2. Quarrelling

Meanwhile, the delay at the border continued to escalate. A conductor warned that the unheated train carriage would remain at the border, including my reserved compartment. He guided me into the adjacent first-class train carriage and pointed out another compartment. Apologising, he opened the door.

I was starting to regret not taking the plane. However, when planning the trip, I had quickly decided that it had to be the train. I was curious about the ‘new’ Central Europe. The Wall had not fallen long ago, Ceaușescu had been recently ousted, Yugoslavia was falling apart; you could only just begin to travel freely through former Eastern Bloc countries like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Train travel seemed like the ideal way to talk to people on the way and record stories. But traveling on international trains didn’t always mean the grandeur of the Orient Express, that was clear by now. ‘Train travel romantic? It’s just cold, cold, cold,’ I later read in my notebook; scribbled with numb fingers and barely decipherable.

The new space was nearly empty except for a fellow traveler. She sat across from me; slender, with a blonde ponytail, and yet another gaunt face. Her hollow eyes in the dark sockets contrasted with her pale complexion, like the black cinders against the thin layer of snow along the railway tracks. She greeted me kindly.

Just as I had stretched out over three seats to sleep, a woman entered. The new passenger demanded her seat in a high tone, and thereby took my sleeping spot. Fuming and quarrelling, she disrupted the amicable status quo; the pact that had just been established in the confined space. Clad in her fur coat, she forcefully intruded into my fledgling territory, hammering the point that this was both first class and reserved.

As she tossed her expensive suitcase into the overhead compartment and her matching beauty case onto my bench, my quiet neighbour across gave up her sleeping spot and offered me the seat beside her. The contrast between the two women couldn’t have been starker. Together, they embodied a dichotomy that I would encounter more often on that journey. In that small compartment of a train rumbling through Romania, it was as if the Wall hadn’t fallen but had turned a hundred and eighty degrees. People were divided into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’

A friend in Bulgaria put it this way later: “The nomenklatura, the KGB, and the mafia rule everything. If you have powerful friends or engage in a lot of black market trade, you’re good and you carry a beauty case or lammy coat. The rest of the population lugs around your cardboard boxes and plastic Woolworth’s bags.”

The woman called over a conductor who knew nothing of previous arrangements. It took five Deutsche Marks to quell his objections. I was allowed to remain seated, and the journey to Bucharest could continue in the first-class carriage.