Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  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 n
ame 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.

  THE FERRY TO BESIKTAS

  ISTANBUL IS A WATER WORLD, and your first view of it, stepping out of Sirkeci Station, is the pin-cushion profile of minarets on domes seeming to rise from steep dark islands, turbulent ocean all around, the Sea of Marmara to the right, the Golden Horn to the left, the Bosporus straight ahead. Walk forward, walk anywhere, and you approach water splashing at the shores of the city, which is spread across three distinct promontories. Across the Sea of Marmara, dappled with raindrops this afternoon—past the ferries and cargo ships and fishing boats, those silhouettes of battlements and villas—is the shore of Asia, the twinkling edge of the Eastern Star.

  To the southeast is Haydarpasa Station, looking like a dark waterside cathedral. Thirty-three years before, I had boarded an express to Ankara and Lake Van. Changing trains, taking buses, I had traveled overland to Iran and India and beyond. Things were different now: the Iranians had turned down my visa application, and war had brought anarchy to Afghanistan. I would take another route this time, head through Turkey and then hope to detour around Iran by changing trains in Georgia and rolling onward, through the Stans: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan—places that had been forbidden to me all those years ago—and into India.