Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "How's business?" I asked a woman at a bookstore.

  "Is bad," she said.

  I kept on asking as I strolled from the station, through the city to the Danube, for the pleasure of taking it all in, with the confidence that in eight or nine hours I would be back at the station to claim my bag and board a new train for Bucharest, the continuation of my own Orient Express.

  It was about this time in my previous trip that I'd met the traveling companion I called Molesworth. He was a theatrical agent and bon vivant, unmarried, and his being a little fruity and familiar added to his twinkle. His clients had been some of the acting Cusacks and Warren Mitchell. A former officer in the Indian army, he had traveled widely in Asia. He winked into a monocle when he read a menu, and had a gentle habit of calling every man "George," as when speaking to the Turkish conductor: "George, this train has seen its better days." After my book came out, he said people recognized him in the text, even through a pseudonym. I saw him now and then in London and invited him to parties, where he made himself popular with his theater stories, all about luvvies, and afterwards my friends would say, "Terry is splendid." Before he died, he said the trip in 1973 to Istanbul was one of the best he'd ever made, and often added, "You should have mentioned my name." But his real name was too good to be true: Terrance Plunkett-Greene.

  I trudged through the downpour with all the other trudgers until I came to a plausible-looking hotel called the Nemzeti, and went in, just to get out of the rain.

  The restaurant was empty except for two women, wearing leather coats and smoking.

  Wasn't I hungry? the pale waiter asked me. Wouldn't I be happier sitting in the warm restaurant and having the lunch of the day?

  I agreed. Goulash was on the menu.

  "Foreign people think goulash is stew. No. Goulash is soup."

  "But what does the word mean?"

  "I don't know in English. But a goulash is someone who looks after sheep."

  "Red ink!" Plunkett-Greene would have said of the Hungarian wine. "Peasant fare! Beans!" he would have crowed over the food here at the Nemzeti.

  The women left. A youngish man took their place. As he was the only other person in the restaurant, we fell into conversation. His name was Istvan. He was in Budapest on business. He said that some European companies were relocating to Hungary because of the cheap labor and the well-educated (but poverty-stricken) populace. I was to hear this description all the way through Asia, especially in India. His own business concerned small engines.

  "How is the government here?"

  "Terrible," Istvan said. He detested Hungarian politicians and their policies. "They are socialists. They are left. I am right."

  This led to a discussion about the American government, which he also detested.

  "Bush is dangerous, arrogant—not intelligent. And now we have to worry about what he'll do in Iran."

  I should have guessed then that I was to hear this opinion in almost every casual conversation for the next seven months, whenever I revealed myself as an American: that our president was a moron and his policies were diabolical and he was controlled by dark forces. That America, for all its promise and prosperity, was the world's bully.

  I would then say, as I did to Istvan, "Would you emigrate to the U.S. if you had a chance?" And they would say yes, as Istvan did, not because they had the slightest notion of American culture, politics, or history, but because they were passionate to get a job and make money, to own a car, a house, and flee their precarious hand-to-mouth existence to become Americans.

  Istvan was fairly intelligent, but there were others, and the most unsettling thing was that the worst of them, the most brutish, would surprise me by praising the U.S. government for its militarism. I was somewhat apprehensive because I would be traveling through at least six Muslim countries. But all of them were tyrannies, more or less, and I took heart in knowing that when people are badly governed, they seldom hold you personally responsible for the decisions of your own government.

  I wished Istvan luck and plodded on, making a detour at a sex shop. Acting on my theory that a country's pornography offers the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation, and especially the male character, I went in and assessed the goods. It was grubby stuff, which included bestiality (dogs and women), very fat people, very hairy people, a sideline in gay cruelty, and every German perversion.

