by Paul Theroux
Much later on my trip, in the bar of a Russian ship in the Sea of Japan, on my way from the Japanese railway bazaar to the Soviet one beginning in Nakhodka, I met a jolly Yugoslav named Nikola who told me, ‘In Yugoslavia we have three things – freedom, women, and drinking.’
‘But not all three at the same time, surely?’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t take offence. I was seasick at the time, and I had forgotten Yugoslavia, the long September afternoon I had spent on the train from Belgrade to Dimitrovgrad, sitting in my corner seat with a full bottle of wine and my pipe drawing nicely.
There were women, but they were old, shawled against the sun and yoked to green watering cans in trampled corn fields. The landscape was low and uneven, barely supporting in its dust a few farm animals, maybe five motionless cows, and a herdsman leaning on a stick watching them starve in the same way the scarecrows – two plastic bags on a bony cross-piece – watched the devastated fields of cabbages and peppers. And beyond the rows of blue cabbage, a pink pig butted the splintery fence of his small pen and a cow lay under a goal of saplings in an unused football field. Red peppers, as crimson and pointed as clusters of poinsettias, dried in the sun outside farm cottages in districts where farming consisted of men stumbling after oxen dragging wooden ploughs and harrows, or occasionally wobbling on bicycles loaded with hay bales. Herdsmen were not simply herdsmen; they were sentries, guarding little flocks from marauders: four cows watched by a woman, three grey pigs driven by a man with a truncheon, scrawny chickens watched by scrawny children. Freedom, women, and drinking was Nikola’s definition; and there was a woman in a field pausing to tip a water bottle to her mouth; she swallowed and bent from the waist to continue tying up cornstalks. Large ochre squashes sat plumply in fields of withering vines; people priming pumps and swinging buckets out of wells on long poles; tall narrow haystacks, and pepper fields in so many stages of ripeness I first took them for flower gardens. It is a feeling of utter quietness, deep rural isolation the train briefly penetrates. It goes on without a change for hours, this afternoon in Yugoslavia, and then all people disappear and the effect is eerie: roads without cars or bicycles, cottages with empty windows at the fringes of empty fields, trees heavy with apples and no one picking them. Perhaps it’s the wrong time – 3.30; perhaps it’s too hot. But where are the people who stacked that hay and set those peppers so carefully to dry? The train passes on – that’s the beauty of a train, this heedless movement – but it passes on to more of the same. Six neat beehives, a derelict steam engine with wild flowers garlanding its smokestack, a stalled ox at a level crossing. In the heat haze of the afternoon my compartment grows dusty, and down at the front of the train Turks lie all over their seats, sleeping with their mouths open and children wakeful on their stomachs. At each river and bridge there were square brick emplacements, like Croatian copies of Martello towers, pocked by bombs. Then I saw a man, headless, bent over in a field, camouflaged by cornstalks that were taller than he; I wondered if I had missed all the others because they were made so tiny by their crops.
There was a drama outside Niš. At a road near the track a crowd of people fought to look at a horse, still in its traces and hitched to an overloaded wagon, lying dead on its side in a mud puddle in which the wagon was obviously stuck. I imagined its heart had burst when it tried to free the wagon. And it had just happened: children were calling to their friends, a man was dropping his bike and running back for a look, and farther along a man pissing against a fence was straining to see the horse. The scene was composed like a Flemish painting in which the pissing man was a vivid detail. The train, the window frame holding the scene for moments, made it a picture. The man at the fence flicks the last droplets from his penis and, tucking it in his baggy pants, begins to sprint; the picture is complete.
‘I hate sightseeing,’ said Molesworth. We were at the corridor window and I had just been reprimanded by a Yugoslav policeman for snapping a picture of a steam locomotive that, in the late afternoon sun, and the whirling dust the thousands of homeward-bound commuters had raised crossing the railway lines, stood amidst a magnificent exhalation of blue vapours mingling with clouds of gold gnats. Now we were in a rocky gorge outside Niš, on the way to Dimitrovgrad, the cliffs rising as we moved and holding occasional symmetries, like remainders of intelligent brickwork in the battlements of a ruined castle. The sight of this seemed to tire Molesworth, and I think he felt called upon to explain his fatigue. ‘All that tramping around with guidebooks,’ he said after a moment. ‘In those horrible crocodiles of tourists, in and out of churches, museums, and mosques. No, no, no. I just like to be still, find a comfortable chair. Do you see what I mean? I like to absorb a country.’
