God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  When the actual day of departure came, neither one of us was feeling very brave. We were packing the leftover space in the Volkswagen with clothes for the camps in Austria I would visit on the way. We had moved the clothing depot out of our room, per doctor’s orders, and into the tiny hallway of the main house, where it was making life miserable for everyone.

  “Bulgaria and Rumania,” Corry said softly. “Those aren’t Yugoslavia! You get arrested in those countries, and I might never see you again. We want you back, Andrew, your baby and I.”

  And of course I tried to reassure her, but I was feeling far from cheery myself. I climbed into the heavily loaded car and started the engine.

  “You’ve got your money?” Corry asked.

  I felt my wallet. For once I was going with more than enough. I couldn’t understand why so many gifts had come from readers of Kracht van Omhoog lately. It cost me very little to travel, sleeping in the tent whenever I could, fixing my own meals. I had tried to leave the extra amount with Corry, but as though with a strange foreknowledge, she had insisted that I take it with me. Yes, the money was all safe.

  And so with a last kiss I was off.

  It bothered me a little, as I headed from the Austrian camp toward Yugoslavia, that I was having to go back into a country from which I had so recently been expelled. But there was absolutely no other practical route into Bulgaria. The only other way to go would be a long and costly trip the length of Italy, by boat to Greece, and then the long drive up through Greek Macedonia. As I had anticipated, there had been no trouble getting a new visa: Yugoslavian paperwork was notoriously inefficient, and the fact that I was persona non grata had not yet been forwarded to the Western consulates. The only place where there might be trouble, I thought, was at the border itself.

  Heart pounding, I pulled up to the frontier. But the guard only glanced at my passport. We chatted a while about road conditions, and within twenty minutes I was across.

  By my calculations I had now four days of grace in Yugoslavia before the information about my arrival at the border was checked against the unwanted persons file in Belgrade. I stopped for a brief visit with Jamil and then pressed on south and east, fully intending to cross the border into Bulgaria on the morning of the fifth day. But as always in Yugoslavia, there was so much to do! Jamil had supplied me with enough names and churches along my route to have kept me busy for a month. There hadn’t been a whisper of trouble from the authorities. I decided to stretch my luck by 24 hours.

  On the fifth evening I checked into a hotel after midnight, turned in my passport at the desk, and went up to my room. I had slept for perhaps five hours when there was an abrupt rap on the door. I opened it and found two men in ordinary business suits standing in the hall.

  “Dress and follow us,” they said in German, holding the door open. “Do not bring anything with you.”

  They never took their eyes from me as I struggled into pants and a shirt. We walked through the lobby, empty at that hour except for a woman scrubbing the steps. Outside, we walked a few hundred yards to a large stone building. I was shepherded down a marble corridor, echoing in its emptiness, and into an office.

  The man behind the desk had my passport in his hand.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded. “Why are you back in Yugoslavia?” He did not wait for me to answer but went on, voice rising as he spoke. “How did you get this passport changed? Is this what Holland does, make it easy for conspirators and lawbreakers?”

  He reached into his desk, and I saw with dismay that he had taken out the enormous stamp with the red ink. He slammed it down on the Yugoslav visa three times before he seemed satisfied.

  “You will leave the country within twenty-four hours,” he said. “You will have no further contacts with any person in Yugoslavia. We will telephone the border guard in Trieste when to expect you.”

  Trieste! Surely he wouldn’t insist upon that! Trieste was in the northwest corner of the country, right back where I had come from, while here we were fifty miles from the Bulgarian frontier.

  “But I’m on my way to Bulgaria!” I pleaded. “Couldn’t I leave the country that way? It’s so much closer!”

  But he was adamant. Trieste he had said, and Trieste it had to be, and as quickly as possible.

  And so with a sinking heart, I headed back north to Trieste and the long round-about trip through Italy and Greece—fifteen hundred miles out of my way, when I had been almost in sight of my goal.

  A depression such as I had never known before settled over me as I inched my way down the boot of Italy. The roads were maddening: an endless succession of towns strung one after another down the coast—trucks, bicycles, horsedrawn carts—I seldom got the Volkswagen out of second gear.

  March 31 came; Corry’s birthday. I sent her a telegram, but instead of cheering me up, it only served to remind me how far away she was. Her first birthday since we’d been married, and there I was, not even out of Italy yet, farther away from my goal than ever, and getting farther from Corry every minute. Suppose something happened. Suppose there was trouble with the police in Bulgaria too. Suppose I didn’t get back for the birth of the baby. At least I understood now the reason for the extra money. I’d be lucky to make it there and back by this route even with all I had.

  To make matters worse, there was that suspicion-arousing stamp on the Yugoslavia page again.

  And then, just when I thought I’d reached my lowest point, my back began to act up. For three or four years I’d been having trouble on and off with a slipped disk. It seemed to bother me most when I’d been driving long distances. About halfway through Italy the trouble began again, worse than I’d ever known it. By the time I reached Brindisi, where the boat left for Greece, I was literally bent double, walking with a kind of strange, crouching gait on the balls of my feet.

