The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Two

Duffill had put on a pair of glasses, wire-framed and with enough Scotch tape on the lenses to prevent his seeing the Blue Mosque. He assembled his parcels and, grunting, produced a suitcase, bound with a selection of leather and canvas belts as an added guarantee against it bursting open. A few cars down we met again to read the sign on the side of the wagon-lit: direct-orient and its itinerary, PARIS – LAUSANNE – MILANO – TRIESTE – ZAGREB – BEOGRAD – SOFIYA – ISTANBUL. We stood there, staring at this sign; Duffill worked his glasses like binoculars. Finally he said, 'I took this train in nineteen twenty-nine.'

It seemed to call for a reply, but by the time a reply occurred to me ('Judging from its condition, it was probably this very train!) Duffill had gathered up his parcels and his strapped suitcase and moved down the platform. It was a great train in 1929, and it goes without saying that the Orient Express is the most famous train in the world. Like the Trans-Siberian, it links Europe with Asia, which accounts for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself ('As I couldn't take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was buy a record of Honegger's Pacific 231,' Greene writes in the Introduction to Stamboul Train). The fictional source of the romance is La Madone des Sleepings (1925) by Maurice Dekobra. Dekobra's heroine, Lady Diana ('the type of woman who would have brought tears to the eyes of John Ruskin'), is completely sold on the Orient Express: 'I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may step off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the colour of the eyes of my neighbour in the compartment.' In the end I stopped wondering why so many writers had used this train as a setting for criminal intrigues, since in most respects the Orient Express really is murder.

My compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. I swung my suitcase in and, when I had done this, there was no room for me. The conductor showed me how to kick my suitcase under the lower berth. He hesitated, hoping to be tipped.

'Anybody else in here?' It had not occurred to me that I would have company; the conceit of the long-distance traveller is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone – inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

The conductor shrugged, perhaps yes, perhaps no. His vagueness made me withhold my tip. I took a stroll down the car: a Japanese couple in a double couchette -and it was the first and last time I saw them; an elderly American couple next to them; a fat French mother breathing suspicion onher lovely daughter; a Belgian girl of extraordinary size – well over six feet tall, wearing enormous shoes – travelling with a chic French woman; and (the door was shutting) either a nun or a plump diabolist. At the far end of the car a man wearing a turtleneck, a seaman's cap, and a monocle was setting up bottles on the windowsill: three wine bottles, Perrier water, a broad-shouldered bottle of gin – he was obviously going some distance.

Duffill was standing outside my compartment. He was out of breath; he had had trouble finding the right car, he said, because his French was rusty. He took a deep breath and slid off his gaberdine coat and hung that and his cap on the hook next to mine.

'I'm up here,' he said, patting the upper berth. He was a small man, but I noticed that as soon as he stepped into the compartment he filled it.

'How far are you going?' I asked gamely, and even though I knew his reply, when I heard it I cringed. I had planned on studying him from a little distance; I was counting on having the compartment to myself. This was unwelcome news. He saw I was taking it badly.

He said, 'I won't get in your way.' His parcels were on the floor. 'I just have to find a home for these.'

Til leave you to it,' I said. The others were in the corridor waiting for the train to start. The Americans rubbed the window until they realized the dirt was on the outside; the man with the monocle peered and drank; the French woman was saying ' – Switzerland.'

'Istanbul,' said the Belgian girl. She had a broad face, which a large pair of glasses only complicated, and she was a head taller than I. 'My first time.'

'I am in Istanbul two years before,' said the French woman, wincing the way the French do before lapsing into their own language.

'What is it like?' asked the Belgian girl. She waited. I waited. She helped the woman. 'Very nice?'

The French woman smiled at each of us. She shook her head, and said, ' Tres sale.'

'But pretty? Old? Churches?' The Belgian girl was trying hard.

'Sale.¹Why was she smiling?

i am going to Izmir, Cappadocia, and – '

The French woman clucked and said, 'Sale, sale, sale.' She went into her compartment. The Belgian girl made a face and winked at me.

The train had started to move, and at the end of the car the man in the seaman's cap was braced at his door, drinking and watching our progress. After several minutes the rest of the passengers went into their compartments – from my own I heard the smashing of paper parcels being stuffed into corners. This left the drinker, whom I had started to think of as the Captain, and me alone in the passage. He looked my way and said, 'Istanbul?'

'Yes.'

'Have a drink.'

'I've been drinking all day,' I said. 'Do you have any mineral water?'

'I do,' he said. 'But I keep it for my teeth. I never touch water on trains. Have a real drink. Go on. What will it be?'

'A beer would be nice.'

'I never drink beer,' he said. 'Have some of this.' He showed me his glass and then went to his shelf and poured me some, saying, 'It's a very drinkable Chablis, not at all chalky – the ones they export often are, you know.'

We clinked glasses. The train was now moving fast.

'Istanbul.'

'Istanbul! Right you are.'

His name was Molesworth, but he said it so distinctly that the first time I heard it I thought it was a double-barrelled name. There was something military in his posture and the promptness of his speech, and at the same time this flair could have been an actor's. He was in his indignant late fifties, and I could see him cutting a junior officer at the club – either at Aldershot or in the third act of a Rattigan play. The small glass disc he wore around his neck on a chain was not, I saw, a monocle, but rather a magnifying glass. He had used it to find the bottle of Chablis.

'I'm an actors' agent,' he said. 'I've got my own firm in London. It's a smallish firm, but we do all right. We always have more than we can handle.'

'Any actors I might know?'

He named several famous actors.

I said, 'I thought you might be army.'

'Did you?' He said that he had been in the Indian army – Poona, Simla, Madras – and his duties there were of a theatrical nature, organizing shows for the troops. He had arranged Noel Coward's tour of India in 1946. He had loved the army and he said that there were many Indians who were so well bred you could treat them as absolute equals – indeed, talking to them you would hardly know you were talking to Indians.

'I knew a British officer who was in Simla in the forties,' I said. 'I met him in Kenya. His nickname was "Bunny".'

Molesworth thought a moment, then said, 'Well, I knew several Bunnys.'

We talked about Indian trains. Molesworth said they were magnificent. 'They have showers, and there's always a little man who brings you what you need. At mealtime they telegraph ahead to the next station for hampers. Oh, you'll like it.'

Duffill put his head out the door and said, 'I think I'll go to bed now.'

'He's your chap, is he?' said Molesworth. He surveyed the car. 'This train isn't what it was. Pity. It used to be one of the best, a train de luxe – royalty took it. Now, I'm not sure about this, but I don't think we have a dining car, which is going to be a terrible bore if it's true. Have you got a hamper?'

I said I hadn't, though I had been advised to bring one.

'That was good advice,' Molesworth said. 'I don't have a hamper myself, but then I don't eat much. I like the thought of food, but I much prefer drinking. How do you like your Chablis? Will you have more?' He inserted his eyeglass and found the bottle and, pouring, said, 'These French wines take an awful lot of beating.'

A half hour later I went into the compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a grey corpselike look, and his pyjamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn't sleep, at first; my cold and all that I'd drunk – the fatigue itself- kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill's watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.

Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.

In the morning Duffill was gone. I lay in bed and worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I travelled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.

