Author's Note: I wrote this story nearly 20 years ago, when the country then called Yugoslavia was in the mist of its brutal civil war. I wrote it about events that even then seemed to me impossibly long ago, though in fact they had happened less than ten years before. Thirty years ago, now. It was a different world: the Iron Curtain divided Europe, and I was young. Except for my friend Andrea's name, everything in this story is as true as memory can make it.
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YUGOSLAVIA
All the reward I wished for was that you
With me a poet's timeless fame might share,
That native songs our poignant tale might bear,
That all Slovenes should waken and that true
Content and joy might come. Despite my care,
Frail growth these blossoms had, so sad and few.
Francè Prešeren, "A Wreath of Sonnets"
I could steal a line from the introduction to Lure of the Labrador Wild: "As with so many adventures, this story begins with a map." And it ends with a map too, with a map that shows me that Ljubljana is in a country called Slovenia, just as it was when Prešeren wrote and drank there, that Skopje is in Macedonia and only Belgrade is still in Yugoslavia. But in 1987, when Andrea met me at Orly airport in Paris and told me she had made some changes to our itinerary, all those cities were in one country. It was called Yugoslavia, and on Andrea's Interrail map it was white, like most of Western Europe, though the rest of the Eastern Bloc countries were shaded a forbidding grey.
Having the wrong map and the wrong rail pass was the key to everything, I suppose. Andrea and I were both twenty-one and qualified for the Eurail Youthpass--four weeks of third-class travel. But we could only get to Europe for two weeks, and it was actually cheaper to get a first-class pass for two weeks than a third-class pass for four. So for much of our journey we rode in first-class carriages and created an uneasy social division between ourselves and our natural peers: the hordes of English, German, American and Canadian young people with backpacks almost as large as themselves. On one train an English university student was holding court on a pile of backpacks on the floor of the train, ready to teach a large weary group all the lyrics to "Alice's Restaurant." When Andrea came to tell me she had found a seat for us in first class, the Englishman said, "Ooh, first class? Too bloody good fer us, are you, Canadian girls?"
But that was later, in Italy. Andrea met me at the airport in Paris clutching the well-worn Interrail map she had used when she lived in Europe two years before; she had mapped out our planned route on it and that was why we never unfolded the Eurail map I had gotten when I bought my pass. We would travel to Venice, then across the border to Yugoslavia and through that mysterious Communist country into Greece.
Venice was golden and glorious like the poets promised, rather than dirty and smelly as other tourists had warned, and I was still reeling from it when we boarded the train that would carry us into Yugoslavia. The thought of entering the East made me a little fainthearted, but I was determined not to say so.
We met communism first-hand when two young men came into our carriage laughing about some girls they had met who were wearing three pairs of jeans each--jeans they had bought in Italy and were hoping to get across the border. After two days on the trains we were already tired of overly friendly young men with broken English, and we waved goodbye with no regrets when the conductor checked their tickets and banished them to second class.
