Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

‘Theroux’s prose explodes with texture, depth and wisdom. He reflects brilliantly on the jarring surreal juxtapositions of the tribal and the corporate, the primitive and the high-tech, Mumbai’s citizens able to discuss widow-burning and arranged marriages in the same breath as hedge funds and computer software, his observations culminating in a powerful meditation on the hostility of America’s poor in painful contrast to the hospitality of India’s’
Boston Globe

‘One of Theroux’s most human books … a kind of wise commonplace book’
Independent

‘Mature and thoroughly engrossing … we are the author’s companions rather than the audience for his tales’
Los Angeles Times

‘A wicked acerbity remains one of Theroux’s strengths … this, plus his uncanny eye for the big picture, knack for description and talent for turning his experiences into stories’
San Francisco Chronicle

‘It is hard to find the world more colourful than in a travel book by Paul Theroux … so exciting one can only be envious’
Revu Magazine (Holland)

‘He moves about, looks around him and tells us what he sees and feels. Few do it better’
The Times Literary Supplement

‘Wonderfully evocative, full of superb sentences and dialogue, and written by someone who loves to be on the move, alive to the possibilities of the world’
Traveller Magazine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Theroux’s highly acclaimed books include Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh-Air Fiend and The Elephanta Suite. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux is also a frequent contributor to magazines. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.

PAUL THEROUX

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the USA by Houghton Mifflin, New York 2008
First published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton 2008
Published in Penguin Books 2009

The lines from L’Homme qui regardait passer les trains © 1938 Georges Simenon Ltd, a Chorion company, all rights reserved. Excerpts from ‘Aubade’ and ‘Water’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, by kind permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. The extract from ‘plato told’ is reprinted from Complete Poems 1904–62 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George Firmage, by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage. The lines from ‘Tom O’Roughley’ by W. B. Yeats used by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Gráinne Yeats.

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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

On the Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar

1. The Eurostar

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy – being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a licence to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.

Of course, it’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where’s the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:

This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, ‘An aimless joy is a pure joy.’

And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars and what V. S. Pritchett called ‘human architecture’, lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly coloured unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don’t belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you’re strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible – the usual condition of the older traveller – is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveller isn’t in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel’s slow tempo.

Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness – travelling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your travelling life and not feel like a spectre. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train.

Long after I took the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar I went on thinking how I’d gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what I’d seen – the way the unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train too. Ages later, you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a distant country. Or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, ‘Run you life, dim-dim!’ – or the sound of a train at night, striking that precise musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you lie in the train, moving through the world as travellers do, ‘inside the whale’.

Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives, boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.

‘Without change there can be no nostalgia,’ a friend once said to me, and I realized that what I began to witness was not just change and decay, but imminent extinction. Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much as me? I had the idea of taking the same trip again, travelling in my own footsteps – a serious enterprise, but the sort of trip that younger, opportunistic punks often take to make a book and get famous.*

The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. Travel also holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you – nearly always a plus. And you can pretend, in travel, to be different from the person you are, unattached, enigmatic, younger, richer or poorer, anyone you choose to be, the rebirth that many travellers experience if they go far enough.

The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since. In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and hardly recognizing the object of desire in this pinched and bruised old fruit. We all live with fantasies of transformation. Live long enough and you see them enacted – the young made old, the road improved, houses where there were once fields; and their opposites, a good school turned into a ruin, a river poisoned, a pond shrunk and filled with rubbish, and dismal reports: ‘He’s dead,’ ‘She’s huge,’ ‘She committed suicide,’ ‘He’s now prime minister,’ ‘He’s in jail,’ ‘You can’t go there any more.’

A great satisfaction in growing old – one of many – is assuming the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to the delusions of the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and fear and progress and the enemy – the world as a wheel of repetition. They – I should say ‘we’ – are bored by things we’ve heard a million times before, books we’ve dismissed, the discoveries that are not new, the proposed solutions that will solve nothing. ‘I can tell that I am growing old,’ says the narrator in Borges’s story ‘The Congress’. ‘One unmistakable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it – it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.’

Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes – but no, they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame. Going back and retracing my footsteps – a glib, debunking effort for a shallower, younger, impressionable writer – would be for me a way of seeing who I was, where I went, and what subsequently happened to the places I had seen.

Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned – volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So – writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life, the nearest I will come to autobiography – as the novel is, the short story, and the essay. As Pedro Almódovar once remarked, ‘Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.’

