On the Road to Babadag

Description of a Journey through East Hungary to Ukraine

I'LL NEVER FORGET the sky when at dusk we left Nagykálló for Mátészalka. The entire train a single car. In addition, it was an express, and we had to make seat reservations. The heavy woman at the ticket window smiled and did a few broad sitting motions in her chair to show us what a seat reservation was.

Hungarian train tickets are pretty, resembling small banknotes. The young Gypsies going to Szerencs made accordions out of them, decks of cards, fans. In the Gypsies' ears were gold rings. But that happened two days earlier.

Now, a crest of crimson feathers unfurled in the west. A hand of fire poised above the plain, and below, in the cornfields and orchards, a blue dark had begun to float. We drank aszú from the bottle and sat with our backs to the front of the train, so the west, in a flood of blazing blood, was before us, and we could see the night slowly lifting from the earth, climbing, turning colder, until finally all was extinguished and the lights went on in the little red car of our train.

Less than half an hour had passed, and already we were reminiscing about Nagykálló: the bright warmth of the afternoon as we walked downtown between yellow houses. How we found an enormous church. How musicians sat on the bench by the entrance. One of them raised a gleaming trombone in greeting. I ventured into the vestibule, wanting to see what a Hungarian church looked like, but there was a crowd, a young couple standing up front, and at the altar a pastor. No organ, no chasubles, only the Word at its plainest, as it was in the beginning and shall be at the end, instead of all these wonders made by human hand for human consolation. Then the procession exited, slow, stately, and the three musicians waiting in their white shirts — the trombonist, the accordionist, the guitarist — who seemed so trifling, almost frivolous, practically Catholic, played a subdued piece, and the crowd moved in a cortege toward the marketplace.

We had gone to Nagykálló because, according to our guidebook, "at the end of a long and creepily empty square" stood a psychiatric hospital. Which might be, I thought, some kind of physically manifested metaphor, a metaphor for Eastern Europe. My imagination evoked a large dusty space surrounded by crumbling buildings. Divisions in various uniforms file through the square from time to time, but they stay no longer than needed for the ravage and rapine. They ride off, and the hot dust of the plain immediately hides the horsemen. From the windows of the hospital, the insane follow them with their eyes and pine, because in these eastern regions power, violence, and madness have forever lived in concubinage and sometimes in a completely legal union.

But no, nothing of the sort: this square was not a waste. It was shaded, cool. Before the hospital door, several madmen in dressing gowns smoked cigarettes. The atmosphere was, more than anything, that of a sanatorium, so the heated imagination of the tourist could take a breather.

So anyway, we were drinking aszú and traveling east. Actually, we were fleeing the west, fleeing hopeless Budapest, where in the worst gussied-up dive on Rákóczi Street a shot of pear brandy cost three times what it did in Nagykálló, and the coffee even more. Fleeing the rain as well, because the sky had opened up on the Danube, on Gellért Hill, on the bridges, on everything. But it was August 20, Saint Stephen's Day, therefore even with the downpour parachutists jumped from vintage An-24s, trailing ribbons of smoke in the national colors: green, red, and white. Around Parliament the police stood and made sure no one got too close. The rain fell in buckets on the big limos too, nature being a democrat. On Zoltán Street near the covered market, we had to step back, because the sidewalk filled with roller skaters, five hundred strong, raising their arms and reciting. They looked like a foreign horde bent on conquest. M. said, "That's what cities are becoming. To survive, you'll have to belong to something like that. As it used to be. Loners won't have a prayer." "Unless," I replied, "you're someone like Snake in Escape from New York." Cars couldn't move in the jam. At a bus stop, two black men conversed in Hungarian. The water gurgled in our pockets and shoes. Sirens howled, horns honked, the glare of the city doubled, tripled, and we were ghosts now, having lost confidence in our existence. On Dohány Street, opposite the Great Synagogue, I found the small pub in which, a year before, a producer from Israel told me how a lion had eaten the hand of its trainer, a mishap that sank the film project, because no one in his right mind would do a comedy with a man-eating lion in the lead. The pub was now packed; between the walls papered with gazettes from the days of Franz Josef, it was so bad that mothers had to hold their children in their laps, the children dozing from the smoke and hot breaths. The weary barmaid knew what I wanted, reading my face, and over the heads of the customers she passed us two pear brandies and two coffees. We sat outside under a leaky umbrella, rain pattering in the cups and glasses.

