by Paul Theroux
I believed that when the epicene voice of a youth in a sailor suit, addressing me sweetly as Effendi, urged me to hurry as I boarded the ferry for my last trip to Haydarpasa. I found the upper deck and sorted out my provisions: I had cans of tuna fish, beans and stuffed grape leaves, several cucumbers and a lump of white goat’s cheese, as well as crackers, pretzels, and three bottles of wine – one bottle for each day to Lake Van. I also took with me three cartons of whipped yogurt, which they call ayran, said to be the traditional drink of Turkish shepherds.
But I needn’t have bothered, for while the Lake Van Express was standing at Haydarpasa Station I spotted the dining car. I found my compartment, then went to the dining car for lunch and watched the activity on the platform. Groups of hippies, like small clans of tribesmen setting out for a baraza or new pastures, fought past soberly dressed Turkish families. Minutes later, Turks and hippies found themselves in the same third-class compartments, quarrelling over window seats. The steam locomotives, used by Turkish Railways for short runs, were being stoked at the platform; they poured soot over the boarding passengers and darkened the sky with smoke, giving the German station a German atmosphere.
It was pleasant to be eating, drinking, reading Little Dornit, and moving east once again on a railway bazaar that would bring me to the shores of Turkey’s largest lake. And I was reassured by what I saw of Turkish Railways: the train was long and solid, the sleeping car was newer than the wagon-lit on the Direct-Orient, the dining car had fresh flowers on the tables and was well stocked with wine and beer. It was three days to Lake Van, five to Teheran, and I was supremely comfortable. I went back to my compartment and propped myself at the window – a cool corner seat – and was lulled by the feel of Asia rumbling under the wheels.
We approached the coast and balanced there, on the easternmost shore of the Sea of Marmara, stopping at the outlying towns of Kartal and Gebze (where Hannibal committed suicide) and then to the Gulf of Izmit, flecked with the last lighted eddies of sunset. It grew dark and we were inland, travelling towards Ankara. Our stops were briefer and less frequent, and at these stations little men in cloth caps, figures of discouragement, alighted from the train with roped bundles and, once clear of the stairs, dropped their bundles and looked for the next train. I watched them as we pulled out, taking the light with us, until the only visible thing about them were their cigarettes, bright from their impatient puffing. Most provincial stations had outdoor cafés, full of white chairs and tables and green floodlit trees. The people drinking in them are not travellers; they are locals who have come down to the station after dinner to spend the evening watching the trains go by. The Lake Van Express is an event for the café: as soon as we leave, the hulking fellow shifts in his seat and, pointing over his coffee cup, calls to the waiter in the white jacket, who is momentarily fixed into a posture of concentration by the express. He hears the man’s voice and comes alive, patting the small towel on his forearm and starting towards the table, preparing to bow.
‘Guten Abend.’ There was a Turk at the door to my compartment. He did not speak English, he said, but he knew some German. He had spent a year assembling cars in Munich. He was sorry to bother me, but his friend had a few questions. His friend, an old man who spoke no language but his own, stood just behind him. They entered the compartment timidly; then the German-speaker started in: Why was I alone in the compartment? Where was I going? Why did I leave my wife behind? Did I like Turkey? Why was my hair so long? Was everyone’s hair that long at home? The questions ceased. The old man had picked up Little Dorrit and was turning the pages, marvelling at the tiny print and weighing the 900-page volume in his hand.
I felt I had earned a right to ask them the same questions they had asked me, but I hesitated. They were fresh from the meal they’d had in their compartment and carried an aroma of sour vegetables into mine. They were eyeing my gin. Their fly buttons were undone, and now I could understand why these buttons were called ‘Turkish medals’ by British soldiers in the First World War. The old man kept moistening his finger with spittle and smearing it on my book.
