Trg

I can only say it looked a face twice devastated. This may have been hindsight, as I would later understand the history behind this man's face, but I think not. The first time I saw him, I wondered what tragedies had befallen that visage, and was sure that no single event could have created such devastation. It also, in time, gave me the sense of a country, a nation small enough for the anecdotal and the personal to come together and reveal a past far greater than the individuals under discussion.

After initially noticing him, I would see him again and again, during that trip. I saw him too when I returned to this small city on the Croatian coast three years later. He would always be seated outside a café on a narrow side street in the old town of Zadar, a fortress city that was popular but still less so than the fortified towns further down the Adriatic, such as Split and Dubrovnik. The side street was the first turning to the right once inside the walls after crossing the bridge and passing under the arch. The streets would feel like cobbled marble under your feet, and would be slippery when it rained.

I first noticed him at this cafe for two reasons. It was night, and most of the other customers were much younger, while the music coming from the speakers was a hypnotic beat, containing an inducement. Nothing in this man’s demeanour indicated he was inclined to move to such rhythms. The second reason was that he possessed a face that was wrinkled like a hand, and his head sat massively on his shoulders, as though a third the size of his body. It made him resemble those drawings children sometimes sketch that have no sense of proportion.

I saw him again the next morning in the same spot, drinking a macchiato rather than a beer, and I noticed much more clearly in daylight this etched, ravaged face. It made other people’s look un-used, second-hand, with low mileage. I didn’t doubt his face had a story to tell, but on this first visit, I was neither quite fascinated enough by, nor linguistically capable of, exploring it. I spoke no Croatian; I assumed he spoke no English.

I was only in the city on that first occasion for three nights. It was part of a six-week trip around the Balkans, and someone I met in the hostel in Istanbul, from Croatia, proposed that since I was going along the Adriatic coast before flying back to the UK from Trieste, I should visit his home town. He wanted to know what I’d think. We’d been talking for several hours over afternoon chai, looking out over the Bosporus from the European side to the Asian continent. The next day, he was going to travel further east, while I was going to pass through northern Greece, Macedonia, Albania and along to the Adriatic. We’d been discussing Istanbul when he said I seemed a good observer, maybe I should visit his town and muse over its merits or otherwise. And so I did, writing Marko a long email after returning to Edinburgh, discussing what I thought was distinctive about this small city. Yet nothing was more so than that man’s face.

The reason behind that six-week trip was an ambition. I wanted to become a travel writer and managed to persuade a magazine to let me write a weekly dispatch, hoping this would lead to more journalistic work and a book about the region. My PhD was on the rise of Ataturk, and I learnt a little Turkish and Armenian for the doctorate. I spoke French and Spanish better, but I hoped I could pass myself off as knowledgeable about the Balkan region, because of the PhD. I did indeed find a publisher in Edinburgh who accepted the book, and its publication in turn led to regular work for the newspaper to which I am now affiliated. It was why I found myself again in Zadar three years after that initial visit.

It was a twelve-day trip to the Adriatic coastline, incorporating Dubrovnik, Split and Zadar. Before going, I contacted Marko to see if he would be in his hometown when I would be there. My stay was only three nights. Oddly, he was returning the night before my departure. We could at least meet for a drink, perhaps dinner.

I probably hadn’t thought much about the man during those three years, but as I crossed the bridge, instead of continuing past Narodni Tag and onto the studio apartment I’d rented, I detoured left and along the side street, where I saw, shielded from the morning sunlight, the man sitting with his macchiato and a glass of water untouched beside it. I passed again in the evening, and he was there once more. The music was loud, repetitive and with a beat to match the heart’s rhythm. The next day it was the same — he was there in the morning and again in the evening.

As Marko returned, I met him in a cafe on the walls of the town. The music was mainly British pop hits of the eighties, pleasantly synth, occasionally sax-oriented, and often lyrically agreeable. I compared it to the music played in some of the other cafes in the city and mentioned the one along the side street. I talked about the man sitting there, who I couldn’t believe was responsive to the sounds playing.

Marko asked me to describe the man, and only the briefest of descriptions was necessary. I asked him if he knew the man’s story. He said he did, but story might not be the appropriate word. Marko and many others knew it — he just didn’t know if it was true, though maybe knew more about its truth than most. It came from too many sources to be reliable — and there he was adding to the potential fiction. The best he could do was tell it as if it were a story, though he didn’t doubt there was plenty that was veritable in his telling.

