cars. Many of the compartments were filling up; some, it appeared, were too full. I started to wonder, could—and before I finished that thought, we turned the corner to our compartment. A new German guy was sitting on our side.
It was now kind of uncomfortable, but tomorrow morning we would be in Istanbul. We could manage this, even though now it had been thirty-something hours with very little sleep and sitting up the whole time. But in talking to the German guy, we discovered to our disbelief that no, not tomorrow morning, but not until sometime the day or night after tomorrow would we arrive in Istanbul. The feeling was indescribable. I laughed to keep from crying.
Another hour passed. The farm couple had opened some bags of food that seemed by their odor to be way past their expiration dates, assuming they even had such things in the small villages and towns where we stopped. By now, there was no room for many of the villagers, and they just dropped their bags in the corridor and sat next to or on them. Walking between compartments had become nearly impossible.
A hulking Turk suddenly barged into our compartment, very drunk and wanting to befriend anyone who would look his way. The German couldn’t take it anymore and fled.
Not long after the Turk also left, and we thought we had caught a break. But no. He came back with three of his friends, a teenage girl and two guys—and all had been drinking heavily.
Now we had eight instead of the recommended four people in our compartment. The girl sat across from us, and two of the more sinister-looking Turks bookended Doug and me, with the original Turk, Mehmet, sitting on a suitcase in front of the window.
“Swede…no, English,” remarked Mehmet as he cut pieces from a rotten-looking piece of fruit he had taken out of a bag. Was he cutting it with a knife? Nah, more a machete.
Confused, Doug and I looked at each other, and I answered, “No, American.”
“Oh, Americano,” Mehmet said with a sly smile. The two bookend Turks nudged us and nodded their heads and grinned.
“Tourists, how you say, para? Money? Tourists,” he said, rubbing two fingers together on the other hand not holding the very big knife. “Where you from?”
“Chicago and New York,” Doug whispered, hoping not to encourage this line of questioning.
Mehmet smiled. “Very much money. Tourists, I think.”
“No, no, we are just students—just poor students.”
The conversation continued, but I was starting to notice the young girl sitting directly across from me. Her body was swaying, and her hand frequently came up to rub her eyes or hold back belches, as if a hand could do that. She—we’ll call her Jane for lack of a better name—was starting to be in trouble. Her eyes were roaming, moving up in their sockets. She had been drinking, of course, but the odor wafting from our passengers and their food was enough to make anyone nauseous.
I thought, how can this be? This was not the prisoner train from Dr. Zhivago; this was the Orient Express! Where was Sean Connery; where was 007; where were the beautiful heroines or evil-but-gorgeous female foreign spies? This was the Orient Express; I should be having dinner in the club car, sipping expensive wine and listening to furtive whispered conversations at the other tables. And my dinner partner should be Greta or Ursula, not Mehmet.
And as I was starting to fantasize about Ursula—think Ursula Andress, the 1960s movie star—Mehmet changed places and sat beside me. He put his arm around my shoulder as he said, “You Americanos should come with us. We Gypsies. We take you for…I mean, we, bok”—that was clearly an expletive—“how you say… we show you a good time. No problem, we have money; you have money. How much money you have?”
At that moment, much to my relief, Jane jumped up, screamed three words in Turkish, and dove for the door, barely managing to slide it open before she heaved her guts into the hallway. The contents of her stomach landed between two huge Yugoslavian ladies, who seemed to not only not notice but not care. They continued arguing with anyone who would speak to them.
Somehow, one of the conductors cleaned up the mess. Before he could disappear, Doug and I begged him for relief, any relief. He motioned again with his fingers, as many Europeans seemed to do in our company, signaling, It’ll cost you, but get your bags and follow me. He took us to a sleeper with two English girls. Morning was almost upon us, and we were just falling asleep when a new conductor burst in asking for our passports and visas. The train was entering Communist Yugoslavia.
He stood in front of us, yelling and gesturing. “I know, I know,” I said. “No visas.” Having gained wisdom from recent experience, I thought it appropriate to hold out my hand and rub my thumb and forefinger together as I repeated the word “visa” in pigeon Yugoslavian. We walked into the hallway, the conductor negotiated payment with the border guard, and we were given two slips of paper with stamps on them—they looked official.
The conductor indicated we were lucky. We could have been taken off the train and even jailed: we were lucky to get that guard. As we were walking away, we heard the conductor talking to himself, “Bulgaria won’t be as easy, and I will not be here to help you; you’ll have another conductor.”
Back in our compartment, I think we would have started to do some major worrying if we weren’t so tired—but within ten seconds, we were out cold.
We woke up mid-morning to the girls holding hot pastries under our noses. They had jumped off the train and gotten food items from vendors like those we had seen on the platforms as we passed through so many small, dismal-looking Eastern European towns.
The girls, Chelsea and Alice, were on holiday to meet one of their grandmothers in Istanbul, a woman whose late husband had been a British attaché to Turkey about thirty years earlier. They were going to travel south along the seacoast for a couple of weeks.
The train wound through the dreary Yugoslavian countryside slowly, but we were grateful to have a day so calm after the chaos of the night before.
Doug and I jumped out a couple of times when we stopped—what seemed like fifty times, in every town we passed through—to buy food from a vendor. Most of the vendors were selling the same indeterminate meat between slices of the same stale-looking gray bread.
The drinks were all takeoffs on American soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi, but the tastes were very different and highly suspect. The endless hours looking out our windows as we chugged up hills and rolled down the other side were so desolate, they prompted me to write a poem about the very mysterious Orient Express.
As I continued to draw our travel line on my map, starting in Luxembourg, then to Paris and now leaving the large Belgrade station, it became clear to me that I had to find another map. This one, although perfect and large, only went as far east as Istanbul. I needed one showing Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan—the entire route to India. As I read my map and scratched my face something else became clear: I was growing a beard. This was a first for me.
Yes, it wasn’t much of one, but after more than a month not shaving, I had more than stubble. I glanced at my reflection in the window and decided I liked it. It looked rugged and adventurous, appropriate for this time in my life. The idea of a different look appealed to me, and I had started to comb my hair, which I had grown considerably since I left the States, straight back. My new life would be devoid of modern bath facilities and mirrors, I guessed, and low-maintenance would be best. I reminded myself of a blond, younger Barry Gibb, think early Bee Gees. My hair was more than creeping over my collar, but I managed to control it by frequently dampening it with water, often raindrops. No matter where we went in what