When we took Rákóczi Street to the station at last, we saw a tremendous assembly on its steps. Black-market money changers were there, cabbies, young ladies, railroad employees, smooth operators, vendors — in a word, everyone: all looking into the deep night. We too turned to look. In the leaden sky over the Danube burst a thousand purple sparks, a myriad scarlet spiders and golden stars. The reports from the explosions, muffled by the rain and distance, reached us with delay, which made the spectacle doubly unreal. Celadon and bile, turquoise and violet, sapphire and silver, emerald and crystal — fictional, ephemeral gems that died instantly in the rain and did nothing to lift the darkness. As if old Austro-Hungary were making yet another effort to give a sign from the beyond. The wet night was a maniacal ballroom full of glistening black mirrors, spectral chandeliers, trick candelabras and sconces. The Turks on the street brandished long knives to cut meat for kebabs. A German who had lost his way, pulling a suitcase on wheels, muttered, "Scheisse, scheisse." And, wrapped in blankets, a Gypsy couple slept in a tunnel walkway beneath the street. A black hat lay beside his head; beside hers, a carefully folded, flower-patterned scarf.

We got on the train to Nyíregyháza, that being the farthest point east, and it would run until morning. Which was fine: we had to sleep somewhere. South and east, our plan. Somewhere near Hatvan the conductor appeared. I tried explaining that we didn't have tickets. He was over six feet, all smiles, and repeated, "Kein Problem." Then, with the aid of a piece of paper and a pen, he told us not to worry, we could stay on, he would return, maybe at Füzesabony or Tiszafüred, and sell us the tickets then, so they would be cheaper. He vanished, then reappeared in half an hour, apologetically, saying that it had to be now, there was someone onboard more important than he who might come through and check. With elaborate flourishes he wrote us a receipt. We also had some aszú with us but no corkscrew. Seeing the long-necked bottle, the conductor threw up his hands helplessly, but then disappeared and reappeared with a curious tool for locking compartments and punching ticket holes. We tried it, but the tool was too short, the cork came less than halfway out. Tremendous disappointment on the conductor's face. Again he disappeared, and all we could hear was the echo of his strides in the empty corridor. He returned in a few minutes, beaming, and pulled at my sleeve. The man is so invested in this Tokay, I thought; a pity that the bottle's only half a liter. He explained excitedly, pulling me to the john, pointing at the toilet-paper peg, which was thin, long enough, strong enough. We pushed the cork in. With a sigh of relief, I handed him the bottle. "Drink, brother," I said in Polish. He stood at attention and with solemnity pointed to his uniform, cap, all his officialdom, then clapped me on the shoulder and said something that must have meant "To your health." He appeared again at dawn. He was half asleep and repeated, "Nyíregyháza, Nyíregyhá za." He made sure we hadn't forgotten anything on the train, then waved from the window.

It was that way everywhere. That's how it was at Hidasnémeti at the border station half an hour from Košice, where we got off on a hot platform and the sun rolled in the west like a cut- off rooster's head trailing a ribbon of red. Nothing, as far as the eye could see. The black railway wires vanished in the vastness of burned fields and blowing wind. About the station, guards in Slovak and Hungarian uniforms milling. The borders at the edge of old Europe must have looked like this: emptiness, wind, and garrisons, where you wait for something, for the enemy perhaps, and when the years pass and the enemy doesn't show, you put a bullet through your head out of boredom. A man on a rusty bicycle approached, but I knew only one Hungarian word — the name of a town, Gönc — so I repeated it over and over, until he finally squatted and wrote the departure time with his finger in the sand. He touched my backpack to tell me that the train would be red, raised a finger to tell me it would have only one car. He smelled of wine, beer, and cigarettes. He took off on his bicycle but returned in two hours to make sure we boarded the red car at the station.

It was that way also at Gönc, where in the middle of the night a Gypsy with a gold earring led us down dark lanes between vegetable plots and barking dogs, for several kilometers because he couldn't understand our request, and we followed till we reached a noisy pub where a man sat at a table: the only person in the neighborhood who spoke English. It was he who informed us, finally, that the local pension was closed, the hostess having passed away three days ago. But not to worry, he added, and put us in his Lada, and we went barreling up a hundred hairpin switchbacks deep into the Zemplén Hills. Now and then, in the distance and below, mercury lights flashed from the Slovak side, and over Vel'ka Ida rose a ghoulish industrial glow. But here, on the road to Telkibánya, was nothing but green forest, spruce. Gabor drove us to a hotel stuck in the mountains.