Nikola and Ivo were never really friends; more rivals who studied at the same university and couldn’t quite deny the significance of the other one, somehow accepting their differences as useful enough to believe they were the most talented architectural students of their years, without assuming initially they were in direct competition. Nikola Kamen was deemed the artist, and Ivo Trg — the man I would see each day at the cafe —the visionary. Both showed signs of anti-communism at a time when it was still alive, even if the man who was deemed to hold together the Yugoslavian socialist state, Joseph Tito, had recently died. They both probably understood that with Tito gone, Yugoslavia would become more market-oriented. For Kamen, this potentially offered the artist greater creativity; for Trg, the relaxation of capital could lead to the influx of money into the country. He could see Croatians keen to live more like Westerners in houses that would reflect their expectations, and no longer possessed of restrictions that gave them somewhere to live but little opportunity to express their identity.

For Trg, this notion of selfhood was closely affiliated with expressions of affluence. For Kamen, it was predicated on an expression of singularity. He saw a post-communist architecture based on architects working with clients who wished to live in homes that were in harmony with their personalities and the environment. In contrast, Trg saw a future where money dominated, and it would show in people’s houses, with material success at its most fundamental.

They were both studying in Zagreb, and these conversations took place in a cafe on a street next to the main square, one that would lead into the forest. Sometimes, when Trg and Kamen were still capable of talking to each other without anger, they would leave the others in the cafe and walk there. Kamen saw in the trees the wood he so admired as a material, just as he saw in the rocks the basis for building homes that would last. Glass was for windows, he would insist, while for Trg, concrete and glass were the materials that might not last but would better reflect the glories of newfound wealth.

Their arguments were forcefully expressed, but it wasn’t until they incorporated a sculptural student in their cafe group from the same year that they became consistently acrimonious with each other. Camilla Kiparstvo was dissatisfied with socialist limitations and didn’t want a career making monuments for the people or the glories of Yugoslavia. But her anti-communism was closer to Kamen’s than to Trg’s. She saw communism’s failure not in the limited amount of money one could earn but in the greater freedom the individual could attain. Like Kamen, she admired in many ways the balance the country had achieved between socialism and relative autonomy — including the freedom to travel abroad. She wanted the security to remain and the freedoms to be expanded. Trg thought the whole thing would collapse — and it couldn’t happen soon enough.

How to describe these people physically? Marko knew that only a partial description was needed for Trg - I knew Trg in the present, had been fascinated by his imposing head and the innumerable wrinkles. The visage would have changed, but he would probably always have been stocky and never handsome. He was, however, always a man of immense, almost charismatic vigour. Kamen was taller and leaner, with thick hair, already greying in his mid-twenties, and the only one anybody knew who didn’t eat meat. He smiled rarely, but his blue eyes were always alert and curious, and this almost passed for a warmth that wouldn’t have otherwise been present. He was neither cold nor affable but socially neutral, conveying an integrity and purpose that would make most social interactions appear superficial. He wasn’t a young man people liked or disliked. He was admired or mocked, for his ideas were so integral to his personality.

Trg was liked or disliked, could be warm or cool, and believed in the importance of engaging with others personably or dismissively. He often laughed at those who disagreed with him, and did so without the sincerity of argument but with the wisdom of prophecy. He would tell people to wait and see — he would be proved right. Communism would collapse, and the individual would become all-important. He was preparing for this inevitability, and he would build accordingly. Kiparstvo was willowy and elegant. She dressed without great expense but with an astute style that made others assume she would buy her clothes in Paris, New York or London. She smiled secretively and knowingly — she often made the clothes herself, using local materials, her own sewing machine and based on images she took from Western fashion magazines. It was clear to others that Nikola’s indifference to even basic social niceties meant that he was unlikely to be given to seduction, while Camilla was initially unwilling to see in this coolness anything other than arrogance. In time, she saw it was part of the solidity of his being rather than a disdainful aspect of it and, as they began going for walks before meeting others at the cafe, it became inevitable they would become lovers.

When he realised they were, Trg was infuriated. He may or may not have been in love with Camilla, but he had tried to seduce her with far more purpose than Kamen and, if his heart wasn’t broken, his pride was wounded. Maybe it isn’t easy to distinguish one from the other in most, but in Trg it was impossible. The rivalry between Trg and Kamen became a one-sided animosity, and some believed that out of this slight, Trg decided to do whatever was necessary to become a far more famous figure than Kamen, and also steal Kipartsvo from him.

And so it would be. Now, Marko said, I could probably be easily convinced that Trg would go on to become a successful architect, no matter if I may have believed I saw a defeated man at the cafe bar. But history can intrude on the personal and even alter people’s feelings. For ten years, Nikola and Camilla were together. They never married but were so publicly perceived as a couple that no ceremony with guests or a priest could have matched what was seen as their commitment to each other.

