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Wednesday Morning:

After three beautiful sunny days the weather in Sofia starts to get cold and a bit grim.
I figure it’s gonna be warmer further south.

 
I try my luck thumbing beside the road for a while. It’s usually pretty hopeless in Europe, hitchhiking in service stations works better. But I haven’t got much experience hitching in Bulgaria yet, so I figure it’s worth a go.

For two hours cars zoom past me.
Hitchhiking in Europe is slow for me. I can see the fear and suspicion written on people’s faces as they glare at me through their windshields.

A white BMW pulls up on the shoulder. I’m not sure if the guy stopped for me but I jog over and wave at the driver through the window. He’s a well dressed dude in his forties. He’s talking on the phone but he glances up and makes some vague gesture at me that looks like a wave.
I open the door of the car and give him a friendly greeting.
The guy starts yelling at me. He flips open the glove compartment. His hand goes inside and comes out gripping a sleek black gun. He waves the gun in my face, yelling, spitting flecks of saliva at me.

 
Sometimes when I’m traveling in exotic places like Morocco or Thailand I have these moments I call ‘Tintin moments’.
In the Sahara with Bedouins and camels or riding a motorbike through crowded markets in Chiang Mai, I sometimes feel like I’m in one of my favorite graphic novels with Tintin, the intrepid boy reporter.

Standing beside the road with a gun in my face is a bit of a Tintin moment too. But not a good one. This is a moment from one of the darker, more political Tintin books, where the hero finds himself on the run behind the Iron Curtain. This is a dystopian Tintin moment.

 
I watch the white BMW roar away down the road.

Travel is full of new experiences. Now I know what the pointy end of a gun looks like.

There’s a service station not too far away.
I decide to hitch inside the service station for a while.

(Below: a dystopian Tintin moment. Tintin created by Herge.)

 
 

Wednesday Afternoon:

I settle myself in a sunny spot beside the service station doorway and get comfortable. I figure I’m gonna be here a while.

There are two friendly guys working the pumps. They come over and chat with me between customers. One of them, Martyn, speaks English pretty well. He is curious about Australia and my travels. He tells me that he and his colleague will help me get a ride by talking to the drivers they are serving. I thank him.

I have a six pack of beer in my bag. I give one to each of my new friends.

 
Hours pass. I talk to lots of people as they come past me to pay for their gas. Most of them tell me no, they aren’t going towards Greece. I feel like at least some of them are lying. This motorway is the main arterial to Thessaloniki. A lot of people I greet just ignore me completely. I’m usually not bothered by that but it happens so much in Europe compared to other places.
I start to laugh at them as a way to overcome my embarrassment at being ignored. Sometimes I make sarcastic comments.

“Hi. Are you going to Greece?”
Nose in the air. Silence.
“Thanks so much. Have a lovely day.”

“Hi. Are you going to Greece?”
Slight flicker of a glance in my direction.
“How’s your hearing? Ears work OK?”
Frowning silence. Faster walking pace.

“Any luck?” Martyn asks me.
“Not yet. I’ll get a ride though. Just a matter of time” I sound more confident than I feel.
Four weeks of European service stations has worn me down.
“Yes, of course. Don’t worry. I am asking them too” Martyn reassures me.

A woman with bleached hair gets out of a silver Mercedes. Her husband gives a curt order to Martyn, who stoically fills the Merc’s tank.
The blonde woman marches towards the service station doorway.
I smile at her and ask “Are you going to Greece?”
“Yes” she says, slightly surprised but smiling broadly.
“Awesome! Can you give me a lift?” I ask.
Her smile fades.
“Oh. No. We… we have no space. Sorry.” She hurries into the cafe.
Martyn finishes fueling the Mercedes. The blonde woman and her husband glide out of the service station in their immaculate, half empty saloon. I smile and wave. She doesn’t meet my eye.
“They’re rich” Martyn informs me. “They don’t help nobody.”

