Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Turning the pages of my passport, he put his fingers on the visas. "Azerbaijan! Uzbekistan! Pakistan! India!"

"Tourismus."

He flipped his big fingers at me. "Heroin? Cocaine?"

I laughed, I tried to stop laughing, I laughed some more, and I think this idiotic laugh convinced him of my innocence. His comrade joined him, and together they searched my briefcase. I stood to one side, and when they were done they welcomed me to Romania.

Their baggage fondling was no worse than the TSA's at any American airport. In fact, it was a lot simpler and less invasive.

Just behind these customs men was an attractive woman wearing an ankle-length leather coat and high shiny boots, another figure from the past, a suitable introduction to Transylvania, where we were headed, and like a character in the Nabokov novel, which could have happened in a place like Bucharest.

***

THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING AS, with howling brakes, the train came to a dead stop at Baneasa Station in the center of Bucharest, where I was to change trains—the next one, for Istanbul, leaving later in the day. The rain spattered on the oily locomotive and the platform roof and the muddy tracks. But this was not life-giving rain, nourishing roots and encouraging growth. It was something like a blight. It spat from the dreary sky, smearing everything it hit, rusting the metal joints of the roof, weakening the station, fouling the tracks. It lent no romance to the decaying houses of the city; it made them look frailer, emphasized the cracks in the stucco, turned the window dust to mud. There was something so poisonous in its greenish color, it seemed to me like acid rain.

Pale, pop-eyed Romanians had a touch of Asia in their dark eyes and hungry faces, and almost the first people I saw were two urchins, very skinny boys not more than ten, in rags, looking ill, both smoking cigarettes and pretending to be tough. They had tiny doll-like heads and dirty hands. They fooled among themselves and puffed away, and when they saw me they said something, obviously rude, and laughed.

Only pale, underfed faces—now and then one of a girl that was porcelain-pretty; skinny girls, fat women, tough-looking men, most people smoking foul cigarettes—no foreign faces, none that I could see at the station. Why would anyone come here? Romania was a world few people visited for pleasure, and that was evident in its abandoned look, its wrecked buildings, its mournful people. It seemed lifeless, just hanging on. A great melancholy in the houses with cracked windows, the broken streets, the bakery shops where every pastry looked stale.

I went to make sure that the train to Istanbul, the Bosfor Express, would be leaving on time. A young man standing near the information booth said he hoped it would—he was taking it.

"I'm going to a conference in Turkey," he said. He was an academic, named Nikolai, teaching at a university in Bucharest.

He showed me where the Left Luggage window was—he was leaving bags there too. On the way, I mentioned that I hadn't seen any foreigners—none of the Asians or Africans or South Americans I'd noticed from London to Hungary.

"Some Americans come here. We have bases."

I might have known. Romania was in the news as America's friend in the war on terrorism. Its right-wing government, desperate for money, eager to join the European Union, had approved the imprisoning and interrogation of suspects. The process, called extraordinary rendition, meant that a man like the one described in the New York Times in July 2006 from Algeria, who was picked up by American agents in Tanzania, would be blindfolded and sent to a third country to be questioned—and questioning always involved some sort of torture, ranging from sleep deprivation, to the suffocation and simulated drowning called waterboarding, to being hanged by the wrists against the wall of a cell, all these methods going under the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." I never heard that expression without thinking of a prisoner being kicked in the balls.

America's prisoners from across the world were shipped off to, among other places, jails in Romania, where humane conventions did not have to be observed and torture was allowed. But the incarceration and interrogation had been instigated by the United States and paid for by American taxpayers. The program was so secret that it was only when, after two or more years, a prisoner was released and interviewed by a newspaper (as several had) that the despicable program was revealed. Poland was also mentioned as a country of interrogation under torture.

Nikolai said he had things to do but would see me on the train. I had the feeling I'd made him uncomfortable with my questions and that he simply wanted to get away.