Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE OTHER ORIENT EXPRESS

A NATIONAL CRISIS is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness. Purgatorial as a crisis sometimes is for a traveler, it is preferable to public holidays, which are hell: no one working, shops and schools closed, natives eating ice cream, public transport jammed, and the stranger's sense of being excluded from the merriment — from everything. A holiday is an occasion for utter alienation; a crisis can be spectacle, seizing the stranger's attention.

The reason Paris has the luminous quality of being a stage set is that it was redesigned with that theatrical aim in mind, around 1857, by Georges Haussmann (hired by Louis Napoleon, calling himself emperor), who destroyed its houses and slums in mass evictions, flattened its alleyways and lanes, and gave it wide boulevards, soaring mansion blocks, monuments and fountains, and the big-city conceit of seeming to be at the center of the world. The city was remade in a single style.

Paris's ornate backdrop of beautiful biscuit-colored buildings and extravagant arches and obelisks — the imperial city, complete with floodlights — is so fixed in people's minds, especially people who've never seen it, that describing it is irrelevant. And anyway, who bothers? In the fiction of Paris, it is enough for the writer to state the name of a boulevard or a district. Take Simenon. I happened to be reading his novels, for their portability and their oddness. "He returned to Rue des Feuillantines by a long detour in order to go to Montsouris Park" — no more than that; the place is taken for granted, as fixed as a picture on a calendar. The mention of evocative names is description enough. Nothing to discover, nothing to show; the city looms, but instead of feeling dwarfed, the big-city dweller feels important.

Yet this apparent familiarity, one of the powerful attractions of Paris, is an illusion. "Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations," Nabokov once wrote, "and local color is not a fast color." The brilliant Parisian stage set has a long history of insurrections, mob violence, unrest, and the extreme humiliation of foreign occupation — in the experience of many Parisians alive now, the memory of Germans in charge, the betrayals, the shame of surrender. Once a city's boulevards have been marched by triumphant Nazis, they never look quite so grand again. Like many of its decorous women, Paris, while appearing inviolate, has had a turbulent past, been raped and pillaged and bombed and besieged, and has gone on changing, like its sister city, London, and the other cities on my itinerary: Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Ankara, Tbilisi, Baku, and the rest of the glittering anthills of Asia, as far as Tokyo.

I seldom feel uplifted in a city; on the contrary, I feel oppressed and confined. In my travels I have been more interested in the places that lay between the great cities than the cities themselves: the hinterland, not the capital. It is my suspicion that people who are glamoured by big cities and think of themselves as urbane and thoroughly metropolitan are at heart country mice — simple, fearful, overdomesticated provincials, dazzled by city lights.

So the car burnings of a month before and the present crisis in Paris were revelations. I don't believe in the immutability of cities. I think of them generally as snake pits, places to escape from. But this manifestation—a huge noisy mob at (so the smiling man had told me) the Place de la République — had brought the city to a halt. Perhaps something to see — certainly a rowdy mob was more of a draw than anything I might look at in the Louvre.

I found a taxi. The driver was sitting comfortably, listening to the radio, his chin resting on his fist.

"Place de la République," I said, getting into the car.

"Not easy," he said. "It's the manifestation."

"What's the problem?"

"They're angry," he said, and he mentioned the debonair prime minister, who wrote and published his own poetry, and who wanted to change the labor laws.

More minutes passed, during which the driver made a call on his cell phone. Predictably, he reported that he was stuck in traffic.

"Also, it's raining."

Recognizing a fellow taxi driver, he leaned out the window and began bantering. Then he interrupted himself, saying to me, "And there's road-work on the Boulevard Saint-Germain."

When we had gone nowhere and the meter showed 10 euros—$13, for about fifty yards — I said, "Then I think I'll go to the Gare de l'Est."

"Better to walk there — it's just past that street and down some steps."

I got out, walked back to the Gare du Nord, bought a newspaper, and saw signs to the Gare de l'Est. Crossing the street, I was distracted by a pleasant-looking restaurant, the Brasserie Terminus Nord, the sort of warm, well-lighted, busy eatery that made me hungry on this cold wet day.

I told myself that this was a farewell meal, and ordered a half bottle of white burgundy, salad, and bouillabaisse marseillaise—a big bowl of fish, mussels, large crabs, small toy-like crabs, and prawns in a saffron-tinted broth, with croutons and rémoulade. The waiters were friendly and went about their business with eficiency and politeness and good humor.

Noticing my bag, one said, "Taking a trip?"

"Going to Istanbul. On the train." And I thought: Also Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and onward…

"Nice trip."

"To Budapest tonight, then tomorrow night to Romania. I have a question." I tapped the newspaper. "What is the meaning of licenciement?"

"It means losing your job."

"That's what the manifestation is about?"

"Exactly."

He explained: The prime minister proposed changing the law to make it easier to fire workers who, in France, had jobs for life, since firing them was almost impossible. But the young people had risen up against the change — as did the unions, the communists, and workers generally, because job security was considered sacred. If French jobs were not protected (it was argued), they would be taken by immigrant Poles and Al-banians, leaving the social order in tatters and cultural life under siege by foreigners.

I finished my meal, talked with the waiters, and made a few notes. From these few hours in France I could conclude that French waiters are friendly and informative, French food is delicious, French taxi drivers have a sense of humor, and Paris is rainy. In other words, generalize on the basis of one afternoon's experience. This is what travel writers do: reach conclusions on the basis of slender evidence. But I was only passing through; I saw very little. I was just changing trains en route to Asia.

I continued on my way, walking to the Gare de l'Est, found a steep old staircase that was cut into the slope of the narrow road. A stenciled sign in French on the pavement said, The greatest danger is passivity.

