by Thomas King
“Our son lives in Colorado,” says Trudy. “But it’s hard to know where you’ll be comfortable, until it’s too late.”
“We should look at Texas.” Jim gives Trudy a squeeze. “Bet you can find some decent clothes in Dallas.”
Trudy opens the jacket, so we can see the label. “I have a thing for vintage clothing.”
Jim grunts. “Dresses like my grandmother.”
Trudy smiles and pats Jim’s knee. “He doesn’t mean to hurt my feelings. He just does.”
“Bull in a china shop.” Jim hunkers down in the seat and splays his legs out as though he has all the room in the world. “That’s me.”
“But he’s my bull,” says Trudy. “So, you two are from Canada.”
“We are,” says Mimi.
“Metric system?” says Jim. “Two languages? Free health care?”
“That’s right.”
“Wouldn’t give you two cents for socialized medicine.”
I lean back and close my eyes. Mimi can deal with Trudy and Two-Cent Jim. I want to save my energy for Budapest. If I know Mimi, she’s going to want to try to walk the entire city.
“So why are you two going to Budapest?” says Trudy.
“You know, Hungary’s got a serious refugee problem,” says Jim. “Serbs are pouring into the country.”
“Syrians,” says Trudy. “We saw it on the news.”
It takes me a moment, and then I remember. The story of television. The men with the backpacks, the women with signs, the children with toys, the police in helmets with shields and guns.
It hadn’t been a riot.
Jim takes his cellphone out of his jacket and holds it up. “I get all the travel advisories. There’s one for Budapest.”
“What did you do at Nestlé?” says Mimi.
“Bottled water division,” says Jim. “I looked after most of the East Coast.”
My hand is on Mimi’s thigh in an instant, but I’m too late.
“In Canada,” she says, “there’s a debate around bottled water.”
Jim rolls his eyes. “Let me guess,” he says. “Bottled water should be banned. Plastic bottles are a blight on the environment. It takes seven hundred years for the plastic to break down. Eighty percent of the bottles are never recycled. Each year, over 38 million plastic bottles wind up in landfills.” Jim pauses and squares his shoulders. “How am I doing?”
I squeeze Mimi’s thigh a bit harder.
“You forgot about the amount of oil and fresh water it takes to make the bottles in the first place,” she says. “Or that ninety percent of the cost of bottled water is in the bottle itself.”
Jim holds up his hands. “I confess. I’m the devil incarnate.”
“Bottled water is very popular,” says Trudy. “If people want it, they’re going to get it.”
“Tried to ban alcohol back in the 1920s and look how that turned out.” Jim pulls his legs back and gets to his feet. “Going to find the little boys’ room. If you hurry, you can have a gallows built by the time I get back.”
I keep my hand on Mimi’s thigh. She doesn’t say anything. And then she does.
“I’m sorry if I upset your husband.”
Trudy sits up straight. “He’s not a bad man. But he’s not particularly flexible.”
“Neither is Bird,” says Mimi.
Two-Cent Jim doesn’t return right away. Trudy and Mimi talk about vintage clothing for the next hour, and when Jim still hasn’t returned, Trudy goes looking for him.
“They’re not coming back,” I tell Mimi, after Trudy leaves.
“Their luggage is still here.”
“They’ll pick the bags up when the train gets to Budapest.”
“It’s sad not having a home,” says Mimi. “But it’s probably for the best.”
“Best?”
“It’s obvious that they’re not going to stay together,” says Mimi. “Not having a house will make the divorce easier. You really should try to pay more attention.”
The next morning, we set out to find the town hall. Kymi wasn’t all that big, but the town hall proved to be more elusive than I would have supposed. The directions came in pieces. Up this street. Down that one. Behind the church. Above the bus station. Just past the statue.
But we weren’t in any rush, and it gave me time to practise with my komboloi.
“This is the way you see a place,” Mimi told me after we had circled one particular block for the third time.
We did finally find the town hall, a building we had walked past several times. It was Mimi who noticed the flag.
“Greek flag,” she said, pointing to the building. “Town hall.”
“You sure?”
“They’re not going to fly a flag over a fish market.”
Most guidebooks do not tout the town halls of the world as holiday highlights, and for good reason. The town hall in Kymi was no exception. It was an older structure, not exactly falling down, not exactly standing up. It was the sort of government building you could find almost anywhere on the planet, from Havana to Missoula, Lethbridge to Limerick, Quito to Chengdu. Dull white on the outside with a dim interior of soft light and shadow. Not a gloomy place and not murky. Well worn. Your grandmother’s house with the windows sealed and the shades pulled.
“You’re going to have to do all the talking,” Mimi told me.
“Sure.”
“Is your Greek good enough for that?”
“You bet.”
“You want the phrase book?”
The first thing any traveller needs to learn when going to a foreign country is how to ask the question “Do you speak English?” in the resident language. In Greek, this all-important phrase is “Signomi, milate agglika?”
To which the answer is generally “Okhi.”
But if you ask the question enough times, you’re bound to find someone who will say “Nai.”
And I did.
