Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

the distortions of the foreign—the dream dimension of travel where things are especially strange because they look somewhat familiar. Fewer people, too, as though no one wanted to go where I was going, especially now, in the muddy landscape of Hungary, the drizzle crackling into the wet clumps of snow by the tracks.
    Even here, still in Europe, I sensed an intimation of Asiatic ambiguity in the cat-stink of the sleeping car, the unsmiling crowd suffering in second-class hard seats, the clutter of the dining car: piles of fluorescent tubes in cardboard boxes and coils of wire stacked on the tables, with sticky cruets of vinegar and bottles of sinister sauce, their caps clotted with spilled and dried gunk.
    Racing into the darkness and the downpour, dramatic weather smothering the tracks, whistle screaming, this train is perfect, this sleeper is a cozy throwback,
I was writing in my notebook. It reminded me pleasantly, in sepia tones and inexpensiveness (about $100), of my previous trip. I had taken a diesel through Belgrade and Nis and Sophia before, but so what? This was not much different—sullen men in track suits, women in shawls, tired glassy-eyed children shivering in small wet shoes.
    As on the previous night en route to Budapest, the sleeping-car conductor punched my ticket, brought me beer, made my bed, and reminded me that we'd be in Bucharest around nine the following morning.
    "Why you go Bucharest?"
    "To look around," I said. "And then leave."
    "You airplane home?"
    "I change trains. To Istanbul."
    "Istanbul very nice. Good business. Good money."
    "What about Bucharest?"
    "No business. No money." The conductor made a clown's mocking face.
    "Is there a dining car on this train?"
    "Everything—for you!" When he winked at me I could see that he was tipsy.
    Rain was smacking the window, the train swaying as most trains do, seeming to describe an elaborate detour around the back of the world. I was going the old way, as I had long ago, and there was hardly any difference—Budapest had had the strained and uncertain and unstylish look of the seventies.
    Even though no one advertised a trip like this, it had not been much trouble to find this antique railway experience—railways and buses were how the poor traveled in much of eastern Europe. Most tourists going to Romania, if they went at all, would take a short-hop plane. European airfares were very cheap because they were based on fuel that was sold untaxed. Someday soon a fuel tax would be imposed, airfares would reflect their true cost, and this train would be valuable again. Well, it was valuable now—the sleeping car almost full and the rest of the train crowded.
    A sudden station loomed, blobs of fluorescence in the darkness, the storm sweeping down, bursting in oversized drops on an unsheltered platform, the right texture of raindrops for this dark, creaking night train. The weather looked old-fashioned, so did the leaky roof of the station, the puddles in the ticket lobby, the wet benches, the utter emptiness. No one got on or off: just a station sitting in the dark—I saw it was Szolnok, on the Tisza River—and after that we were really benighted.
    ***
    REMEMBERING THE CONDUCTOR'S WINK , I went in search of the dining car, walking through the passageway of the dark tipping train making anvil clangs in the night.
    And when I found it I thought: Just at the point in my life when I'd imagined that all travel was a homogenized and bland experience of plastic food and interchangeable railway cars and waiters in fast-food caps, I stumble into the dining car of the Euronight to Romania and find three drunken conductors and a man (who turned out to be the chef) in a greasy sweater with a torn bandage unraveling on his hand, all of them playing backgammon in the bad light, drinking beer, and smoking. No one was eating, and when the chef blew his nose messily he looked as if he were using a rag that had just wiped a dipstick.
    Nor had the boxes of fluorescent