The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  ‘Me?’ he said again, but before I could reply with the sarcasm he was pleading for, the train left the tunnel, and the compartment filled with sunlight and Duffill said, ‘This must be Italy.’

  Duffill put on his tweed cap. He saw me staring at it and said, ‘I’ve had this cap for years – eleven years. You dry clean it. Bought it in Barrow-on-Humber.’ And he dug out his parcel of salami and resumed the meal the Simplon tunnel had interrupted.

  At 9.35 we stopped at the Italian station of Domodossola, where a man poured cups of coffee from a jug and sold food from a heavily laden pushcart. He had fruit, loaves of bread and rolls, various kinds of salami, and lunch bags that, he said, contained ‘tante belle cose’. He also had a stock of wine. Molesworth bought a Bardolino and (‘just in case’) three bottles of Chianti; I bought an Orvieto and a Chianti; and Duffill had his hand on a bottle of claret.

  Molesworth said, ‘I’ll take these back to the compartment. Get me a lunch bag, will you?’

  I bought two lunch bags and some apples.

  Duffill said, ‘English money, I only have English money.’

  The Italian snatched a pound from the old man and gave him change in lire.

  Molesworth came back and said, ‘Those apples want washing. There’s cholera here.’ He looked again at the pushcart and said, ‘I think two lunch bags, just to be safe.’

  While Molesworth bought more food and another bottle of Bardolino, Duffill said, ‘I took this train in nineteen twenty-nine.’

  ‘It was worth taking then,’ said Molesworth. ‘Yes, she used to be quite a train.’

  ‘How long are we staying here?’ I asked.

  No one knew. Molesworth called out to the train guard, ‘I say, George, how long are we stopping for?’

  The guard shrugged, and as he did so the train began to back up.

  ‘Do you think we should board?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s going backwards,’ said Molesworth. ‘I expect they’re shunting.’

  The train guard said, ‘Andiamo.’

  ‘The Italians love wearing uniforms,’ said Molesworth. ‘Look at him, will you? And the uniforms are always so wretched. They really are like overgrown schoolboys. Are you talking to us, George?’

  ‘I think he wants us to board,’ I said. The train stopped going backwards. I hopped aboard and looked down. Molesworth and Duffill were at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘You’ve got parcels,’ said Duffill. ‘You go first.’

  ‘I’m quite all right,’ said Molesworth. ‘Up you go.’

  ‘But you’ve got parcels,’ said Duffill. He produced a pipe from his coat and began sucking on the stem. ‘Carry on.’ He moved back and gave Molesworth room.

  Molesworth said, ‘Are you sure?’

  Duffill said, ‘I didn’t go all the way, then, in nineteen twenty-nine. I didn’t do that until after the second war.’ He put his pipe in his mouth and smiled.

  Molesworth stepped aboard and climbed up – slowly, because he was carrying a bottle of wine and his second lunch bag. Duffill grasped the rails beside the door and as he did so the train began to move and he let go. He dropped his arms. Two train guards rushed behind him and held his arms and hustled him along the platform to the moving stairs of Car 99. Duffill, feeling the Italians’ hands, resisted the embrace, went feeble, and stepped back; he made a half-turn to smile wanly at the fugitive door. He looked a hundred years old. The train was moving swiftly past his face.

  ‘George!’ cried Molesworth. ‘Stop the train!’

  I was leaning out the door. I said, ‘He’s still on the platform.’

  There were two Italians beside us, the conductor and a bed-maker. Their shoulders were poised, preparing to shrug.

  ‘Pull the emergency cord!’ said Molesworth.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ said the conductor. ‘If I pull that I must pay five thousand lire. Don’t touch!’

  ‘Is there another train?’ I asked.

  ‘Si,’ said the bed-maker in a tone of irritation. ‘He can catch us in Milano.’

  ‘What time does the next train get to Milano?’ I asked.

  ‘Two o’clock.’

  ‘When do we get to Milano?’

  ‘One o’clock,’ said the conductor. ‘We leave at two.’

  ‘Well, how the hell –’

  ‘The old man can take a car,’ explained the bed-maker. ‘Don’t worry. He hires a taxi at Domodossola; the taxi goes varoom! He’s in Milano before us!’

  Molesworth said, ‘These chaps could use a few lessons in how to run a railroad.’

