No going back.
Not knowing where a taxi stand was, I trudged along aimlessly for twenty minutes or more until finally I managed to flag down a taxi on the street. “Centraal Station,” I told the Turkish cab driver.
But when he left me off in front, after a drive through haunted gray streets like old newsreel footage, I thought for a moment he’d taken me to the wrong place since the building from the front looked more like a museum: red-brick fantasia of gables and towers, bristling Dutch Victoriana. In I wandered, amidst holiday crowds, doing my best to look as if I belonged and ignoring the police who seemed to be standing around nearly everywhere I looked and feeling bewildered and uneasy as the great democratic world swept and surged around me once more: grandparents, students, weary young-marrieds and little kids dragging backpacks; shopping bags and Starbucks cups, rattle of suitcase wheels, teenagers collecting signatures for Greenpeace, back in the hum of human things. There was an afternoon train to Paris but I wanted the latest one they had.
The lines were endless, all the way back to the news kiosk. “This evening?” said the clerk when I finally got to the window: a broad, fair, middle aged woman, pillowy at the bosom and impersonally genial like a procuress in a second rate genre painting.
“That’s right,” I said, hoping I didn’t quite look as sick as I felt.
“How many?” she said, hardly looking at me.
“Just one.”
“Certainly. Passport please.”
“Just a—” voice husky with illness, patting myself down; I’d hoped they wouldn’t ask—“ah. Sorry, I don’t have it on me, it’s in the safe back at the hotel—but—” producing my New York State ID, my credit cards, my Social Security card, pushing them through the window. “Here you go.”
“You require a passport to travel.”
“Oh, sure.” Doing my best to sound reasonable, knowledgeable. “But I’m not leaving till tonight. See—?” indicating the empty floor at my feet: no luggage. “I’m seeing my girlfriend off, and since I’m here I thought I’d go ahead and get in line and buy the ticket if that’s all right.”
“Well—” the clerk glanced at her screen—“you have plenty of time. I’d suggest you wait and purchase your ticket when you return this evening.”
“Yes—” pinching my nose, so I wouldn’t sneeze—“but I’d like to purchase it now.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“Please. It’d be a huge help. I’ve been standing here for forty-five minutes and I don’t know what the lines will be like tonight.” From Pippa—who had gone all over Europe by rail—I was fairly sure I remembered hearing they didn’t check passports for the train. “All I want is to buy it now so I have time to run all my errands before I come back this evening.”
The clerk looked hard at my face. Then she picked up the ID and looked at the picture, then again at me.
“Look,” I said, when she hesitated, or seemed to hesitate: “You can see it’s me. You have my name, my Social Security card—here,” I said, reaching in my pocket for pen and paper. “Let me duplicate the signature for you.”
She compared the two, side by side. Again she looked at me, and the card—and then, all at once, seemed to make up her mind. “I can’t accept this documentation.” Pushing my cards back to me through the window.
“Why not?”
The line behind me was growing.
“Why?” I repeated. “It’s perfectly legitimate. It’s what I use in lieu of passport to fly in the U.S. The signatures match,” I said, when she didn’t answer, “can’t you see?”
“Sorry.”
“You mean—” I could hear the desperation in my voice; she was meeting my gaze aggressively, as if defying me to argue. “You’re telling me I’ve got to come all the way back here tonight and stand in line all over again?”
“Sorry, sir. Can’t help you. Next,” said the clerk, looking over my shoulder at the next passenger.
As I was walking away—pushing and bumping my way through crowds—someone said behind me: “Hey. Hey, mate?”
At first, disoriented from the ticket window, I thought I was hallucinating the voice. But when, uneasily, I turned, I saw a ferret-faced teenager with pink-rimmed eyes and a shaved head, bouncing up and down on the toes of his gigantic sneakers. From his darting side-to-side glance I thought he was going to offer to sell me a passport but instead he leaned forward and said: “Don’t try it.”
“What?” I said uncertainly, glancing up at the policewoman standing about five feet behind him.
“Listen, mate. Back