I was taking an overnight train to Warsaw, Poland, killing time by talking to a Ukrainian guy who was in the same cabin as me. He was on his way up to the Baltic Sea to work at a resort for the summer. He was leaving especially early to make sure he was able to find a job once he arrived.
“Never fall sleep on this train,” he was whispering at a volume that was almost impossible to hear. He was somewhat creepy, and missing a fairly large number of knuckles and fingernails from his hands. He clearly must have been pretty clumsy with a band saw at one point in his life. He told me how on this train it was common to be drugged and robbed by thieves who would pump sleeping gas into your compartment at night. “If you begin to fall asleep, leave and smoke a cigarette outside.”
He had a lot of scary stories about overnight trains through Poland. A few years ago he had been on the train when the conductor found a mutilated head in the bowl of the toilet. The police were never able to find out the identity of the head, much less the person who had chopped it off and put it there.
Another time, this guy told me, whose name was Ivan, a woman was just thrown from the train he was on in the middle of the night and nobody could figure out how, why, or who did it.
“I have very bad luck,” he told me. “Many times when I ride a train, somebody will die.”
“It sounds to me like other people are having worse luck than you,” I said, which was kind of meant to be a joke, but Ivan didn’t think it was funny.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Never mind.” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
It occurred to me that the common thread tying these stories together was actually this guy, Ivan, my only bunk mate on this sparsely populated train. Maybe I was talking to a serial killer. Maybe he was planning to knife me when I wasn’t looking and hide my body in my own Army issue duffel bag. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken him up on his offer to share his flask of hard, unforgiving, Russian vodka, which I regretted as soon as I tasted it. It was like taking a shot of battery acid, and it was probably laden with horse tranquilizers. I offered him some bananas, a food I like to travel with because it’s guaranteed not to have been touched by anyone, including myself, but he declined so I ate them all.
But, nothing happened, and as far as I know Ivan didn’t kill anybody on that train that day. We arrived in Warsaw and I said goodbye to Ivan, who stayed on the train. Outside it was dark and cold and raining, almost sleeting. Very eastern bloc, but I was beginning to enjoy weather like this. It made me feel important to walk around in a very cold, very old city in a country I knew nothing about in bad weather. I walked through the station and found a cab on the street, even though I didn’t really know where I was going.
“Where do you want to go? The stadium?” asked the driver.
It was close to four in the morning, which made the stadium seem like an odd place to go. “What’s happening at the stadium?”
“That’s where all the Chinese sell guns at night.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Sometimes the Russians bring rockets.”
It seemed odd that a black market weapons fair would be advertised so publicly, and held in an open air arena that probably held soccer games and high school graduation ceremonies during the day. I’d only been in Poland for a couple of hours and conceivably I could have my hands on a pair of MAC-10s and a pile of incendiary explosives before dawn. Maybe even a helicopter.
“Ok,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”
Trips to Poland can be good, or they can be very bad for some people. 24,421 out of 100,000.
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