Counter 27

At the railway station in Chișinău, I joined a queue and waited my way to the front to ask for a ticket to Odessa, only to be brusquely referred, with an eye-roll, to counter 27, as though the same question were asked a dozen times a day, and as though I could not possibly expect to buy an international journey from any of the first 26 counters.

The ticket windows were numbered in an unnecessarily long row, given that virtually every journey from here went either to Tiraspol or Bălți, but the building had been erected during the communist years and the logic of that era had come with it. Employment above all. The woman at the counter was therefore not particularly accommodating, so I tried counter 5 instead, which had no queue, and asked the man there, who was sitting counting tokens for some dice game I had no intention of trying to interpret. He too gave me an irritated look, as if I had just toppled his pick-up sticks, and muttered: “International travel, 27.” But there are only 26 counters here, I noted, slightly desperate, gesturing across the station hall, because time was passing and the train would leave the platform with or without me, and then I would be stuck in this sooty city for at least another twenty-four hours, and considering the state in which I had left the hotel room, it would be best for me to get out of here as quickly as possible. But my problems were mine, and evidently not the station staff’s.

For several hours I searched for counter 27, via all the other ticket windows, but nobody knew exactly where this mythical gateway to foreign lands was located. I asked around wherever there were people. The tobacco seller claimed it had been moved after the damp damage in the concrete ceiling. The sweeper pointed out that before that, you needed a special code, Gagarin, to be granted access at all, but that was a long time ago, and besides, the code was top secret. The lad who used to sit at that counter later became a decent poet, the newspaper distributor told me, after all the reading he had managed to do during working hours, but that information was of no use to me now, as the hours passed and who knew whether the hotel cleaner might not call the police. Was that sort of thing illegal in this country? Entirely possible.

Then at last I saw a small arrow on the floor, pointing towards the urinal, then an A4 sheet with another hand-drawn arrow, and I followed the direction down towards the basement level, where there was an Orthodox prayer room that did appear to be in use, and also a rest room that seemed altogether too well used by shady elements who could hardly be ending their working days by reciting the commandments of God, and at the far end, by the boiler, there was another arrow, a childish sticker pointing towards a ladder and yes, I climbed all the way down and found myself in a bunker-like system that had surely been in use long before the station was built, back when world wars were raging above.

At the far end of the corridor with the flickering fluorescent lights, there actually was counter 27, the number written on a folded sheet of paper, with the addition: International travel. But nobody was sitting there to take my order, which of course was not so surprising, given how inaccessible the place was, and therefore how poor the prospects were for encountering other human beings. I sat down on the wooden chair behind the folding table and waited, because now at least I was in the right place, and there was nothing more I could do anyway, and I had grown rather tenderised by all the searching.

A few minutes later I heard a clatter over by the ladder, and an unknown body climbed down into the bunker system to keep me company. Slowly but surely this person approached, whose sluggish steps led me to assume that this was unlikely to be a swift affair. My companion turned out to be a backpacker guy, of course, one of my kind. In Greek English filtered through some sort of peculiar Low German dialect, the stranger managed to ask: “Is it here I can buy tickets to Prague?” I looked around and caught sight of a scratched larchwood hutch, odd that I had not noticed it before, and when I opened it, there lay tickets arranged in alphabetical order, to almost every destination on the planet. Under P I soon found the one he was after, first class as well. I handed it to the lad and accepted his notes and coins, weighing them in my palm, staring him in the eye, and decided to keep the change. Then he went back up towards the higher levels, while I put my feet up on the table and searched my breast pocket for a packet of cigarettes. Not that I really smoked, but it just felt right in the moment. It was hardly going to get busy here.