Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

But the man at the desk scarcely looked up from his newspaper.

"Bus is fool."

"Just one seat," I said.

"Is fool"

"Excuse me, effendi." This politeness seized his attention. "I have serious business in Teeflees," I said, using the Turkish pronunciation. "Very serious."

He looked up at me and licked his thumb, manipulated a printed pad, and clicking his pen wrote me a ticket.

"Leaving at thirteen o'clock," he said and went back to his newspaper. The shrouded women had kept their attention on the war news.

But in the event, the bus left at noon—good thing I was early, drinking a coffee next door to the stop. The bus was more than full: many people were sitting on the floor, on each other's laps, or straphanging. I could see no space at all. The driver poked my arm and said gruffly, "You sit here," and indicated a cushion next to him, on the step. "In Hopa, many seats." Hopa was near the Turkish border; the border post was a place called Sarp.

So I sat on a cushion on the floor of this crowded, beat-up bus, pleased with myself for being an older man, thus invisible, ghostly, grubbier than most of the bus passengers, some of them Turks going to Hopa, and the rest Georgians on their way over the border to Batumi. The Georgians were the ones with big black plastic sacks, bulging with Turkish goods that were apparently unobtainable in Georgia—children's clothes, toys, toasters, telephones, microwave ovens, and boxes of cookies. All this luggage boded ill for the upcoming customs inspection.

Only a hundred-odd miles to Hopa, but the entire coast road was being repaved, and we went so slowly and stopped so often the trip took five hours. I told myself that I was not in any hurry, and I smiled when I remembered saying to the ticket seller, I have serious business in Teeflees, because I had no business at all. This was one of those times when I was reminded again of how travel was a bumming evasion, a cheap excuse for intruding upon other people's privacy.

We passed some friendly-looking towns, and stopped at many to pick up passengers. At Rize and Pazar we stopped for food. The hills beyond Rize were dark with tea bushes, and the Black Sea was motionless, as though we were at the shore of a glorified lake—no current, no tide, no chop or waves, more famous now for allowing prostitutes to be ferried across the water from Odessa to the Turkish shore.

We went through Hopa, where a two-mile line of trucks was parked, awaiting permission to go farther. I got off the bus at the border, Sarp. The driver told me that we would all go through customs and immigration and then meet again and reboard the bus on the Georgian side. I thought: Not me, effendi.

One of the pleasures of such a journey is walking across a border, strolling from one country to another, especially countries where there is no common language. Turkish is incomprehensible to Georgians, and Georgians boast that there is no language on earth that resembles Georgian; it is not in the Indo-European family but rather the Kartvelian, or South Caucasian, one. Georgians triumphantly point out that their language is unique, since the word for mother is deda and the word for father is mama.

I paid $20 for a Georgian visa, got my passport stamped, was saluted by the soldier on duty, and walked into Georgia, where I learned there was a two-hour time difference from the other side of the border. It would be an hour or more before the bus passengers cleared their toasters and microwaves through Turkish customs. So when a Georgian taxi driver began pestering me, I listened—more than that, I offered him a cup of coffee.

His name was Sergei. We sat in a border café, out of the rain. He said business was not good. I looked for something to eat, but there were only stale buns and boxes of crackers. As soon as you leave Turkey, by whatever border crossing, the quality of the food plunges.

"You go Batumi?"

I said, "Maybe. How much?"

He mentioned a sum of money in Georgian lari. I translated this into dollars and said, "Ten dollars. Batumi."

This delighted him. And Batumi was thirty miles away, so I was happy too.

"You get bus, Batumi to Tbilisi."

"How long does it take?" I asked.

"Six o'clock. Seven o'clock."

He meant six or seven hours. I said, "Is there a train?"

"Yes, but train take nine o'clock, ten o'clock."

"Sleeping car—Schlafwagen?"

He nodded, yes. So I threw my bag in the back seat of his car, got in the front with him, and off we went, dodging potholes and deep mud puddles. The road was empty. He said that in the summer people flocked here for a Black Sea vacation, but I found this hard to imagine: there were no obvious hotels; the houses were small and dark, as though mossy; the coastal road was in bad shape and, unlike its Turkish counterpart, was not being repaired.