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Broadside: Riding with ‘Mr Gray’ in the Balkans

The perils of planning to see the sun set an hour before it actually sets includes missing the event altogether. Psh and I hurtled around bends up the narrow mountain road, dodging cars that were hurtling down. The Montenegrin sky had acquired a sepia tone.

A road sign said 30 minutes to Lovcen National Park.

“Let’s hope that’s for hikers,” said Psh, optimistically. We hadn’t seen any hiker, not during the hour we had headed in the wrong direction or since.

An especially sharp turn with a broad lookout point made us slow down. That is when we saw a thumb, then the hand which belonged to an elderly man, probably in his 60s. He was an especially gray figure, dressed in gray trousers, gray shirt, with gray hair and gray eyebrows to match. Only his bag was black and he held it close to his body.

Normally, Psh and I, make judgment calls when we come across hitchhikers. The judgment depends on the place we are in and how well we know the region. If we are foreigners ourselves, especially prone to getting so lost in an area that even Google Maps has a hard time finding us, our verdict is to show mercy to the hitchhiker by ignoring them.

This man was elderly and, besides, he was walking where we had seen no one else walk. It would be dark soon and even if he ran, he wouldn’t make it past the sparse forest before nightfall. All the other cars we had come across had only been hurtling down the mountain.

We seemed to be the only ones foolish enough to head uphill at this hour. The road signs had confirmed that we were heading to the Park. It was the only possible destination. Optimistic that he probably wanted a ride to somewhere en route, we stopped the car.

Mr Gray stepped in, shoved our bags and empty yogurt cups further down the passenger seat.

“Zdravo,” he said.

“Zdravo,” we replied in greeting. All of what he said next was lost in the space between us. So began the business of trying to find a mutual language to converse in. Something that would allow him to communicate and exchange the destinations we each had in mind. This particular transaction was more complicated than we had imagined.

Sitting in a car means everyone is facing forward, making it quite a challenge to draw conclusions based on body language or sweeping gestures. Car video games would do well to include hitchhikers and language barriers to increase difficulty levels. Turn around as frequently as we did to see if we could make sense of what he was trying to say, Mr Gray, we quickly learned, was intent on clutching his black bag.

“English?” we said, hopeful.

“No English, thank you,” said Mr Gray with a sudden British accent.

Psh and I ran down the list of language we thought he might know and we were familiar, or vaguely familiar, with.

“Français?”

“Umpitipee,” said Mr Gray and smiled, “Ca va?”

Pleased, we said, “Oui, ca va, et vous. Ou vous voulez venir?”

The blank look on Mr Gray’s face told us that he had exhausted his French. It was back to Step One.

“Italiano?” he asked.

“Si, si,” I replied, hopeful, even though my vocabulary was limited to what you find in guidebooks, restaurant menus and a few extra words from Hollywood mafia movies.

“Oh, but no Italiano,” said Mr Gray and sighed as if immensely sad.

“Espagnol?” asked Psh, hopeful.

Psh had been teaching himself Spanish from Spanish for Dummies book. A Spanish friend, whom Psh had tried out his Spanish on, glimpsed through the book and informed Psh that it was Mexican Spanish. The pronunciations bewildered a Spanish from Spain. Psh’s Spanish pronunciations were bewildering enough and in that department, he was quite capable already. Psh was nothing if not persevering, however. Anytime, he met an unsuspecting foreigner with a remote possibility of Spanish, he sprang for the opportunity to practice.


“Zdravo,” we replied in greeting. All of what he said next was lost in the space between us. So began the business of trying to find a mutual language to converse in. 


“No Espagnol,” said Mr Gray.

We had run out of languages in our language list. Mr Gray had run out of words that were comprehensible to us and embarked on incomprehensible ones. We still didn’t know where he wanted to go. What if we missed a turn and didn’t understand each other?

“Lovcen National Park,” we said.

“Lovcen,” said Mr Gray and nodded gravely.

All of us looked out of our respective windows.

“Voda,” said Mr Gray.

“Ruski?” said Psh, in triumph.

“Da, da, da!,” said Mr Gray.

I stayed out of the conversation as my mastery of Russian was limited to a nursery rhyme about farming potatoes.

“Voda,” said Mr Gray again.

“What does he want,” I asked.

“Voda means water,” said Psh.

I handed my bottle of water to Mr Gray. He uncorked the lid and smelled it.

“Niet, niet, artisanal voda,” pronounced Mr Gray, disapprovingly.

“I don’t get it,” I said, “I think he wants vodka.”

Mr Gray pulled out a bottle from his black bag and shook its emptiness at us.

“Artisanal voda,” he said.

Psh and Mr Gray launched into another conversation in Russian, punctuated with many umms and uhhs and Nepanimayus.

“Where does he want to go?” I asked.

“To a restaurant in Lovcen to get artisanal water,” said Psh.

“That’s a long way off for water. What’s Nepanimayu?” I asked, since the phrase had been lobbed back and forth several times.

“I don’t understand,” said Psh.

“No, what does it mean?”

“It means I don’t understand in Russian,” said Psh.

Later, Psh explained that his own Russian was rusty from years of disuse and Mr Gray’s vocabulary so heavily accented that their exchanges furthered more misunderstanding than mutual comprehension. We stopped at the Park’s gate to pay the admission fee, asked if the security guard spoke English. The guard laughed when he saw Mr Gray and said, yes, he just wants to go to the restaurant in the park. The first one on the right.

Were we giving a ride to the town alcoholic to his local watering hole?

At the restaurant, Mr Gray said Thank you in English and scuttled off sentences in Russian before scuttling off himself. The only thing I could glean was that he was grateful for the ride. A couple of Nepanimayus later, Psh translated for me. Mr Gray wanted us to stop and check if he was there on our way back, he may need a ride.

Above us, the sky had turned a deep red. We would make it to the hilltop just in time to miss the sun set.

(This article is the second chapter of a series. Read the first chapter here. The writer is based in France and can be reached at [email protected].)

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Image credit

Hernán Piñera/Flickr

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