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During the 1999 NATO air war against the former
Yugoslavia, the Serbian Interior Ministry in Belgrade
was blown up by a cruise missile.
I watched the news report with mixed emotions,
my sorrow offset by a gleeful satisfaction.
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I hadn't seen that building in almost twenty years,
but I recognized the monstrous façade and portentous
stairs right away. The place hadn't changed at all--except
for the flames and piles of rubble. On June 14, 1980,
I underwent a rigorous, three-hour police interrogation
there, accused of entering the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia without a passport.
I was seventeen, on my
way to Greece after graduating from high school in Stavanger,
Norway, the week before. My four friends and I were
crossing Yugoslavia by rail because it was the cheapest
way to get to the Pella Inn in Athens, a youth hostel
that let people sleep on the roof for only eighty drachmas
a night. The brochure said that the inn was managed
by "The Brothers Tsiaktanis, John and Thomas," and there
was "Lively Atmosphere, Good Music, Friendly People,
No Curfew, Low Price Bar, and Free HOT showers DAY AND
NIGHT!" Not mentioned were the Greek beaches, where
girls frolicked naked and proud. The prospect almost
drove me out of my mind with attraction/repulsion. I
didn't know if I would be able to go through with naked
girl watching, much less take off my clothes in their
midst. What if I got an erection? What if I didn't?
The theme of the trip
had been established on the ferry out of Norway: Everybody
Get Hammered! My four pals drank across the Skagerrak
into Denmark, drank down Germany, and drank into Austria
while I sulked. Since I still had a few years to go
before I turned into a full-blown alcoholic, I wasn't
interested in being drunk for a whole month. I wanted
to see castles and cathedrals, not the interiors of
bars in red-light districts. This caused enough friction
that when we crossed into Yugoslavia from Salzberg on
June 12, I was no longer on speaking terms with my friends.
It was a legendary, apocryphally
horrible train ride, fifty-six hours long. We had been
told that it would make us wish we had never been born.
At the first stop, hordes of Yugoslavians avalanched
in through the doors. They were extremely loud, extremely
hostile, and extremely unhygienic. It was as if we had
blundered into a mass evacuation of very angry refugees.
They had tons of luggage; they hawked and spat on the
floors; they hawked and spat on the windows for
some reason; they smoked cigarettes that smelled like
burning plastic and wet dogs; they dropped garbage everywhere;
and they did unspeakable things to the bathrooms. I
only used the bathroom once in twelve hours. When I
was done, I had to put my right foot into the sink to
rinse off my shoe, step halfway out into the corridor,
and do a gymnastic stork pose to get my left leg back
in to rinse my other shoe. The worst part was that there
was no way to escape the glowering faces. Every seat
was taken, and the aisles were crammed. Serbs, Croats,
Bosnians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Albanians, Slovenes,
Slovaks, Romanians, or Hungarians--they all seemed to
hate us.
We were in our own compartment
with our backpacks piled at our feet. I had a seat next
to the sliding door. During the first night, somebody
slit my shirt while I slept and took the denim pouch
I wore around my neck, relieving me of passport, money,
and Inter-Rail pass. I discovered this sometime before
dawn and woke my friends, who groaned and went back
to sleep. They were already distancing themselves from
me and my upcoming doom. I searched the compartment
over and over, looking under the seats and going through
my backpack as if my shirt weren't sliced open from
collar to waist, as if maybe I'd only dropped my pouch
or absentmindedly tucked it away. It was good to keep
busy because it distracted me from the ashy, freezing
panic. When the conductor appeared at around eight,
I asked if he spoke English.
"Yes. Ticket."
"My ticket, my passport,
and my money have been stolen," I said, pointing to
my slashed shirt.
"Ticket," he answered,
holding out his hand.
"Wait: Do you speak English?"
"No. Ticket."
"No ticket," I said, folding
my arms.
Yugoslavian trains carried
armed policemen. I found this out when the conductor
went and got one.
