Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

And when I found it I thought: Just at the point in my life when I'd imagined that all travel was a homogenized and bland experience of plastic food and interchangeable railway cars and waiters in fast-food caps, I stumble into the dining car of the Euronight to Romania and find three drunken conductors and a man (who turned out to be the chef) in a greasy sweater with a torn bandage unraveling on his hand, all of them playing backgammon in the bad light, drinking beer, and smoking. No one was eating, and when the chef blew his nose messily he looked as if he were using a rag that had just wiped a dipstick.

Nor had the boxes of fluorescent tubes and coils of wire stacked on the tables been moved or tidied. They crowded the gunked-up sauce bottles.

At the sight of this filth and disorder, my spirits rose. It was easy to prettify a nation in an airport, but on this train traveling through the provinces of a hard-pressed country I felt I was seeing the real thing, a place with its pants down. I didn't take this personally. I was grateful that no one had gone to any trouble for me, that I was not getting red-carpet service.

The chef did not even look up from his backgammon board when he said, "Eat!"

Another, the man who had winked, said, "Sit! Sit! You want chicken?"

"No."

"Only chicken. Sit!"

He pushed some coils of wire to the far side of one of the tables—I was apparently the only diner—and then the lights went out. When the lights came on again there was a bowl of bread crusts in front of me, which seemed a neat trick.

"Salade?"

"No."

I was served a bowl of dill pickles. I thought: Who could invent this? Merely to live here was to experience satire.

Tipsy though he was, the conductor was able to form the words "You lock couchette?"

"How could I lock it?I don't have a key."

Without a word, in a kind of reflex of drunken panic, he ran out of the dining car. I followed him, and when he got to my compartment he motioned for me to check my bag. He gave me to understand, in gestures, that there were thieves on the train and that I must be very careful (wagging his finger, then touching it to the side of his nose).

The lights went out before we got back to the dining car, but came on again in time for me to see the man in the filthy sweater (and now I knew why it was greasy) standing over a frying pan, holding a cleaver, and sending up sparks and spatters. He could not remove the cigarette from his mouth, because he was holding the frying pan with one hand and smacking at a piece of meat with the other. His smeared glasses were slipping down his nose; he pushed them up with a deft nudge of his dripping cleaver.

He yelled at the others, one of whom relayed the message to me: "Gratin?"

"Okay."

Then the backgammon players began bantering with each other.

When the plate was put before me I marveled at the man serving me: his sticky glasses, his drooping cigarette, his dirty sweater and bandaged hand. The fried potatoes were coated with cheese. I picked at it, grateful for the reassurance that in this corner of the world nothing had changed in decades. And the next time someone praised the Hungarian economy or talked optimistically of Romania's imminent entry into the European Union, I could reflect on the revelation of this disgusting meal.

While the rest of the world was bent on innovation and modernization, looking for salvation on the Internet, things here were pretty much what they'd always been. Speaking of time warps, Hungary was about to elect another socialist government. For some reason, perhaps the sheer perversity that finds absurd logic still alive in the world, this pleased me. It reminded me of the time I'd spent in Vanuatu, in the western Pacific. One rainy day I saw some people on the island of Tanna standing and squatting, bollocky naked, wearing only penis sheaths and refusing to listen to some missionaries who had come across the ocean to convert them. These God-botherers had then trekked twenty miles down a muddy path to share their Good News Bibles. The people on Tanna sent them away, saying they had their own gods, thanks very much.

Stubborn seediness has great appeal, and this ramshackle railway had not changed in thirty-three years. It was, if anything, worse, almost a parody of my previous experience. The Hungarian border was farcical too, the customs-and-immigration people tramping through the carriage in wet boots and ill-fitting brown uniforms. The Romanian border at Curtici was even grimmer, as though another act in the same farce: big beefy-faced brutes with earflaps and gold braids, a dozen of them swarming over the train demanding passports, opening bags.

One of the customs men went through my books, the Simenons and some others, and selected Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. He squinted at it. Did he guess that this novel is about injustice in a nightmarish police state?

"Where you going?"

"Istanbul."

"What doing? You tourismus?"

"Me tourismus."