The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  He leapt up to supervise a table setting. His T-shirt said “I ♥ BJ” in giant letters.

  Two weeks later, after a couple of shows in China, I flew from Beijing to London for the last leg of what had become a six-month worldwide tour. Maria continued east, to the Pacific Northwest, to teach accordion at a folk music camp. There were no newsstands in the Beijing airport. On my LOT flight via Warsaw, you could buy alcohol from the crotchety, elderly Polish staff only in złoty or dollars, not renminbi or pounds. I retraced in nine hours by air what had taken two months by land: northwest from Beijing over Mongolia, across Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Moscow, to Warsaw. The slow pace of land travel is frustrating or relaxing or simply literal, time to be passed. It has the smoky flavor of nostalgia. The train journeys were always over too soon—I always had another chapter to read, another chapter to write, another hour I wanted to sleep. The flight, though, felt endless. If the faster you travel, the slower time passes, perhaps the slower you move, the faster you find your way to the end of the line.

  PART II

  I.

  Drunk Nihilists Make a Good Audience (Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia)

  I spent my thirtieth birthday on a bus with the Russian national rugby team. The band I was in at the time, the Hold Steady, was on an overnight drive across the mountainous border between Slovenia and Croatia, and we wound up passing a bottle of duty-free Jameson’s between ourselves while the athletes harassed a trio of unfortunate Russian girls. We should have been on a flight from London to Zagreb, but it was delayed so long that the Zagreb airport was closed by the time we left. The airline, a suspect budget option out of Hungary called W!zzAir (exclamation point and purple-and-fuchsia logo sic), flew us to Ljubljana—in Slovenia, an entirely different country—and loaded us onto cross-border buses. In the twelve-hour interregnum, it being my birthday and all, I’d had the chance to get drunk on Bloody Marys and sober up twice over. A couple of the Russians hadn’t quite competed the cycle. Two of them, in fact, didn’t make it on the plane at all. One was so drunk that his coach, a short but tough-looking man in his fifties, held him by the throat against the terminal wall, slapping him across the face and cursing.

  “You’re not letting him on the plane, are you?” I asked the stewardess as we boarded.

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Not a chance.” An unlucky teammate drew a short straw and had to stay behind to babysit. He planted himself next to his slumped friend, plotting grim retribution.

  Five years later, I left Padova, Italy, in the pouring rain and headed east again to Zagreb, on the way to shows in Serbia. It was early spring of 2013, and I was three weeks into a seven-week European tour.

  Maria was pregnant, and I was ambivalent and worried. I don’t think I ever affirmatively said I wanted children, but I had stopped saying I didn’t, and I knew that it was a precondition for the future of our relationship. But I liked our life the way it was, and I didn’t want it to change. It was insecure and unpredictable, sure, but I was my own boss, and I could travel wherever I wanted and get paid to do it. Maria had finished her PhD, and we were living an unsettled life, following her through a series of postdoctoral appointments or sojourns in Boston, New York, Toronto, Virginia. I was touring frantically—maybe I thought I needed to prove my earning power as we tried to figure out the shape of the rest of our lives, maybe I just wanted to get in as much travel as I could before the baby came and I’d be off the road, for all I knew, forever. So six weeks after I’d returned from our six-month tour, I was on the road again, for a disheartening monthlong circuit of the United States. Then, three months later, I headed back to Europe for seven weeks.

  The tour started well. I was making money in Poland and Germany, and the weather was crisp and bright. I was playing French shows outside Paris for the first time, mostly successfully. I would head east after my French week, then south into Romania and Bulgaria for the first time.

  Then the snow came, a series of spring storms that would chase me eastbound all the way to Serbia. I was about an hour from Paris on day three of the storm when the traffic stopped. The snow had begun to pile up against the guardrails, but at least the center lane was clear. I’m not surprised that there’s been an accident, I thought. But they should have this cleared pretty quickly—an hour at most. Both lanes of traffic pulled to the side and a cop car and an ambulance made their way through the center.