Nothing in Telkibánya, a village that hadn't changed in a hundred years. Wide, scattered houses under fruit trees. The walls a sulfurous, bilious yellow, the wood carving deep brown, the door frames sculpted, the shutters and verandas enduring in perfect symbiosis with the heavy, Baroque abundance of the gardens. The metaphor of settling and taking root appeared to have taken shape here in an ideal way. Not one new house, yet also not one old house in need of repair or renovation. Although we were the only foreigners, we drew no stares. From the stop, in the course of the day, four buses departed. Time melted in the sunlight; around noon, it grew still. In the inn, men sat from the morning on and without haste sipped their palinka and beer in turn. The bartender immediately knew I was a Slav and said, pouring, "dobre" and "na zdorovye." It was one of those places where you feel the need to stay but have no reason to. Everything exactly as it should be and no one raising a voice or making an unnecessarily abrupt movement. On a slope above the village, the white of a cemetery. From windows of homes, the smell of stewing onions. In market stalls, mounds of melons, paprikas. A woman emerged from a cellar with a glass jug filled with wine. But we left Telkibánya eventually, because nothing ends a utopia quicker than the desire to hold on to it.

The return trip to Gönc ran through forests and limitless fields of sunflowers. The driver of the white delivery van talked nonstop and didn't mind at all that we couldn't understand him. We too talked. He listened with care and answered in his own tongue. In Gönc he pulled up in front of the Hussite House, but we were less interested in museums, more in the old women sitting in front of the houses on the main street. Like lizards in the sun. Their black clothes stored the afternoon heat, and their eyes gazed on the world without motion and without surprise, because they had seen everything. The women sat in groups of three, four, and in utter silence observed the passage of time.

A shiny škoda Octavia drove up, with Slovak plates, and a family got out. They looked around with uncertainty, and the father, like a brood hen, pushed them together and cast suspicious glances to either side, because — as everyone knows — Slovaks and Hungarians hold mutual grievances. This time it probably had to do not with history but with intuition, instinct, because those newcomers were white and plump as raised dough, round as loaves of bread, dressed up in tourist smartness — shorts, knee-high socks, pocket flaps — while the main street in Gönc was swarthy, dark-haired, and sinewy-nimble even in the quiet of siesta. This was the sort of thing we wanted to see, not the Hussite House with its "curious wooden bed that pulls out like a drawer," as the guidebook said. What happened on the main street in Gönc was more interesting than what had become mere history. It drew us, because life is made of bits of the present that stay in the mind. The world itself, really, is made of that.

The Slovaks drove off, and I went into a liquor store, because it was August 18, the hundred-and-sixty-ninth anniversary of the birth of Franz Josef, and I was determined to celebrate it. When I was again seated on the low wall before the store, there appeared beside me a bearded man in a herringbone coat and nothing under it. Without a word he produced from an inside pocket an enamel mug and lifted it toward me. How could I refuse him, and on this day, the birthday of His Highness? Here I was, traveling through his country, and he granted audiences even to simple peasants and made no distinction between Serb and Slovak, between Pole and Romanian. So I took out the flask of pear brandy I had just purchased and shared it with my fellow man. He drank in silence and pointed at my pack of Kossuths. I gave him a cigarette. Some citizen came by and in the international language of gestures gave me to understand that I was dealing with a lunatic. I reflected that in the empire lunatics too had their place, and I refilled the mug. We drank to the health of Franz Josef. I told my new friend that I had always been partial to sovereigns and caesars, that I particularly missed them in these threadbare times, because democracy cannot satisfy the thirst for the aesthetic and mythic, and so people feel abandoned. My friend nodded emphatically and held out his mug. I poured and told him that the idea of democracy contains a fundamental contradiction, because true power cannot, by its nature, be immanent; it would in that case resemble the most ordinary anarchy, though without all the entertainments and pleasures of anarchy. Power must come from without; only then can we embrace it and revolt against it. "Igen," said my new friend, nodding. A small crowd had gathered around us and was listening to the discussion. People also nodded and said, "Igen, igen." Then my friend proposed that we arm-wrestle. He won twice; I won twice. The crowd kibitzed and cheered. When it was all over, men came up to me, clapped me on the back, and said, "Franz Josef, Franz Josef."