"Ticket," the officer
said, patting his AK-47.
"Do you speak English?"
"No. Ticket."
It didn't seem like the
right time to say "No ticket." The cop started to unsling
his rifle to address what he probably thought was my
insolent silence, but a passenger in the aisle asked
if I spoke German. One of my friends did; he had already
proven himself a godsend by talking our way out of confrontations
with German rockers, German whores, German pimps, and
German merchant seamen. He explained to the passenger
what had happened, and the passenger told the policeman.
The cop relaxed and sat next to me, suddenly all smiles.
After writing a brief report with the German-speaking
passenger's help, he ordered me to get off at Belgrade,
the nation's capital. Beograd, he called it.
I had to go to the American embassy for a new passport
immediately, or I would be arrested.
Belgrade was an Eastern-bloc
dump, a brooding, forbidding, grim, gray, half-demolished
caricature with clouds of cement dust blowing down the
wide, dreary streets. It was exactly the way I imagined
it would be, like the backdrop of a Cold War spy thriller
in which the main characters all die in the end--Funeral
in Berlin, maybe. There was no doubt that I was
in the worst trouble of my life. Citizens tramped past
in a parade of Communist chic: young men in rayon shirts
and hideously tight jeans; young women in rayon blouses
and hideously tight jeans; youngish men in greasy, sacklike
suits; youngish women in sleeveless polyester tunics
and knee-length polyester skirts; middle-aged to old
men in white shirts, black vests, and round caps; middle-aged
to old women in iron-colored shawls and Baba Yaga kerchiefs;
young to middle-aged men in green army uniforms and
flat, backward-sloping hats that made it look like the
tops of their heads had been cut off. Everybody had
enormous shoes, like Disney characters, the seldom-seen
ones who are force-fed lemon juice and bile.
The train cop had helpfully
written the address of the American embassy on a slip
of paper. In Cyrillic. We tried asking passersby, but
they ignored us or made deep growling noises. One of
my friends finally said, "I'm going to do it like a
Yugoslavian." He stepped in front of a man, shoved the
paper into his face, and grunted, "Meh?" The rest of
us surrounded them, blocking the man's escape. After
a couple of lunges, he sagged and gave us directions
in fluent English. His English was good because he was
an American, a member of the embassy staff. The embassy
was just a few yards away.
At first, the folks at
the embassy refused to help. They said that they couldn't
issue me a new passport because I had no way to prove
who I was. I might not even be American. I didn't try
to argue. I just asked over and over what they thought
would happen to me in a Communist country without money
or identification. They eventually gave in. As they
drew up the paperwork, they told us that I was lucky
to have slept through the taking of my pouch; if I had
awoken, the thief might have sliced my throat too. It
was a tradition dating back to the Serbian highwaymen,
the folk heroes of centuries ago. Foreign tourists with
cut throats were found in the hills every summer, where
they had been hiking by themselves. It was a shame.
Train thieves were getting a lot more sophisticated,
though. They had started using a knock-out gas of Soviet
origin. Maybe I had been unconscious, not asleep, in
which case my throat would probably have been okay.
My four friends were asked
to swear oaths and sign affidavits that I was exactly
who I said I was, and then I was sent to a nearby studio
to have my photo taken by an eighteen-year-old photographer
with what appeared to be a one hundred-fifty-year-old
camera. I had to hold still for almost a minute after
she uncovered the shutter. While she developed the glass
plate negative, I called my parents from a post office
several blocks away and had them wire money to the embassy.
By dusk, I had a new passport. The embassy staff told
me that I must go to the Interior Ministry the next
day for an entrance visa, which I would need to exit
the country. I didn't ask for an explanation. Whatever
got me out of Yugoslavia was fine.
As the sun set, my companions
went on to Greece and the rest of their lives. I was
sorry to see them go because I knew we weren't friends
anymore. Months later, a mutual acquaintance claimed
that the cop on the train had predicted--through the
German-speaking passenger--that they would never see
me again. Even if I was given a new passport, I would
be thrown in prison and forgotten. My German-speaking
former friend allegedly shared this information with
my three other former friends before we got off in Belgrade.