  An hour passed, then another. People got out, stretched, pissed in the snowbanks. Three hours passed. I hadn’t had breakfast, but luckily I had bought groceries in Heidelberg. A man walked back with news: the big trucks were barred from driving, but there weren’t police to organize them so that we smaller cars could pass. So, it seemed, we could be here all night, or at least until someone took charge.

  My phone buzzed. “Are you on your way to Orleans?—Fabien.”

  “On my way,” I texted.

  “OK—the bar is open until midnight, so whenever you get here is fine.”

  Four hours had passed by the time the line of traffic finally began to crawl forward. Exhilarated, I took the first exit—it was westbound, toward Calais, but at least I was moving, and I could cut south shortly. It was cutting it close, though; the Orleans show was supposed to be from seven to nine, and my estimated arrival now was nine thirty and creeping toward ten. I texted Fabien.

  “The bar says no one will stay after ten,” he replied. “You can come here, but I think it is better if we cancel and you stay in Paris. Do you know someone there?”

  I didn’t, really. I called Maria. “Can you do me a favor? Can you book me a hotel in Paris and text me the address?”

  In the meantime, I’d found another southbound highway. This would all be fine—I’d get to Paris in ninety minutes and have a nice night off. Maria texted back with a hotel: “It looks crappy, but I think it’s the best bet.”

  When I saw the traffic begin to slow, then the red emergency lights start to blink ahead of me, and then realized that we were once again stopped and trapped, the despair set in. I cursed myself for changing highways. I cursed the French highway department for their incompetence. I cursed myself for my life choices and swore I would never do another tour, I would learn a trade and fly right. I read every publication on my phone and every scrap of paper in the car. I listened to five hours of the History of England podcast, from Alfred the Great through the Norman Conquest, and tried to identify the irony, if there were any, of being stranded so close to the Norman heartland. I heard a beep as my phone battery died and opened my laptop to find that it had too. I ate my provisions: five bananas, two yogurts, a package of Wasa sesame wafers, a whole packet of sliced herbed cheese, and a liter of multivitamin juice. I turned the car off and let the heat drain away, then turned it on full blast. A couple of cars went rogue, forming a third lane in the deeper snow, and I joined them for a glorious third of a mile or so. I pulled out my pillow, curled up, and decided to give up and sleep, but every time I did the line would move forward a hundred yards for no obvious reason.

  It was nearly twelve thirty a.m. when the movement started in a sustained manner. I’d been trapped for seven hours, plus the four hours on the other highway. And I was still almost ninety miles from Paris.

  We wove, single file, between and around the miles of hulking, cold trucks, which formed perfect bulwarks for banks of windblown snow. It took nearly an hour just to creep along the mile or so of trucks before we got to the open highway and rose to a cruising speed of thirty—or, when we were lucky, forty—miles an hour. I was looking at arriving in Paris at, optimistically, three—more than two more hours of white-knuckle driving. Neither plows nor highway patrol were anywhere to be found. The rest stops had Ibis hotels, but half the entrances were blocked by trucks or by snow; at the others the hotels were booked full of truckers. On one exit, even the off-ramp from the highway was closed and rerouted to an empty highway patrol building.

  By this point I was nearly the only person on the high
way. It was pushing three, and I was on my third bottle of Club-Mate soda, shivering with cold and caffeine in equal measure.

  It was after four when I finally pulled into an arctic Belleville. The hotel, on a cobbled side street, was locked. I pounded on the door until a middle-aged Arab shuffled over and opened the door with a malevolent glare.

  “Do you speak English?” I said, hopefully.

  “Non.”

  I handed him my passport, wordlessly, and he checked me in.

  Not wanting to get up in five hours to check out, I asked, “Deux nuits?”

  He shook his head. “Tomorrow,” he said, indicating I should come and deal with that in the morning.

  I’d logged onto the Wi-Fi while he was checking me in and ran back downstairs to quickly Skype Maria and let her know I was OK. He gave me a look as I passed the check-in desk. I logged onto Skype, hit call—and the Wi-Fi signal disappeared. I ran upstairs and grabbed my laptop. He saw me and said, “Internet, n’est pas.”

