AK-47

It's been a while since I have been this close to a Kalashnikov. Yesterday while crossing into SCG (Serbian/Crna Gora) from Croatia I needed to exchange some US currency (which is falling in value faster than the hailstones I got nailed with yesterday in Belgrade) into Serbian Dinar. The Serbian border has always had a Wild West feel to it and even more so now, when they are in the middle of construction and you have no earthly idea which way you are supposed to go.

They have moved the insurance-exchange-banking-customs offices to one side in these little modular buildings. The first three exchanges/banks I stopped in told me to go to the next one (well, as far as I could understand since I don't actually speak Serbo-Croatian . . . but I can usually understand about 65% since it is halfway between Russian and Macedonian). Sooooo when I arrive at the door of the fourth exchange/bank, I started to enter, but there was a man there holding an AK-47 (it wasn't one of the new AK-74's) sorta half blocking the door. As I was out in the sun and he was inside, I did not realized that he was an officer of some type. It is very unusual for anyone other than a military officer to carry a submachine gun in public. Most police officers have pistols. And I asked, "may I exchange money?" and received no answer. My internal SYRE (save your rear end) radar was not flashing warning signals loud enough to slow me down . . . so I came inside and found the atmosphere rather tense.

When I spoke I gave myself away as a foreigner, and while my spoken words may have implied I was a Macedonian, my dress clearly identified me as a foreigner foreigner! That is a non-former-yugoslav. So the young man with the Kalashnikov was tense and worried. When the man holding the gun is worried, then generally I worry too. Once I was inside and at the window, everything suddenly made sense. There was a cash delivery being made and I essentially had crashed a private party. Until the man carrying the huge bag of money and the man with the AK-47 left the little room, I neither moved nor spoke. While I generally have all of the emotional sensitivity of a crocodile, my self-preservation instincts are top notch.

It was the weapon itself that I kept looking at though, and that made the young fellow holding it even more tense. What I decided that I would not tell him, was that while in Russia, I had heard many stories about Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov, the designer of the very submachine gun this young man was nervously caressing. My foreignness and abrupt entry, combined with interest in his weapon, not to mention who knows how much money being passed from the safe into a large leather bag handcuffed to his friend created an atmosphere that was edgy.

All I had really wanted to do initially was talk about the AK-47 (OK OK I wanted to hold it too) and exchange my meager $200. Now I would have been content to leave and go outside, but I was essentially afraid that the young fellow would perceive movement to be threatening. So I held still in body and I held my peace too. The feeling in that little office lightened considerably when these two characters left.

As I got back in my Peugeot and headed down the Serbian highway, it occurred to me that it would not have taken too much to have made that little encounter have a very different ending. Such little episodes in my day remind me of how precious life is . . . so I called one of my daughters when I got home and gave my wife a big hug. Yeah, life is precious, and God protects the simple.