  There was no time to stop and get treatment; I just had to let people stare. When I took the car off the boat in Greece, I was no better; after a couple of days on the Greek roads I was literally crying aloud with the pain. If the Italian roads had been choked with traffic, the Greek ones were all rocks and chuck holes. I could not read the signs with their strange Greek characters and often, after twenty spine-jarring miles, would discover I had made a wrong turn and have to give up all that hard-won distance.

  And all the while, that insidious depression was working its poison in me. “Well, Andrew,” the inner whispering would begin, “you got away with it that time. . . . They were easy on you. Sent you out of the country. . . . You could have gone to jail. For how many years, Andrew? Five? Ten? You’ll find out in Bulgaria. They lock people up there. Sometimes they never get out. . . . Not even a letter. Corry will never know. . . .”

  And so it went, hour after hour, day after day, until every nerve was on edge. And then came the final blow. At the Greek town of Serrai I discovered that the border crossing toward which I had been heading all this time was open to diplomats only. For ordinary travelers there was no entry at all into Bulgaria from Greece. The only way was through Turkey, many miles and many days farther on.

  The morning after this discovery I was grinding and bumping along a stony track toward what seemed a horizon of endless frustrations, when up ahead I saw a small blue sign. The top lettering was in Greek. But below it, in Latin characters, I read the single word:

  FILIPPI

  I stopped the car with a jerk. Philippi? The Philippi in the Bible? The town where Paul and Silas had been in prison—where God had sent the earthquake to open the door?

  Of course! This was the very place! I got out of the car and stared through a tall link fence at a field of ruins. There were the old streets, there was what was left of a temple. A row of houses, only the walls standing now. Was Lydia’s house—where Paul had stayed—one of these?

  There was a gate in the fence, but it was locked and there was no one around. An immense silence brooded over the scene; the modern town of Philippi was two miles away to the north and west.


  Here, there was not a sound. Only Paul shouting over the centuries: “Christian! Where is your faith!”

  Paul had been in prison in this place, just as I was in prison too: a prison of pain and discouragement. Paul and Silas had been doing the same thing I was doing, preaching the Gospel where it was not allowed. God had performed a miracle to get His men out of prison then, and in that instant I knew that He was even now performing another one to get me out of mine.

  The bonds of depression that had wrapped themselves around me snapped as had the chains on Paul’s wrists. The spirit of heaviness lifted, and as it did I realized with a start that I was standing erect, back tall, head high. Joy welled up in me, physical joy as well as mental.

  I literally ran back to the car, stopping every now and then to jump several inches off the ground. I started the engine, shoved the car into first, and with a roar set off once more for my appointment with the unknown believers of the Inner Circle.

  14

  Abraham the Giant Killer

  After all my apprehension, the border crossing from Turkey into Bulgaria turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The customs inspector scarcely glanced into the rear of the car and did not ask me to open any of my cases. He entered the date and point of entry on my Bulgarian visa but did not turn the other pages in the passport. Then he made me a little speech in English welcoming me to the country.

  What was more, after the Turkish roads, which had been as appalling as the Greek, the Bulgarian highway was newly paved and well engineered. All along it I met the same welcome I had received at the border. Children shouted and ran along the edge of the road as long as they could keep the car in sight. Men and women working in the fields straightened up to smile and wave, a thing I had not seen anywhere else in Europe.

  Bulgarian roads were good, that is, as long as I stuck to the main routes. That first evening I turned off on a little track up a mountainside in search of a camping site. I found a secluded spot and in the morning spent some time unpacking Bibles from the various spots where I had stowed them. Then I packed the Rumanian ones away again and drove down the mountain, slipping and sliding on the dangerous gravel road, intending to pick up the main pavement again.

  Instead, I soon found myself following a track that wound through the backyards of a tiny village. The road was getting muddier every second. I splashed through a little stream and a few feet further on bogged down altogether.

  There I sat, hopelessly stuck in the mud in an out-of-the-way mountain village where I had no business being. What was I going to do? I had no sooner asked the question than I seemed to hear some loud and rather brassy singing. It was coming from a building just on the edge of the village. I opened the door of the car and jumped. When the mud reached my ankles, I stopped sinking. Well, nothing for it. . . . I slogged heavily through the muck until I reached the door of the building.

  It was a pub, and although it was only ten in the morning, the sounds were those of men well into their cups. I stepped inside, and instantly the singing stopped.

  Twenty faces stared at me, obviously astonished at the appearance of a foreigner in their village. The air was thick with smoke, heavier and more pungent than the smoke smell of Western pubs.

  “Does anyone here speak English?” I asked. No one responded. “German?” No. “Dutch?”

  “Well, hello anyway,” I said, smiling and touching my forehead in salute. And then while these round, brown-eyed faces stared at me, I went into a pantomime routine. I made a noise that was meant to sound like a VW getting stuck in the mud. Huumm Huumm. Splutter, splut. Stop.

  No one gave a sign of recognizing my charade.

  I held my hands out in what I thought looked like a man holding a steering wheel with both hands.

  “Ahh! Oh!” The man behind the high wooden bar nodded knowingly. In a moment he had run forward with two glasses of beer, shoving one in each outstretched hand.

