Outside Prague, Czech Republic
November 26
Another raindrop hit the train’s window and dripped slowly downward. Eva watched it, her head against the glass, as the sky darkened. She shivered in the cold, pulled her thinning denim jacket tighter, her arms substituting for the buttons long since torn from the front. Her tank top was too threadbare and worn for this weather, but she had no bags, no clothes to change into.
She peered down the side of the train, as far as she could, but saw no movement. The fields outside were abandoned, half-turned soil waiting for another pass with a tractor.
“Forty minutes,” she muttered to herself, checking her watch. She looked back the way they’d come, saw nothing there but hostile sky.
A knock at the door startled her. She sat straight, adjusted her jacket, tried to fix her poorly bundled hair. The door opened a moment later, and a uniformed officer with a surgeon's mask entered the suddenly cramped compartment. He took a quick look around, but seemed bored by the action, like he’d done it one too many times before.
Eva tried not to move, kept a smile on her face that felt fake no matter how she adjusted it. The officer made no attempt to establish eye contact, only said gruffly in Czech: “Ticket. Passport. Photo identification.”
Eva slid a small worn manila envelope from her right breast pocket, holding out the contents with shaking hands. The officer took the papers and cards, started running them through his handheld with casual expertise. He nodded towards her jacket as he worked.
“Not the safest place to keep these things,” he said.
“I know,” she said, nodding anxiously.
“Stolen passports go for, what, €65,000 in Barcelona?”
“Eight-five—” Eva began, then stopped very abruptly, and stared at the ground. She could hear the officer had paused his work. She tried not to shiver during the awkward silence.
“You should get a better jacket,” he said, and the work resumed.
“I will,” Eva said, relaxing a bit, but still on guard. “It’s been a long trip.”
“I can see that,” he muttered, flipping through the pages of her passport. He turned it sideways, flicked his eyes over at her, then snapped it shut and slipped it underneath the handheld while he worked on her health card.
“You look young for twenty-three,” he said, though he wasn’t looking at her.
“Th-thank you.” she stammered.
“It’s not a compliment. Under the circumstances, nothing I say is going to be a compliment. Let’s see your eyes.”
She looked up at him, nervous. He squinted at her.
“Nice shade of blue. What’s that, azure?”
“I think it’s called brandeis, actually.”
“Really. Never heard of that before. It’s funny, the odd facts and trivia you learn from these encrypted health cards.”
There was an awkward silence.
“A border guard in Switzerland told me,” Eva said.
The officer cocked an eyebrow.
“What else did he tell you?”
“I looked old for twenty-one.”
The guard smiled at this, but it wasn’t a warm smile. He had very hard features, and the mask didn't sit well on his face. The metal bridge for the nose was snapped in half where he'd tried to reshape it too often, and the spaces around the sides fogged his glasses in slow, steady bursts as he breathed.
“Ms Kolikov,” said the officer, gruffly but wearily, like he was repeating a lecture for the thousandth time, “your passport is Russian. Your name is Russian. And unless you’re going to claim you’ve been living under a rock until recently, I’m pretty sure you know the Czech Republic closed its borders over two years ago, especially to our cousins in Russia.”
Eva lowered her gaze, appropriately chastised. The officer continued. “Unspoken policy says we don’t even do the small talk with people who carry Russian passports. Last guy who did ended up dying from boils the size of a fist on his neck, because — and I don’t mean to generalize — even though you people started it, you still don’t seem to grasp how big a shitstorm it’s become. Don’t know when to quit. And we’re sick of trying to make you understand. Like spitting into the wind.
“Now, I could list you about fifteen regulations covering the rights of refugees and amnesty claimants as they relate to UN containment policies, but the bottom line is this. I’m fully within my rights to grab you by the scruff of the neck and toss you off this train before you even have a chance to think of a way to convince me otherwise.”
Eva held her breath. The officer scrolled his handheld briefly.
“This is the part where you convince me otherwise,” he sighed.
“Oh!” Eva stammered. “Well, I used to have dual citizenship, so while I’m not technically Czech anymore, my mother is. She lives in Prague right now and I—”
“You've been in Paris,” he interrupted.
Eva nodded. “A few years ago. At school.”
“Computer science,” noted the officer.
“No, fine arts,” Eva corrected.
“Says here ‘computer science’.”
“I switched majors.”
He glanced at her again, eyes unflinching.
“Computer science in Paris is all I see. Let’s move on.”
“I haven’t been in Paris for years. You can check my passport… I left before —”
“Ms Kolikov,” said the officer, staring her down, “your mum’s a citizen. You cleared the first hurdle. Congratulations. Now trust me when I say this: if you are lucky enough to continue on this train, you will want to have saved your impassioned speeches for the Immigration agents at the station. Words don’t change your documents, and from here on out, all we care about are your docu…”
He trailed off, frowned at the screen, and looked back at her sharply. She froze, unsure what he’d read. He pocketed her ID and his handheld, leaned out the door and called down the hallway.
“What’s a 17-5?” he said, his voice scratchy when loud.
There was a brief pause, some clattering, then a voice mumbled something back that Eva couldn’t make out. The officer sighed, leaned further out the door, cupped his hand to his mask and shouted again: “What’s a 17-5?”
He glanced back at Eva, then walked out of her cabin, sliding the door half-closed, and disappeared down the hall. She was left there with no papers, painfully alone in a space meant for four. The wind outside was picking up, and the sky was darker still.
A sudden scream from the hallway broke her stare, and she turned round to see a woman being shoved down the narrow passage. The officers on either side kept pushing her forward, their faces cold behind creased masks.
The woman grabbed the bar outside Eva’s door and tried to resist, but the larger of the two officers planted a hand on her face and pushed so hard it seemed as if her neck might break.
The woman reached inside her jacket and pulled out a passport, a Euro ID card, tried to hand them back. One of the officers smacked them out of her hand, onto the ground, as if they meant nothing to him. They meant everything to her, and she gasped in horror, lost her grip, and was pushed out of view.
Eva carefully leaned closer to the door, trying to see where they’d gone. She heard the echo of screaming, frantic banging, and then the sound of the heavy doors to the train slamming shut.
The woman’s passport lay on rug in the hall, cover bent and tread upon. Bulgarian. Eva glanced out the window again, felt the cold through her jacket more intensely now. She touched her empty pocket, bit her lip.
“A long way home,” she said to herself, then risked another peek at the passport. Her hands clasped together, white fingertips trembling, working up the nerve to snatch another lifeline. It would only take a second to pull it in. All it would take is a second and she’d have a back up plan after months of—
A knock at the hallway window jolted her back to attention. The officer had returned, holding her passport and rapping the glass again with scarred knuckles.
“Up!” he called.
Eva quickly obeyed, slipped out of the cabin without a word. The officer watched her with callous eyes, squinting unhappily. He grabbed her chin and turned her towards him, making sure he had her attention. He waved her passport, health card, and ticket like a magician about to perform a trick, then shoved them into her pocket. Eva flinched at the contact. Her jaw was aching from being clenched so long.
“Back of the train,” he said, shoving her slightly.
She caught her balance just in time, stared at him desperately.
“What’s at the back of the train?”
“Quarantine,” he said coldly, thumbing the safety off his pistol.
