Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Duffill put his head out the door and said, 'I think I'll go to bed now.'

'He's your chap, is he?' said Molesworth. He surveyed the car. 'This train isn't what it was. Pity. It used to be one of the best, a train de luxe – royalty took it. Now, I'm not sure about this, but I don't think we have a dining car, which is going to be a terrible bore if it's true. Have you got a hamper?'

I said I hadn't, though I had been advised to bring one.

'That was good advice,' Molesworth said. 'I don't have a hamper myself, but then I don't eat much. I like the thought of food, but I much prefer drinking. How do you like your Chablis? Will you have more?' He inserted his eyeglass and found the bottle and, pouring, said, 'These French wines take an awful lot of beating.'

A half hour later I went into the compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a grey corpselike look, and his pyjamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn't sleep, at first; my cold and all that I'd drunk – the fatigue itself- kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill's watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.

Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.

In the morning Duffill was gone. I lay in bed and worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I travelled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.

At Vevey, I thought of Daisy and restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He'd be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn't say what he'd be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much

older than he had in the greyness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.

He looked out at the Alps. He said, 'They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they'd be rather flatter.'

I decided to have breakfast, but I walked to both ends of the Direct-Orient and saw no dining car – nothing except more sleeping cars and people dozing in their second-class seats. On my way back to Car 99 I was followed by three Swiss boys who, at each compartment door, tried the handle; if it responded they slid the door open and looked in, presumably at people dressing or lounging in bed. Then the boys called out, 'Pardon, Madame!' 'Pardon, Monsieur!' as the occupants hastily covered themselves. As these ingenious voyeurs reached my sleeping car they were in high spirits, hooting and shrieking, but it was always with the greatest politeness that they said, 'Pardon, Madame!' once they got a door open. They gave a final yell and disappeared.

The door to the Americans' compartment opened. The man was out first, swinging the knot of his tie, and then the woman, feebly balancing on a cane, tottered out and followed after, bumping the windows as she went. The Alps were rising, and in the sheerest places wide-roofed chalets were planted, as close to the ground as mushrooms and clustered in the same way at various distances from gravity-defying churches. Many of the valleys were dark, the sun showing only farther up on cliff faces and at the summits. At ground level the train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

The American couple returned. The man looked in my direction and said, 'I can't find it.'

The woman said, 'I don't think we went far enough.'

'Don't be silly. That was the engine.' He looked at me. 'Did you find it?'

'What?'

'The dining car.'

'There isn't one,' I said. 'I looked.'

'Then why the hell,' the man said, only now releasing his anger, 'why the hell did they call us for breakfast?'

'Did they call you?'

'Yes. "Last call." Didn't you hear them? "Last call for breakfast," they said. That's why we hurried.'

The Swiss boys, yelling and sliding the compartment doors open, had preceded the Americans' appearance. This commotion had been interpreted as a summons to breakfast; hunger's ear is not finely tuned.

The man said, 'I hate France.'

His wife looked out the window. 'I think we're out of it. That's not France.'

'Whatever it is,' said the man. He said he wasn't too happy, and he didn't want to sound like a complainer, but he had paid twenty dollars for a taxi from 'the Lazarus to the Lions'. Then a porter had carried their two suitcases from the taxi to the platform and demanded ten dollars. He didn't want French money; he wanted ten dollars.

I said that seemed excessive and added, 'Did you pay?'

'Of course I paid,' said the man.

'I wanted him to make a fuss,' said the woman.

The man said, 'I never get into arguments with people in foreign countries.'

'We thought we were going to miss the train,' said the woman. She cackled loudly. 'I almost had a haemorrhage!'

On an empty stomach, I found this disconcerting. I was glad when the man said, 'Well, come along, mother; if we're not going to get any breakfast we might just as well head back,' and led her away.

Duffill was eating the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.

'Try the lights,' he said. 'I can't eat in the dark. I can't taste it.'

I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.

Duffill said, 'Maybe they're trying to save electricity.'

His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels' drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill's woollens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sink-hole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.

Duffill said, 'This must be the Simplon.'

I said, 'I wish they'd turn the lights on.'

I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.