Rostov-On-Don/4

Morning was breaking as we started to get our luggage’s together. The train had pulled in to the main railway station of the city of Rostov-On-Don and people had already started to disembark from the train.
The Portuguese speaking group of students were in front of us as we all made our way onto the corridor and towards the exit. I managed to catch a glimpse of the lovely girl and had overheard somebody call her by the name “Adelaide”.

Adelaide; I had never heard of that name before but the sound of it to my ears was so melodious and befitting of her. It was as befitting as a garment that has been painstakingly chosen and made just for her.

Our group had started to congregate at one corner of the railway hall where we were to wait for Alexei Segeivitch who had gone to sort out the bus that was to take us to our hostels. And as I struggled with my luggage I had purposely brushed passed her in the crowded chaos of that cold hall and she had turned and looked at me. And in that fleeting moment, as the butterflies started flying about in my abdomen, our eyes had connected. But she had looked past me as if I didn’t yet exist in her world.

I was now looking at her standing just several metres away with the rest of her group as she engrossed herself in a conversation with one of the girls. I was hearing them, just above the noise in the hall, chattering away in Portuguese. And then I noticed for the first time that standing not too far away from her was that mixed-race guy; the same guy she had sat next to in that beryozka on our very first night in Moscow. Now this is definitely not good at all. I thought as I watched to see if I could notice anything in their interaction, which would suggest that something was going on between them. But I could see nothing as he was busy talking with somebody else in their group.

I looked around the hall; This one was a lot smaller than that of the Kursky train station in Moscow. And it seemed almost unable to accommodate the swarming crowd that was thronging around as you could see a lot of people standing just in front of the entrance to the hall. The noise here was unbearable; with the sound of people shouting and talking all at the same time, in that language that was sounding so hard to the ears. The population here… though still predominantly Russian…seemed to comprise a lot of nationalities with darker Southern European looks and also a lot with mild Oriental features, like the two girls whom we had met in the canteen the previous evening.

People here looked a lot less affluent than those in Moscow; in Moscow the younger population had worn clothes, which looked like they had come from the Western countries. Here the clothes came across slightly tackier…slightly shabbier…giving an impression of things mass produced in factories where the equipments didn’t quite work. And most of the people seemed to be carrying briefcases.“I wonder why everybody seems to be carrying a briefcase” I said.
“ They call them modjet be'it bags here!” Eddy said. “Modjet be'it are the Russian words for maybe. My brother told me that people carry these sacks around with them everywhere they go, in case they run into one scarce commodity or the other. You see practically everything is rationed here and always in short supply.“ Eddy’s older brother was a student in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov where he was studying Medicine on scholarship. He had arrived the USSR a year earlier.

As we stood there waiting for Alexei Sergeivitch, one young man with a strong smell of stale alcohol on his breath had walked up to us and started whispering something in Russian to Eddy. When he realized that he was a bit taken aback by his uncouth approach and that he didn’t have the faintest idea of what he was on about he had pointed to the jean jacket that Eddy was wearing and tried to whisper something again “You sell me?...I have plenty man'ny?” I heard him say.

At that moment Alexei Sergeivitch started to walk towards us, and as the man saw him coming he hastened away.“I thought they said that buying and selling things are illegal in this country!” I said.
“Hm. Its illegal officially, but that’s the business people do here to survive” Eddy said. “My brother says there’s loads of money to be made buying things from the West and then selling to the Russians.”

One bus was to take all the groups of students that arrived from Moscow on that train to their various hostels. The groups comprised Nigerians, some Portuguese speaking students from Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau and also a few Ghanaians. As we made ourselves comfortable in the bus, I noticed that Adelaide was engrossed in a conversation with her fellow Portuguese speaking students at the back. But she was sitting next to that fat guy with the spectacles. And as I saw them sitting there together, something seemed to start hurting inside of me.