Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (4 page)

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

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

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

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

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

"Château-Thierry. Épernay."

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

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

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

"Hungarian, I think."

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

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

"It could be Bulgarian. Or Czech."

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"Linz," she said.

"Isn't that where—?"

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

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

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

"Nazis, you mean?"

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

"I take this train all the time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How's the knitting?"

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

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

***

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

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

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

"Is bad," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

I agreed. Goulash was on the menu.

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

"But what does the word mean?"

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

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

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

"How is the government here?"