  Like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and the other countries formerly in the Soviet shadow, when Hungary liberalized its policies in 1989 the immediate effect was the sanctioning of what had been regarded as antisocial behavior—porno, loud music, vocal complaints, and graffiti, which had been obvious from the walls I had seen on the outskirts of Budapest. Some of these promiscuous outbursts could have been dismissed as rising from irrational anger, but not porno. Pornography is specific, particular in its rituals and images, and it can't be gratuitous or faked or cooked up for its shock value, or else it won't sell. Shelves of videocassettes and DVDs of bestiality—women canoodling with dogs and horses, pigs and goats—meant that there was a market for it.

  In the sleety rain and wet snow of the decaying city, amid shuffling boots (down at the heels in the most literal sense), wet faces, and stringy hair, there was no sensuality, certainly no temptation for me to linger. Nothing looked sleazier to me than another imperial city overlaid by decades of Soviet style. Yet everyone I spoke to—for I was constantly asking directions—was polite to me, every one of the fatigued, greasy-haired people, scruffy in the late-winter drizzle. I seem to be criticizing, but I liked Budapest for being in a time warp and looking left behind.

  I could not identify a Hungarian face—not a national face. The heavy jaw and wide forehead and close-set eyes were not enough; yet it seemed a monolithic culture—no ethnic people, no minorities in evidence, just a lot of weary white people, relieved that Hungary had been admitted to the European Union so that they could leave and find work elsewhere and maybe never come back, as a man said to me at a café in Keleti Station when I went to reclaim my bag.

  "You're going where?" he asked.

  I told him Romania, and he made me repeat it because he found it so funny. He laughed a big, mocking belly laugh.

  From Hungary onward, it was clear to me that very few people are looking east. There were no tourists, and the only travelers were ones going home—reluctantly, because the great wish was to travel west, to leave home. The east represented hopelessness, poverty, failure, more excuses. Most of the travelers at Keleti Station wanted to go west, even the ones who were headed east. And no one was going to Turkey.

  With the drunks, the drifters, the flinty-eyed evangelists looking for sinners to convert, the moneychangers, the lurking youngsters who might have been druggies or hookers or both, and the burdened old women heading to the countryside on commuter trains, the people who held my attention at Keleti Station were the chess players. They stood at a long marble pedestal near the bumpers, in the middle of the crowd of commuters waiting for their trains to be announced. Or perhaps they weren't going anywhere: a train station is a little democracy in which everyone has a right to exist on the presumption that he or she might be waiting for a train. These men were studying the chessboards, clawing at their hair and their beards, now and then making a move—the slow and graceful logic of chess at the center of railway pandemonium.

  ***

  THE PASSENGERS WHO BOARDED the Euronight, the express to Bucharest, were Romanian—I was traveling against the prevailing current of people headed west. Who would take the train to Romania if they didn't have to? I was told that in recent years foreigners who wished to adopt Romanian orphans took this train from time to time, but because so many adoption agencies were fraudulent, fewer outsiders were willing to risk what might prove to be a disappointment.

  I liked the way this train journey was removing me from things I knew, replacing them with the distortions of the foreign—the dream dimension of travel where things are especially stra
nge because they look somewhat familiar. Fewer people, too, as though no one wanted to go where I was going, especially now, in the muddy landscape of Hungary, the drizzle crackling into the wet clumps of snow by the tracks.

  Even here, still in Europe, I sensed an intimation of Asiatic ambiguity in the cat-stink of the sleeping car, the unsmiling crowd suffering in second-class hard seats, the clutter of the dining car: piles of fluorescent tubes in cardboard boxes and coils of wire stacked on the tables, with sticky cruets of vinegar and bottles of sinister sauce, their caps clotted with spilled and dried gunk.

  Racing into the darkness and the downpour, dramatic weather smothering the tracks, whistle screaming, this train is perfect, this sleeper is a cozy throwback, I was writing in my notebook. It reminded me pleasantly, in sepia tones and inexpensiveness (about $100), of my previous trip. I had taken a diesel through Belgrade and Nis and Sophia before, but so what? This was not much different—sullen men in track suits, women in shawls, tired glassy-eyed children shivering in small wet shoes.