The thing to avoid while in my own footsteps would be the tedious reminiscences of better days, the twittering of the nostalgia bore, whose message is usually I was there and you weren’t. ‘I remember when you could get four of those for a dollar.’ ‘There was a big tree in a field where that building is now.’ ‘In my day …’

What traveller backtracked to take the great trip again? None of the good ones that I know. Greene never returned to the Liberian bush, nor to Mexico, nor to Vietnam. In his late fifties, Waugh dismissed modern travel altogether as mere tourism and a waste of time. After 1948, Thesiger did not return to Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia. Burton did not mount another expedition to Utah, or to substantiate the source of the Nile – at my age he was living in Trieste, immersed in erotica. Darwin never went to sea again. Neither did Joseph Conrad, who ended up hating the prospect of seafaring. Eric Newby went down the Ganges once, Jonathan Raban down the Mississippi once, and Jan Morris climbed Everest once. Robert Byron did not take the road to Oxiana again, Cherry-Garrard made only one trip to Antarctica, Chatwin never returned to Patagonia, nor did Doughty go back to Arabia Deserta, nor Wallace to the Malay Archipelago, nor Waterton to the Amazon, nor Trollope to the West Indies, nor Edward Lear to Corsica, nor Stevenson to the Cévennes, nor Chekhov to Sakhalin, nor Gide to the Congo, nor Canetti to Marrakesh, nor Jack London to the Solomon Islands, nor Mark Twain to Hawaii. So much for some of my favourite authors.

You could ask, ‘Why should they bother?’ but the fact is that each of these travellers, grown older, would have discovered what the heroic traveller Henry Morton Stanley found when he recrossed Africa from west to east ten years after his first successful crossing from east to west from 1874 to 1877 – a different place, with ominous changes, and a new book. Richard Henry Dana added a chastened epilogue to Two Years Before the Mast when, twenty-four years after its publication in 1840, he returned to San Francisco (but no longer travelling in the forecastle) and found that it had changed from a gloomy Spanish mission station with a few shacks to an American boom town that had been transformed by the Gold Rush. Dana was scrupulous about reacquainting himself with people he’d met on his first visit and sizing up the altered landscape, completing, as he put it, ‘acts of pious remembrance’.

Certain poets, notably Wordsworth and Yeats, enlarged their vision and found enlightenment in returning to an earlier landscape of their lives. They set the standard in the literature of revisitation. If it is a writer’s lot to repeat the past, writing it in his or her own way, this return journey might be my own prosaic version of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ or ‘Tintern Abbey’.

My proposed trip to retrace the itinerary of The Great Railway Bazaar was mainly curiosity on my part, and the usual idleness, with a hankering to be away; but this had been the case thirty-three years before, and it had yielded results. All writing is launching yourself into the darkness, and hoping for light and a soft landing.

‘I’m going to do a lot of knitting while you’re away,’ my wife said. That was welcome news. I needed Penelope this time.

Though I had pretended to be jolly in the published narrative, the first trip had not gone as planned.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ my first wife had said in 1973 – not in a sentimental way, but as an angry demand.

Yet I had just finished a book and was out of ideas. I had no income, no idea for a new novel, and – though I didn’t know what I was in for – I hoped that this trip might be a way of finding a subject. I had to go. Sailors went to sea, soldiers went to war, fishermen went fishing, I told her. Writers sometimes had to leave home. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

She resented my leaving. And though I did not write about it, I was miserable when I set off from London, saying goodbye to this demoralized woman and our two small children.

It was the age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. I wrote home often. But I succeeded in making only two phone calls, one from New Delhi and another from Tokyo, both of them futile. And why did my endearments sound unwelcome? I was homesick the whole way – four and a half months of it – and wondered if I was being missed. That was my first melancholy experience of the traveller’s long lonely evenings. I was at my wits’ end on the trip. I felt insane when I got home. I had not been missed. I had been replaced.

My wife had taken a lover. It was hypocritical of me to object: I had been unfaithful to her. It wasn’t her sexual exploit that upset me, but the cosy domesticity. He spent many days and nights in my house, in our bed, romancing her and playing with the children.

I wanted to kill this woman, not because I hated her, but (as homicidal spouses often say) because I loved her. I threatened to kill the man who, even after I was home, sent her love letters. I became an angry brute, and by chance I discovered a wickedly helpful thing: threatening to kill someone is an effective way of getting a person’s attention.

Instead of killing anyone, or threatening it any more, I sat in my room and wrote in a fury, abusing my typewriter, trying to lose myself in the book’s humour and strangeness. I had a low opinion of most travel writing. I wanted to put in everything that I found lacking in the other books – dialogue, characters, discomfort – and to leave out museums, churches and sightseeing generally. Though it would have added a dimension, I concealed everything about my domestic turmoil. I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my children, my wife, my happy household.