South of Gönc, the plain began. Fields of corn to the blue horizon. The green-gold sea licked the Zemplén foothills and returned in a wave of warm air. On the roads in the fields stood old private automobiles with trailers loaded with the first harvest. The sun shone from straight above, making our shadows no larger than a dog at heel. The roads joined, crossed, separated — from the sky it must have looked like the board of a gigantic game. Ignorant of the rules, we took the wrong turn. That is, we had been making wrong turns from the start, the whole point of our trip, but this time we went in circles. Everywhere — hot wind and the rustle of leaves baked dry. One cornstalk is like another, so we were in a labyrinth. It took us three hours to get out. In a straight line, we must have gone three kilometers.

In Göncruszka the sidewalks were violet from the plums. A swarm of wasps over the fruit, and not a soul in sight. We walked through a village. No sound from any yard. The windows all shuttered. Only Gypsies — they were having a fiesta instead of a siesta, drinking beer in the full sun before a roadside pub. An old Gypsy woman with the face of Ella Fitzgerald was telling her man to stand up. She had her hands on her hips and spoke in a voice that climbed to a scream, but he sat, answered her calmly, indifferently, punctuating his words with light gestures of his right hand. Apparently a scene that the couple had been repeating, with no variation, for God knows how many years. The woman stamped the ground, raising dust.

We walked on, beyond the village. The posts along the road were light blue, and each had painted on it a white infinity sign. Fifty meters apart, they went evenly up and down the hills, and we thought maybe they were a hallucination from the fierce heat, but when the Slovak van finally picked us up, they didn't vanish, they continued flickering past the window until Vilmány, where we got out to look for a railway station among the sunflowers. The station was simply one pair of rails and a patch of beaten earth — no board, no building, no sign or semaphore; we found it only because some people were gathered there, a couple of kids stretched out on dry grass and resigned, with an almost empty bottle of mineral water and a small backpack. There was no roof or tree to provide shade, but to the west lay a vast landscape that shimmered in lilac. The long ridges were indistinct in the heat, but you could make out the church spires in Hernádcéce, Fáj, Garadna, Novajidrány, Vizsoly, and who knows, the hot air may have carried apparitions from Miskolc and Eger all the way here to the Hornád valley. Anything was possible that day. Budapest itself could have sailed in, floating over our heads, and we wouldn't have been surprised.

But it was a train, not the capital, that appeared. Ella Fitzgerald sat in the middle with three children. Evidently she had been unable to persuade her husband. We moved slowly. There is no better kind of rail travel in a foreign land than the local, second-class kind. People get on, get off, and perform their life in so unhurried a manner that it begins to resemble our own. Everything becomes familiar. Guys returning from work smell exactly like those who get on at the Żerań station in Warsaw and are bound for Nasielsk. A mother accompanying her sixteen-year-old daughter to the train hands her a plastic bag of candy. The girl gives her mother a perfunctory kiss, is a little sullen, gets on, and when the train moves, the mother waves with a helpless smile, but her child is already elsewhere in her thoughts and doesn't notice. That might have been in BoldogkŐváralja… No, it definitely was, because there was a medieval castle on a hill to the left. The girl wore faded jeans and black boots with silver buckles. The conductor came and asked the Gypsy woman for something but got a flood of words, so he threw up a hand and passed. One could open a window, one could smoke and in lazy anticipation think of what would happen in an hour, in half an hour, and wonder, for example, if that dressed-up blonde with the red fingernails was going to Szerencs or would get off at some more backwater spot. Forty kilometers an hour at a steady clip lets you come to an understanding with space, lets you control it without causing it any injury.

The station at Szerencs smelled of chocolate, because right next door was the biggest chocolate factory in Hungary. Drinking beer, palinka, and coffee, we considered our next move. The timetable simply held too many possibilities, and for the moment intuition was dumb. To be able to go everywhere means not going anywhere. We decided to do nothing and let the world do. And we were right: after an hour, an empty bus pulled up, practically to our outdoor table at the summer pub, with the sign TOKAJ.

