Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (6 page)

Their baggage fondling was no worse than the TSA's at any American airport. In fact, it was a lot simpler and less invasive.

Just behind these customs men was an attractive woman wearing an ankle-length leather coat and high shiny boots, another figure from the past, a suitable introduction to Transylvania, where we were headed, and like a character in the Nabokov novel, which could have happened in a place like Bucharest.

***

THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING AS
, with howling brakes, the train came to a dead stop at Baneasa Station in the center of Bucharest, where I was to change trains—the next one, for Istanbul, leaving later in the day. The rain spattered on the oily locomotive and the platform roof and the muddy tracks. But this was not life-giving rain, nourishing roots and encouraging growth. It was something like a blight. It spat from the dreary sky, smearing everything it hit, rusting the metal joints of the roof, weakening the station, fouling the tracks. It lent no romance to the decaying houses of the city; it made them look frailer, emphasized the cracks in the stucco, turned the window dust to mud. There was something so poisonous in its greenish color, it seemed to me like acid rain.

Pale, pop-eyed Romanians had a touch of Asia in their dark eyes and hungry faces, and almost the first people I saw were two urchins, very skinny boys not more than ten, in rags, looking ill, both smoking cigarettes and pretending to be tough. They had tiny doll-like heads and dirty hands. They fooled among themselves and puffed away, and when they saw me they said something, obviously rude, and laughed.

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 name 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."