Valley of Thracians (14 page)

Chapter
29

I am not expecting the bagpipe. The
troupe of entertainers strikes up its Balkan beat with enthusiasm. One musician
plays an accordion,
another pounds
rhythmically on a
shoulder-strung
tupan
drum, and an
older man pipes out simple sounds on his
kaval
flute. But it’s the bagpipe that surprises me, as I would normally
associate this animal-skinned bag instrument with the Scottish highlands.

“It’s called a
gaida
,” one of the Peace Corps instructors explains to me. “It’s
quite common all over Europe, actually.”

It is strange to hear the long, whiny
notes emerging from the bag being carried under the arms of the mustached band
member. To produce this protracted sound, he puffs into the blowpipe at the
top, squeezing the bag to force air through the reeds of the pipes, and a
mesmerizing Balkan drone fills the hall.

“You know a lot about bagpipes!” I joke
with the instructor.

“Oh, not really, but I do know one
thing,” he says, laughing. “When you finish playing your
gaida
each night, you pour a glass of
rakia
into the bag.”

“You must be kidding me!”

“No, it’s true.
Rakia
acts as an antiseptic within the bag to keep it from rotting.
It’s apparently also quite common to rub hand lotion on the exterior of the
gaida
bag. A well-kept
gaida
can last for some thirty years!”

I stand and watch, entranced by the
music that has been advertised as coming straight from the Rhodopes Mountains.
Then I join Lance at the open bar. He hands me an ice-cold Shumensko and helps
himself to a handful of pistachio nuts.

“Great party,” he comments, “but not
enough girls.”

“Why do you keep insisting that
Bulgarian women are so beautiful?” I say,
clinking
my
beer bottle against the one held by my friend.

“They just are,” he responds lightly.
“They’re so thin, with jet-black hair, pointed noses, tight asses. Their legs
stretch for miles, and their skin is so white! Take a look around at our fellow
American inductees. All the girls from the States are pudgy, short, and
entirely unattractive.
Hold me back if you find me trying to
elope with that lovely Ivanka we met at the pub the other night.”

I laugh, not knowing if he’s serious or
if he’s gotten a head start with Bulgarian beer consumption for the night.

The party is quite lively, a fitting
tribute to our having completed the pre-service training. We are now officially
Peace Corps volunteers, serving as ambassadors of the United States and
qualified to give Bulgarians a better command of the English language and an appreciation
of the American way of life. The party is in the Vratsa high school, where our
final courses took place. I am proud of myself for completing the course. I am
truly capable of accomplishing anything if I work at it hard enough, I tell
myself.

By now, my command of Bulgarian is
gore-dolu
, or so-so, but it’s enough to
get along. The locals can understand me—grammar mistakes and all. I am ready
for my initial volunteering assignment, wherever that will be. But first, it’s
time to get drunk and party!

The band members wear traditional
Bulgarian attire. The men sport black pants, white shirts, and embroidered
vests. A woman joins the ensemble, dressed in a plain black skirt with colorful
embroidery at the lower edges. Over the skirt she has an orange-and-red plaid
apron. She wears a white blouse with decorative embellishments and, over that,
an open jacket with a neckline framed in more color. Her dark hair is garlanded
by a large pink flower.

The woman takes the microphone and
launches into a sorrowful Balkan melody. I don’t understand the words, but by
her expressions, I can determine that this is a heartfelt tale of lost love.
The entire audience, Peace Corps inductees and local residents alike, stands
still in respectful silence as the singer’s woeful melody runs its course. We
all clap appreciatively when she reaches the end.

And then the folk dancing begins.

I am not a dancer. Never was, never will
be. It doesn’t matter how much patience and encouragement go into efforts to
get me to join in the frolicking, whether it’s at a discotheque or at a party
offering Bulgarian folk dances, I don’t dance. I know that I will only end up
making a fool of myself if I try.

Lance is enthusiastic about the
opportunity to grab hold of one particular dark-haired girl. He circles the
room with her to the beat of the complex rhythm. The name of the dance is the
horo
. The dancers start by moving to the
right with a series of lift-steps, and then they move to the left. They cross
the right foot in front of the left, transferring the weight onto the right
foot while moving the left foot to the right. It all seems so complicated, but
Lance picks up the moves effortlessly; they come as naturally to him as his
successful attempts to pick up the local women.

The dancers circle around ever faster as
the beat of the music picks up in intensity. Lance draws his partner as close
as possible and almost trips over his feet as a result. I hold up my beer to
salute him, but he doesn’t notice me as he swirls around the room.

A man at the far end of the room is
staring at me. With a sense of impending horror, I realize it is Vlady. I
haven’t seen him since our journey together to Romania. I made efforts to avoid
Boris during my last days in Montana, and I certainly have no desire to see his
accomplice. I figured I was through with these two crooks. What is Vlady doing
here now?

I move back, trying to hide from Vlady’s
view, but it’s no use. Before I have a chance to escape, he has slipped across
the room and is standing at my side.

“We need to go,” he says, his breath
thick with alcohol.

“I’m at a party, can’t you see that?”

“We go now,” he says, leading me by the
elbow out of the room.

Lance is too busy dancing to notice my
departure, and there is no one else for me to tell that I’m being forced to
leave. Before I fully comprehend what’s happening, I am sitting in the pickup
truck next to Vlady, and we are driving away from the school.

“Where are we going?”

“We go to the train,” he says, not
bothering to explain anything more than that.

A few minutes later, we are parked at
Vratsa’s train station, a sorry-looking building with few comforts to offer
passengers bound for Sofia in the south. But I soon learn Sofia is not where we
are headed.

