Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "But martyrdom is important in Christianity," I said. "That's one way of becoming a saint."

  "Yes. But unlike in Christianity, in Islam it is also good to aid and abet martyrdom," he said. "And giving away money is also a form of martyrdom."

  "What I don't understand," I said, "is why Muslims leave Islamic communities and emigrate to places like Germany and Britain, basically Christian countries. To live among Christians and Jews. And Muslims get fractious when they're told not to wear headscarves and so forth. Why bother to emigrate if it makes them so unhappy?"

  "They emigrate because their countries are backward," the professor said with superb good sense. "Better to emigrate than to starve to death."

  "Muslim boys were burning cars in Paris a few months ago."

  He said, "A North African has limited choices. He can only go to a Francophone country. He ends up in France and sees it is secular, and he objects. But you see Muslims are also reacting against political oppression."

  "Tell me how this applies to Iraq now."

  "American experts are the problem," Professor Halman said. "They were wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Iraq. They are academics and bureaucrats with vested interests."

  "Sinister forces?"

  "Not sinister but obtuse. The ones who said the Soviet Union was strong were politically motivated, perhaps. They didn't know how weak the Soviets were."

  "So the U.S. government gets the wrong advice?"

  "Yes, and mainly from scholars. Scholars need to validate the status quo, or they will lose their funding."

  "The last time I took this trip," I said, "the shah was in power. Everyone said he was strong and progressive, though it was clear to me that the countryside was reactionary and orthodox Muslim."

  "That's a point. Advice-givers don't travel enough," he said. "Where are you going next?"

  "Up to Trabzon, then Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and—" I stopped; it seemed unlucky to mention more countries.

  "That's good," he said. "Ankara is a dreary place."

  "But I've had an interesting time here."

  "It's a wasteland," he said. "And Turks are a melancholy people." He pressed his fingers to his temples as though to accelerate his memory. "I think there's been trouble in Trabzon. I can't remember what."

  So I headed out of Ankara intending to leave Turkey. Long ago, Turkey had seemed a distant and exotic country of frowning men and enigmatic women, with unreliable telephones and simple roads and a dramatic, confrontational culture. Now it had everything, it was part of the visitable world, but it was no longer the way to Iran and Afghanistan, so I headed north.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO TBILISI

  THE TROUBLE IN TRABZON, on the Black Sea, where I found filthy weather, ugly rumors, and ill tidings, was the incident that had slipped Professor Halman's mind: the murder a month before of an unbeliever in a fit of sentimental fury. This singular outrage—singular because such things seldom happened in Turkey—was the shooting of an Italian priest, Father Andrea Santoro, by an overexcited Islamist named Oguz intending to avenge the honor of Muhammad in a controversy over mocking cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in various European newspapers. Oguz, who was sixteen, was caught the day after the murder, and Father Santoro's corpse was given a solemn sendoff, attended by the highest Muslim clergy in Turkey, the muftis.

  Symbolism is everything in religious strife, which is why it looks so logical, while being so stupid and brutal. The Catholic was singled out and shot for symbolizing the enemy, as any outsider might be, including me. The poor man had been praying in a back pew of the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon, where, on an average Sunday, there were no more than a dozen communicants. Rare as this murder was, it was so recent it concentrated my mind on leaving Trabzon. On arriving I'd asked, "What are the sights?" and been told the ancient mosque was a must-see. It was a Friday, a day of prayer in this (so I was also told) pious city. I should add that not once in Turkey was I hassled for being an unbeliever, nor was the subject ever mentioned. But the rain got me down, so I began to look for ways to escape it.

  Because there was no train, I had arrived on the night bus from Ankara, the Ulusoy coach—Greyhound standard—with frequent pit stops on the twelve-hour ride to the northeast, allowing passengers to get out and smoke, since smoking had been banned on Turkish buses. The exception was the bus driver, who could light up as much as he wished. These were also eating stops, at rest-area cafeterias, where the food was not bad: thick soup, trays of reddish beans, sinister slabs of meat drifting in black gravy, scorched kebabs, and bread in round loaves the diameter of a steering wheel.