He was drinking. We were both drinking, but drink made him reflective and it made me hungry. All I had had to eat during the day was a cheese bun in Belgrade, an envelope of pretzels, and a sour apple. The sight of Bulgaria, with its decrepit houses and skinny goats, did not make me hopeful of a good meal at Sofia Station, and at the fearfully named town of Dragoman a number of people, including several from Car 99, were taken off the train because they hadn’t had cholera shots. Italy, the Bulgarians said, was stricken.
I found the Bulgarian conductor and asked him to describe for me a typical Bulgarian meal. Then I wrote down the Bulgarian words for the delicacies he had mentioned: cheese, potatoes, bread, sausages, salad with beans, and so forth. He assured me that there would be food in Sofia.
‘This is an awfully slow train,’ said Molesworth as the Direct-Orient creaked through the darkness. Here and there was a yellow lantern, a fire far off, a light in a hut at a remote halt where, barely visible, the stationmaster could be seen five paces from his hut, presenting his flag to the dawdling express.
I showed Molesworth my list of Bulgarian foods, and said I planned to buy what was obtainable at Sofia; it would be our last night on the Direct-Orient – we deserved a good meal.
‘That should be very useful,’ said Molesworth. ‘Now, what are you going to use for money?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ I said.
‘They use the lev here, you know. But the snag is, I couldn’t find a quotation for it. My bank manager said it was one of those hopeless currencies – I suppose it’s not really money at all, just pieces of paper.’ From the way he talked I could tell he wasn’t hungry. He went on, ‘I always use plastic. Plastic’s incredibly useful.’
‘Plastic?’
‘Well, these things.’ He set his drink down and took out a wad of credit cards, shuffled them, and read their names.
‘Do you think the Barclaycard has hit Bulgaria yet?’
‘Let’s hope so,’ he said. ‘But if not, I still have some lire left.’
It was after eleven at night when we pulled into Sofia, and, as Molesworth and I leaped off the train, the conductor told us to hurry: ‘Fifteen minutes, maybe ten.’
‘You said we’d have a half-hour!’
‘But we are running late now. Don’t talk – hurry!’
We quick-marched down the platform, searching for food. There was a cafeteria with a mob at the counter and then nothing more except, at the far end of the platform, a man with a steaming metal pushcart. He was bald. He held a small paper bag in one hand and with the other he flipped open the several tabernacles of his pushcart and stabbed at white buns and red, dripping sausages, the size of bananas, with pink meat showing in slightly burst seams. There were three customers ahead of us. He served them, taking his time, urging buns and sausages into the bags with his busy fork. When my turn came I showed him two fingers, changed my mind, three fingers. He bagged three of each.
‘The same again,’ said Molesworth and handed him a 1000-lire note.
‘No, no,’ said the man; he pushed my dollar away and at the same time took my bag from me and put it on the pushcart.
‘He won’t take our money,’ said Molesworth.
‘Banka, banka,’ said the man.
‘He wants us to get change.’
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‘This is a dollar,’ I said. ‘Take the whole thing.’
‘He won’t wear it,’ said Molesworth. ‘Where’s your banka, eh?’
The bald man pointed to the station. We ran in the direction his finger was pointing and found a teller’s cage where a long line of disconsolate people stood clutching pieces of paper and kicking their luggage as the line inched forward.
‘I think we’ll have to give this up as a bad job,’ said Molesworth.
‘I’m dying for one of those sausages.’
‘Unless you want to get duffilled,’ said Molesworth, ‘you should get back on the train. I think I shall.’