However, after ten years, the war started. Nikolai wanted nothing to do with it, and his long-standing vegetarianism met with what seemed like an inevitable pacifism — someone who for fifteen years refused to harm animals wasn’t inclined suddenly to start harming human beings — even Serbians. He said this with sarcasm and added, to clarify, he had no more respect for the Serbian leader than he had for Croatian war-mongers. He would say this not only to Camilla but to long-term friends. Everyone he knew said he needed to fight; he insisted he would not. Nor would he leave the country. At the time, he and Camilla were living in Dubrovnik, and he took a boat to a tiny island off it and he built for himself, on a small piece of land he had long since bought, a compact cottage made out of the stones he found on the island, and the tiles that he took from disused buildings. He was helped by a couple of islanders who wanted nothing to do with the war either, though their reasoning was quite different from Nikola’s. They were farmers who saw killing animals as part of their job but didn’t see killing fellow Yugoslavians as part of their duty. Why would they want to kill people from the same country, they insisted, unaware of the rise in national politics in both Croatia and Serbia. Kamen was relieved to find people who would help him on this island, with fewer than a hundred living there, and he was also relieved that it was on so underpopulated an island that he had bought land without at all thinking that he would one day need to retreat to it because of a civil war.

Perhaps if it had been one of the bigger islands, he would have been hounded and harassed, told to be a man and fight for his country. But no, between 1991 and 1996, he lived there, heating the home with trees he would cut down, as he relied on vegetables he cultivated and fruit (lemons, limes, apples and figs) hanging from nearby trees. He fished three times a week from a small rowing boat he purchased from the farmers, and relied on his savings to buy eggs, milk and other items. Of course, this vegetarian was now eating fish, and he wasn’t oblivious to the irony: he had escaped the mainland to avoid slaughtering humans, found himself surviving by using a hook and nets to haul in living things, and then slapping their skulls against rocks. He could see Camilla scoffing at this, disgusted as his cowardice met hypocrisy. Or he would have, had she joined him. Instead, he often merely had her in his mind as they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since the start of the war.

Kamen would think about her often; how could he not, since they had been together for a decade, lived in the same capacious apartment in Dubrovnik, and whose only luxury was space? She needed a studio, and he had an office that was also often occupied by a couple of apprentices. But the house on three floors was drafty and relied on fireplaces in the main rooms. The furniture they found, rather than purchased, and Kamen liked that Camilla was not interested in luxury and didn’t expect it. During their decade together, he never feared she would find herself making compromises to attract wealthier clients, but while on the island, he worried about what he saw in the last period they were together was an increasingly national fervour, one that would lead to work promoting the Croatian cause more than it was furthering artistic progress. Camilla had always been more interested than Kamen in art serving a cause; it must have a value beyond its presence in the world. She wasn’t unsympathetic to the principles behind Social Realism, only that it was often used by governments that weren’t worthy of it, corrupt, degenerate regimes. Kamen reckoned what mattered wasn’t the social purposes art could serve but a respect for the sources that it used. That would itself be political, he'd say, one harmonious with the planet rather than proselytising for an idea. They had always argued gently about these notions until the year before the war started, and she became more insistent about art’s duty to the nation and his to the idea that nations dissolved into land, into the resources that everyone could use but use carefully and with respect.

During the years on the island, he was in contact with no one but other islanders. He had no phone line and only occasionally sent and received letters. Newspapers would arrive on the island and were sold at its only shop, but Nikola rarely bought one. He occasionally did so to comprehend the war’s developments, though often relied on conversations with the farmers who, after many years showing little interest in the news, were now more inclined to keep up. Yet they would follow the events as if they were happening on the other side of the world rather than not so many miles from the island. The farmers were in their seventies and managed to sit out one world war, so didn’t feel at all obliged to fight in a skirmish nearby that they were far too old to fight in anyway. During WWII, they were young farmers whose obligation to the war effort rested on providing food for troops on the mainland, and every week a boat would come over and they would deposit milk, eggs, cheese and meat. They knew the war was over when this was no longer a requirement, though they continued selling to people beyond the island.

