“Here we are,” said his “uncle,” and Laurent looked up in shock to see that they had reached Rinnicu Sanat, the town at the border. The border. A thrill of fear went through him. If the guards realized that the ID was fake—
He breathed in and out and tried once again to calm himself as he got up and followed his “uncle” down the aisle of the train. They got out into a slightly warmer day than the one they had left behind in Focsani. This area had some hills between it and the mountains, Laurent remembered from school, so that it had a more sheltered “microclimate.” But he was still having to fight off the shivers.
Come on, he told himself. If you look nervous, and give it away, they’ll come after Pop—
His “uncle” led him down to the end of the platform, down a flight of stairs, through a dark tunnel under the tracks, and up the far side, using another flight of stairs, to a middle platform in the station. There was another train waiting, an unfamiliar one, and between them and it, at a guardpost mounted at the top of the stairs and fenced in with wire, were guards with machine guns…and the police.
He saw just one ISF man in his neat gray uniform, watching them come up the steps. But one was enough. And the two soldiers who stood there watching them come up the stairs looked as if they hated the day, and hated standing there, and would hate Laurent, too, if he gave them the slightest excuse — a word or a look, anything that would draw their attention away from how much they were hating everything else.
This was the last barrier. Laurent hardly dared to look up as he brought out his ID card and his train ticket and handed them to the ISF man, afraid that he would notice that they were damp from Laurent’s sweating hands. The policeman stuck the card in the reader, and turned his attention to the ticket as the reader beeped softly to itself. “A lot of counterfeits coming through lately,” he said absently, scratching the paper of the ticket.
Laurent stood there frozen.
“What some people won’t do,” his “uncle” said calmly, holding out his own ticket and card.
The reader stopped beeping, and the ISF man took out Laurent’s card, read it carefully, and handed it back to him. “Why aren’t you in school?” he said.
“Cultural holiday,” said Laurent, and the dryness of his mouth suddenly strangled him, making it impossible to get out the casual-sounding response he had been rehearsing for the past three days.
“Vlad Dracul’s old castle,” said his “uncle,” as the ISF man shoved his card in turn into the reader. “I went to see it when I was his age.”
“Ugly old pile of rocks,” said the ISF man, not impressed. “And the capitalist bloodsuckers actually charge you money to see it. Waste of time.” He pulled Laurent’s “uncle’s” card out of the reader, handed it back. “Still, a nice summer day…any excuse to get out of school, huh?”
Laurent found his attention fixed irrationally on the barrel of the gun belonging to the soldier standing closest to him. It seemed the ugliest thing he had ever seen.
“I like school,” he said abruptly. Though not entirely true, this was at least an entire sentence, and could be taken as a suggestion that he wasn’t frightened out of his wits.
The soldier holding the gun laughed. “Don’t worry, we won’t report you for wanting to be elsewhere,” he said, and glanced at the ISF man, who gave the two of them one last look.
“Go on,” the policeman said. “Have a nice day with the old bloodsucker. No fraternizing with the Western tourists, now.”
“Don’t care to talk to them much anyway,” said his “uncle” righteously. “Dirty profiteering foreigners. Come on, Niki.”
They walked on through the chain-link-fence gate, toward the train waiting on the platform. Then, “Nicolae!” someone shouted behind them.
The sound of the shout was as sudden and startling as a gunshot. Laurent turned, looked back to see who was getting yelled at — then belatedly realized it was him. The ISF man, expressionless, watching them, turned away. The soldier laughed, waved them on again.
They turned again, walked another twenty or thirty yards down the platform and climbed on the waiting train.
“Ha ha,” Laurent muttered under his breath as they got up into it and turned right through the narrow door into the second-class carriage. “Big joke, very funny.”
“Maybe,” his “uncle” said softly. Laurent swallowed.
They got into the carriage, sat down and waited. The carriage was very quiet. People came and settled down around them, waiting in bored silence. Down the carriage, a frustrated fly bumped and bumbled against the windows, trying to get out — bumped, buzzed, bumped again. Laurent watched the soldiers and ISF men going up the length of the train, shutting the doors that still lay open. Bang! Bang! Bang! The sound, in this nervous silence, was too much like gunfire for Laurent’s liking. The ISF man who had looked at him now came down the length of the train again, peering in the windows. Laurent made it his business to be looking out the other side of the train when the man came by again, paused outside the window, then passed on.
Silence again. Laurent sat and twitched.
Then there came a crash! from down the locomotive end of the train, and the world lurched forward as the diesel’s sudden convulsive forward pull propagated down the cars of the train. They were moving.
The train accelerated to about fifty Km/h and held that speed for maybe twenty minutes. With the unfriendly eyes outside the window gone now, Laurent pressed his nose to the smudged, dusty glass and looked hungrily out at the world. It streamed by him — houses with untidy gardens and houses with tidy ones, cabbage patches and corn piled up in the shock in broad fields already cut to stubble, parking lots, level crossings, manufacturing collectives with oil sumps built into their concrete “backyards,” piles of old tires, chained-up, ratty-looking guard dogs yapping inanely at the passing train. Then suddenly the locomotive began to slow again, and Laurent realized that they were coming to another fence, one that came right up to the edges of the track. Slowly the train lumbered through, past more guards on a concrete platform, the guards looking at the train with weary or even hostile eyes.
Then they were on the other side of the fence, and there were guards there, too, equally weary looking, but the uniforms were different, blue instead of gray. The train rumbled past them all, left them behind.
Laurent’s heart leaped irrationally. He looked over at his “uncle,” who was gazing out the other side of the train, past two dark-dressed ladies with parcels in their laps. After a moment, as if he felt Laurent’s glance, he looked over at him. He didn’t manage an answering smile, but he raised his eyebrows.
“Was that it?” Laurent said.
A slight nod. Then his “uncle” leaned back. “A while yet before Brasov,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap.”
“Okay,” Laurent said. His “uncle” shrugged his jacket up into a more comfortable conformation around him, closed his eyes. Laurent, turning to stare out the window, found that everything suddenly looked different. This was the beginning of the rest of the world.