Anne Enright: Diary

Anne Enright

On 3 August, after a long drive from Dubrovnik Airport, we turned off the Adriatic Highway to rendezvous with a guy on a motorbike, who would show us the way through the darkness to our holiday rental three kilometres further on. The bike’s tail light disappeared around hairpin bends, through patches of construction and unfinished road, before finally plunging down a tiny lane with, at the very end of it, a house and an underlit blue pool. The night air was loud with cicadas. It was maybe 30°C but the place was air-conditioned and everything seemed fine. The motorbike guy said: ‘You will see in the morning. It is very nice up here.’

And it was. We woke to a view of olive groves and the coast far below. The days were blisteringly hot, but the four of us – me, my husband, Martin, and our two grown children – hung out happily around the small pool before going down the mountain to eat, sightsee or swim in the sea. Daylight revealed the various precipices our wheels had skimmed in the darkness of our arrival, also the places where the tarmac itself fell away. The driving was intense. We bickered, froze, took turns behind the wheel, and the trip became less hair-raising as we repeated it over the next three days.

On our final evening, I was sitting in a swing chair overlooking the view when my son called for me. When I asked why, he said: ‘Because there’s smoke coming over the hill.’ And so there was. The crown of the mountain was six hundred metres higher than the house and less than a kilometre away. Not that I knew these measurements at the time, though perhaps I had already assessed our only route out. On the second day, I had quietly gathered our passports and set them by the door.

It was seven o’clock, still light. I took a photograph, zoomed the screen. On the phone the smoke looked dirtier and more yellow, but it also seemed further away. In a wider shot it looked like nothing at all; a close-up showed a dense and unpleasant pall. I scrolled between these images and checked the sky. There was no way to tell how far behind the mountain the fire was.

Martin texted the woman who managed the house. She wrote: ‘People already call fire department, it’s big fire other side of the mountain.’ He thanked her for the information. There were no sirens, no helicopters; there was the sound of cicadas and of two dogs barking a distance away. As the brief dusk gave way to night, I took more photographs. At 7.30 the smoke glowed a vague orange, high in the evening air. At 7.48 my phone camera struggled with the loss of light and the firelight showed neon against a purple sky. I clicked into darkness and watched the image brighten as the phone’s digital processing kicked in. Was this new intensity just visual, I wondered, or did it show an actual increase in the flames? The glow now seemed to extend further along the brow of the mountain. I fixed one rock or another as a measuring point, but it was very hard to think about this properly, so I sat in a chair beside the pool and decided to take the same picture each time – same angle, same magnification – so any changes would be clear.

I told the young people to pack up and leave their cases outside the front door. I said: ‘We have to pack anyway. We might as well do it now.’ They agreed, more or less. The cases did not appear.

There was a smell of smoke. I held a licked finger up to check the wind’s direction, and decided it was blowing our way. Martin and I talked quietly beside the pool. I pointed out that the only road out was higher up: we would have to drive towards the danger in order to get away from it. He agreed that if the flames became visible, we would leave. My daughter found an article that mentioned the fire. It had been posted ten hours earlier and, for some reason, Martin thought this a good sign: ‘These things burn for weeks,’ he said. We checked a satellite image of the terrain and agreed that the barren mountaintop formed a natural firebreak: there was nothing up there to burn. All the best information was on the phone, it seemed, but the fire was right here. Privately, I wondered how everyone was a wildfire expert now.

A flare of white light slipped down a different slope, very fast and faster again. I said ‘There’s another one! There’s another one!’ and my family laughed and said: ‘That’s the moon rising over the hill.’ They seemed to think that everything was going to be OK. I went inside and packed my case and Martin’s case, and left them outside the door.

Here I have to pause and say that, of the four people in our family, three of us are always right. My husband is quietly, I might say stubbornly, right, my daughter has been right since she was two years old. I am right because, excuse me? Our son, the youngest, forbears. There was no point talking the problem out. I thought: ‘If I start an argument now, we could boil to death in the pool.’ Besides, it did not matter, what we took or left behind. My daughter was worried about a wash she had on. Should she take it out of the machine, or let it finish? I said: ‘We can put it in a plastic bag, if we decide to go.’

In the next hour, I swam tiny laps in the dark and considered the savage ironies of late capitalism. I repented my own lifelong contribution to the catastrophe on the mountain and realised how devoutly I love water. I got out to take and compare photographs. The glow did not get worse. It seemed to lessen.

At eleven o’clock we all went inside and watched Rivals, and this is the only evidence that we were all a bit bonkers, because Rivals is really not our kind of thing. Sometime before midnight, we abandoned the fictional Cotswolds and considered sleep. I went outside and thought things were different now. I saw a shift of light behind the mountain, as though an area of scrub or woodland had flared and collapsed, but when I called Martin out it was gone. We sat in the pool chairs and soon enough it happened again, this time in a new place. He texted the woman who managed the house and got no reply. The children’s suitcases had appeared outside and, wordlessly, I put them in the car.

At one thirty in the morning, Martin said he would keep watch while the rest of us got some sleep and, though I remembered his tendency to conk out on the sofa, though I thought him too optimistic and trusting, I kept my doubts to myself. Silently, I went to bed. I thought: ‘Our fates are bound together, that is just the fact of it,’ and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

At three in the morning Martin woke us with some words I cannot remember. I pulled my clothes on, went outside and saw a fringe of bright flame above us, I am guessing about five hundred metres long. A huge cracking boomed out over the landscape; it was the sound of trees combusting. I knew how frightened I must be by the churning in my guts, but I felt very calm. I turned and readied the car for the children to clamber in, while Martin clicked the remote to open the gates and threw it into the house. We did not know if the remote would work at a distance, but when I sped across the grass the headlights showed the open gateway, which I belted through.

‘Eleven minutes, washed,’ my son said, which is my oft-repeated personal record for packing up and leaving a hotel room.

‘Take it easy,’ Martin said, as I continued at some speed up the narrow track to the tiny road above. I honked the horn as we passed the local farmhouse and slowed as we wound our way down the mountainside through now familiar dangers, obstacles and difficulties. At the turn of a hairpin bend I looked up and saw the wildfire crowning the mountain. From this angle, the fire seemed bigger and more frightening than it had before, though we were safely away. There were no cars coming against us, no fire engines, no flashing blue lights. In the back, my daughter wondered if we had made the right decision, and I said: ‘The funny thing is, we will never know.’

But in fact the fire was now showing up on Google Maps, which gave its area as three square kilometres. I drove to the next place on our itinerary and, as dawn broke, pulled in to sleep at the side of the road. The area of wildfire was now given as four square kilometres. In a text, the woman who managed the house apologised for not responding sooner: ‘I was asleep when you sent your message and only saw it this morning. The fire has been brought under control.’ By early afternoon, the area of wildfire was given as seven square kilometres and the area marked ‘possible fire’ encroached the exit road.

We could have checked out of the house at the normal time and lived. Probably. The winds had been kind. Meanwhile, I could not get the smell of woodsmoke out of my nose. Ten days later a news report said a fire on Lisinj mountain had been ‘localised’, but perhaps that was a different blaze.

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