At 23.32, a train approached – but it was a freight, and it ran through the station. After another five minutes, another headlight approached, which gradually became an electric loco pulling a single carriage. It was the train to Turkey: the ghost train of the Orient Express, that ‘Magic Carpet of the East’, ‘The King of Trains and the Train of Kings’.
The carriage was fitted with dingy blue open seating, with ugly headrests. There was one passenger – a youth who was asleep – and another male-and-female team of guards, who asked us to write our passport numbers and other details on a form. Sarah’s son – ‘a real trooper’, according to his mother – said, ‘I can cross another two countries off my map!’ Soon we were ambling through the darkness at forty miles an hour. We called at a couple of stops, and at the second one, both the youth and the woman with the gold teeth had disembarked. (So she wasn’t Turkish.)
We exited Bulgaria at Svilengrad, where our passports were checked and forms collected. In 1952, the border between Turkey and Bulgaria was closed, and the Simplon Orient was advertised as terminating at either Svilengrad or, if the situation in Bulgaria was too dangerous, at Sofia. At 3am we pulled into Kapıkule, in Turkey. It was here that the dining cars were belatedly attached to the westbound Orient Expresses, no doubt to the relief of the passengers, who had probably expected them to be present from the ‘off ’. The station name was spelt out in red neon on top of a bland 1970s building. We stepped off the train to be greeted by half a dozen Turkish customs men, some in uniform, some in plain clothes. Turkey-to-Bulgaria had been an aspiration of many migrants, and the crisis had made hotspots of all the crossing points. We were not desperate refugees heading west, but whimsical tourists heading east. Even so, the head man of the border guards – a good-looking chap in a leather jacket – seemed anxious to make us feel at ease.
‘Welcome to Turkey,’ he said. ‘Show visas please. Paper visa or electronic both OK.’ We were shown into a bare room. After half an hour, a hatch connecting our waiting room with the adjacent office was opened and a Turkish policeman was revealed. He slowly lit a cigarette, then muttered ‘Passports.’
The customs men now ushered us towards an outhouse containing a metal detector and a silent, very tall man. I put my own bag through the machine, then helped Sarah with hers. As we were walking towards the coach that would take us to Istanbul, the X-ray man called to one of the customs men, who asked us to return to the outhouse. Something suspicious had been discovered in Sarah’s suitcase. At this, I protested: ‘This bag is nothing to do with me. I was only helping the lady!’ The leather-jacketed customs man looked at me with narrowed eyes. The suspicious object, it turned out, was a metal statue of Superman of unusual density. Everyone laughed, except the leather-jacketed man, who had not been impressed by my moment of un-chivalry. ‘You!’ he commanded, ‘Help the lady again with her luggage.’
We boarded the coach for Istanbul. ‘Nothing spells fun,’ said Sarah, ‘like a four-hour bus ride.’ But the coach was made cosy by many rugs on the floor. It was manned by a driver and three colleagues, or maybe they were just friends, since they didn’t seem to do anything apart from exchange jovial remarks with the driver, and make a fuss of Sarah’s son. Watching the Turkish motorway unfold, I reflected that here was something we had in common with the passengers on the original Orient Express: while travelling on what was supposed to be a railway journey, we had made our final approach to the Turkish capital on something other than a train. For that party of 1883, the fourteen-hour voyage by which they were, like W. B. Yeats in his poem, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, was not pleasant. The engine of the steamer smoked badly, and the sea was rough. Nobody was interested in the elaborate dinner prepared by a Viennese chef.
After a couple of hours, we stopped at a service station, and were invited to use the toilets in a restaurant apparently kept open especially for that purpose. An hour later, we were driving through the city walls of Istanbul. If we’d come in on the train, we’d have been skirting the Sea of Marmara beneath the walls of Topkapı Palace.
At 06.00, we pulled up. ‘Sirkeci Station!’ the driver announced proudly, and we had reached the terminating point of the Orient Express, or the car park adjacent to it.