At Vevey, I thought of Daisy and restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He'd be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn't say what he'd be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much

older than he had in the greyness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.

He looked out at the Alps. He said, 'They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they'd be rather flatter.'

I decided to have breakfast, but I walked to both ends of the Direct-Orient and saw no dining car – nothing except more sleeping cars and people dozing in their second-class seats. On my way back to Car 99 I was followed by three Swiss boys who, at each compartment door, tried the handle; if it responded they slid the door open and looked in, presumably at people dressing or lounging in bed. Then the boys called out, 'Pardon, Madame!' 'Pardon, Monsieur!' as the occupants hastily covered themselves. As these ingenious voyeurs reached my sleeping car they were in high spirits, hooting and shrieking, but it was always with the greatest politeness that they said, 'Pardon, Madame!' once they got a door open. They gave a final yell and disappeared.

The door to the Americans' compartment opened. The man was out first, swinging the knot of his tie, and then the woman, feebly balancing on a cane, tottered out and followed after, bumping the windows as she went. The Alps were rising, and in the sheerest places wide-roofed chalets were planted, as close to the ground as mushrooms and clustered in the same way at various distances from gravity-defying churches. Many of the valleys were dark, the sun showing only farther up on cliff faces and at the summits. At ground level the train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

The American couple returned. The man looked in my direction and said, 'I can't find it.'

The woman said, 'I don't think we went far enough.'

'Don't be silly. That was the engine.' He looked at me. 'Did you find it?'

'What?'

'The dining car.'

'There isn't one,' I said. 'I looked.'

'Then why the hell,' the man said, only now releasing his anger, 'why the hell did they call us for breakfast?'

'Did they call you?'

'Yes. "Last call." Didn't you hear them? "Last call for breakfast," they said. That's why we hurried.'

The Swiss boys, yelling and sliding the compartment doors open, had preceded the Americans' appearance. This commotion had been interpreted as a summons to breakfast; hunger's ear is not finely tuned.

The man said, 'I hate France.'

His wife looked out the window. 'I think we're out of it. That's not France.'

'Whatever it is,' said the man. He said he wasn't too happy, and he didn't want to sound like a complainer, but he had paid twenty dollars for a taxi from 'the Lazarus to the Lions'. Then a porter had carried their two suitcases from the taxi to the platform and demanded ten dollars. He didn't want French money; he wanted ten dollars.

I said that seemed excessive and added, 'Did you pay?'

'Of course I paid,' said the man.

'I wanted him to make a fuss,' said the woman.

The man said, 'I never get into arguments with people in foreign countries.'

'We thought we were going to miss the train,' said the woman. She cackled loudly. 'I almost had a haemorrhage!'

On an empty stomach, I found this disconcerting. I was glad when the man said, 'Well, come along, mother; if we're not going to get any breakfast we might just as well head back,' and led her away.

Duffill was eating the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.

'Try the lights,' he said. 'I can't eat in the dark. I can't taste it.'

I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.

Duffill said, 'Maybe they're trying to save electricity.'

His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels' drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill's woollens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sink-hole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.

Duffill said, 'This must be the Simplon.'

I said, 'I wish they'd turn the lights on.'

I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.

I said, 'What do you aim to do in Turkey?'

'Me?' Duffill said, as if the compartment was crammed with old men bound for Turkey, each waiting to state a reason. He paused, then said, 'I'll be in Istanbul for a while. After that I'll be travelling around the country.'

'Business or pleasure?' I was dying to know and in the confessional darkness did not feel so bad about badgering him; he could not see the eagerness on my face. On the other hand, I could hear the tremulous hesitation in his replies.

'A little of both,' he said.

This was not helpful. I waited for him to say more, but when he added nothing further, I said, 'What exactly do you do, Mr Duffill?'

'Me?' he said again, but before I could reply with the sarcasm he was pleading for, the train left the tunnel and the compartment filled with sunlight and Duffill said, 'This must be Italy.'

Duffill put on his tweed cap. He saw me staring at it and said, 'I've had this cap for years – eleven years. You dry clean it. Bought it in Barrow-on-Humber.' And he dug out his parcel of salami and resumed the meal the Simplon tunnel had interrupted.

At 9.35 we stopped at the Italian station of Domodos-sola, where a man poured cups of coffee from a jug and sold food from a heavily laden pushcart. He had fruit, loaves of bread and rolls, various kinds of salami, and lunch bags that, he said, contained 'tante belle cose’ He also had a stock of wine. Moles worth bought a Bardolino and ('just in case') three bottles of Chianti; I bought an Orvieto and a Chianti; and Duffill had his hand on a bottle of claret.

Molesworth said, 'I'll take these back to the compartment. Get me a lunch bag, will you?'

I bought two lunch bags and some apples.

Duffill said, 'English money, I only have English money.'

The Italian snatched a pound from the old man and gave him change in lire.

Molesworth came back and said, 'Those apples want washing. There's cholera here.' He looked again at the pushcart and said, 'I think two lunch bags, just to be safe.'

While Molesworth bought more food and another bottle of Bardolino, Duffill said, 'I took this train in nineteen twenty-nine.'

'It was worth taking then,' said Molesworth. 'Yes, she used to be quite a train.'

'How long are we staying here?' I asked.

No one knew. Molesworth called out to the train guard, 'I say, George, how long are we stopping for?'

The guard shrugged, and as he did so the train began to back up.

'Do you think we should board?' I asked.

'It's going backwards,' said Molesworth. 'I expect they're shunting.'

The train guard said, 'Andiamo.'

'The Italians love wearing uniforms,' said Molesworth. 'Look at him, will you? And the uniforms are always so wretched. They really are like overgrown schoolboys. Are you talking to us, George?'

'I think he wants us to board,' I said. The train stopped going backwards. I hopped aboard and looked down. Molesworth and Duffill were at the bottom of the stairs.

'You've got parcels,' said Duffill. 'You go first.'

'I'm quite all right,' said Molesworth. 'Up you go.'

'But you've got parcels,' said Duffill. He produced a pipe from his coat and began sucking on the stem. 'Carry on.' He moved back and gave Molesworth room.

Molesworth said, 'Are you sure?'

Duffill said, 'I didn't go all the way, then, in nineteen twenty-nine. I didn't do that until after the second war.' He put his pipe in his mouth and smiled.

Molesworth stepped aboard and climbed up – slowly, because he was carrying a bottle of wine and his second lunch bag. Duffill grasped the rails beside the door and as he did so the train began to move and he let go. He dropped his arms. Two train guards rushed behind him and held his arms and hustled him along the platform to the moving stairs of Car 99. Duffill, feeling the Italians' hands, resisted the embrace, went feeble, and stepped back; he made a half-turn to smile wanly at the fugitive door. He looked a hundred years old. The train was moving swiftly past his face.

'George!' cried Molesworth. 'Stop the train!'

I was leaning out the door. I said, 'He's still on the platform.'

There were two Italians beside us, the conductor and a bedmaker. Their shoulders were poised, preparing to shrug.

'Pull the emergency cord!' said Molesworth.

'No, no, no, no,' said the conductor. 'If I pull that I must pay five thousand lire. Don't touch!'

