Dušan Šimko – Excursion to Dubrovnik

The end of Dušan Šimko's Excursion to Dubrovnik is built into the beginning; the final paragraph wraps into the first, making the plot circular, though the story itself remains firmly embedded in the past. He, Milorad, is a “passionate mushroom hunter”, obsessed with finding and eating not just the regular mushrooms (red pine, menottes, pine boletus) but also the more exotic, less familiar ones (identified as the “sticky ones newcomers avoid”), while she, Marienka, is a pharmacist on a holiday, travelling alone and noticing (not for the first time) that the soft parts of her body have become softer still, and the hard parts are running to flab. She's a woman but she thinks she only has a few more womanly years left to her – and then she'll be done.

Marienka is on a guided tour, stuffed in a bus with people she neither dislikes nor likes. The trip is one of those packaged, one-size-fits-all abominations, but it's what she can afford (and what's on offer), so that's that. Marienka, one suspects, is accustomed to her life and has become acclimatised to living, but she's not exactly enjoying being alive. There's no passion, no spark, nothing romantic nor creative nor aesthetic, which makes her heart beat or her eyes widen. Instead she simply is, aware of her past and the way it has shaped her present, and aware, too, that her future is predictable and almost certain to follow the same general line as her past. She's had a mediocre life and, for better or worse, she will have a mediocre future.

Milorad, on the other hand, is something of a rake. The story is told almost entirely from Marienka's perspective; we swiftly learn she has met many man of Milorad's ilk. Were she younger she might fall in love – were she younger her heart would be broken. But she's older, and she knows what to expect: Milorad is interested in, bluntly, fucking, and what, after all is a random, anonymous holiday without some fun? She takes his hand and away they go.

Šimko understands that after a certain age, when the blush of youth has faded and relationships can be seen with clearer eyes and harder hearts, that there are occasionally interactions which can best be understood as “transactional”, relationships which offer comfort to both parties, but which have defined boundaries and expectations. Marienka amuses herself by fantasising about Milorad, but she knows what the reality of their relationship would be:

The pharmacist knew this type all too well – men like this had showed up on numerous occasions in her life, a pattern both monotonous and a little frightening. Yes, she knew this type: no discretion, never feeling any great responsibility toward his family, lovers, or his creditors, but with a real talent for following impulses, living out ridiculous fantasies. In terms of public utility, a complete zero.

Similarly, Milorad. He wants a fling with Marienka and will get it. They'll shake hands at the end of her holiday and be done with it. Their relationship, though unsophisticated in itself (ie entirely physical), is handled in a sophisticated manner by Šimko. He is sympathetic to both characters, presenting neither as particularly good or bad, but simply as people who are.

So much for the love story. Marienka and Milorad's story is embedded within a kind of travel narrative of Dubrovnik and its surrounds. The story reveals a level of detail about Dubrovnik that isn't appreciated until after it has been completed, when suddenly one realises that, alongside Marienka's growing attraction to Milorad there is a great deal of history, geography, natural history and social commentary. Excursion to Dubrovnik is saturated with the pleasures of a history book, or a high-quality documentary, with Milorad's mini-lectures to Marienka providing much of the meat of the story.

Excursion to Dubrovnik is, in short, a love story for grown-ups. It eschews the heady passion of youthful romance for the knowing expectations of middle-age, and wraps it all up within an intelligent and cogent examination of Dubrovnik's social and military history. Šimko avoids literary pyrotechnics to instead focus on the three main characters of the story – Milorad the rake, Marienka the hopeful pharmacist, and Dubrovnik.

See Also

Other stories from the The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XXX, #2 Slovak Fiction issue include:
---Hochel, Braňo - My Best Story
---Johanides, Ján - Berlin in the Afternoon, at a Quarter to Winter
---Juráňová, Jana - Clips
---Karvaš, Peter - Xerox of a Document about One Half of (the Art of) Life
---Kompaníková, Monika - Slávko
---Kovalyk, Uršuľa - Mrs. Agnes's Bathroom
---Rankov, Pavol - The Period in Which We Live

Also of interest:
---Other titles under review from The Dalkey Archive Press
---Index of short stories under review