  As on the previous night en route to Budapest, the sleeping-car conductor punched my ticket, brought me beer, made my bed, and reminded me that we'd be in Bucharest around nine the following morning.

  "Why you go Bucharest?"

  "To look around," I said. "And then leave."

  "You airplane home?"

  "I change trains. To Istanbul."

  "Istanbul very nice. Good business. Good money."

  "What about Bucharest?"

  "No business. No money." The conductor made a clown's mocking face.

  "Is there a dining car on this train?"

  "Everything—for you!" When he winked at me I could see that he was tipsy.

  Rain was smacking the window, the train swaying as most trains do, seeming to describe an elaborate detour around the back of the world. I was going the old way, as I had long ago, and there was hardly any difference—Budapest had had the strained and uncertain and unstylish look of the seventies.

  Even though no one advertised a trip like this, it had not been much trouble to find this antique railway experience—railways and buses were how the poor traveled in much of eastern Europe. Most tourists going to Romania, if they went at all, would take a short-hop plane. European airfares were very cheap because they were based on fuel that was sold untaxed. Someday soon a fuel tax would be imposed, airfares would reflect their true cost, and this train would be valuable again. Well, it was valuable now—the sleeping car almost full and the rest of the train crowded.

  A sudden station loomed, blobs of fluorescence in the darkness, the storm sweeping down, bursting in oversized drops on an unsheltered platform, the right texture of raindrops for this dark, creaking night train. The weather looked old-fashioned, so did the leaky roof of the station, the puddles in the ticket lobby, the wet benches, the utter emptiness. No one got on or off: just a station sitting in the dark—I saw it was Szolnok, on the Tisza River—and after that we were really benighted.

  ***

  REMEMBERING THE CONDUCTOR'S WINK, I went in search of the dining car, walking through the passageway of the dark tipping train making anvil clangs in the night.

  And when I found it I thought: Just at the point in my life when I'd imagined that all travel was a homogenized and bland experience of plastic food and interchangeable railway cars and waiters in fast-food caps, I stumble into the dining car of the Euronight to Romania and find three drunken conductors and a man (who turned out to be the chef) in a greasy sweater with a torn bandage unraveling on his hand, all of them playing backgammon in the bad light, drinking beer, and smoking. No one was eating, and when the chef blew his nose messily he looked as if he were using a rag that had just wiped a dipstick.

  Nor had the boxes of fluorescent tubes and coils of wire stacked on the tables been moved or tidied. They crowded the gunked-up sauce bottles.

  At the sight of this filth and disorder, my spirits rose. It was easy to prettify a nation in an airport, but on this train traveling through the provinces of a hard-pressed country I felt I was seeing the real thing, a place with its pants down. I didn't take this personally. I was grateful that no one had gone to any trouble for me, that I was not getting red-carpet service.

  The chef did not even look up from his backgammon board when he said, "Eat!"

  Another, the man who had winked, said, "Sit! Sit! You want chicken?"

  "No."

  "Only chicken. Sit!"

  He pushed some coils of wire to the far side of one of the tables—I was apparently the only diner—and then the lights went out. When the lights came on again there was a bowl of bread crusts in front of me, which seemed a neat trick.

  "Salade?"

  "No."

  I was served a bowl of dill pickles. I thought: Who could invent this? Merely to live here was to experience satire.

  Tipsy though he was, the conductor was able to form the words "You lock couchette?"

  "How could I lock it?I don't have a key."

  Without a word, in a kind of reflex of drunken panic, he ran out of the dining car. I followed him, and when he got to my compartment he motioned for me to check my bag. He gave me to understand, in gestures, that there were thieves on the train and that I must be very careful (wagging his finger, then touching it to the side of his nose).