 
A black SUV pulls up at the pumps. There are three guys in the car, all talking and laughing.
A guy in his thirties slides out of the driver’s seat. He’s wearing black sneakers, black cargo pants and a black baseball cap. On his t-shirt is printed a huge Nazi Iron Eagle motif, complete with Swastika.
He walks towards me where I’m standing beside the doorway.

Thousands of images and words are erupting in my mind. The face of Hitler. The faces of emaciated corpses. The face of my grandfather who survived years as a slave in a Nazi factory. All the words in my mind are pressing forward to be spoken. All the outrage I feel about the cruelty that symbol represents wants to be expressed. The front of my brain fumbles for the right reaction to this moment.
This is a moment of truth. This is what I train for. This is what I do.

As he gets close to me the guy in the Nazi shirt glances my way and our eyes meet.
In a calm, level voice, I ask him “are you a Nazi?”
His eyes drop, and I notice his shoulders rise just a little.
“Are you a Nazi?” I ask him again, making the words as clear and steady as the rage in my throat will allow.
He looks at me sideways as he passes me, a smirk twisting his lower lip. He mutters something I don’t understand, but the tone of his voice is defiant, like a guilty child caught pulling his sister’s hair.
The front of my brain loses it’s grip on my emotions.
“What the fuck?” I yell at his back as he hurries through the service station doorway.
Martin looks up, startled, from where he is fueling the Nazi’s SUV.
“These guys are fucking Nazis” I explain, exasperated, stabbing my finger at the SUV.
I look around to see if anyone else has noticed the mammoth in the room. There are two men sitting at a cafe table drinking coffee. They look away. The Nazi is at the clerk’s counter swiping his credit card.

The other men in the SUV are not laughing now. They are staring at me with faces that I know my grandfather saw in Poland in his youth; equal measures scorn, malevolence and – something else. Something else, that looks almost like lust. A hunger for violence. A desire to dominate.

Anger sweeps into me like a cold wave and I tremble with it’s power, even as my heart races and my jaw tightens.

The Nazi puts his credit card away and walks back towards the SUV. He avoids my eyes. He walks fast, keeping his head down, and I watch him. I watch him. I watch him walk past me and back to the SUV focusing all my scorn and loathing into that narrow eyed stare.

He starts the car and the Nazis start to roll forward.
All three of them eyeball me now. Chins jutted, lips curled. Big men in their big car.
I shake my head slowly. I don’t know what else to do.
The driver yells something at me in Bulgarian.
I make a sweeping gesture with my hands, indicating my whole body, from head to foot. In that moment I’m not even sure what it means. It could have meant many things.
Here I am. This is what you hate. Look at me. I oppose you. I don’t fear you. Kiss my arse.

I spit on the ground so hard that saliva and mucus spray onto the ground all around me. Everyone knows what that means.

The Nazis rev their engine and drive away, middle fingers raised. Sieg Heil.

 
Martyn offers me a cigarette. I thank him and we duck around the corner to smoke, out of sight of the driveway.

“Please” Martyn says “don’t make some trouble here. My boss will make some problems for us.”
“I’m sorry man. I’m really sorry. I was just… shocked. I never saw a neo-nazi like that before. I don’t want to make a problem for you, but it made me so angry.”
“I understand” Martyn says. “In Australia this is not normal to see?” he asks me.
“We have Nazis in Australia, for sure, but… they don’t advertise I guess. They certainly don’t go around wearing swastika shirts. Not that I’ve seen, anyway. My family is half Polish, so Nazis are… kind of a sore point with me, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes” Martyn agrees “I know. They make many people very angry.”
“I just can hardly believe that these arseholes are still around in Europe. We have this comfortable delusion in Australia that all the Nazis are dead.”
Martyn takes a drag on his cigarette and nods.
“Things are very different here to Australia I think. We have different problems here.”
“Yeah. For sure” I agree.
“The guys you saw now are not like the Nazis before. They do not want to kill people” Martyn says. “The police do not protect us, so the Nazis must be here. We need them, I think, for the Gypsies.”