The rickety, Yugoslav-era train churned its way through high mountain valleys, but the view through the windows showed only black silhouettes against a blacker night.
I had the six-bunk compartment all to myself for the night train from Podgorica to Belgrade, and I was awoken from my sleep to the sharp raps on my door by border police making their way through the train.
While at the compartment door, speaking to the Serbian officials and answering questions I can no longer remember, I noticed a tall, intense man with a sharp goatee and piercing eyes that seemed to bore through me from farther down the corridor. He looked like a bouncer at best, mercenary at worst, and I didn’t maintain eye contact with him, but instead returned to my compartment to get a couple more hours of sleep before our 6 am arrival in Belgrade.
As our train pulled into the main station during an October dawn, the man approached me and struck up a conversation. “I heard them grilling you back there at the border, and when I heard your accent, I discovered why. They don’t normally ask so many questions of Americans, I hope.”
“At least they were pretty friendly overall,” I replied, unsure of how much negativity I wanted to convey to this stranger.
“Do you want to have a coffee?” The man asked. “I know a few good places here.”
With really no excuse not to join this towering figure with the enchanting blue eyes of a Siberian husky, I found myself accepting his offer in my half-consciousness after a long night of bumps and turns. As we walked through the pastel, stuccoed streets of Belgrade that morning, my companion introduced himself as Urosh.
“It’s not a name, it’s a title.”
And I understood his meaning. I had finished Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon recently, and in her chapters about the Serbian empire, the names were always preceded by Urosh, or “ruler.” He was from Sombor, in the North of Serbia, near the Croatian and Hungarian borders. He had an air and a confidence to him, and an intensity that was captivating.
He was tall and lean, with broad shoulders, and a buzzcut aside from the long ponytail tied up in a knot on top of his head. His face was not a modern face, but looked like it had been struck clean off an ancient fresco on a monastery wall. He carried some sort of power, and you would not want to find yourself opposing it. He stepped lightly despite this and walked with grace and poise, a true ruler in every sense of the word. And those eyes! I rarely see eyes colored other than brown on Slavic people, and yet these were a chill blue that I’ve never seen before, with wisdom and experience behind them.
At a coffee shop in central Belgrade, we ordered drinks and pastries, and sat down across the table from each other, and traded stories in an otherwise mostly empty cafe at such an early hour. He had been all over the world. Sri Lanka, Tibet, and he was on his way to Peru soon. I came to find out he was also something of a mystic, this ruler.
“Why Peru?”
“I’m going to Lake Titicaca — it’s a special place. It’s where Shambhala, the mythical Tibetan kingdom, is in the process of moving to.”
“Shambhala? Interesting.”
He spoke his reality with unwavering conviction. And the stories he relayed to me over coffee were absolutely unexplainable if not for there being some higher power involved. A story that led to his journey to Sri Lanka had me in utter disbelief.
But soon I was telling him about my onward journey to Nepal. My sister had met an Indian man online five years ago, and they’re “engaged”, even though they’ve never left their respective countries. She spent all of her money on a plane ticket to meet him in Kathmandu, because India was still closed to travelers. And so I decided I needed to fly to Kathmandu and be there so she wasn’t alone with this man that the family doesn’t completely trust.
I had met him two years ago, I said, and I really liked him. But we just don’t know how such a long-distance cross-cultural virtual relationship could be helpful or realistic. So I explained I was flying there to meet them.
Urosh and I eventually left the cafe, and walked through the center of Belgrade. We spent all morning walking and talking. We climbed to the old fortress at Kalemegdan Park, and looked out at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. Urosh asked me what I could see.
“Two rivers, a lot of trees. What about you?”
“I see ships.”
There definitely weren’t any ships out there.
“Like with sails?”
“I can see across time. They’re moving through the river, crawling with crewmen, with billowing white sails.”
As we continued walking, I learned that Urosh has developed an intimate understanding of who he had been in past lives, including on other worlds, and that many of these persons had been rulers as well. And to this day, I don’t disbelieve any of this, as the circumstances around his stories and the details he provided left me with little room for doubt.
We soon entered one of the old Orthodox churches on the fortress grounds, and looked at the stunning mosaics that depict the lives of the Saints and the ceiling’s haunting images of the Holy Trinity. Urosh bought me a small bottle of holy oil, as good luck for my journeys to come.
As we left the church, we were hungry, and we went to a Chinese restaurant. I invited him for lunch, as he had shown and told me so much over the course of our spontaneous morning explorations, and I had forgotten all about checking into my hostel. We kept talking — about our lives at home, spirituality, the universe, and I was enraptured at his every word.
We talked about his visit to China, and how the Chinese occasionally would eat things we wouldn’t dream of eating in the West. Eventually, we finished lunch, and the unsaid feeling was that it was time to part ways. We exited the restaurant and looked at each other, and at that very moment, a man on the street came up to us, and pointed at one of the pictures of menu items on the door and exclaimed to us with true horror in his eyes in an already too-late warning: “They eat dog there!”
Urosh looked at me with widening eyes as his face exploded in riotous, manic laughter. He kept up this booming laughter as he stepped back, and turned away, and I never saw him again.
A few days later, I landed in Nepal, but my sister never arrived at all. Some type of airline scam mixed with COVID regulations. And so a week later, I was depressed and the only guest of a mountain lodge on the trail to Everest Base Camp, without a sense of taste or smell, and I messaged Urosh over the weak internet signal in the mountains, and told him what all had happened.
He responded quicky , telling me that he had known all along that my sister wouldn’t make it to Nepal, but he said nothing at the time because he thought I needed to be there. A couple of days later, I ended my trek prematurely, feeling defeated and convinced that I had come down with Covid. I’ve to this day never returned to finish the trek to Everest Base Camp.
When I returned to my hotel in Kathmandu, and surprisingly received a negative Covid test, a British travel writer walked into the hotel that same day. My defeat in Everest pivoted into a plan to circle Annapurna with her. On the slopes of that mountain, another project would open up for me to return to the Everest region with a team of Sherpas to scout a new trail. Soon after, she and I began collaborating on publishing our work together. And as of the time of this writing, my sister and her husband are married and living happily together in Iowa.
Some people you meet on the road are too good to be true, and others are nothing but. I still have Urosh’s gift, and sometimes wonder where in the universe he may be.
I'm tingling after reading this. What a scintillating adventure. I can picture this man, your face and the train. Thank you for sharing this!
What a beautiful story! I read it nonstop