by Paul Theroux
He let me have my paper.
At the Gare du Nord my car was shunted on to a different engine. Duffill and I watched this being done from the platform and then we boarded. It took him a long time to heave himself up, and he panted with effort on the landing. He was still standing there, gasping, as we pulled out of the station for our twenty-minute trip to the Gare de Lyons to meet the rest of the Direct-Orient Express. It was after eleven, and most of the apartment blocks were in darkness. But in one bright window there was a dinner party ending, like a painting of a city interior, hung and illuminated in the shadowy gallery of rooftops and balconies. The train passed and printed the window on my eye: two men and two women around a table on which there were three wine bottles, the remains of a large meal, coffee cups, a raided bowl of fruit. All the props, and the men in shirt sleeves, spoke of amiable intimacy, the sad comedy of a reunion of friends. Jean and Marie had been away. Jean was smiling, preparing to clown, and had pulled one of those confounded French faces. He waved his hand back and forth and said, ‘She got up on the table like a mad-woman and began shaking it at me like this. Incredible! I said to Marie, “The Picards will never believe this!” This is the truth. And then she – ’
The train made its slow circuit of Paris, weaving among the dark buildings and shrieking frseeeeeeeefronnnng into the ears of sleeping women. The Gare de Lyons was alive, with that midnight glamour of bright lights and smoking engines, and across the gleaming tracks the ribbed canvas over one particular train turned it into a caterpillar about to set off and chew a path through France. On the platform arriving passengers were yawning, shambling with fatigue. The porters leaned on luggage carriers and watched people struggling with suitcases. Our car met, and coupled with, the rest of the Direct-Orient Express; that bump slid the compartment doors open and threw me forward into the lap of the lady opposite, surprising her from sleep.
2. The Direct-Orient Express
DUFFILL had put on a pair of glasses, wire-framed and with enough Scotch tape on the lenses to prevent his seeing the Blue Mosque. He assembled his parcels and, grunting, produced a suitcase, bound with a selection of leather and canvas belts as an added guarantee against it bursting open. A few cars down we met again to read the sign on the side of the wagon-lit: DIRECT – ORIENT and its itinerary, PARIS – LAUSANNE – MILANO – TRIESTE – ZAGREB – BEOGRAD – SOFIYA – ISTANBUL. We stood there, staring at this sign; Duffill worked his glasses like binoculars. Finally he said, ‘I took this train in nineteen twenty-nine.’
It seemed to call for a reply, but by the time a reply occurred to me (‘Judging from its condition, it was probably this very train!’) Duffill had gathered up his parcels and his strapped suitcase and moved down the platform. It was a great train in 1929, and it goes without saying that the Orient Express is the most famous train in the world. Like the Trans-Siberian, it links Europe with Asia, which accounts for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself (‘As I couldn’t take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was buy a record of Honegger’s Pacific 231,’ Greene writes in the Introduction to Stamboul Train). The fictional source of the romance is La Madone des Sleepings (1925) by Maurice Dekobra. Dekobra’s heroine, Lady Diana (‘the type of woman who would have brought tears to the eyes of John Ruskin’), is completely sold on the Orient Express: ‘I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may step off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the colour of the eyes of my neighbour in the compartment.’ In the end I stopped wondering why so many writers had used this train as a setting for criminal intrigues, since in most respects the Orient Express really is murder.
My compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. I swung my suitcase in and, when I had done this, there was no room for me. The conductor showed me how to kick my suitcase under the lower berth. He hesitated, hoping to be tipped.
‘Anybody else in here?’ It had not occurred to me that I would have company; the conceit of the long-distance traveller is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone – inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.
The conductor shrugged, perhaps yes, perhaps no. His vagueness made me withhold my tip. I took a stroll down the car: a Japanese couple in a double couchette – and it was the first and last time I saw them; an elderly American couple next to them; a fat French mother breathing suspicion on her lovely daughter; a Belgian girl of extraordinary size – well over six feet tall, wearing enormous shoes – travelling with a chic French woman; and (the door was shutting) either a nun or a plump diabolist. At the far end of the car a man wearing a turtleneck, a seaman’s cap, and a monocle was setting up bottles on the windowsill; three wine bottles, Perrier water, a broad-shouldered bottle of gin – he was obviously going some distance.
Duffill was standing outside my compartment. He was out of breath; he had had trouble finding the right car, he said, because his French was rusty. He took a deep breath and slid off his gabardine coat and hung that and his cap on the hook next to mine.
