Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'No,' I said. I pointed to an empty compartment. 'I want this one.'

'No.' He gave me a fanatical grin.

He was grinning at my hand. I held thirty Turkish liras (about two dollars). His hand appeared near mine. I dropped my voice and whispered the word that is known all over the East, 'Baksheesh. '

He took the money and pocketed it. He got my bag from the Australian compartment and carried it to another compartment in which there were a battered suitcase and a box of crackers. He slid the bag into the luggage rack and patted the berth. He asked if I wanted sheets and blankets. I said yes. He got them, and a pillow, too. He drew the curtains, shutting out the sun. He bowed and brought me a pitcher of ice water, and he smiled, as if to say, 'All this could have been yours yesterday.'

The suitcase and crackers belonged to a large bald Turk named Sadik, who wore baggy woollen trousers and a stretched sweater. He was from one of the wilder parts of Turkey, the Upper Valley of Greater Zap; he had boarded the train in Van; he was going to Australia.

He came in and drew his arm across his sweating face. He said, 'Are you in here?'

'Yes.'

'How much did you give him?'

I told him.

He said, 'I gave him fifteen rials. He is very dishonest, but now he is on our side. He will not put anyone else in here, so now we have this big room together.'

Sadik smiled; he had crooked teeth. It is not skinny people who look hungry, but rather fat ones, and Sadik looked famished.

'I think it's only fair to say,' I said, wondering how I was going to finish the sentence, 'that I'm not, um, queer. Well, you know, I don't like boys and – '

'And me, I don't like,' said Sadik, and with that he lay down and went to sleep. He had the gift of slumber; he needed only to be horizontal and he was sound asleep, and he always slept in the same sweater and trousers. He never took them off, and for the duration of the trip to Teheran he neither shaved nor washed.

He was an unlikely tycoon. He admitted he behaved like a pig, but he had lots of money and his career was a successful record of considerable ingenuity. He had started out exporting Turkish curios to France and he seems to have been in the vanguard of the movement, monopolizing the puzzle-ring and copper-pot trade in Europe long before anyone else thought of it. He paid no export duties in Turkey, no import duties in France. He managed this by shipping crates of worthless articles to the French border and warehousing them there. He went to French wholesalers with his samples, took orders, and left the wholesalers the headache of importing the goods. He did this for three years and banked the money in Switzerland.

'When I have enough money,' said Sadik, whose English was not perfect, 'I like to start a travel agency. Where you want to go? Budapesht? Prague? Rumania? Bulgaria? All nice places, oh boy! Turkish people like to travel. But they are very silly. They don't speak English. They say to me, "Mister Sadik, I want a coffee" – this is in Prague. I say, "Ask the waiter." They are afraid. They shout their eyes. But they have money in their packets. I say to the waiter, "Coffee" – he understand. Everyone understand coffee, but Turkish people don't speak any language, so all the time I am translator. This, I tell you, drive me crazy. The people they follow me. "Mister Sadik, take me to a nightclub"; "Mister Sadik, find me a gairl." They follow me even to the lavabo and sometime I want to escape, so I am clever and I use the service elevator.

'I give up Budapesht, Belgrade. I decide to take pilgrims to Mecca. They pay me five thousand liras and I take care of everything. I get smallpox injections and stamp the book – sometimes I stamp the book and don't get smallpox injections! I have a friend in the medical. Ha! But I take good care of them. I buy them rubber mattresses, each person one mattress, blow them up so you don't have to sleep on the floor. I take them to Mecca, Medina, Jiddah, then I leave them. "I have business in Jiddah," I say. But I go to Beirut. You know Beirut? Nice place – nightclubs, gairls, lots of fun. Then I come back to Jiddah, pick up the hajis and bring them back to Istanbul. Good profit.'

I asked Sadik why, if he was a Muslim and he was so close to Mecca, he never made the haj himself.

'Once you go to Mecca you have to make promises -no drinking, no swearing, no women, money to poor people.' He laughed. 'Is for old men. I'm not ready!'

He was headed now for Australia, which he pronounced 'Owstraalia'; he had another idea. It had come to him one day in Saudi Arabia when he was bored (he said as soon as he began making money in a project he lost interest in it). His new idea concerned the export of Turks to Australia. There was a shortage of workers there. He would go, and, much as he had sold puzzle rings to the French, visit Australian industrialists and find out what sort of skilled people they required. He would make a list. His partner in Istanbul would get up a large group of emigrants and deal with the paperwork, obtaining passports, health cards and references. Then the Turks would be sent on a charter flight that Sadik would arrange, and after collecting a fee from the Turks he would collect from the Australians. He winked. 'Good profit.'

It was Sadik who pointed out to me that the hippies were doomed. They dressed like wild Indians, he said, but basically they were middle-class Americans. They didn't understand baksheesh, and because they were always holding tight to their money and expecting to scrounge food and hospitality they would always lose. He resented the fact that the hippie chiefs were surrounded by such young pretty girls. 'These guys are ugly and I am ugly too, so why don't the gairls like me?'

He enjoyed telling stories against himself. The best one concerned a blonde he had picked up in an Istanbul bar. It was midnight; he was drunk and feeling lecherous. He took the blonde home and made love to her twice, then slept for a few hours, woke up and made love to her again. Late the next day as he was crawling out of bed he noticed the blonde needed a shave and then he saw the wig and the man's enormous penis. '"Only Sadik," my friends say, "only Sadik can make love to a man three times and think it is a woman!" But I was very drunk.'

Sadik was good company on a dull stretch of the journey. We had taken on thirty freight cars and the train moved very slowly through northwestern Iran towards Teheran, across the most infertile soil I have ever seen. Here, in a baking desert, one is grateful for a good train, and the Teheran Express could not have been better. The dining car was a clean cheerful place, and there were vases of red gladioli on each starched tablecloth. The food was excellent, but unvarying; always the lemony soup, the kebab, and a stack of flat, square, blotterlike bread. The sleeping car was air-conditioned to such a degree that one needed two blankets at night. The farther one got from Europe, it seemed, the more sumptuous the trains became. At Qazvin, another oversized supermarket station in the desert, I discovered that we were running ten hours late, but I had no deadline to meet and in any case have always preferred comfort to punctuality. So I sat and read and over lunch I listened to Sadik's plan to make a killing in Australia. Outside, the landscape had begun to acquire features – hills rose, a plateau appeared, then a blue green range of mountains to the north; villages grew more frequent, and there were refineries spouting flames and shortly we were in Teheran.

Sadik bought a ticket for a train to Meshed that was leaving that same day. He hadn't planned to, but as he was standing in line he overheard two pretty girls buying third-class tickets and saw the clerk assign them a compartment. In third class on Iranian Railways no distinction is made as to sex. Sadik asked for third class and was put in the same compartment: 'So we see what can happen! Wish me luck.'