Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Big shadowy Soviet-era apartment blocks stood in scrubby fields in the middle of nowhere. Compared to them, the huts and cottages farther on were a relief for having a human scale. Old people plodded along dirt roads, like trolls vanishing into the growing dusk, which seemed to rise from the ground like dense fog. This twilight partially obscured Rustavi, a down-at-heels industrial city of steel mills and ironworks that had become antiquated. All this time we were following the winding course of the Kura River, which flowed through Azerbaijan and emptied into the Caspian Sea.

In the darkness of my compartment, rattling across eastern Georgia, I was thinking how my routines of travel were totally different from the routines of my writing life. The predictable regularity of humdrum domesticity is perfect for writing: monotony is the writer's friend. People said to me, "You're always away!" But it wasn't true. I loved being home, waking in my own bed beside my wife, watching the news on TV, spending half the day writing, and then cooking, reading, swimming, riding my bike, seeing friends. Home is bliss.

This—the closed compartment on the old train to Azerbaijan—was something else. Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move towards an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, inventing the trip, cobbling together a set of habits in order to stay sane and rational, finding ways to fill the day and be enlightened, avoiding danger, keeping out of trouble, and, immersed in the autobiographical, for my journal, writing everything down in order to remember, reflecting on where I am and what I'm doing.

Still being jogged in the dark compartment, I recalled the woman—where had I seen her? maybe Ankara?—who said, "I want to live your life."

And I had thought: Really! My nagged and scolded childhood, my undistinguished school career as a punk, no good at games, bewildered in college, terminated early from the Peace Corps, disgraced in Singapore when my contract wasn't renewed, hard up in London, refused a credit card by American Express at the age of thirty-two because I had no visi ble credit, divorced—oh, sorry, you mean all the books and the fun of travel!

A knock at the door: two soldiers with rifles slung at me. "Gid owp."

So I was interrupted in my reverie by gun-toting soldiers at the Georgia border, a gritty settlement called Jandari. They went through the motions of a passport check, perfunctory and simple; but the train was jammed full of people, and it was two hours before we started again.

The next stop came fifteen minutes later—the Azerbaijan border at Beakykok, with many more soldiers and an imposing railway station. The soldiers tramped through the train, scrutinizing passports. I was apprehensive because my visa specified "Entry point—Baku." I was more than three hundred miles from there, but this didn't seem to matter to the soldier who licked his thumb and paged through my passport. He took no interest in my bag or its contents, but he admired my shortwave radio, tuned to the BBC. Fears of a civil war in Iraq are being expressed by officials at the highest levels, a woman was saying on the news.

After midnight we were rolling again. I woke in the darkness, urgently, to use the john but could not budge my door. It seemed I was locked in. The compartment was very hot and the train was moving fast, throwing me back and forth. It was too dark for me to see whether the lock was jammed. For five or ten minutes I struggled with the door in a cramped and growing panic—something I seldom feel. The light didn't work, but I dug out my BlackBerry and switched it on. No reception, but it proved a helpful flashlight illuminating my problem. At last, braced against the berth and kicking at the door, I managed to open it. The corridor was thick with Azerbaijanis gaping out the window at shadowy Tovuz, in the western province, and some of them were staring at me, presumably because they'd heard me kicking the door, or maybe it was my odd-shaped flashlight. The toilet was unspeakable.

At dawn, nine hours past the border, I saw great flat plains with muddy patches, looking overgrazed by the flocks of nibbling sheep—hundreds of them, a clear indication of mutton stews and shish kebabs farther down the line. The whole of the foreground was cropped flat, and in the distance were bare blue mountains.