Pula is presented as a Croatian coastal city whose beauty and social atmosphere give Rob Peace one of the clearest glimpses of a life beyond the pressures of Newark. During visits with Hrvoje Dundovic, Rob encounters a place marked by ancient architecture, relative safety, personal curiosity, and an absence of the racial suspicion and territorial hostility that shaped much of his American experience. Pula becomes more than a travel destination: it is a temporary alternative to the identities and obligations that continually pull him back home.

Setting and Arrival

Pula enters the narrative through Rob’s friendship with Hrvoje Dundovic, who grew up there and later relocated to Newark amid the violence and economic collapse affecting Croatia. Hrvoje lived with his wife, Marina, in Union, New Jersey, and Rob’s repeated evenings at their kitchen table, drinking grappa and asking about Hrvoje’s homeland, eventually led him to accompany Hrvoje on a trip. The journey therefore grows out of an existing friendship rather than an isolated tourist impulse.

The city’s physical setting is emphasized through a boat trip along the Istrian peninsula. Hrvoje steered his father’s small skiff past rocky coastal cliffs dropping into aquamarine water, while Rob sat in the bow in shorts, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops, his dreadlocks spread across his back. The scene contrasts with the crowded, pressured environments that usually define Rob’s life. In Pula, he appears physically and emotionally relaxed, absorbing the scenery with an almost childlike intensity.

Social Atmosphere

Unlike the ethnic diversity Rob had encountered in Rio de Janeiro, Pula had little minority population, and he could spend entire trips without seeing anyone of color. That absence produces a complicated but important reversal in his experience. Rather than being met with suspicion or territorial defensiveness, Rob becomes something of a celebrity in a town of roughly sixty thousand people. Residents who saw him wandering through the city wanted to speak with him, exchange stories, and hear about him rather than summon the police.

The narrative associates Pula with ancient stadium ruins, cultural history embedded in the city’s natural and architectural surfaces, and a general atmosphere of happiness and self-sufficiency. Rob perceives little fear, negativity, or crime. In a country marked by recent violence and currency collapse, the city’s apparent energy and lack of hostility astonish him. Pula thus becomes a counterimage to the neighborhoods and institutions in which he has learned to read danger, race, class, and territorial boundaries.

Lana Kasun and Personal Possibility

Pula’s attraction intensifies when Rob meets Lana Kasun, Marina’s cousin and a Croatian fashion model. She is nearly six feet tall, with an angular face, tan skin, and sun-streaked blond hair, and she becomes, loosely, Rob’s girlfriend. Their relationship is made easier by a slight language barrier and by Lana’s limited knowledge of his background. She treats both the world and Rob in a day-to-day, independent, lightly playful manner, without the possessiveness Rob associates with many women back home.

Their time together gives Rob a form of intimacy detached from his established history. Lana can drink with him, performs small pirouettes in taverns, and sometimes falls into his lap with her arms around his neck. The relationship is not presented as a settled commitment, but its ease matters. In Pula, Rob can be encountered without the full burden of his father’s imprisonment, his mother’s sacrifices, his Yale identity, or his neighborhood obligations. The city and Lana together offer an experience of being known only in the present.

Entrepreneurial Fantasy and Limits

A week into his first visit, Rob told Hrvoje that he would move to Pula someday. He had also conceived a business scheme: selling ice makers in a place where he believed few people owned them. The idea captures his characteristic movement from exhilaration to possibility. Pula’s unfamiliarity appears not as an obstacle but as an open market, and the city’s apparent simplicity invites him to imagine that observation alone could become a business plan.

The proposed ice-maker venture remains an idea rather than an established enterprise. Its importance lies in what it reveals about Rob’s response to Pula. He does not merely want to return as a visitor; he briefly imagines converting the city’s difference into a permanent future. That impulse parallels his later interest in real estate and other schemes through which he tries to make mobility, independence, and financial provision cohere.

Narrative Significance

Pula functions as a place of temporary release rather than a completed transformation. Rob’s experience there is defined by beauty, curiosity, Lana’s companionship, and the absence of the hostility he expects elsewhere. Yet the city does not erase his obligations or settle his direction. His plans to relocate and sell ice makers remain speculative, just as other ambitions repeatedly remain caught between vision and material support.

The location therefore sharpens the book’s contrast between escape and return. Pula shows that Rob can imagine another social order and another version of himself, but it does not prove that he can sustain either one. Its calm surfaces and welcoming strangers offer a genuine alternative to Newark’s pressure, while the brevity of his visit makes the alternative fragile. Pula remains memorable precisely because it allows Rob to glimpse a life that feels possible before the unresolved claims of family, work, money, and identity reassert themselves.