All Of Monday’s Reasons - 12
12. Leaving Athens
Map
I sat on a bench on the platform and read some Hemingway to kill some of the two hour wait. There was no point in going back into Athens in case the station moved again.
At the entrance to the toilets, of course, there was an old lady sitting behind a desk with a saucer of coins in front of her. I had seen this a bit in Greece and it was beginning to annoy me. They normally don’t clean the facilities and often charge extra depending on whether or not they think you’re a tourist.
I went to the toilet and came out and the lady at the table pointed to a fifty drachma coin in the saucer. I swore and fumbled in my pockets searching for a coin and the courage to put it in the dish.
While I was looking in my wallet an American came out. The lady pointed at the coin. “Fifty?” he said, “Jesus!”
I found two twenties and put them in front of her and returned for the crucial ten. She said something in a charitable tone and waved me on without looking up, as if to say “have this one on me”, just as I was beginning to wish I had.
“Too kind, really.” I said and walked away.
No pun intended, but it’s a shit job and my heart goes out to them. Trouble is, so does my money. I wondered that if the Greek authorities stopped charging people to go to the toilet, the streets would start smelling better.
You know you’re away from home when sitting on the railway station platform is almost as interesting as walking through the town itself. A gypsy family of seven stood silently at the far end, out of sight of most of the passengers. One very dirty girl, ages about nine or ten, walked the length of the platform puffing on a cigarette as she paraded before the travellers. A goose waddled behind her, trying to keep up.
A gosling will attach itself at birth to the first thing that cares for it. This has happened with cats, ducks, dogs and apparently, ten year old smoking gypsies.
The grubby youngster walked by and waited at the other end of the platform. Her sister followed next, also smoking and just as dirty. She was a year younger. Even though she was smaller, she carried her filthy four year old brother on her hip even though she could barely walk with him. He cried as he looked at the people on the platform. His sister took no notice and carried him on, dragging on her cigarette as if she had been doing it every day of her short life.
She continued to ignore her brother until he stopped crying. She then nudged him and said something and he resumed his tearless sobbing. When she reached the end of the platform, she put her brother down and walked back to collect money from sympathetic passengers. What a world to grow up into, crying for a living.
On the far side of the tracks, similar families darted in and out of sight from behind empty freight cars. Often only their feet were visible. The groups would shuffle along and stop as the father checked each car until eventually the feet disappeared up into what would be their ride and home for the evening.
It is with great shame that I admit that this made me feel hungry, sparking a boundless war between my brain and my stomach. On the one organ it was morally unjust and on the other it was a necessity which I had the means to satisfy. Needless to say my belly won on the basis that it would have to be fed sometime and I wouldn’t get a chance to eat for another eight hours. I remembered seeing a snack trolley in front of the station.
I stood up and threw Hemingway and my Mets cap down on my seat to save my place. I took four steps before I realised I had just as good as hung up a notice which read: “Hi! I’m not here right now, but if you’d like to steal my luggage, I’ll probably never be able to find you because I’m an American on holiday and the chances are I don’t speak Greek because you don’t need to in Athens. Thank you!”
I returned to my seat and grabbed the attention of the man I had been sitting next to. I pointed at him, then at my eye, then at my bag. He nodded and said something in Greek. I went to the platform trolley and pointed to some sesame bread rings which were like pretzels but were round and tasted nothing like one. I held up four fingers to the vendor.
“Four.” He replied in English.
“Four,” I repeated. I was beginning to be glad I was leaving Athens.
They were ridiculously cheap at seven pence each and were filling for their size. I ate one and put the other three in my back pack. I sat down with the eerie suspicion that I was sitting next to the only non-Anglophone of Greece.
The station had become busy by late afternoon when the train arrived. I stood at the edge of the crowded platform as the cars screeched to a halt and the sleeper section stopped where I was waiting. Because of the crowds, I had no choice but to board the carriage.
A sleeping car has small corridors, due of its large compartments - smaller than the width of the sleeping mat strapped to the bottom of my back pack. I took off my rucksack and carried it sideways in front of me as I stumbled slowly forward with the intention of walking to the next car, which I knew had seated compartments. I was half way down the corridor when I realised this was a bad idea.
By that time it was too late to turn back. Porters from both sides were carrying suitcases down the passageway towards me. The sort of people that take out sleepers don’t carry their own luggage.