It was still dark, but I could read a plaque outside the station, which began, ‘The Orient Express which takes off from Paris, brought its passengers to the terminal for many years.’ The station was open – in the sense of it being accessible to the public – and illuminated by pretty orange lights, but no trains would be leaving that day, and whether Sirkeci will ever return to normal service is uncertain. A couple of vagrants slept on the concourse, and there were about twenty cats, padding loftily about and cutting each other dead. The station has circular and arched windows of stained glass, and delicate iron pillars holding up a glass roof. A placard propped against one of these pointed towards the Orient Express Restaurant, which would be opening later in the day, a possible pointer to the future of Sirkeci: as a leisure amenity or heritage centre.
Since 2013, the station has been closed to trains because of the Marmaray Tunnel project. The tunnel – running under the strait to the Asian side – opened in 2013, and can be traversed on trains accessible from the Metro station below Sirkeci. It is the work to extend the commuter line using the tunnel that has closed the station, and that work had stalled.
The restaurant has a terrace abutting one of the two platforms, and I sat down there and ate the last of my processed cheese, and drank the last of my mineral water. (I had said goodbye to Sarah and her son, who’d gone off in search of a taxi.)
When I emerged from the station it was raining, and there was nothing golden about the Golden Horn. The choppy grey waters reminded me of Hannay’s arrival in Istanbul, as described in Greenmantle:
I don’t quite know what I expected – a sort of fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water, and stately Turks in surplices, and veiled houris, and roses and nightingales and some sort of string band discoursing sweet music. I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere. It was a drizzling day, with a southeast wind blowing, and the streets long troughs of mud.
This contrasts with Buchan’s own memoir of visiting the town. ‘Constantinople,’ he wrote, ‘is pure Arabian Nights. My experience varied from lunching in state with the Sultan’s brother and dining at Embassies to chaffering with Kurds for carpets in a sort of underground Bazaar. I don’t know any place where one feels history more vividly.’ These two seem inverted. It ought to be the latter, rather than the former, that it is the fiction.
THE PERA PALACE
I put up my umbrella and set off across the bridge for Pera, which had been a new suburb in 1892, when Nagelmackers opened the Pera Palace Hotel to accommodate his travellers arriving on the Orient Express at Sirkeci, which had opened in 1890. The Wagons-Lits office and its agents were also lodged at the Pera Palace. Some effete types would have been carried to the hotel in sedan chairs, thus reverting at Sirkeci from the nineteenth to the eighteenth century. The original party of 1893 were taken to the Pera in horse-drawn carriages, having disembarked from their steamer. They had been met at the dockside by Turkish dignitaries and the Belgian Ambassador, but a greater honour was in store for Opper de Blowitz. He would be granted an audience with the Sultan himself, and since Abdul Hamid II was officially the ‘Emperor of Powerful Emperors, the Sole Arbiter of the World’s Destiny, Refuge of Sovereigns, Distributor of Crowns to the Kings of the World, Ruler of Europe, Asia and Africa, High King of the Two Seas, and Shadow of Allah Upon the Earth’, this must be counted a signal honour.
In those days, Constantinople was to be approached with caution. Its hectic streets were frightening, in the grip of an unknowable morality, or possibly none at all. Among the travellers’ accoutrements recommended by George Bradshaw in his Hand-Book to the Turkish Empire (1870) was a Deane & Adams revolver. But by the time Nagelmackers launched the Orient Express, Turkey was presenting a smiling face. Or, a smiling fa
ce was being painted on it.
In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, Disraeli had attempted to prop up Turkey (the ‘sick man of Europe’), in the face of antipathy from Russia and the Balkans. The Sultan had promised reform. On the strength of these developments, the firm of Thomas Cook placed an advert in The Excursionist and Tourist Advertiser on 19 April 1884, proclaiming that ‘political and military troubles, and brigandage’ in Eastern Europe were at an end: ‘We have decided that the time has now arrived when we may without doubt do everything we possibly can to induce travellers to visit these interesting districts.’ (Henri Opper de Blowitz, by the way, was a beneficiary of the Congress of Berlin twice over. Not only was his joyride on the Orient Express enabled by its diplomacy, he had also made his name as a journalist by leaking its conclusions before they were published.)