'Is there another train?' I asked.

'Si',' said the bed-maker in a tone of irritation. 'He can catch us in Milano.'

'What time does the next train get to Milano?' I asked.

'Two o'clock.'

'When do we get to Milano?'

'One o'clock,' said the conductor. 'We leave at two.'

'Well, how the hell-'

'The old man can take a car,' explained the bed-maker. 'Don't worry. He hires a taxi at Domodossola; the taxi goes varooml He's in Milano before us!'

Molesworth said, 'These chaps could use a few lessons in how to run a railroad.'

The meal that followed the abandoning of Duffill only made that point plainer. It was a picnic in Molesworth's compartment; we were joined by the Belgian girl, Monique, who brought her own cheese. She asked for mineral water and got Molesworth's reprimand: 'Sorry, I keep that for my teeth.' We sat shoulder to shoulder on Molesworth's bed, gloomily picking through our lunch bags.

'I wasn't quite prepared for this,' said Molesworth. 'I think each country should have its own dining car. Shunt it on at the frontier and serve slap-up meals.' He nibbled a hard-boiled egg and said, 'Perhaps we should get together and write a letter to Cook's.'

The Orient Express, once unique for its service, is now unique among trains for its lack of it. The Indian Rajdhani Express serves curries in its dining car, and so does the Pakistani Khyber Mail; the Meshed Express serves Iranian chicken kebab, and the train to Sapporo in Northern Japan smoked fish and glutinous rice. Box lunches are sold at the station in Rangoon, and Malaysian Railways always include a dining car that resembles a noodle stall, where you can buy mee-hoon soup; and Amtrak, which I had always thought to be the worst railway in the world, serves hamburgers on the James Whitcomb Riley (Washington-Chicago). Starvation takes the fun out of travel, and from this point of view the Orient Express is more inadequate than the poorest Madrasi train, where you exchange stained lunch coupons for a tin tray of vegetables and a quart of rice.

Monique said, 'I hope he takes a taxi.'

'Poor old chap,' said Molesworth. 'He panicked, you see. Started going backwards. "You've got parcels," he said, "you go first." He might have got on if he hadn't panicked. Well, we'll see if he gets to Milan. He should do. What worries me is that he might have had a heart attack. He didn't look well, did he? Did you get his name?'

Tuffill,'Isaid.

'Duffill,' said Molesworth. 'If he's got any sense at all, he'll sit down and have a drink. Then he'll get a taxi to Milan. It's not far, but if he panics again he's lost.'

We went on eating and drinking. If there had been a dining car we would have had a simple meal and left it at that. Because there was no dining car we ate all the way to Milan, the fear of hunger producing a hunger of its own. Monique said we were like Belgians, who ate constantly.

It was after one o'clock when we arrived at Milan. There was no sign of Duffill either on the platform or in the crowded waiting room. The station, modelled on a cathedral, had high vaulted ceilings, and simple signs like uscita gained the metaphorical quality of religious mottoes from their size and dramatic position on the walls; balconies served no further purpose than to provide roosts for brooding stone eagles that looked too fat to fly. We bought more lunch bags, another bottle of wine, and the Herald Tribune.

'Poor old chap,' said Molesworth, looking around for Duffill.

'Doesn't look as if he's going to make it.'

'They warn you about that, don't they? Missing the train. You think it's shunting, but really it's on its way. The Orient Express especially. There was something in the Observer about it. Everyone misses it. It's famous for that.'

At Car 99, Molesworth said, 'I think we'd better get aboard. I know I don't want to be duffilled.'

Now, as we travelled to Venice, there was no hope for Duffill. There wasn't the slightest chance of his catching up with us. We finished another bottle of wine and I went to my compartment. Duffill's suitcase, shopping bag, and paper parcels were piled in a corner. I sat down and looked out the window, resisting the urge to rummage through Duffill's effects for a clue to his going to Turkey. It had grown hotter; the corn fields were baked yellow and strewn with shocks and stubble. Beyond Brescia, the shattered windows in a row of houses gave me a headache. Moments later, drugged by the Italian heat, I was asleep.

Venice, like a drawing room in a gas station, is approached through a vast apron of infertile industrial flatlands, criss-crossed with black sewer troughs and stinking of oil, the gigantic sinks and stoves of refineries and factories, all intimidating the delicate dwarfed city beyond. The graffiti along the way are professionally executed as the name of the firms: motta gelati, lotta COMMUNISTA, AGIP, NOI SIAMO TUTTI ASSASSINI, RENAULT, UNITA. The lagoon with its luminous patches of oil slick, as if hopelessly retouched by Canaletto, has a yard-wide tidewrack of rubble, plastic bottles, broken toilet seats, raw sewage, and that bone white factory froth the wind beats into drifts of foam. The edges of the city have succumbed to industry's erosion, and what shows are the cracked back windows and derelict posterns of waterlogged villas, a few brittle Venetian steeples, and farther in, but low and almost visibly sinking, walls of spaghetti-coloured stucco and red roofs over which flocks of soaring swallows are teaching pigeons to fly.

'Here we are, mother.' The elderly American man was helping his wife down the stairs, and a porter half-carried her the rest of the way to the platform. Oddly appropriate, this couple who had seen Venice in better days: now the city and its visitors were enfeebled, suffering the fatal poisoning of the age. But Mrs Ketchum (for that was her name: it was the very last thing she told me) looked wounded; she walked with pain, using joints that had turned to stone, leaning on her stick. The Ketchums would be going to Istanbul in a few days, though it struck me as foolhardy, to say the least, for them to carry their feebleness from one remote country to another.

I handed over Duffill's violated belongings to the Venetian Controllare and asked him to contact Milan and reassure Duffill. He said he would, but spoke with the kind of Italianate carelessness that mocks trust. I demanded a receipt. This he provided, showing me his sour resignation as he slowly and distastefully itemized Duffill's parcels on the chit. As soon as we left Venice I clawed it to pieces and threw it out the window. I had asked for it only to chasten him.

At Trieste, Molesworth discovered that the Italian conductor had mistakenly torn out all the tickets from his Cook's wallet. The Italian conductor was in Venice, leaving Molesworth no ticket for Istanbul, or, for that matter, Yugoslavia. But Molesworth stayed calm. He said his strategy in such a situation was to say he had no money and knew only English; 'That puts the ball in their court.'

But the new conductor was persistent. He hung by the door of Molesworth's compartment. He said, 'You no ticket.' Molesworth didn't reply. He poured himself a glass of wine and sipped it. 'You no ticket.'

'Your mistake, George.'

'You,' said the conductor. He waved a ticket at Molesworth. 'You no ticket.'

'Sorry, George,' said Molesworth, still drinking. 'You'll have to phone Cook's.'

'You no ticket. You pay.'

'I no pay. No money.' Molesworth frowned and said to me, 'I do wish he'd go away.'

'You cannot go.'

'I go.'

'No ticket! No go!'

'Good God,' said Molesworth. This argument went on for some time. Molesworth was persuaded to go into Trieste Station. The conductor began to perspire. He explained the situation to the stationmaster, who stood up and left his office; he did not return. Another official was found. 'Look at the uniform,' said Molesworth. 'Absolutely wretched.' That official tried to phone Venice. He rattled the pins with a stumpy finger and said, 'Pronto! Pronto!' But the phone was out of order.