For Kamen, it wasn’t that he was still a young man, and the farmers were not, that led him to have moments of shame, moments where he would wonder if he shouldn’t have retreated to the island at all. He was aware history had impacted upon him far more than these men who had never married (there were no women to marry), never left the island, and whose lives were made up of days and seasons. They didn’t even think in weeks, months or years because they were of little relevance to them: days were important as they needed to understand the imperatives placed upon them in making sure their animals were fed and the chores covered, and the seasons no less so as they shaped their crops and animal feed around the weather changes, however relatively mild they were on this Adriatic island. There didn’t even seem much of a sense of loss in their childless status: they were constantly around birth and renewal in the animals they looked after, fed and slaughtered. Their lives appeared so simple, and Kamen was sometimes envious of this simplicity and vigilant to the condescension it contained. That vigilance may have been what generated the shame.

He also knew, though, that his life was contradictory as their lives were not: he had grown up in a communist country, benefiting from it in the education he received and the burgeoning success of his architectural firm, one that had been reliant on contracts from all across Yugoslavia. Perhaps he could have persuaded himself to fight for that cause: to insist he wanted a united nation and not the splintering into regions. Yet this would have led him to fight for the Serbians, and whatever his feelings towards Tudman, this didn’t mean that Milosovic was any better. They may have both been belligerent, but Tudman wanted to defend Croatia, Milosovic wished to monopolise the Balkans. Even Kamen was willing to accept the claim was more than his country’s propaganda. So there he was, unwilling to fight for a cause he didn’t believe in, and unable to fight for one that no longer was an ideal but an act of oppression. His pacifism sometimes seemed to him cover for at least dealing with a contradiction, though others would have viewed it as a cover for cowardice. Maybe they were right, he thought, for how pacifist was he as he picked away at the bones of the fish. At least he turned down the occasional offers of free cuts of meat when he came to buy cheese, eggs and milk. They were around a mile away from his house on the island that was no more than four miles long and three miles wide, and he went everywhere by bike. If the farmers were outside of history, he knew he was merely escaping it.

Camilla and Ivo were immersing themselves in that history; Camilla perhaps naively, Trg many would say cynically. His company was involved in rebuilding at modest rates towns and villages destroyed in the war and, though he was not involved in the fighting, he could often be seen in combat fatigues, offering interviews and making many a patriotic statement. Kipartsvo was making sculptures of soldiers and generals, in works without nuance, and when a couple of critics proposed this was so, rather than arguing why the work was of merit, she insisted that if the art was lacking in texture, then that was necessary during such difficult times. The impression some had was that Kipartsvo was producing honest work out of a misguided sense of loyalty to her country; Trg saw an opportunity to align himself with the nationalist cause, all the better to make money from it. After the war, Camilla returned to producing far superior work than during it, and when asked why the work was so simple while the country was at war, would say that she saw herself as contributing to the war effort the way a farmer would: if the soldiers needed simple protein to feed their bodies, then in turn they needed simple art to feed their spirits. Yet her reputation remained that of a mediocre sculptor, even if someone who looked carefully at the work she did before the war, and after it, as opposed to during the conflict, could see that the war work was not of the same value. Yet few could see it because she was never more famous than during the war years. It was this period that many people saw as her famous work.

During this time, she also started seeing Trg and, not long after the war ended, they married. Those who knew Camilla, Trg and Nikola saw in it revenge against Nikola for leaving her and retreating to the island; others insisted that she could see that even if she were to forgive Nikola, it would have been a terrible career move. Nobody was going to employ him in post-war Croatia. Everyone wanted to employ Trg. Most agreed, however, that there might have been an aspect of revenge and a modicum of pragmatism, but, most of all, people could see that Camilla would admire enormously a man who was so involved in the Croatian national cause. Over the next ten years, they became among the best-known couples in the country, appearing in magazines and newspapers. If no major critic or public curator any longer took Camilla’s work seriously, she was popular among private dealers, and sold a lot of work in Germany and the US. Trg was becoming very rich indeed, buying almost as many properties as he built. People would talk of him as one of the key architects of the post-war years, the visionary that a new country needed. He put up hotels, schools, apartment blocks and leisure centres. There was nothing distinguishable about them, but their foursquare shape and style became the standard for modern Croatia, with people turning away from stonebuilds and tiled roofs, towards the flat and forbidding. In those first few years, most of the places he built relied on government contracts, and with the money he bought up property on the coast. He hoped, in time, to move on to buying large amounts of land, where he would then build his own hotels and apartment blocks.

In that decade after the war, many were jealous of Trg, but it came out mainly in dismissive remarks about his wife’s work, as though they knew that criticising Trg would have been beside the point. He never pretended to have artistic ambitions — he had commercial imperatives and met them well. Nobody could throw up a building more quickly or cheaply than Trg, while Camilla, when interviewed, would speak of her admiration for Rodin, Henry Moore, Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth and Croatia’s own great sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic. Her pretensions led others to mock her, even if her work before the war was valued, and her work during it so deliberately served the nation’s interests. Few seemed to believe it was unfair that her sincerity should be mocked, while Trg’s cynicism was admired.

