I was sitting in a restaurant that serves Bosnian national cuisine, where I had gone at 4pm to eat a late lunch and to do some writing. It was barely 9 o’clock and, after having filled ten pages and consumed both lunch and dinner, I was beginning to think of heading back, and of whether a stop at a café en route should be in order, and of what a quiet and relaxing evening it was proving.
A small boy, with pale skin, yellow hair, and a light-blue tracksuit that matched his eyes, came into the restaurant and held out his hand asking for money. I shook my head no; I only had 12 marks, and needed them to pay for my meals on Sunday, since exchange offices were closed and withdrawing cash from an ATM cost an extra fee. It would already be difficult to budget. I edged my wallet closer to me and rested my fingers on it. The boy, who was about ten years old, made a circuit of the restaurant. There were only three other occupied tables, one by a man who was slurping soup, one by two older men who were reading newspapers over dinner, and one by a couple on a date. (I wrote something in my notebook about how here, Gypsy children were not the only beggars.) The boy went to the young couple seated at the far end of the restaurant, and opened his eyes very wide; the woman gazed at the man, who smiled at the boy and pulled out his wallet and gave him a coin. (I wrote something about how the little beggars could usually count on the men who wanted to impress their dates with their benevolence, and suspected that the children were masters of sizing up such situations.) The boy headed toward the door. I continued writing, until I noticed a bit of sky-blue hovering at my elbow and had a prickling in my neck and looked up. There was a man beside the boy, wearing black, with close-shaved hair. Something was not right.
What happened next seemed even at the time to be in slow motion. A hand grabbed my wallet from under my fingers at the same time that I turned to look at the boy. The man froze for a split second, caught in the act, and then darted for the door. I leapt up from my chair and dove after him. One of my sandals came off in the restaurant, the other in the street. The man came to a corner and stopped. He looked back and saw that I was still coming, looked completely shocked, and kept running, and I sprinted behind, my toes springing from each stone.
We were in the center of the city. There were a lot of people. They saw him running. But they stared at me. And did nothing.
I could see him and could see that the gap between us was narrowing and I knew exactly how I would bring him down because I could already see that I could take him and my fingers itched to grab his shoulders and flip him and just recalling it sends adrenaline coursing through me.
He turned away from the main street down a street by the mosque and I followed, closer and closer, and then he turned down a dark alley where no one else was.
And at the same time that my brain knew which part of his back to apply leverage to it and I craved it… I was wondering why I was chasing him, since there was not much money and nothing irreplaceable in the wallet, and decided that it must be because the keys to my apartment were in it, but was already speculating that there must be a spare set, and although I put on a burst of speed, I stopped when he went down the alley because it would have been nothing short of stupid to follow him there.
I walked back down the side street and as I came to the intersection with the main street, some Gypsies who were selling DVDs from the top of a cardboard box stopped me and started speaking Bosnian to me and I shook my head and that was when they tried German. I do not know how some Gypsies in the center of Zenica spoke fluent German; there was a man and his wife and a child, and the adults were hardly taller than my shoulder, but they asked if I had caught him, did I get my wallet back, and when I said, ‘Nein,’ they began tsk-ing and saying how bad that man was and it would be alright, I shouldn’t worry about not having caught him, because they knew who he was and where he lived. The Gypsy man said something about how the man had been in prison and/or was a drug addict and/or I don’t know what else because my brain was distracted and not entirely registering the words, but he shook my hand and introduced himself and said that his wife would call the police, and the Gypsy woman, small-boned with an ankle-length skirt with a fanny-pack around her waist, where they kept the money from sales, unzipped the pack and pulled out a cell phone and started asking passers-by for the number of the police.
At this point, I had stopped caring about the wallet and was just a fascinated observer. It was my impression that Gypsies usually held no truck with police, avoiding them when possible, just as they did not really try to have anything to do with non-Roma, but these two people were extraordinarily concerned for me and I was amazed that they, unlike anyone else who had been on the street and witnessed the chase, took the initiative to try to set things right. And it was equally impressive to see that even when the Gypsy woman was trying to help me and asking people for the phone number of the police, most of them ignored her entirely and continued walking past, which caused some frustration for her. Finally one man barely broke stride to call back a number, over his shoulder, which she dialed, and spoke.
