Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I woke the next day in a better frame of mind. Today I would fulfil a little dream. I was going to take a
first-class sleeper from one European capital to another. This had long seemed to me the very pinnacle of
luxury, and I breakfasted in the dining-room of the Excelsior with the serene composure of a man who knows
his time has come. My plan was to buy the ticket directly after breakfast and spend the day going around the
museums before heading to the station in the evening to take my place among the dispossessed
duchesses, Hercule Poirot look-alikes and other exotic characters I presumed still travelled by first-class
sleeping carriage in this part of the world.
The concierge told me not to buy my ticket at the station - 'It is hysterical there,' he said, shaking his
head sadly - but to go to the main office of Sputnik, the state-run travel agency, where I could make a
reservation in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity.
The Sputnik office was orderly but unfriendly and full of sluggish queues. First I had to stand in a line to
find out which line to stand in. Then I had to stand in a line to reserve a sleeping compartment, but these, I
was told with withering disdain by a nasty-looking piece of work masquerading as a middle-aged woman,
were booked solid for weeks and no amount of money could secure one for me now. Well, there goes
another dream whooshing down the sluicepan of life, I thought bleakly. The woman directed me to a third
line where I might get a seat ticket if I were lucky, but she gave a wave of her hand that told me this was
unlikely. She was right.
Without even a seat on the train, I returned to the first line to see if there were any other lines I could
usefully stand in. The girl in the first line, who happened to be the only nice person in the place, told me that I
should stand in the airline line because flights across Yugoslavia were nearly as cheap as the train. I went
and stood in the airline line, which was exceptionally long and slow-moving, and discovered when my turn
came that it wasn't the airline line at all - ha, ha, ha - that the airline line was one more line to the left. So I
went and stood in the airline line and eventually discovered that there were no airline seats available either,
not that day or the next.
A sense of helpless frustration was overcoming me, with weepy panic nipping at its heels. I had been
here for nearly two hours. I explained to the girl as patiently as I could that I had to be in Sofia the next day on
account of my visa. She gave me a look that said, Well, why on earth do you expect me to give a fuck?, but
she said she would put my name on the standby list for the evening flight and told me to come back at four.
I went to the bus station, hoping by some miracle that there would be a bus to Sofia. The station was
absolute chaos - throngs of people bunched around every ticket window or sitting on piles of suitcases,
waiting listlessly or erupting into little localized riots whenever a bus arrived. The babble of a dozen tongues
filled the air. All the signs were in Cyrillic. I examined the timetables on the wall, but had no real idea what
Sofia would look like in Cyrillic. Suddenly the idea of being innocent and free in a foreign land didn't seem
so exotic and appealing. I couldn't even tell which was the information window. I was as helpless as an
infant.
It took me most of the afternoon to discover that there were no buses to Sofia. My best hope was to
take a bus to Niš and another onward to Dimitrovgrad on the Bulgarian border, and hope that I could find
some kind of transport the last forty miles to Sofia. It would take three days at least, but I was so eager by
now to get out of Yugoslavia and into any other country that I bought a ticket to Niš for $12, pocketed it and
trudged back up the long hill to the Sputnik office.
I arrived two seconds after the stroke of four. A new girl was seated at the airline reservations
computer. I told her the situation and she looked through the standby list for my name. After a moment she
informed me that my name was not on the list. I looked at her with the expression of a man who has lost his
job and had his car stolen and now has learned that his wife has run off with his best pal. I said, 'What?'
She said it didn't matter because there were still plenty of seats left on the evening flight.
I said, 'What?'
She looked at me with manifest indifference. A ticket to Sofia would cost $112. Did I want one?
Did I want a ticket? Is the Pope Catholic? Is Betty Ford a clinic? 'Yes,' I said. She did some tinkering
with the computer and at length issued me with a ticket. A wave of relief washed over me. I would be in
Sofia for dinner - or at least for a late snack. I was getting out of Belgrade. Hooray!
I went outside and hailed a taxi. 'Take me to the airport!' I said to the driver, falling into the back as he
 
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