If that's true, then I guess they really meant it when
they said goodbye.
Not wanting to sample
the Belgrade night life, I took a taxi to an empty campground
recommended by the embassy. The proprietor, a young
guy in a tiny wooden kiosk, spoke perfect English. He
listened to my story, gave me a pack of Yugoslavian
cigarettes that tasted like Kleenex, and let me stay
for free. I lay awake all night in the three-foot-high
grass, smoking and moaning, my sleeping bag soaking
up the dew. In the morning, the proprietor offered me
an apple and noticed my paperback copy of Hermann Hesse's
Steppenwolf. I told him that I hated it because
every time I tried to read it, I felt like I was going
crazy. He obviously thought that I'd already gone crazy,
but he nodded and asked if I really wanted to go to
the Interior Ministry. I did. He asked again. I was
adamant. He asked again. I ordered him to help me get
there. He sighed and picked up the phone. When the cab
rolled up half an hour later, he went out and had a
ten-minute argument with the driver. I just smoked and
watched them yell and slice the air with their hands
until the proprietor waved me over. The driver flung
open the rear passenger door of the Yugo and spit into
the grass, avoiding my eyes. The proprietor stood by
his kiosk like a sentry as we drove off. I've never
seen a more guilt-stricken face.
The rattling, wheezing
cab took me into the heart of the city, where more and
more blue-shirted, assault rifle-toting policemen appeared
on the streets. They all had thick black moustaches
and huge round white captains' hats. I started laughing
because I was so scared and because the cops who wore
their hats normally looked like Venetian gondoliers,
and the ones who wore them tipped back looked like Catholic
saints. The taxi driver turned around and shushed me.
Two blocks from the Ministry, he pulled over and gestured
for me to get out. When I fumbled with the unfamiliar
money, he yelled "Ah-na-na-na-na," snatched one bill
out of my hand, and sped away. There were no civilians
on the sidewalks now, just hundreds of policemen. They
stared at me, their heads turning slowly as I walked
past.
Two cops stopped me on
the front steps of the Interior Ministry. I showed them
a letter in Serbo-Croatian provided by the embassy;
they grabbed my upper arms and marched me inside. My
passport and backpack were taken away, and I was led
down two flights of stairs to a small, dark, windowless
room with bare walls painted glossy battleship gray
to match the gray linoleum floor. The only furniture
was what appeared to be a wooden electric chair in the
center of the room and a gray metal desk in the corner,
positioned so that whoever sat behind it could look
at whoever was in the electric chair. A goose-necked
lamp and a black manual typewriter sat on the desk like
film noir props. The cops plunked me down into the electric
chair and left. I was happy to see that the chair didn't
have any wrist or ankle straps, but I was worried about
the way everything had been coated with smooth paint
or varnish, as if to make it easy to clean. I closed
my eyes and recited Hail Marys.
After an hour, two men
in civilian clothes came in. The older one was fat and
bald, with thick glasses and rubbery lips. He sat behind
the desk, lit a cigarette, and began typing. I couldn't
look at him because he was so froglike that I pictured
him snapping out a six-foot tongue and croaking "Bork!"
or suddenly hopping over the desk, his long frog legs
kicking out behind him. I almost started giggling again
as an insane fantasy unreeled in my head, all about
him being a hard-boiled frog investigative reporter
at a frog newspaper in the fifties.
The younger man was blond
and muscular, a recruiting-poster Aryan. He switched
on the lamp and adjusted it to shine into my eyes, blinding
me. I heard the flare of a match and then the tapping
of leather-soled shoes as he paced from one side of
the room to the other, back and forth. The secret to
not giggling, I discovered, was to think about the scene
in the book The Day of the Jackal, in which the
Polish legionnaire sits in a wooden chair in a dark,
cigarette smoke-filled room with a light shining into
his eyes--right before he's tortured to death by the
French police.
