Trapped in Perpetual Transit

I needed a place to brush the ferrous red dust off my jeans and shake the rumble of buses and trains out of my head. So I had a notion to wind up my travels through Greece and Yugoslavia at the village of Peania, outside Athens, where my grandmother lives. She had never made it as far as America and I felt pretty sure she would want to hear about what separated us. It wasn't like old times anymore, though: my grandmother had lapsed into a make-believe world, delicately and, to an outsider, bafflingly crocheted from frayed borders of the obsolete past. As her feet led her aimlessly and restlessly around a cramped room, her mind resolutely hitched longer distances, cottoning up to the view somewhere around World War I, or even before. My senile grandmother has become an itinerant wayfarer in the last days of her life, and in that way we were spiritually akin to one another this summer.

I'd stumbled onto a lot of shiftless people by the end of the summer; you could say I was more or less one of them: never pausing in a particular place for longer than a day or two, breaking away from friends when I'd barely found them out, too often moving on reluctantly. It was pretty awesome how much company I had: all of us feeling trapped in perpetual transit, even though some of us knew we were slated to come to a standstill, eventually, in this house or on that date.

I rode into Greece from Yugoslavia on a lazy train in which the second class was crammed with fidgety bodies while the corridors were impassably strewn with parcels, sleeping bags and surplus passengers staring fixedly out the windows for hours or hunched down against the walls. Nonetheless, someone was forever trying to pace from one car to another, so there was a perpetual rippling of volumes in the dimness (most of the trip took place at night) as bodies and belongings obligingly traded then resumed their places.

I squeezed into a cabin with a family of former exiles--lost Greeks--and a Bolivian. I had the feeling I was watching the last, unnoticed stretch in the return of a handful of modern-day Odyssei. The man had left Greece with his wife at the age of 18, after fighting with the partisans in a civil war that crept out of the mountains to shake the country all over again after the Allied liberation of 1944. This man was one of many communists finally forced to flee, who thought they would die outlaws.

Now these communists, or at least alleged communists, are being permitted to trickle back over the border. The man and woman across from me hadn't slept for a frazzled five days, since leaving Poland, their adopted country. "I just can't close my eyes, my head's too full of worries, about the kids, a place to stay, a job, what the city will have turned into," the father told me. They both wanted to talk about what was happening, but they couldn't get beyond the refrain, "I can't believe it; I never thought it was possible." I think they were the only ones who didn't mind when the train stalled, because they were so used to waiting, and so eager to peer out at anything Greek.

They had toted along bread and an assortment of glass and plastic bottles for drink. The water on board was rancid, and the bottles needed refilling. As we pulled into a station, the woman urged her husband, "Hail someone outside, they won't refuse." Nervously, he wedged his shoulders over the pane and called "Eh, Compatriot!"

Compatriot--it sounded so musical yet so forlorn. I shrink from recalling that greeting because it hangs in my memory like a portent of betrayal. I hope it really meant that hope is possible. Already the man had culled suspicion in a stolidly bourgeois farming couple as he pressed for workers' movements, and in a spurt of desperation and elation, invoked Che Guevara's name. I guess he'll learn not to go so far.

Once in Greece, I holed up briefly in a relative's empty home. The stucco house was maybe two kilometers from the nearest village, secluded in a ravine. I hardly saw another living presence there, yet I could hear alarming noises, like clandestine signals, before dawn. At night ephemeral animal shrieks passed through the porous walls and around 4 a.m. sporadic double-toned whistles started picking a course down the incline. A bold spell of moonlight walking told me they were merely bats and shepherds.

The chicken-lady was the intruder who finally forced me on the road again. I first met her on the bus to my relative's house; she was the stout matron, slouched in a rear seat with lumpy plastic sacks packed against it. A younger woman staggered up the steps moaning, "God, I'm tired." So Stout, bridling at her gall, blurted, "Tired! What've you got to be tired about?" And the rest went sort of like this:

Young Woman: I can't stand it, I'm so beat.

Stout (smoothly): What about people who are just getting off a midnight shift? How should they feel?

Young Woman: But I've been on the move since six o'clock--shopping.

Stout: You haven't been sweating in a tavern all night, and now you don't have to go home and feed the chickens.

Young Woman: Feed the chickens! What do you have to do that for?

Stout: Chickens eat too, you know. They get hungry too. Don't you eat?

Young Woman (distractedly): Would you open a window? I can't do it.

Old man across the aisle: Open it yourself.

Stout: Don't worry, the conductor will do it; he knows how.

The three of them were putting on a familiar Greek show of stubborn taunts mixed with something soft and weary, that always seems to end in resignation. I soon learned that the lament, "What can you do." (with a period), is an uncontestable way to squirm out of a tight spot, a nearly infallible method for stifling conversation and a tirelessly whispered non sequitur, paired with a byzantine, palms-up gesture.