  “No, no,” I said, laughing. “Automobile. Car. Huum. Huum. Brrr. Brrr. Stop.” I put the glasses down and signaled with my arm. “Come!”

  At last several of the men got the idea and rose from their tables, enjoying the game and shouting encouragement to their companions. I felt like the Pied Piper leading the parade. Back of the pub was the answer to what this was all about, sitting expectantly in the mud: my little blue VW.

  “Ahh!” Nodding of heads, clapping of thighs. Now they understood! They were glad to help. They were wearing knee-high boots and without hesitation waded into the mud, indicating that I should get behind the wheel. I started the motor, and while these broad-shouldered men lifted, I eased the car into gear and within moments we were out on the main road in front of the pub.

  I got out of the car and thanked them, a little worried at the curiosity they were showing for the car and its contents. It would never do for a story to get started about a Dutchman with a cargo of books in his car. Quickly I took one mammoth, work-hardened hand after the other, shook it soundly, and moved on.

  “I really do thank you,” I said. “Holland thanks you. The Lord thanks you. . . .”

  And while I was speaking, one man simply did not let go of my hand. Instead he pulled me with him into the pub. Even before we reached the bar, I knew what was going to happen. They were going to buy me a beer whether I wanted one or not.

  I hadn’t had a drink since that stormy January night more than nine years ago when I had turned my will over to God. In my life, anyhow, alcohol had clearly always been a destructive thing.

  “But what should I do now, Lord?” I asked aloud in Dutch. And suddenly I knew that I had to go ahead and drink that beer, that to turn it down would be to turn them down, that their kindness and hospitality ranked higher with God than one observance of a rule. Twenty minutes later, eyes watering from the powerful home-made brew, I once again shook twenty hands, laughed, wished them the speediest of all possible salvations, and went on my way. It took forty minutes of high-speed travel down the highway before the mud that had been trapped on the wheels of my little car stopped thumping the sides of the fenders.

  ———

  My final night in Yugoslavia, the night for which I had been sent back across the border, I had met a man whose closest friend lived in Sofia.

  “Petroff is one of the saints of the church,” he had told me. “Will you go to see him?”

  And of course I was delighted. I had memorized Petroff’s address so as not to have it written down on my person in case I got into trouble with the authorities. Now as I sat on a hillside looking down over Sofia, I marveled at how God used the very last person I spoke to in one country to give me the first contact I needed in another.

  Sofia was a beautiful sight, stretched out below me, the mountains rising beyond, the round domes of her Orthodox churches sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. But how in that vast metropolis was I to find the street where Petroff lived? My Yugoslav friend had warned me that it could be dangerous for him if a foreigner were to go around asking for it. So when I checked into my hotel, the first thing I did was to ask for a plan of the city.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re all out. You might try the bookstore on the corner.”

  But the bookstore was out too. I went back to the hotel and asked the clerk if he was quite sure he had no maps at all. He looked at me suspiciously.

  “What do you want a map so badly for?” he asked. “Foreigners shouldn’t go wandering just anywhere.”

  “Oh,” I said, “just to get my bearings. I don’t want to get lost, not speaking Bulgarian.”

  The clerk seemed satisfied. “All we have,” he said, “is this little one here.” He pointed to a small hand-painted street plan under the glass on his desk. It would never be of any help to me; only the names of the biggest boulevards were shown. But I bent over the map to please him, and as I did I saw an amazing thing. The cartographer had indeed penned in the names only of major avenues, with one terribly important exception. There was a single, tiny street just a few blocks from the ho
tel that had a name on it. And it was the street name I was looking for! Not one other street of similar size on the entire map bore a name. I felt again the most amazing sense that this trip had been prepared long before.

  Early the next morning I left the hotel and headed immediately for the street where Petroff lived. I found it with no difficulty, just where the map had indicated. Now it was only a matter of finding the number.

  As I walked along the sidewalk, a man came down the street from the opposite direction. We drew abreast just as I came to the number I was looking for. It was a large double-duplex apartment house. I turned up the walkway, and so did the stranger!

  As we neared the front door, I glanced for a fraction of a second into the face of the man who had arrived at the precise moment I did. And at that instant I experienced one of the common miracles of the Christian life: Our spirits recognized each other.

  Without a word we marched side by side up the stairs. Other families lived in the house too. If I were making a mistake, it would be very embarrassing. The stranger reached his apartment, took out his key, and threw open the door. Without invitation I walked into his house. Just as quickly, he closed the door behind him. We stood facing each other in the darkness of the single room that was his home.

  “I am Andrew from Holland,” I said in English.

  “And I,” said Petroff, “am Petroff.”

  ———

  Petroff and his wife lived in this single room. They were both over 65, and their combined pensions from the state paid for the room, food, and an occasional purchase of clothing. The three of us spent our first few moments together on our knees, thanking God for having brought us together in this wonderful way, so that there was not a minute of time wasted, so that there was a minimum of risk involved.

  Then we talked. “I’ve heard,” I said, “that both Bulgaria and Rumania are desperately in need of Bibles. Is that so?”