Finally Molesworth said, 'I give up. Here – here's some money.' He flourished a handful of 10,000 lire notes. 'I buy a new ticket.'

The conductor reached for the money. Molesworth withdrew it as the conductor snatched.

'Now look, George,' said Molesworth. 'You get me a ticket, but before you do that, you sit down and write me an endorsement so I can get money back. Is that clear?'

But all Molesworth said when we were again underway, was, 'I think they're all very naughty.'

At Sezana, on the Yugoslav border, they were very naughty, too. Yugoslav policemen with puffy faces and black belts crossed on their chests crowded the train corridor and examined passports. I showed mine. The policeman pawed it, licked his thumb, and wiped at pages, leaving damp smudges, until he found my visa. He passed it back to me. I tried to step by him to retrieve my wine glass from Molesworth's compartment. The policeman spread his fingers on my chest and gave me a shove; seeing me stumble backwards he smiled, lifting his lips over his terrible teeth.

'You can imagine how these Jug policemen behave in third class,' said Molesworth, in a rare display of social conscience.

'"And still she cried and still the world pursues,"' I said, "Jug Jug' to dirty ears." Who says The Waste Land's irrelevant?'

'Jug' seemed uncannily exact, for outside the train little Jugs frolicked on the tracks, big parental Jugs crouched in rows, balanced on suitcases, and uniformed Jugs with leather pouches and truncheons strolled, smoking evil-smelling cigarettes with the apt brand name, 'Stop!'

More passengers had installed themselves in Car 99 at Venice: an Armenian lady from Turkey (with a sister in Watertown, Massachusetts), who was travelling with her son – each time I talked to this pretty woman the boy burst into tears, until I got the message and went away; an Italian nun with the face of a Roman emperor and traces of a moustache; Enrico, the nun's brother, who was now in DuffiU's berth; three Turkish men, who somehow managed to sleep in two berths; and a doctor from Verona.

The doctor, a cancer specialist on his way to a cancer conference in Belgrade, made a play for Monique, who, in an effort to divert the man, brought him to Moles-worth's compartment for a drink. The man sulked until the conversation turned to cancer; then like William Burroughs' Doctor Ben way ('Cancer! My first love!'), he became quite companionable as he summarized the paper he was going to read at the conference. All of us tried as well as we could to be intelligent about cancer, but I noticed the doctor pinching Monique's arm and, feeling that he might have located a symptom and was planning a more thorough examination, I said good night and went to bed to read Little Dorrit. I found some inspiration in Mr Meagles' saying, 'One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind,' and, with that thought repeating in my brain, fell into that deep slumber familiar to infants in old-fashioned rocker cradles and railway travellers in sleeping cars.

I was shaving the next morning, amazing Enrico with my portable electric razor as I had Duffill, when we pulled level with a train that bore an enamelled plate on its side inscribed moskva-beograd. The Direct-Orient halted, making its couplings grunt, and Enrico dashed out of the door. This was Belgrade, calling attention to the fact with acronyms, centrocoop, ateks, rad, and one I loved, transjug. It was here, at Belgrade Station, that I thought I would try out my camera. I found a group of Yugoslav peasants, Mama Jug, Papa Jug, Granny Jug, and a lot of little Jugs; the men had Halloween moustaches, and one of the women wore a green satin dress over a pair of men's trousers; the granny, wearing a shawl that hid everything but her enormous nose, carried a battered Gladstone bag. The rest of their luggage, an unmanageable assortment of cardboard boxes and neatly sewn bales, was in the process of being transferred across the track, from one platform to the other. Any one of the bundles would have caused a derailment. Migrants in Belgrade: a poignant portrait of futility. I focused and prepared to snap, but in my view finder I saw the granny muttering to the man, who whipped around and made a threatening gesture at me.

Farther down the platform I had another excellent chance. A man in the uniform of a railway inspector, with a correct peaked cap, epaulettes, and neatly pressed trousers was walking towards me. But the interesting and photogenic feature was that he carried a shoe in each hand and was in his bare feet. They were big splayed feet, as blunt and white as turnips. I waited until he passed, and then clicked. But he heard the click and turned to yell a meaningful insult. After that I took my pictures with more stealth.

Molesworth saw me idling on the platform and said, 'I think I shall board. I don't trust this train any more.'

But everyone was on the platform; indeed, all the platforms at Belgrade Station were filled with travellers, leaving with me the unforgettable image of Belgrade as a terminal where people wait for trains that will never arrive, watching locomotives endlessly shunting. I pointed this out to Molesworth.

He said, 'I think of it now as getting duffilled. I don't want to get duffilled.' He hoisted himself into Car 99 and called out, 'Don't you get duffilled!'

We had left the Italian conductor at Venice; at Belgrade our Yugoslav conductor was replaced by a Bulgarian conductor.

'American?' said the Bulgarian as he collected my passport.

I told him I was.

'Agnew,' he said; he nodded.

'You know Agnew?'

He grinned. 'He is in bad situation.'

Molesworth, all business, said, 'You're the conductor, are you?'

The Bulgarian clicked his heels and made a little bow.

'Wonderful,' said Molesworth. 'Now what I want you to do is clean out those bottles.' He motioned to the floor of his compartment, where there was an impressive heap of wine bottles.

'The empty ones?' The Bulgarian smirked.

'Quite right. Good point. Carry on,' said Moles-worth, and joined me at the window.

The Belgrade outskirts were leafy and pleasant, and as it was noon by the time we had left the station, the labourers we passed had downed their tools and were sitting cross-legged in shady spots by the railway line having lunch. The train was going so slowly, one could see the plates of sodden cabbage and could count the black olives in the chipped bowls. These groups of eaters passed loaves of bread the size of footballs, reducing them by hunks and scrubbing their plates with the pieces.

Much later on my trip, in the bar of a Russian ship in the Sea of Japan, on my way from the Japanese railway bazaar to the Soviet one beginning in Nakhodka, I met a jolly Yugoslav named Nikola who told me, 'In Yugoslavia we have three things – freedom, women, and drinking.'

'But not all three at the same time, surely?' I said, hoping he wouldn't take offence. I was seasick at the time, and I had forgotten Yugoslavia, the long September afternoon I had spent on the train from Belgrade to Dimitrovgrad, sitting in my corner seat with a full bottle of wine and my pipe drawing nicely.

