Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Baku was an overnight trip from Tbilisi, not much more than the distance from Boston to Washington, but he had never taken the train. He had never been to Baku, in neighboring Azerbaijan, though he had lived for several years in Moscow and had spent some months working in Germany.

It occurred to me that, though he was thirty-four and had grown up in Tbilisi, he had perhaps never been to the Tbilisi railway station—or not recently, because he seemed shocked at how haunted and dirty it was. He made a face, shrugged at me in helpless pity, wished me luck, and hurried away when he saw the elderly train standing at the platform.

NIGHT TRAIN TO BAKU

THE TRANS-CAUCASIAN

A RAILWAY TRAIN in an old country seems to go backward into the dark, simple, and primitive hinterland that is the remote past. But that is an illusion. The train only appears to be a cruel artifact, as it crawls out of the huge neglected station crowded with passengers and rolls like a loud antique, looming rust-stained and sticky with grease, its bunks and seats obscured by dirty windows, the whole thing shaking from the whirs of its clacking engine, spattering black oil onto the tracks as it makes its way on what seems a route into history. The train offers the truth of a place: horrible or savage as it may seem, the hinterland is also the present.

I always felt lucky on a train, as on this one. So many other travelers are hurrying to the airport, to be interrogated and frisked and their luggage searched for bombs. They would be better off on a national railway, probably the best way of getting a glimpse of how people actually live—the back yards, the barns, the hovels, the side roads and slums, the telling facts of village life, the misery that airplanes fly over. Yes, the train takes more time, and many trains are dirty, but so what? Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

Why don't you take the plane? the Georgian had asked me.

Because—I thought when I was in the corner seat of my railway compartment—airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked.

Like a Soviet relic, complete with dented samovars in the vestibule and a very grumpy provodnik,

a conductor in a stained uniform jacket, the Azerbaijani train was like something that had rattled out of a bygone era. Even the platform at Tbilisi Station looked like a tableau from the distant past—old women squatting near big sacks of oranges and piled bags of dried fruit—from where? Azerbaijan, perhaps. Ragged children, old men in heavy boots sleeping against the sacks, young girls in long skirts holding babies. It was an unromantic view of peasantry, Giselle with scruffy costumes and no music. Many people I met in Georgia spoke of the modernity and promise of the country, even its alleged prosperity—"And we can fly to Paris in a few hours." But what I saw at Tbilisi Station could have been a scene from some dismal period in czarist times. I felt it was a kind of luck for me to witness this.

It so happened that the railway tracks followed one of the roads to the Tbilisi Airport. I could see a colorful billboard on the widest thoroughfare that read (in English) President George W. Bush Street, a sign the visiting president could have seen, and read, on his visit to Georgia the previous year. With a vocal Muslim country on every border, Georgia was a natural ally of Bush's so-called war on terror, though I did not meet any Georgian who agreed with American policy, except in a shortsighted and self-interested way.

The outskirts of Tbilisi were dilapidated: tall dreary tenements on narrow potholed lanes, and beyond them ramshackle houses, small archaic-looking compounds—interconnected huts with courtyards, animal pens, stockyards. Peasant huts dominated—Asiatic jerry-building, a world apart from Tbilisi's casinos and city slickers and ballet and the velvety ritual of the christening.

After a while, the grumpy conductor in his soup-stained jacket and dented cap shoved open my compartment door.

"Ticket?" I asked.

"Nyet, nyet" he said and pushed past me. He insisted on making my bed, and then—rubbing his fingers together in the money gesture—demanded 10 lari, about $5. This seemed steep, but when a big ugly man wearing a uniform in a foreign country asks for a small, specific sum, I usually hand it over.

The long-distance bus was the more popular way of going from Tbilisi to Baku. Not that many people took it: Georgia was westward-looking and Azerbaijan was to the east, at the edge of central Asia. But the bus was slower because the roads were so bad, and of course there were roadblocks, manned by soldiers. The train just rolled on, but the train was a revelation, the crummiest I'd been on so far. Nothing worked, neither the lights nor the locks. It was very grubby; it was an express yet it made lots of stops, the stations growing creepier and more ruinous.