Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN TO TASHKENT

MOST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what's the alternative? Usually there is none. There was none for me here, at the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, kicking through the gravel.

As I picked my way across the weeds and stones in the no man's land between the two frontiers, from dismal Farap in Turkmenistan to dismal Jalkym in Uzbekistan, it began to rain, not a downpour but desert rain, a bleak pattering that served only to moisten the dust and intensify the gloom. I came to a gate in a high barrier, the sort of fifteen-foot fence you see at the edge of a sports stadium parking lot, except that this one was trimmed with razor wire and enclosed nothing but a few low huts and stony desert. Not a car to be seen. The fence continued into the distance, the national boundary of Uzbekistan.

Some downhearted people were waiting by the gate, about twenty of them, their fingers hooked into the rusted chain-link fence, like captives, prisoners gazing mournfully through it. They were very wet. I took this to mean they had been there a long time. Obviously they were waiting to enter. But the gate was padlocked; no cars, no trucks, no camels, no traffic at all on the road.

Because even the most absorbing travel involves spells of tedium, it is boring to relate one's complaints about delays. This open-air border crossing took half a day — another rainy day. I was anxious, because I had checked out of Turkmenistan and could not reenter. I could enter Uzbekistan only when I was allowed. But in the course of waiting in the rain to pass through the fence to the Jalkym customs post, I got acquainted with an old Turkmen who was traveling with his wife and daughter. He spoke no English, I had no Turkmen, and yet he grasped that I was going by road to Bukhara, and he gave me to understand that he was going to a village called Qorakol, about halfway there. Gesturing and grunting, he conveyed to me that we could go together.

I said, "Okay."

"Okay, okay."

He was a powerfully built man in his fifties, wearing a lambskin cap and a heavy coat. Both of the women with him wore cloaks, and head-scarves that were yanked forward to keep the rain off, so I could hardly see their faces; but I could tell that one woman was younger than the other. They were drenched, their boots muddy. In this group of people waiting to enter Uzbekistan there was very little chatter. I took this to mean that some were Uzbeks and the others Turkmen. They had the solemn patience of the poor in the presence of soldiers, with plastic bags for luggage and wet heads.

Hours of this. It was now midafternoon. No signs of life on the other side of the fence. But then a soldier appeared. The Turkmen called out to him. The soldier walked away, into his shed. Half an hour later he emerged and walked the fifty yards to the fence.

The Turkmen said something to him, the soldier cracked open the gate, and then, in a paternal gesture, the Turkmen helped the two women through, and finally he pushed me through, while the others stared. We walked to the shed, but by the time I got there all I saw in the drafty open-sided structure were two soldiers at a table. I handed over my passport.

"America," one said. He examined my passport, turning the pages slowly, wetting his thumb with saliva, and transferring the saliva to my passport.

The other soldier shrugged and stamped it and gestured for me to leave the shed in the direction of Bukhara, another empty stony road.

There on the road, standing near an old jalopy, a beat-up Lada with a broken windshield, was the Turkmen and his two women. He beckoned to me. He introduced me to the driver, a small, sad-looking man in a dirty sweater.

"Bukhara," I said.

"Qorakol," the Turkmen said.

"Five dollar," the Uzbek said and showed me five fingers.

I paid and, doors banging, springs creaking, tires bumping, we began to race across the desert, the drizzle streaking the dust on the cracked windshield.

The driver's name was Farrukh. He wasn't a taxi driver. He was one of the men you see at such places: he owned an old car, and he knew — as all such men know — that at borders like this he could find helpless people in need of a lift. Since so few people were allowed to leave Turkmenistan, and no one with any sense wanted to enter, business was slow.

I considered myself lucky, up to a point. There was always the chance — it had happened to me before — that the driver was an opportunist. Farrukh's first promising sign was that he asked for the $5 in advance. Dishonest drivers said, "Pay me later," and on arrival at the destination there would be threats and a shakedown. In another classic crooked maneuver, the driver might pull off the road, choosing a ghoul-haunted woodland, and tell me that he wanted more money, or else no more ride. There were more menacing ploys too, involving dire threats and lethal weapons.

After an hour we came to Qorakol, a town of low cement houses. The side streets were littered with baseball-sized rocks. Boys stood watching us, the only car. One yanked on a goat's tether, another kicked a tin can. The rain came down. The Turkmen in the rear seat gave directions and was dropped off at the gate of a high wall. He beckoned me out of the car — why? Yet I got out, and when I did, he embraced me in a big bear hug, as thanks for my paying, and then he wished me salaam and placed his hand on his heart, the most touching of Asiatic gestures.