There were women, but they were old, shawled against the sun and yoked to green watering cans in trampled cornfields. The landscape was low and uneven, barely supporting in its dust a few farm animals, maybe five motionless cows, and a herdsman leaning on a stick watching them starve in the same way the scarecrows -two plastic bags on a bony cross-piece – watched the devastated fields of cabbages and peppers. And beyond the rows of blue cabbage, a pink pig butted the splintery fence of his small pen and a cow lay under a goal of saplings in an unused football field. Red peppers, as crimson and pointed as clusters of poinsettias, dried in the sun outside farm cottages in districts where farming consisted of men stumbling after oxen dragging wooden ploughs and harrows, or occasionally wobbling on bicycles loaded with hay bales. Herdsmen were not simply herdsmen; they were sentries, guarding little flocks from marauders; four cows watched by a woman, three grey pigs driven by a man with a truncheon, scrawny chickens watched by scrawny children. Freedom, women, and drinking was Nikola's definition; and there was a woman in a field pausing to tip a water bottle to her mouth; she swallowed and bent from the waist to continue tying up cornstalks. Large ochre squashes sat plumply in fields of withering vines; people priming pumps and swinging buckets out of wells on long poles; tall narrow haystacks, and pepper fields in so many stages of ripeness I first took them for flower gardens. It is a feeling of utter quietness, deep rural isolation the train briefly penetrates. It goes on without a change for hours, this afternoon in Yugoslavia, and then all people disappear and the effect is eerie: roads without cars or bicycles, cottages with empty windows at the fringes of empty fields, trees heavy with apples and no one picking them. Perhaps it's the wrong time – 3.30; perhaps it's too hot. But where are the people who stacked that hay and set those peppers so carefully to dry? The train passes on – that's the beauty of a train, this heedless movement – but it passes on to more of the same. Six neat beehives, a derelict steam engine with wild flowers garlanding its smokestack, a stalled ox at a level crossing. In the heat haze of the afternoon my compartment grows dusty, and down at the front of the train Turks lie all over their seats sleeping with their mouths open and children wakeful on their stomachs. At each river and bridge there were square brick emplacements, like Croatian copies of Mar-tello towers, pocked by bombs. Then I saw a man, headless, bent over in a field, camouflaged by cornstalks that were taller than he; I wondered if I had missed all the others because they were made so tiny by their crops. There was a drama outside Nis. At a road near the track a crowd of people fought to look at a horse, still in its traces and hitched to an overloaded wagon, lying dead on its side in a mud puddle in which the wagon was obviously stuck. I imagined its heart had burst when it tried to free the wagon. And it had just happened: children were calling to their friends, a man was dropping his bike and running back for a look, and farther along a man pissing against a fence was straining to see the horse. The scene was composed like a Flemish painting in which the pissing man was a vivid detail. The train, the window frame holding the scene for moments, made it a picture. The man at the fence flicks the last droplets from his penis and, tucking it in his baggy pants, begins to sprint; the picture is complete.

'I hate sightseeing,' said Molesworth. We were at the corridor window and I had just been reprimanded by a Yugoslav policeman for snapping a picture of a steam locomotive that, in the late afternoon sun, and the whirling dust the thousands of homeward-bound commuters had raised crossing the railway lines, stood amidst a magnificent exhalation of blue vapours mingling with clouds of gold gnats. Now we were in a rocky gorge outside Nis, on the way to Dimitrovgrad, the cliffs rising as we moved and holding occasional symmetries, like remainders of intelligent brickwork in the battlements of a ruined castle. The sight of this seemed to tire Moles-worth, and I think he felt called upon to explain his fatigue. 'AH that tramping around with guidebooks,' he said after a moment. 'In those horrible crocodiles of tourists, in and out of churches, museums, and mosques. No, no, no. I just like to be still, find a comfortable chair. Do you see what I mean? I like to absorb a country.'

He was drinking. We were both drinking, but drink made him reflective and it made me hungry. All I had had to eat during the day was a cheese bun in Belgrade, an envelope of pretzels, and a sour apple. The sight of Bulgaria, with its decrepit houses and skinny goats, did not make me hopeful of a good meal at Sofia Station, and at the fearfully named town of Dragoman a number of people, including several from Car 99, were taken off the train because they hadn't had cholera shots. Italy, the Bulgarians said, was stricken.

I found the Bulgarian conductor and asked him to describe for me a typical Bulgarian meal. Then I wrote down the Bulgarian words for the delicacies he had mentioned: cheese, potatoes, bread, sausages, salad with beans, and so forth. He assured me that there would be food in Sofia.

'This is an awfully slow train,' said Molesworth as the Direct-Orient creaked through the darkness. Here and there was a yellow lantern, a fire far off, a light in a hut at a remote halt where, barely visible, the stationmaster could be seen five paces from his hut, presenting his flag to the dawdling express.

I showed Molesworth my list of Bulgarian foods, and said I planned to buy what was obtainable at Sofia; it would be our last night on the Direct-Orient – we deserved a good meal.

'That should be very useful,' said Molesworth. 'Now, what are you going to use for money?'

'I haven't the slightest idea,' I said.

'They use the lev here, you know. But the snag is, I couldn't find a quotation for it. My bank manager said it was one of those hopeless currencies – I suppose it's not really money at all, just pieces of paper.' From the way he talked I could tell he wasn't hungry. He went on, 'I always use plastic. Plastic's incredibly useful.'

'Plastic?'

'Well, these things.' He set his drink down and took out a wad of credit cards, shuffled them, and read their names.

'Do you think the Barclaycard has hit Bulgaria yet?'

'Let's hope so,' he said. 'But if not, I still have some lire left.'

It was after eleven at night when we pulled into Sofia, and, as Molesworth and I leaped off the train, the conductor told us to hurry: 'Fifteen minutes, maybe ten.'

'You said we'd have a half-hour.'

'But we are running late now. Don't talk – hurry!'

We quick-marched down the platform, searching for food. There was a cafeteria with a mob at the counter and then nothing more except, at the far end of the platform, a man with a steaming metal pushcart. He was bald. He held a small paper bag in one hand and with the other he flipped open the several tabernacles of his pushcart and stabbed at white buns and red, dripping sausages, the size of bananas, with pink meat showing in slightly burst seams. There were three customers ahead of us. He served them, taking his time, urging buns and sausages into the bags with his busy fork. When my turn came I showed him two fingers, changed my mind, three fingers. He bagged three of each.

'The same again,' said Molesworth and handed him a iooo-lire note.

'No, no,' said the man; he pushed my dollar away and at the same time took my bag from me and put it on the pushcart.

'He won't take our money,' said Molesworth.

‘Banka, banka,' said the man.

'He wants us to get change.'

'This is a dollar,' I said. 'Take the whole thing.'

'He won't wear it,' said Molesworth. 'Where's your banka, eh?'

The bald man pointed to the station. We ran in the direction his finger was pointing and found a teller's cage where a long line of disconsolate people stood clutching pieces of paper and kicking their luggage as the line inched forward.

'I think we'll have to give this up as a bad job,' said Molesworth.

'I'm dying for one of those sausages.'

'Unless you want to get duffilled,' said Molesworth, 'you should get back on the train. I think I shall.'

We did and minutes later the whistle blew and the Bulgarian darkness swallowed Sofia. Enrico, seeing us empty-handed, got Italian crackers from his sister, the nun, and gave them to us; the Armenian lady presented a slab of cheese and even sat with us and had a drink, until her son wandered in wearing a pair of pyjamas. He saw his mother laughing; he burst into tears. 'Now I go,' she said, and went. Monique had gone to bed; so had Enrico. Car 99 was asleep, but we were picking up speed. 'And we're not badly off,' said Molesworth, slicing the cheese. 'Two more bottles of wine – that's one apiece – and still some Orvieto to finish. Cheese and biscuits. We can call it a late supper.' We went on drinking, and Molesworth talked of India, how he had gone out for the first time on a P amp; O liner with thousands of enlisted men, tough mineworkers from the Durham coal fields. Molesworth and his fellow officers had plenty to drink, but the lower ranks were battened down. After a month they ran out of beer. There were fights, the men were mutinous, 'and by the time we reached Bombay most of them were in chains. But I got an extra pip on my shoulder for behaving myself.'