I cleared my throat and
said, "Can--"
The Aryan stepped in front
of the light and shouted, "How did you get into
Yugoslavia without passport?" I told him that it had
been stolen. He spoke to the frog, who shook his head
and flapped his hand, sneering something that probably
meant, "Yeah, right." The Aryan turned back to me and
shouted, "You sold passport, didn't you?" I denied
it. He spoke to the frog. The frog snorted "Na, na,
na" and typed.
I explained the whole
fiasco--slashed shirt, crazed search, train cop, unhelpful/helpful
embassy staff, photos, wired money, friends gone, empty
campground, taxi ride, arm-grabbing Ministry cops, march
down stairs, electric chair. We must have gone through
it twenty times, the sweat pouring out of me by the
quart. I stank like a lying capitalist. Every time I
finished, we started up again.
"Okay! You! Thomas! Tell
me! What does this letter from American embassy say?"
"I don't know. I can't
read Serbo-Croatian."
"Shachima vegrimo bucheche
od trasnye vizu."
"Na, na, na."
"How did you get into
Yugoslavia without passport?"
"I had a passport.
It was stolen on the train."
"Novi vastibro tren
pasopriko na laznesta."
"Na, na, na."
"Did you sell your passport,
Thomas? Did you?"
"No, it was stolen."
"Stolen? How? Tell
me!"
This went on for two hours,
and then a uniformed officer brought in my backpack.
It looked like somebody had beaten the hell out it.
My clothes and paperbacks were hanging out of the unzipped
pockets, and one of the seams was starting to unravel.
The Aryan handed me my passport and said that I'd been
given an entry visa. It expired at midnight.
"What happens after midnight?"
I asked.
"You will be arrested!"
he barked. "You must leave Yugoslavia before midnight!"
"Well, how do I get to
the train station? I don't know where I am."
"Take bus."
"Which bus?"
"Bus Guh. We cannot
waste all day with you, Thomas! Go!"
I ran out onto the street.
There was nothing that resembled a bus stop anywhere,
though I didn't actually know what a Yugoslavian bus
stop looked like. What I took to be a trash barrel could
have been a bus stop, I suppose. The policemen sprawled
on the front steps of the Ministry were watching me
again, stroking their rifles and chuckling. As I set
off in a randomly chosen direction, I remembered that
my brother Pat listened to a punk band called Millions
of Dead Cops.
Forty-five minutes later,
I flagged down a cab and said, "Train station. Statzionen.
Choo-choo-choo-choo. Woooooo-woooooo." The driver promptly
made a U-turn and drove back toward the Interior Ministry.
I figured that he was an undercover cop, sent because
the frog and the Aryan had changed their minds about
letting me go, but he turned off on an alley to avoid
passing in front of the building. He dropped me off
at the station, and I bought a ticket for an express
that left at six in the evening. Then I sat on a bench
and watched Yugoslavians for almost five hours, reminding
myself that this country was touted in the left-wing
press as a Communist success story.
Although I couldn't tell
if people were successful or not, I did pick up that
they never smiled, and they loved their dictator-president-premier
Josip Broz Tito, who had died only a month earlier.
His pouty-lipped, double-chinned face was everywhere,
even on the T-shirts of the slacker teenage boys. The
designs used grainy black-and-white photos and angular
graphics, like he was an underground rock star only
the ultrahip knew about. He looked more like a movie
star to me--Gert Fröbe in Goldfinger. After a
while, I noticed that one of the ticket sellers had
a five o'clock shadow that went all the way up his cheeks
to his eye sockets. It was too painful for him to shave
his lower eyelids; I knew this because he had moustaches
right below his eyes, two narrow black bars of hair
that mirrored his eyebrows.
A short, spherical man
in a blue uniform and hat was working by the front entrance.
He was a porter, Belgrade-style. As people rushed by,
he would try to snatch the suitcases out of their hands.
