Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Red ink!" Plunkett-Greene would have said of the Hungarian wine. "Peasant fare! Beans!" he would have crowed over the food here at the Nemzeti.

The women left. A youngish man took their place. As he was the only other person in the restaurant, we fell into conversation. His name was Istvan. He was in Budapest on business. He said that some European companies were relocating to Hungary because of the cheap labor and the well-educated (but poverty-stricken) populace. I was to hear this description all the way through Asia, especially in India. His own business concerned small engines.

"How is the government here?"

"Terrible," Istvan said. He detested Hungarian politicians and their policies. "They are socialists. They are left. I am right."

This led to a discussion about the American government, which he also detested.

"Bush is dangerous, arrogant—not intelligent. And now we have to worry about what he'll do in Iran."

I should have guessed then that I was to hear this opinion in almost every casual conversation for the next seven months, whenever I revealed myself as an American: that our president was a moron and his policies were diabolical and he was controlled by dark forces. That America, for all its promise and prosperity, was the world's bully.

I would then say, as I did to Istvan, "Would you emigrate to the U.S. if you had a chance?" And they would say yes, as Istvan did, not because they had the slightest notion of American culture, politics, or history, but because they were passionate to get a job and make money, to own a car, a house, and flee their precarious hand-to-mouth existence to become Americans.

Istvan was fairly intelligent, but there were others, and the most unsettling thing was that the worst of them, the most brutish, would surprise me by praising the U.S. government for its militarism. I was somewhat apprehensive because I would be traveling through at least six Muslim countries. But all of them were tyrannies, more or less, and I took heart in knowing that when people are badly governed, they seldom hold you personally responsible for the decisions of your own government.

I wished Istvan luck and plodded on, making a detour at a sex shop. Acting on my theory that a country's pornography offers the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation, and especially the male character, I went in and assessed the goods. It was grubby stuff, which included bestiality (dogs and women), very fat people, very hairy people, a sideline in gay cruelty, and every German perversion.

Like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and the other countries formerly in the Soviet shadow, when Hungary liberalized its policies in 1989 the immediate effect was the sanctioning of what had been regarded as antisocial behavior—porno, loud music, vocal complaints, and graffiti, which had been obvious from the walls I had seen on the outskirts of Budapest. Some of these promiscuous outbursts could have been dismissed as rising from irrational anger, but not porno. Pornography is specific, particular in its rituals and images, and it can't be gratuitous or faked or cooked up for its shock value, or else it won't sell. Shelves of videocassettes and DVDs of bestiality—women canoodling with dogs and horses, pigs and goats—meant that there was a market for it.

In the sleety rain and wet snow of the decaying city, amid shuffling boots (down at the heels in the most literal sense), wet faces, and stringy hair, there was no sensuality, certainly no temptation for me to linger. Nothing looked sleazier to me than another imperial city overlaid by decades of Soviet style. Yet everyone I spoke to—for I was constantly asking directions—was polite to me, every one of the fatigued, greasy-haired people, scruffy in the late-winter drizzle. I seem to be criticizing, but I liked Budapest for being in a time warp and looking left behind.

I could not identify a Hungarian face—not a national face. The heavy jaw and wide forehead and close-set eyes were not enough; yet it seemed a monolithic culture—no ethnic people, no minorities in evidence, just a lot of weary white people, relieved that Hungary had been admitted to the European Union so that they could leave and find work elsewhere and maybe never come back, as a man said to me at a café in Keleti Station when I went to reclaim my bag.

"You're going where?" he asked.

I told him Romania, and he made me repeat it because he found it so funny. He laughed a big, mocking belly laugh.

From Hungary onward, it was clear to me that very few people are looking east. There were no tourists, and the only travelers were ones going home—reluctantly, because the great wish was to travel west, to leave home. The east represented hopelessness, poverty, failure, more excuses. Most of the travelers at Keleti Station wanted to go west, even the ones who were headed east. And no one was going to Turkey.