'This is the idea,' said Molesworth. The train was racing, and he was uncorking the last bottle. 'It's usually a good rule to drink the wine of the country you're passing through.' He glanced out the window into the blackness. 'I suppose that's still Bulgaria. What a great pity.'

Large grey dogs, a pack of seven, presumably wild, were chasing across the harsh steppes of northwestern Turkey, barking at the train. They woke me in Thrace, which Nagel calls 'rather unattractive', and when the wild dogs slackened their pace and fell behind the fleeing train there was little else to see but a dreary monotony of unambitious hills. The occasional army posts, the men shovelling sugar beets caked with dirt into steel hoppers, and the absence of trees made the dreariness emphatic. And I couldn't bear those hairless hills. Edirne (Adrianople) was to the north, Istanbul still four hours away; but we travelled over the steppes, stopping at only the smallest stations, an unremarkable journey across a barren landscape: featurelessness is the steppes' single attribute, and, having said that, and assigned it a shade of brown, there is nothing more to say.

And yet I hung by the window, hoping to be surprised. We passed another station. I searched it for a detail; it repeated fifty previous stations and this repetition kept it out of focus. But just past it was a garden plot and, next to that, three turkeys, moving with that clockwork bustle characteristic of fowl.

'Look!' Molesworth had seen them.

I nodded.

'Turkeys. In TurkeyV he exclaimed. 'I wonder if that's why they're called – '

But it isn't. These birds got their name from African guinea fowl which, imported through Istanbul, were called turkey cocks. We discussed this over our morning drink for the next hour or two, and it struck me that, for a man with a wife and children, I was embarked on a fairly aimless enterprise, the lazy indulgence of travel for its own sake.

The great express from Paris became a doubtful and irritating Turkish local once it got to Istanbul's outskirts, stopping at every station simply to give conductors a chance to fool with notebooks in the Turkish Clapham Junctions and Scarsdales.

On the right-hand side of the train was the Sea of Marmara, where freighters with rusty hulls and fishing boats with the contours of scimitars lay surrounded by caiques in the glittering water. On our left the suburbs were passing, altering every fifty yards: scattered tent settlements and fishing villages gave way to high-rise apartment houses, with shacks at their ankles; then a shantytown on an outcrop of rock, bungalows where it levelled out, and an uneven terrace of wooden houses toppling grandly from a cliff – a style of building (the falling, unpainted, three-decker house) favoured in Somerville, Massachusetts, as well as Istanbul. It takes a while to realize that what are represented in these vastly different building styles are not social classes, but rather centuries, each style an example of its own age – Istanbul has been a city for twenty-seven centuries -and getting older and more solid (shingle to timber, timber to brick, brick to stone) as you get closer to the Seraglio.

Istanbul begins as the train passes the city wall at the Golden Gate, the Arch of Triumph of Theodosius – built in 380 but not appreciably more decrepit than the strings of Turkish laundry that flap at its base. Here, for no apparent reason, the train picked up speed and rushed east along Istanbul's snout, past the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Sarayi, and then circled to the Golden Horn. Sirkeci Station is nothing compared to its sister station, Haydarpasa, just across the Bosporus, but its nearness to the busy Emindnu Square and one of the prettiest mosques in the city, Yeni Valide Camii, not to mention the Galata Bridge (which accommodates a whole community of hawkers, fish stalls, shops, restaurants, and pickpockets disguised as peddlers and touts), gives to one's arrival in Istanbul by the Direct-Orient Express the combined shock and exhilaration of being pitched headfirst into a bazaar.

'It all looks absolutely hideous,' said Molesworth. But he was smiling. 'I think I'm going to like it.' He was off to the high-priced fishing village of Tarabya. He gave me his telephone number and said I should ring if I got bored. We were still on the platform at Sirkeci. Moles-worth turned to the train. 'I must say I'm not sad to see the back of that train, are you?' But he said it in a tone of fussy endearment, in the way a person who calls himself a fool really means the opposite.

To catch a glimpse of oneself in a gilt-framed ten-foot mirror at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul is to know an instant of glory, the joy of seeing one's own face in a prince's portrait. The decor in the background is decayed sumptuousness, an acre of mellow carpet, black panelling, and rococo carving on the walls and ceilings, where cupids patiently smile and Bake. Overhead are complicated chandeliers, like giant wind chimes in crystal, and past the ballroom's marble pillars and potted palms is the mahogany bar, hung with excellent copies of mediocre French paintings. This palace, which from the outside looks no more imposing than the Charlestown Savings Bank in Boston, is run by small dark men who look as if they belong to several generations of the same family, and each wears a courtly smirk under his moustache as he gives French replies to English questions. Happily, the hotel is a charitable foundation, according to the wishes of the late owner, a Turkish philanthropist: the profits of your princely spending, every voluptuous excess, improve the lot of needy Turks.

My first day in the city I spent obsessively walking, like a man released on a sudden from the closeness of a long captivity. The single penalty of the train, for a rambler like me, is this deprivation of walking. As the days passed I slowed down and, with Nagel's Turkey in my hand, began sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations. But how should one see Istanbul? Gwyn Williams in his Turkey, A Traveller's Guide and History recommends:

A day for walls and fortifications, a few days in pursuit of aqueducts and cisterns in and outside the city, a week for palaces, another for museums, a day for columns and towers, weeks for churches and mosques… Days may be spent on tombs and cemeteries and the decor of death will be found to be gayer than one thought

After those exhausting forays death itself, never mind the decor, would seem fairly gay. In any case, I had a train to catch; so I poked in a few corners and satisfied myself that this was a city I would gladly return to. In the Topkapi harem I was shown the quarters of the black eunuchs. Outside each cell were various instruments of torture, thumbscrews, lashes, and so forth. But punishments, according to the guide, were not always elaborate. I pressed her for an example.

'They hang them up and beat them on their feet,' she said.

A Frenchman turned to me and asked, 'Is she talking in English?'

She was, and also in German, but she gave to both languages Turkish rhythms and fricatives. No one seemed to mind this, however, and most of the people simply shuffled back and forth, saying, 'How'd you like to have one of those?' In the jewel room the remark acquired a curious irony, since most of the jewels on the daggers and swords are fakes, the real ones having been pilfered years ago. The average air fare to Istanbul would undoubtedly buy the whole Topkapi treasury, though the Turks insist, for patriotic reasons, that those egg-sized emeralds are genuine, just as they insist that the footprint of Mohammed in the sacred museum across the courtyard is really that of the Prophet. If so, he may have been the only Arab in history to wear a size 14 triple-E sandal.