  “What the hell? I saw it! I got my e-mail just now!”

  “Internet, n’est pas.”

  Motherfucker had turned it off so I’d leave his lobby.

  I took a Xanax and waited for the nerves and the caffeine to let me sleep.

  Then, at the legendary Miroiterie squat, I was robbed. My bag with my passport, laptop with all my new writing, my Rebecca West book, and all my tour cash (somewhere north of two thousand euros), was stolen from the backstage room. The soundman said he’d seen the tall, drunken guy who had been heckling the show—whose hand I’d even shaken from the stage—walk off with a black leather shoulder bag. But everyone else had already left, and he gave me the French equivalent of “Shit, sorry bro” and disappeared as well. I raced around the blocks, looking for the drunk, looking for my empty bag in the trash, looking for anything in the snowbound, deserted streets. The expat New Yorker with whom I was staying was kind to me while I cursed, cried, swigged from his bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and vowed to head straight home and never tour again.

  Touring musicians, of course, are vulnerable targets. We are usually carrying a significant amount of cash, sometimes have a language issue, and almost always have to be hundreds of miles away the next day. So this sort of thing is a kind of occupational hazard.

  The next day was a throbbing mess of rage, despair, generosity, and clenched, shivering anxiety at the U.S. consulate, a locked-up La Miroiterie, and the local police station (where I managed, pointlessly, to file a report despite the lack of a common language with any of the officers), followed by a self-flagellating drive to the provincial town of Le Mans.

  I called Maria. Having put some physical distance between myself and Paris, I was feeling a little less broken and violated. Maria, four thousand miles away, pregnant and staying with her mother in Virginia, was not. Why, she raged, was I even on tour? I wouldn’t even be coming back with any money now. All the well-paying shows were behind me in Germany and Poland.

  I wanted to come home too. I felt defeated. I loved touring, I truly did, but it wasn’t like I was playing for rapturous crowds every night or making enough money to justify grinding it out. The idea of four more weeks alone in a car felt impossible. But if I quit now, I’d be returning with no money, still on the hook for the plane ticket, rental car, and merchandise. I had to keep going. The snow chased me through the Mont Blanc tunnel, down the serpentine roads of the Italian Alps and east to Zagreb.

  The terrain was dull and flat until just before the Slovenian border, when it roughened and rose and lost the marks of cultivation. In Slovenia the rain turned inevitably back to snow, and the rural country was all white hills and powdered pine, its few villages dark and deserted.

  Once in Croatia, the old capital glowed like a fairy tale. The snow had stopped, but it was too cold for it to start dripping, and the streetlights had the hazy amber aura of a Rembrandt. I parked my car in an underground lot. It wore an armor of ice scales, whipped backward and frozen by the wind.

  But people were still out on this Sunday night. It wasn’t too cold to visit the pubs, though the plastic outdoor chairs were stacked and stowed. The city was a layer cake, if not a soft-serve swirl, of histories. The wide central square and tram stop had the vastness and aggressive branding of a post-Soviet capital, but in the center stood a statue of Count Jelačić, a mustachioed horseman, that celebrates the Hapsburg defeat of the Hungarians, with whom the Croats had an uneasy relationship, not to say rivalry, from their twelfth-century union through the post-1867 dual monarchy, in which Croatia was placed under Hungarian authority by Maria Theresa. The statue was erected in 1866, controversially, by the Austrians, removed in 1947 by the Communists, and returned in the nationalist 1990s. The monumental buildings of the central square are not Communist; in Rebecca West’s words, “those vast, toast-colored buildings, barracks, and law courts, and municipal offices . . . are an invariable sign of past occupancy by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” It was against the Hungarian national hero Kossuth that Count Jelačić rode.

  Another layer, though, was not political but cultural. It was a distinctly Mediterranean place, though Zagreb is 160 kilometers from the sea. It was a town of cobblestones and cafés (which advertise, in bold letters, that smoking is permitted), steamy low bars, and pizzeria after pizzeria, offering a kind of uncut bowl of a pizza that manages to be both soupy on top and crusty beneath. Zagreb almost seemed more Italian, in its own relaxed way, than the raucous, frivolous Italians. This was a city built not for grandeur but for low-slung charm: “It has no grand river, it is built up to no climax,” West wrote of Zagreb. It “marks from its featureless handsomeness something that pleases like a Schubert song, a delight that begins quietly and never definitely ends.”

