People on the Road

She was around seventy. She must have always been a short woman, closer to the land than to the sky, like so many Balkan women. Age had shrunk her to the size of a child. Natural curls, dyed shades of brown showing grey roots, big glasses with foggy lenses, through which her eyes seemed bigger than they really were and somehow innocent. Harmless. She must have given that impression to the Serbian border patrol when she got out of the car. He barked at her: “What’s on the back seat?” She looked up at him with those eyes and said unflinchingly: “Clothes”. I froze. The Serbians were in their worst post-war depression with law enforcement notoriously unpredictable. And we were so close – the pale lights of Drobeta Turnu-Severin flickered on the other side of the mud-coloured Danube, through the darkness beyond the skeletal bridge that Romanian generations risked death to cross towards Yugoslavian freedom. She really did not need to lie. I would have paid the import duty on the scooter for her. It looked broken by years of screeching around on the Italian country roads so it could not have been worth much.

I had picked her up hitch-hiking before Trieste, at another border. She was going to Romania, I was going to Romania. It made sense. I get tired and sleepy driving alone, especially on highways. She asked me to make a small detour to get something. She looked at my empty back seat and said that we would put it there. It was not going to take too much room. I said fine. I was happy to help an older lady. She directed me to this one-storey house where I asked to use the toilet. The room was upstairs and human-size dolls cut just under the shoulders flanked the wooden steps. More dolls in the bathroom. Eerie. I attended to nature’s call with my eyes half-closed and was out of there fast. Downstairs, my new passenger had already disassembled the scooter, with the help of another younger woman. They wrapped the pieces in plastic, then threw clothes on top of the horns. It was not going to obstruct the back view, she said. It was not that big. Just something for her brother in a Romanian village. He needed the bike to herd the sheep and stop walking the field for miles every day. “Do you have papers for that bike?” She said she did, and I chose to believe her.

So did the young Serbian border patrol. We drove slowly, tossed by the holes in the road, across the border and over bridge. History had turned the tables. Freedom was now on the other side.