Review
“Summer in the South”(1959) is, in fact, an elaboration of a recurrent idea of Andrić’s found in “Unrest” and “Signs by the Roadside”. Sometimes by the sea, which he loved, Andrić found himself thinking of the perfect salvation of simply dissolving into its salty, iodine evaporation.
The story describes a staid and apparently very ordinary Austrian teacher on holiday on the Southern Adriatic coast. The sensation of renewal and refreshment from the sea, sun and salt air is described in physical terms: “Refreshed by swimming, the sun and the sea-water, he felt as though he were dressed in light, festive, flower-white and scented clothes, and that he was himself blossoming and growing together with them and with everything around him.” Increasingly, the teacher becomes susceptible to tricks of the air, and the smoke of the cigarette that seems intoxicating in these surroundings: he begins to feel himself part of the heady atmosphere itself. The teacher disappears without trace, mystifying not only his wife and the local police but the whole population of the little town, who find the uncertainty surrounding the whole curious affair disconcerting and uncomfortable.
Fragment
When Professor Alfred Norgess and his wife Anna arrived in the little town on the Adriatic coast, they were met by sweltering heat and pretty disappointments of all kinds. Everything looked crude and forbidding. Everything–beginning with the porter who brought their luggage and took his money without even saying "Thanks" to the ailing landlady who, standing in front of them with her arms limp at her sides, answered all their questions with helpless shrugs. The room was like a darkened and suffocating oven, for the green wooden shutters had been kept closed. What was worse, the town's water supply had run low; instead of water, the little faucet above the wash basin emitted a sadly mocking hiss. The landlady assured them with a perfectly straight face that the water would be turned on before dawn and would run for a couple of hours; one would have to catch it then. In the air, and over the furnishings, lay on odour of neglect and lassitude.
The professor watched his wife as she took her things out of the valise, and wished he could run far away from there, in any direction, for it seemed to him that the place lacked not only water and freshness but was devoid also of order and life. Still, in his usual old way, he didn't say a word.
After an hour, this first impression underwent a change. In the last glow of the afternoon sun, they had a short swim in the sea and felt refreshed, then took a short walk around the lighted town square, and after supper lingered a long time on their apartment terrace, which was fringed with flowers and partially roofed over with a dense vine arbor.
In the morning, after getting up early, they had breakfast on the terrace, with a view of the sea, in the freshness and shade of the summer morning. That early hour promptly displayed for them all the radiance and glory of the region, and won them over completely. In the wake of this came an unexpected and swift transformation. Their bad humour of the day before disappeared without a trace, as did the thought of running away; and they wished only one thing: that this beauty met their old friends from Vienna, who spent every summer in this place and who, in fact, had recommended it to them. Nothing seemed important or difficult any more, not the sweltering room nor the water system that produced a tepid dribble during a few short night hours, nor the slow service in the restaurant. On the contrary, they now began to discover fresh beauties in this sojourn by the seaside.
(...)
The days passed. It was already the end of August, the finest time of the year on the coast. The long investigation of the professor's disappearance had still not produced any clues. Neither the sea nor the land had yielded up his body. The authorities continued to inquire and search. The tiny seaside resort lived under the shadow of the mysterious disappearance. Walking along the street one would often hear a couple of house wives, on their way back from market, ending their conversation with a shake of their hands.
"Still nothing. What do you make of it?"
One guessed right away that the topic was the halpless vanished professor. And the other townsmen, too, when chatting among themselves or with the visitors, remembered the fate of the missing man. From the sudden embarrassed pauses in their conversation and the troubled glances they stole unconsciously toward the sea, one could infer, even without words, that they were all anxious to have some kind, any kind, of explanation of the baffling disappearance, that they were waiting for it impatiently, as though it were something on which the inner peace of every single one of them depended.