Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

The door to my compartment flew open as I was looking at this desolation. It was the saffron-faced man from next door with the large family. He gestured, winced, closed the door, and sat down. He held his head. His children were crying; I could hear them through the window. The man had a narrow moustache and his expression was that of the comedian to whom everything bad happens, the sad figure who suits comedy. He made another helpless gesture, somewhat apologetic, and lit a cigarette. Then he sat back and smoked it. He did not speak. He sighed, finished his cigarette, stubbed it out, slapped his knee and pulled the door open, and, without looking back, marched in the direction of his screaming children.

It was lunchtime, and lunch on the Lake Van Express could be very pleasant if you got to the dining car early enough to be on the shady side and had sufficient elbow room to continue with Little Dorrit. I had just started to eat and read when one of the subchiefs sloped in and sat with me. He had long blond hair in the page-boy style affected by aspiring prophets. His shirt had been artistically cut from a flour sack and he wore a very faded pair of 'Washington Brand' bib overalls, an elephant-hair bracelet on one wrist, and an Indian bangle on the other. I had seen him sitting in a lotus posture in second class. He put a worn book by Idries Shah on the table; it had the chewed-over look Korans have in the hands of the languid fanatics I saw later in the holy city of Meshed. But he did not read it.

I asked him where he was going.

He shook his head; his hair danced. *J ust' ~ neraised his eyes and said with drama – 'travelling.'

He looked rather pious, but it might have been the train. Second class in that part of Turkey lent to every dusty face a look of suffering piety.

His melon came. It was cut into cubes. He smiled at it in a pitying way and said, 'They cut it.'

I volunteered the information that the Turks at the next table had uncut melon. Whole slices, complete with rinds, rested on their plates.

The subchief considered this; then he leaned over and looked me in the eye. 'It's a strange world.'

I hoped for his state of mind that it wouldn't get any hotter. But it did, searing the air, and the shades were drawn in every compartment. Each time I began to read or write I dropped off to sleep, waking only when the train came to a complete stop. These were halts in the desert, a little hut, a man with a flag, a signboard reading mush or bug. I wrote a few lines and was alarmed to see my handwriting assume the anxious irregularity of the lost explorer's, the desert diary script that is decoded and published posthumously by the man's widow. The next time the whistle blows, I would say to myself, I will get up and walk to the engine. But I was always asleep when the whistle blew.

We reached Lake Van at about ten at night, which was annoying. The darkness made it impossible for me to confirm the stories I had heard of the swimming cats, the high soda content of the water that bleaches clothes and turns the hair of Turks who swim in it a bright red. I had another regret: it was the end of the line for this express. The sleeping car was taken off and I had no idea what the arrangements were for the rest of the journey. The diesel engine was removed; a steam locomotive pulled us down to the ferry landing and for several hours shunted the cars two at a time on to the ferry itself. While this was going on I found the new conductor, an Iranian; I showed him my ticket.

He pushed it aside and said, 'No couchette.'

'This is a first-class ticket,' I said.

'No room,' he said. 'You go down dere.'

Down there. He was pointing to the cars just being loaded on to the ferry, the third-class coaches. After three days of passing through them on my way to the dining car, I thought of them with pure horror. I knew the occupants: there was a bandy-legged gang of dark Japanese with bristly hair who travelled with a dwarf squaw, also Japanese, whose camera on a thong around her neck bumped her knees. Their chief was a fierce-looking young man in military sunglasses who sucked an unlit pipe and wore rubber shower sandals. There was also a Germanic tribe: bearded boys and porcine girls with crew cuts. Their chief was a gorilla who loitered in the passage and sometimes refused to let anyone pass. There were Swiss and French and Australians who slept, waking only to complain or ask the time. And there were the Americans, some of whom I knew by name. The chiefs were having a powwow on the ferry; the others were watching from the rail.

'Go,' said the conductor.

But I didn't want to go, for besides the overcrowded compartments of Europeans and Americans there were the compartments of Kurds, Turks, Iranians, and Afghans, who slept on top of each other and cooked stews between their berths over dangerously flaring kerosene stoves.

The ferry moved off, hooting into the black lake. I chased the conductor from one deck to the other, trying to continue my argument. It was past midnight, I said, cornering him down below where the huge railway cars clanked against the chains that held them to the tracks in the deck: where was my compartment?

He put me in second class with three Australians. It was a situation I grew to recognize over the next three months. At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom. This trio on the Lake Van ferry considered me an intruder. They looked up surprised in their meal: they were sharing a loaf of bread, hunched over it like monkeys, two boys and a pop-eyed girl. They grumbled when I asked them to move their knapsacks from my berth. The engines of the ferry rattled the compartment windows and I went to bed wondering how, if the ferry sank, I could scramble to safety, out of the compartment and the car and up the narrow stairs to the boat deck. I did not sleep well, and once I was awakened by the harsh antipodean groans of the girl, who, not two feet from me, lay beneath one of her snorting companions.

At dawn, in the rapid light of early morning, we arrived at the eastern shore of the lake. Here the train becomes the Teheran Express. The Australians were breakfasting, pulling the remainder of their loaf to bits. I went into the corridor to count out what I thought the conductor might accept as a bribe.

A the new Teheran Express pulls out of the modern supermarket-style frontier station at Qotur on tracks that shriek with newness (Iranian National Railways are modernizing and expanding), the steward in the French-built dining car takes off his crisp white jacket, unrolls a lovely square of carpet, and gets down on his knees to pray. He does this five times a day in a little corner between the cash register and the kitchen, intoning, 'There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet,' while diners slurp lemony soup and pick at chicken kebab. The giant glass and concrete stations house three portraits – the Shah, his queen, and their son. They are fifteen times life-size and the vulgarity of the enlargement makes them look plump and greedy and monstrously regal. The smiling son might be one of those precocious child entertainers who tap-dance in talent shows, singing 'I've Got Rhythm'. It is an old country; everywhere in the gleaming modernity are reminders of the orthodox past – the praying steward, the portraits, the encampments of nomads, and, on what is otherwise one of the best-run railways in the world, the yearning for baksheesh.

Again I showed the conductor my ticket. 'First-class ticket,' I said. 'You give me first-class couchette.'

'No couchette,' he said. He pointed to my berth in the Australian compartment.