  The meal that followed the abandoning of Duffill only made that point plainer. It was a picnic in Molesworth’s compartment; we were joined by the Belgian girl, Monique, who brought her own cheese. She asked for mineral water and got Molesworth’s reprimand: ‘Sorry, I keep that for my teeth.’ We sat shoulder to shoulder on Molesworth’s bed, gloomily picking through our lunch bags.

  ‘I wasn’t quite prepared for this,’ said Molesworth. ‘I think each country should have its own dining car. Shunt it on at the frontier and serve slap-up meals.’ He nibbled a hard-boiled egg and said, ‘Perhaps we should get together and write a letter to Cook’s.’

  The Orient Express, once unique for its service, is now unique among trains for its lack of it. The Indian Rajdhani Express serves curries in its dining car, and so does the Pakistani Khyber Mail; the Meshed Express serves Iranian chicken kebab, and the train to Sapporo in Northern Japan smoked fish and glutinous rice. Box lunches are sold at the station in Rangoon, and Malaysian Railways always include a dining car that resembles a noodle stall, where you can buy mee-hoon soup; and Amtrak, which I had always thought to be the worst railway in the world, serves hamburgers on the James Whitcomb Riley (Washington-Chicago). Starvation takes the fun out of travel, and from this point of view the Orient Express is more inadequate than the poorest Madrasi train, where you exchange stained lunch coupons for a tin tray of vegetables and a quart of rice.

  Monique said, ‘I hope he takes a taxi.’

  ‘Poor old chap,’ said Molesworth. ‘He panicked, you see. Started going backwards. “You’ve got parcels,” he said, “you go first.” He might have got on if he hadn’t panicked. Well, we’ll see if he gets to Milan. He should do. What worries me is that he might have had a heart attack. He didn’t look well, did he? Did you get his name?’

  ‘Duffill,’ I said.

  ‘Duffill,’ said Molesworth. ‘If he’s got any sense at all, he’ll sit down and have a drink. Then he’ll get a taxi to Milan. It’s not far, but if he panics again he’s lost.’

  We went on eating and drinking. If there had been a dining car we would have had a simple meal and left it at that. Because there was no dining car we ate all the way to Milan, the fear of hunger producing a hunger of its own. Monique said we were like Belgians, who ate constantly.

  It was after one o’clock when we arrived at Milan. There was no sign of Duffill either on the platform or in the crowded waiting room. The station, modelled on a cathedral, had high vaulted ceilings, and simple signs like USCITA gained the metaphorical quality of religious mottoes from their size and dramatic position on the walls; balconies served no further purpose than to provide roosts for brooding stone eagles that looked too fat to fly. We bought more lunch bags, another bottle of wine, and the Herald Tribune.

  ‘Poor old chap,’ said Molesworth, looking around for Duffill.’

  ‘Doesn’t look as if he’s going to make it.’

  ‘They warn you about that, don’t they? Missing the train. You think it’s shunting, but really it’s on its way. The Orient Express especially. There was something in the Observer about it. Everyone misses it. It’s famous for that.’

  At Car 99, Molesworth said, ‘I think we’d better get aboard. I know I don’t want to be duffilled.’

  Now, as we travelled to Venice, there was no hope for Duffill. There wasn’t the slightest chance of his catching up with us. We finished another bottle of wine and I went to my
compartment. Duffill’s suitcase, shopping bag, and paper parcels were piled in a corner. I sat down and looked out the window, resisting the urge to rummage through Duffill’s effects for a clue to his going to Turkey. It had grown hotter; the corn fields were baked yellow and strewn with shocks and stubble. Beyond Brescia, the shattered windows in a row of houses gave me a headache. Moments later, drugged by the Italian heat, I was asleep.

  Venice, like a drawing room in a gas station, is approached through a vast apron of infertile industrial flatlands, crisscrossed with black sewer troughs and stinking of oil, the gigantic sinks and stoves of refineries and factories, all intimidating the delicate dwarfed city beyond. The graffiti along the way are as professionally executed as the names of the firms: MOTTA GELATI, LOTTA COMMUNISTA, AGIP, NOI SIAMO TUTTI ASSASSINI, RENAULT, UNITA. The lagoon with its luminous patches of oil slick, as if hopelessly retouched by Canaletto, has a yard-wide tidewrack of rubble, plastic bottles, broken toilet seats, raw sewage, and that bone white factory froth the wind beats into drifts of foam. The edges of the city have succumbed to industry’s erosion, and what shows are the cracked back windows and derelict posterns of water-logged villas, a few brittle Venetian steeples, and farther in, but low and almost visibly sinking, walls of spaghetti-coloured stucco and red roofs over which flocks of soaring swallows are teaching pigeons to fly.