Stranger than this, but manifestly true, is the story behind the mosaic in an upper gallery of Saint Sofia, which depicts the Empress Zoe (980-1050) and her third husband, Constantine Monomachus. Constantine's face has the masklike quality of Gertrude Stein's in the famous Picasso portrait. Indeed, the face of Constantine was put in this mosaic after Zoe's first husband, Romanus III, died or was exiled. But the best mosaics are not in the grand churches and mosques of central Istanbul. They are in a tiny crumbling dirt-coloured building called the Kariye Camii in the outskirts of the city. Here, the mosaics are wonderfully supple and human, and the millions of little tiles have the effect of brush strokes: Christ seems to breathe, and the Virgin in one fresco looks exactly like Virginia Woolf.

That afternoon, anxious to have a look at the Asian side of Istanbul and prepared to buy my train ticket to Teheran, I took the ferry across the Bosporus to Haydar-pasa. The sea was unexpectedly calm. I had thought, having read Don Juan, that it would be rough:

There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.

But that is farther up the Bosporus. Here the sea was mirror-smooth, and Haydarpasa Station, a heavy dark European building with a clock and two blunt spires, was reflected in it. The station is an incongruous gateway to Asia. It was built in 1909, from the designs of a German architect who apparently assumed that Turkey would soon be part of a German empire in which, in stations like this, subject peoples would loyally be eating sausages. The intention seems to have been to put up a building in which the portrait of the Kaiser could be hung and not look out of place.

'Teheran gitmek ichin hit bilet istiyorum,' I said to the girl at the counter, glancing at my phrase book for courage.

'We do not sell tickets on Sunday,' she said in English. 'Come tomorrow.'

Because I was on the right side of the Bosporus, I walked from the station to the Selimiye Barracks, where Florence Nightingale tended gangrenous soldiers during the Crimean War. I asked the sentry if I could go in. He said, 'Nightingale?' I nodded. He said her room was closed on Sunday and directed me to the cemetery at Uskiidar, Istanbul's largest necropolis.

It was on the way to Uskudar that I had an insight into what had, up to then, been bothering me about Turkey. The father of the Turks, which is what his surname means, was Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, and everywhere one goes in Turkey one sees photographs, portraits, and statues of him; he is on billboards, stamps, coins – always the same wincing banker's profile. His name is given to streets and plazas and it enters nearly every conversation one has in the country. The face has become emblematic, the shape of a softening star, with the suggestions of a nose and chin, and is ubiquitous as the simplified character the Chinese use to frighten devils away. Atatiirk came to power in 1923, declared Turkey a republic, and, by way of modernization, closed down all religious schools, dissolved dervish orders, and introduced the Latin alphabet and the Swiss civil code. He died in 1938, and that was my insight: modernization stopped in Turkey with the death of Atatiirk, at five minutes past nine on 10 November 1938. As if to demonstrate this, the room in which he died is as he left it, and all the clocks in the palace show the time as 9.05.

This seemed to explain why the Turks typically dress the way people did in 1938, in hairy brown sweaters and argyle socks, in baggy pinstriped pants and blue serge suits with padded shoulders, flapping winglike lapels and a three-pointed hanky in the breast pocket. Their hair is wavy with brilliantine and their moustaches are waxed. The hemlines on the brown gaberdine skirts the women habitually wear are below the knees, about two inches. It is prewar modernity, and you don't have to look far to see 1938 Packards, Dodges, and Pontiacs lumbering along streets that were last widened when those models appeared. The furniture stores of Istanbul show their latest designs in the window – boxy over-upholstered chairs and clawfoot sofas. All this leads one to the inescapable conclusion that, if the zenith of Ottoman elegance was the sixteenth-century reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the high-water mark of the modern was in 1938, when Atatiirk was still modelling Turkish stylishness on the timid designs of the West.

'Why, that's awfully clever of you,' said Molesworth, when I rang him up to explain this to him. Then he changed the subject. He was enjoying Tarabya; the weather was perfect. 'Come up for lunch. The taxi will cost the earth but I can promise you a very good wine. It's called either Cankia or Ankia. It's dry, white, with a slight twinkle - a pinky colour, but definitely not a rose, because I hate rose and this was very drinkable indeed.'

I could not meet Molesworth for lunch. I had a previous engagement, my single duty in Istanbul, a luncheon lecture arranged by a helpful American embassy man. I couldn't cancel it: I had a hotel bill to pay. So I went to the conference room where about twenty Turks were having a pre-lecture drink; I was told they were poets, playwrights, novelists, and academics. The first man I spoke to was the most pompous, the president of the Turkish Literary Union, a Mr Ercumena Behzat Lav, a name I found as hard to conjure with as to pronounce. He had a look of spurious eminence – white-haired, with tiny feet, and an unwilling gaze that was disdainful in an overpractised way. He smoked with the squinting disgust people affect when they are on the verge of giving up smoking. I asked him what he did.

'He says he does not speak English,' said Mrs Nur, my pretty translator. The president had spoken and looked away. 'He prefers to speak in Turkish, though he will speak to you in German or Italian.'

‘Va bene,' I said. 'Allora, parliamo in Italiano. Ma dove imparava questa lingua?'

The president addressed Mrs Nur in Turkish.

'He says, "Do you speak German?"'

'Not very well.'

The president said something more.

'He will speak Turkish.'

'Ask him what he does. Is he a writer?'

'This,' said the man through Mrs Nur, 'is a completely meaningless question. One cannot say in a few words what one does or is. That takes months, sometimes years. I can tell you my name. Beyond that you have to find out for yourself.'

'Tell him he's too much work,' I said, and walked away. I fell into conversation with the head of the Enghsh Department of Istanbul University, who introduced me to his colleague. Both wore tweeds and stood rocking on their heels, the way English academics size up new members of the Senior Common Room.

'He's another old Cantabrigian,' said the head, slapping his colleague on the back. 'Same college as me. Fitzbill.'

'Fitzwilliam College?'

'That's right, though I haven't been back there for donkey's years.'

'What do you teach?' I asked.

'Everything from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf!'

It seemed as if everyone had rehearsed his lines except me. As I was thinking of a reply, I was seized by the arm and dragged away in a very powerful grip. The man dragging me was tall and stoutly built, bull-necked, with a great jaw. His palely tinted glasses did not quite hide his right eye, which was dead and looked like a withered grape. He talked rapidly in Turkish as he hustled me into the corner of the room.

'He says,' Mrs Nur said, trying to keep up with us, 'he always captures beautiful girls and good writers. He wants to talk to you.'

This was Yashar Kemal, the author of Mehmet My Hawk, the only Turkish novel I could ever remember having read. It is thought that before long he will be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He had, he said, just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union where he had been lecturing with his friend, Aziz Nesin. He had addressed audiences in Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, and Alma-Ata.

'At my lectures I said many terrible things! They hated me and they were very upset. For example, I said that socialist realism was anti-Marxist. This I believe. I am a Marxist: I know. All the writers in the Soviet Union except Sholokhov are anti-Marxist. They did not want to hear this terrible thing. I told them, "Do you want to know the greatest Marxist writer?" Then I said, "William Faulkner!" They were very upset. Yes, Sholokhov is a great writer, but Faulkner was a much greater Marxist.'

I said I didn't think Faulkner would have agreed with him. He ignored me and pressed on.

