Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Symbolism is everything in religious strife, which is why it looks so logical, while being so stupid and brutal. The Catholic was singled out and shot for symbolizing the enemy, as any outsider might be, including me. The poor man had been praying in a back pew of the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon, where, on an average Sunday, there were no more than a dozen communicants. Rare as this murder was, it was so recent it concentrated my mind on leaving Trabzon. On arriving I'd asked, "What are the sights?" and been told the ancient mosque was a must-see. It was a Friday, a day of prayer in this (so I was also told) pious city. I should add that not once in Turkey was I hassled for being an unbeliever, nor was the subject ever mentioned. But the rain got me down, so I began to look for ways to escape it.

Because there was no train, I had arrived on the night bus from Ankara, the Ulusoy coach—Greyhound standard—with frequent pit stops on the twelve-hour ride to the northeast, allowing passengers to get out and smoke, since smoking had been banned on Turkish buses. The exception was the bus driver, who could light up as much as he wished. These were also eating stops, at rest-area cafeterias, where the food was not bad: thick soup, trays of reddish beans, sinister slabs of meat drifting in black gravy, scorched kebabs, and bread in round loaves the diameter of a steering wheel.

Over the mountains in darkness from Ankara, and still in darkness to Samsun and the edge of the Black Sea, we followed the coast road serenely until the day lifted. In the dreary, sunless dawn the towns on the shore, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, and nameless little settlements, looked ugly and lifeless, with hideous new buildings and ramshackle older ones on the barren coast. Yet the steep escarpment just behind the coast was beautiful, dark with wooded hills, and farther back the mountains loomed in a tangle of rain clouds.

The sight of the Black Sea made the passengers happy. They were all Turks, clearly glad to be away from Ankara, which was overbuilt and modern, set in the dry hills; this was the drizzly shore of an inland sea.

"Karadeniz," the old man next to me said when he woke and saw the water. I had once sailed on a Turkish ship called the Akdeniz

—meaning the White Sea, which is what the Turks call the Mediterranean—so I understood this as the Black Sea. He marveled, smiled, elbowed his wife in the ribs. Like the other men on the bus he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. In the course of the twelve-hour ride through the night, these men loosened their ties a little.

Judging from what I'd seen from Istanbul to Ankara to Trabzon, a building boom had overwhelmed Turkey, new houses everywhere, and the newer ones were dreadful, lopsided, misshapen, thrown together, and looked dangerously combustible; they were famous for falling down at the slightest earth tremor, of which seismic-prone Turkey had plenty.

But once I stowed my bag in a bus station locker and hiked to the foot of Trabzon's hill and up the steep winding streets to the middle of town, I changed my mind about the ugly houses. Trabzon was a pleasant place, even in the rain: a compact town center, the usual Turkish shops selling food and clothes and sweets, but also something I hadn't expected: banyos,

bathhouses. And I had the sense they were traditional baths and that this was not a euphemism for knocking shops.

I saw a man being luxuriously shaved in a barbershop, so I went in and, using grunts and signs, asked for the same. The whole process, with a haircut, took forty-five minutes; after the long bus ride I was restored.

Near the barbershop was a hotel that was undistinguished but clean. The room rate was $350 a night—who would pay that in Trabzon? Instead of checking in, I used the breakfast buffet in the restaurant, telling the clerk that I would pay for it. He said okay, so I idled over breakfast and tried to make a plan for my onward journey. I had seriously pondered my options: after weeks of travel I was still facing terrible weather, wet and cold, the north wind blowing off the Black Sea from Odessa; the recent murder of the Italian priest, for being Christian, was not encouraging; and the main point of interest in Trabzon was a mosque.

When I finished, deciding that I would head east, out of town, and took out my money, the clerk waved me away. I repeated that I was not a guest of the hotel. The clerk just smiled and said, "No problem," indicated that it was a slow day in Trabzon, and added, "Beer-shay de-eel"—You're welcome.

I walked back to where I had stowed my bag and on the way saw a sign advertising buses to the Georgia border and beyond: Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, and other distant places. I went into a bus agency, and the door chime went ding-dong. Some women in black gowns were watching the Iraqi war news—scenes of American tanks—on a black-and-white television. They were eating pink popcorn out of a bag.

"Ticket, please?"