Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.                                                                                                                                   The train journey itself, which took three days and three nights from Lausanne to Athens (via Milan, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, and Salonika), and my subsequent sojourn in Greece, introduced me to the most extreme form of two sensations: loneliness and nostalgia. Throughout the long passage through then-Yugoslavia I sat sleepless, thinking of home--the garden, the owls, the blue Jura mountains--and staring fixedly at the identical but reversed face in the window and the drab world beyond, the surly bondage and resentment of the Serbs and Croats that I’m tempted to see in hindsight as primed for a Milosevic or Karodzic to come along and kick into snarling action, like half-starved curs. Every visit to the nations of ex-Yugoslavia reinforced the impression that they, whether they call themselves Croats, Serbs or Bosnians, were and are unhappy together and unhappier apart, the very embodiments of the gloomy Slav...but that might have been just me.  

     What was worse, during my slow progress on the unglamorous Orient Express across the entire wretched Titoist federation, from the outskirts of Trieste to the suburbs of Salonika, there was no dining car, and I’d soon exhausted my personal stocks of Henniez mineral water, cheese-and-chocolate sandwiches, Bahlsen snack crackers, and cherries from our garden (sob). On midnight of the second day, as the train rocked back and forth on the irregular rails of Titoland, I too was rocking back and forth in my compartment, not in sympathy or as in grooving to the tune, daddy-o, but as in agonies of starvation. There might or might not have been a tiny food stall a hundred carriages away, but the aisle outside my compartment was dense with drunken Serbs trying to break down the door of the neighboring compartment, in which cowered a reasonably attractive Canadian woman who’d foolishly stuck her nose outside just long enough to be spotted by the marauding Serbs. The train jolted along; the Serbs in the corridor, in their unshaven fashion, bellowed pseudo-English endearments (“Dahling! I love you Kim Novak!”); I took to chain-smoking cigarettes to allay the pangs; and then, in the depths of night, the train shrugged to a halt in Nis, no doubt at its best a center of art, theatre, and dance, but a dismal shithole indeed as seen from a train at night…but on the platform of the station (pictured above) there was a food vendor vending something grilled over a leaping flame. I didn’t know how long the train was stopping, but my hunger impelled me out my compartment window, limbs windmilling, and I hoarsely embarked upon negotiations in half-remembered Russian with the vendor, a hirsute Serbian elder in an apron and a kind of wooly fez, for a mess of grilled fatty lumps of meat aligned on a sliced loaf of grayish bread. I asked him what it was. He frowned, seemingly reluctant or unable to understand my fractured schoolboy Russian; but midway through the negotiations, his whiskery old mug lit up in sudden delight.

     “Lamps mitt,” he said.

     “What kind?”

    “Lamps mitt. Yes, pliss.”

    It was the extent of his English, and of my patience. Whether it was diced sewer rat or chopped guinea pig, I was hungry enough for any old “lamps mitt.” Then, as I was counting out my dinars, a whistle sounded behind me and the Orient Express pulled briskly away from the platform. I screamed at the vendor in schoolboy Russian to hurry (“byistro! byistro!”), but he chuckled and prolonged by about three minutes the time it normally took him to assemble a lump-of-meat sandwich, while I glanced back and forth in desperation from the food I craved to the train that was clanking obliviously away into the night with my steamer trunk and passport, leaving me in the middle of darkest Serbia with no belongings, no identification, and no ability to communicate. It was extreme panic, overridden by hunger. I grabbed the sandwich when he’d finally finished with it and took to my heels in fruitless pursuit. The train’s wagging red dorsal light soon disappeared into the night. Alone on the platform, I stood staring at the quiet gleam of the empty rails and mechanically gobbled my sandwich. Well, I thought, invoking the protective deity of my birth-nationality in extremis as atheists in foxholes are said to suddenly acknowledge God: There must be an American consulate somewhere. I’d eaten, anyway, the gristly fare of grisly Slobbovia. And I had Greek drachmas on me, and leftover Swiss francs. My first order of business was to find a telephone, and I was looking for one when–presto! Like a timid paramour, the Orient Express coyly reappeared, slowly backing into the station, and came to a halt along another platform in a great Westinghousian wheeze of brakes. I ran across the tracks and climbed aboard and succeeded in parting the throngs of unshaven Serbian sex maniacs besieging the Canadian lady and sought refuge behind my compartment door. In my head ran the full-length feature of which Fate had just given me a grim little preview: abandonment, disgrace, imprisonment, deportation. The Serbs in the corridor attempted a final, futile assault on the Canadian lady’s redoubt, then finally dispersed in frustration when a strident conductor, newly-arrived, sent them packing. Through the rest of dingy Serbia and Bosnia and Macedonia I slept, stomach roiling uneasily. Then—efharisto poli, passaporti! Greece again.