Children’s faces appeared at the door; one youngster began to cry, and my annoyance was complete. I asked for my book back and evicted them. I bolted the door and slept. In my dream I was trying to fly, pumping my arms against a stiff wind that held me like a kite as I tried to rise from the ground. But I remained skimming horizontally the way a coot moves across the water, flapping wildly, but dragging my toes. I had this dream several times a week for three months, but it took a lungful of opium in Vientiane to get me airborne.
There were only Turks in the de luxe sleeping car. So much for the traveller’s truism that natives don’t go first class. As if fearing contamination from the rest of the train, these Turks seldom left their couchettes and they never left the car itself. Each couchette was fitted with two narrow berths, and I spent some time speculating on how these berths were allotted. For example, next to me a saffron-faced man travelled with two fat women and two children. I saw them seated in a row on the lower berth during the day, but God alone knows what happened at night. None of the couchettes held fewer than four people and this crowding gave to the sleeping car the air of squalor in third class these travellers seemed anxious to avoid.
The German-speaking Turk described the rest of the train as schmoozy and made a face. But it was only in the schmoozy part that English was spoken. There, one saw tall fellows with pigtails and braids, and short-haired girls who, lingering near their boyfriends, had the look of pouting catamites. Gaunt wild-haired boys with shoulder bags and sunburned noses stood rocking in the corridors, and everyone had dirty feet. They grew filthier and more fatigued-looking as I moved down the cars, and at the very front of the train they might have passed for the unfortunate distant relatives of the much cleaner Turks who shared their compartments, munching bread, combing food out of their moustaches, and burping their babies. On the whole, the hippies ignored the Turks; they played guitars and harmonicas, held hands, and organized card games. Some simply lay on their seats lengthwise, hogging half the compartment, and humped under the astonished eyes of Turkish women who sat staring in dark yashmaks, their hands clasped between their knees. Occasionally, I saw an amorous pair leave their compartment hand in hand to go copulate in a toilet.
Most were on their way to India and Nepal, because
the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu,
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.
But the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee. Indeed, I had no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation pictures: MISSING PERSON and HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? These initiates had leaders who were instantly recognizable by the way they dressed: the faded dervish outfit, the ragged shoulder bag, the jewellery – earrings, amulets, bracelets, necklaces. Status derived solely from experience, and it was possible to tell from the ornaments alone – that jangling in the corridor – whose experience had made him the leader of his particular group. All in all, a social order familiar to the average Masai tribesman.
I tried to find out where they were going. It was not easy. They seldom ate in the dining car; they often slept; they were not allowed in the fastness of the Turks’ de luxe. Some stood by the windows in the corridor, in the trancelike state the Turkish landscape induces in travellers. I sidled up to them and asked them their plans. One did not even turn around. He was a man of about thirty-five, with dusty hair, a T-shirt that read ‘Moto-Guzzi’, and a small gold earring in the lobe of his ear. I surmised that he had sold his motorcycle for a ticket to India. He held the windowsill and stared at the empty reddish yellow flatlands. In reply to my question he said softly, ‘Pondicherry.’
‘The ashram?’ Auroville, a kind of spiritual Levittown dedi
cated to the memory of Sri Aurobindo and at that time ruled over by his ninety-year-old French mistress (the ‘Mother’), is located near Pondicherry, in South India.
‘Yes. I want to stay there as long as possible.’
‘How long?’
‘Years.’ He regarded a passing village and nodded. ‘If they let me.’
It was the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation. But Moto-Guzzi had a wife and children in California. Interesting: he had fled his children and some of the girls in his group had fled their parents.
Another fellow sat on the steps of the bogie, dangling his feet in the wind. He was eating an apple. I asked him where he was going. ‘Maybe try Nepal,’ he said. He took a bite of the apple. ‘Maybe Ceylon, if it’s happening there.’ He took another bite. The apple was like the globe he was calmly apportioning to himself, as small, bright, and accessible. He poised his very white teeth and bit again. ‘Maybe Bali.’ He was chewing. ‘Maybe go to Australia.’ He took a last bite and winged the apple into the dust. ‘What are you, writing a book?’