"Bukhara," Farrukh said.

It was another forty miles through the desert. Farrukh drove fast — it seemed he was not going to rob me. My bag was in his trunk, my briefcase in my lap. From it I heard a familiar buzzing — my BlackBerry, which had not worked since Tbilisi, was alerting me to messages, now that we were in Uzbekistan and away from the enclosed world of Turkmenbashi.

A message from Penelope. She was worried. She had not heard from me for quite a while. Where was I?

We were passing a settlement of one-story stucco houses, Farrukh slowing down for the potholes. I made a querying gesture, to ask the name.

"Jondor," he said.

Passing through Jondor, on way to Bukhara, I typed with my thumbs. Then, succumbing to e-mail's narcissistic temptation to self-dramatization, added, Racing in an old car into Uzbekistan…

The outskirts of Bukhara looked seedier, poorer, dirtier, grubbier, more tumbledown than Turkmenabat, just over the border, which was merely ugly and strange. Farrukh was asking me a question with his hands.

"Hungry," I said and accompanied this word with gestures of my own.

Farrukh indicated that he was hungry too. We drove down a back street, and he parked in front of a café.

We shared the meal: a bowl of cooked pigeon eggs, a bowl of meat dumplings, which Farrukh described using the Turkish word manti—but in this region everyone's manti were different — a wheel of hard bread, a pot of tea, and I thought, This is very nice. I think I'll stay in Bukhara.

***

"THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is that Niyazov puts his opponents in jail and Karimov kills them," an American in Ashgabat had said to me. This was a reference to the Uzbek dictator's suppressing an uprising in the city of Andijon in which several hundred unarmed demonstrators (but no one knew the exact number of casualties) were slaughtered by soldiers. This was in May 2005. A little over a year later, in September 2006, UNESCO awarded Islam Karimov the Borobudur Gold Medal for "strengthening friendship and cooperation between nations, development of cultural and religious dialogue, and supporting cultural diversity." So this hard-faced murderer and (until the massacre) solid ally of the United States now sported a gold medal from the United Nations.

The renewal and general fixing up of Bukhara had been one of the programs for which Karimov had been rewarded. He was a murderer, but unlike Joseph Goebbels, when he heard the word "culture" he did not reach for his gun. He had Bashi's obsession with the glorious past, and he too had lots of oil revenue. Most of the city in drizzly March seemed woebegone, but the restored part of Bukhara retained an atmosphere that was a mixture often spurious and the authentic, half Disney, half Divanbegi — the bazaars, the mosques, the markets, the synagogues, the madrasas, the central pond and mausoleums, the ancient Ark.

I was inclined to stay because I liked the food, and I found a cheap hotel, where the news on TV was not of Uzbekistan but of the war in Iraq. Out of season, in the rain, the shops empty, it seemed I was the only unbeliever in this, the pillar of Islam.

The downside of being the only traveler here was that desperate hawkers implored me to buy carpets or samovars or silver jewelry; and because I usually walked away, a classic haggling technique, they offered excellent prices, and chased me, and reduced them even more.

"You buy this. Is beautiful," a market seller said, showing me a silver dagger he had made. He demonstrated its razor-sharp blade by slipping it easily through a hunk of Uzbek bread he'd been eating.

I wasn't interested, but so as not to offend him I said, "I'd never be able to travel with that."

"No problem!"

"On a plane?"

"I wrap it in special way. I use folded metal. Put in your bag. When they x-ray, they see nothing. You take knife on plane!"

I bought a small icon and some old coins. I tried to engage various Uzbeks in a discussion about the massacre at Andijon, but no one had much to say. And by early evening the streets were empty. Bukhara was a city that emptied after dark — nobody on the street, not even much traffic.

Since Farrukh had kept his word on the $5 drive along the rutted roads from the border to Bukhara, I gave him another $5 to show me around the city, and to take me the next day to the outer suburb of Kagan, to buy a train ticket.

Kagan, a Russified town ten miles away, was Bukhara's train station — built there by a superstitious emir who considered railways a dangerous, possibly satanic innovation that had to be kept at a safe distance.

I was reassured by the ordinariness of the station, its busy lobby, the crowded waiting room, the sight of people boarding trains, and most of all by the tall board marked Departures in Cyrillic letters, the only destinations CaMapKaHД (Samarkand) and ToШKeHT (Tashkent), because I was coming to the end of the line. Headed to India, I knew there was no overland route through the Hindu Kush mountain range that was open to me. In Tashkent, I intended to look for a flight to northern India; I'd heard there was a short flight to Amritsar in the Punjab, where I'd gone thirty-three years before, and could resume my sentimental journey.

