by Paul Theroux
Mr Konopny's whisky glass was sliding back and forth on the table. I said goodnight and went below to my sleeping car. Already the ship had begun to pitch; the waves were hitting the hull and the chains that held the cars stationary were rattling eerily; the iron stanchions creaked, and all night—it was such an unusual feeling—my railway berth tipped up and down, eventually rocking me to sleep to the sound of clanking chains and the shuddering hesitation of the ship's droning screws.
It was light when I awoke, a misty day in the north of France, drenched fields, corridors of slender trees, some with nests in their arms, and one wicked giraffe that became, as we drew near, a farm implement—a loader probably—with a long curved neck peering into a furrow. Through Picardy and Oise and the killing fields of two world wars, we drank coffee. Then I joined Mr Konopny at the window. He gave me his business card and invited me to come to his tailor shop—"We'll have a drink." Just as the French office workers were crowding out of the Metro to start the day we pulled in at the Gare du Nord—too soon. But then, all great trains arrive too soon.
Stranger on a Train: The Pleasures of Railways
[1976]
There are two sorts of people who like trains, and I am neither. The first is the railway buff, for whom trains are toys. With the mind of a child and the constitution of a night-watchman, he has been elderly in that pipe-stuffing British way since he started to smoke; he enjoys running his thumb along the coachwork and jotting down engine numbers on a greasy note-pad, and though he smiles bizarrely when the whistle blows, he doesn't climb aboard: he is going nowhere.
Put your feet up—get the bennyfit, say the second sort. Their knowledge of trains is non-technical. They like the space, the convenience; they like fuddling and fussing from carriage to carriage, juggling cheese rolls and pale ale, or just sitting, dozing, darning socks, doing the crossword and gloating out the window at the traffic jams: "Another level-crossing, Doris. Look at the silly buggers!" Barrister and criminal, publisher and printer, all crammed elbow to elbow in the compartment with Wankers spray-gunned on its walls. They are going to work, or home for the weekend, or to the coast for a bit of fun. They aren't travelers—in a sense nothing alien is human to them; they are non-drivers and Season Ticket-holders—they love chatting: in the area of small talk they are the world's true miniaturists. They have, each of them, a destination.
I know I am not a railway buff, and I prefer not to travel with a destination in mind. Mine is the purest form of travel, a combination of flight and suspended animation. I enjoy getting on trains; I loathe getting off. For instance, last summer in Massachusetts my brother told me a hurricane was on its way. Even the tiredest and most mooching West Indian hurricane, when it reaches New England, causes floods, broken windows, power failures and a kind of fricassee on the television screen. I helped my brother secure his stables, bought a biography of the writer of weird tales, H. P. Lovecraft, and boarded the train for New York. In New York I caught "The Lake Shore Limited" for Chicago and en route my book proved an invaluable conversation piece, since most of my fellow passengers took the title, Lovecraft, to be that of a sex manual. I spent an afternoon in Chicago and at bedtime, instead of looking for a hotel, took "The Panama Limited" to New Orleans: dawn in Winona, breakfast—ai-yugs and gri-yuts—in Jackson, mid-morning in the swamps of Louisiana, a vision of the Jurassic Age. My one regret, when I arrived, was that "The Southern Crescent" (New Orleans-New York) was fully booked. For a terrible minute, in the station at New Orleans, I contemplated a trip to Laredo, Texas, and "The Aztec Eagle" to Mexico City. The Laredo train was waiting. I could imagine the temptations in Mexico City: "El Mexicali" to Nogales, a sleeper on "El Jarocho" to Veracruz, or the three-day journey on Number 49, via Palenque, to Merida and thence to Guatemala, Nicaragua and who-knows-what ferrocarril in Costa Rica? I resisted, and walked to the French Quarter, ate five dollars' worth of oysters and a few days later was on my way back home through the deep south—perhaps Alabama? it was very dark—and the steward was moving through the Lounge Car shouting, "Last call for dinner! If you don't come now you ain't going to get no dinner, and you ain't going to hear this no more!"