  There were near-whiteout blizzard conditions when I left Zagreb in the morning, continuing east, and I nearly turned back. I’d be damned if I’d spend another night on the highway. But storms are slower than rental cars, even those without winter tires, and within two hours I’d gotten out ahead of the clouds, past lumber farms with square clear-cut acres and little hills with villages huddled at their humble feet. In the no-man’s-land between the Croatian exit and Serbian entrance borders it began to sleet, but it was just a border chill.

  “To change one’s country is tantamount to changing one’s century,” Custine declared. Nowhere else—save, possibly, the contrast between Mongolia and China—did I feel this more literally than at the crossing between Croatia and Serbia, once partners in the Yugoslav federation. In the wake of the wars of the 1990s, Serbia, as the most recent loser of the Balkan musical chairs of local villains, became persona non grata on the international stage. Croatia, meanwhile, was in the process of accession to the European Union,1 to be followed at some point by—against the vehement advice of the British and Polish—adoption of the euro. The laments of the locals notwithstanding, by most appearances this was a modern and relatively developed place.

  The split between Western-facing Croats and Eastern-dominated Serbs goes back at least as far as the early Middle Ages, when the Croats allied with the Carolingian Franks as a bulwark against the expanding Bulgarian empire. The Serbs at the time, prior to their own imperial period, were ruled from Constantinople as Byzantine subjects.

  Not so Serbia. After a bad cop/bad cop routine from the skinhead thugs of the Serbian border patrol, who worked out of what would otherwise pass for an outhouse shack on the side of the road, I crossed into the country and might as well have passed back into the nineteenth century. I was now in a world of oxcarts (really just wooden platforms on truck tires) and conical haystacks, of old women in kerchiefs and old men in flat caps.

  I experienced a psychological shiver during the crossing into Serbia. “Serbo-Croat speech has an expression,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “a vukojebina—employed to describe a remote or barren or arduous place—[which] means literally a ‘wolf-fuck,’ or more exactly the sort of place where wolves retire to copulate . . . easily adapted to encapsulate a plac
e that is generally, so to say, fucked up. This is the commonest impression of the Balkans.” For me, born in 1977, the beginnings of my consciousness of world events coincided with the Balkan wars, in which, Hitchens argued, “the greatest harm was arguably inflicted upon the Serbs themselves. . . . Serbia lost its national honor and became an international pariah.” On some preteen synaptic level, for me, the Serbs have remained filed under “bad guys.” It’s the same frisson our grandparents’ generation must have felt visiting Germany or Japan (for our parents, it was Russia) or what our younger cousins will feel if they go to Iraq or Afghanistan a decade from now. And so I stared southbound, trying to catch a glimpse of the Bosnian border that lay just a few miles outside the right-hand windows, and pondered the intensely local and bloody politics that, in Rebecca West’s words, “grow on the basis of past injustice. A proud people acquire the habit of resistance to foreign oppression, and by the time they have driven out their oppressors they have forgotten that agreement [with each other] is a pleasure.”

  I was headed for Bačka Topola, a small town up by the Hungarian border, which is, and has been for centuries, majority ethnic Hungarian. The street signs were in both Hungarian and Serbian. The locals recalled the Communist years with something like active nostalgia. The Yugoslav era “was like Disneyland,” said Nicola, the affable impresario of the café. He wore his long hair in a ponytail, like an Israeli backpacker or a Burning Man enthusiast. Bačka Topola had been an industrial town where everyone worked for one of four state-run corporations. They sent employees’ families on vacations to the Croatian coast or skiing in Bosnia or Montenegro. Each company was privatized or closed by the post-Milošević democrats, and, not coincidentally and as part of a common regional trend, reactionary nationalists won the recent elections. The local public swimming pool and spa shut down for the want of municipal maintenance funds.