In the days that followed, the chicken-lady never failed to pounce as the bus set me down at her doorstep for the hike home. And then I had to start talking. I think she was putting together a mental list of everything money can buy--a little project to while away the time. And she figured an American should know about luxury. Most country people refused to be taken in, as they saw it, by a thin cotton dress and a limp wallet. After all, you need money to get past that ocean. I would catch this woman scrutinizing me warily and abruptly, waiting for the truth to out about my customary, high falutin' life-style.

But you couldn't rightly call this type of grilling envy. Sometimes it reflected amazement at the unpractical and uncomfortable use foreigners made of their money. In a cramped bus headed for dull and puny Olympia, near the tumbled grace of the ancient games-site, a teenager offered her seat to a German woman and murmured, "Those back-breaking packs: I would never do this tourism bit."

Though they may not have understood migrants like myself, everywhere in Greece, people kept repeating the word "phyloxenia." A coupling of "friendliness" and "strangers," it promises hospitality. I don't think the offer is ever made falsely or frivolously. Greeks are fascinated and amused by strangers, by differences, though not all tourists fit the category. Hordes of them are off-handedly dismissed as "the American" or "the Germans" or, in one rude case, "those Yugoslav barbarians." It's not hard to understand why: There are simply too many, and they hurry through the same monotonous motions. The people who both gave and took hospitality were those who, like a lot of Greeks, enjoyed the feeling of peculiarity or singularity in others and themselves. These tended to be travelers without any plans. The Bolivian, for example, who spoke only Spanish and Rumanian but let go a slew of facial expressions and circular gestures that drew you to him.

Some versions of hospitality from fellow wayfarers annoyed me. I rated special attention as a solitary woman, and older, perhaps more worldly-wise, members of my own sex tsked at me warningly or smiled enigmatically (An unsatisfactory verbal rendering might be, "Foolish urchin, she'll get what's coming to her, like it or not."), while men couldn't get it through their heads that I wasn't beaming a silent plea for companionship. Slips of paper scrawled with undecipherable names of meaningless splotches on the globe flutter out of my wallet now and then:

HAMZA OSMAN ALHAG KOULONISKE ISTRADA HAGDED KAMUNO CHACTI 7

Maybe they're still anticipating fond letters, waiting for me to come begging refuge at their doors--all those men who so solicitously handed me their addresses.

I fended off one cagey evening pursuer by turning heel and hazarding that well-worn suggestion of what he could do to his ancestors, just as a staid gentleman with an attache case glanced in our direction. I still feel lucky that he didn't step out of the darkness later to make me regret the public injury. I plunged reluctantly into somber dissections of the mystery of romance. And a porter advised me that marrying him would beat bedding down on the floor of the train station any day.

These men were very persistent but, as far as I could tell, very willfully scorned by the objects of their affection. Or their efforts may have gained them a reward I simply didn't notice. Maybe someday the porter will pull a wife up off the floor and live happily ever after. I don't suppose I'll ever find out, so I'm going to leave their story open and tell about an encounter before I reached Greece.

I settled down ontop of a sack of potatoes offered me by a peasant in the corridor of the next train out of Yugoslavia. I hadn't known you could bring sheep onto a passenger train, but maybe this one didn't count--it had, after all, been reduced to a skinless carcass and it swayed neatly and gently on a hook in the doorway. After our tickets had been punched, I decided to stroll on up to the first class just in case I could weasel a genuine seat.

There were four men behind the door I slid open, but they waved me in vigorously and it was kind of a plush cranny, the likes of which I hadn't come close to in a while. None of them spoke English, but three of them prodded snatches of inexact but useful French out of a sullen type with a mustache, and with the additional aid of maps and newspapers, we managed a make-shift dialogue. We may not have interpreted every word in the same way, but I'm pretty sure we set a few facts straight. First off, I was American, and I didn't think Kissinger was "beautiful." In token of the pleasure this information gave them, they lit me a cigarrette--one in an alarming flow, since they insisted on taking my nauseated refusal for shyness. When I used the Serbian version of thank you, they revised my meager vocabulary to fit their own dialect. Two of them were professors; the pudgy man who showed off a snapshot of his daughter in return for a look at my ID taught economics, and Janev's field was philosophy, but they had all been recruited for manual labor in one of Tito's work brigades. Janev flipped through an envelope of photographs till he found a group portrait for me to remember them by.

Our conversational ingenuity sort of petered out after a study of the Olympic athletes displayed in the the sports section of a newpaper and a resort to numbers, as they jotted down the scores of various games for me. The train pulled into their station during a game of canasta, and they trooped off. Janev rushed back momentarily, to shake my hand and present me with a left-over tin of meat; and the conductor showed up to throw me out of first class, now that my escort was gone.

When the news about the Croatian nationalist hijackers broke, and I had long put Europe out of mind, the pages of the Minneapolis Tribune opened onto the sneering image of one of my four traveling Yugoslavs. I dredged the forgotten picture from the bottom of my pack and the pair seemed to mirror each other right down to the cut of their clothes. The following day the outlaws' identities were released--Petar Matovic was a resident of New York. But I can't help musing that the sketch of the man with the mustache that emerged in my first class compartment last summer fits Matovic well, and isn't any more sparing than the newspaper account. I'll always wonder what the connection is.