The hurricane had passed.
That week was pure pleasure. I had wide berths, a good book, an afternoon in Indiana and a morning in Mississippi. Durant, Mississippi, is not Mandalay, which is a pleasant surprise, because Mandalay is unremittingly dull. And I had good company. To get an Indian on "The Howrah Mail" talking you have first to answer a number of his questions: nationality, occupation, marital status, destination, birth sign, and how much you paid for your wrist watch. They are prying questions, but they license you to be similarly inquisitive. No such preliminaries are required on American railways. To get an American talking it is only necessary to be within shouting distance and wearing a smile; your slightest encouragement is enough to provoke a non-stop rehearsal of the most intimate details of your fellow traveler's life. In one sense, this is the third degree turned upside-down: instead of being tortured with questions you are tortured with replies. This sounds like criticism; I mean it as praise, for conversationally I am a masochist, and there is nothing I like better than putting my feet up, tearing open a can of beer and auditing a railway bore in full cry.
It is well-known that the train is the last word in truth drugs. All the world's airlines have failed to inspire what one choo-choo train has: the dramas of "The Orient Express" and a whole library of railway masterpieces. A rail journey is virtually the only occasion in travel on which complete strangers bare their souls, because the rail passenger—the calmest of travelers—has absolutely nothing to lose. He has more choices than anyone else in motion: unlike the air-traveler strapped in his chair like a candidate for electrocution, he can stroll, enjoy the view and sleep in privacy in a horizontal position—he can travel, as the natives do, the six thousand miles from Nakhodka to Moscow, in his pajamas; unlike the person on ship-board, he can restore his eyes with landscape, eat whenever he chooses and never know the ghastly jollity of group games—and he can get off whenever he likes. He can remain anonymous, adopt a disguise, or spend the five days from Istanbul to Tehran canoodling in his couchette. The train offers the maximum of opportunity with the minimum of risk. A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when you arrive.
I am speaking of long journeys, good services, comfortable seats and berths. British Rail, in its characteristic frenzy of false economy, removes the dining car, abolishes coffee, foreshortens the train, and at the same time retains a brakeman on trains where no brakeman is needed and continues to ensure—on a simple journey from, say, Waterloo to Salisbury—that your ticket is examined no less than five times. For this thumb-twiddling and for braying, "I say that British Rail is second to none in the world!", the head of British Rail is handed a knighthood and enjoined to become part of the already grotesquely overmanned British Establishment. A long, fairly pleasant train journey is possible in Britain if one takes the sleeper to Glasgow and then, via Inverness and Wick, to Thurso, varying on the way back by heading for the Kyle of Lochalsh.
But they order these things better in India. You can leave Jaipur at midnight and, after changing to "The Grand Trunk Express" in Delhi, not arrive in Madras for four days—which can be extended to a six-day rail gala if you go on to Rameswaram at the tip of India's nose, or a full week if you make the short crossing of the Palk Straits and take "The Talaimanner Mail" in Sri Lanka for Colombo. And it's another day on a pretty train from there to Galle.