The book succeeded. I was cured of my misery by more work – an idea I had on the trip for a new novel. Yet something had been destroyed: faith, love, trust and a belief in the future. After my travel, on my return, I became an outsider, a ghostly presence, with my nose pressed against the window. I understood what it was like to be dead: people might miss you, but their lives go on without you. New people take your place. They sit in your favourite chair and dandle your children on their knees, giving them advice, chucking them under the chin; they sleep in your bed, look at your paintings, read your books, flirt with the Danish nanny; and as they belittle you for having been an over-industrious drudge, they spend your money. Most of the time, your death is forgotten. ‘Maybe it was for the best,’ people say, trying not to be morbid.

Some betrayals are forgivable, but others you never quite recover from. Years later, when my children were out of the house, I left that life, that marriage, that country. I began a new life elsewhere.

Now, thirty-three years older, I had returned to London. To my sorrow, about to take the same trip again, I relived much of the pain that I thought I’d forgotten.

Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather. It matched my mood, too, the rain that morning in London, the low brown sky leaking drizzle, darkening the porous city of old stone, and because of it – the rain descending like a burden – everyone was hunched, their wet heads cast down, eyes averted, thinking, Filfy wevva. Traffic was louder, the heavy tyres swishing in the wet streets. At Waterloo Station I found the right platform for the Eurostar, the 12.09 to Paris.

Even at Waterloo, the reminders of my old London were almost immediate. The indifference of Londoners, their brisk way of walking, their fixed expressions, no one wearing a hat in the rain yet some carrying brollies – all of us, including honking public school hearties, striding past a gaunt young woman swaddled in dirty quilts, sitting on the wet floor at the foot of some metal steps at the railway station, begging.

And then the simplest international departure imaginable: a cursory security check, French immigration formalities, up the escalator to the waiting train, half empty on a wet weekday in early March. In 1973 I had left from Victoria Station in the morning, got off at the coast at Folkestone, caught the ferry, thrashed across the English Channel, boarded another train at Calais, and did not arrive in Paris until midnight.

That was before the tunnel had been dug under the channel. It had cost $20 billion and taken fifteen years and everyone complained that it was a money loser. Though the train had been running for twelve years, I had never taken it. Never mind the expense – the train through the tunnel was a marvel. I savoured the traveller’s lazy reassurance that I could walk to the station and sit down in London, read a book, and a few hours later stand up and stroll into Paris without ever leaving the ground. And I intended to go to central Asia the same way, overland to India, just sitting and gaping out of the window.

This time, I had been refused a visa to enter Iran, and civilians were being abducted and shot in Afghanistan, but studying a map, I found other routes and railway lines – through Turkey to Georgia and on to the Islamic republics. First Azerbaijan, then a ferry across the Caspian, and then trains through Turkmenistan, past the ancient city of Merv, where there was a railway station, to the banks of the Amu Darya River – Oxiana indeed – and more tracks to Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, within spitting distance of the Punjab railways.

After that, I could follow my old itinerary through India to Sri Lanka and on to Burma. But it was a mistake to anticipate too much so early in the trip, and anyway, here I was a few minutes out of Waterloo, clattering across the shiny rain-drenched rails of Clapham Junction, thinking: I have been here before. On the line through south London, my haunted face at the window, my former life as a Londoner began to pass before my eyes.

Scenes of the seventies, along this very line, through Vauxhall, and making the turn at Queenstown Road, past Clapham High Street and Brixton and across Coldharbour Lane, a name that sent chills through me. Across the common, in 1978, there had been race riots on Battersea Rise, near Chiesman’s department store (‘Est. 1895’), where clerks sidled up and asked, ‘Are you being served?’ I bought my first colour TV set there, near the street on Lavender Hill where Sarah Ferguson, later the Duchess of York, lived; on the day her marriage to Prince Andrew was announced, my charlady, carrying a mop and bucket, sneered, saying, ‘She’s from the gutter.’

We were travelling in a deep railway gully, veering away from Clapham Junction, and from the train I got a glimpse of a cinema I had gone to until it became a bingo hall, the church that was turned into a daycare centre, and beyond the common the Alfarthing Primary School, where my kids, all pale faces and skinny legs, were taught to sing by Mrs Quarmby. These were streets I knew well: one where my bike was stolen, another where my car was broken into; greengrocers and butcher shops where I’d shopped; the chippie, the florist, the Chinese grocer; the newsagent, an Indian from Mwanza who liked speaking Swahili with me because he missed the shores of Lake Victoria; the Fishmonger’s Arms – known as the Fish – an Irish pub where refugees from Ulster swore obscenely at the TV whenever they saw Prince Charles on it, and laughed like morons the day Lord Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA, and where, every evening, I drank a pint of Guinness and read the Evening Standard; this very place.