  The lights went out before we got back to the dining car, but came on again in time for me to see the man in the filthy sweater (and now I knew why it was greasy) standing over a frying pan, holding a cleaver, and sending up sparks and spatters. He could not remove the cigarette from his mouth, because he was holding the frying pan with one hand and smacking at a piece of meat with the other. His smeared glasses were slipping down his nose; he pushed them up with a deft nudge of his dripping cleaver.

  He yelled at the others, one of whom relayed the message to me: "Gratin?"

  "Okay."

  Then the backgammon players began bantering with each other.

  When the plate was put before me I marveled at the man serving me: his sticky glasses, his drooping cigarette, his dirty sweater and bandaged hand. The fried potatoes were coated with cheese. I picked at it, grateful for the reassurance that in this corner of the world nothing had changed in decades. And the next time someone praised the Hungarian economy or talked optimistically of Romania's imminent entry into the European Union, I could reflect on the revelation of this disgusting meal.

  While the rest of the world was bent on innovation and modernization, looking for salvation on the Internet, things here were pretty much what they'd always been. Speaking of time warps, Hungary was about to elect another socialist government. For some reason, perhaps the sheer perversity that finds absurd logic still alive in the world, this pleased me. It reminded me of the time I'd spent in Vanuatu, in the western Pacific. One rainy day I saw some people on the island of Tanna standing and squatting, bollocky naked, wearing only penis sheaths and refusing to listen to some missionaries who had come across the ocean to convert them. These God-botherers had then trekked twenty miles down a muddy path to share their Good News Bibles. The people on Tanna sent them away, saying they had their own gods, thanks very much.

  Stubborn seediness has great appeal, and this ramshackle railway had not changed in thirty-three years. It was, if anything, worse, almost a parody of my previous experience. The Hungarian border was farcical too, the customs-and-immigration people tramping through the carriage in wet boots and ill-fitting brown uniforms. The Romanian border at Curtici was even grimmer, as though another act in the same farce: big beefy-faced brutes with earflaps and gold braids, a dozen of them swarming over the train demanding passports, opening bags.

  One of the customs men went through my books, the Simenons and some others, and selected Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. He squinted at it. Did he guess that this novel is about injustice in a nightmarish police state?

  "Where you going?"

  "Istanbul."

  "What doing? You tourismus?"

 
; "Me tourismus."

  Turning the pages of my passport, he put his fingers on the visas. "Azerbaijan! Uzbekistan! Pakistan! India!"

  "Tourismus."

  He flipped his big fingers at me. "Heroin? Cocaine?"

  I laughed, I tried to stop laughing, I laughed some more, and I think this idiotic laugh convinced him of my innocence. His comrade joined him, and together they searched my briefcase. I stood to one side, and when they were done they welcomed me to Romania.

  Their baggage fondling was no worse than the TSA's at any American airport. In fact, it was a lot simpler and less invasive.

  Just behind these customs men was an attractive woman wearing an ankle-length leather coat and high shiny boots, another figure from the past, a suitable introduction to Transylvania, where we were headed, and like a character in the Nabokov novel, which could have happened in a place like Bucharest.

  ***

  THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING AS, with howling brakes, the train came to a dead stop at Baneasa Station in the center of Bucharest, where I was to change trains—the next one, for Istanbul, leaving later in the day. The rain spattered on the oily locomotive and the platform roof and the muddy tracks. But this was not life-giving rain, nourishing roots and encouraging growth. It was something like a blight. It spat from the dreary sky, smearing everything it hit, rusting the metal joints of the roof, weakening the station, fouling the tracks. It lent no romance to the decaying houses of the city; it made them look frailer, emphasized the cracks in the stucco, turned the window dust to mud. There was something so poisonous in its greenish color, it seemed to me like acid rain.

  Pale, pop-eyed Romanians had a touch of Asia in their dark eyes and hungry faces, and almost the first people I saw were two urchins, very skinny boys not more than ten, in rags, looking ill, both smoking cigarettes and pretending to be tough. They had tiny doll-like heads and dirty hands. They fooled among themselves and puffed away, and when they saw me they said something, obviously rude, and laughed.