"The Orient Express" used to be a four-day affair, but why stop in Istanbul when six days and three trains later you can be in Meshed, close enough to Afghanistan to hear gunfire in Herat? Turkish trains have plush bedrooms, Iranian trains serve kebabs, "The Frontier Mail" out of Peshawar dishes up curry, everyone gets a banana with his morning tea on "The Golden Arrow" to Kuala Lumpur; Thai trains have shower rooms (a huge stone jar, a dipper and a well-drained floor), Russian tra
ins have a samovar in every coach, and ones in Sri Lanka have special compartments for you if you're a Buddhist monk. There is a telephone booth on the Amtrak "Metroliner" between New York and Washington and a pop-group on "The Coast Starlight" (Los Angeles-Seattle). "The Vostok" (Nakhodka-Khabarovsk) serves caviar; you can buy roasted sparrows and grasshoppers on most Burmese railway platforms, and everyone in the dining car of "The Izmir Express" (Ankara-Izmir) is presented with a loaf of bread: tear off a hunk, attack your portion of stewed eggplant, Imam Bayildi ("The Imam Fainted"), and either examine the greenery of Anatolia or sip one of their dusty but gamin white wines and say to the lady at the next table, "I can't help admiring your hat—"
When people tell me nothing ever happens on trains I ask them what they mean by nothing. In December, 1964, on a long train journey from Bulawayo in Rhodesia to Lusaka, Zambia, I witnessed two strangers meeting. The man was an Afrikaner, the woman English, both middle-aged and sunburnt, both headed for the Copper Belt. Their courtship began in awkward formality and progressed archly to joshing; they clinked glasses, they exchanged reminiscences. When we crossed Victoria Falls they were holding hands, and that night the man confided to me that he was going to ask her to marry him: "If she'll have me," he added, as if daring me to laugh. He had not slept with her: the Africans on the train (and now, in Zambia, they had penetrated to the bar, wearing papooses and cowboy hats) made him self-conscious. But it was not really sexual reticence—it was part of the Bwana's Code. He said he'd have plenty of time for that once they got to Chingola. Their arrival in Lusaka was festive, their eyes were shining with gin: she had agreed to marry him.
The courtships on "The Orient Express" were brief. Within hours of meeting, the Italian cancer specialist and the Belgian girl were barricaded in a single compartment. On "The Van Gölü Express" hippies copulated standing up in the lavatories with the door ajar. On "The Tehran Express" a pair of Australians in the four-bunk cabin we shared, held a corroboree that ended with a ritual in the dark two feet from where I lay, unable to sleep.
And on "The Rossiya" of the Trans-Siberian Express there was a boy traveling with his father. The father was mortally ill, his face the color of clay, and throughout the trip to Sverdlovsk he remained in his berth under a thick wrapping of brown blankets. The boy sat opposite, drinking sweet Russian champagne. He invited me in, but after one drink I left. The compartment had a smell of death about it, the clammy decay of a tomb; and the combination of the champagne drinker looking out at the snowy forests of Central Russia and his father dying in a narrow berth were more than I could bear. Stretcher-bearers—men wearing harnesses—appeared on the platform at Sverdlovsk; the old man's face was waxen and the boy told me in German, "I think he is dead."
Courtship, copulation and death: it is all the proof I need that the most intense experiences we know are enacted on trains. I have never seen anyone give birth on a train (though a child was born on a steamship I took to Borneo, the M.V. Keningau: I didn't see the birth, but I did see the infant swinging in its bloodstained hammock in steerage) or had anything like the afternoon Philip Larkin records in his poem "The Whitsun Weddings".
My memory of trains does not go back very far, and yet—though it was only twenty-five years ago or so—it was another age, when the tracks were the frontier of every American town and there were tadpoles in the ditches beside them and the expression "to come from the other side of the tracks" was a warning of slums, tenements, children who picked fights, men with runny noses, "people," my mother said, "who'll molest you." My first solitary train journey was in 1949, when I was eight. My father put me in my seat and told me not to move. He gave me a book. Throughout the trip from Boston to Hartford—no distance at all, really—a huge black man in a railwayman's uniform appeared at intervals and said, "Not yet, sonny." It was summer, and soon there were tobacco fields out the window—large, still, spade-shaped leaves in rows that reached to Connecticut. I held my book, but I didn't read it; and I didn't stir until at one station my aunt appeared and knocked on the window, and the black man whom my father had tipped in Boston said, "Off you go." My uncle said I had shown I was a man for having gone all that distance alone, and—he had some connection with The Eagle Lock Company—gave me a brass padlock as a present. I have been catching trains ever since.
When travelers, old and young, get together and talk turns to their journeys, there is usually an argument put forward by the older ones that there was a time in the past—fifty or sixty years ago, though some say less—when this planet was ripe for travel. Then, the world was innocent, undiscovered and full of possibility. The argument runs: In that period the going was good. These older travelers look at the younger ones with real pity and seem to say, "Why bother to go?"