For ten years, Trg could do no wrong, until he did wrong and could do no right. It wasn’t only that he cheated on Camilla, it was that he did so with a woman who could have been his daughter, which in turn would have been acceptable if the rumour hadn’t been that it was his daughter.

In his late teens and early twenties, before meeting Kamen and before attending architectural college, Trg got engaged to a girl from the same town and, when he broke it off, she started drinking and sleeping with other men. Some said she loved Trg so much that she was trying to escape her pain with momentary pleasure, and alcohol alone wouldn’t suffice. She woke up with a man next to her in her studio apartment and was so horrified it wasn’t Trg, she would throw the man out, yet went looking for another that evening. It was said she slept with fifty men, and a few teenagers lost their virginity to her. This all took place within eighteen months, and after, she found God — an easy figure to find in an independent Croatia that allowed its latent Catholicism to become blatant, but it was one that she discovered many years before that.

It was this woman’s daughter Trg slept with, initially unaware that she was his first-love’s offspring. She was twenty-four, a pharmaceutical student in Zagreb, and he met her when she was doing an internship in a pharmacy near where he lived. He saw her two or three times in the shop, and then she would often be having a coffee at the same time as he was, and they would say hello. Once he asked her to join him for a coffee, and in time an affair started. At first, when it was revealed, reporters made much of the age gap and even offered the occasional cruel headline that read beauty and the beast. Trg was of course never attractive, and Camilla was known to be beautiful, but it was as if the age discrepancy with the young woman brought out all the more Trg’s ugliness. Trg may have felt personally insulted, even hurt. But nothing suggested he showed it. When Camilla became aware of the affair through the newspapers, she gave an interview to one of them, saying she would start divorce proceedings immediately. Again, it appeared that Trg was ok with this. But next came the rumours that would be the first stage of his destruction — to the development of those deep lines I saw on his face.

His lover, people said, and the papers reported, offering unnamed sources, was his daughter. What could Trg say? He could have insisted she wasn’t, but where was his evidence? All of it moved in the direction indicating she was. The papers noted that the girl was from a particular town, that Trg had gone out with her mother in his youth, and around the same time that the child was born. It didn’t help that the mother, now crazy with religion, proposed that it was entirely possible Trg was the father of her child, and there he was, not only happy having destroyed her life, but was now destroying the next generation as well. It had all the elements of Greek tragedy interacting with the most scurrilous of gossip, and the newspapers reported on it for several months, longer than the time the affair lasted.

Commentators thought it was too much of a coincidence that Trg and this young woman met without deliberation on somebody’s part. Some reckoned Trg had sought her out, perhaps initially trying to make contact with a daughter he had never known, and found himself appallingly attracted to her. Others proposed that he knew nothing about her: that her mother had persuaded her to take an internship next to Trg’s place and hoped he would take a liking to this girl and ruin his life over her. In these claims, some saw the mother as an unequivocal monster; others saw her as merely a manipulative one, well aware that her daughter wasn’t Trg’s but who wanted revenge after hurting her so many years before. Some believed it had nothing to do with the mother, or at least not directly. They assumed the mother had been speaking so much about this man she once loved that Trg intrigued the daughter, so she sought him out, and that was how the affair started. The scandal was great enough for Trg to lose more than a wife. Government contracts, while none were cancelled, were not renewed. Trg didn’t need the money — he had by then a property empire of his own. However, his reputation as the architect of post-war Croatia was gone and, though there were other scandals during these years that showed up a new nation as far from an innocent one, nobody was more associated with this than Trg.

It was around a year after the scandal that Camilla and Kamen were once again in contact and became at least friends. Many said lovers. They never again lived together,

but Marko said he could say with some confidence Camilla and Kamen had a child together. Kamen was living mainly in Berlin at the time, but when he heard about Trg betraying Camilla he contacted her and she asked him to visit her at what had become her holiday home. In the divorce, all she asked from Trg was one of the Zagreb flats, and also one of the few places on the coast that Trg owned, one that wasn’t a vulgar new build. She had been involved in the renovation herself.