Inside the station, at the far end of this road, a milling crowd with upturned faces searched the departure board for platform assignments. I saw my train listed — to Vienna. This information was confirmed by a voice on the loudspeaker: "Platform nine, for the Orient Express to Mulhouse, Strasbourg, and Vienna"

My train was called the Orient Express? I was surprised to hear that. All I had was a set of inexpensive tickets: Paris-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul, necessitating my changing trains in each city, three nights on sleeping cars. There are two ways by train to Istanbul — my rattly roundabout way, on three separate trains, and the luxurious way. It so happened that the luxury train was at an adjacent platform, its sleeping cars lettered Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, a grand sendoff, with an old-fashioned limo parked on the platform lettered Pullman Orient Express — pour aller au bout de vos rêves (to take you to the limit of your dreams).

This waiting train, which was not my train, was the sumptuous, blue and gold Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, which had run from Paris to Istanbul from 1883 until 1977. It was a ghost of its former self (one sleeping car, no dining car, grouchy conductor) when I took it in 1973, and it was canceled altogether four years later. Its rusted and faded carriages were offered at auction in Monte Carlo, and all of them, all its rolling stock, bought by an American businessman. He plowed $16 million into restoring the coaches and bringing back the luster. He bought a version of the name, too, and restarted this luxury train in 1982. It has been a success with the nostalgic rich.

It was not my train because, one, it was too expensive: it would have cost me around $9,000, one way, from Paris to Istanbul. Reason two: luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living — indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.

I was on the other Orient Express, traveling through eastern Europe to Turkey. The total was about $400 for the three days and three nights, not luxurious (from the looks of the train at the Gare de l'Est) but pleasant and efficient.

"You will take this seat," the conductor said, indicating a place in a six-seat compartment. "You will change at Strasbourg for the sleeping car."

Only one other passenger so far, an elderly woman. I sat down and drowsed until I was woken by a few toots on the train whistle, and off we went, this other Orient Express, pulling out of the Gare de l'Est without ceremony. After a mile or so of the glorious city, we were rushing through a suburb and then along the banks of the River Marne, heading into the hinterland of eastern France in the lowering dusk.

Traveling into the darkness of a late-winter evening, knowing that I would be waking up in Vienna only to change trains, I felt that my trip had actually begun, that everything that had happened until now was merely a prelude. What intensified this feeling was the sight of the sodden, deep green meadows, the shadowy river, the bare trees, a chilly feeling of foreignness, and the sense that I had no clear idea where I was but only the knowledge that late tonight we would be passing through Strasbourg on the German border and tomorrow morning we'd be in Austria, and around noon in Budapest, where I'd catch another train. The rhythm of these clanging rails and the routine of changing trains would lead me into central Asia, since it was just a sequence of railway journeys from here to Tashkent in Uzbekistan.

A lovely feeling warmed me, the true laziness of the long-distance traveler. There was no other place I wished to be than right here in the corner seat, slightly tipsy from the wine and full of bouillabaisse, the rain lashing the window.

I did not know it then, of course, but I would be traveling through rain and wind all the way through Turkey, on the Black Sea coast, through Georgia, and as far as Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, and would not be warm — would be wearing a woolly sweater and a thick jacket — until I was in the middle of Turkmenistan, among praying Turkmen, mortifying themselves and performing the dusty ritual of waterless ablutions, called tayammum, also on a train, but a dirty and loudly clattering one, in the Karakum Desert, where it never rained.

The little old lady caught my eye, and perhaps noticing that the book I had in my lap was in English, said, "It's snowing in Vienna."

With the pleasant thought that I would be in Istanbul in a few days, I said, "That's all right with me. Where are we now?"

"Château-Thierry. Épernay."

French place names always seemed to call up names of battlefields or names on wine labels. The next station was Châlons en Champagne, a bright platform in the drizzle, and the tidy houses in the town looking like a suburb in Connecticut seen through the prism of the driving rain. Then, in the darkness, Nancy, the rain glittering as it spattered from the eaves of the platform, and a few miles farther down the line, clusters of houses so low and mute they were like the grave markers of people buried here.

Somewhere a woman and two men had joined the old woman and me in the compartment. These three people talked continuously and incomprehensibly, one man doing most of the yakking and the others chipping in.

"What language are they speaking?" the old woman asked me.

"Hungarian, I think."

She said she had no idea, and asked why I was so sure.

I said, "When you don't understand a single word, it's usually Hungarian."

"It could be Bulgarian. Or Czech."

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"Linz," she said.

"Isn't that where—?"

Before I finished the sentence she laughed very hard, cutting me off, her eyes twinkling, smiling at what we both knew, and said, "It's a charming little city. About a quarter of a million people. Very clean, very comfortable. Not what you might think. We want to forget all that business."

"All that business" meant that Adolf Hitler, the Jackdaw of Linz, had been born there, and his house still stood, some deluded people making pilgrimages, though all the symbolism and language of Nazism was illegal in Austria. Just about this time, the writer David Irving was given a jail sentence and punished for making the irrational claim in print that the Holocaust had not happened. It was as loony as saying the earth was flat, but in Austria it was unlawful.

"They're coming back in France," the old woman said.

"Nazis, you mean?"

"My daughter says so. She lives in Paris. I go to visit her." She looked out the window — nothing to see but her own reflection.

"I take this train all the time."

"You could fly, maybe?" I asked, only to hear what she would say.

"Flying is horrible. Always delays in this weather. This is much better. We will be in Linz early tomorrow morning, and I will be home for breakfast." She leaned over again and whispered, "Who are they?"

She was perhaps seventy-five or so, and had lived (so she said) her whole life in Austria. Next door to Hungary all that time and she didn't have a clue about this just-over-the-border language, could not even identify Magyar-speakers, which they were — I asked them on the platform at Strasbourg, where we waited for the sleeping car.

Ten o'clock on a cold night in March, the rain smacking the rails; some carriages slid along the platform on creaking wheels, with the welcome word Schlafwagen on the side, lettered in gilt. Why was it I felt no excitement entering a great hotel on a rainy night like this but was thrilled to climb up the stairs of a sleeping car and hand my ticket to a conductor and be shown a couchette? The bed was made, a bottle of mineral water on a little shelf; a sink, a table, a ripe orange on a plate.