From scenes like these I had made my London life. In those days I prayed for rain, because it kept me indoors – writing weather. So much of what I saw today was familiar and yet not the same – the usual formula for a dream. I looked closer. The trees were bare under the grey tattered clouds, and most of the buildings were unchanged, but London was younger, more prosperous. This district that had been semi-derelict when I moved here – empty houses, squatters, a few ageing residents still holding on – had become gentrified. The Chinese grocer’s was now a wine shop, and one of the pubs a bistro, and the fish-and-chip shop was a sushi bar.

But the wonderful thing was that I was whisked through south London with such efficiency, I was spared the deeper pain of looking closely at the past. I was snaking through tunnels and across viaducts and railway cuttings, looking left and right at the landscapes of my personal history and, happily, moving on, to other places that held no ambiguous memories. Don’t dwell on it, the English say with their hatred of complaint. Mustn’t grumble. Stop brooding. It may never happen.

I loved the speed of this train and the knowledge that it wasn’t stopping anywhere but just making a beeline to the coast, past Penge, Beckenham, Bromley – the edge of the London map and the old grumpy-looking bungalows I associated with novels of the outer suburbs, the fiction of twitching curtains, low spirits and anxious families, especially Kipps and Mr Beluncle, by the Bromleyites H. G. Wells and V. S. Pritchett, who escaped and lived to write about it.

In the satisfying shelf of English literature concerned with what we see from trains, the poems with the lines ‘O fat white woman whom nobody loves’ and ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop’ stand out, and so do the trains that run up and down the pages of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. But the description that best captures the English railway experience for me is Ford Madox Ford’s in his evocation of the city, his first successful book, The Soul of London, published a hundred years ago. Looking out of the train window, Ford speaks of how the relative silence of sitting on a train and looking into the busy muted world outside invites melancholy. ‘One is behind glass as if one were gazing into the hush of a museum; one hears no street cries, no children’s calls.’ And his keenest observation, which was to hold true for me from London to Tokyo: ‘One sees, too, so many little bits of uncompleted life.’

He noted a bus near a church, a ragged child, a blue policeman. I saw a man on a bike, a woman alighting from a bus, schoolchildren kicking a ball, a young mother pushing a pram. And, as this was a panorama of London back gardens, a man digging, a woman hanging laundry, a workman – or was he a burglar? – setting a ladder against a window. And ‘the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train windows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. It is akin to the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end.’

‘Little bits of uncompleted life’ – what the traveller habitually sees – inspire pathos and poetry, as well as the maddening sense of being an outsider, jumping to conclusions and generalizing, inventing or recreating places from vagrant glimpses.

It was only twenty minutes from soot-crusted Waterloo to its opposite, the open farmland of Kent, many of the fields already raked by a harrow, ploughed and awaiting planting in this first week of March.

A woman in a blue uniform brought me a bottle of Les Jamelles Chardonnay Vin de Pays d’Oc 2004, praised on the menu for its ‘subtle vanilla from the oak and a buttery finish’.

And then the lunch tray: terrine de poulet et de brocoli, chutney de tomates, the main course a fillet of lightly peppered salmon, with coupe de chocolat for dessert. This was, superficially at least, a different world from the one I had seen on the Railway Bazaar, that long-ago trip to Folkestone, and then standing at the rail of the ferry, feeling guilty and confused, eating a cold pork pie.

The tunnel was a twenty-two-minute miracle, the ultimate rabbit hole, delivering me from my English memories, speeding me beneath the channel to France, where I had only superficial and spotty recollections, of pleasures and misunderstandings, of eating and drinking, of looking at pictures, or hearing oddities, like that of the young pretty French woman who said to me, ‘I am seeing tonight my fiancé’s mistress. I seenk we will have sex. I love stupid women.’ And then she said, ‘You are smiling. You Americans!’

After the tunnel, rain falling from the French sky on the tiled roofs and the tiny cars driving on the right, but apart from that it could have been Kent: the same smooth hills and chalky plateau, and the same blight, the same warehouses, the low industrial outbuildings and workshops, the rows of bare poplars in the misty mid afternoon.