Marko said it was a house about 6 kilometres outside Zadar, stone- built and with a sloping tiled roof, and about a hundred metres away from the tiny harbour. She moved between the two cities and even learned to drive for the purpose, often lugging sculptures and work equipment in the back of the car and in the boot. Most of the work was now being done in a converted studio in the Diklo house, and any teaching and writing she did, she would do in Zagreb. In time, she began to regain her reputation as a serious sculptor, and while she never renounced her work during the war, she did contextualise it. She taught a course on the difference between propaganda and morale-boosting — the difference between creating art that professed an ideology, and another that wished to give people point and purpose during a moment of crisis like a war. She had no interest in creating art specifically defending the Croatian cause once the war was over, and was willing to admit that the work she created during this period was not her best. Sculpture, generally, she believed, isn’t there to serve a specific function but, during those years, this is what she wanted it to do. People supposed that such conversations came out of discussions she would be having with Kamen; that both of them had reason to wonder whether they acted well during the war years. Kamen retreated to his island; Kipartsvo advanced into the public eye. Yet the consensus appeared to be that both acted with sincerity, no matter the antithetical positions they took. These conversations between them no doubt would take place often in cafes in Zadar, while drinking a coffee in the morning; a glass of wine or a beer in the evening. Kamen would visit her often, though rarely in Zagreb, as if what he sought from Camilla was the tranquillity of the sea and the gentle pace of a small village. Zadar itself may have become a tourist town of some magnitude, but Camilla and Nikola occupied it in such a way they managed to avoid the hordes. They knew of quiet cafes, went to the market at 730, and watched the sunset sometimes by the harbour on fold-up chairs they brought from the house, accompanied by a bottle of wine.

As Marko was telling me all this, of course I wondered how he knew so much about the lives of these three people. How could he know of Camilla and Nikola and their fold-up chairs and their bottle of wine; how did he know she helped renovate the stone-built house? It made sense that he knew all about the scandal that led Camilla to leave Trg — that would no doubt have been very common knowledge and a scandal that lingered enough for people to continue discussing it for weeks, months, perhaps years. And yet even this might have been of no interest to a person who wouldn’t have been born when it took place.

Marko smiled as if able to explain himself lucidly, while containing an enigma he at that moment felt under no obligation to reveal. He said that these were all well-known figures; Croatia was a small enough country that the few famous people it did have became objects of curiosity, and were viewed as people somewhere between celebrity and familiarity. They were like everybody else, just better known. They had also all written books about their lives, and Marko had read them all. I asked him a bit more about Nikola, and he said that Kamen after the war moved to Germany, lived for a few years in Berlin and, more recently, had been living in a village in the south of France. He also often worked in villages in the Italian south. In Berlin, he was involved in a couple of housing projects, public buildings that would be made out of traditional materials, using stones and tiles taken from small villages that were underpopulated, where the buildings were disused, and used them to build anew. In France, he was working with the local department, renovating numerous houses that were in states of disrepair and the government was offering them to those who were struggling to find places to live in bigger cities. His job was to make the houses as attractive as he could; the government’s purpose was to find jobs that people could do either within the village or within commuting distance. In Italy, there was an increasing number of villages left all but deserted, and he, along with a number of other architects, wanted to find ways to make them commercially viable without necessarily making a profit. They were paid to make them habitable, and the government would find ways to sell them off, often by making these unloved towns lovable once again, providing enough amenities to make them attractive to a mixture of tourists, locals, artists and retirees.

At no stage during these years, however, did Kamen build anything in Croatia. It may have been because his refusal to involve himself in the war led to successive Croatian governments refusing to employ him in any capacity after it. Some might have said that Trg had immense power in the decade after Croatian independence and probably wouldn’t have allowed Kamen to access any contracts But it was more likely that Croatia was interested in building fast, using concrete and glass, and would have seen Kamen’s work as old-fashioned, even conservative.

Marko then revealed the second catastrophe in Trg’s life. People wondered if Trg ever got over both Camilla and the scandal. The affair with the young woman lasted less time than the scandal remained residually in the newspapers, and, for years afterwards, many would talk about the architect who slept with his daughter. He would also have seen himself losing his partner to a great rival, even if others might have believed he stole her from Kamen in the first place. Such thinking, of course, gave little place for Camilla as an independent agent making her own choices, yet Trg all but revealed, in his autobiographical book about post-independent Croatian architecture, that this was how he felt. His book contained self-pity alongside numerous useful anecdotes about the years after the war, though it was published before Trg was implicated in a tower housing nine hundred, collapsing in a city in China, and some had forgotten the affair with a woman who could have been his daughter. It wasn’t badly reviewed.