‘I’m up here,’ he said, patting the upper berth. He was a small man, but I noticed that as soon as he stepped into the compartment he filled it.
‘How far are you going?’ I asked gamely, and even though I knew his reply, when I heard it I cringed. I had planned on studying him from a little distance; I was counting on having the compartment to myself. This was unwelcome news. He saw I was taking it badly.
He said, ‘I won’t get in your way.’ His parcels were on the floor. ‘I just have to find a home for these.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said. The others were in the corridor waiting for the train to start. The Americans rubbed the window until they realized the dirt was on the outside; the man with the monocle peered and drank; the French woman was saying ‘– Switzerland.’
‘Istanbul,’ said the Belgian girl. She had a broad face, which a large pair of glasses only complicated, and she was a head taller than I. ‘My first time.’
‘I am in Istanbul two years before,’ said the French woman, wincing the way the French do before lapsing into their own language.
‘What is it like?’ asked the Belgian girl. She waited. I waited. She helped the woman. ‘Very nice?’
The French woman smiled at each of us. She shook her head, and said, ‘Très sale.’
‘But pretty? Old? Churches?’ The Belgian girl was trying hard.
‘Sale.’ Why was she smiling?
‘I am going to Izmir, Cappadocia, and –’
The French woman clucked and said, ‘Sale, sale, sale.’ She went into her compartment. The Belgian girl made a face and winked at me.
The train had started to move, and at the end of the car the man in the seaman’s cap was braced at his door, drinking and watching our progress. After several minutes the rest of the passengers went into their compartments – from my own I heard the smashing of paper parcels being stuffed into corners. This left the drinker, whom I had started to think of as the Captain, and me alone in the passage. He looked my way and said, ‘Istanbul?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have a drink.’
‘I’ve been drinking all day,’ I said. ‘Do you have any mineral water?’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘But I keep it for my teeth. I never touch ‘water on trains. Have a real drink. Go on. What will it be?’
‘A beer would be nice.’
‘I never drink beer,’ he said. ‘Have some of this.’ He showed me his glass and then went to his shelf and poured me some, saying, ‘It’s a very drinkable Chablis, not at all chalky – the ones they export often are, you know.’
We clinked glasses. The train was now moving fast.
‘Istanbul.’
‘Istanbul! Right you are.’
His name was Molesworth, but he said it so distinctly that the first time I heard
it I thought it was a double-barrelled name. There was something military in his posture and the promptness of his speech, and at the same time this flair could have been an actor’s. He was in his indignant late fifties, and I could see him cutting a junior officer at the club – either at Aldershot or in the third act of a Rattigan play. The small glass disc he wore around his neck on a chain was not, I saw, a monocle, but rather a magnifying glass. He had used it to find the bottle of Chablis.
‘I’m an actors’ agent,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my own firm in London. It’s a smallish firm, but we do all right. We always have more than we can handle.’
‘Any actors I might know?’
He named several famous actors.
I said, ‘I thought you might be army.’
‘Did you?’ He said that he had been in the Indian army – Poona, Simla, Madras – and his duties there were of a theatrical nature, organizing shows for the troops. He had arranged Noël Coward’s tour of India in 1946. He had loved the army and he said that there were many Indians who were so well bred you could treat them as absolute equals – indeed, talking to them you would hardly know you were talking to Indians.
‘I knew a British officer who was in Simla in the forties,’ I said. ‘I met him in Kenya. His nickname was “Bunny”.’
Molesworth thought a moment, then said, ‘Well, I knew several Bunnys.’
We talked about Indian trains. Molesworth said they were magnificent. ‘They have showers, and there’s always a little man who brings you what you need. At mealtime they telegraph ahead to the next station for hampers. Oh, you’ll like it.’
Duffill put his head out the door and said, ‘I think I’ll go to bed now.’
‘He’s your chap, is he?’ said Molesworth. He surveyed the car. ‘This train isn’t what it was. Pity. It used to be one of the best, a train de luxe – royalty took it. Now, I’m not sure about this, but I don’t think we have a dining car, which is going to be a terrible bore if it’s true. Have you got a hamper?’
I said I hadn’t, though I had been advised to bring one.