I read a bit of Simenon, snuggling under my comforter, as the train pulled out of Strasbourg in the streaks of rain that sparkled, seemingly crystallized by the lights of the city. A few miles farther on, the darts of rain pocked the surface of the Rhine. And I slept — it had been a long day, beginning at Waterloo, and all those memories of London. I was glad to be in a strange land, in dramatic weather, headed for places even stranger.

In the gray light of early morning, near a station called Amstetten, the snow was like the dirty snow in the Simenon novel I was reading, "piles of it that looked like they were rotting, stained black, peppered with garbage. The white powder that loosed itself from the sky in small handfuls, like plaster falling from a ceiling." But it was much whiter at a later station, Purkersdorf Sanatorium, its hundred-year-old hospital an architectural oddity, cubist in design. The snow was deeper farther east, where villas stood by the line, stately chapels, sheep in muddy fields, and cemeteries dense with pious statuary. The Austrian houses looked bomb-proof, indestructible, with gardens of black saplings in the drifted snow.

Vienna for me was just its station and the very platform where Freud diagnosed his own Reisefieber—the anxiety of traveling by rail. He was so fearful of missing a train, he would arrive at the station an hour early, and usually panicked when the train pulled in. Here I got another train, slightly shabby, probably Magyar, for the leg to Budapest, where we were to arrive at noon. Even the landscape was shabbier, flatter, the snow thinner and lying in filthy twists as we rumbled over the border at the Hungarian frontier of GyŐr, which was a set of solid buildings dating from the time when this was one of the rusted folds in the Iron Curtain, factories and stubbly fields, bare trees and the late-winter farmland scored with plow marks and skeletal with ribs of snow. "Farmland" seems a pastoral and serene description, but this was the opposite, so dark and dreary, with burst-open barns and broken fences, it looked less like farmland than a sequence of battlefields in a long retreat, the evidence of ambushes in a rear-guard action that ended in a smudge at the horizon, which grew and became human, a yokel on a bicycle.

Blackbirds streaked low across the winter sky over the thick Hungarian hills and ditches and brown copses that were all smeared with discolored snow like stale cake icing, the dark landscape of early morning in eastern Europe, jumping in the train window like the tortured frames of an old movie.

The appeal of traveling through this wintry scene, just a few people on the train, the flat open land — What do they grow here? I wondered — the pleasure of it was its stark and rather romantic ugliness, and the knowledge that I was just passing through. I'd be in Budapest in a few hours, Bucharest tomorrow, Istanbul the next day. This sort of travel, an exercise in sheer idleness, was also a way of wallowing in the freedom of this trip.

Thirty-three years before, I had been anxious. Where was I going? What would I do with the experience of travel? I was oppressed by the sense that the people I loved most disapproved of my going. You're abandoning us! I don't want you to go. You'll be sorry!

In that mood of reproach, feeling scolded, I had looked out the window of a slightly different route — Yugoslavia — and hated what I saw, feeling futile among the muddy hills and resenting every obstacle, as though the trip I'd chosen to take was just an elaborate encumbrance. But I was happy now, and happiness lends, if not enchantment, then a merciful detachment. I did not see the route I was traveling as enemy territory. It looked disheveled and mild and a bit forlorn, but I didn't take it personally.

The lesson in my Tao of Travel was that if one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier. I thought that anyone who has lived through the latter half of the twentieth century is unshockable, and so has a better time of it, with lower expectations, a contempt for political promises. After a certain age the traveler stops looking for another life and takes nothing for granted.

And this time my wife was on the phone. She had prevailed on me to bring a hand-held device that doubled as cell phone and Internet receiver. I had resisted. I had traveled for more than forty years without feeling the need to be in close touch. And I hated the sight of people using cell phones as much as I hated the sight of people eating and walking at the same time — the unembarrassed indulgence, making a private ceremony into a public act, almost as a boast, braying into the damned thing and to the world at large: Hey, honey, I'm on a train! Pretty soon I'm going to be in a tunnel!

I had forgotten I had the instrument. I switched it on and got a screen message, Welcome to Hungary, and soon after that it rang again.

"I miss you," my wife said. "But I want you to know that I'm on your side. I know you have to take this trip."

"How's the knitting?"

"I haven't started. I'm still looking over the patterns."

I found her procrastination oddly reassuring, and we talked a little more, she at home and I on a train, looking out at the snowy fields outside a city of factories and tenements called Tatabanya, less than an hour from Budapest.

***

THE SIGHT OF THE old pockmarked city of puddles, smutty under the snowmelt, Keleti Station looming like a Hungarian madhouse in the rain, the slushy streets and muddy sidewalks, defrosting and dripping after the long winter — all of it made me hopeful. I wasn't looking for glamour or a version of home, but rather something altogether different, as proof that I'd covered some distance. Grim-faced women in old clothes, carrying shopping bags, scuffing through the slush in dirty boots, held out signs lettered Zimmer, offering their houses or apartments for home stays, to make a little money in an economy that had tanked so badly that people were leaving in droves — mobbing Keleti Station for the trains going west to Austria and Germany and Britain. I was crowded by taxi touts and pimps, not pestiferous but merely desperate for money.

I dumped my bag at Left Luggage — my train to Romania was not due to leave until late that evening — and walked out to look at the grandiose edifice of the station, with its statues and winged chariot, stallions and feather-and-floral motifs, dated 1884, an Austro-Hungarian extravaganza, grandiose and pompous, seeming to mock the weary travelers in wet raincoats and the footsore pedestrians with shopping bags.

"How's business?" I asked a woman at a bookstore.

"Is bad," she said.

I kept on asking as I strolled from the station, through the city to the Danube, for the pleasure of taking it all in, with the confidence that in eight or nine hours I would be back at the station to claim my bag and board a new train for Bucharest, the continuation of my own Orient Express.