Seeing the fate that awaited me between two waves of porters, who would have reached me at the same time in the middle of the train, I hopped into a cabin to let one of the groups pass, since the corridors were just wide enough for two people to walk past each other without luggage. Then chaos ensued. The two lines met just in front of my refuge and the men began screaming and pointing beyond those facing them, each saying that they wanted to get past the other. Add to the mayhem was a time limit of four minutes before the train left, and the porters didn’t want to be on it.
The walls of the car were lined with velvet and the windows were shut, so everyone was soon sweating. A porter fought his way to my compartment and dumped luggage on the floor. Another did the same, and soon there were five large suitcases between me and the crowded corridor. The concentration of porters in the carriage eventually thinned slightly, but the occupants had arrived. Until then, I was happy being ignored, but the Greek couple whose cabin it was stared at me in disbelief. Realising some sweaty, foreign student was occupying their personal cabin, the lady called to their porter as if they had found a dead rat rotting in the corner.
I was trying to explain to the couple that I couldn’t get out because there were so many people in the corridor when the porter appeared. The porter, at that stage didn’t want to waste time because the guard’s whistle had just blown, signalling the departure of the train. He shouted at me and I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders to show that I didn’t understand. Bad move.
He grabbed me around the neck and pulled me towards the exit. Not wanting to step on the occupants’ designer luggage, I braced both arms against either side of the door. The couple then begin pushing me from behind to get me out of their compartment. With the force of their shoves, I jumped up and was propelled over the suitcases into the crowded corridor. Unfortunately, I landed into a man who shouted in my ear. I grabbed my rucksack and pushed me into the angry porter, who pushed my backpack into my chest with such force that it winded me as the force threw me against the wall.
I realised I was in the wrong car, and possibly the wrong country.
It was still difficult to walk down the eisle because the porters were trying to get off the train and the passengers were trying to get on. The only way to move was to hold my rucksack over my head and walk sideways. I squeezed past a porter who shouted at me and a passenger who swore dispairingly in my direction. Not making good ground, a little further on I was faced with a porter carrying a suitcase as wide as the corridor itself. I gave him my bag which he put behind him. I jumped around him using handrails on the windows to support me. I sighed a thank you in Greek and patted him on the back.
Relieved to be out of the riot, I tried the door to the next compartment. Locked. The guard on the platform blew his whistle, again signalling the departure of the train.
I jumped off the train and ran to the couchette car and jumped in.
“Oh!” shouted a guard on the platform.
I opened the door.
“Teekette.”
I fumbled in my wallet and produced my ticket.
“Reservation?”
I shook my head.
“No. Off.”
“Where then?”
He pointed up and down the length of the train. “There, there. Here: no. Off.”
The whistle blew.
I jumped off. I could hear the clatter of the train’s doors closing. I moved as fast as I could to the front of the train, where there was a second class seating car. The train shuddered and slipped backwards the way some do before they move away. A door ten feet in front of me opened as the engine began to pull out of the station. A girl’s head appeared.
“Come on!” She shouted. She was from Liverpool and she was holding the door open for me.
The next train out of Athens heading East was the following day, and I had seen enough. I tried desperately to run faster. My rucksack, hanging off one shoulder, was slowing me down as I lumbered on at a laboured trot.
I reached the door with ten feet of platform left, grabbed the rail on the side of the train, planted a foot firmly on the step and swung myself in, dragging my rucksack after me.
“Made it!” The girl said for me as she closed the door.
She and two boys, all in their late teens, looked down at me. I was soaked with sweat on the floor, where I collapsed against a wall to catch my breath, clinging my rucksack to my chest
I looked up at them. “This,” I gasped, “is travel.”
They all nodded, each of them silently agreeing I had finally lost it.
We remained there for a while cursing the Greek railway system before deciding to find ourselves seats. I quickly found one, but had to put my back pack under my feet because the overhead luggage rack was full. I found myself sitting next to an old Yugoslavian man who spoke at high volume to a young compatriot couple.
When the ticket collector came by, I realised I hadn’t reserved a seat, which on some services was obligatory with a heavy fine as the penalty. Thinking that every little bit helps, I wrote Athens and Thessaloniki, my destination, in the unfamiliar Cyrillic alphabet on my ticket instead of in English.
The grumpy guard came round and punched the tickets and checked the reservations. My turn came and I handed him my ticket which he looked at and laughed before handing it back with a smile. I was hot and tired and had a loud Yugoslavian sitting next to me, but I was travelling again, heading away from Athens, which was enough to send me to sleep.