sign ahead said Podgorica, Montenegro’s capital, which was more inland than we were headed.
Read also: Broadside: The great mystification of mathematics in Nepal
We turned around and headed back to Cetinje, the former capital, from where we had come. We allowed cars hurtling behind us to pass us by. No one stopped us. No one else seemed to be headed the way we had returned. Psh had calmed down and there was no honking, but for some reason, neither of us could shake off the conversation with the driver of the white van.
“Maybe he was asking us where we were headed,” said Psh.
“Or trying to warn us of that stretch of rocky road,” I said.
“Or tell us about that abandoned house.”
“Maybe he was trying to tell us of his childhood.”
“Or his political beliefs –”
“Or of how he must leave this place and go elsewhere.”
“What was he trying to tell us?”
We pondered on the mysterious meaning of the conversation we had not understood as we headed back to the fork in the road. What we did know was that to head left, which was now our right, would take us to Lovcen Park.
(This article is the first chapter of a series. The writer is based in France and can be reached at [email protected].)
