Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  She was, she said, a ballet correspondent for a London newspaper, in Tbilisi for the week. She would be writing about this.

  Still besotted by the ballet, I asked, "How do you even begin evaluating something as pleasant as this?"

  "The corps de ballet needs work," she said without hesitating, "though they're about average for this part of the world, and if they keep working really hard they'll have a chance of being something watchable in about two years."

  So much for my angelic kick-line of flitting nymphs.

  "The male lead, I'm afraid, doesn't really have what it takes," she went on, "though you can see the chap is trying his best." She smiled grimly and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. "That ballerina from the Bolshoi, Anastasia Goryacheva, is talented. She performed well, but she was terribly let down by the orchestra. They were just so plodding. They're all second-rate players, not real symphony musicians. I mean, they hardly seemed to care."

  So much for the mellifluous harmonies I'd heard.

  Her criticism was probably accurate, though the audience had been more enthusiastic, had cheered the ballet all the way through, and had applauded numerous curtain calls. As for me, who had happened upon this spectacle and gaped like a dazed dog, I was grateful for the warmth and the music and the sight of the weightless legs of flitting nymphs moving to and fro on tippy-toe.

  ***

  A WOMAN NAMED MARIKA, who had also been at the ballet, offered to show me around Tbilisi—the parts that had been renovated, the districts that were still dilapidated, the ancient villas, the Soviet bureaus, the synagogues and mosques. But I found Marika more interesting than any of this real estate.

  She was in her mid-thirties and, she said, from a noble family, large landowners, their ancestral home in Ratja. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather had spent time in Soviet prisons, thirteen years in her grandfather's case, for being members of the Georgian aristocracy and therefore counterrevolutionaries. One prison, part of the gulag in Kazakhstan, was a remote work camp near the city of Karaganda. Later, I read that Solzhenitsyn had spent a year in the same camp.

  "You're a writer," Marika said. "You're lucky to be an American. Our writers were put into a prison in Mordva. It was a terrible place but had a nice name—White Swan Prison."

  In 2001, Marika worked for a while at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tbilisi, earning 30 lari a month.

  "That's not much, is it?"

  "Fifteen dollars," she said. She added that after various political upheavals, the most recent being the so-called Rose Revolution of 2004, which had been aimed at rooting out crooked politicians, government salaries had improved and she began earning $160 a month. She was now working for an insurance company, earning $200, and just getting by.

  Gregory had told me that business was good, tourism was up, and the service industries—he did not specify which ones—were busy. Gregory also owned a vineyard, but said that though it was good-sized, wine-making was merely a hobby.

  "Then what business are you in?" I asked.

  "I'm managing Nina. But just for fun. I live on revenues and investments."

  So he was doing fine and was well connected. Marika had another story. She said that business was abysmal. Food was still cheap but sala ries were pathetic. Most people her age spoke of emigrating to the United States. In this connection, she said that George Bush had come the previous year—in May 2005—and had received a rapturous welcome. This had something to do with Georgia needing a powerful friend, for Georgia was, geographically speaking, in a bad neighborhood, bordered by unfriendly Russians, the breakaway region of Abkhazia, the bandit-haunted valleys of Dagestan, and the dangerous ruin of Chechnya, with its Islamic guerrillas and frequent bombings.

  "What about emigrating to Turkey?"

  "No," she said, though some people would settle for a job in Europe.

  We strolled, talking about the bleak, not to say obscure, future, and soon came to a restaurant.

  "Have you had khajapuri?" she said.

  "Yes. In Batumi"

  "Then you have to try Georgia's other national dish, khingali"

  This turned out to be a big bowl of broth with dumplings, some of them filled with meat, called khafsuru, others with greens, called kalakuri. The restaurant was fairly crowded, mostly with families at the wooden tables, everyone eating dumplings with their fingers, Georgian style.

  Marika wasn't complaining, but it seemed to me depressing that a university graduate with perhaps fifteen years experience working in a big city should be paid so little.

