The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar by Franz Nicolay

Author:Franz Nicolay [Nicolay, Franz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971802
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-08-01T21:00:00+00:00

For three of the past four days, I had awoken to blizzard conditions, as the snow I outran the day before caught up with me in the morning. This morning, I pulled out my phone to call ahead and cancel the evening’s concert, but some vestigial showbiz reflex made me pause and give the show a chance to go on. The streets of Novi Sad weren’t, of course, plowed, but it was a heavy wet snow that turned quickly to slush and melted under my tires. I got out of the city, across the bridge over the Danube, and turned back up into the Fruška Gora hills, my wheels slipping ever so slightly.

At the park’s entrance, two policemen were leaning into the window of a stopped car, and I thought the road was closed. They waved me through. I wound my way up to the ridge, crawling and slipping. At the peak sat a line of stopped cars. “Not again,” I thought, with visions of another night spent becalmed on a snowy foreign road. I had the impulse to pull a U-turn, head back to the city, and take the longer highway route through Belgrade.

But Serbs are made of sterner stuff than the French—in West’s words, “they were certain in any circumstances to act vigorously”—and not five minutes of fidgety inaction passed before a dump truck the size of a small house lumbered forward from the back of the line of traffic and nudged its way to the front, and we began to creep forward in its wake. Once the line was moving, restless drivers chafed at the slow speed and began to pass the plow truck on the snowy downhill, and in this way we put the storm behind us.

Assume what you might about potholed Serbian highways, but they had the benefit of being nearly deserted, and the gas stations had free Wi-Fi and toilets with proper seats, which is more than I can say for large portions of France. The road was steamy with fog and littered, on both sides of the Serbian–Croatian border, with the broken fluff of what must be the slowest, dumbest sparrows in creation. It’s hard to imagine what the birds were eating on the roads—worms can hardly crawl through asphalt—but they didn’t have the reflexes for such hazardous grazing. Every mile or two, another startled bird thudded off my front bumper. One was a direct, bloody hit in the center of my windshield. A stubborn feather stuck to the glass for hours.

I crossed the border alongside a convoy of vans and heavy machinery painted blue with a yellow stripe and labeled “Republika Slovenija Civilna Zaščita” (Republic of Slovenia Civil Defense). One flatbed hauled a four-wheel off-road vehicle; another was loaded with kayak paddles. As I passed Zagreb and approached the craggy Adriatic coast, the low hills and huddled hamlets gave way to frosted mountain tunnels and majestic elevated bridges over vast pine valleys. Some government organization had, for obscure reasons, erected bear silhouettes along the roadside, which caused me more than one adrenaline-shot double take.

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