  Over the mountains in darkness from Ankara, and still in darkness to Samsun and the edge of the Black Sea, we followed the coast road serenely until the day lifted. In the dreary, sunless dawn the towns on the shore, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, and nameless little settlements, looked ugly and lifeless, with hideous new buildings and ramshackle older ones on the barren coast. Yet the steep escarpment just behind the coast was beautiful, dark with wooded hills, and farther back the mountains loomed in a tangle of rain clouds.

  The sight of the Black Sea made the passengers happy. They were all Turks, clearly glad to be away from Ankara, which was overbuilt and modern, set in the dry hills; this was the drizzly shore of an inland sea.

  "Karadeniz," the old man next to me said when he woke and saw the water. I had once sailed on a Turkish ship called the Akdeniz—meaning the White Sea, which is what the Turks call the Mediterranean—so I understood this as the Black Sea. He marveled, smiled, elbowed his wife in the ribs. Like the other men on the bus he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. In the course of the twelve-hour ride through the night, these men loosened their ties a little.

  Judging from what I'd seen from Istanbul to Ankara to Trabzon, a building boom had overwhelmed Turkey, new houses everywhere, and the newer ones were dreadful, lopsided, misshapen, thrown together, and looked dangerously combustible; they were famous for falling down at the slightest earth tremor, of which seismic-prone Turkey had plenty.

  But once I stowed my bag in a bus station locker and hiked to the foot of Trabzon's hill and up the steep winding streets to the middle of town, I changed my mind about the ugly houses. Trabzon was a pleasant place, even in the rain: a compact town center, the usual Turkish shops selling food and clothes and sweets, but also something I hadn't expected: banyos, bathhouses. And I had the sense they were traditional baths and that this was not a euphemism for knocking shops.

  I saw a man being luxuriously shaved in a barbershop, so I went in and, using grunts and signs, asked for the same. The whole process, with a haircut, took forty-five minutes; after the long bus ride I was restored.

  Near the barbershop was a hotel that was undistinguished but clean. The room rate was $350 a night—who would pay that in Trabzon? Instead of checking in, I used the breakfast buffet in the restaurant, telling the clerk that I would pay for it. He said okay, so I idled over breakfast and tried to make a plan for my onward journey. I had seriously pondered my options: after weeks of travel I was still facing terrible weather, wet and cold, the north wind blowing off the Black Sea from Odessa; the recent murder of the Italian priest, for being Christian, was not encouraging; and the main point of interest in Trabzon was a mosque.

  When I finished, deciding that I would head east, out of town, and took out my money, the clerk waved me away. I repeated that I was not a guest of the hotel. The clerk just smiled and said, "No problem," indicated that it was a slow day in Trabzon, and added, "Beer-shay de-eel"—You're welcome.

  I walked back to where I had stowed my bag and on the way saw a sign advertising buses to the Georgia border and beyond: Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, and other distant places. I went into a bus agency, and the door chime went ding-dong. Some women in black gowns were watching the Iraqi war news—scenes of American tanks—on a black-and-white television. They were eating pink popcorn out of a bag.

  "Ticket, please?"

 
But the man at the desk scarcely looked up from his newspaper.

  "Bus is fool."

  "Just one seat," I said.

  "Is fool"

  "Excuse me, effendi." This politeness seized his attention. "I have serious business in Teeflees," I said, using the Turkish pronunciation. "Very serious."

  He looked up at me and licked his thumb, manipulated a printed pad, and clicking his pen wrote me a ticket.

  "Leaving at thirteen o'clock," he said and went back to his newspaper. The shrouded women had kept their attention on the war news.

  But in the event, the bus left at noon—good thing I was early, drinking a coffee next door to the stop. The bus was more than full: many people were sitting on the floor, on each other's laps, or straphanging. I could see no space at all. The driver poked my arm and said gruffly, "You sit here," and indicated a cushion next to him, on the step. "In Hopa, many seats." Hopa was near the Turkish border; the border post was a place called Sarp.