"Tashkent," I said to the woman at the ticket window, and pointed to the date on the calendar when I wished to go — the next day, at a quarter to five, the night train to Samarkand and Tashkent.

No berth to Tashkent, only Samarkand, the woman said.

Another $4 ticket. I used my time in Bukhara to write up my notes, and when Farrukh took me to the station to leave, I was so impressed by his dependability I offered him a tip. He said no, he would take only the agreed-upon amount, and with smiles and gestures he indicated that we were friends and that when I came back to Bukhara he would take me to meet his family — his wife, his two small children; we'd have a home-cooked meal. He already knew that I liked manti and pigeon eggs.

We hugged, we touched our hearts, we exchanged salaams, and I was off.

***

EVEN BEFORE THE NIGHT TRAIN, the Bukhara Express, drew out of Bukhara Station, the two men in my compartment had settled themselves at the little table where I was writing and begun preparing their evening meal of tortured chicken and vodka. Without removing their heavy leather coats, they made ready. One twisted the top off a big bottle of vodka, the other unwrapped a roasted chicken and, using his hands as though shredding paper, tore the chicken into fragments, scattering bones and meat and grease on the table. He also unwrapped a package of grated carrot and a loaf of bread.

"Woodka" the man with the bottle said, pushing it into my face. I could see that they were already drunk and would just get drunker.

"No thanks."

But he insisted, so — to be companionable — I took a swig. And then I left the compartment and saw that we were moving slowly into the darkness.

The provodnik—why were they always such brutes? — demanded my ticket. With the two drunks in mind, I asked if he would sell me a ticket to Tashkent. We were due to arrive in Samarkand at two in the morning; if I changed my mind, I could simply stay aboard.

The train was technically full — the ticket seller at Bukhara had told me that. But provodniks are wily birds; they control all seats on the train; anything is for sale, at their discretion.

"Five dollars," he said.

I paid up and he wrote me a ticket.

Back at my compartment, the two drunks had finished the grated carrot and the bread and the chicken — they had chewed and spat out the bones. They had nearly finished the bottle of vodka.

From time to time they sit beside me and put their faces against my notebook, marveling at the page of my writing, I wrote. And they stared crazily at me with the weepy boiled-looking eyes of drunks, trying to focus. They were so soused they did not bother to wipe their greasy cheeks, their food-spattered faces.

Because the crooked provodnik had sold more tickets than he had seats or berths for, the compartment began filling up with hopeful travelers. In addition to the two drunks, their leather coats gleaming with chicken grease, there was a pale young man, then two young women, also in leather coats, and a big boy in a baseball hat.

Farce, I wrote on the scrap of paper in my hand, a crossword puzzle I'd found in my briefcase, from an old Friday Herald Tribune, one of the harder puzzles I kept for my idle days. As there were now six other people in the four-berth compartment, and still a vodka bottle being passed around, I primly excused myself and slipped into the corridor, where I stood peering out through the windows at the plowed fields, the cows, the sheep, the steppes of Gidjuvan.

Studying the clue Keeping Don Juans at bay, I worked out Bucking the pass, and I was nudged by one of the drunken Uzbeks, who had followed me and was staring over my shoulder. Central Asian language was another clue, five letters. I inked in Azeri. The man was breathing hard, but what could I do? Just look busy. Finishing off a dressy outfit. Ah yes, clichés in the form of spoonerisms. I wrote Knotting the tie. The man was still breathing hard, his alcoholic halitosis like car fumes. Azeri was wrong. I wrote Uzbek, and had the solution.

"Krussvort" the Uzbek said, putting his face against the scrap of paper.

The same word in Russian, I later discovered.

At about ten o'clock I went back into the compartment. Now there were eight people, three of them sleeping stretched out, four of them jammed together on a lower berth (two were women), and one had tucked himself on the shelf of the overhead luggage compartment above the door. One, the upper berth, was empty — mine.

This was obviously the compartment where the provodnik stuck the extra passengers who had bribed him. He entered as I lay down on my berth and, pointing, indicated that in a few stations I would have to trade places with the man crouched in the luggage hole.

The drunks were snoring, the lights blazing in their eyes. The women had removed their leather coats and were wrapped in quilts. Soon everyone was asleep, even me.

Samarkand was a jolting stop at two in the morning. I could have gotten out and looked for a man with a jalopy, but I was half asleep and cold. The drunks, still drunk, were dragging themselves out of the compartment. Two more women got on. I glanced at the man in the luggage hole, and he waved an I'm all right signal to me and ducked his head, so I did not have to change places after all.