It wasn’t a challenge. He was contented – they all were, with one exception. This was the German marathon runner. He could be seen at any hour of the day doing isometric exercises in second class. His addiction was yogurt and oranges. He wore his track suit, a blue zippered outfit, and walked on the balls of his feet. ‘I am going crazy,’ he said. He was used to running twelve miles a day. ‘And if this train takes very long I am going to get out of shape.’ For a reason I did not grasp he was going to Thailand to run. He had been to Baluchistan. He told me the trains were running to Zarand. He smiled at the thought of it: ‘You will be very dirty when you get to Zhedn.’
A bump that night roused me to look out the window and see the disappearing station signboard of Eskisehir. At six in the morning we were at Ankara, where the marathon runner leaped from the train and jogged furiously up and down beside the shunting engines. At lunch, in Central Turkey, the marathon runner told me he had enough yogurt to see him to the Afghanistan border, where there would be more.
Then we stared out of the dining-car window in silence. There was little to remark upon. The landscape was changeless and harsh: long strings of treeless hills lay at the horizon; before us was an arid plain, streaming with the fulvous dust the Lake Van Express had raised. The desert glare hurt my eyes. The only variations I saw were uninteresting acts of God, evidence of floods, droughts, and sandstorms, dry riverbeds in eroded gullies and exposed outcrops of rock. The rest was a waterless immensity that continued for hours under a clear blue sky. The people I saw were like those pathetic figures in a Beckett play, made absurd by their worried movement in a landscape of unheeding devastation. From nowhere a little girl in a charming skirt hobbled with two pails of water, a futile example of the desert’s emphasis; standing in a dry sluice, like a weed, was a Turkish man in his pinstripes, woollen golfer’s cap, V-neck sweater, and tie, his big moustache framing his big grin. Miles from that spot we passed some houses, six of them, built like adobe huts with log butts sticking in a trim row from the roof. This was the Central Plateau, and descending it after lunch we saw signs of irrigation, some green oases, and, far off, the dusty outlines of high mountains. But it was a strain to look out the window, for the glare and the heat increased. By late afternoon the temperature was in the 90s and suffocating dust collected on every surface.
‘It looks more or less like this all the way to Pakistan,’ said the marathon runner. ‘The same, very flat and brown, but of course much hotter and dustier.’
I went to my compartment and lay down, like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee. To cheer me up still further, a small spotty-faced Australian girl from one of the third-class cars wandered by my couchette and asked if she could have a drink. I offered her raki; she wanted water. There were six people in her compartment. The previous night one had crept away – she didn’t know where – ‘so it wasn’t so bad with five. I mean, I slept for a couple of hours, but tonight there’ll be six again, and I’m buggered if I know what I’m going to do.’ She looked around my couchette and smiled. ‘I’m Linda.’
‘I’d ask you to stay here,’ I said, ‘but the thing is, Linda, it’s so small we’d be on top of each other in no time.’
‘Well, thanks for the drink.’
She was a student and, like the others, had a student card to prove it. Even the oldest, most ragged and drugged chieftain had a student card. And for good reason: a card got each one a 50 per cent reduction on the ticket. The spotty Australian girl was paying nine dollars to get from Istanbul to Teheran. My own ticket cost fifty dollars, which was ridiculously cheap for two thousand miles of travel in a private compartment with a fan, a sink, and enough pillows so that I could prop myself on my berth like a pasha and consult Nagel on the passing towns.
