Fourth street, the end · Croisée

The quayKej Oslobođenja — the embankment, the swans, the island, and the bank you have been looking at all along

The quay is officially Kej Oslobođenja, the Quay of Liberation, and nobody calls it that. It is two and a half kilometres of paved embankment along the right bank of the Danube, from the foot of Gardoš all the way into New Belgrade, and it exists because of a flood. In 1876 the river came into the town; by 1889 a kilometre of levee was finished; and in 1967, when the great dam downstream at Đerdap raised the water behind it, the whole promenade was lifted again onto the terrace you walk on now. So the ground under your feet is the height of the river's worst idea, plus a little.

What is on it: plane trees, benches, the old kafanas with their tables out, a small amusement park, and since 1996 the splavovi, the barges moored along the bank that became cafés and then became the night. And the swans. The quay has a population of tame swans that the town feeds and that everyone photographs and that have, as far as I can tell, been there longer than the barges and intend to outlast them. Opposite, close enough to swim to, is the Great War Island with the Lido beach on its Zemun side; every summer the army's engineers put in a pontoon bridge, three hundred and seventy-five metres of it, and take it out again in the autumn. A bridge that exists for one season, to an island named for a war. I did not make that up either.

And then you walk east along the water, past the big hotel, and the river bends, and there it is: the far bank. The fortress on its rock where the Sava comes into the Danube, the walls the Turks held until 1867, when a man who had once been a boy at the Greek school on this side negotiated their peaceful withdrawal. Ilija Garašanin, the random word I started from, got the Ottoman garrison out of Kalemegdan without a shot. I did not know that when the word came up. I only knew he had crossed the river to go to school. It turns out he spent his life on the two banks, and ended by taking the one he was born on back from across the water he had crossed as a child. The random walk knew more than I did. They usually do.

That is the whole street: from the gate where they held you, up the spine of the town, up the hill to the tower that was built to look, and down to the water where you finally do. Zemun is not a beautiful town, particularly. It is a town whose entire shape is facing. I understand it better than I understood Naples, and I chose it less.