Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Passing through Jondor, on way to Bukhara, I typed with my thumbs. Then, succumbing to e-mail's narcissistic temptation to self-dramatization, added, Racing in an old car into Uzbekistan...

The outskirts of Bukhara looked seedier, poorer, dirtier, grubbier, more tumbledown than Turkmenabat, just over the border, which was merely ugly and strange. Farrukh was asking me a question with his hands.

"Hungry," I said and accompanied this word with gestures of my own.

Farrukh indicated that he was hungry too. We drove down a back street, and he parked in front of a café.

We shared the meal: a bowl of cooked pigeon eggs, a bowl of meat dumplings, which Farrukh described using the Turkish word manti—but in this region everyone's manti were different—a wheel of hard bread, a pot of tea, and I thought, This is very nice. I think I'll stay in Bukhara.

***

"THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is that Niyazov puts his opponents in jail and Karimov kills them," an American in Ashgabat had said to me. This was a reference to the Uzbek dictator's suppressing an uprising in the city of Andijon in which several hundred unarmed demonstrators (but no one knew the exact number of casualties) were slaughtered by soldiers. This was in May 2005. A little over a year later, in September 2006, UNESCO awarded Islam Karimov the Borobudur Gold Medal for "strengthening friendship and cooperation between nations, development of cultural and religious dialogue, and supporting cultural diversity." So this hard-faced murderer and (until the massacre) solid ally of the United States now sported a gold medal from the United Nations.

The renewal and general fixing up of Bukhara had been one of the programs for which Karimov had been rewarded. He was a murderer, but unlike Joseph Goebbels, when he heard the word "culture" he did not reach for his gun. He had Bashi's obsession with the glorious past, and he too had lots of oil revenue. Most of the city in drizzly March seemed woebegone, but the restored part of Bukhara retained an atmosphere that was a mixture often spurious and the authentic, half Disney, half Divanbegi—the bazaars, the mosques, the markets, the synagogues, the madrasas, the central pond and mausoleums, the ancient Ark.

I was inclined to stay because I liked the food, and I found a cheap hotel, where the news on TV was not of Uzbekistan but of the war in Iraq. Out of season, in the rain, the shops empty, it seemed I was the only unbeliever in this, the pillar of Islam.

The downside of being the only traveler here was that desperate hawkers implored me to buy carpets or samovars or silver jewelry; and because I usually walked away, a classic haggling technique, they offered excellent prices, and chased me, and reduced them even more.

"You buy this. Is beautiful," a market seller said, showing me a silver dagger he had made. He demonstrated its razor-sharp blade by slipping it easily through a hunk of Uzbek bread he'd been eating.

I wasn't interested, but so as not to offend him I said, "I'd never be able to travel with that."

"No problem!"

"On a plane?"

"I wrap it in special way. I use folded metal. Put in your bag. When they x-ray, they see nothing. You take knife on plane!"

I bought a small icon and some old coins. I tried to engage various Uzbeks in a discussion about the massacre at Andijon, but no one had much to say. And by early evening the streets were empty. Bukhara was a city that emptied after dark—nobody on the street, not even much traffic.

Since Farrukh had kept his word on the $5 drive along the rutted roads from the border to Bukhara, I gave him another $5 to show me around the city, and to take me the next day to the outer suburb of Kagan, to buy a train ticket.

Kagan, a Russified town ten miles away, was Bukhara's train station—built there by a superstitious emir who considered railways a dangerous, possibly satanic innovation that had to be kept at a safe distance.

I was reassured by the ordinariness of the station, its busy lobby, the crowded waiting room, the sight of people boarding trains, and most of all by the tall board marked Departures in Cyrillic letters, the only destinations CaMapKaHД (Samarkand) and ToШKeHT (Tashkent), because I was coming to the end of the line. Headed to India, I knew there was no overland route through the Hindu Kush mountain range that was open to me. In Tashkent, I intended to look for a flight to northern India; I'd heard there was a short flight to Amritsar in the Punjab, where I'd gone thirty-three years before, and could resume my sentimental journey.

"Tashkent," I said to the woman at the ticket window, and pointed to the date on the calendar when I wished to go—the next day, at a quarter to five, the night train to Samarkand and Tashkent.

No berth to Tashkent, only Samarkand, the woman said.