While we waited for the police to come, I retraced my steps along the street, was concerned that I did not see my shoe anywhere, wondered why in the world someone would have stolen one sandal from the street in such a short period of time, but once I got back to the restaurant I saw that someone had gone out and retrieved it, and the young man who had given the boy a coin was standing in the door waiting for me and also did not speak English, but one of the newspaper-brandishing men did, and they all asked if I had caught the man and if I had gotten my wallet, and the man said that it was alright that I had not because the young man knew the name of one of them, and he knew who they were (‘It’s a small town,’ he said), and they were calling the police. I tried to explain that the Gypsies had also called the police and that I needed to go back to them to talk with the police there and then come back. At the word ‘Gypsies’ he looked very skeptical, but I nonetheless went back to that corner. I saw the young boy in the blue tracksuit ahead of me. The Gypsy woman saw that I saw him and caught my eye and put her finger to her lips and motioned me to come over to their side of the corner quickly, and once I was there, she and her husband indicated that I should stand, not in the center of the street with them but at the side with the husband, to not raise the boy’s suspicions or make him think that I recognized him. (Although, really, if he didn’t want to be recognized he should hardly have been wearing such conspicuous clothes – then again, perhaps ten-year-olds don’t think of such things.) The Gypsy man explained this to me in German and asked me what was in the wallet, had I lost my identification, and looked as relieved as I was to know that my passport had not been in the wallet. The policemen came surprisingly quickly considering all of the extenuating circumstances (it being the Balkans; the call being made by Gypsies). Neither spoke English or German. The Gypsy man began translating between German and Bosnian, and then both of the Gypsies started talking rapidly in Bosnian about what had happened and what they had seen and who had done it. I had to go back to the restaurant to speak with yet another policeman, and at the restaurant the young man and the older one both spoke with the policeman about what they had seen and who it was. The older one stayed to translate. The policeman asked what had been in my wallet. He seemed baffled that I had chased the thief for twelve marks, a lot of other people’s business cards, my state and university identification cards, my Bank of America ATM card, and my keys. Upon hearing that my keys had been taken, the older man was very concerned and asked what I would do, would I be able to get into my accommodation, would I have a place to stay. The policeman asked if I wanted him to fill out a report; the older man explained that in these countries, if someone goes to the authorities and says that their identification was stolen and they need a replacement, they have to have an official report of it being stolen. The policeman and the older man both said that it was likely that they would recover the wallet, reiterating the size of the town and the known identity of the thief. I was and remain highly dubious, suspecting that they only said that because I was a foreigner since, really, he would probably have taken the 10 mark bill and maybe the coins (and, if he found it sandwiched between the business cards, my BoA card) and tossed the wallet away, but it was an interesting brush with law enforcement nonetheless.
After the policeman left, I called one of my colleagues and he drove to meet me outside of the office with his girlfriend and another of our colleagues. He bought thirty minutes of internet time so that I could contact my family and check up on the BoA regulations for freezing an account, just in case, and then withdrew 20 marks from his bank account for me to use today, and also made a detour to show me where one of the town’s seven Catholic churches was. They had been worried to get my call and asked several times what exactly had happened. ‘I am from the Balkans and nothing like this has ever happened to me,’ said one. (No wonder, since they probably sensed that I was a foreigner and thought to take advantage of that.) ‘I would expect something like that to happen in Skopje, but not here.’ (This is also true, Skopje feels somehow more of a place where this would happen, for reasons I can’t entirely pinpoint.) My parents called later that night, and I got to speak with my family for the first time in two months
Before meeting my colleagues, I had gone back to thank the Gypsies profusely. They seemed quite startled that I had even thought to do so. I am still very surprised by their willingness to help me – perhaps as members of a group that has been marginalized so often, they felt some sympathy for my situation, or perhaps because the young blond boy had been begging, as so many Gypsy children do, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the thieves (as mentioned above, one of the things that had struck me about the boy was that he was not Roma, and I have not seen anyone asking for money in that way who is not Roma; the thief was also not Roma). I do not know. I do know that I would almost gladly have had twelve marks stolen in order to witness briefly that moment of marginalization when everyone walked by, ignoring the requests for the number of the police. I would actually like to see them again and to talk with them and to try to understand why it was that they made such an effort to help me.
