Korea July 12, 2009, dateline Milna

Korea is missing. For three days running now that I have returned to Milna I have watched his favorite spots. He is missing from the side alley by the butcher shop, missing from his little wooden stool in the shade near the public pay phone where he used to harass me as I phoned home to the States Julia, missing from the large spomenik by the sea with the great iron anchor – commemorative of Milna's seagoing history, missing from Dina's where he bought his litres of pivo.

Everyone else seems to be here and still in their proper places. Jere is here, walking his ceaseless rounds of the Riva shops and the village at large, hailing everyone, joking and gossiping, his days as a building contractor largely behind him. Ljiliana 2 still runs the hardware store and still has her little doggie. Stipe 1 is fresh in from his day watering his sheep at the deserted village of Smrka and is watering himself at Mille Naves on the Riva. Zoran, a giant of a man who works nights at the fish farm and days as a gardener, is there with his wife and child and friends.

Even Stipe 2, Korea's competition for used beverage bottles, dressed in his big baggy brown shorts and dirty tee-shirt, is still wheeling his hand cart from refuse bin to bin – it now sports a big handwritten label that says 'recycle bottles here' in 3 or 4 languages. (Although they
were never really competitors, since Korea only needed the deposit from enough bottles to earn another litre of beer or a pack of cheap cigarettes, while Stipe 2, his son, and brother run a major recycling
effort on thee island, even driving from village to village and beating out the locals there for their prizes, grossing – so embittered gossips say – 1000 euros a week.)

Korea is not an easy man to overlook. Stringy, unwashed hair; skin almost as dark as a ripe carob pod from the Dalmatian sun; unpleasant teeth; dirty shirts and cotton trousers – rags really - that were a uniform waste-water grey from age and dirt.

He would shuffle down the Riva, cursing, yelling back at Jere who taunted him, laughing and laughing. I would find his cigarette butts here and there where I was trying to sit, or find him sitting on the white stone curb, blocking my way to the sea.

But I have not found him this time.

Someone said that he drank too much, had stomach problems, and spent 10 days in the hospital drying out. Someone said that you can find him now, nursing a soka down by Cafe Fontana.

I dunno. The Korea I knew would never drink a juice, never reform.

Perhaps I will watch for him tonight as Julia and I promenade past the Fontana in the cool evening. But even if he were there, now, I'm sure I would never recognize him.

No, Korea is missing and I have no more idea of his whereabouts than I could guess the original color of his shirt, or how he came by his strange nickname.