I arrived at the hotel, to be greeted with embarrassing deference. In 1896, that Wagons-Lits propaganda sheet, The Continental Traveller, had said of the hotel, ‘It enjoys the most perfect air on account of its situation.’ It had then pointedly added, ‘The sanitation, the furniture, and the comfort are English.’
In his short story ‘Turkish Night’, Paul Morand was his usual charitable self about the Pera Palace: ‘The hotel was unbearable: sneaky faces, loose mouths, fat noses, receding chins, charred crepe eyelids, sharp Pera eyes. A shrill pistol-shooting orchestra played to smoking-room seats covered with false Bokharas lit by mosque lamps made from soda bottles.’ That was in the early 1920s. A couple of years ago the hotel was (to use a word that would have made Morand’s lip curl) refurbished, and I found it flawlessly stylish: a soft-focus film set of silver chandelier-light, white marble, burnished brass and rich red Turkey carpets.
On gaining my room, I closed the velvet curtains against the grey sky, and went to sleep. Even travellers who’d arrived in Istanbul on the proper Orient Express were exhausted by the journey: a combination of excitement and overindulgence giving way to stress and perhaps a few hours of actual deprivation (if the last dining car had failed to appear). At the end of his documentary on the Orient Express, Ian Nairn, looking even more dishevelled than usual, perches on the buffer stop at Sirkeci. ‘My impressions of the whole journey?’ he says, in a shaky voice. ‘I’m so physically shattered, it’s hard to sort ’em out – a kind of shock therapy right through Europe, this one …’
***
I hadn’t booked into the ‘Agatha Christie Room’, number 411. That was twice the price of my own sufficiently splendid quarters, and anyway its provenance is questionable.
In An Autobiography, Christie described her first run on the Orient Express, undertaken in 1928 soon after her husband, Archie, had said he wanted a divorce. ‘It was settled at last. I wrote to my lawyers and went to see them. Things were put in train.’ That phrase might have been meant literally, because she did then board the train to Istanbul. On it, she met a Buchan-esque ‘Dutch mining engineer’, who, on the approach to what they both called ‘Stamboul’, advised her to stay at the Tokatlıyan Hotel: ‘You are quite safe there.’ Except possibly from him, because he added: ‘I will call for you at nine o’clock.’ The flirtation fizzled out, and the Tokatlıyan Hotel closed down in the 1950s. Christie progressed further east by train, to Iraq, where she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist.
The two began a phase of almost commuting on the Orient Express, shuttling between England and Mallowan’s excavations. According to the travel writer Andrew Eames, ‘on further occasions she sometimes chose the Pera Palace’. I will take Eames’s word for it, having read his authoritative and enjoyable work The 8.55 to Baghdad, in which he pursues every possible connection between Agatha Christie and the Orient Express.
Eames did stay in Christie’s room, and found it ‘far more modest’ than others in the hotel bearing plaques indicating that they had been favoured by the likes of Marshal Tito, Mata Hari and Greta Garbo. He explains how ‘The designation of room 411 as hers was largely the work of a glossy American psychic and self-publicist called Tamara Rand.’ In 1979, Rand was recruited by Warner Brothers to promote a projected film about Agatha Christie’s famous ‘lost weekend’. Rand obligingly had a vision of Christie (three years dead by then) getting off a train, then entering a room – number 411 – of a Pera Palace-like hotel. Thus was an awkward situation rectified, because the fact is that in Murder on the Orient Express, which is the foundation stone for all this mythologizing, Poirot stays at the Tokatlıyan Hotel, where he meets M. Bouc, the Belgian director of W-L, a man whose natural habitat surely ought to have been the Pera Palace.
