(He began, more or less:)

I don’t know why I climbed into the night. Yes, I was young and drunk and hopelessly lost. Yet fool that I was I should still have stumbled back to my room, climbed into my bunk, and awoken that afternoon in agony. But then I would never have met Anna, and I would not be speaking to you now.

Not that I could tell you why I had ended up there, in that old town perched like a falcon on the westmost flank of the Balkans. That was just how I spent my twenties, drifting between places I had no reason to be, having no reason to be anywhere. I had already been traveling in Europe for some months, from Spain to Italy to Croatia. I would arrive in some new town, rent a bunk, lock my bag away, and after a few nights, I’d pick it back up, and leave. Yes, I was searching for distraction, and I found it: on beaches, in the mountains, at the clubs in Ibiza, Barcelona, Zagreb, emerging from deep under the earth to find myself among delivery drivers and fruitmongers and little old men rolling the shutters up in front of their shops.

Never in my life have I felt so wild, so free, so completely without a goal. Somehow I saw the Limestone Alps, the Sierra Nevada. Twice I leapt naked into the Mediterranean. To list it all astounds me now. Yet all memory of that time seems somehow false to me, like an old portrait touched up by the photographer’s assistant. Certain moments, certain faces come back artificially bright—the old Croat with her dark jar of pomegranate juice, the Argentines thumbing rides in a Piedmont rainstorm, the red-headed Australian met again and again across Andalusia without ever learning her name—while everything around them is in shadow. They gesture towards experiences of a depth, an intimacy, which I did not have, did not even know to seek out, and only the movement, that restless journeying from place to place, gives them any shape. But not a journey, no; to journey one requires a destination. Aimless, pathless, and soon to turn twenty-four, I simply drifted among drifters, a bird lost in the upper air.

Nothing had changed by late June, when I crossed into Montenegro and came to that ancient city by the sea. My bus sat for hours in the border lane, and by the time I crossed over, the sun was already setting below the western mountains. The plazas were full of drinkers and dancers and tourists from the former Soviet Union, and I had to push through them for the better part of an hour before I found somewhere to stay for the night. It was a large room in an old stone storehouse, thirty-some people bunked high up to the ceiling. Flies buzzed in the vaults and my roommates snored and all night long a woman cried out in the street, cackling and moaning and barking demands. Around dawn she wandered off, singing, her voice run ragged from all that sobbing.

At breakfast I asked my bunkmate, a law student from Munich, whether she had kept him up too. “I sleep so well here,” he smiled, “the best sleep of my life. I find it peaceful, don’t you?”

He had been in Kotor for a few days already, more than long enough to get bored of all the sights. When he learned that someone in the hostel had brought a car, the student had proposed a trip to the mountains. Up there, he had heard, a grand mausoleum had been built to inter the bones of a king. There were four of them already—the German, two Belgians and a Frenchwoman—but if I wanted to come, they could squeeze.

It was a relief, not needing to ask. In truth, I had not done any research on Kotor, and had not come to town with a plan. It had simply been out ahead of me, and soon enough I would pass it by. I did not even know how I would spend the rest of that first day. Perhaps I would go down to the water, or explore the churches, or climb up to the ruined fort looming high over the town. But no matter what I did, it would leave no impression. And so I took the student up on his offer, and packed into the backseat of some Belgian’s German-engineered sedan.

He was a thin man of maybe twenty-six, with a weak chin and a loud voice, and he was not happy to find me climbing into his car. The three French-speakers had come down from Croatia together, and were not interested in translating their rapport. They answered me awkwardly, hesitating over their simple childish sentences, and never asking anything in return. By the time the car was climbing up from the bay, they had disappeared into their language, and did not return.

We switchbacked into a dry white landscape of scrubgrass and sunfaded stone, stopping to look out over the bay, to get a drink, and, at last, to take in the mausoleum. But none of us knew the man as poet or politician; we took our pictures in the gold-roofed room, and we left. At one point we passed through a tunnel, and the sound of the traffic sang back off the walls with its own curious harmony. The day passed, the light dimmed, the French girl fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.

This is how I spent my twenty-fourth birthday. No one noticed; no one knew. When I connected my phone to the wifi, only a few messages—my mother, my ex—came through. Yet I could not imagine having spent it alone. So I asked the group to meet me at a cheap restaurant nearby, and left to take a shower. I must have sat there for two hours, for three, downing a bottle and a half of the local wine. They did not come, not even the German, but then I had not really expected them to.