I woke up early in the morning and stepped out on the balcony. The red roofs had darkened from the night rain. The street pavement shone, steamed. The town was still. You could hear drops falling from leaf to leaf in the garden below. Only the storks made a racket. One by one they flew up from the Tisza and settled on their chimneys. I must have counted five nests. The birds clattered, raising echoes, then smoothed their feathers and returned to the river somewhere among ancient poplars. Tokaj lay motionless, glittering like fish scales. I stood in that preternatural silence, smoked a cigarette, and thought that all mornings of the world should be like this: we wake in absolute peace, in a foreign city that has no people in it, and everything around us is a continuation of sleep. Before the pastel gates of the houses, wrought-iron signs swayed in the breeze: ZIMMER FREI… SZOBA KIADÓ… ZIMMER FREI… In the east, a violet lid of cloud hung heavily, let through a few rays, sank. It was all so beautiful, I wondered if I had died. To check, I returned to my room. M. was still asleep, so everything was okay, because we had never figured that we would go together, arguing instead who would outlive whom.

Don't assume there will be something to eat at eight in the morning in Tokaj. At the glassed-in pub on Kossuth Street, you can drink coffee after coffee and watch the rain fall in the empty square. Curious thoughts enter your head. For instance, should you follow the lead of that couple at the next table, who ordered two 300 ml glasses of aszú, or ask yourself quietly a question in the vein of "What am I doing here anyway?”—the fundamental mantra if not prayer of every traveler? For it is precisely on a trip, in the morning, in a strange city, before the second cup of coffee has begun to work, that you experience most palpably the oddness of your banal existence. Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all. Have another cup, wait for the rain to let up a bit, and walk to the river, the green and twisting Tisza, and your imagination will speak to you as unmistakably as a growling stomach. Because the water that poured at your feet here was on Montenegro a few days ago and will join the Danube near Novi Sad a few days from now. That's the way of it: geography orders space but muddles the head, and a man would rather be a fish than mentally straddle north and south, east and west.

Persistently, if indirectly, we tended east. Somewhat in the style of š vejk's peregrination to České Budejovice. From Tokaj we ran to escape the rain, only to have the sky open on us in Budapest. From Budapest we ran to escape the crowds, chaos, and homelessness, only to find ourselves, at four in the morning, escorted off the train by an over-six-foot conductor, in the unknown yet sizable city of Nyíregyháza. Four in the morning is an hour when you either sit and weep or keep going. At the platform just then, an antique narrow-gauge pulled in, so we didn't hesitate. In the car was a genuine coal stove, its pipe going right through the ceiling. We rocked the whole way to SóstófürdŐ, because our pretty green choo-choo ended there. SóstófürdŐ still slept. A health resort at five A.M. is an uncommon sight. Between the trees gleamed the saucer of a salt lake. An old-fashioned water tower; huge umbrellas with the inscription John Bull Pub; an exquisite hotel, in the Swiss style yet standing here on the eastern border of the Great Hungarian Plain. Limos agleam in the morning sun; villas reminiscent of Chinese socialist realism; blocked signs that said no longer ZIMMER FREI but WOLNE POKOJE, "rooms available" in Polish; and no movement or sound other than the chirp of birds at dawn. Except a dog out of nowhere sniffed at us and continued on its way. A spa without people always seems like a stage set. We found a pension on a sandy lane. A woman in an apron swept the steps. We said we wanted to sleep, nothing more. She told us, in an English German, that we could sleep until five in the afternoon, because a disco started then.

We woke to the sound of our native tongue. Before the pension, three guys in baggy shorts urged their girlfriend, "Andżelika, fucking take it!" "You have to pose," replied Andżelika, trying to get the swaying group in her lens. "We're all standing here, take it!" the guys pleaded, steadying one another. Our trip had become a little too Polish.

We took our leave of SóstófürdŐ with a modest lunch. In the square where the pub was, a wild show advertising Sprite. Gangsta rap over loudspeakers while Hungarian kids on skateboards slalomed in and out of giant green bottles, imagining themselves black brothers. At a table nearby, the father of a family called to the waiter in Polish, "Kotlet schabowy z frytkami! Veal cutlet with fries! Veal cutlet, dummy!" No matter how much the man raised his voice, however, the Hungarian dummy didn't understand a word. It was time to go. I couldn't find Kossuths in any kiosk or shop. I had become dependent on them, flattened and twenty-five to a pack. Those orange packs mark the divide between provincial and urban: they are a provincial attempt at urban. You can get them in any village or Zemplén town cut to the human scale, but not in Tokaj, and no way in Budapest.

