3. The Children

‘Trrr… trrr… trrr…’

The numbers rattled across the towering board above the information desk at the station. New departure times appeared relentlessly, showing no mercy to stranded travellers. It seemed as if they delighted in the announced delays. ‘Trr… trr… Stay here… stay here…’

The arrival and departure times were approximate, as a precautionary note indicated. Delays were measured in minutes. A delay of 270 minutes spontaneously translated into an interruption of 450 minutes; from 4.5 to 7.5 hours. ‘Stay here…’

I was trapped between arrival and departure, a disheartening gap in time. My next train was supposed to come from Moscow and take me to Ruse, just across the border with Bulgaria. There, I would transfer for the last time onto the train to my final destination, Varna.

I could somewhat understand that the Rossiejskieje Zjeleznye Dorogi (RZjD, the Russian railway company) hadn’t prioritised my journey. After the definitive breakup of the Soviet Union just over three months ago, on December 8th, they surely had other concerns. But after six hours of hanging around between the information board and a couple of heating panels in the hall, I couldn’t bear it any longer. All that time, I had postponed a visit to a restaurant or café. I wasn’t in the mood for begging or enduring new rough treatment. But now, with my backpack as my only anchor, I sought refuge in the buffet, a narrow space coloured in brown and sepia, with four Formica tables along one side and loose kitchen chairs against the opposite wall. Inside, deals were being made, and stacks of money changed hands. Occasionally, a child would dart in or out with a message, or beg for cigarettes or money. “Please give me a dollar, mister? I love you. Please?”

The children were a story of their own. They wandered around the station all day, sometimes playing and singing, other times begging or chasing each other. They wore worn-out shoes and dirty sweaters. Most of them had sleek, jet-black heads, with smudges under eyes far too wise. If not shooed away by adults, they would find a bit of shelter in the large waiting area at the station in the evenings; a room with long wooden benches, dimly lit, where hundreds of people sometimes waited for days – snoring, quarrelling, or staring blankly ahead – for trains that might never come. The antechamber of hell must have looked something like this, complete with the all-pervading smell of urine and the stench of unwashed bodies. For the street children, there was also a place below ground, among the heating pipes and in the city’s sewers.

That’s how bad it was.