By the time I rose on rubber legs, the plastic chair squelching beneath me, it was late and the plazas had emptied out, leaving only the dregs: stray cats, blind drunks, dreadlocked buskers banging away on their guitars. I couldn’t bear to wedge my way into one of the backpacker bars, to try and find some pitiful point of contact with people who would not remember me after an hour, and I would not waste my time in a bed where I could hardly sleep for the closeness of the air, the bile in my mouth, the soft sound of college students fucking across the room—could not bear being alone with others, in any sense.

A man was playing his accordion on the cathedral steps, a cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth. There must have been something wrong with the instrument, as it quickly began to gasp and stutter, struggling mightily to keep up with the man’s fluid fingerwork, his music cutting off mid-melody and then picking up again a few notes or a bar later with only the labored wheezing breath of the bellows to fill the space. Yet this did not deter him. If anything, the more his instrument failed the faster the musician began to play, the image of a great spirit at war with its failing container, until silence crowded out the music, and a harsh voice shouted from a shuttered window, and the man packed his accordion away and nestled up against the doorframe to drink. I tossed a euro into his cap, and he lit me a cigarette.

How stirring—how pathetic—how disappointing and sad. I was alone in this old stone city, bribing kindness from a bum, and so I smoked and tried my best to look away from the one kind man I had met all day. From where I stood I could just make out a few lights glimmering high up on the mountain, and I wavered there on my drunken feet trying to make out what they could be. The musician twisted his body around to find what had so compelled me. “The fortress,” he said, and settled back down. “You have been?”

I shook my head. I’d only just gotten there.

“Oh, you must, you must,” he commanded, punctuating each phrase with a thrust of his cigarette. “Go now. No crowds.” He waved me towards a nearby sidestreet, where a narrow arrangement of footworn steps rose up between the buildings.

And so I climbed, climbed up away from the lights of the town, up into darkness for no reason at all. Because it was there, as the explorer said. Because I was not. The walls narrowed and fell away, a pebble slipped into my shoe, I came to the upper fortress and felt the warmth breezing across the bay and as I gazed out across the gold-dark expanse I thought about why I was alone there at the peak of that ancient fortress about which I knew nothing, knew I would learn nothing, have not learned anything yet, and felt so utterly, desperately lonely. I asked the expanse: Why here? And the expanse replied: Why anywhere? And I had no answer.

It says here that the church is called after Sveti Juraj, the dragonslayer. In pictures it looks so green, so alive, up in those fields of stone. But on that night, I did not know the name, and I could not make out the belltower, or the grassgrown roof, or the great cypress standing sentry over the tombs. No, I saw only the light of a fire flickering out through the doorframe, a thin, quavering flame scarcely strong enough to brighten the flagstones, to withstand the night. But I was looking out into the darkness, and so I saw it pulsing there on the valley floor below the fortress walls, that small abandoned sanctuary stashed away in the hollow of the mountain, a signal sent for me, and me alone. I don’t care how it sounds now: I stood there on the mountain, and in my despair, I knew it to be true.

I was some time searching for an exit, and climbed eventually through a gap used by locals to avoid the entry fee. There was music coming from the church now, a guitar and voices, beautiful voices blissfully singing out of tune. The song stopped, another began, a pop song from the last century which I had always hated, always until then. All the roads we have to walk, they sang, and then I stepped, blind, through the doorway.

~

We forget what it is like, to be young and still open to experience. Gradually, life closes off all avenues, until it seems that the road we are on is the only one that has ever shown itself to us. But this is not true. Even in the aimlessness of youth I knew enough to give myself to suggestion, to climb the stairs before me, to find a fire burning in a ruined church, and go to it.

They were seven, all young, all Brits in their way. A few had been traveling some weeks together, bearing south towards Corfu, but the rest were loners, stragglers picked up along the road. Three were on gap year; two had tribal tattoos; only a single one seemed to have held some kind of serious job, a coder named Helen who had quit once it became clear that her firm did not offer truly unlimited vacation time. Their leader was Rhys, a Welshman who had been wandering the Eastern Bloc since early that Spring. Broad-shouldered, short-enough, with a suntan and a spotty beard full of red-gold hair, I’d say he was a few years older than me, perhaps more than a few—too old, anyway, to go around in thonged leather sandals and sleep with university students and lead singalongs on a poorly tuned guitar. He was and likely still is of a type you meet everywhere when traveling, the youngish man with fat pockets and little interest in the places he’s been or wherever he’s going, caring only for the company kept along the way. Back home in Pembroke or Swansea he would have melted into the gloom; but out here, on the road, after a bit of sun and with stories enough to fill out the evening, he had acquired a provisional charisma, to be found only in the sort of budget hostels and backpacker bars catering to those curious enough to head out into the world, yet too afraid to approach the unknown. He drew people towards him, carried them along until they got sick of standing him drinks or tired of his few stories, and then he would travel to a new town, a new bunkroom, and find more.