  On my previous trip I met many poorly paid workers, but they lived in an era of sealed borders and expensive travel. They expected no better and had no means to leave wherever they happened to be. But in these days of cheap travel, the world had shrunk, and anyone with access to a computer—which seemed to be most city people—knew that life was better elsewhere. The places I had known, of settled people in villages and towns, of working urbanites in big cities, with their civic pride and cultural pieties, these homebodies whose horizon was their national frontier, had all (it seemed to me) become soured and discontented. The world of settled people had evolved into a world of people wishing to emigrate. There was hardly any distinction, and not much romance, in being a traveler. It was now a world of travelers, or people dreaming of a life elsewhere—far away. Please, take me to America!

  Some cultural pieties still persisted. Gregory and Nina invited me the next day to the christening of their daughter, Elena. The ceremony was performed in the district of Metekhi, in an old Eastern Orthodox church that had been built and rebuilt from ancient times. The church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. More out of national pride than religious sanctimony, Georgians boast that Christianity was brought by Saint Nino from Greece in the fourth century (incidentally, at about the time it was spreading through Ethiopia). Saint Nino's image was everywhere.

  Little Elena, just over a month old, pink-faced and beatific, was swaddled in a heavy blanket and wore a bobble hat. A very short priest chanted and made repeated signs of the cross. He had a bushy beard, an enormous nose, and a hat shaped like a tea cozy, which gave him the look of a garden gnome costumed as a Smurf. Tapers were lighted, candles were waved, icons were kissed, a profusion of genuflection and energetic idolatry. There were no pews—no seats at all.

  We stood and watched the dwarfish bearded priest pressing his forehead against a saint's picture and murmuring prayers. The baby was being bounced: no sign of holy water.

  Cell phones also rang, men were chatting into them and making calls, other people were talking among themselves, laughing, greeting newcomers, inserting lari into the poorboxes, and some of them even praying.

  Strangely, Gregory and Nina were excluded from the ceremony and stood some distance away, but watched eagerly as the godparents coddled Elena. I was excluded as well, but when I took too great an interest in a very shiny candle-lit icon, a man in a black smock hissed at me and indicated with angry gestures that I was standing too close.

  "Up yours," I said, smiling, and returned to the christening, which had become dramatic.

  The baby was stripped naked, her bobble hat removed. And then I realized that the church was cold. Her skinny arms and legs began to thrash, and whimperings issued from her little red body.

  The gnome-like priest adjusted his odd ecclesiastical Smurf hat and beckoned the godparents to the baptismal font, which stood like a large marble sink at the side of the church. He took the baby and immersed her in the cold water—totally, head to foot, as though he were rinsing a chicken. As he pronounced her new name and recited the baptismal formula ("and I renounce the devil and all his pomps"), baby Elena began to howl. She went on howling for quite a while, but who could blame her?

  Then, as Elena was turning purple, the future ballerina was wrapped in her warm blanket, people kissed and shook hands, the mother and father received the priest's blessing, and sums of money were bestowed.

  Aware of the superstitious sen
timentality in such a rite, a number of opportunistic old women seized the chance to line the path that led down the hill from the church, and there they crouched, their confident hands extended for alms.

  Some customs don't change. That baptismal ceremony had been performed in that very church since the early seventh century—indeed, the Byzantine era, before Arab caliphs took over in the year 654 and made Tbilisi an emirate.

  When it came time for me to leave Tbilisi for Baku, I was offered a lift by one of Gregory's friends.

  "It's no problem. I can take you to the airport," he said.

  "Railway station," I said.

  He scowled at me. "You're going on the train?"

  "That's right."

  "On the train?" he repeated hoarsely, in disbelief. "Why don't you take the plane?"

  Baku was an overnight trip from Tbilisi, not much more than the distance from Boston to Washington, but he had never taken the train. He had never been to Baku, in neighboring Azerbaijan, though he had lived for several years in Moscow and had spent some months working in Germany.