They always resisted, yanking their bags back without
looking at him. He would mope for a few seconds and
then paw at somebody else, and that person would fight
him off too. Each encounter was a brief but vicious
tug-of-war--a brief but vicious and completely silent
tug-of-war. The porter didn't say anything, and nobody
ever told him to get lost. He was still at it when I
caught my train.
I had an entire compartment
to myself. As soon as the train was out of the station,
a young Yugoslavian soldier came in and asked in German
if he could hide under the seats. Suddenly, I could
speak and understand German. He told me that he was
going to see his girlfriend but didn't have enough money
for a ticket. I said sure. He lay down on the floor,
and I pulled both benches out, forming a compartment-wide
mattress. I lay across it and waited for the conductor.
When he slid open the door, I expected him to point
a gun at me and ask in German why I was hiding a soldier
of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under
my seat, but he just punched my ticket. The soldier
emerged at the next station, handed me a pack of Turkish
cigarettes, and got off.
I made it to the Austrian
border at 11:05, less than an hour before my visa expired.
I wanted to kiss the Austrian passport control officer
on his heavy red beard. After he left, I put my passport
and money down the front of my pants and went to sleep,
rubbing my itchy eyes. I still had the entire compartment
to myself. When I woke up at four in the morning, my
left eye felt strange, and my vision was cloudy. I went
to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My left eye
had swollen into a lumpy, jellied mass that protruded
half an inch out of my head. I could close it, but there
was an unpleasant, full sensation, as if my eyeball
had overeaten. It didn't hurt at all. I went back to
my compartment and fell asleep again, resolving to deal
with the loss of my eye in the morning. The next thing
I knew, we were pulling into Munich. My left eye wouldn't
open, even when I tried forcing the lids apart with
my fingers. I got off the train, went to the men's room,
and gently washed my eye in warm water for five minutes.
I didn't look in the mirror yet. The eyelid came unstuck;
I took a deep breath and looked. My eye was fine. It
had resumed its normal size and shape, and I could see
perfectly. I went and bought a ticket out of Germany.
The only other thing that
happened on my way back to Norway was that I shared
a train compartment with six people from the Dutch province
of Friesland. They were speaking Frisian, a language
that sounds like a German parody of English. It's very
disorienting, especially if you're tired. I'd already
lost my ability to speak and understand German--it only
lasted twenty minutes or so--and now it seemed as if
I'd lost my ability to speak and understand English.
If you hear Frisian long enough, you start thinking
that you've had a stroke.
The woman who did most
of the talking had a drilling, high-pitched, buzzing
voice, like a wasp caught in an envelope. It made my
skin crawl. I could feel millions of tiny feet scuttling
all over my head, into my ears, across my thighs. For
about nine hours, I heard
So vazumzez
on the mzzvorzaz fass iz vat day ad tiz? Yeah, and datzezzum
shmoken my vellek zezmn. Or ya could zezrizmem and zavzz
vim yeah, okay, but das iz vazmn nemzin should havtez
kezfizinmzz, yeah? Then she saz venmn zazviz zemn did
slow up saziz vorminzaz and shore zizazbez.
I was sure that I'd died
from my eye-thing and gone to hell, and I would have
to spend eternity confused, hot, and exhausted on a
train that never arrived, listening to a German wasp
that never stopped talking.
A year later, almost to
the day, I received a package from the United States
Department of State. It contained my stolen denim pouch,
a letter from an assistant to the assistant to the undersecretary
of something, and a letter from the Athens Police. They
wanted to let me know that my pouch had been found by
the cleaning crew when the train was being hosed down
and fumigated at the end of the line. My passport, money,
and traveler's checks were gone, of course, but my journal,
pens, Inter-Rail pass, and wallet were still there.
The strap of the pouch
had been cut with a blade so sharp that the material
hadn't frayed. Whoever did it had a surgeon's touch.
I'm grateful for his professionalism.
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