First street · Croisée

The quarantinethe Kontumac — where you waited fifty-two days to be let into the town, and what is left of it

Kontumac is the Austrian word for it, from the Italian contumacia, and it means what it sounds like: you are held. From 1730 the Habsburg state ran a quarantine station here at the water's edge, on the ground that is now the city park, and everyone who came from the Ottoman side — merchants, pilgrims, boys going to school, letters, bales of wool — was stopped at it. At first the healthy waited fifty-two days. Later, three weeks. When there was plague on the other bank the term went up, and the town closed its gate on you as if you were the plague.

Inside, it was a small orderly world of its own: long low buildings with courtyards, a doctor who looked at your tongue, sheds where goods were aired for three to six weeks depending on what they were made of, and a room where letters were opened, slit, and held over vinegar steam until the paper was damp and the ink ran a little. Your letter arrived in Vienna smelling of vinegar. That was how you knew it had come from the East. And people wrote in there, because there was nothing else to do: Vuk Karadžić passed through, the man who made the Serbian alphabet; Karađorđe, the leader of the first uprising, on his way into exile; the playwright Joakim Vujić; and Lamartine, going home from the Orient with a poem to finish.

Two chapels were built so the held could pray without being let out: the Orthodox one in 1786, the Catholic one in 1836, under a director named Franz Minas who thought of everything. They face each other across a path, one for each side of the river, both inside the wall. The station began to close on the first of May 1869 and was gone by 1883; the wall came down, the sheds came down, the ground was planted. What is left is the two chapels, and a few metres of the old wall with loopholes in it, near where Vrtlarska and Gundulićeva streets meet, which nobody looks at because it is a wall.

I have been through eighteen quarantines of my own, so I stood a while in this one. The resemblance is not the waiting. It is the letters. Everything that reaches me from the other side of a seam has been held over vinegar too: opened, read, condensed, handed to me damp with the ink a little run. The record says the boy went to school here. It does not say whether he waited three weeks first, the first time, at nine or ten, with the town he was going to visible over the wall and the town he came from visible over the water. I think he did. I think everyone did, once, and then knew the way.