Finally, I am so glad that I had not yet folded up my ten pages of journaling and placed them inside the wallet, where I typically carry my loose pages of writing, and that I had no such writing in it; I would have cared much more about those, because unlike everything else, they are irreplaceable. After hearing my story, one of my colleagues commented that the thief must have been taken aback and scared to see me running after him, because women do not run after men here. Although I generally strive for cultural awareness and try to blend in wherever I am, I was not about to let some person just pick up my wallet and leave and not do anything about it. He must have been so sure that he was getting a lot of money, or something valuable, because I was chasing him. I have to laugh at the effort he went to for nothing, and imagining his face once he got down the alley and opened it up and realized it.
One final note on why I am able to be so calm about all of this: I always try to not carry any cash or anything irreplaceable on me, both home and away, and especially while traveling, I spread out my cash – carrying just a little in my wallet, and spreading the rest through my bags and pockets, very rarely shoes, and the most important things next to my skin – i.e. while on any of my train trips, my passport has gone in one part of my bodice and the bulk of my money and my credit card in the other. When I am in a town, if I have any reason to mistrust my accommodation, I also carry those items on me; otherwise, the passport stays well-hidden in a bag. One person I met, who coordinated study abroad programs, advised us to ‘keep it in your pants’ – he had a sort of slim pack that fastened around his hips and fit under his waistband. For years, I was extremely hesitant to use wallets at all because they seemed to me to encourage the concentration of all of one’s important cards and much of one’s money; this was even before hearing about friends who experienced thefts of their wallets. It is easier to travel confidently, and also to be relatively trusting of people one meets, if one has already precluded the possibility of major theft and the abuse of any trust. Whether or not you ‘keep it in your pants’, it is a good idea to not keep it in your wallet if it is not something that you are prepared to lose.
A small boy, with pale skin, yellow hair, and a light-blue tracksuit that matched his eyes, came into the restaurant and held out his hand asking for money. I shook my head no; I only had 12 marks, and needed them to pay for my meals on Sunday, since exchange offices were closed and withdrawing cash from an ATM cost an extra fee. It would already be difficult to budget. I edged my wallet closer to me and rested my fingers on it. The boy, who was about ten years old, made a circuit of the restaurant. There were only three other occupied tables, one by a man who was slurping soup, one by two older men who were reading newspapers over dinner, and one by a couple on a date. (I wrote something in my notebook about how here, Gypsy children were not the only beggars.) The boy went to the young couple seated at the far end of the restaurant, and opened his eyes very wide; the woman gazed at the man, who smiled at the boy and pulled out his wallet and gave him a coin. (I wrote something about how the little beggars could usually count on the men who wanted to impress their dates with their benevolence, and suspected that the children were masters of sizing up such situations.) The boy headed toward the door. I continued writing, until I noticed a bit of sky-blue hovering at my elbow and had a prickling in my neck and looked up. There was a man beside the boy, wearing black, with close-shaved hair. Something was not right.
What happened next seemed even at the time to be in slow motion. A hand grabbed my wallet from under my fingers at the same time that I turned to look at the boy. The man froze for a split second, caught in the act, and then darted for the door. I leapt up from my chair and dove after him. One of my sandals came off in the restaurant, the other in the street. The man came to a corner and stopped. He looked back and saw that I was still coming, looked completely shocked, and kept running, and I sprinted behind, my toes springing from each stone.
We were in the center of the city. There were a lot of people. They saw him running. But they stared at me. And did nothing.
I could see him and could see that the gap between us was narrowing and I knew exactly how I would bring him down because I could already see that I could take him and my fingers itched to grab his shoulders and flip him and just recalling it sends adrenaline coursing through me.
He turned away from the main street down a street by the mosque and I followed, closer and closer, and then he turned down a dark alley where no one else was.
