Four Letters on the Back of a Ticket
The woman behind the glass at the ferry terminal in Split said the same thing to me four times, and out of all of it I understood one word: tomorrow.
“Sorry — could you repeat that?” I said. She repeated it. Same speed, slightly louder, which is what everyone does everywhere and which has never once helped anybody. Behind me a man with two suitcases moved his weight from foot to foot. I have been embarrassed in six countries now, and it is always at a window like this one, with a queue behind me and a clock somewhere above my head.
So I tried the other thing. “Please. Can you speak more slowly?”
She could, and it worked — almost. Slowly, I caught the shape of it: something about the boat, something about eleven o'clock, and then that word again, the word that had been sitting in all four sentences. Two syllables. It was nowhere in my head. And with it came the size of my mistake: for ten minutes I had been asking politely about seats, and there were no seats to ask about, because there was no boat.
“I don't understand that word,” I said. “What does it mean?”
She wanted to explain it. She opened her hands, blew air out like someone putting out a candle, pointed at the sea and then at the ceiling, and said it once more, patiently, the way you say a name to someone who ought to know it. She had run out of English. I had run out of guesses. We stood there with the glass between us.
Then I remembered the one question that has ever got me out of this.
“How do you spell it?”
She turned my ticket over and wrote four capital letters on the back. B, U, R, A. I typed them into the translator on my phone, and the phone said: a strong cold wind from the north-east. Boats do not sail in it.
When I looked up she had already turned her screen around so I could see it — tomorrow, 14:00. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Wind finished.” It was the same sentence she had been saying since I walked up. Now it had the missing piece in it, and it was perfectly clear.
She pushed the ticket back through the gap in the glass. Under the time she had written the word again, in careful capitals. “For next time,” she said.