It was about this time in my previous trip that I'd met the traveling companion I called Molesworth. He was a theatrical agent and bon vivant, unmarried, and his being a little fruity and familiar added to his twinkle. His clients had been some of the acting Cusacks and Warren Mitchell. A former officer in the Indian army, he had traveled widely in Asia. He winked into a monocle when he read a menu, and had a gentle habit of calling every man "George," as when speaking to the Turkish conductor: "George, this train has seen its better days." After my book came out, he said people recognized him in the text, even through a pseudonym. I saw him now and then in London and invited him to parties, where he made himself popular with his theater stories, all about luvvies, and afterwards my friends would say, "Terry is splendid." Before he died, he said the trip in 1973 to Istanbul was one of the best he'd ever made, and often added, "You should have mentioned my name." But his real name was too good to be true: Terrance Plunkett-Greene.

I trudged through the downpour with all the other trudgers until I came to a plausible-looking hotel called the Nemzeti, and went in, just to get out of the rain.

The restaurant was empty except for two women, wearing leather coats and smoking.

Wasn't I hungry? the pale waiter asked me. Wouldn't I be happier sitting in the warm restaurant and having the lunch of the day?

I agreed. Goulash was on the menu.

"Foreign people think goulash is stew. No. Goulash is soup."

"But what does the word mean?"

"I don't know in English. But a goulash is someone who looks after sheep."

"Red ink!" Plunkett-Greene would have said of the Hungarian wine. "Peasant fare! Beans!" he would have crowed over the food here at the Nemzeti.

The women left. A youngish man took their place. As he was the only other person in the restaurant, we fell into conversation. His name was Istvan. He was in Budapest on business. He said that some European companies were relocating to Hungary because of the cheap labor and the well-educated (but poverty-stricken) populace. I was to hear this description all the way through Asia, especially in India. His own business concerned small engines.

"How is the government here?"

"Terrible," Istvan said. He detested Hungarian politicians and their policies. "They are socialists. They are left. I am right."

This led to a discussion about the American government, which he also detested.

"Bush is dangerous, arrogant — not intelligent. And now we have to worry about what he'll do in Iran."

I should have guessed then that I was to hear this opinion in almost every casual conversation for the next seven months, whenever I revealed myself as an American: that our president was a moron and his policies were diabolical and he was controlled by dark forces. That America, for all its promise and prosperity, was the world's bully.

I would then say, as I did to Istvan, "Would you emigrate to the U.S. if you had a chance?" And they would say yes, as Istvan did, not because they had the slightest notion of American culture, politics, or history, but because they were passionate to get a job and make money, to own a car, a house, and flee their precarious hand-to-mouth existence to become Americans.

Istvan was fairly intelligent, but there were others, and the most unsettling thing was that the worst of them, the most brutish, would surprise me by praising the U.S. government for its militarism. I was somewhat apprehensive because I would be traveling through at least six Muslim countries. But all of them were tyrannies, more or less, and I took heart in knowing that when people are badly governed, they seldom hold you personally responsible for the decisions of your own government.

I wished Istvan luck and plodded on, making a detour at a sex shop. Acting on my theory that a country's pornography offers the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation, and especially the male character, I went in and assessed the goods. It was grubby stuff, which included bestiality (dogs and women), very fat people, very hairy people, a sideline in gay cruelty, and every German perversion.

Like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and the other countries formerly in the Soviet shadow, when Hungary liberalized its policies in 1989 the immediate effect was the sanctioning of what had been regarded as antisocial behavior — porno, loud music, vocal complaints, and graffiti, which had been obvious from the walls I had seen on the outskirts of Budapest. Some of these promiscuous outbursts could have been dismissed as rising from irrational anger, but not porno. Pornography is specific, particular in its rituals and images, and it can't be gratuitous or faked or cooked up for its shock value, or else it won't sell. Shelves of videocassettes and DVDs of bestiality — women canoodling with dogs and horses, pigs and goats — meant that there was a market for it.

In the sleety rain and wet snow of the decaying city, amid shuffling boots (down at the heels in the most literal sense), wet faces, and stringy hair, there was no sensuality, certainly no temptation for me to linger. Nothing looked sleazier to me than another imperial city overlaid by decades of Soviet style. Yet everyone I spoke to — for I was constantly asking directions — was polite to me, every one of the fatigued, greasy-haired people, scruffy in the late-winter drizzle. I seem to be criticizing, but I liked Budapest for being in a time warp and looking left behind.

I could not identify a Hungarian face — not a national face. The heavy jaw and wide forehead and close-set eyes were not enough; yet it seemed a monolithic culture — no ethnic people, no minorities in evidence, just a lot of weary white people, relieved that Hungary had been admitted to the European Union so that they could leave and find work elsewhere and maybe never come back, as a man said to me at a café in Keleti Station when I went to reclaim my bag.

"You're going where?" he asked.

I told him Romania, and he made me repeat it because he found it so funny. He laughed a big, mocking belly laugh.

From Hungary onward, it was clear to me that very few people are looking east. There were no tourists, and the only travelers were ones going home — reluctantly, because the great wish was to travel west, to leave home. The east represented hopelessness, poverty, failure, more excuses. Most of the travelers at Keleti Station wanted to go west, even the ones who were headed east. And no one was going to Turkey.

With the drunks, the drifters, the flinty-eyed evangelists looking for sinners to convert, the moneychangers, the lurking youngsters who might have been druggies or hookers or both, and the burdened old women heading to the countryside on commuter trains, the people who held my attention at Keleti Station were the chess players. They stood at a long marble pedestal near the bumpers, in the middle of the crowd of commuters waiting for their trains to be announced. Or perhaps they weren't going anywhere: a train station is a little democracy in which everyone has a right to exist on the presumption that he or she might be waiting for a train. These men were studying the chessboards, clawing at their hair and their beards, now and then making a move — the slow and graceful logic of chess at the center of railway pandemonium.

