We're not in Kansas anymore Toto

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

This train was a trip, no pun intended…. It was five in the morning when I boarded my third train at the Romanian border town of Timisoara on the way to Belgrade. Pulling back the curtain to my cabin, I am delighted to see there is only one backpack and no person attached to it inside. It seemed a bit peculiar someone would just leave their back pack, but I didn’t think too much of it. I open the curtains and settle into the prime seat, the one next to the window, where you can watch the countryside as it comes rather than as it disappears, and say a quick prayer that it will just be me and the partner of the unattended backpack for the ride to Belgrade.

Suddenly, a wiry man bursts into the compartment dressed in a t-shirt and warm up pants with a cover up jacket. He reaches past me, whips the curtains closed, and jumps up on to the seats, placing a foot on each bench for balance, and proceeds to unscrew the vent shaft above. I’d like to think he is the electrician fixing the light, but there is no light. A moment later he has wriggled his body half way into the shaft and is tossing down small rectangular shaped somethings wrapped in black plastic trash bags. Terrific… Of all the seats on this train I get the one where they are smuggling illegal whatever across the border. I don’t want to know. I politely turn around and face the corner, waiting until his rummaging stops.

A minute later an older, decently dressed, and seemingly educated man starts barking at my wire terrier friend from the aisle. WT (let’s call him) is rushing frantically now and I am suddenly concerned that maybe it is better I not see everyone involved in this transaction. I pray for the safety of my backpack, strap my purse around my shoulder, bow my head, and step past the man in the aisle. I feel him glaring at me. I pray again.

The older man is exasperated. He hands a large plastic tarp-like bag to WT, barking more unintelligible commands. I hear scurrying in the compartment and wonder if my backpack will be raided as well. I think for a moment if I should enter. I decide it is probably not a good idea. Just then the old man steps out, a full bag in his arms and genteelly saunters down the aisle, and off the train.

I take my seat and open the curtains. The wire-terrier bounds off to the next compartment and I hear rummaging again. I look at the dismantled vent shaft above me and wonder if I should change cars. Could I get arrested for turning my back to a cross-border smuggling operation? I begin to wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed on the train to Budapest. Being interrogated in Bosnia just doesn’t seem like that much fun to me. At least whatever it was is gone, I think to myself. As I’m pondering what they were smuggling across Romania, my yapper friend pops back in, his arms filled with more of the black plastic wrap containers. He closes the curtains again and proceeds to climb back into the shaft. This time I’m not moving. He finishes the last screw and steps off the bench just as the passport control opens the curtain to ask for my passport – they greet each other like old friends. I would love to ask exactly what is going on, but it is doubtful he speaks English and probably better I don’t know. So much for my future as a war correspondent.

Passport control barely glances at my passport – I guess you are on the inside track if you’re in the smuggler’s compartment. The officer leaves. Another guy comes to the doorway and slaps my yapper friend on the back. He says something back then pulls out a two-liter bottle filled with a thick brown substance which he pours into two plastic cups, handing one to his friend and they toast what appears to be a success toast. Hmmm, a nip of liquor would actually be quite nice right now. I guess he saw the longing in my eye for he turns to me, gesturing with the bottle, “Kafa?” I nod yes. He smiles and pours me a cup, hands it to me, opens the drapes, and disappears with his backpack out into the aisle. Now we are bonded.

I sit back in my seat, sipping the thickest, strongest coffee I have ever tasted, watching the sunflowers turn their heads to the morning sun as the concoction begins to eat through my stomach lining.

I barely breathed the hour and a half we sat at the border. My heart stood still in my chest as the investigator lifted the benches in my car then glanced at the vent above. He searched the outlines, checking the placement of screws I presume, before leaving the cabin. I tried not to exhale audibly as relief swept through me and thankfulness that WT had picked up the screw he had dropped on the floor and climbed back up to replace it. Whew… The train was moving on. I breathed freely again. For a few minutes anyway. Then WT came back, opened the vent, and began taking stuff out again! Jesus Christ… I stepped out in the aisle to let him work.

Standing there I saw train security coming down the aisle as he was tossing stuff down from the vent to the floor. Shit! What should I do? I felt a complicity with my friend the coffee-sharing wire-terrier, a fear of ‘the goods’ being discovered in MY cabin, a desire to be a good citizen, and a desire to be an invisible one, all at the same time. The four reactions collided and I stood there silently, heart pounding, as the officer walked the corridor, checking each compartment. I’m sure the look on my face was classic when he opened the curtain to my cabin, and said, I presume, “hey how’s it going” to WT while he was standing on the benches with his hands in the vent shaft! Train security was in on it! For the next twenty minutes, WT and the other smuggler were running up and down the aisles in a frenzy taking stuff down and filling up bags, while everyone, security included, walked around like nothing was happening. It was absolutely bizarre.

When we pulled into the last station before Belgrade, I laughed out loud. Looking out on the platform I saw dozens of people walking away from the train with these tarp like plastic collapsible bags – all filled to the brim just like WT’s. The entire train must have been smuggling something! At the beginning of the ride in the dark of the night in the littered border town, my mind was racing with thoughts of what they might be smuggling – cocaine? Weapons? False papers? I actually had a nanosecond fear at the beginning that I was going to have my throat sliced for “knowing to much” – a dispensable American tourist with bad timing in a multi-million dollar drug smuggle. In the light of day, as hundreds of bags were carried across the tracks I realized it was more likely Charmin tissue and bed linens! Guess I won’t get my throat cut for toilet tissue….