And at the same time that my brain knew which part of his back to apply leverage to it and I craved it… I was wondering why I was chasing him, since there was not much money and nothing irreplaceable in the wallet, and decided that it must be because the keys to my apartment were in it, but was already speculating that there must be a spare set, and although I put on a burst of speed, I stopped when he went down the alley because it would have been nothing short of stupid to follow him there.
I walked back down the side street and as I came to the intersection with the main street, some Gypsies who were selling DVDs from the top of a cardboard box stopped me and started speaking Bosnian to me and I shook my head and that was when they tried German. I do not know how some Gypsies in the center of Zenica spoke fluent German; there was a man and his wife and a child, and the adults were hardly taller than my shoulder, but they asked if I had caught him, did I get my wallet back, and when I said, ‘Nein,’ they began tsk-ing and saying how bad that man was and it would be alright, I shouldn’t worry about not having caught him, because they knew who he was and where he lived. The Gypsy man said something about how the man had been in prison and/or was a drug addict and/or I don’t know what else because my brain was distracted and not entirely registering the words, but he shook my hand and introduced himself and said that his wife would call the police, and the Gypsy woman, small-boned with an ankle-length skirt with a fanny-pack around her waist, where they kept the money from sales, unzipped the pack and pulled out a cell phone and started asking passers-by for the number of the police.
At this point, I had stopped caring about the wallet and was just a fascinated observer. It was my impression that Gypsies usually held no truck with police, avoiding them when possible, just as they did not really try to have anything to do with non-Roma, but these two people were extraordinarily concerned for me and I was amazed that they, unlike anyone else who had been on the street and witnessed the chase, took the initiative to try to set things right. And it was equally impressive to see that even when the Gypsy woman was trying to help me and asking people for the phone number of the police, most of them ignored her entirely and continued walking past, which caused some frustration for her. Finally one man barely broke stride to call back a number, over his shoulder, which she dialed, and spoke.
While we waited for the police to come, I retraced my steps along the street, was concerned that I did not see my shoe anywhere, wondered why in the world someone would have stolen one sandal from the street in such a short period of time, but once I got back to the restaurant I saw that someone had gone out and retrieved it, and the young man who had given the boy a coin was standing in the door waiting for me and also did not speak English, but one of the newspaper-brandishing men did, and they all asked if I had caught the man and if I had gotten my wallet, and the man said that it was alright that I had not because the young man knew the name of one of them, and he knew who they were (‘It’s a small town,’ he said), and they were calling the police. I tried to explain that the Gypsies had also called the police and that I needed to go back to them to talk with the police there and then come back. At the word ‘Gypsies’ he looked very skeptical, but I nonetheless went back to that corner. I saw the young boy in the blue tracksuit ahead of me. The Gypsy woman saw that I saw him and caught my eye and put her finger to her lips and motioned me to come over to their side of the corner quickly, and once I was there, she and her husband indicated that I should stand, not in the center of the street with them but at the side with the husband, to not raise the boy’s suspicions or make him think that I recognized him. (Although, really, if he didn’t want to be recognized he should hardly have been wearing such conspicuous clothes – then again, perhaps ten-year-olds don’t think of such things.) The Gypsy man explained this to me in German and asked me what was in the wallet, had I lost my identification, and looked as relieved as I was to know that my passport had not been in the wallet. The policemen came surprisingly quickly considering all of the extenuating circumstances (it being the Balkans; the call being made by Gypsies). Neither spoke English or German. The Gypsy man began translating between German and Bosnian, and then both of the Gypsies started talking rapidly in Bosnian about what had happened and what they had seen and who had done it. I had to go back to the restaurant to speak with yet another policeman, and at the restaurant the young man and the older one both spoke with the policeman about what they had seen and who it was. The older one stayed to translate. The policeman asked what had been in my wallet. He seemed baffled that I had chased the thief for twelve marks, a lot of other people’s business cards, my state and university identification cards, my Bank of America ATM card, and my keys. Upon hearing that my keys had been taken, the older man was very concerned and asked what I would do, would I be able to get into my accommodation, would I have a place to stay. The policeman asked if I wanted him to fill out a report; the older man explained that in these countries, if someone goes to the authorities and says that their identification was stolen and they need a replacement, they have to have an official report of it being stolen. The policeman and the older man both said that it was likely that they would recover the wallet, reiterating the size of the town and the known identity of the thief. I was and remain highly dubious, suspecting that they only said that because I was a foreigner since, really, he would probably have taken the 10 mark bill and maybe the coins (and, if he found it sandwiched between the business cards, my BoA card) and tossed the wallet away, but it was an interesting brush with law enforcement nonetheless.
