Three
Chinese boys join me in the ancient train compartment first. The lighting is
bad in the compartment, the faded mint-green of the seats and the cloudy
windows all seem shrouded in the aura of sketchy murder scene. They throw stock
English phrases into their Mandarin-dominated banter: “Shut the fuck up, bro!”
I’m think I might be glad they’re here to share the sketchiness of the train,
even as I dread a long, sleepless night punctuated by swear words turned
superlatives.
The
train fills up—an English speaker who greets the three Chinese boys with
familiarity, two American boys traveling together. Two girls visit from the
other compartment, which also seems to be dominated by non-Romanians leaving
Bucharest. “Ours is much more crowded,” one says.
One
of the American boys hunts for something in his companion’s bag. “Where is it?
Next to your Bible?” “No, it’s . . .” If I were bold, that’s when I would have
started a conversation. I would have said, “You keep your whole Bible while
traveling? Wow—I just tore out pages from mine and stuck them in my notebook”
and invited his judgment. I didn’t, though. That same American has, like me,
caught a cold. He sneezes many times, wiping his hands and face on his shirt.
It is blue, without writing, but sprayed down the front with snot. I barely
have enough napkins to cover my own sneezes and snot—a souvenir of nights of
trains and days of walking—and for a single trip to the bathroom before
arriving in Sofia in 11 hours.
A
stack of passports, blue and red mostly, maybe a green, already in hand, the
uniformed man asks for ours as well. When he’s added them to the stack, he
leaves. I feel my anxiety mirrored in the others’ suddenly alert postures.
Minutes ago we were sleeping, silent, waiting; now we wait until he comes back.
“Um, okay,” he says, both authoritative and daunted by the foreign names in our
passports. “Okay. Any Americans?” He reads the other boys’ names, but I am the
only female. He smiles barely as he hands me back my passport. I can fall back
asleep now.
“Billet.”
“Ticket.”
Glare.
This
is how I woke up so many times during the night. It’s enough to long for the
future warned by every science fiction novel ever when I can simply leave my
wrist dangling over the seat edge and snore on while security IDs me from some
bar code in my veins.
It’s
5:30 and mists are hanging over green swells of farmland. I curl back up on my
checkered towel. Sleep has not waited long this entire ride.
At
some point the bathroom finally becomes necessary. I steel myself, but my
senses were not prepared for the stench of soured piss and the sight of it
pooled on the floor. Or maybe it’s water. It’s water from the sink. Definitely.
A bolder part of me—the same that might have started the conversation—wants to
lean out and yell into my compartment: “Which one of you can’t aim? This is
disgusting.” But there is no point. Disgusting toilets are part of it all.
It’s
7:30 and two security guards wander past. I blink awake and see them pointing
angrily at my shoes, which are rested against the seat across from me. I take
then down. They leave. By now the Chinese boys have left. So have the
Americans. It is me, an English man, and mostly Bulgarians. I fall back asleep.
Not
long after that I decide to wake up for real. I open the bottle of orange juice
I bought the night before and take a swig. Revived, I set it down to reach for
my torn out Bible pages. Sometimes I lose track of my elbows. The juice
splatters against the glass, spraying me and the unprepared man sitting
caddycorner from me, a full three feet away from the juice debacle. The bottle
falls to the floor and the rest of the juice finds its way across the
compartment to one of the English-speakers’ shoes. The rest pools around my
suitcase. I apologize and try not to laugh at myself as I mop up what I can. I
can feel the others’ amusement, perhaps derision in their nonchalant postures.
No one looks at me.
“Seriously,
who let the clumsy American on the train?"
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