One was Kayseri, formerly Caesarea. It appeared at the window that hot afternoon. It had known a number of conquerors since the year A.D. 17, when Tiberius made it the capital of Cappadocia: the Sassanids in the sixth century, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth; it was Byzantine in the ninth, Armenian in the tenth, and the Seljuks captured it a year after the Battle of Hastings. Eventually it was taken by Bayezid, whom some English lecturers know as Bajazeth, Tamburlaine’s crazed captive who brains himself against the bars of a cage in the first part of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. It was after the historical Tamerlane defeated Bayezid at the Battle of Angora (1402) that Caesarea was annexed; then it was occupied by the Mamelukes and in the sixteenth century became part of the Ottoman Empire. But dust does not hold the footprints of conquerors, and not even the bright name of Tamerlane makes this monotonous-looking town interesting. The successive conquests only robbed it of its features, leaving it nothing marvellous except a mosque that might have been built by the architect Sinan, a genius who put up the greatest mosques of Istanbul and is best known for having repaired Saint Sofia’s with ingenious and massive buttresses. The pencil-like minarets of the mosque in Kayseri are just visible between the grotesque tenements, and farther from the town, beyond rows of poplar trees with pale spinning leaves, there are straggling suburbs of doghouses with crooked windows and fatuous little bungalows where Tamerlane’s inheritors are lounging in their gardens, dolefully scanning the horizon for another conqueror.
It is dusk, the serenest hour in Central Turkey: a few bright stars depend from a velvet blue sky, the mountains are suitably black, and the puddles near the spigots of village wells have the shimmering colour and uncertain shape of pools of mercury. Night falls quickly, and it is all black, and only the smell of the dust still settling reminds you of the exhausting day.
‘Mister?’ It is the green-eyed Turkish conductor on his way to lock the sleeping-car door against the marauders he imagines in the rest of the train.
‘Yes?’
‘Turkey good or bad?’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Thank you, Mister.’
From Malatya that third day we crossed the upper reaches of the Euphrates River, to Elazig and beyond, pushing slowly towards Lake Van, stopping often, and, as the whistle’s echo dies, starting again. The houses were still square, but were made of round stones and appeared like cairns showing the way to a carefully irrigated oasis. Farther on there were sheep and goats on the humpy plain; if there had been any grass in evidence one would have said they were grazing. But there was no grass at all, and the battered features of these animals matched the battered ground they stood upon. At several halts children chased the train; they were blond and lively and might have been Swiss, except for their rags. The landscape repeated, becoming bigger, drier, emptier with repetition; the distant mountains had massive volcanic wrinkles, some very green, and the closer hills had these folds as well, but they were brown and scorched, like overbaked pie crust.
The door to my compartment flew open as I was looking at this desolation. It was the saffron-faced man from next door with the large family. He gestur
ed, winced, closed the door, and sat down. He held his head. His children were crying; I could hear them through the window. The man had a narrow moustache and his expression was that of the comedian to whom everything bad happens, the sad figure who suits comedy. He made another helpless gesture, somewhat apologetic, and lit a cigarette. Then he sat back and smoked it. He did not speak. He sighed, finished his cigarette, stubbed it out, slapped his knee and pulled the door open, and, without looking back, marched in the direction of his screaming children.
It was lunchtime, and lunch on the Lake Van Express could be very pleasant if you got to the dining car early enough to be on the shady side and had sufficient elbow room to continue with Little Dorrit. I had just started to eat and read when one of the subchiefs sloped in and sat with me. He had long blond hair in the page-boy style affected by aspiring prophets. His shirt had been artistically cut from a flour sack and he wore a very faded pair of ‘Washington Brand’ bib overalls, an elephant-hair bracelet on one wrist, and an Indian bangle on the other. I had seen him sitting in a lotus posture in second class. He put a worn book by Idries Shah on the table; it had the chewed-over look Korans have in the hands of the languid fanatics I saw later in the holy city of Meshed. But he did not read it.
I asked him where he was going.
He shook his head; his hair danced. ‘Just’ – he raised his eyes and said with drama – ‘travelling.’
He looked rather pious, but it might have been the train. Second class in that part of Turkey lent to every dusty face a look of suffering piety.
