Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr

Author:Anthony Doerr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780007146987
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 2003-08-04T07:00:00+00:00

The bison herder had an automatic rifle and wanted nothing to do with bribes. She waited on a bench outside a Belorussian border station eating confiscated muesli bars while helmeted police unscrewed the Americans’ rod cases, peered into their fly boxes and upended their duffels. As a kind of interrogation, a tiny police captain in pump-up basketball shoes asked the dumbfounded Americans a series of questions about pro basketball. Did Patrick Ewing have a wife? How carefully did American refs call the three-second rule? How much did Americans pay for basketball shoes with built-in pumps?

When he seemed satisfied he nodded, then deflated and repumped one of his sneakers. All this will have to go, he finally said, sweeping his arm over their fishing gear.

But we only wanted to fish, the Americans insisted. For trout.

Oh yes, he nodded, repumping the other shoe. Oh yes. There are trouts, big trouts in the Biebzra. He said something to his men and they repeated, Big trouts, and showed the Americans how big with their hands.

But you see, the little chief shook his head, Americans must not fish here. It is illegal. The czars shot boars here. And before them, Polish kings. Lithuanian princes. All shooting boars.

We didn’t shoot boars, the Americans said. We didn’t even fish. We were sleeping. We thought we were in Poland.

Nonetheless, said the chief, removing his helmet, you must play us in basketball for your things.

There was a dirt court behind the border station: chain nets, plywood backboards. The Belorussians unclipped their police belts and leapt into a series of pregame drills. When the game started they executed backdoor cuts, shot rainbow jumpers, ran the pick and roll to perfection. They beat the befuddled Americans by forty. Afterward the Belorussians hoisted their small chief onto their shoulders and sang to him. The bison herder on her bench unwrapped another muesli bar and cheered placidly.

The sweaty Americans were ushered onto a motorbus with cracks in the windshield. You will go to Lodz, the chief told them, picking at a thread on his newly won Gore-Tex pullover. Back to Poland. It is lovely there.

Halfway to Lodz the windshield fell onto the driver and the motorbus plunged into a drainage culvert and rolled onto its side. The passengers climbed out hatches in the roof and squatted by the roadside in a field of buckthorn. It began to rain. The Americans sat in a soggy cluster, mud seeping through their socks.

Hours later they were shivering on a speeding flatbed between plastic crates of meat chickens heading south to a Slovakian slaughterhouse. They watched southern Poland scroll past, crumbling apartment blocks, buckled roads, rusted cisterns, weathered steeples, haystacks, the skeleton of a Soviet tank grown over with sawgrass—all the unkempt, haphazard Polish gloom. By the time they got to Kraków they were drenched and ravenous and the swarthy Poles in velour jogging suits who smoked cigarettes on street corners shot them wary scowls.

The Americans were badly discouraged. Twelve days to go, stripped of their gear,

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