  So I sat on a cushion on the floor of this crowded, beat-up bus, pleased with myself for being an older man, thus invisible, ghostly, grubbier than most of the bus passengers, some of them Turks going to Hopa, and the rest Georgians on their way over the border to Batumi. The Georgians were the ones with big black plastic sacks, bulging with Turkish goods that were apparently unobtainable in Georgia—children's clothes, toys, toasters, telephones, microwave ovens, and boxes of cookies. All this luggage boded ill for the upcoming customs inspection.

  Only a hundred-odd miles to Hopa, but the entire coast road was being repaved, and we went so slowly and stopped so often the trip took five hours. I told myself that I was not in any hurry, and I smiled when I remembered saying to the ticket seller, I have serious business in Teeflees, because I had no business at all. This was one of those times when I was reminded again of how travel was a bumming evasion, a cheap excuse for intruding upon other people's privacy.

  We passed some friendly-looking towns, and stopped at many to pick up passengers. At Rize and Pazar we stopped for food. The hills beyond Rize were dark with tea bushes, and the Black Sea was motionless, as though we were at the shore of a glorified lake—no current, no tide, no chop or waves, more famous now for allowing prostitutes to be ferried across the water from Odessa to the Turkish shore.

  We went through Hopa, where a two-mile line of trucks was parked, awaiting permission to go farther. I got off the bus at the border, Sarp. The driver told me that we would all go through customs and immigration and then meet again and reboard the bus on the Georgian side. I thought: Not me, effendi.

  One of the pleasures of such a journey is walking across a border, strolling from one country to another, especially countries where there is no common language. Turkish is incomprehensible to Georgians, and Georgians boast that there is no language on earth that resembles Georgian; it is not in the Indo-European family but rather the Kartvelian, or South Caucasian, one. Georgians triumphantly point out that their language is unique, since the word for mother is deda and the word for father is mama.

  I paid $20 for a Georgian visa, got my passport stamped, was saluted by the soldier on duty, and walked into Georgia, where I learned there was a two-hour time difference from the other side of the border. It would be an hour or more before the bus passengers cleared their toasters and microwaves through Turkish customs. So when a Georgian taxi driver began pestering me, I listened—more than that, I offered him a cup of coffee.

  His name was Sergei. We sat in a border café, out of the rain. He said business was not good. I looked for something to eat, but there were only stale buns and boxes of crackers. As soon as you leave Turkey, by whatever border crossing, the quality of the food plunges.

  "You go Batumi?"

  I said, "Maybe. How much?"

  He mentioned a sum of money in Georgian lari. I translated this into dollars and said, "Ten dollars. Batumi."

  This delighted him. And Batumi was thirty miles away, so I was happy too.

  "You get bus, Batumi to Tbilisi."

  "How long does it take?" I asked.

  "Six o'clock. Seven o'clock."

  He meant six or seven hours. I said, "Is there a train?"

  "Yes, but train take nine o'clock, ten o'clock."

  "Sleeping car—Schlafwagen?"

  He nodded, yes. So I threw my bag in the back seat of his car, got in the front with him, and off we went, dodging potholes and deep mud puddles. The road was empty. He said that in the summer people flocked here for a Black Sea vacation, but I found this hard to imagine: there were no obvious hotels; the houses were small and dark, as though mossy; the coastal road was in bad shape and, unlike its Turkish counterpart, was not being repaired.

  Never mind, I was bouncing towards Batumi in a cold drizzly dusk—into the unknown, a place I'd never been. Its very dreariness and decrepitude were a consolation. I could see from the border, the roadside, Sergei in his old car, and the men laboring with pushcarts that this was a benighted place, not expensive, and slightly creepy—wonderful, really, because I was alone and had all the time in the world. No sign of any other tourist or traveler; I had walked across the frontier into this wolfish landscape. And if Sergei was correct in saying that there was a night train to Tbilisi, it would be perfect.