A man in his fifties who looked as though he had been born in the building and had never left.
I explained my situation as best I could.
“Your pappou is born here?”
“Yes.”
“But he goes to America?”
“To join his older brother,” I said.
“And does not return.”
“Right,” I said. “He went to California, met my grandmother, and had four children.”
“But you come back to Greece,” said the man.
“I’m the first in the family to return,” I told him.
The official took this in for a moment, went to a computer, hit a couple of keys, looked at the screen. Then he went to the shelves and pulled down a large ledger.
It was one of those books you see in the movies. Something out of an episode of Harry Potter. Large, gilded, dusty. A book that had been around before the Egyptians began building pyramids.
“Mavrias?”
“Yes,” I said. “That is correct.”
He opened the book and began running a finger down columns of exquisitely handwritten entries. Then he turned a page. And another. And another.
“Here,” he said, stopping his finger at a name. “Mavrias. Giannis.”
“That was my great-grandfather’s name.”
“His wife is Eleni?”
“Yes. Giannis and Eleni Mavrias.”
“And your grandfather?”
“Thomas.”
“Yes,” said the man. “He is here. And a brother, Georgios.”
I hadn’t expected to find any trace of my grandfather. And yet there he was. A name in a book that was older than me. My grandfather and his brother. My great-grandparents. Alive again.
“But,” said the city official, “he is not born in Kymi. The family is from Maletiani.”
“That’s one of the villages Nikos mentioned,” said Mimi. “This is great.”
“Four kilometres is Maletiani,” said the man.
“You hear that, Bird? Four kilometres.” Mimi put her arms around me. “We can
walk that.”
I WAS RIGHT. The Blunds don’t reappear until we pull into Keleti station.
“One of these days,” says Trudy, “I’d like to visit Canada.”
“Watch yourself in Budapest,” says Jim as he begins dragging the bags down the aisle. “Desperate times. Desperate people.”
Mimi doesn’t get up right away. She waits in her seat as the other passengers file by us.
“I’m sorry we had so little time,” she says.
“Time?”
“With Jim. I was really looking forward to talking to him about baby formula.”
Television likes to turn simple misfortunes into major catastrophes, and as Mimi and I make our way along the platform, I’m expecting to find the station itself empty and quiet, the refugees having moved on.
Mimi is in high spirits. “What do you want to do first?”
“Do you really want to stay in Budapest overnight?”
Normally, train stations are busy and noisy. Union Station in Toronto is always abuzz with public announcements and the sounds of people on the move. But as we come off the platform and into the station proper, the world erupts, and for once, it appears that the press hasn’t exaggerated the situation.
The lower level of Keleti station is awash in blankets and tents, boxes and backpacks. Men stand around in tight groups, while women sit on the floor with babies and younger children. The older children race through the mass of people, pushing each other, playing a makeshift game of soccer with a paper coffee cup.
A little girl huddles against a wall, holding a stuffed monkey.
Mimi stops. I wait for a moment and then try to nudge her forward. But she doesn’t move.
“I don’t think we want to stand here.”
“Are you seeing this?”
Young women in safety vests are passing out bananas and bottled water, while men in combat gear form a corridor so that the commuters and the tourists can get through the camp quickly and efficiently. I don’t know if the men are military or police, and I’m not sure I care. I can see that they’re armed, as though they expect that the refugees might conjure up tanks and fighter jets out of their backpacks.
“Babies.”
One of the security guys waves at Mimi. It’s clear he wants us to keep moving.
“Honem!” the man shouts at Mimi.
Mimi holds her ground.
“Move!” the man shouts in English.
Mimi drags me back against the wall, out of the way. “We should stay and help.”
“How?”
“Jesus, Bird. They brought their babies.”
The man cuts through the crowd to where we’re standing. “American?”
“Blackfoot,” says Mimi, which is what she says when she crosses borders or has to deal with arrogant government officials.
“Canadian,” I say.
“Ah, Canada,” says the man in accented English. “You stand on guard, yes?”
I’ve never liked that line. The song is a bit too far on the militaristic side for my taste. With the ease that nations go to war, I don’t think we need musical encouragement.
“We stand on guard also,” said the soldier. “Very difficult the situation. You can see. Too many people. Everyone is upset. So, you must move.”
“What’s going to happen to all these people?”
The soldier shrugs. “No one knows. More come all the time. So, you must move.”
“We’d like to help.”
“Yes.” The man resettles the rifle on his shoulder. “But now you must move. You cannot stay here. Here is not the place for the tourists of Canada.”
Mimi pushes off the wall, and we start to work our way through the crowd. The soldier stays with us until we get to the stairs.
“No one likes this,” says the man. “I have three children. No one likes this.”
The refugees have taken over the top level of Keleti as well, and they’ve spilled out onto the street and into the park across the boulevard. I’m not good at estimating, but I’m guessing that there are several thousand people camped around the station.
I try to put a good face on it. “At least they have good weather.”
Mimi walks around in a circle. Which is never a good sign. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Back to Prague.”
“I thought you wanted to stay the night and see Budapest.”
