A train to Transylvania

by Conan McGlone (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Romania

“Vampire hunting!” quipped Sebastian with a smile impossibly cheesier than the joke. “What else?” One girl laughed, the other rolled her eyes and pushed her bag onto the rack above her friend’s grinning head. The train car jolted forward and my copy of Dracula fell from my broken backpack above me, along with an orange and a bottle of water, and spilled onto the floor. “You weren’t joking?” remarked the unimpressed friend as she handed me back my book. “Guess not.” I said, awkwardly smiling through my reddened face. Turning my attention to the window I pressed my forehead against the glass - hoping the vibrations would drown out the sound of Sebastian ramping up his theatrics to his fresh audience. Unlike the city’s centre the outskirts of Budapest are largely unspectacular and unless you have a particular interest in functional, prefabricated, Communist era apartments there isn’t much to see on the way out of town. The warmth of the August sun was baking the car around us and soon the heat and the old locomotive’s rumbling began to put me to sleep. It was the sweaty, jerky, and uneven sleep that you never grow used to but that becomes all too familiar when you’ve been on the road for a few months. (We had grown accustomed to saving an evening’s stay in a hostel by taking every night train possible. “We’ll sleep in our saddles!” Sebastian would cry in mock encouragement - as if we were troops in Napoleon’s doomed armies marching towards Russia…) I awoke to a blinding golden light that hit me full in the face and made me recoil and turn back inside the train. The cabin was quiet now - Sebastian was asleep and the two girls were busying themselves with a game of cards. I rubbed my eyes, sheepishly mopped up the drool that had pooled on my forearm, and turned my eyes back to the window. We had left Budapest behind and had been spilled into what seemed like an endless sea of yellow. Fields upon fields of sunflowers stretched before us and the orange orb of the setting sun met them at the horizon and spun a vision of golden silk that both enchanted and burned my eyes. Looking away, I took my book back out. As a Dublin native I suspected that Stoker was hardly an expert on Romania and after reading Kafka in Prague I felt a pang of guilt that I hadn’t attempted to find an actual Romanian author. However, the guilt soon dissipated once we crossed into Romania and were greeted with three dead rabbits hanging from a sign a sign post without any real explanation as to why. All of a sudden the Irishman’s Gothic novel struck a chord with the mood in the cabin as we leered out the window excited for what curiosity we'd come upon next, if this was Transylvania’s introduction I was excited for the rest. What came next were the Romanian border police checking passports and asking how long people intended to stay. "A week" I said as I handed over my mangled UK passport. "A week" echoed Sebastian handing over his Australian. The officer nodded silently and started thumbing through the books. "Visa?" he said to Sebastian as he handed back my passport. We exchanged an uncertain look. “Visa?” he repeated. “You need a visa on an Australian passport.” said the one of the girls with a worryingly somber look. Evidently they were also Australian and better at research than Sebastian. “Oh” he mustered. The officer pointed at Sebastian and nodded toward the door, then slowly walked away with his passport. Sebastian followed with trepidation looking back at me with a mix of apology and pleading etched across his once smirking face. I picked up my bag and orange and followed after him. The sun was setting over the station house and I could see the silhouettes of my friend and the officer walking in front of me when all of a sudden the train behind jerked forward. It was at that point I realised that I had left my book behind, but judging what lay ahead I figured I no longer needed it.