  ‘Here we are, mother.’ The elderly American man was helping his wife down the stairs, and a porter half-carried her the rest of the way to the platform. Oddly appropriate, this couple who had seen Venice in better days: now the city and its visitors were enfeebled, suffering the fatal poisoning of the age. But Mrs Ketchum (for that was her name: it was the very last thing she told me) looked wounded; she walked with pain, using joints that had turned to stone, leaning on her stick. The Ketchums would be going to Istanbul in a few days, though it struck me as foolhardy, to say the least, for them to carry their feebleness from one remote country to another.

  I handed over Duffill’s violated belongings to the Venetian Controllare and asked him to contact Milan and reassure Duffill. He said he would, but spoke with the kind of Italianate carelessness that mocks trust. I demanded a receipt. This he provided, showing me his sour resignation as he slowly and distastefully itemized Duffill’s parcels on the chit. As soon as we left Venice I clawed it to pieces and threw it out the window. I had asked for it only to chasten him.

  At Trieste, Molesworth discovered that the Italian conductor had mistakenly torn out all the tickets from his Cook’s wallet. The Italian conductor was in Venice, leaving Molesworth no ticket for Istanbul, or, for that matter, Yugoslavia. But Molesworth stayed calm. He said his strategy in such a situation was to say he had no money and knew only English. ‘That puts the ball in their court.’

  But the new conductor was persistent. He hung by the door of Molesworth’s compartment. He said, ‘You no ticket.’ Molesworth didn’t reply. He poured himself a glass of wine and sipped it. ‘You no ticket.’

  ‘Your mistake, George.’

  ‘You,’ said the conductor. He waved a ticket at Molesworth. ‘You no ticket.’

  ‘Sorry, George,’ said Molesworth, still drinking. ‘You’ll have to phone Cook’s.’

  ‘You no ticket. You pay.’

  ‘I no pay. No money.’ Molesworth frowned and said to me, ‘I do wish he’d go away.’

  ‘You cannot go.’

  ‘I go.’

  ‘No ticket! No go!’

  ‘Good God,’ said Molesworth. This argument went on for some time. Molesworth was persuaded to go into Trieste Station. The conductor began to perspire. He explained the situation to the stationmaster, who stood up and left his office; he did not return. Another official was found. ‘Look at the uniform,’ said Molesworth. ‘Absolutely wretched.’ That official tried to phone Venice. He rattled the pins with a stumpy finger and said, ‘Pronto! Pronto!’ But the phone was out of order.

  Finally Molesworth said, ‘I give up. Here – here’s some money.’ He flourished a handful of 10,000 lire notes. ‘I buy a new ticket.’

  The conductor reached for the money. Molesworth withdrew it as the conductor snatched.

  ‘Now look, George,’ said Molesworth. ‘You get me a ticket, but before you do that, you sit down and write me an endorsement so I can get money back. Is that clear?’

  But all Molesworth said when we were again underway was, ‘I think they’re all very naughty.’

  At Sežana, on the Yugoslav border, they were very naughty, too. Yugoslav policemen with puffy faces and black belts crossed on their chests crowded the train corridor and examined passports. I showed mine. The policeman pawed it, licked his thumb, and wiped at pages, leaving damp smudges, until he found my visa. He passed it back to me. I tried to step by him to retrieve my wine glass from Molesworth’s compartment. The policeman spread his fingers on my chest and gave me a shove; seeing me stumble backwards he smiled, lifting his lips over his terrible teeth.

  ‘You can imagine how these Jug policemen behave in third class,’ said Molesworth, in a rare display of social conscience.

  ‘ “And still she cried and still the world pursues,” ’ I said, ‘ “ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.” Who says The Waste Land’s irrelevant?’

  ‘Jug’ seemed uncannily exact, for outside the train little Jugs frolicked on the tracks, big parental Jugs crouched in rows, balanced on suitcases, and uniformed Jugs with leather pouches and truncheons strolled, smoking evil-smelling cigarettes with the apt brand name, ‘Stop!’