And that, more or less, was our trip. Instead of following the path of Lajos Kossuth, we took the route of cheapest possible tobacco. Lajos Kossuth endures in the names of streets, squares, and boulevards, but those cigarettes in orange packs vanish along with the world that smokes them, just as the obscure country inns in which I felt so much at home vanish. I thought of my Europe as a place where, no matter what the distance covered and despite the borders and changing languages, a person feels he is merely going, say, from Gorlice to Sanok. Thus I reflected on the last decent myth or illusion to be applied like a bandage to the wounds and abrasions of homelessness in this ever more orphaned world. My thoughts were sentimental, yet I indulged in them on the road between Nagykálló and Mátészalka under the purple western sky. The purple I imagined as the glow from burning Vienna, which was treating its provinces and peripheries to one last spectacle, sacrificing in a gigantic auto-da-fé its spit-and-polish shops, Graben display windows, archetypal burghers walking their dogs in the morning, memories and deep sadness blowing like the wind between the Hofburg Palace and Maria Theresa Square. At most only the Café Havelka would be spared, and a night sausage stand on St. Stephen's Square. Thus I reflected between Nagykálló and Mátészalka, trying to stage a heroic, impressive end for a world dying naturally, of simple old age.

***

"This route is known for robbery. Even the customs officers on the Ukrainian side will extort money from travelers or confiscate possessions that they want." So says the guidebook. Obviously that's the route we immediately chose. Not that there was another way to get from Hungary to Ukraine.

Waiting for the border train at the station in Záhony, we took all the necessary precautions. First we hid, at the bottom of the backpack, the possession that they would want: a fifteen-year-old Praktica camera. Then we prepared ourselves for extortion, stuffing in various pockets bills of all the currencies we carried. A dollar here, two there, ten in another place in case a higher bribe was needed. Also Slovak crowns, forints, even Romanian lei, because who knew what those guys would want? For courage, we drank the last of our pear brandy, brushing aside the unpleasant thought that it might be our last in this life.

The train pulled in: all of two cars, plus the locomotive. In the first car, young men and women loaded merchandise — washers, refrigerators, stoves, tires, halves and quarters of automobiles, and miscellaneous items of daily use. The second car was for us and a hundred other travelers. Besides our Polish, people spoke Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romany, and Romanian. A woman sitting opposite us had only her passport and a five-liter bottle of oil. The Hungarians checked our papers as the train crossed the border bridge over the Tisza. Then something happened in the passageway between the two cars. One skinhead kid hit another skinhead kid. The girls got into it, and so much was going on, you couldn't see a thing. Someone must have lost the fight, because one of the girls came to our compartment and asked for a bottle of water, for reviving the injured party. It seemed a completely internal disagreement, so we were calm and admired the scenery. A Ukrainian guard appeared with a customs officer. He nonchalantly looked at the passports and stamped them with no interest. Feverishly I tried to remember which pockets held which bills. Fear had driven it all out of my head, so there was a chance I might pull out, like an utter fool, a fifty. The border folk were approaching; in a panic I clutched five hundred Romanian lei in my hand — that is, enough to buy a box of matches in Bucharest. The guard finally came to us, and I handed him our passports. He barely looked at them, slipped them in his pocket, and said in Ukrainian, "See me at the station in Chop."

At the station in Chop, the unloading took time. Washers, refrigerators, halves and quarters of cars were lifted and passed over people's heads. The two skinheads, in perfect amity, carried a television set together. We saw our guard in the crowd. He gestured for us with a tired look. We followed him, and now I remembered where I had hidden the hundred dollars. He led us, like convicts, through the hall for arrivals. Now and then he nodded at someone. We passed the customs table, the passport window, pushed through the crowd, and were suddenly on the other side. Then our cicerone gave us our stamped passports and said, "I didn't want you to have to stand in those lines. You have hryvnias?" "Only dollars," I blurted, idiot that I was. He looked around the hall and waved over a short guy who held a plastic bag. The guy approached. The guard said, "Exchange money for them, but at a decent rate." The bag was full of hryvnias in bundles tied with rubber bands. The guard asked us if we needed anything else, wished us a pleasant trip, and we were again alone.