***

THE PASSENGERS WHO BOARDED the Euronight, the express to Bucharest, were Romanian — I was traveling against the prevailing current of people headed west. Who would take the train to Romania if they didn't have to? I was told that in recent years foreigners who wished to adopt Romanian orphans took this train from time to time, but because so many adoption agencies were fraudulent, fewer outsiders were willing to risk what might prove to be a disappointment.

I liked the way this train journey was removing me from things I knew, replacing them with the distortions of the foreign — the dream dimension of travel where things are especially strange because they look somewhat familiar. Fewer people, too, as though no one wanted to go where I was going, especially now, in the muddy landscape of Hungary, the drizzle crackling into the wet clumps of snow by the tracks.

Even here, still in Europe, I sensed an intimation of Asiatic ambiguity in the cat-stink of the sleeping car, the unsmiling crowd suffering in second-class hard seats, the clutter of the dining car: piles of fluorescent tubes in cardboard boxes and coils of wire stacked on the tables, with sticky cruets of vinegar and bottles of sinister sauce, their caps clotted with spilled and dried gunk.

Racing into the darkness and the downpour, dramatic weather smothering the tracks, whistle screaming, this train is perfect, this sleeper is a cozy throwback, I was writing in my notebook. It reminded me pleasantly, in sepia tones and inexpensiveness (about $100), of my previous trip. I had taken a diesel through Belgrade and Nis and Sophia before, but so what? This was not much different — sullen men in track suits, women in shawls, tired glassy-eyed children shivering in small wet shoes.

As on the previous night en route to Budapest, the sleeping-car conductor punched my ticket, brought me beer, made my bed, and reminded me that we'd be in Bucharest around nine the following morning.

"Why you go Bucharest?"

"To look around," I said. "And then leave."

"You airplane home?"

"I change trains. To Istanbul."

"Istanbul very nice. Good business. Good money."

"What about Bucharest?"

"No business. No money." The conductor made a clown's mocking face.

"Is there a dining car on this train?"

"Everything — for you!" When he winked at me I could see that he was tipsy.

Rain was smacking the window, the train swaying as most trains do, seeming to describe an elaborate detour around the back of the world. I was going the old way, as I had long ago, and there was hardly any difference — Budapest had had the strained and uncertain and unstylish look of the seventies.

Even though no one advertised a trip like this, it had not been much trouble to find this antique railway experience — railways and buses were how the poor traveled in much of eastern Europe. Most tourists going to Romania, if they went at all, would take a short-hop plane. European airfares were very cheap because they were based on fuel that was sold untaxed. Someday soon a fuel tax would be imposed, airfares would reflect their true cost, and this train would be valuable again. Well, it was valuable now — the sleeping car almost full and the rest of the train crowded.

A sudden station loomed, blobs of fluorescence in the darkness, the storm sweeping down, bursting in oversized drops on an unsheltered platform, the right texture of raindrops for this dark, creaking night train. The weather looked old-fashioned, so did the leaky roof of the station, the puddles in the ticket lobby, the wet benches, the utter emptiness. No one got on or off: just a station sitting in the dark — I saw it was Szolnok, on the Tisza River — and after that we were really benighted.

***

REMEMBERING THE CONDUCTOR'S WINK, I went in search of the dining car, walking through the passageway of the dark tipping train making anvil clangs in the night.

And when I found it I thought: Just at the point in my life when I'd imagined that all travel was a homogenized and bland experience of plastic food and interchangeable railway cars and waiters in fast-food caps, I stumble into the dining car of the Euronight to Romania and find three drunken conductors and a man (who turned out to be the chef) in a greasy sweater with a torn bandage unraveling on his hand, all of them playing backgammon in the bad light, drinking beer, and smoking. No one was eating, and when the chef blew his nose messily he looked as if he were using a rag that had just wiped a dipstick.

Nor had the boxes of fluorescent tubes and coils of wire stacked on the tables been moved or tidied. They crowded the gunked-up sauce bottles.

At the sight of this filth and disorder, my spirits rose. It was easy to prettify a nation in an airport, but on this train traveling through the provinces of a hard-pressed country I felt I was seeing the real thing, a place with its pants down. I didn't take this personally. I was grateful that no one had gone to any trouble for me, that I was not getting red-carpet service.

The chef did not even look up from his backgammon board when he said, "Eat!"

Another, the man who had winked, said, "Sit! Sit! You want chicken?"

"No."

"Only chicken. Sit!"

He pushed some coils of wire to the far side of one of the tables — I was apparently the only diner — and then the lights went out. When the lights came on again there was a bowl of bread crusts in front of me, which seemed a neat trick.

"Salade?"

"No."

I was served a bowl of dill pickles. I thought: Who could invent this? Merely to live here was to experience satire.

Tipsy though he was, the conductor was able to form the words "You lock couchette?"

"How could I lock it?I don't have a key."

Without a word, in a kind of reflex of drunken panic, he ran out of the dining car. I followed him, and when he got to my compartment he motioned for me to check my bag. He gave me to understand, in gestures, that there were thieves on the train and that I must be very careful (wagging his finger, then touching it to the side of his nose).

The lights went out before we got back to the dining car, but came on again in time for me to see the man in the filthy sweater (and now I knew why it was greasy) standing over a frying pan, holding a cleaver, and sending up sparks and spatters. He could not remove the cigarette from his mouth, because he was holding the frying pan with one hand and smacking at a piece of meat with the other. His smeared glasses were slipping down his nose; he pushed them up with a deft nudge of his dripping cleaver.

He yelled at the others, one of whom relayed the message to me: "Gratin?"

"Okay."

Then the backgammon players began bantering with each other.

When the plate was put before me I marveled at the man serving me: his sticky glasses, his drooping cigarette, his dirty sweater and bandaged hand. The fried potatoes were coated with cheese. I picked at it, grateful for the reassurance that in this corner of the world nothing had changed in decades. And the next time someone praised the Hungarian economy or talked optimistically of Romania's imminent entry into the European Union, I could reflect on the revelation of this disgusting meal.

