PART IX – The Belarusian Capacitance
So a month later and I was going back to Budapest again.
By a strange coincidence every time I took the train to Hungary I was giving exactly the same seat in the same car.
I boarded the train in Ploiesti and when I entered the compartment where my seat was supposed to be, there was a young man seated on it. I excused myself and pointed to him that he was on my seat and he apologized and told me that he wasn’t supposed to be in that car anyway. I asked him what happened and he explained:
He’s Austrian and is traveling from Bucharest to Vienna. He had a sleeping car ticket but when the conductor came to check his ticket he was called by the next car’s conductor and when he came back the conductor had lost his ticket so he told the young man to move to the non-sleeping car and take any seat that is not occupied.
Well, that in itself is disturbing but then I asked him why is he in the train to Budapest as there is a Bucharest – Vienna train? And he explained that when he went to buy the ticket at Bucharest station he asked for a ticket to Vienna but the ticket vendor wasn’t sure if there was a direct train to Vienna and she couldn’t check if there was one because the computer network was down at the station. So she suggested he takes the train to Budapest and then take another train to Vienna from there.
Really, now I’ve been living in Romania for 8 years and I still find it hard to believe that it is possible for these things to happen.
As the train left Ploiesti we talked about traveling and visas and he told me that when he was a student, he and a friend used to go to Cuba, buy cigars and then sell them in the US for a pretty good profit as Austrians could get Cuban visas easier than Americans. And he told me that the last time he did that, on the way to board the plane to US they were delayed at passport control and by the time they were released the boarding gate had already been closed. Airport officials were trying to find a way to get them into the plane and finally they decided to use a forklift to lift the guys into the airplane through the galley compartment of the plane. Mind you, the galley compartment access is a trapdoor in the cargo bay of the plane where the galley boxes containing the flight’s meals are loaded directly into the food shelves in the plane’s galley. So from the flight attendant’s point of view, these two guys simply popped into the plane from the food cupboard. Which caused quite a commotion in the plane and more delays. And considering that Cuba is quite a paranoiac communist country it was surprising that it didn’t cause an international incident.
When the train stopped in Brasov, another passenger came into our compartment and started talking to us.
He asked me where am I from and as I told him Brazil, he told me that he has been in Brazil and Peru. I asked him if he’s been there for business or pleasure and his answer was: “I was there in a… Well… Let’s say it is a sort of business” so I asked him what line of business he’s and his answer was: “I work for God”. To which I asked: “So are you some kind of priest or missionary?” And he answers: “Mmm…. Yeah… I suppose we could say that I am a kind of priest…”
He was obviously trying too hard to create an aura of mystery around himself so I immediately lost any interest in talking to him and just let him talk to the Austrian. I put on my earphones and started to listen to some music in my mp3 player and ended up dozing off.
When I woke up the two of them were apparently engaged in an animated conversation. The Austrian was saying: So I met this beautiful girl online, she’s from Belarus… And I immediately thought: Uh oh… This sounds like the beginning of a very interesting story with a very bad ending. So I started paying attention.
And he was telling about this beautiful blonde Belarusian girl and how he met her in a web site, how they started talking every day, how he started feeling that there was a connection between them, how he realized they were in love… And at every line he said, the “priest” was saying “Oh, I am sure you two are very happy now”.
So he continued:
“We decided to get married and that she should move with me in Austria.”
“Oh… I’m sure you two are very happy now!”
“So I wanted to give her the wedding of her dreams…”
“Oh, this is so beautiful! I’m sure you two are very happy now!”
“And I arranged for us to get married in this beautiful chapel in the mountains with only my close friends as guests…”
“Oh, this is so perfect! I’m sure you two are very happy now!”
“And I bought this nice apartment in Vienna and we moved there…”
“Oh… I’m sure you two are very happy living there!”
“And everything was going so well…”
“Ah see? I knew you two are very happy!”
“And one day I got home and there was an ashtray in the living room, but she doesn’t smoke”
The “priest” pauses.
“I asked who has been there and she said it was a girlfriend of hers…”
“Ah, see? It was nothing after all…”
“And another day there was two glasses of wine in the bedroom…”
Silence…
“And I asked her why there were wine glasses in the bedroom and she said her girlfriend came and they drank wine and she wanted to clean the place before I come home and started gathering the things and when I arrived she had the glasses on her hand and went to the bedroom to arrange her hair and forgot the glasses there…”
Silence…
“And another day I got home early and she was in bed and I asked what’s going on and she got angry and we had a fight…”
Silence…
“And I found out that it wasn’t any girlfriend visiting her. It was some of my friends and every time I confronted her about this we would fight and she would beat me…”
Silence… And you could hear the “priest’s” jaw drop.
“Then she started saying that she can’t live like this, with me controlling her all the time so she said we have to divorce and she called her father…”
Silence…
“Her father and brother came to fight with me and demand that we divorce. So we divorced, she took all my money, I had to sell the apartment… Now I live alone.”
The compartment was very silent until we reached Budapest.
It may sound anti-climatic but the rest of the trip was uneventful.
I simply arrived at the consulate, waited for a while in the cold street, got called inside, had my passport stamped with the visa, walked around Budapest, boarded the train home and that was it.
No pretty girls staring at Japanese geeks, no megalomaniac consulate officers, no eccentric bag ladies in train stations, no greedy train conductors.
All’s well that ends well but this whole visa business left me an indelible bitter taste in my mouth. The impression that I am a castaway, marooned in an alternate universe where things do not make sense, where laws are created to protect criminals and punish innocents, where being wrong is the only way to be right, where no good deeds go unpunished.
Stop this universe, I want to get off.
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