A German campaigner for Friends of the Earth had told me that while this cutback of sleepers was undoubtedly a bad thing, he was pleased it will not be accompanied by any great expansion of German high-speed rail. In fact, Germany is scaling back on that too. High-speed rail is less environmentally friendly than conventional rail, even if it is not as bad as aeroplanes, but this is not why DB is scaling back on it. The motivation, according to the Friends of the Earth man, is that DB ‘has huge financial problems’.
After ablutions in the WC (which was clean, although the sink was so small there was no room to put down my soap bag), I went to bed and to sleep. But the shunting at Salzburg woke me up, and I went to the loo again, passing the Hungarian sleeping conductor, who was not sleeping, but making notes in a ledger on a high, Dickensian desk in his cubicle at the end of the corridor. This was almost as reassuring as if he’d been on one of the folding seats occupied through the night by Wagons-Lits conductors.
Salzburg has a baleful place in Orient Express history. While the train carried many people worth killing (Michael Barsley lists ‘King’s Messengers and couriers … crowned heads and princelings with their retinues, and gentlemen on important diplomatic missions’) only one murder seems to have occurred on the train – or perhaps the word is ‘from’ the train. In February 1950 the battered body of Eugene Karpe, a US Naval Attaché in Bucharest, was found by the side of the line near Salzburg. The previous week, a friend of his, a businessman named Robert Vogeler, had been sentenced in Budapest to fifteen years in prison for spying. Karpe was travelling to Paris on the Orient Express having visited Mrs Vogeler in Vienna – so his was a life strung out along the Orient Express route. The Austrian authorities declared his death the result of foul play, but no arrest was ever made.
Waking again at quarter to six, I raised the blind. We were at St Pölten in eastern Austria. I had slept through Vienna. On that original press trip, the train had arrived at Vienna late on the second day. A tour of the city had been arranged, so that the party could see the new electric lighting. Edmond About and Opper de Blowitz declined this tour – they had already seen the new electric lighting at Gare de l’Est and Strasbourg, after all. They were more interested in the two women who boarded at Vienna – the very first female passengers. These were Mme von Scala, wife of the Vice-Minister of Transport, and her sister, Mlle Leonie Pohl. Being French, Edmond About was a connoisseur of women as well as food, and he preferred Mme von Scala: ‘She is somewhat of the type of a great English lady, but more animated and with Viennese features that make her even more alluring.’ E. H. Cookridge observes that, in the 1880s, ‘for a woman to travel by night on a train was regarded by most Europeans as unconventional if not actually dangerous’. At night, women could lock themselves in their sleeping cars, but a short night could descend at any minute, when the train went through a tunnel, and women in day cars were advised to keep hatpins and long needles handy. But erotic danger was good for business – for Nagelmackers, and others.
In Paris, from 1898, a musical called The Orient Express ran at the Ancien Élysée Montmartre, ‘departing’ every night at half past ten. Wagons-Lits perhaps endorsed the show. Certainly the company name appeared on the posters, which showed women undressing in sleepers they shared with cad-dish-looking men. The Ancien Élysée was where the can-can had been pioneered, and this ‘Voyage en 2 Tableaux’ was part of a bawdy continuum, since the theatre would be associated with striptease in the 1940s, and Oh! Calcutta! would have a long run there in the 1970s.
The first novel to exploit the racy reputation of the Orient Express was The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, published in 1925. It was by Maurice Dekobra, the pen name of a French playboy called Maurice Tessier. He had once watched a snake charmer in Egypt who had two cobras: ‘deux cobras’, hence ‘Dekobra’. His tale of high life and espionage features a femme fatale called Lady Diana Wynham, who is determined to find ‘the imbecile who will cater to my whims and ripen in my garden of Hesperides some golden apples’. The Girl on the Train it is not, and the significance of sleeping carriages to the plot is more symbolic than actual: they represent a life of gilded libertinism, and Lady Diana is only seen boarding a train – the Orient Express – at the very end.