  It occurred to me that, though he was thirty-four and had grown up in Tbilisi, he had perhaps never been to the Tbilisi railway station—or not recently, because he seemed shocked at how haunted and dirty it was. He made a face, shrugged at me in helpless pity, wished me luck, and hurried away when he saw the elderly train standing at the platform.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO BAKU

  THE TRANS-CAUCASIAN

  A RAILWAY TRAIN in an old country seems to go backward into the dark, simple, and primitive hinterland that is the remote past. But that is an illusion. The train only appears to be a cruel artifact, as it crawls out of the huge neglected station crowded with passengers and rolls like a loud antique, looming rust-stained and sticky with grease, its bunks and seats obscured by dirty windows, the whole thing shaking from the whirs of its clacking engine, spattering black oil onto the tracks as it makes its way on what seems a route into history. The train offers the truth of a place: horrible or savage as it may seem, the hinterland is also the present.

  I always felt lucky on a train, as on this one. So many other travelers are hurrying to the airport, to be interrogated and frisked and their luggage searched for bombs. They would be better off on a national railway, probably the best way of getting a glimpse of how people actually live—the back yards, the barns, the hovels, the side roads and slums, the telling facts of village life, the misery that airplanes fly over. Yes, the train takes more time, and many trains are dirty, but so what? Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

  Why don't you take the plane? the Georgian had asked me.

  Because—I thought when I was in the corner seat of my railway compartment—airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked.

  Like a Soviet relic, complete with dented samovars in the vestibule and a very grumpy provodnik, a conductor in a stained uniform jacket, the Azerbaijani train was like something that had rattled out of a bygone era. Even the platform at Tbilisi Station looked like a tableau from the distant past—old women squatting near big sacks of oranges and piled bags of dried fruit—from where? Azerbaijan, perhaps. Ragged children, old men in heavy boots sleeping against the sacks, young girls in long skirts holding babies. It was an unromantic view of peasantry, Giselle with scruffy costumes and no music. Many people I met in Georgia spoke of the modernity and promise of the country, even its alleged prosperity—"And we can fly to Paris in a few hours." But what I saw at Tbilisi Station could have been a scene from some dismal period in czarist times. I felt it was a kind of luck for me to witness this.

  It so happened that the railway tracks followed one of the roads to the Tbilisi Airport. I could see a colorful billboard on the widest thoroughfare that read (in English) President George W. Bush Street, a sign the visiting president could have seen, and read, on his visit to Georgia the previous year. With a vocal Muslim country on every border, Georgia was a natural ally of Bush's so-called war on terror, though I did not meet any Georgian who agreed with American policy, except in a shortsighted and self-interested way.

  The outskirts of Tbilisi were dilapidated: tall dreary tenements on narrow potholed lanes, and beyond them ramshackle houses, small archaic-looking compounds—interconnected huts with courtyards, animal pens, stockyards. Peasant huts dominated—Asiatic jerry-building, a world apart from Tbilisi's casinos and city slickers and ballet and the velvety ritual of the christening.

  After a while, the grumpy conductor in his soup-stained jacket and dented cap shoved open my compartment door.

  "Ticket?" I asked.

  "Nyet, nyet" he said and pushed past me. He insisted on making my bed, and then—rubbing his fingers together in the money gesture—demanded 10 lari, about $5. This seemed steep, but when a big ugly man wearing a uniform in a foreign country asks for a small, specific sum, I usually hand it over.

  The long-distance bus was the more popular way of going from Tbilisi to Baku. Not that many people took it: Georgia was westward-looking and Azerbaijan was to the east, at the edge of central Asia. But the bus was slower because the roads were so bad, and of course there were roadblocks, manned by soldiers. The train just rolled on, but the train was a revelation, the crummiest I'd been on so far. Nothing worked, neither the lights nor the locks. It was very grubby; it was an express yet it made lots of stops, the stations growing creepier and more ruinous.