After the policeman left, I called one of my colleagues and he drove to meet me outside of the office with his girlfriend and another of our colleagues. He bought thirty minutes of internet time so that I could contact my family and check up on the BoA regulations for freezing an account, just in case, and then withdrew 20 marks from his bank account for me to use today, and also made a detour to show me where one of the town’s seven Catholic churches was. They had been worried to get my call and asked several times what exactly had happened. ‘I am from the Balkans and nothing like this has ever happened to me,’ said one. (No wonder, since they probably sensed that I was a foreigner and thought to take advantage of that.) ‘I would expect something like that to happen in Skopje, but not here.’ (This is also true, Skopje feels somehow more of a place where this would happen, for reasons I can’t entirely pinpoint.) My parents called later that night, and I got to speak with my family for the first time in two months
Before meeting my colleagues, I had gone back to thank the Gypsies profusely. They seemed quite startled that I had even thought to do so. I am still very surprised by their willingness to help me – perhaps as members of a group that has been marginalized so often, they felt some sympathy for my situation, or perhaps because the young blond boy had been begging, as so many Gypsy children do, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the thieves (as mentioned above, one of the things that had struck me about the boy was that he was not Roma, and I have not seen anyone asking for money in that way who is not Roma; the thief was also not Roma). I do not know. I do know that I would almost gladly have had twelve marks stolen in order to witness briefly that moment of marginalization when everyone walked by, ignoring the requests for the number of the police. I would actually like to see them again and to talk with them and to try to understand why it was that they made such an effort to help me.
Finally, I am so glad that I had not yet folded up my ten pages of journaling and placed them inside the wallet, where I typically carry my loose pages of writing, and that I had no such writing in it; I would have cared much more about those, because unlike everything else, they are irreplaceable. After hearing my story, one of my colleagues commented that the thief must have been taken aback and scared to see me running after him, because women do not run after men here. Although I generally strive for cultural awareness and try to blend in wherever I am, I was not about to let some person just pick up my wallet and leave and not do anything about it. He must have been so sure that he was getting a lot of money, or something valuable, because I was chasing him. I have to laugh at the effort he went to for nothing, and imagining his face once he got down the alley and opened it up and realized it.
One final note on why I am able to be so calm about all of this: I always try to not carry any cash or anything irreplaceable on me, both home and away, and especially while traveling, I spread out my cash – carrying just a little in my wallet, and spreading the rest through my bags and pockets, very rarely shoes, and the most important things next to my skin – i.e. while on any of my train trips, my passport has gone in one part of my bodice and the bulk of my money and my credit card in the other. When I am in a town, if I have any reason to mistrust my accommodation, I also carry those items on me; otherwise, the passport stays well-hidden in a bag. One person I met, who coordinated study abroad programs, advised us to ‘keep it in your pants’ – he had a sort of slim pack that fastened around his hips and fit under his waistband. For years, I was extremely hesitant to use wallets at all because they seemed to me to encourage the concentration of all of one’s important cards and much of one’s money; this was even before hearing about friends who experienced thefts of their wallets. It is easier to travel confidently, and also to be relatively trusting of people one meets, if one has already precluded the possibility of major theft and the abuse of any trust. Whether or not you ‘keep it in your pants’, it is a good idea to not keep it in your wallet if it is not something that you are prepared to lose.
2 comments:
Bridget the first part of this read like you were some sort of superhero. I approve. Although I am sorry to hear that your wallet was stolen.
props on the chase and on your account of it.
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