While the rest of the world was bent on innovation and modernization, looking for salvation on the Internet, things here were pretty much what they'd always been. Speaking of time warps, Hungary was about to elect another socialist government. For some reason, perhaps the sheer perversity that finds absurd logic still alive in the world, this pleased me. It reminded me of the time I'd spent in Vanuatu, in the western Pacific. One rainy day I saw some people on the island of Tanna standing and squatting, bollocky naked, wearing only penis sheaths and refusing to listen to some missionaries who had come across the ocean to convert them. These God-botherers had then trekked twenty miles down a muddy path to share their Good News Bibles. The people on Tanna sent them away, saying they had their own gods, thanks very much.

Stubborn seediness has great appeal, and this ramshackle railway had not changed in thirty-three years. It was, if anything, worse, almost a parody of my previous experience. The Hungarian border was farcical too, the customs-and-immigration people tramping through the carriage in wet boots and ill-fitting brown uniforms. The Romanian border at Curtici was even grimmer, as though another act in the same farce: big beefy-faced brutes with earflaps and gold braids, a dozen of them swarming over the train demanding passports, opening bags.

One of the customs men went through my books, the Simenons and some others, and selected Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. He squinted at it. Did he guess that this novel is about injustice in a nightmarish police state?

"Where you going?"

"Istanbul."

"What doing? You tourismus?"

"Me tourismus."

Turning the pages of my passport, he put his fingers on the visas. "Azerbaijan! Uzbekistan! Pakistan! India!"

"Tourismus."

He flipped his big fingers at me. "Heroin? Cocaine?"

I laughed, I tried to stop laughing, I laughed some more, and I think this idiotic laugh convinced him of my innocence. His comrade joined him, and together they searched my briefcase. I stood to one side, and when they were done they welcomed me to Romania.

Their baggage fondling was no worse than the TSA's at any American airport. In fact, it was a lot simpler and less invasive.

Just behind these customs men was an attractive woman wearing an ankle-length leather coat and high shiny boots, another figure from the past, a suitable introduction to Transylvania, where we were headed, and like a character in the Nabokov novel, which could have happened in a place like Bucharest.

***

THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING AS, with howling brakes, the train came to a dead stop at Baneasa Station in the center of Bucharest, where I was to change trains — the next one, for Istanbul, leaving later in the day. The rain spattered on the oily locomotive and the platform roof and the muddy tracks. But this was not life-giving rain, nourishing roots and encouraging growth. It was something like a blight. It spat from the dreary sky, smearing everything it hit, rusting the metal joints of the roof, weakening the station, fouling the tracks. It lent no romance to the decaying houses of the city; it made them look frailer, emphasized the cracks in the stucco, turned the window dust to mud. There was something so poisonous in its greenish color, it seemed to me like acid rain.

Pale, pop-eyed Romanians had a touch of Asia in their dark eyes and hungry faces, and almost the first people I saw were two urchins, very skinny boys not more than ten, in rags, looking ill, both smoking cigarettes and pretending to be tough. They had tiny doll-like heads and dirty hands. They fooled among themselves and puffed away, and when they saw me they said something, obviously rude, and laughed.

Only pale, underfed faces — now and then one of a girl that was porcelain-pretty; skinny girls, fat women, tough-looking men, most people smoking foul cigarettes — no foreign faces, none that I could see at the station. Why would anyone come here? Romania was a world few people visited for pleasure, and that was evident in its abandoned look, its wrecked buildings, its mournful people. It seemed lifeless, just hanging on. A great melancholy in the houses with cracked windows, the broken streets, the bakery shops where every pastry looked stale.

I went to make sure that the train to Istanbul, the Bosfor Express, would be leaving on time. A young man standing near the information booth said he hoped it would — he was taking it.

"I'm going to a conference in Turkey," he said. He was an academic, named Nikolai, teaching at a university in Bucharest.

He showed me where the Left Luggage window was — he was leaving bags there too. On the way, I mentioned that I hadn't seen any foreigners — none of the Asians or Africans or South Americans I'd noticed from London to Hungary.

"Some Americans come here. We have bases."

I might have known. Romania was in the news as America's friend in the war on terrorism. Its right-wing government, desperate for money, eager to join the European Union, had approved the imprisoning and interrogation of suspects. The process, called extraordinary rendition, meant that a man like the one described in the New York Times in July 2006 from Algeria, who was picked up by American agents in Tanzania, would be blindfolded and sent to a third country to be questioned — and questioning always involved some sort of torture, ranging from sleep deprivation, to the suffocation and simulated drowning called waterboarding, to being hanged by the wrists against the wall of a cell, all these methods going under the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." I never heard that expression without thinking of a prisoner being kicked in the balls.

America's prisoners from across the world were shipped off to, among other places, jails in Romania, where humane conventions did not have to be observed and torture was allowed. But the incarceration and interrogation had been instigated by the United States and paid for by American taxpayers. The program was so secret that it was only when, after two or more years, a prisoner was released and interviewed by a newspaper (as several had) that the despicable program was revealed. Poland was also mentioned as a country of interrogation under torture.

Nikolai said he had things to do but would see me on the train. I had the feeling I'd made him uncomfortable with my questions and that he simply wanted to get away.

The largest, weirdest building in Europe — perhaps the world — the Palace of Congresses, is in Bucharest. I had thought it was within walking distance. I ended up taking a taxi — or perhaps not a taxi but a volunteer driver eager to make a little money.

The building was an impressively ugly and gigantic example of megalomaniacal architecture.

"Is amazing, eh?"

"Amazing."

"You have zis in your country?"

"Nothing like it"

On the way, we had passed many casinos. They were the only splash of color in the brown city, along with smoky bars and massage parlors. It was a city of sullen, desperate vice. The driver gave me a copy of What's On in Bucharest. This guide offered tips on how to find sex. Avoid pimps, it said; you will probably get robbed. "Better you ring the number of the escort agency, almost all of which can deliver ladies to your hotel room within half hour."

