TWO ADVANTEROUS STORIES ABOUT RETURNING STOLEN KIDS

I shake with fear and who knows what else. My fear is transferred to her, I take her hand and silently, as her teeth chatter, she loudly keeps on repeating Our Father, which I don’t know if I know. Instead of going to the closest bus station, the two of us, completely paralyzed with fear, make an incredible trip though the Zemun park, by the church and high school, along some streets back to the same bus station from which we had been only some twenty meters away. We enter a bus, we exit at the station just after Merkator, and here we are in front of the Fountain. Five minutes later, dad arrives with a car: a red 101 and some young guy, the driver. We leave in silence. I am quiet. Dora is quiet, only dad, excited gives the young guy some abstract explanation of this sudden trip, which I can clearly see upsets the young guy a lot as I catch his suspicious gaze in the rearview mirror, more and more. Something is not clear and obviously he doesn’t like something. Whether real or not, I’ll never know, but some twenty kilometers later, his car starts to cough and jump and in the end, it completely stops. Near Banatsko Novo Selo. Somehow, we return to the centre of the village. Yes, I didn’t tell you, we are going towards Romani, Timisoara, from where I thought of flying to Amsterdam. We reach the village, soaked, dad says there is no other option but to return. In the village we reach the House of Culture. From the speaker we can hear Blue moon you saw me standing alone…, and that gives me some new strength, fully convinced that we’ll contonue somehow. In front of the House of Culture, a group of people. I ask them if there was a taxi in teh village, there was none, they told me, but a kind guy tells me that he was just on his way to Vrsac to his father-in-law, and that taxi drivers from Vrsac drive to Timisoara without any problems. We enetered his car, dad, Dora and I and we reached Vrsac. He left us at the taxi station, he would not take any money for the drive – a broad smile, he wished us a happy journey, he kissed Dora. I approach the firts avialble taxi driver and we leave for Temisoara with him. I tell dad to return to Belgrade, but his face is so desperate that I understand that I can not just leave him here. We contonue, all three of us. Around noon, we reacched Timisoara. Thirty-three degrees. Dust. Everything is hot. Dry throats.A Romanian taxi driver explained to us where the closest tourist agency was. There I found out that there had been no flights from Timisoara for months, that the airport was closed and that I could go to Bucharest or Arad, where Pannonia Express, the train to Budapest was leaving, and from there I could fly to Amsterdam. I thank them and I return to the car to think. The taxi driver from Vrsac tells me that he comes to Romania regularly, that Ceausescu is dead but everything else is alive, that you should not hang around unless you are a tourist or in a group or you know somebody local, and that if he were in my shoes, he would go to Budapest rather than deeper in this madness. And so I decide – straight to Budapest.