“Now I don’t.”
Mimi goes back into the station to find a ticket counter. I wait outside in the sunshine. I know how she feels. It’s not easy to see people in distress, to walk by them as though they don’t exist, as though they don’t matter.
Of course, I do it all the time. Young men who wait outside shops and ask for change. Young women who sit on street corners with cups and dogs. Older men who stand at traffic lights, holding signs. I don’t even pause to wonder how they got to where they are. Drug abuse, alcohol, mental illness. Bad luck.
And I really don’t care.
So why would I care about the people in Keleti station?
Mimi doesn’t come back, and after twenty minutes, I begin to worry that she might have gone down into the bowels of Keleti to do battle with the forces of injustice and indifference, that she is, even now, rallying the refugees to her banner.
People have broken out signs and flags, and there’s singing and chanting and yelling. A knot of young men has started an argument that threatens to break into something serious.
We could be shot. Kitty huddles at my shoulder. Or worse.
Eugene has retrieved a piece of cardboard that says “I am a human being.” Chip and the twins are in the crowd somewhere, but I can’t see them.
I slip my camera out of my pocket. I don’t know why I feel hesitant about taking a photo of the refugees. Almost everyone has a camera or a cellphone. There are several television crews at work. Very young women, buffed and lacquered, roam about with microphones, looking for good visuals—children holding each other, an old man with blood on his face, three animated teens waving a Hungarian flag at the refugees, a mother comforting a crying child.
Eugene raises the cardboard sign high over his head. Here I am, he shouts.
The last time this happened, Kitty whispers, they sent in tanks.
Mimi has been gone long enough, and I push back into the crowd to find her.
“Bird!”
And there she is, at the entrance to the station, looking no happier than when she left.
“There’s a train at five forty,” she says. “It gets to Prague just after midnight.”
I don’t feel like arguing.
“That is,” she says, “if the trains run. They’re talking about closing the station.”
“Because of the refugees?”
“So, we have a little under four hours.” Mimi tucks her hair behind her ear. “What do you want to do?”
“Save the world.”
“You want coffee, don’t you.”
“Sure, coffee now, save the world later.”
SO FAR AS I could tell, Vogiatzi was the main street in Kymi. Kymi Square, with its statue of Georgios Papanikolaou, the man who developed the Pap test, was on Vogiatzi. So was the church and most of the stores.
“Small world,” said Mimi.
There was a taxi parked at the curb, and standing next to the car was the same guy who had picked us up in Athens.
“Our English-speaking driver.”
There was a teenage boy in the car. As soon as the man saw us, he began talking rapidly to the kid.
“Good morning,” said the boy. “How are you today?”
The boy’s English wasn’t great, but it was considerably better than my Greek.
“Hi,” said Mimi. “We need a taxi.”
“I am Talos,” said the boy. “My father is Stavros. He is very good driver.”
“Poso tha kostisei na paei Maletiani?” I said, exhausting all of my Greek.
Talos quickly consulted with his father. “Exi,” h
e said.
“Euros?” I flip my komboloi a couple of times, in case there’s a discount for fellow Greeks.
“Yes.”
“Both ways?”
I tried to imagine what Talos would do with his life. Good manners. Good looks. He could be an actor. Or a musician.
“Okto,” he said. “Eight. Both ways.”
“Will you come along and translate?”
“Sure, yes, deka. Ten. You understand?”
A lawyer. The kid had all the makings of a lawyer.
The ride up to Maletiani took a little over ten minutes. I wanted to learn as much as I could about Kymi, and Talos wanted to talk about Toronto.
“Toronto is very big.”
“It is,” I told him. “So is Athens.”
“Yes,” said Talos, “but no jobs in Athens.”
“Were you born in Kymi?”
“Yes,” said Talos. “The family goes to Athens. Two years. But no jobs, so we come back.”
The road to Maletiani was windy and slow, with tight turns around granite outcroppings and tough, stringy trees.
“Why are you to Maletiani?”
“My pappou is from Maletiani.”
“Your pappou? You are Greek?”
“My mother’s side.”
“You are here to buy the village?”
“What?”
“Maletiani,” said Talos, “is small. Ekato. One hundred persons.”
“In Maletiani?”
“Yes. Very old.”
“The people?”
“You should buy the village.”
Mimi was intrigued. “Why would we buy a village?”
“Americans. American dollars,” said Talos. “They come to Ellada and buy, buy, buy.”
“We’re Canadians.”
“If you buy Maletiani,” said Talos, “then you could fix.”
“I don’t think we’re going to buy a village.”
“If you fix,” said Talos, “the people will love you. Then you will be king.”
MIMI AND I STAND on the sidewalk in front of Keleti station and ignore the people pushing past us.
“Here we are,” I say, making sure my voice is filled with artificial enthusiasm. “Budapest.”
Mimi ignores me and digs the brochures out of the pack.
“We could catch a cab, have coffee, walk around a bit, see the bullet holes and the shoes, and be back in time for the train.” I wait to see if this is an idea whose time has come. “We could even pick up some pastries for the refugees.”