We did and minutes later the whistle blew and the Bulgarian darkness swallowed Sofia. Enrico, seeing us empty-handed, got Italian crackers from his sister, the nun, and gave them to us; the Armenian lady presented a slab of cheese and even sat with us and had a drink, until her son wandered in wearing a pair of pyjamas. He saw his mother laughing; he burst into tears. ‘Now I go,’ she said, and went. Monique had gone to bed; so had Enrico. Car 99 was asleep, but we were picking up speed. ‘And we’re not badly off,’ said Molesworth, slicing the cheese. ‘Two more bottles of wine – that’s one apiece – and still some Orvieto to finish. Cheese and biscuits. We can call it a late supper.’ We went on drinking, and Molesworth talked of India, how he had gone out for the first time on a P & O liner with thousands of enlisted men, tough mineworkers from the Durham coal fields. Molesworth and his fellow officers had plenty to drink, but the lower ranks were battened down. After a month they ran out of beer. There were fights, the men were mutinous, ‘and by the time we reached Bombay most of them were in chains. But I got an extra pip on my shoulder for behaving myself.’
‘This is the idea,’ said Molesworth. The train was racing, and he was uncorking the last bottle. ‘It’s usually a good rule to drink the wine of the country you’re passing through.’ He glanced out the window into the blackness. ‘I suppose that’s still Bulgaria. What a great pity.’
Large grey dogs, a pack of seven, presumably wild, were chasing across the harsh steppes of northwestern Turkey, barking at the train. They woke me in Thrace, which Nagel calls ‘rather unattractive’, and when the wild dogs slackened their pace and fell behind the fleeing train there was little else to see but a dreary monotony of unambitious hills. The occasional army posts, the men shovelling sugar beets caked with dirt into steel hoppers, and the absence of trees made the dreariness emphatic. And I couldn’t bear those hairless hills. Edirne (Adrianople) was to the north, Istanbul still four hours away; but we travelled over the steppes, stopping at only the smallest stations, an unremarkable journey across a barren landscape: featurelessness is the steppes’ single attribute, and, having said that, and assigned it a shade of brown, there is nothing more to say.
And yet I hung by the window, hoping to be surprised. We passed another station. I searched it for a detail; it repeated fifty previous stations and this repetition kept it out of focus. But just past it was a garden plot and, next to that, three turkeys, moving with that clockwork bustle characteristic of fowl.
‘Look!’ Molesworth had seen them.
I nodded.
‘Turkeys. In Turkey!’ he exclaimed. ‘I wonder if that’s why they’re called –’
But it isn’t. These birds got their name from African guinea fowl which, imported through Istanbul, were called turkey cocks. We discussed this over our morning drink for the next hour or two, and it struck me that, for a man with a wife and children, I was embarked on a fairly aimless enterprise, the lazy indulgence of travel for its own sake.
The great express from Paris became a doubtful and irritating Turkish local once it got to Istanbul’s outskirts, stopping at every station simply to give conductors a chance to fool with notebooks in the Turkish Clapham Junctions and Scarsdales.
On the right-hand side of the train was the Sea of Marmara, where freighters with rusty hulls and fishing boats with the contours of scimitars lay surrounded by caïques in the glittering water. On our left the suburbs were passing, altering every fifty yards: scattered tent settlements and fishing villages gave way to high-rise apartment houses, with shacks at their ankles; then a shantytown on an outcrop of rock, bungalows where it levelled out, and an uneven terrace of wooden houses toppling grandly from a cliff – a style of building (the falling, unpainted, three-decker house) favoured in Somerville, Massachusetts, as well as in Istanbul. It takes a while to realize that what are represented in these vastly different building styles are not social classes, but rather centuries, each style an example of its own age – Istanbul has been a city for twenty-seven centuries – and getting older and more solid (shingle to timber, timber to brick, brick to stone) as you get closer to the Seraglio.
Istanbul begins as the train passes the city wall at the Golden Gate, the Arch of Triumph of Theodosius – built in 380 but not appreciably more decrepit than the strings of Turkish laundry that flap at its base. Here, for no apparent reason, the train picked up speed and rushed east along Istanbul’s snout, past the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Sarayi, and then circled to the Golden Horn. Sirkei Station is nothing compared to its sister station, Haydarpasa, just across the Bosporus, but its nearness to the busy Eminönu Square and one of the prettiest mosques in the city, Yeni Valide Camii, not to mention the Galata Bridge (which accommodates a whole community of hawkers, fish stalls, shops, restaurants, and pickpockets disguised as peddlers and touts), gives to one’s arrival in Istanbul by the Direct-Orient Express the combined shock and exhilaration of being pitched headfirst into a bazaar.
