Red in the Morning (Chapter 4 - Bulgarian border)

There were a hundred yards of no-man's-land. Through the trees along the rutted, sunlit track, we saw the Bulgarian border. It was seven-thirty a.m. We started the scooter and ran out of Yugoslavia and into the buffer strip of land between the two countries. For those hundred or so yards, we were politically nowhere. It was a peculiar feeling, those few moments in limbo. I felt that had we stopped and set up camp we could probably have stayed in that strategic vacuum, acknowledged by neither government, for ever. Ahead, to left and right, a stout wire fence marked the Bulgarian frontier. We drove up to a chequered barrier, stopped the engine and waited.

From a whitewashed hut stepped a uniformed double of Peter Ustinov, much as he appeared in The Love of Four Colonels. He opened the barrier and, in broken English that was almost as funny as the play, said:

'Hullow, travellers. Please insides; signings.'

We nodded, parked the scooter and followed his ample, heavily belted frame back into the hut.

'Passaporrtas please.'

He flung down his red-starred cap and settled comfortably behind a big desk that sported a dusty ink-well and an ancient hand-crank telephone. He indicated two hard-backed chairs for our pleasure and immediately fell to a most thorough examination of our precious document. Above and behind him, two faded portraits stared down, it seemed directly at Nita and me, with what appeared to be faintly disapproving expressions. One was Lenin, the other, surprisingly, was Josef Stalin, edged in black.

I looked about me but the rest of the room was empty save for a very old office safe, upon which I could just make out the 'Made in England' trade-mark. We sat in silence, waiting for the end of the perusal. After twenty minutes, the officer looked up with a
beaming smile.

'This one passaporrta not good.'

'Oh,' said I, thinking that all the pessimists back home had perhaps been right after all, 'what's wrong with it?' I tried to adopt a suitably aggressive tone in accord with that line on the passport flyleaf regarding 'Without Let or Hindrance'. But it was no use. Tapping the document against his thumb, he launched into a long, barely understandable explanation, which briefly revealed the trouble: apparently everything was in order so far as we personally were concerned, but the passport visa mentioned nothing about a motor-scooter.

I tried to explain that all the formalities regarding our transport were covered by the carnet - I flourished the fat booklet at him - but this was sadly insufficient. It should be in the 'passaporrta'; he was pleasant, apologetic, but firm. We would have to wait while he rang through to Sofia. If they granted permission, we would be able to proceed; if not, we would have to return to Yugoslavia. (He indicated this with a disparaging directional nod of the head.)

Nita immediately went outside and returned with the map case. She gave me an I-told-you-so look, as she began totting up the mileage to Turkey via Yugoslavia and Greece. I watched anxiously as our Peter Ustinov cranked vigorously at the telephone. He eventually got through to somewhere and after a few minutes' conversation which consisted mostly of the word dobra, he hung up and sat back with a contented smile. Sofia, he said in effect, would ring back within a few minutes with the necessary permission. In the meantime we were offered a glass of water and given cigarettes to pass away the time. It was just eight o'clock.

At two p.m. the poor man, who now looked less like Ustinov, was as fed up with the sight of us as we were with him and his wretched frontier post. He had certainly done his best to entertain, but after six hours he had run clean out of ideas. We had been on a tour of the garrison, including the barn-like soldiers' quarters and the vegetable patch, and walked round and round the postage-stamp lawn in front of the building. We had washed at the well, after superhuman efforts to draw water, and cleaned our boots of some of the thick dust which clung so tenaciously. The scooter had been repacked several times as a sort of occupational therapy and stood waiting outside the guardroom door. Still no permission.

At four o'clock, the last strained smile had been smiled and we all sat glumly and silently, chins in hands, watching and willing that telephone to ring. At four-thirty the quiet was broken by our captor with strange noises which turned out to be an invitation to eat with the rest of the frontier guard. We all adjourned to the barn and there joined the rest of the troops who were noisily engaged in drinking bowls of watery soup and eating mountains of dry bread. Nita and I took our indicated places at the long scrubbed table and conjuring up expressions of surprised delight, managed to swallow the luke-warm gruel and some of the ancient bread. For a pudding, we each received a small block of what appeared to be, and tasted like, solidified jam; quite pleasant, by far the nicest course, but very, very sweet.

Afterwards, we returned to the guardroom for what fortunately turned out to be the last half-hour of waiting. At five o'clock, exactly nine and a half hours after arrival, we were given permission to proceed. We went post-haste, anxious to reach Sofia sixty miles away before nightfall. We had learned our first lesson. Communist government departments had a lot in common with our own; but at least they supplied refreshments.