  More passengers had installed themselves in Car 99 at Venice: an Armenian lady from Turkey (with a sister in Watertown, Massachusetts), who was travelling with her son – each time I talked to this pretty woman the boy burst into tears, until I got the message and went away; an Italian nun with the face of a Roman emperor and traces of a moustache; Enrico, the nun’s brother, who was now in Duffill’s berth; three Turkish men, who somehow managed to sleep in two berths; and a doctor from Verona.

  The doctor, a cancer specialist on his way to a cancer conference in Belgrade, made a play for Monique, who, in an effort to divert the man, brought him to Molesworth’s compartment for a drink. The man sulked until the conversation turned to cancer; then like William Burroughs’ Doctor Benway (‘Cancer! My first love!’), he became quite companionable as he summarized the paper he was going to read at the conference. All of us tried as well as we could to be intelligent about cancer, but I noticed the doctor pinching Monique’s arm and, feeling that he might have located a symptom and was planning a more thorough examination, I said good night and went to bed to read Little Dorrit. I found some inspiration in Mr Meagles’ saying, ‘One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind,’ and, with that thought repeating in my brain, fell into that deep slumber familiar to infants in old-fashioned rocker cradles and railway travellers in sleeping cars.

  I was shaving the next morning, amazing Enrico with my portable electric razor as I had Duffill, when we pulled level with a train that bore an enamelled plate on its side inscribed MOSKVA-BEOGRAD. The Direct-Orient halted, making its couplings grunt, and Enrico dashed out of the door. This was Belgrade, calling attention to the fact with acronyms, CENTROCOOP, ATEKS, RAD, and one I loved, TRANSJUG. It was here, at Belgrade Station, that I thought I would try out my camera. I found a group of Yugoslav peasants, Mama Jug, Papa Jug, Granny Jug, and a lot of little Jugs; the men had Halloween moustaches, and one of the women wore a green satin dress over a pair of men’s trousers; the granny, wearing a shawl that hid everything but her enormous nose, carried a battered Gladstone bag. The rest of their luggage, an unmanageable assortment of cardboard boxes and neatly sewn bales, was in the process of being transferred across the track, from one platform to the other. Any one of the bundles would have caused a derailment. Migrants in Belgrade: a poignant portrait of futility. I focused and prepared to snap, but in my view finder I saw the granny muttering to the man, who whipped around and made a threatening gesture at me.

/>   Farther down the platform I had another excellent chance. A man in the uniform of a railway inspector, with a correct peaked cap, epaulettes, and neatly pressed trousers was walking towards me. But the interesting and photogenic feature was that he carried a shoe in each hand and was in his bare feet. They were big splayed feet, as blunt and white as turnips. I waited until he passed, and then clicked. But he heard the click and turned to yell a meaningful insult. After that I took my pictures with more stealth.

  Molesworth saw me idling on the platform and said, ‘I think I shall board. I don’t trust this train any more.’

  But everyone was on the platform; indeed, all the platforms at Belgrade Station were filled with travellers, leaving with me the unforgettable image of Belgrade as a terminal where people wait for trains that will never arrive, watching locomotives endlessly shunting. I pointed this out to Molesworth.

  He said, ‘I think of it now as getting duffilled. I don’t want to get duffilled.’ He hoisted himself into Car 99 and called out, ‘Don’t you get duffilled!’

  We had left the Italian conductor at Venice; at Belgrade our Yugoslav conductor was replaced by a Bulgarian conductor.

  ‘American?’ said the Bulgarian as he collected my passport.

  I told him I was.

  ‘Agnew,’ he said; he nodded.

  ‘You know Agnew?’

  He grinned. ‘He is in bad situation.’

  Molesworth, all business, said, ‘You’re the conductor, are you?’

  The Bulgarian clicked his heels and made a little bow.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Molesworth. ‘Now what I want you to do is clean out those bottles.’ He motioned to the floor of his compartment, where there was an impressive heap of wine bottles.

  ‘The empty ones?’ The Bulgarian smirked.

  ‘Quite right. Good point. Carry on,’ said Molesworth, and joined me at the window.

  The Belgrade outskirts were leafy and pleasant, and as it was noon by the time we had left the station, the labourers we passed had downed their tools and were sitting cross-legged in shady spots by the railway line having lunch. The train was going so slowly, one could see the plates of sodden cabbage and could count the black olives in the chipped bowls. These groups of eaters passed loaves of bread the size of footballs, reducing them by hunks and scrubbing their plates with the pieces.