***
I woke up at lunchtime, and opened the curtains to see that Istanbul had got its act together: sunshine, the reverberating call to prayer, wheeling seagulls. Early travellers on the Orient Express might have thought the world came to an end in Constantinople, only to find that it started up again on the other side of the Bosphorus. I myself took a ferry across to the Asian side – one of those wide, bouncing boats, with the sunlight flashing in through the windows – and walked to Haydarpaşa Station, dating from 1909, and described by Eames as rising ‘like a proud neo-German schloss complete with turreted corners, directly from the quayside, where it is surrounded on three sides by water’. This was the Asian counterpart to Sirkeci, and remains its counterpart, in that it too has been closed by the Marmaray Tunnel project.
The tunnel does not run from Sirkeci to Haydarpaşa, as traditionalists, fond of that east-west railway double act, would have liked. It goes from Sirkeci to Üsküdar, which is north of Haydarpaşa, leaving the latter dangerously out on a limb. The high-speed line being projected from Ankara to Istanbul might come into Haydarpaşa, or it might not. At the time of writing, it terminates at Pendik, east of Istanbul, and Haydarpaşa is apparently being eyed by the speculators. Meanwhile, it is given over to dusty sunbeams, and another colony of cats.
Nagelmackers had perpetuated his vision on this side of the water. The Wagons-Lits company had an atelier, or workshop, at Haydarpaşa, and it despatched trains from there, allowing Orient passengers to continue east. (They were taken across the Bosphorus in special Wagons-Lits launches.) Most famously, there was, from 1930, the Taurus Express to Aleppo, with carriages and connections to Tehran, Mosul, Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo. But travel that way lay well beyond the territory depicted on the badge of the British Railwaymen’s Touring Club, I’m glad to say.
I spent the rest of the day shuttling between the Pera Palace and the main tourist street, Istiklal Avenue, using an alleyway about which a friendly hotel doorman had tipped me off. Istiklal has an antiquarian bookshop of the kind you might find in Oxford, but it’s not easy to get a drink on that street. You have to go down the alleyways to the north. I wondered whether the bars and pubs were thinning out under the more Islamic society promoted by President Erdoğan. I discussed this with a barman. ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘most Turks don’t drink much anyway?’ ‘Like hell they don’t,’ he said, and he pointed out that modern Turkey had been founded by a brilliant alcoholic: Kemal Atatürk.
In the early days of the Orient Express, British diplomats made their own fraught calculations. Turkey, at the helm of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, may have been ‘the sick man of Europe’, but it was still gingerly embraced as a counter-weight against Russia. At the time of my visit, the European Union was engaging in a similarly wary clinch, in order to secure Turkey’s help in the migrant crisis. Turkey can exact a high price for its support, but it didn’t exactly choose its pivotal position, and it was also paying a high price, in the form of Islamist attacks.
When I flew back on a British Airways flight from Istanbul, the plane was only a third full. We were told to congregate in the middle before take-off, for balance, but that we could spread out once in the air. That was on Saturday 12 March 2016. The following Saturday, an Islamic State suicide bomber blew himself up on Istiklal Avenue, at the junction with the alleyway that had formed my cut through to the Pera Palace. Five people died, including the pe
rpetrator. Thirty-six people were wounded, including twenty-four Turks. Looking in detail at the news reports, I was satisfied that neither Sarah nor her son were among the casualties.
5
THE SUD EXPRESS
I was back in Paris for a journey on the Sud Express, which was no hardship of course. Paris is the railway city par excellence. The Parisian stations were polished and set like so many jewels by Baron Haussmann, architect-protégé of that great rail enthusiast, Napoleon III. The approaches to the Gare de l’Ouest (Montparnasse) were opened up by Rue de Rennes, and Haussmann framed the Gare St Lazare by the creation of the Place de Rome. In 1855, the northerly prong of Haussmann’s ‘Grande Croisée’ was formed of the Boulevard de Sébastopol and its extension, the Boulevard de Strasbourg, which is like a red carpet flamboyantly bowled by this ‘Attila of the Straight Line’ towards the classical façade of the Gare de l’Est. The Boulevard de Magenta was extended to reach the new Gare du Nord, although compared to Est, Nord is tucked away, like a masterpiece kept in a cupboard.
Night Trains Page 18