An entrepreneur, identified as "Arab businessman, Zyon Ayni," was opening a new nightclub in Bucharest, offering lap dances, fifty strippers, and "dances in private rooms."

"'I sell fantasies. This is my business,' synthesizes Ayni. If you want to go on a cruise with the company's yacht, accompanied by a very beautiful woman, the company also offers this service. Ayni's company owns 25 yachts but also planes, for those who are seasick."

One club had opened, and "unique at this moment in Romania, on Tuesday night, the international porno star, Quanita Cortez."

As for drinks: "A selection of drinks carefully picked on the taste of the most pretentious clients." At the Harbour Restaurant "you can have reinless fun with all your friends." And the Culmea Veche Restaurant advertised itself as an "above average Romanian restaurant." Don Taco's boast was "The only Mexican restaurant in Bucharest."

They were empty. A few businessmen in Bucharest had money, and what foreigners there were making deals knew that Romanians were ripe for exploitation. The sale of orphans and newborn babies is one of the brisker businesses, followed by the traffic in women for the sex trade. When I rolled my eyes at the dereliction here, Romanians said, "It used to be worse" — they meant the nightmare under Ceausescu. It has been seventeen years since he stood to give a speech in the main square and people began to chant, "Rat! Rat! Rat!" — and he looked cornered and crept away before being captured and shot like a rat.

The Third World stink and disorder were strong in Bucharest, its suburbs looked blighted, its farms muddy and primitive. Romania was another country people were leaving, all of them headed west. The look of Bucharest was desperate and naked, that look which is without shame or self-consciousness: everyone struggling, everyone dressed as though for a hike on a rainy day or dirty job.

No one I spoke to made any money. Nikolai, the university teacher — assistant professor — earned the equivalent of $200 a month. That is exactly what a clerk at a fast-food pizza restaurant told me he earned. His name was Pawel and his English was better than Nikolai's. Neither man had been out of the country. The average national wage was $100 a month. No wonder that Romania, like Albania, is furnishing western Europe with factory workers, hookers, and car thieves.

***

"MISTER PAWEL" — it was Nikolai, hailing me on the platform. He introduced me to the people seeing him off, his university colleagues, threadbare scholars.

"What is your business?" one asked.

"I'm retired," I said.

"Many retired people come here!" he said, being hearty. What did that mean?

"Would you like to be going to Turkey with us?" I said.

"We would rather be going there," one said, and pointed to where the sun, like a coddled egg, was slipping through the sooty sky in the west.

Apart from Nikolai and a big grouchy-looking man with a mustache like a small animal attacking his nose, there was a mother and small daughter — the mother shaking her head and saying "Bulgaristan," because we had to pass through this (she said) unfriendly place. Clearly the route of the Bosfor Express was not popular; I kept noticing that few people wanted to travel east.

Seeing no dining car, I hurried back to the station lobby and bought beer, bottled water, and sandwiches. And then I found my sleeping compartment and watched Bucharest recede from view.

We traveled across the flat plain that is the southeast of Romania, through the immense fields of wheat that, besides orphans, is Romania's only export. The farming villages could have been illustrations from Grimm's Fairy Tales—cottages, huts, outbuildings, barns, all of them aslant, surrounded by fields, no trees, the occasional flock of ducks or turkeys, and the only human a hurrying man who, seeing a cast-off plastic bottle, drank from it — the dregs someone had left — and flung it away when he saw another one, which he snatched and drank from, and tossed to the ground, where he pounced on another and greedily drank. But in a huge homogenized world, this seemed like a novelty, because it was a throwback to a much earlier time: nothing happening except the rain falling on the desperate man and the village in the background, beyond the railway ditch, the witch's house, the woodchopper's hut, the Gray Dwarf's cottage.

Just at dusk the border, Giurgiu Nord: a decayed façade of a station that turned out to have nothing behind it but wasteland, some leafless trees, a snippy immigration official, and a miserable three-legged dog.

Giurgiu is a river town at the edge of the great flat Danubian Plain, which is the southern third of Romania. The Danube River (second only to the Volga in length) has a different name in each country it flows through; it's called the Dunav here. Past a settlement of filthy apartment houses, a garbage dump next to them heaped with plastic bottles and blowing plastic bags, then a truck depot.

The edges of countries are often visual facts. The southern plain of Romania ended at the river, which was the border, but for greater emphasis the other side, the south bank of the Danube, was high ground, a long irregular bluff, which was the edge of Bulgaria, like a castle wall straggling to the horizon east and west. Across the river we went, the flow a hundred yards wide at this point, into Russe, the big river port of Bulgaria — power plant, cranes, chimneys, much bigger and more prosperous than any city I saw in Romania, new tenements as well as grotty ones, buildings in much better condition. Even the railway station was big and solid, unlike the purely symbolic one on the other side of the river in Romania.

One polite and one silly Bulgar examined my passport, and when they left my compartment an old man and three nasty-faced boys leaped into view and rapped on my window, making begging gestures, hand to mouth.

"You don't see this in airports," I said to Nikolai, who stopped by to see if the Bulgars had searched me. He too called it Bulgaristan. He said you'd never find people begging like this in Romania, but I knew for a fact he was wrong.

The border guards hadn't searched me. No one had taken an interest in my bag since I'd entered Romania, and that had been perfunctory, just a sniff-and-sort routine to satisfy a deprived and underpaid border guard. I'd hardly been searched since leaving London and had changed trains five times so far.

The train lost itself in the Bulgarian plateau and the higher ground south of the river, among the hills, where trees were like a sign of wealth, not needed for farmland or fuel, and the stations sheltered little clusters of pale Bulgars, scowling men, mustached old women. And then long sweeping hills, startling, lovely, because I had been expecting more Romanian decrepitude; finally sunset over Veliko Turnovo, and more beer.

