I needed a place to brush the ferrous red dust off my jeans and shake the rumble of buses and trains out of my head. So I had a notion to wind up my travels through Greece and Yugoslavia at the village of Peania, outside Athens, where my grandmother lives. She had never made it as far as America and I felt pretty sure she would want to hear about what separated us. It wasn't like old times anymore, though: my grandmother had lapsed into a make-believe world, delicately and, to an outsider, bafflingly crocheted from frayed borders of the obsolete past. As her feet led her aimlessly and restlessly around a cramped room, her mind resolutely hitched longer distances, cottoning up to the view somewhere around World War I, or even before. My senile grandmother has become an itinerant wayfarer in the last days of her life, and in that way we were spiritually akin to one another this summer.

I'd stumbled onto a lot of shiftless people by the end of the summer; you could say I was more or less one of them: never pausing in a particular place for longer than a day or two, breaking away from friends when I'd barely found them out, too often moving on reluctantly. It was pretty awesome how much company I had: all of us feeling trapped in perpetual transit, even though some of us knew we were slated to come to a standstill, eventually, in this house or on that date.

I rode into Greece from Yugoslavia on a lazy train in which the second class was crammed with fidgety bodies while the corridors were impassably strewn with parcels, sleeping bags and surplus passengers staring fixedly out the windows for hours or hunched down against the walls. Nonetheless, someone was forever trying to pace from one car to another, so there was a perpetual rippling of volumes in the dimness (most of the trip took place at night) as bodies and belongings obligingly traded then resumed their places.

I squeezed into a cabin with a family of former exiles--lost Greeks--and a Bolivian. I had the feeling I was watching the last, unnoticed stretch in the return of a handful of modern-day Odyssei. The man had left Greece with his wife at the age of 18, after fighting with the partisans in a civil war that crept out of the mountains to shake the country all over again after the Allied liberation of 1944. This man was one of many communists finally forced to flee, who thought they would die outlaws.

Now these communists, or at least alleged communists, are being permitted to trickle back over the border. The man and woman across from me hadn't slept for a frazzled five days, since leaving Poland, their adopted country. "I just can't close my eyes, my head's too full of worries, about the kids, a place to stay, a job, what the city will have turned into," the father told me. They both wanted to talk about what was happening, but they couldn't get beyond the refrain, "I can't believe it; I never thought it was possible." I think they were the only ones who didn't mind when the train stalled, because they were so used to waiting, and so eager to peer out at anything Greek.

They had toted along bread and an assortment of glass and plastic bottles for drink. The water on board was rancid, and the bottles needed refilling. As we pulled into a station, the woman urged her husband, "Hail someone outside, they won't refuse." Nervously, he wedged his shoulders over the pane and called "Eh, Compatriot!"

Compatriot--it sounded so musical yet so forlorn. I shrink from recalling that greeting because it hangs in my memory like a portent of betrayal. I hope it really meant that hope is possible. Already the man had culled suspicion in a stolidly bourgeois farming couple as he pressed for workers' movements, and in a spurt of desperation and elation, invoked Che Guevara's name. I guess he'll learn not to go so far.

Once in Greece, I holed up briefly in a relative's empty home. The stucco house was maybe two kilometers from the nearest village, secluded in a ravine. I hardly saw another living presence there, yet I could hear alarming noises, like clandestine signals, before dawn. At night ephemeral animal shrieks passed through the porous walls and around 4 a.m. sporadic double-toned whistles started picking a course down the incline. A bold spell of moonlight walking told me they were merely bats and shepherds.

The chicken-lady was the intruder who finally forced me on the road again. I first met her on the bus to my relative's house; she was the stout matron, slouched in a rear seat with lumpy plastic sacks packed against it. A younger woman staggered up the steps moaning, "God, I'm tired." So Stout, bridling at her gall, blurted, "Tired! What've you got to be tired about?" And the rest went sort of like this:

Young Woman: I can't stand it, I'm so beat.

Stout (smoothly): What about people who are just getting off a midnight shift? How should they feel?

Young Woman: But I've been on the move since six o'clock--shopping.

Stout: You haven't been sweating in a tavern all night, and now you don't have to go home and feed the chickens.

Young Woman: Feed the chickens! What do you have to do that for?

Stout: Chickens eat too, you know. They get hungry too. Don't you eat?