Nevertheless, in the years after the affair, Trg found it hard to gain employment in Croatia. Trg was in a country increasingly Catholic, and morality mattered. Even when it was clear Trg hadn’t slept with his own daughter, he was nevertheless perceived by many to be sleazy and his character questionable. He found contracts in countries that didn’t care much for his personal life, could see that he had an impressive resume and might be the sort of figure who could usefully put up buildings quickly and cheaply in their country. He found work in Turkey and also elsewhere in the region. But he became perhaps obscenely rich when he received contracts in China during the 21st century. He was no longer a visionary public figure at home, but an anonymous one abroad whose shrinking reputation was compensated for by an accumulating bank account. By 2016, he was a multi-millionaire, and people who knew him said that he no longer cared what Croatians thought about his moral life; he was an architect of international standing.

No doubt the richest one in Croatia, perhaps one of the richest in Europe. Yet while his wealth remained intact, his reputation was finally ruined when one of these edifices collapsed. China was building with a rapidity that far outstripped anything that happened in Croatia after its war, or even in Europe after WWII. Many of these buildings in China had been built with sustainable materials and within strict building regulations, but many hadn’t, and some of these latter dwellings had been designed by Trg. Nine hundred people were in this high-rise building on the day it fell, and twenty-two people died. The story made Croatian newspapers, but it made them all over again when Croatia was hit by a Mw 6.4 earthquake, and various older buildings in Zagreb and elsewhere were badly damaged. Some architects proposed it was lucky they were built to withstand such a seismic event, but, luckily, very few had been designed by Trg. This wasn’t fair — none of Trg’s Croatian buildings suffered major damage. But events demand scapegoats. Trg had been critical of Croatian architects in the 21st century, and when large sums of money came in from China, he would flaunt the cash without caring to share the source of that money. While other Croatian architects may have liked to supplement their modest Croatian incomes with Chinese cash, Trg kept the market to himself. This is what was said, and this was why they turned on him after the Croatian quake.

From a certain perspective, one might have looked at Trg’s life as that of continual success or steady failure, and the person best qualified to claim it was one or the other would have been Trg himself. He owned numerous homes in Croatia and apartments elsewhere, but more and more he lived in a flat in the centre of Zadar's old town, only a hundred yards from the cafe where I would see him seated. The flat was a converted nunnery, turned into three flats on the first floor, and one apartment above them that he occupied. Why Zadar? Marko sometimes wondered whether he wished to be closer to Camilla, though he knew they never met up, even if they may have occasionally passed each other on the town’s narrow streets, and may or may not have said hello. It might have been because he wanted to live in this town close to where he was born, and because the bar seemed the only business he owned. All the other places were apartments that he rented out.

That evening, Marko and I talked for around three hours, and after the bar we carried on to a restaurant. I said I needed to get back to the hotel and do a little work, but mentioned that I had a couple of hours in the morning free if he wanted to meet for a coffee after breakfast. We arranged a time and a place.

Usually, in the evening I tried to write up my impressions of the day, and would edit them into coherent shape the next morning. But that night, I wasn’t sure what images I could put down since they weren’t of places I could describe but of a story I’d been told. I thought about Marko and how much he knew about these three characters, accepting that Croatia was a country with fewer than five million and famous people weren't so numerous. Also, all three had written autobiographies. I knew, too, that Marko had written his PhD on post-war Croatian history and culture. It would make sense that he had read about them. Yet I wondered if this would quite explain a fascination with the lives of these figures.

I had breakfast in the hotel and then walked around the town one final time. I still had forty-five minutes and thought about crossing the bridge, but there was nothing to see unless I went further afield, and a walk out of the gates on the other side and along to the end of the peninsula would take at least an hour. I went to Trg's cafe and was surprised to see that he wasn’t there. I tried to recall the times that I passed and saw him sitting outside drinking his macchiato and his glass of water. I realised I was probably a little early, so ordered the same thing Trg would usually get — hardly a rarity for a Croatian, nor for a tourist — and waited. As the time passed and Trg still hadn’t arrived, I thought of sending a text to Marko saying we could meet where I was sitting, yet something stopped me.

While paying the bill, I saw walking towards the cafe Trg, a newspaper under his arm, and wearing baggy beige chinos that still looked tight on his thick legs, and a white T-shirt that suggested a man who was both strong and slothful, a person who may have exercised with weights but didn’t quite exercise the same discipline in the kitchen. It was the first time I‘d seen him on his feet, and the impression was of a mass that couldn’t easily be shifted. As I got up to leave, he sat down at the table next to mine and acknowledged my presence with a nod. In another country, this may not have been so surprising, but Croatians aren’t known for unsolicited acknowledgements, and I felt as if he somehow knew that I was aware of his presence beyond this moment. Yet, as I walked across the main square towards the side-street cafe where I was meeting Marko, I supposed he nodded because he was simply the owner, and may have greeted everybody likewise.