It was such a swift train trip, and so near was France to England, that it was hard to think of it as a separate country, with its own food and its peculiar scandals and language and religion and dilemmas. Enraged Muslim youths setting cars on fire was one of the current problems; only one death but lots of blazing Renaults.

Why is the motorway culture drearier in Europe than anywhere in America? Perhaps because it is imitative and looks hackneyed and unstylish and ill fitting, the way no European looks quite right in a baseball cap. While the petrol stations and industrial parks matched the disposable dreariness of American architecture, set against a French landscape they looked perverse, with Gothic spires and haywains and medieval chalets in the distance, like a violation of an old trust, the compact villages and ploughed fields and meadows set off by ugly roads and crash barriers.

Because of what Freud called ‘the narcissism of minor differences’, all these open fields, battlegrounds since ancient times, were the landscapes of contending armies, a gory example of civilization and its discontents. And so whatever else one could say, it was a fact that the route of this railway, once soaked in blood and thick with the graves of dead soldiers – millions of them – had been serene for the past half century, perhaps its longest period of peace.

We crossed a river with a tragic name. One day in July ninety years ago, where the soft rain fell on the lovely meadows and low hills, in sight of the distant spires of Amiens on one side of the train and the small town of Péronne on the other, the valley of this river, the Somme, had been an amphitheatre of pure horror. On that first day of battle, 60,000 British soldiers were killed, plodding slowly because of the 66-pound packs on their backs. They advanced into German machinegun fire, the largest number of soldiers killed on one day in British history. In the four months of this bloodbath, the first battle of the Somme, which ended in November 1916, more than one million soldiers were killed – British 420,000; French 194,000; German 440,000. And to no purpose. Nothing was gained, neither land nor any military advantage, nor even a lesson in the futility of war, for twenty-five years later – in my own lifetime – the same armies were at it again, warring in these same fields. All of them were colonial powers, which had annexed vast parts of Africa and Asia, to take their gold and diamonds, and lecture them on civilization.

The colours and clothes of the pedestrians on the streets nearer Paris reflected French colonial history – Africans, West Indians, Algerians, Vietnamese. They were kicking footballs in the rain. They were shoppers in the street markets, residents of the dreary tower blocks and tenements, the public housing at the edge of Paris that the Eurostar was passing and penetrating. We entered the city of mellow cheese-like stone and pitted façades and boulevards. London is largely a low city of single-family homes – terraces, cottages, townhouses, mews houses, bungalows, semidetached villas. Paris is a city of rococo apartment buildings, bosomy with balconies, not a house to be seen.

With my small bag and a briefcase I looked such a lightweight that the porters at the Gare du Nord ignored me. I passed through the station to the front entrance, in the floodlit glow of the lovely façade with its classical-looking statues representing the cities and larger towns of France. They were sculpted in the early 1860s by (so a sign said) ‘the greatest names in the Second Empire’.

The streets were thick with unmoving cars and loud honking and angry voices. I asked a smiling man what the problem was.

Every Tuesday there was a large, riotous demonstration in Paris. But for its size and its disruption this one was to be known as Black Tuesday.

* The list is very long and includes travellers’ books in the footsteps of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Mr Kurtz, H. M. Stanley, Leopold Bloom, Saint Paul, Basho, Jesus and Buddha.

2. The Other Orient Express

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They’re angry,’ he said, and he mentioned the debonair prime minister, who wrote and published his own poetry, and who wanted to change the labour laws.

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

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

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

‘Better to walk there – it’s just past that street and down some steps.’

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

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

‘Going to Istanbul. On the train.’ And I thought: also Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and onward …

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

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

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

I continued on my way, walking to the Gare de l’Est, found a steep old staircase that was cut into the slope of the narrow road. A stencilled sign in French on the pavement said, THE GREATEST DANGER IS PASSIVITY.

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

My train was called the Orient Express? I was surprised to hear that. All I had was a set of inexpensive tickets: Paris–Budapest–Bucharest–Istanbul, necessitating my changing trains in each city, three nights on sleeping cars. There are two ways by train to Istanbul – my rattly roundabout way, on three separate trains, and the luxurious way. It so happened that the luxury train was at an adjacent platform, its sleeping cars labelled COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGON-LITS, a grand send-off, with an old-fashioned limo parked on the platform lettered PULLMAN ORIENT EXPRESS – POUR ALLER AU BOUT DE VOS RÊVES (to take you to the limit of your dreams).

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

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

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

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

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

Travelling 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 traveller. 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 travelling 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?’

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 further 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.

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

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.

GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAUL THEROUX