Day 6/7: Bus to İstanbul - Sprechen zie Czech?

The bus I was on left Skopje on time at 19:00 and took (including crossing one time zone) 12 hours. I was one of only three passengers on the bus. The other two people were the driver and another guy whose job appeared to be smoking cigarettes, making occasional coffee and smuggling. At the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, all three of us were hustled off the bus by our anonymous friend and taken to the duty free, where, using our passports, he purchased nine cartons of cigarettes to sell on the other side of the border. It all seemed to be accomplished with the complicity of the sales person on duty, who, although unruffled by him herding us to the conveyor belt, restricted my purchasing power because apparently I was not going to be in Turkey long enough to justify the purchase of three cartons of cut-rate fags.

I had a very long and interesting conversation with the only other male passenger, a Macedonian of Ottoman Turk descent named Tair. Tair was a very personable guy who, between cigarettes chainsmoked directly beneath the NO SMOKING sign on the bus despite my polite coughs, told me about his life as an illegal migrant worker.

Tair is 36 now. At the age of 16, as a citizen of the then state of Yugoslavia, he began his life-long career as a Jack-sans-Frontieres when he got his father to sign the permission slip for his passport by saying he would take his sister back to Turkey to visit family. Instead, he promptly absconded to Greece where he worked on the beach as a waiter and bartender for three years. Coming back, he stayed in Macedonia long enough to serve his military conscription period and then, in 1991, just before the war, he went to work in Austria and Germany. He told me about one of his first forays into working 'in black', which involved crossing the mountains into Austria on foot and then hitchhiking to Vienna where he worked as a wurst vendor on Stefansplatz. Another time, he waded 30 km through freezing water to get to Slovenia for a job. Tair left school at 14, speaks 7 languages and is currently working as a leather goods salesman at a boutique in a Turkish resort town. Half of the money he makes there during the four month summer season goes on feeding his wife and son and the other half is invested in bringing back leather jackets that he sells in Macedonia through a shop he leased. He plans to expand to three shops this year and hopefully, by the time Macedonia enters the EU, sell up and move his family. He told me repeatedly that his only ambition is that his son will do 'a proper job' instead of the haphazard struggling that constitutes his work.

In 1997 he bought a house for his family in Skopje with money he earned in a year and a half working in Stuttgart, posing as a Czech national. He told me that Czech passports were among the easiest to forge back then because they had no plastic sheet covering the photo page. He would simply buy the secondhand passport, paste his picture in the appropriate space and hey presto, he was Czech. As long as the age of the real passport holder was close enough and he had mastered the signature, he very rarely had problems. The trick, he told me, was getting into the country. Once you were in, most countries didn't run regular or stringent checks. He had one job for two years before the immigration officials actually ran his passport through the system and found out he was there illegally. Also, considering the fact that the penalty for possession of a fake passport tends to be a fine of around 500 euros and deportation, Tair and his fellow economic migrants view the punishment as a sort of tax, since the majority if not all of their money is earned in cash under the table anyway. The closest he came to a real problem was when, during a routine traffic stop on the German autobahn, a particularly observant customs official noticed that he looked more Balkan than Czech. They scanned his prints and all his previous infractions came up. The prosecutor pushed for jail time, but Tair pointed out that he wasn't selling drugs or running hookers, he was simply working as a kebab shop assistant to feed his family. The judge banned him from entering the EU for ten years under threat of a guaranteed 12 months in prison, a ban that expires next year to his delight. He is looking forward to the time when Macedonia joins the EU so that he can move his family to a country where his son wıll have a better chance of it, like France or Spain. He told me proudly about how his son is doing well at school and how, much like his nephew (the son of his elder brother who put his son through university with money he made by smuggling Carrera jeans into Yugoslavia by hiding them in the ceiling panels of trains), his son will also go to university and, as he put it, 'do something with this life, not like me'.

One question I had was how people who are broke enough to need to leave their homes to find work can afford to buy a black market passport in the first place. Tair explained that sending someone abroad is a community effort - the money for his first fake passport was raised by donations from twenty or so members of his family. Other men he knows save up money from menial odd jobs in order to spend it on a decent forgery that will allow them to go make real money in the EU. The new biometric passports are making things harder, although some countries still have the old school passports that allow the photo and signature sheet to be steamed off and replaced.

As for finding work without papers or accommodation or bank account, Tair explained that, as a native in a privileged position economically, I wouldn't realise that for people like him finding the work is sometimes literally as easy as asking. When he got to Vienna the first time, after crossing the mountains, he went to the nearest mosque (as an Ottoman Turk he was raised Muslim) and simply told the imam he had no place to live and no job. The imam put him up at the mosque for his first week and found him a job. Most employers who hire black market labour apparently also supply accommodation as well. During his time in Vienna and Stuttgart, Tair was working 15 - 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with living space supplied and sending home 1600 euros a month cash.

Among the highlights of his career, Tair told me fondly of making friends with the Pet Shop Boys as a beach bartender in Alicante and averaging, at his peak, one conquest for every weekly package tour that came to town, over the course of a season amounting to 12 or so ladies looking for (and receiving) a beach fling.

A common thread in what I was told by several people in Macedonia, Tair included, is that things were better under Tito and the Communists. Tair was at great pains to stress that he wasn't politically inclined, but at the same time he, along with many others, pointed out that Yugoslav communism was very different from the Russian variety and involved visa-free travel to pretty much anywhere, something that now to those with a Macedonian passport is something of a joke. The only countries that Macedonians can visit without a visa are Kosovo and Montenegro. Even getting a transit visa to cross Bulgaria on the bus to go to his summer job takes Tair three to six weeks. Another aspect of Tito's Yugoslavia that is remembered fondly is the 100% employment rate. Tair, just like Kalist, the monk at Treskavec Monsatery, told me that while he wasn't saying communism was fun, it's hard to convince someone who went from having a job with a pension to being indigent without transferable skills that the so-called free market democracy they live under is better than when they had a regular source of income.

Tair views himself as largely retired now. At the age of 36, he talked about his adventures with the fond expression of a veteran relating campaign exploits. His job in Turkey is legit and in partnership with a guy who says he couldn't possibly run the business without him. Tair told me about all the friends he's made in the past six years of selling leather, friends from as far afield as Ireland and Romania. When we stopped for a meal break, he noticed me getting ready to open a can of tuna and insisted that I share his pizza with him. He got me a cup of tea and flirted with the waitress while we drank. I felt like the shroud of mystery that seems to surround economic migrants had in some way been dispelled. Tair talked about his past with no regrets, no furtiveness, no indication that he felt he had somehow done something wrong. In fact, he went out of his way to tell me that because of his wife and son, he makes sure that he never puts himself in a position where he is doing something that would be considered illegal or dishonourable by his family.

When we were standing around at the Turkish border as the customs guards checked our baggage and questioned us, one of the guards looked at my hair and beard and then asked me if I was carrying any marijuana. I laughed. The guards laughed as well and walked off without checking my bags. Instead, they opened up the hold and searched it as well as underneath the bus, looking for people who might be trying to sneak into their country for work. Tair and I stood side by side, the bootleg cigarettes the mysterious smoking man had gotten us to buy sitting openly on the table.