Soundtrack: TATU, “Nas nie dogoniat”/>
Location: Bulgaria – Golden Sands
Time: Summer 2004
Two Russian tourists, older women, had booked an excursion: Varna by Night. They paid the money and received their tickets. The meeting point was a suburban bus stop. A tour coach picking up tourists from the many hotels along the Black Sea coast could stop there without difficulty.
Everything was explained to the women in their native language—that is, Russian. They were most interested in the itinerary. They were to visit Aladzha Monastery and Varna, spend the evening tasting wines, and then enjoy a romantic night walk through the city.
The Bulgarian representative who sold the excursion to the grandmothers made sure three times that, first, they knew the departure day; second, the departure time; and third, the meeting point. The women nodded to show they understood, thanked him for his concern, and then, on the day of departure, at the meeting time, they vanished without a trace.
The tour guide was the first to raise the alarm. After waiting at the meeting point for half an hour, he called the representative to explain that the participants booked for the excursion were missing. A search began. An immediate investigation showed that both women had been seen leaving the hotel an hour earlier—half an hour before the meeting. A passer-by had seen the grandmothers waiting at the bus stop. So they returned to the place where the women had disappeared. There, the trail went cold. Everyone helplessly spread their hands. There was no sign or sound of the tourists. The coach had to leave to carry out the itinerary. And the tourists’ mysterious disappearance continued to torment the representative.
As he sat alone at the bus stop, wondering where on earth those infernal women had gone, a suburban bus suddenly arrived and… enlightenment came to him on its own. For completely inexplicable reasons, the tourists must have boarded a regular bus!
The representative immediately summoned his company van with his assistant, the young Zhorko, and ordered a pursuit. They had to get off somewhere. The problem was that five bus lines stopped at the place where they had disappeared. Only a short stretch of their routes was shared. As they approached Varna, they branched off in different directions.
Zhorko, who had graduated from a prestigious university, had no idea that his job would involve chasing tourists. He carried out his mission with the dignity of a man prepared for higher purposes. Always elegant, with the bearing of a young priest, innocent, avoiding strong liquor, a nonsmoker, and fluent in four foreign languages, he sped the van along the expressway in pursuit of the unruly old ladies.
The representative stayed at the hotel in case they suddenly returned by bus. The tour guide continued the sightseeing, but was prepared to receive the two unwilling fugitives at any moment.
Stop by stop, Zhorko checked whether the two lost tourists were tearing their hair out, cursing the dishonest representative, or, God forbid, writing a complaint!
When the owner of the travel company called the representative from the head office in Sofia to ask about an important transfer of several tens of thousands of dollars that was supposed to arrive for the contracted hotel, the representative merely replied that he was currently coordinating the pursuit of two Russian tourists and had no time for foolishness. The astonished boss hung up and decided to contact Zhorko, the more level-headed assistant. Instead of the obliging “Good morning, Madam President,” however, she heard an ecstatic cry: “I’ve got them! So there you are, you devils!”
The boss hung up and, putting herself in the situation, called the representative back:
– Zhorko, good lad, he caught them – she reported. – I’ll wait for your explanation later.
The women were immediately taken from the bus depot, where their unauthorized excursion had ended, and brought to the proper coach so they could take part in the Varna by Night itinerary. After the wine tasting, the guide asked them why they had boarded a city bus. They answered honestly:
– We stood there, we stood there, then a bus pulled up, everyone got on, and we got on too.
Why? No one has yet discovered all the possibilities of the human mind. The functioning of the Brain of the Idiot of the Season is one of the mysteries of the universe.
Grażyna Hanaf