Here is Lady Diana’s departure from Gare de l’Est:
The early arrivals were wandering through the corridors of wagon-lits … Suddenly I saw a little truck laden with two valises and a toilet case of mauve crocodile which I recognised. I spied Lady Diana following the porter. She was a symphony in pearl grey, from her tiny hat, stabbed through with a diamond ornament, to the tips of her little shoes of alligator skin.
Being a femme fatale, she declares, ‘I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may stop off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or the colour of the eyes of my neighbour in the compartment.’ It’s possible I like this book partly because I’m the only person I know who’s read it, yet it sold 15 million copies when it came out in 1925, and it was the first of the night train bestsellers.
It would be impossible to encompass the amount of sex that must have taken place on the Orient Express. The sleepers most closely associated with the the train, the S-class, had (like the later versions of the Lx-class) some single compartments and some doubles. The doubles shared a washroom that could be accessed from the compartment on either side. You were supposed to lock the door against the opposite carriage, but these washrooms are said to have been used for amours. Or they provided a covert means of access, unseen from the corridor, between compartments. But the chap on his fold-down seat at the end of the corridor was a man of the world, and the Wagons-Lits sleeping car conductors were known for the things they did not do, as well as the things they did.
Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2015, Jean Seaton, official historian of the BBC, said that George Howard, who was the BBC chairman from 1980 to 1983, had claimed expenses for using a prostitute on the Orient Express. The expenses form was found in a safe by a newly appointed secretary. The previous incumbent, Jean Seaton said, had suffered a nervous breakdown, and he (this was a male secretary) had deliberately left the expenses form lying about as a warning that his successor ‘would have to deal with the chairman and he had to be managed around these young women’.
On the opposite platform at St Pölten stood a double-decker commuter train marked ‘Weasel’ and decorated with a cartoon of same. You wouldn’t call an English train ‘Weasel’, since it was the nickname of Roy James, one of the Great Train Robbers. I went back to sleep, and woke again shortly after seven at Hegyeshalom on the Hungarian border. There were no passport checks, Hungary being in the Schengen zone, although it had closed its border to migrants. There had been a migrant camp here in the summer of 2015, but now there was only a vast marshalling yard, and no passengers. Yet there were constant announcements, punctuated by what sounded like blasts on a harmonica. We pulled away, passing empty brown fields, with a light rain falling from a grey sky. The conductor knocked on my door with a white plastic tray, on which was a plastic cup of instant coffee and a jam-filled croissant in a sealed wrapper uninspiringly labelled ‘7 Days’. I took out my map. I was now on the other side of its principal fold, in the place marked ‘Eastern Europe’.
BUDAPEST
We arrived at Budapest Keleti station on time at 09.05. My connection – EuroNight 473, named Ister (Hungarian for ‘Danube’) – would not be departing until 19.10. There is also a day train over the route. It takes only an hour less, and I had missed it anyway, since it had departed at 07.10. There were few historical precedents for how to fill this day. When the Orient Express had speeded up from its 1883 timings it tended to arrive at Budapest late on the second night, in either direction. And there usually wasn’t much of a wait, either for those progressing to Bucharest or those heading to Belgrade en route to Constantinople. In February 1896, for instance, the Orient Express arrived at 01.35, departing for Belgrade at 01.45. Coming the other way, it arrived at 02.02.
&nbs
p; This is why the famous incident at Biatorbágyi Viadukt, ten miles west of Budapest, occurred at the time it did: 12.20am, on 12 September 1931. The Orient Express was heading west along the viaduct when a bomb exploded. The engine and nine carriages – an unusually long consist – plunged into the ravine below, and twenty-two people died. On board the train were delegates returning to London and Paris from an International Air Transport Association conference in Bucharest. They were among the survivors, but the disaster must have underlined their belief in the superiority of aviation. Josephine Baker was also on board. It is said that she sang her big hit, ‘J’ai Deux Amours’, to keep up the spirits of the survivors as they awaited the emergency services. Baker knew her way about a train. As a girl, she had played in the railway yards of Union Station, St Louis, and her first husband – whom she married at thirteen – had been a Pullman porter. She does keep coming up in a railway setting. The following is from Josephine, by Baker and her fourth husband, Jo Bouillon:
It was raining that morning in 1925. The Gare St Lazare was teeming with its daily ration of pale, grim-faced commuters. Suddenly the bustling crowd froze. An excited, noisy, gaudy knot of people had just stepped off the Le Havre-Paris train. They were carrying strange-looking instruments and laughing uproariously. Their rainbow-coloured skirts, fuchsia jeans and checked and polka dot shirts lit up the grey platform … A tall, willowy girl in black-and-white-checked gardening overalls and an amazing hat detached herself from the group. ‘So this is Paris,’ she cried. These were Josephine’s first words about the city she was to conquer.