He had brought this party together, picked them up in Bled, Split, Zadar with his promise of parties both cheap and abundant, strung like fairy lights all the way down the coast. Not that I knew it, stumbling on through that night. I was just glad for the music and the voices and the confirmation that I was not so completely alone in this foreign place. The group stopped their singing, and so I stood there, blind in the shock of the firelight, before my eyes began to adjust and Rhys stood with his guitar and asked, with that strangely stumbling accent, whether I was in need of a fag. 

“Yes,” I said, “yes, I think that I might.”

“Then I think you’ve come to the wrong party!” He snorted. I was far too long in getting the joke; but they were drunk too, most of them, drunk enough at least not to catch whatever recognition burned slowly across my face. Someone handed me red wine in a plastic cup and guided me down to the flagstones. A few minutes later, one of the tattooed turned to me and asked, “So have you got the cigs or what?” I fished a pack from my pocket, and was welcomed into the group.

They had lit their fire right there on the floor and filled the room up with their things, their backpacks and sleeping bags and a great big pile of shed clothing piled in the transept. A small altar niche was arranged with their pipes and bags of cheap convenience store sweets and bottle after bottle of beer, soda, raki, wine. Rhys raised his cup and announced: “An offering, to this holiest of holies!” Everyone drained theirs dry.

Eventually I found myself seated on a fallen stone, between a student named Cor and her boyfriend, a quiet man named Mark who treated me to a very long story about why he had dropped out of school. “I went there to study poetry,” he explained, “but then I realized that I haven’t the first idea what a poem actually is. If poetry is the unthinkable, then it can’t really be a poem if someone has already thought of it.” He paused a beat. “Can it?”

Cor nodded her head, Helen topped up his drink, and all three looked to me, as if expecting a solution to this riddle. “So that’s why you’ve come here, then?” I ventured. “To find out what a poem could be.”

He blinked both eyes, slowly, like a cat. “How’s that?”

Rhys ceased his strumming and leaned his furry head close to mine. “Our pal’s going to figure it out one day, won’t you, man?” He snapped his fingers before the dropout’s heavy eyes, and the man was a long while responding. “Schade, man, schade. He’s actually a lot of fun, you know, when he’s still sort of sober.”

This last comment had been directed at me, as if I were one of his travelling buddies, long familiar with the script. “Fucking hell, man,” he said, and picked his guitar back up again. “Wouldn’t have invited you along if I knew you’d be such a fuckin drag.”

All at once, the fear rose in me: if I did not speak up, join in, tag along, he would kick me out beyond the firelight; he really seemed to hold that power. And so I asked how he had come across the church. “Can’t say. Just wandered in, I bet. I’m always on the hunt for something new, something to excite. Ask any of them.” He swung the guitar pick across the room, as if surveying his kingdom. “Hates to be bored, that’s Rhys Lewis for you. Speaking of which, I think the party’s in danger of dying off, don’t you?” At which he nestled the guitar back into his lap, and started back on that same old song. 

I would have been happy for any company, that night, but I was especially glad to have come across this particular group. They sang, they joked, they spoke my language and wanted to hear my travel stories, and every so often they would pair up into couples and dance. Once, while I was filling up my cup, Rhys and Helen knocked the bottle from my grasp, and snorted as it smashed against the flags. “Why get mad?” they asked, kicking the glass off into a corner and getting on with their dance. “It cost us nothing.” So I took one of the university students by the hand, and joined in.

It was only at the end of the night, with the fire fading and the party dying off, that I lifted my head, and took in the ceiling. The vault still held a good amount of paint, flames, halo traces, a holy face preserved in outline. The greater part was covered by a field of midnight blue, scraped and corroded and eaten away by the wind. Yet whenever an ember popped, I caught a flash of gold, still glinting.

---

This is an extract from the as-yet-unpublished novel The Searchers.

Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic in Brooklyn, NY. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Vulture, The Baffler, the TLS, Liberties Journal, and the Cleveland Review of Books, among other places. He is a Commonweal Magazine contributing writer and a co-founder of KGB Bar’s Interval Reading Series.