'And the greatest comic writer, of course we all know – Mark Twain. But the next greatest is Aziz Nesin. And don't think I'm saying that simply because we're both Turkish or because he's my best friend.'

Aziz Nesin, who was across the room mournfully nibbling an American embassy vol-au-vent, has written fifty-eight books. Most are collections of short stories. They are said to be hilarious, but none has been translated into English.

'I have no doubt about it,' Yashar said. 'Aziz Nesin is a greater comic writer than Anton Chekhov!'

Aziz Nesin, hearing his name, looked up and smiled sadly.

'Come to my house,' said Yashar. 'We go swimming, eh? Eat some fish? I will tell you the whole story.'

'How will I find your house?' I had asked Yashar the previous day. He said, 'Ask any child. The old people don't know me, but all the little ones do. I make kites for them.'

I took him at his word, and when I arrived at the apartment block on a bluff above a Marmara fishing village called Menakse, I asked a fairly small child the way to Yashar's house. The child pointed to the top floor.

The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order – the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cosy solidity of a nest. On several of Yashar's shelves were editions of his own books in thirty languages; the English ones had been translated by his wife, Thilda, whose narrow desk held an open Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Yashar had just been interviewed by a Swedish newspaper. He showed me the article, and although I could not read it, the word Nobelpreiskandidate caught my eye. I commented on it.

'Yes,' said Thilda, who interpreted my questions and Yashar's replies, 'it's possible. But they feel it's Graham Greene's turn now.'

'My frint,' said Yashar, hearing Greene's name. He placed his hairy hand on his heart when he said it.

Graham Greene seemed to have a lot of friends on this route. But Yashar knew many other writers and he slapped his heart as he listed them. William Saroyan was his friend, and so were Erskine Caldwell, Angus Wilson, Robert Graves, and James Baldwin, whom he called 'Jimmy' – he reminded me that Another Country had been written in a luxurious Istanbul villa.

'I can't face going swimming,' said Thilda. She was a patient, intelligent woman who spoke English so well I didn't dare to compliment her on it for fear she might say, as Thurber did on a similar occasion, 'I ought to – I spent forty years in Columbus, Ohio, working on it like a dog.' Thilda sees to the practical side of his affairs, negotiating contracts, answering letters, explaining Yash-ar's harangues about the socialist paradise he envisions, that Soviet pastoral where the workers own the means of production and complete sets of Faulkner.

It was unfortunate that Thilda didn't come swimming with us because it meant three hours of talking pidgin English, an activity that Yashar must have found as fatiguing as I did. Carrying our bathing trunks, we walked down the dusty hill to the beach. Yashar pointed out the fishing village and said he was planning a series of stories based on the life there. On the way, we met a small quivering man with a shaven head and the regulation rumpled thirties suit. Yashar shouted a greeting at him. The man crept over and grabbed Yashar's hand and tried to kiss it, but Yashar, by jerking his own hand, turned this servility into a handshake. They spoke together for a while, then Yashar slapped the man on the back and sent him tottering away.

'His name Ahmet,' said Yashar. He put his thumb to his mouth and tilted his hand. 'He drunk.'

We changed at a swimming club where some men were sunning themselves. In the water I challenged him to a race. He won it easily and splashed water at me as I struggled in his wake. The previous day he had looked like a bull; but now, swimming, his bulk making the water foam at his arms, he had the movement of a mature sea monster, with hairy shoulders and a thick neck, and he surfaced roaring as his vast head dripped. The champion swimmers – he claimed to be one – all came, he said, from Adana, his birthplace in South Anatolia.

'I love my country,' he said, meaning Anatolia. 'I love it. Taurus Mountains. Plains. Old villages. Cotton. Eagles. Oranges. The best horses – very long horses.' He put his hand on his heart: 'I love.'

We talked about writers. He loved Chekhov; Whitman was a good man; Poe was also great. Melville was good: every year Yashar read Moby Dick, and Don Quixote, 'and Homerus'. We were pacing up and down in the hot sun on the beach front, and Yashar cast a giant shadow over me that eliminated any danger of my getting sunburned. He didn't like Joyce, he said. 'Ulysses - too simple. Joyce is a very simple man, not like Faulkner. Listen. I am interested in form. New form. I hate traditional form. Novelist who use traditional form is' – he fumbled for a word – 'is dirt.'

'I don't speak English,' he said after a moment. 'Kurdish I speak, and Turkish, and gypsy language. But I don't speak barbarian languages.'

'Barbarian languages?'

'English! German! Ya! French! All the barbarian – ' As he spoke, there was a shout. One of the men sunning himself in a beach chair called Yashar over and showed him an item in a newspaper.

Returning, he said, 'Pablo Neruda is dead.'

Yashar insisted on stopping at the fishing village on the way back. About fifteen men sat outside a cafe. Seeing Yashar, they leaped to their feet and Yashar greeted each one with a bear hug. One was a man of eighty; he wore a ragged shirt and his trousers were tied with a piece of rope. He was deeply tanned, barefoot, and toothless. Yashar said he had no home. The man slept in his caique every night, whatever the weather, and he had done so for forty years. 'So he has his caique and sleeps in it too.' These men, and one we met later on the steep path (Yashar kissed him carefully on each cheek before introducing him to me), obviously looked upon Yashar as a celebrity and regarded him with some awe.

'These my friends,' said Yashar. 'I hate writers; I love fishermen.' But there was a distance. Yashar had attempted to overcome it with clowning intimacy, yet the distance remained. In the atmosphere of the cafe one would never take Yashar – twice as big as any of the others and dressed like a golf pro – for a fisherman; neither would one take him for a writer on the prowl. There, he looked like a local character, part of the scenery and yet in contrast to it.

It seemed to me that his restless generosity led him into contradictions. My conclusion did not make my understanding any easier. Over lunch of fried red mullet and white wine Yashar talked about prison, Turkey, his books, his plans. He had been to jail; Thilda had served an even longer jail sentence; their daughter-in-law was in jail at the moment. This girl's crime, according to Thilda, was that she had been found making soup in the house of a man who had once been wanted for questioning in connection with a political offence. It was no good expressing disbelief at the muddled story. Turkey, the Turks say, is not like other places, though, after describing in the dour Turkish way the most incredible horrors of torture and cruelty, they invite you to come and spend a year there, assuring you the whole time that you'll love the place.

Yashar's own characteristics were even stranger. A Kurd, he is devoted to Turkey and will not hear of secession; he is an ardent supporter of both the Soviet government and Solzhenitsyn, which is something like rooting for the devil as well as Daniel Webster; he is a Muslim Marxist, his wife is a Jew, and the only foreign country he likes better than Russia is Israel, 'my garden'. With the physique of a bull and the gentleness of a child, he maintains in the same breath that Yoknapatawpha County has an eternal glory and that the Kremlin's commissars are visionary archangels. His convictions defy reason, and at times they are as weirdly unexpected as the blond hair and freckles you see in Asia Minor. But Yashar's complexity is the Turkish character on a large scale.

I told Moles worth this at our farewell lunch. He was sceptical. 'I'm sure he's a marvellous chap,' he said. 'But you want to be careful with the Turks. They were neutral during the war, you know, and if they'd had any backbone at all they would have been on our side.'