Marko was there when I arrived, with a book open in front of him and a half-empty macchiato. I laughed, saying we could have met a bit earlier; I’d already had a coffee. I also said I saw Trg once again, and he had nodded. If I wondered whether Trg may have been his father, I wondered too if it might have been Kamen, or that neither man was his father, but Camilla perhaps his mother. When I proposed to Marko that I found myself wondering if any of these people were his parents, he suggested I should write detective fiction rather than travel writing. I said he was being slippery, and he insisted that, no, I was being reductive. It was perhaps a consequence of coming from a large nation, where the well-known and the unknown are so far apart. Croatia was a small one, and the gap wasn’t so great, and he was a historian who had read all their biographies. He was also observant, knew the town well, and viewed its inhabitants, those who would be deemed famous and those who weren't. Knowing that Kiparstvo lived in Diklo, he wasn’t surprised to have seen Kamenthere with her on one occasion, and in Zadar town centre on two or three others. And, obviously, he would see Trg often. Even I saw Trg on a few occasions.

He asked if Trg had paid for my coffee. I said he hadn’t, adding that I was receiving my change just as he sat at his table. Marko said that if he’d arrived a few minutes earlier, he would have insisted on paying. He often did. He guessed it made him feel good for the briefest of moments when most of the time he felt very bad indeed. There wasn’t an architect in Croatia who spoke well of him, and many who would be happy to mock his architectural ambitions and how they had ruined Croatia aesthetically after the war. The Serbs did far less damage destroying buildings than Trg would do putting them up. They knew they would be exaggerating, that the buildings weren't so terrible, nor Trg’s influence so encompassing. But envy can be the father of invention.

Did he sometimes speak to Trg, I asked. No, he didn’t, and this wasn’t out of animosity on his part, but perhaps an odd complicity on his and Trg’s — as if they could convey more respect and warmth by nodding to each other and nothing more. He did wonder whether in the smile he offered, Trg could see this wasn’t just a young man being polite, but somehow knew his history, and too the nation’s history, and was forgiving of Trg involvement in the latter, his misdemeanours in the former. If they were to speak, Marko probably wouldn’t know what to say, and perhaps Trg neither. But what Marko would sometimes do was get a coffee at Trg’s cafe, and sit and wait for Trg to arrive. They would nod at each other, and when Marko left, they would nod again, usually after a gesture Trg offered the waiter, showing that Marko shouldn’t pay. Often, he left the money anyway as a tip, and sometimes smiled as he did so — aware that this wasn’t Marko insulting Trg as he insisted on paying, but as a sign of respect that he had no interest in exploiting or insulting Trg. He would get a free coffee and give a handsome tip.

I still couldn’t get out of my mind that Trg could have been his father, though nothing in his looks indicated he was, no doubt much to Marko’s relief. And so I had wondered if Kamen might be, though photos indicated this was unlikely to be the case. If he resembled anybody, it was Camilla, but many people have similar noses and eye colour.

He said he would have liked to show me Diklo. There wasn’t much there but some houses, a couple of churches, a cafe, a restaurant and of course the sun and the sea. But while the sun and the sea in Zadar and other towns and cities along the coast had become contained by these natural resources that drew in so many tourists (would they be here without them?), Diklo never, he believed, allowed them such paramountcy. People were living their lives: the sun was shining, and the sea lapped against the shore. But you could feel, in these resources, time passing, and not just money being made out of them. It was what Kiparstvo once said in an interview, and he agreed.

After we parted, I went back to the hotel, took my bags from behind the reception, and walked the six or so minutes to the bus stop just outside the city’s walls. Through the slightest of detours, I passed once more Trg’s cafe. He wasn’t sitting there as I wondered if perhaps after his macchiato, he went for a stroll around the town and may have passed Marko and me, drinking a coffee, and one he would accept we ourselves would pay for. Instead of seeing him with my own eyes, I somehow managed to see the pair of us with his. With this thought I wondered if I might forgo travel writing and see what I could do with fiction. Yet somehow I believed this story wasn't mine to tell, and yet to detail it as history wouldn't capture an aspect of the personal that it contained. It was as though certain nations were small enough to contain much of their history in the anecdote, and others were too vast to do so, as I couldn't imagine doing the same with Britain, but maybe just possibly with Scotland. But whose face could I find that would allow for such a telling?

Trg

24/11/2025

Trg