The Biatorbágy bomb had been planted by Sylvestre Matuschka, a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian Army, who was arrested near the scene. He was a member of a far-right group called the Arrow Cross League, and a political motive has been ascribed to him. But here are some highlights from his entry on the Murderpedia website:
SYLVESTER MATUSCHKA
Classification: mass murderer
Characteristics: Derailment of several trains – Caused the crashes to obtain sexual gratification
Status: Sentenced to death in 1934. Commuted to life in prison. Escaped from jail in Vác in 1944. Never recaptured and his fate is unknown
The viaduct is no longer in use. There are trees growing on it today.
Budapest Keleti station was opened in 1881, so it was only two years old when the first Orient Express arrived, to be met by a military band. In Stamboul Train, Graham Greene describes the station as an ‘echoing hall’, and that is still about right. The arch of the train shed is oddly pinched, like a bishop’s mitre, and this mirrors the shape of the carriage roofs within. There was an air of battered grandeur, with classical pillars leading up to high arched windows, some of them broken. A side entrance hall, which might have been a neglected anteroom of the Louvre, contained giant friezes, one showing showing classical figures, including Mercury, all riding upon – or in Mercury’s case hovering above – a flat-bed railway wagon. So here were the gods … shunting.
Keleti was freezing and everybody seemed to have a cold. There was a strong, sickly smell of bread and cakes, and the platforms were dotted with little fairy-lit kiosks, tended by muffled-up women. In one alcove, a man was slapping raw, pale pink meat onto a kebab spit. I bought a coffee and a ham roll from one of the kiosks, and consumed these next to a stall retailing dusty old magazines, some of them pornographic. Nearby, a thick brown curtain concealed a recess. Pinned to the curtain was a sign showing the number ‘18’ in a red circle with a red line through it. Presumably this meant that only people over eighteen could enter, rather than only people under eighteen. It was too early in the morning to tangle with whatever lay behind that curtain.
A more inviting doorway was marked ‘Wasteels’. Wasteels is a Belgian travel agency, established in 1951, and specialising in discounted international rail tickets. They used to have an office in Victoria, in the 1970s and 1980s, when that station was still, just about, ‘The Gateway to the Continent’. Might they know about the enigmatic sleeper from Bucharest to Istanbul?
The office was reminiscent of an infant school, except without the children. Middle-aged, matronly women sat at low desks in a bright room decorated with tattered travel posters. There were tiny green plastic chairs for their clients to sit on. In front of me, a man took his place on one of these. He was clearly not English, but he and the woman communicated in English, albeit not for long. ‘I want to take a train to Zagreb,’ he said. ‘You can’t,’ said the woman, ‘the border’s closed.’ (Zagreb is the capital of Croatia: in 2015 Hungary closed its border with Serbia and Croatia, to stem the flow of migrants.) She told him there was a bus, however.
I was next. ‘I’m heading for Bucharest,’ I said, at which she began typing furiously on an old computer. ‘I already have a ticket,’ I said, and she stopped typing and looked cross. ‘From Bucharest,’ I said, ‘I want to go to Istanbul on the sleeper,’ and she resumed her manic typing. This seemed promising, but the typing went on too long, and began to be interspersed with sighing pauses. After one final flurry, the woman stopped.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not responding.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘The system.’
‘But I will be able to book a ticket for Istanbul in Bucharest?’
‘Maybe yes. I think so.’