Boris meets us outside the station and
wordlessly climbs into the back of the truck. He lifts out a portable moving
cart and hands it down to Vlady, and then he starts handing me some very large
but surprisingly lightweight boxes.

More stolen watches, I assume. Soon we
have all the cartons lowered to the ground, and we begin wheeling them into the
station. It takes three trips, but finally we have the boxes stacked together
in neat piles on the platform. Boris hurries to return the cart to the pickup
and then returns to wait with us in the dark for the train to arrive.

“I should get back now,” I say to Vlady,
but he ignores my statement. I could just run, but they would probably chase me
if I did. I still remember Boris’s fist looming in front of my face, a pounding
that was averted only at the very last second by Ralitsa’s intervention.

“Train comes,” Vlady says.

And then I hear it, long before it comes
into view. It sounds like a very tired train, struggling along the tracks,
reluctantly transporting its cargo on the journey north. A lonesome whistle
sounds, spooking me even more. And then the headlight pops around the corner,
shining a beam down the length of parallel iron rails until it lights up the
concrete siding of the platform.

What the hell am I doing here?

The train pulls into the station as if
it has just arrived from the 1950s. The cars are dirty and rust-colored, their
graffiti-covered exteriors looking like they're from the Iron Curtain era. The
passenger windows are small, as if added as an afterthought. As the whistle
blows again, the train grinds to a halt alongside the concrete where we are
standing.

We quickly get into action. Vlady jumps
aboard one of the passenger cars, and Boris and I hand the cartons up to him.
Shouldn’t these be stored in the baggage compartment? I wonder, but there is no
one to ask. When the last of the boxes is loaded, Boris pushes me ahead of him,
and I am forced to climb the narrow metal steps onto the car itself.

Not too many passengers have boarded the
train, and the three of us have an entire compartment to ourselves. The narrow
sleeping bunks don’t appear particularly accommodating. I ask Vlady a question
to which I already know I don’t want to hear an answer.

“Where are we going?”

“Belgrade,” he says. “We’ll get there
tomorrow.”

He talks in rapid Bulgarian with Boris
while I stare out the window at the dark Balkan countryside. I am on a train to
Serbia? This can’t be happening! I’ve been kidnapped, I think, forced to travel
on this train against my will. I stand up, ready to pull a lever and make the
engines stop and end this nightmarish journey.

“Where you go?” Vlady asks.

Just then a conductor arrives and points
at the cartons at the end of the corridor. Both Vlady and Boris argue with him
for several minutes, and then Boris takes out his wallet and leads the conductor
out of sight to negotiate the price of our travel. I’m not quite sure if a
bribe is involved, but when Boris comes back to our cabin, he is whistling as
if nothing had happened.

I’m hoping that’s the last of our
troubles. As the two of them chain smoke despite the no-smoking warnings, I
climb up the thin metal rungs to an upper bunk and lie down, with my feet
hanging partly in midair. The flickering florescent fixture just inches above
my head swings back and forth like a pendulum, its movement partially hypnotic
and strangely comforting. My eyes slowly adjust to the half light of the
compartment, and I find myself totally relaxed. The rumble and creaking of the
old train shake me back and forth, but despite my worries and troubles, it’s as
if I am being rocked in a cradle, and soon I’m fast asleep.

The train slows as we approach the
Serbian border crossing, and I’m jerked awake. It’s at this moment that a
sudden thought pops into my mind. I don’t have my passport with me!

I sit up quickly on the bunk and see
Vlady pulling out documents from his travel bag. I see that he’s holding three
passports, and one of them is mine!

“Hey, where did you get that?” I ask,
jumping down to the cabin floor.

“We knew you’d need it,” Vlady replies.

I am about to grab the passport from
him, but there is movement in the corridor. We all realize at the same time
that a customs inspector has boarded the train and is about to discover the
shipment we’re transporting.

Vlady and Boris whisper to each other,
and I sit down on the lower bunk opposite them. Boris again takes out his
wallet and goes to talk to the inspector and negotiate our passage into Serbia.

This time, though, he is gone a long
time. At one point I hear strange sounds from the distant end of the corridor,
but I’m afraid to dwell on what this might mean. And then Boris returns, his
eyes a bit glazed over as he sits down. Vlady avoids looking at his partner.

The train begins moving again, slowly,
inching forward as it passes over the line on the map that designates the
border between Bulgaria and Serbia. I wait for it to pick up speed, but it
continues at this sluggish pace as if it has all night to reach Belgrade,
which, of course, it does.

I stand up and move to leave the cabin.

“Where you go?” Vlady asks, reaching out
to grab my arm.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“No bathroom now,” he says, and I drop
to my seat.

Hours later, the ordeal of this night
train is over. We pull into the Serbian station before the sun has risen. A
sign declares that we’ve arrived in Beograd, but I realize that this is just
the local spelling for Belgrade, the country’s capital. There is a
rough-looking man waiting for us on the platform, and we help bring the boxes
to his van. Our delivery mission is completed with little fanfare, not even a
word of thanks is exchanged. We return to the station to wait for the morning’s
train back to Bulgaria.

The next day, as I’m packing up my room
to leave Vratsa, where I had completed the Peace Corps training, I log on to
the Internet to check the English-language news from Sofia and the local
weather forecast. A headline catches my eye, as if planted there specifically
for me: “Customs Officer Dies
During
Search for
Smuggled Cigarettes
.”
I skim through
the lines of the short article:

Passengers
on the train traveling between Bulgaria and Serbia are said to have heard some
kind of noise. The train crew was alerted but only discovered the body of the
customs officer in one of the bathrooms when the train pulled into the Belgrade
station. The case is under investigation. Trains traveling on this route are
frequently used to smuggle cigarettes between the two countries.