  It seemed to me that this was the whole point of traveling—to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and did not instantly think of me as money on two legs. Life was harder but simpler here—I could see it in the rough houses and the crummy roads and the hayricks and the boys herding goats. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans was a liberating event. I told myself that it was a solemn occasion for discovery, but I knew better: it was more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.

  Batumi was a low coastal town of puddly streets and dimly lit shops and Georgians in heavy clothes hunched over, plodding in the rain. On the outskirts were plump central Asian bungalows, and approaching the center of town at dusk was like entering a cloudy time warp where it was permanently muddy and old-fashioned. In the 1870s it had been a boom town built on the oil fortunes of the Rothschilds and the Nobels.

  "Football," Sergei said.

  We passed a muddy soccer field.

  "Sharsh."

  We passed a round church with an elaborate spire and a sharp-edged Christian cross on top.

  "Shakmat club."

  Shakmat is Persian for checkmate: "king death." The chess club, a big building and one of the newest in Batumi.

  We kept going, and Sergei conveyed to me in broken English that the train station was not in Batumi but farther up the coast in a village called Makinjauri, where passengers boarded and tickets could be bought.

  This, the last, westernmost stop on the Trans-Caucasian Railroad, was not a station but rather a rural platform under a grove of leafless trees and bright lights. Near it stood a ticket booth, the size and shape of one of those narrow little carnival sheds that offer tickets to the merry-go-round. I bought a first-class berth to Tbilisi for about $15 and felt I had lucked out, for the train was not leaving for hours. I paid off Sergei and enthusiastically tipped him for being helpful, then wandered around, looking for a place to eat.

  Babushkas in aprons, bulky skirts, headscarves, and thick leggings welcomed me into a cold, lamp-lit one-room restaurant, and one of them, explaining with gestures, made me a Georgian dish—a big round puffy loaf filled with cheese and baked in a pan, then cut into wedges. Peasant food, simple and filling. I drank two soapy-tasting bottles of beer and asked for more detail, which they cheerfully gave me: as we were in Batumi, this was Adjaruli cuisine—west Georgian style.

  Some factory workers stopped in, and their English was sufficient for them to explain to me that they came here every evening at this time for the stew; so I ordered some of that, too,
and like them, ate it with a wheel of bread.

  "What country?"

  "America."

  "Good country. I want to go!"

  A sense of out of this world, I scribbled in my notebook between bites. Cold, dirty room, old beaky women with raw hands in thick clothes; poor lighting, jumping shadows, a sputtering samovar, people talking in low voices; all weirdly pleasant. At the ragged edge of Georgia—the ragged edge of Turkey, too—I was happy.

  At some point the rain stopped. The darkness turned frigid, the night glistening with frost crystals that were star-like, and overhead, stars were visible above the Black Sea. At Makinjauri Station, on the exposed platform, a hundred or so people waiting for the train were stamping their feet and chafing their hands to keep warm, yawning because it was so late and so cold.

  I had a compartment to myself. I bought some bottled water from a stall on the platform. Two blankets and a quilt were piled on my berth, and after punching my ticket the conductor gave me a sealed package: bed sheets with bunnies printed on them.

  So I lay down and read the opening pages of Conrad's The Shadow-Line and fell asleep as we traveled north along the coast and then headed inland.

  It was an old noisy train with clanging wheels, and couplings that banged as we went through the mountains; but it rocked like a cast-iron cradle, and I slept so well on the ten-hour trip I did not awake until we were almost at Tbilisi.

  Even on the outskirts of the capital the full moon lighted the huts in the hills, giving it all the look of a Gothic landscape, darkness and blunted shadow, and rooftops and hilltops bluey white from the cold moon. As I watched from the window outside my compartment, I nod ded to another watcher, a man in a blue suit, plump, a head of white hair, a cell phone to his ear, and when I smiled he sprang forward and shook my hand. The clamminess of his handshake made me guess that he was a Georgian politician. He acknowledged that he was, of President Mikhail Saakashvili's party.