The Return of Stray Dogs

Most of the natives living in Vukovar today like talking about the things that used to exist in the town.

One soon finds out that a pile of overturned and broken cranes was once a port with the largest turnover on the Yugoslav section of the Danube. Large office blocks and shopping centres riddled with bullets which look as if someone trampled over them once belonged to companies such as "Borovo", "Vuteks" and "Vupnik". The sign "Vukovar" which, also riddled with bullets, stands awkwardly slanted on a piece of ruin which used to be the railway station. Crumpled traffic lights, which, dislodged, hang and swing above the streets stand as evidence that in former Yugoslavia, Vukovar rated second or third in terms of the number of cars per capita.

The only thing that looks the same as it used to is the soil. Vast fields with the best soil in Europe. Near Tenja, it looks like this: a row of tanks on the Serbian side, than a field and on it a man in a tractor, and a bit further on a row of tanks and bunkers on the Croatian side.

"I think this should have been theirs", one of the natives told us,"Why else would anyone normal pound it with over a million and a half shells. If they intended it to be Serbian they would have taken it in a different way."

"God knows what sort of agreement they reached.", said Slobodan, and added that the only chance of Vukovar ever becoming Serbian lies in more people. When the war stopped, there were only about two and a half thousand people left, most of them spaced out. Some of those who stayed soon decided to put an end to the whole story, so the suicide rate, mostly with firearms, was for a while, terribly high.

In that sense, life has calmed down over time, and the town is now populated by some 20,000 inhabitants, though it is not entirely clear where they are. A hotel, a hospital, the police station, the Local Council building (not the old one) and a few cafes are the only buildings restored in the city.

Pero, one of our kind hosts, took us to one of those restored cafes, in Mitnica, the part of the town where battles raged even after the war officially ended. "Look", he said smiling, "at first sight, it looks like a set for a Coke advertisement". White building, large windows, smart looking young people, flowers on the tables, nice cars parked in front, and the Danube. However, when one steps back, the whole picture suddenly looks unreal and flashes amid the darkness from which the shadows of the destroyed hundreds and thousands of houses and the huge water tower smirk at the onlooker.

It looks even more unreal when one of the disfigured skyscrapers suddenly lights up in the night; when washing can be seen hung out to dry from the broken and dislodged windows or when a woman wearing a dressing gown comes out onto a piece of concrete sticking out of the building, which was once a balcony, sits on a stool and quietly drinks her coffee.

Vukovar is most incredible in the morning. Then, people start walking hastily through the ghostly scenery, people who care about their appearance and consequently look smart, with polished shoes, straightened ties, tidy hair and make up. They walk through the ruins, while the onlooker fails to understand where they are off to, or indeed why. It appears to any visitor, on entering the town that the standard dress in Vukovar ought to be the uniform, and the standard activity-shooting, passage of military vehicles and , most commonly, convoys of petrol tanks escorted by an expensive car with Belgrade number plates. Everything else sticks out like a sore thumb.

In any case, whatever Vukovar is like, some kind of life has emerged. Since about a year ago it is again possible to see stray dogs and Gypsies begging in the streets of Vukovar. They were gone during the war.