‘That was good advice,’ Molesworth said. ‘I don’t have a hamper myself, but then I don’t eat much. I like the thought of food, but I much prefer drinking. How do you like your Chablis? Will you have more?’ He inserted his eyeglass and found the bottle and, pouring, said, ‘These French wines take an awful lot of beating.’
A half hour later I went into the compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a grey corpselike look, and his pyjamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn’t sleep, at first; my cold and all that I’d drunk – the fatigue itself – kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.
Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.
In the morning Duffill was gone. I lay in bed and worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I travelled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.
At Vevey, I thought of Daisy and restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He’d be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn’t say what he’d be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much older than he had in the greyness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.
He looked out at the Alps. He said. ‘They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they’d be rather flatter.’
I decided to have breakfast, but I walked to both ends of the Direct-Orient and saw no dining car – nothing except more sleeping cars and people dozing in their second-class seats. On my way back to Car 99 I was followed by three Swiss boys who, at each compartment door, tried the handle; if it responded they slid the door open and looked in, presumably at people dressing or lounging in bed. Then the boys called out, ‘Pardon, Madame!’ ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ as the occupants hastily covered themselves. As these ingenious voyeurs reached my sleeping car they were in high spirits, hooting and shrieking, but it was always with the greatest politeness that they said, ‘Pardon, Madame!’ once they got a door open. They gave a final yell and disappeared.
The door to the Americans’ compartment opened. The man was out first, swinging the knot of his tie, and then the woman, feebly balancing on a cane, tottered out and followed after, bumping the windows as she went. The Alps were rising, and in the sheerest places wide-roofed chalets were planted, as close to the ground as mushrooms and clustered in the same way at various distances from gravity-defying churches. Many of the valleys were dark, the sun showing only farther up on cliff faces and at the summits. At ground level the train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.
The American couple returned. The man looked in my direction and said, ‘I can’t find it.’
The woman said, ‘I don’t think we went far enough.’
‘Don’t be silly. That was the engine.’ He looked at me. ‘Did you find it?’
‘What?’
‘The dining car.’
‘There isn’t one,’ I said. ‘I looked.’
‘Then why the hell,’ the man said, only now releasing his anger, ‘why the hell did they call us for breakfast?’
‘Did they call you?’
‘Yes. “Last call.” Didn’t you hear them? “Last call for breakfast,” they said. That’s why we hurried.’
The Swiss boys, yelling and sliding the compartment doors open, had preceded the Americans’ appearance. This commotion had been interpreted as a summons to breakfast; hunger’s ear is not finely tuned.
The man said, ‘I hate France.’
His wife looked out the window. ‘I think we’re out of it. That’s not France.’
‘Whatever it is,’ said the man. He said he wasn’t too happy, and he didn’t want to sound like a complainer, but he had paid twenty dollars for a taxi from ‘the Lazarus to the Lions’. Then a porter had carried their two suitcases from the taxi to the platform and demanded ten dollars. He didn’t want French money; he wanted ten dollars.
I said that seemed excessive and added, ‘Did you pay?’
‘Of course I paid,’ said the man.
‘I wanted him to make a fuss,’ said the woman.
The man said, ‘I never get into arguments with people in foreign countries.’
‘We thought we were going to miss the train,’ said the woman. She cackled loudly. ‘I almost had a haemorrhage!’
On an empty stomach, I found this disconcerting. I was glad when the man said, ‘Well, come along, mother; if we’re not going to get any breakfast we might just as wel
l head back,’ and led her away.
Duffill was eating the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.
‘Try the lights,’ he said. ‘I can’t eat in the dark. I can’t taste it.’
I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.
Duffill said, ‘Maybe they’re trying to save electricity.’
His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels’ drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill’s woollens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sink-hole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.
Duffill said, ‘This must be the Simplon.’
I said, ‘I wish they’d turn the lights on.’
I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.
I said, ‘What do you aim to do in Turkey?’
‘Me?’ Duffill said, as if the compartment was crammed with old men bound for Turkey, each waiting to state a reason. He paused, then said, ‘I’ll be in Istanbul for a while. After that I’ll be travelling around the country.’
‘Business or pleasure?’ I was dying to know and in the confessional darkness did not feel so bad about badgering him; he could not see the eagerness on my face. On the other hand, I could hear the tremulous hesitation in his replies.
‘A little of both,’ he said.
This was not helpful. I waited for him to say more, but when he added nothing further, I said, ‘What exactly do you do, Mr Duffill?’