‘It all looks absolutely hideous,’ said Molesworth. But he was smiling. ‘I think I’m going to like it.’ He was off to the high-priced fishing village of Tarabya. He gave me his telephone number and said I should ring if I got bored. We were still on the platform at Sirkei. Molesworth turned to the train. ‘I must say I’m not sad to see the back of that train, are you?’ But he said it in a tone of fussy endearment, in the way a person who calls himself a fool really means the opposite.
To catch a glimpse of oneself in a gilt-framed ten-foot mirror at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul is to know an instant of glory, the joy of seeing one’s own face in a prince’s portrait. The décor in the background is decayed sumptuousness, an acre of mellow carpet, black panelling, and rococo carving on the walls and ceilings, where cupids patiently smile and flake. Overhead are complicated chandeliers, like giant wind chimes in crystal, and past the ballroom’s marble pillars and potted palms is the mahogany bar, hung with excellent copies of mediocre French paintings. This palace, which from the outside looks no more imposing than the Charlestown Savings Bank in Boston, is run by small dark men who look as if they belong to several generations of the same family, and each wears a courtly smirk under his moustache as he gives French replies to English questions. Happily, the hotel is a charitable foundation, according to the wishes of the late owner, a Turkish philanthropist: the profits of your princely spending, every voluptuous excess, improve the lot of needy Turks.
My first day in the city I spent obsessively walking, like a man released on a sudden from the closeness of a long captivity. The single penalty of the train, for a rambler like me, is this deprivation of walking. As the days passed I slowed down and, with Nagel’s Turkey in my hand, began sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations. But how should one see Istanbul? Gwyn Williams in his Turkey, A Traveller’s Guide and History recommends:
A day for walls and fortifications, a few days in pursuit of aqueducts and cisterns in and outside the city, a week for palaces, another for museums, a day for columns and towers, weeks for churches and mosques … Days may be spent on tombs and cemeteries and the décor of death will be found to be gayer than one thought …
Af
ter those exhausting forays death itself, never mind the décor, would seem fairly gay. In any case, I had a train to catch; so I poked in a few corners and satisfied myself that this was a city I would gladly return to. In the Topkapi harem I was shown the quarters of the black eunuchs. Outside each cell were various instruments of torture, thumbscrews, lashes, and so forth. But punishments, according to the guide, were not always elaborate. I pressed her for an example.
‘They hang them up and beat them on their feet,’ she said.
A Frenchman turned to me and asked, ‘Is she talking in English?’
She was, and also in German, but she gave to both languages Turkish rhythms and fricatives. No one seemed to mind this, however, and most of the people simply shuffled back and forth, saying, ‘How’d you like to have one of those?’ In the jewel room the remark acquired a curious irony, since most of the jewels on the daggers and swords are fakes, the real ones having been pilfered years ago. The average air fare to Istanbul would undoubtedly buy the whole Topkapi treasury, though the Turks insist, for patriotic reasons, that those eggsized emeralds are genuine, just as they insist that the footprint of Mohammed in the sacred museum across the courtyard is really that of the Prophet. If so, he may have been the only Arab in history to wear a size 14 triple-E sandal.
Stranger than this, but manifestly true, is the story behind the mosaic in an upper gallery of Saint Sofia, which depicts the Empress Zoë (980–1050) and her third husband, Constantine Monomachus. Constantine’s face has the masklike quality of Gertrude Stein’s in the famous Picasso portrait. Indeed, the face of Constantine was put in this mosaic after Zoë’s first husband, Romanus III, died or was exiled. But the best mosaics are not in the grand churches and mosques of central Istanbul. They are in a tiny crumbling dirt-coloured building called the Kariye Camii in the outskirts of the city. Here, the mosaics are wonderfully supple and human, and the millions of little tiles have the effect of brush strokes: Christ seems to breathe, and the Virgin in one fresco looks exactly like Virginia Woolf.