  Big shadowy Soviet-era apartment blocks stood in scrubby fields in the middle of nowhere. Compared to them, the huts and cottages farther on were a relief for having a human scale. Old people plodded along dirt roads, like trolls vanishing into the growing dusk, which seemed to rise from the ground like dense fog. This twilight partially obscured Rustavi, a down-at-heels industrial city of steel mills and ironworks that had become antiquated. All this time we were following the winding course of the Kura River, which flowed through Azerbaijan and emptied into the Caspian Sea.

  In the darkness of my compartment, rattling across eastern Georgia, I was thinking how my routines of travel were totally different from the routines of my writing life. The predictable regularity of humdrum domesticity is perfect for writing: monotony is the writer's friend. People said to me, "You're always away!" But it wasn't true. I loved being home, waking in my own bed beside my wife, watching the news on TV, spending half the day writing, and then cooking, reading, swimming, riding my bike, seeing friends. Home is bliss.

  This—the closed compartment on the old train to Azerbaijan—was something else. Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move towards an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, inventing the trip, cobbling together a set of habits in order to stay sane and rational, finding ways to fill the day and be enlightened, avoiding danger, keeping out of trouble, and, immersed in the autobiographical, for my journal, writing everything down in order to remember, reflecting on where I am and what I'm doing.

  Still being jogged in the dark compartment, I recalled the woman—where had I seen her? maybe Ankara?—who said, "I want to live your life."

  And I had thought: Really! My nagged and scolded childhood, my undistinguished school career as a punk, no good at games, bewildered in college, terminated early from the Peace Corps, disgraced in Singapore when my contract wasn't renewed, hard up in London, refused a credit card by American Express at the age of thirty-two because I had no visi ble credit, divorced—oh, sorry, you mean all the books and the fun of travel!

  A knock at the door: two soldiers with rifles slung at me. "Gid owp."

  So I was interrupted in my reverie by gun-toting soldiers at the Georgia border, a gritty settlement called Jandari. They went through the motions of a passport check, perfunctory and simple; but the train was jammed full of people, and it was two hours before we started again.
r />   The next stop came fifteen minutes later—the Azerbaijan border at Beakykok, with many more soldiers and an imposing railway station. The soldiers tramped through the train, scrutinizing passports. I was apprehensive because my visa specified "Entry point—Baku." I was more than three hundred miles from there, but this didn't seem to matter to the soldier who licked his thumb and paged through my passport. He took no interest in my bag or its contents, but he admired my shortwave radio, tuned to the BBC. Fears of a civil war in Iraq are being expressed by officials at the highest levels, a woman was saying on the news.

  After midnight we were rolling again. I woke in the darkness, urgently, to use the john but could not budge my door. It seemed I was locked in. The compartment was very hot and the train was moving fast, throwing me back and forth. It was too dark for me to see whether the lock was jammed. For five or ten minutes I struggled with the door in a cramped and growing panic—something I seldom feel. The light didn't work, but I dug out my BlackBerry and switched it on. No reception, but it proved a helpful flashlight illuminating my problem. At last, braced against the berth and kicking at the door, I managed to open it. The corridor was thick with Azerbaijanis gaping out the window at shadowy Tovuz, in the western province, and some of them were staring at me, presumably because they'd heard me kicking the door, or maybe it was my odd-shaped flashlight. The toilet was unspeakable.

  At dawn, nine hours past the border, I saw great flat plains with muddy patches, looking overgrazed by the flocks of nibbling sheep—hundreds of them, a clear indication of mutton stews and shish kebabs farther down the line. The whole of the foreground was cropped flat, and in the distance were bare blue mountains.

  On this great Gromboolian plain was a village of steep-roofed bungalows. Some of the bungalows had a graceful roofline, the curvature with a hint of Asia in the pitch. The landscape looked unfinished, like an Edward Lear watercolor—no trees, no people, the usual sheep, a few sketched-in paths, and I was reminded that I had not seen a tourist or a green leaf or any sunshine since leaving Paris.