I was woken by a sudden knock at two-thirty the next morning. I sprang awake, still half drunk, and a slight but fierce Bulgar woman shone a flashlight in my face.

"Pusspoot."

But that was all there was to the Bulgarian border. In the past, the passports were handled by the conductor, who then demanded a tip at the end of the journey. I didn't mind the interruption; I found it revelatory and vaguely exciting: a fierce foreign woman in a peaked cap and leather coat and boots appearing in the middle of the night at the foot of my bed, insisting that I obey her.

Half an hour later we were at the Turkish border, in a town called Kapikule, the heavy rain lashing the open platform and the glittering lights. The night was cold, and big shrouded Turks marched up and down. Three in the morning and all the officialdom of Kapikule had turned out to greet the train. In spite of the score of policemen and soldiers, only one man was processing the train passengers who were entering the Turkish Republic: he sat in a little lighted window while we stood in the rain. I was last, Nikolai next to last. And now I could see the passengers: Romanians, Bulgars, Turks, big families, children in modest clothes, small Slavic boys no more than ten with mustaches as visible as those of their grannies, beetle-browed men — no tourists. With the driving rain, the old train, the intimidating border guards, and the shadowy town behind the prison-like station, it could have been forty years ago, all of us squeezing into the far edge of Turkey like refugees, soaking wet.

Nikolai said, "Is not modern!"

"Why are you going to Istanbul?"

"Attending conference on European enlargement. I am reading paper."

"Romania's being allowed to join, right?"

"Will join in January 2007."

"But not Turkey?"

"Turkey is problem. Human rights." He shrugged, rain pouring down his face.

"Romanian human rights are better?"

"Improving now, because we want to join EU."

"America is capturing people in places like Tanzania and Albania and sending them to Romania for interrogation."

"Who tell you this?"

"It's called extraordinary rendition. They can be tortured in Romania."

"We are friendly with America now. Also with Britain. We have U.S. military bases. Romanians are against the war in Iraq, but we like Americans."

"What is Romania's main industry?"

"Agriculture."

"Nikolai, agriculture isn't an industry."

"We have much wheat and maize." He thought a moment, then said, "Ceausescu ruined the country. He destroyed it and tried to rebuild it. He put up ridiculous buildings."

"I saw the Palace of Congresses."

"Ha! A monster! His daughter wants his body to be dug up so they can identify him. It's not him, she says."

"Do you remember when he fell?"

"I was seven in '89 when he was overthrown, but I remember the excitement. My grandparents lived with us. They were so happy. They always said, 'The Americans will come.' Meaning — will save us. They said it after the war. My parents said it. They said it in the 1950s. During Ceausescu. 'The Americans will come.' After Ceausescu. 'The Americans will come.' We hated our government. We wanted to be saved."

"How do you know this?"

"One of my projects is oral history. I interviewed many people, not just my relatives but people from all over Romania. One man was in solitary confinement for seventeen years, for a petty offense. Another man I spoke to was walking down a street in Bucharest. He was carrying a French book — literature, maybe Flaubert. The police stopped him. They seized the book and they framed it as 'antisocial.' He got a year in prison — this was in the 1980s!"

"Weren't people angry, being treated like this?"

"They said, 'The Americans will come. They will save our soul.'"

"Has it happened?"

"We have a right-wing government. It is opportunistic. We have U.S. military bases, and the people approve it. We have seen worse, much worse."

Eventually we got to the window. I bought a Turkish visa for $20 and we had our passports stamped. Then, completely wet and very cold, I re-boarded the train and went to sleep. It was then around four-thirty, and by the time I woke, dawn had broken and we were passing the Sea of Marmara, muddy fields on one side, ships beyond the tracks, the big bold city of domes and minarets in the distance.

Nikolai had crept out of his compartment, his face pressed to the window. He had never been to Turkey before; he had never been out of Romania. He looked alarmed.

"What do you think?"

"More modern than I thought."

He was dazzled and swallowing hard, for it was not just the enormous mosques and churches that were impressive but the density of the building in these southwestern suburbs of Istanbul. I was impressed too, as much by the extent of the new construction as by its modernity. It made Romania seem the muddiest Third World backwater.

I said, "Isn't it unfair that Turkey can't join the EU for another ten years or more?"

Nikolai said, "They have problems with human rights of the Kurds and the Armenians."

"The Kurds want to secede and start their own country, which is a little unreasonable. And the Armenian business was a hundred years ago. Look at this city — imagine the power of this economy."

"But in the countryside is different. Poor people," Nikolai said, thinking of the poverty in rural Romania.

"You've seen them?"

"No."

"What about the Gypsies in Romania?"

"Is a problem. How integrating? We don't know. Some live in tents. We call zidane" he said, using the Russian word for the people, called Rom or Romany all over Europe.

"What's the biggest problem in Romania?"

"Maybe Gypsies. Maybe poverty."

"What's the cost of living?"

"Is the same as Toronto. My uncle lives there."

He was appalled by what he was seeing, Istanbul rising all around us, the train screeching past the old city wall and new tenements. We were racing towards Seraglio Point and the sight of the Bosporus — Asia looming on the far side.

Nikolai was speechless. It was obvious that he had prepared himself for a shabby Asiatic city of oppression and torture, crumbly mosques and fez-wearing Turks and backward-looking Muslims. Instead he was greeted by a grand and reimagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by the Islamic republics. It was a city of ancient gilt and impressive modernization. He could see that the old city had been preserved — we were passing through it, approaching Sirkeci Station in the old-fashioned but carefully preserved quarter of Sultanahmet; and beyond the Golden Horn were the bluffs of Beyoglu and the tooting ferries to the Asian side, which was lined with magnificent sea-front houses, the villas they called yalis, and the rain still coming down hard. Nikolai shriveled into a country mouse and, with his forehead pressed against the train window, looked as though he were going to weep with frustration.