I walked out of Keleti, turning back to look at the arch incorporated into the façade. According to Richards and Mackenzie, this, along with the old Euston Arch (which was un-incorporated), is ‘a symbol of the triumph of the railways, the arrival, consolidation and dominance of the new mode of transport’. With the idea of escaping the cold – and killing time in the way that a patrician Orient Express passenger might have gone about it – I rode a modern, bland underground train towards the Gellért Baths. These are on the west bank of the Danube: in Buda, rather than Pest, on the east bank, where Keleti is located; indeed, Keleti is subtitled ‘East Station’. The second station of the city, Budapest Nyugati, is subtitled ‘West Station’, but it too is in Pest, albeit west of Keleti. Budapest Déli Station is in Buda, and is subtitled ‘South Station’, despite being west of Keleti and Nyugati and south only of the latter. This all becomes slightly less bizarre if it is remembered that the stations’ directional subtitles refer to the direction from which their trains arrive, but then again Keleti serves both west and east, hence its pivotal role on the Orient Express route.
Gellért Baths has an art nouveau exterior and a classical interior. The place is full of muscular male staff, attendant upon basking Hungarian narcissists. In the steaming turquoise waters of the hot pool, I was half sitting, half floating next to a man of about seventy who had heard me arguing with one of the attendants, who’d stopped me going into the main swimming pool because I didn’t have a bathing cap. In order to get a bathing cap, I would have to pay, which would require me to return, by way of labyrinthine cold corridors, to my locker for the money.
‘They should supply the bathing cap free with the towels,’ said my hot pool companion.
I introduced myself, but he did not do likewise, even though he had initiated the conversation.
I complimented him on his English, and asked if he was Hungarian.
‘Half,’ he said, smiling enigmatically.
I praised the beauty of Budapest, describing the architecture as ‘beaux arts’.
‘Buttons and bows are …’ the man said, satirising my French accent. ‘You are here on holiday?’
I explained that I was travelling along the route of the Orient Express.
‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked, after a while.
‘I might write something about it,’ I said (because I have found that people become self-conscious if you openly declare that you’re a writer).
‘You mean you are writing something about it,’ the man said, seeing through my ruse immediately. ‘If you like trains,’ he continued, now swimming around in a little circle, ‘you will like our Metro.’
‘I’ve been on it already,’ I said, not very enthusiastically.
‘On Line 1?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You will like only Line 1, and you can take it to the Transport Museum, which you will also like.’
That was a thought: I dimly recalled that this museum housed an early Wagons-Lits dining car, a ‘teak’, that had been sold to Hungary after the ‘steels’ came in – also that visitors were handed a glass of champagne as they entered this particular exhibit.
For my parting question, I risked asking the man what he made of Viktor Orbán, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary.
‘I am persona non grata, as far as he is concerned,’ he replied, perhaps rather self-importantly.
Now that, I thought, climbing out of the pool, was the sort of conversation that could have taken place on the Orient Express.
There is some excellent Orient Express dialogue in The Mask of Dimitrios, a film of 1944, based on the thriller of the same name by Eric Ambler. It is partly set aboard the train on a westbound run from Istanbul. An insinuating con man called Mr Peters (played by Sydney Greenstreet) shares a compartment with the bemused author Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre). Mr Peters, who is perusing a volume called Pearls of Everyday Wisdom, introduces himself as ‘a man of the world’. He then alarms Leyden by saying, ‘Your passport describes you as a writer, and that is a very elastic term.’ But then again, as he admits, ‘My friend Dimitrios describes me as a spymaster – the term is ambiguous.’ Another line of his that seems particularly fitting for the Orient Express is, ‘I’m not without friends in Sofia. I assume you know Mr Varza?’ When Leyden proposes turning in for the night, Mr Peters says, ‘Ah, sleep, the great mercy vouchsafed to us humans’, which does nothing for Leyden’s attempts to get to sleep.
The mysterious man in the baths was right about Line 1. All the charm of the Budapest Metro is concentrated in this, the oldest of the three lines. It is in fact the oldest underground line on the continent of Europe, dating from 1896. The beautifully preserved stations are white-tiled, and not much bigger than a drawing room. Each contains a wooden booth for the sale of tickets. In mid-afternoon, these were all closed, as signified by the pulling across of thick, purple velvet curtains. The trains were like small yellow trams that made electrical fizzing noises as they stopped and started.
Night Trains Page 15
