Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

It was still raining in Istanbul. The rain had followed me from Paris, and it had defined each city—making Paris glisten with scattered light; giving the Budapest streets a slop of snow and mud and darkening the mildew on its buildings; muddying Bucharest and filling its potholes with black puddles. But in Istanbul the rain gave the roads a somnolent nobility, because it was a city of waterways and domes and slender minarets and towers that glowed in the diffused light of the downpour. The buildings were masterpieces, but what I remembered was how, at a distance, they were transformed by the rain.

NIGHT TRAIN TO ANKARA

THE CENTURY-OLD STATION at Haydarpasa was floodlit and looked like an opera house on the night I crossed the Bosporus to take the night express to Ankara. "A railway here in Asia—in the dreamy realm of the Orient ... is a strange thing to think of," Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, when he was in Turkey. "And yet they have one already, and are building another." My night train was leaving at ten-thirty, but I arrived an hour early, sliding to the pier on the ferry from the far bank. The whole station had been renovated. It was obviously regarded as a venerable building, worth preserving; the restoration had been extensive. Years ago, dark and decrepit, its days seemed to be numbered. Now that the train was the best way to go from Istanbul to Ankara, investment in the railways had increased.

The conductor in his new uniform was also an encouraging sign that Turkish railways were in good shape. He was standing by the stairs to the sleeping car. He greeted me, welcomed me aboard, and helped me locate my couchette. I saw that there was a dining car on this train. The carriages were new. All this was a kind of heaven—a private berth, a cozy cabin, a book to read (I was reading Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace), and twelve hours of comfort ahead of me. No border to cross, no interruptions. The other passengers were businessmen, wearing suits, carrying briefcases; a family with two children; and some shrouded women.

Turkish manti

(dumplings) were on the dining car menu: flour cubes, cheese, meat, and spices, served with lentil soup and a glass of wine. After eating I turned in, read a chapter of The Flea Palace, and, rocked gently by the movement of the train, hearing the rain lashing the windows, fell asleep.

I awoke eight hours later in bright sunshine, the first rainless day since leaving London, in the dry rough hills and the gravesites and tumuli of Gordion, about sixty miles west of Ankara, where Alexander had slashed the hard-to-pick knot.

Nearer Ankara were new houses, gated communities, college campuses, rows of tenements—the building boom that seemed to be general around the growing cities of Turkey. On my first trip I had summarized Turkey as a peasant economy with colorful ruins, but modernized, mechanized, it had undergone a transformation: it was an exporter of food, literacy was high, and the trains had improved, though most people took buses because the roads were so good.

There was no train to Trabzon; I'd have to take a bus, I was told as soon as I arrived in Ankara and announced my intention of traveling northeast to Georgia and Azerbaijan. My plan was to circumvent Iran while staying on the ground.

I'd been invited to give a talk in Ankara, and it was hinted to me that the setting would be formal. That meant I'd need a necktie, an article I did not possess. I bought one for a few dollars, and that night, to the invited guests, I enlarged on my theme of the return journey, how it reveals the way the world works, and makes fools of pundits and predictors. How it showed, too, the sort of traveler I had been, what I'd seen, what I'd missed the first time. I was not in search of news—had never been, I said. I wanted to know more about the world, about people's lives. I wasn't a hawk in my travels; more a butterfly. But revelation was granted to even the most aimless traveler, who was happier and more receptive to impressions.

"An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats.

And wisdom is a butterfly

And not a gloomy bird of prey.

Ankara, which had seemed to me long ago a dusty outpost at the edge of the known world, had become a thriving city, important for its manufacturing, bright, youthful, sprawling across the dusty hills and ravines, with three large universities at its periphery. Culturally it had reclaimed its past, the golden age of bull worshipers and philosophers who had flourished thousands of years before, to the west of Ankara at Hatusa.

Mingling with the people who'd attended my talk, many of them academics or politicians, I was told in confidence by a whispering man that they were against the war in Iraq and wished the United States had never invaded.