Nine of us in a four-person compartment, but it was orderly and safe nonetheless. Dirty, though, and smelly too — everyone sleeping in their clothes, the windows shut, wet boots steaming under the seats, stinky luggage, old leather jackets piled in a corner, chicken grease and bread crumbs and grated carrot littering the table. Filthy compartment, gracious people, no hassle: the railway experience of the Eastern Star.

The women were up early making breakfast — boiled eggs, pickled cabbage, chunks of hard bread. Did I want some? Yes, I said, and there we sat, rolling past Chinaz and Yangiyol, still nine of us, friends after a long night, entering the big city.

Shimoly Station — North Station — was one of the largest railway stations I saw on my entire trip, possibly the grandest, lovely even, and swept clean by old women with straw brooms. A ribbon of Uzbek motifs in bright mosaics ran around the top-story façade of this palatial building, which the Soviets had built as a monument to their power and influence in this, the third-largest city in the Soviet Union, now the capital of independent Uzbekistan.

For me it was the end of the line, the first leg of my trip. From here to India or Pakistan, the only overland route crossed the most isolated mountain passes in the world and the antagonistic fastness of the Islamic valleys that produced Al Qaeda recruits and opium growers — perhaps a route to avoid, because it was off the map, beyond the reach of any government or any law but its own, a place of suspicious villages where every woman was veiled and every man armed. It was possibly the most inaccessible area on earth: the Pamir Valley, Waziristan, the NorthWest Frontier, where the Wali of Swat held court. Osama bin Laden was last seen there, but how would any outsider know more than that? There was no road, only a network of mountain footpaths. The nearest railway was the line in Tajikistan that went nowhere except from Dushanbe to Termiz on the border of Afghanistan — nothing helpful to me between Tashkent and Amritsar, though there was a short direct flight.

Spring had come to Tashkent: daffodils in the city gardens, pale sunshine, cherry blossoms, and, as in Georgia and Azerbaijan, people gathered in the parks and gardens, the men to sell the family silver and hawk postcards, the women to prostitute themselves.

"Take me," a young woman said, and pursed her lips to make a kissing sound.

"Tomorrow," I said, so as not to be rude.

On the next corner: "Streep shaw, meester?"

"No, thank you."

"Dreenks?"

"No, thank you."

They were also selling old watches, chewing gum, bathroom fixtures, Soviet memorabilia, candelabra. A man from distant Chukchi offered me a walrus penis and some indigenous ivory carvings. Murat and Zahir specialized in Christian art; it seemed to be a niche market for enterprising Muslims. I bought another icon, for $100.

Rauf, at his stall of pirated videos, was studying English. Like Murat and Zahir and most other Uzbeks I met, he was eager to emigrate to the United States; like them, he hated the war in Iraq. Becoming an American did not interest Rauf much; he seemed to dislike America, but he wanted badly to go to America.

"Business very bad here, but worse in Samarkand," he said.

He was filling in the blanks in an exercise book.

Beside Can you swim? he wrote slowly, No, I cannot swim.

I picked it up. I read the next question: "Do you like to watch TV?"

"Yes, I like."

"Like what?"

"Watch TV."

"Yes, I like to watch TV."

"Yes, I like to watch TV."

I sat down. I read another one: "What did you do last night?"

"With my friends, we listen the music," he said.

"Do you own a car?"

"No, I am not have car?"

I pretended to read a question, saying, "Do you like George Bush?"

"I am not," he said, and stammered with fury, "I am not like Meester Bush President."

Rauf had a sister in Miami who had a green card. He lusted after one himself, and though he was hustling cheap videos and CDs at a stall, he wanted to get out of Uzbekistan and work in America. This eagerness to emigrate to the West seemed to soften people's attitudes towards me — I was never the object of personal hostility, except from the occasional customs official.

It seemed I was the only foreign traveler in Tashkent. I was the only guest in my huge hotel. I never saw another tourist in this vast city. And when at last I went to Tashkent Airport for the flight to the Punjab, I was the only person checking in, the only passenger boarding the plane. It was the plane's one stop, the Uzbek Airways flight from Birmingham to Amritsar, every male passenger a turbaned Sikh, every woman in a sari.

I left Tashkent feeling lucky that I had gotten here unscathed from London, that my close encounters had been with good people. The hassles and delays were part of all travel. The revelation was that the old world still existed. The airport had been empty; but the marshaling yards of Shimoly Station were busy with shunting trains, and the station itself was crowded with people going all over the country, and they were taking the train because they were poor.

As for me, here as elsewhere, I felt I was the fortunate traveler.