It is a ridiculous conceit to think that this enormous world has been exhausted of interest. There are still scarcely visited places and there are exhilarating ways of reaching them. You can fly to Merida in Yucatan from New York and spend an interesting week among the ruins, and come back to people saying, "It's not what it was,"—every pre-war tourist acting like Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent. But there is a better way to go, as a stranger on a train, via Peachtree Station in Georgia and New Orleans to Nuevo Laredo and Mexico City. It is every traveler's wish to see his route as pure, unique, and impossible for anyone else to recover. The train is the answer; for the bold and even the not-so-bold (there has never been a time in history when the faint-hearted traveler could get so far) the going is still good.
I began by saying that there are two sorts of people who like trains—the railway buff and the joy-rider. There are also two sorts of travelers.
There are those whom we instantly recognize as clinging to the traditional virtues of travel, the people who endure a kind of alienation and panic in foreign parts for the after-taste of having sampled new scenes. On the whole travel at its best is rather comfortless, but travel is never easy: you get very tired, you get lost, you get your feet wet, you get little co-operation, and—if it is to have any value at all—you go alone. Homesickness is part of this kind of travel. In these circumstances, it is possible to make interesting discoveries about oneself and one's surroundings. Travel has less to do with distance than with insight; it is, very often, a way of seeing. The other day I was walking through London and saw an encampment of gypsies on a patch of waste ground—the caravans, the wrecked cars, the junked machines, the rubbish; and children wandering through this cityscape in metal. This little area had a "foreign" look to me. I was curious, but I didn't investigate—because, like many other people, I suppress the desire to travel in my own city. I think we do this because we don't want to risk dangerous or unpleasant or disappointing experiences in the place in which we live: we don't want to know too much. And we don't want to be exposed. As everyone knows, it is wrong to be too conspicuously curious—much better to leave this for foreign places. All these are the characteristics of a person with a traveling mind.
The second group of travelers has only appeared in numbers in the past twenty years. For these people travel, paradoxically, is an experience of familiar things; it is travel that carries with it the illusion of immobility. It is the going to a familiar airport and being strapped into a seat and held captive for a number of hours—immobile; then arriving at an almost identical airport, being whisked to a hotel so fast it is not like movement at all; and the hotel and the food here are identical to the hotel and the food in the city one has just left. Apart from the sunshine or the lack of, there is nothing new. This is all tremendously reassuring and effortless; indeed, it is possible to go from—say—London to Singapore and not experience the feeling of having traveled anywhere.
For many years, in the past, this was enjoyed by the rich. It is wrong to call it tourism, because businessmen also travel this way; and many people, who believe themselves to be travelers, who object to being called tourists. The luxury travelers of the past set an example for the package tourists of today: What was the Grand Tour but a gold-p
lated package tour, giving the illusion of gaining experience and seeing the world?
In this sort of travel, you take your society with you: your language, your food, your styles of hotel and service. It is of course the prerogative of rich nations—America, western Europe, and Japan.
It has had a profound effect on our view of the world. It has made real travel greatly sought-after and somewhat rare. And I think it has caused a resurgence in travel writing.
As everyone knows, travel is very unsettling, and it can be quite hazardous and worrying. One way of overcoming this anxiety is to travel packaged in style: luxury is a great remedy for the alienation of travel. What helps calm us is a reminder of stability and protection—and what the average package tourist looks for in foreign surroundings is familiar sights. This person goes to China or Peru and wants to feel at home. Is this a contradiction? I suppose it is, but we must remember that in the past the very rich went from castle to castle or court to court; from the court of George III in London to the court of The Son of Heaven in Peking. It is much the same among certain travelers today. I was once in Siberia, and I recall an Australian saying to me in a complaining way, "It's cold here!" In Peru an American woman said to me, "I hate these hills—they're too steep." We were in the Andes. And not long ago, in China, a woman said to me, "I've been all around the world—Madagascar, the Galapagos Islands, Arabia, everywhere—and I didn't walk. I never walk. I hate to walk. I never go to places where I have to walk. But I've been everywhere."
