Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (12 page)

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.

Never mind, I was bouncing towards Batumi in a cold drizzly dusk—into the unknown, a place I'd never been. Its very dreariness and decrepitude were a consolation. I could see from the border, the roadside, Sergei in his old car, and the men laboring with pushcarts that this was a benighted place, not expensive, and slightly creepy—wonderful, really, because I was alone and had all the time in the world. No sign of any other tourist or traveler; I had walked across the frontier into this wolfish landscape. And if Sergei was correct in saying that there was a night train to Tbilisi, it would be perfect.

It seemed to me that this was the whole point of traveling—to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and did not instantly think of me as money on two legs. Life was harder but simpler here—I could see it in the rough houses and the crummy roads and the hayricks and the boys herding goats. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans was a liberating event. I told myself that it was a solemn occasion for discovery, but I knew better: it was more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.

Batumi was a low coastal town of puddly streets and dimly lit shops and Georgians in heavy clothes hunched over, plodding in the rain. On the outskirts were plump central Asian bungalows, and approaching the center of town at dusk was like entering a cloudy time warp where it was permanently muddy and old-fashioned. In the 1870s it had been a boom town built on the oil fortunes of the Rothschilds and the Nobels.

"Football," Sergei said.

We passed a muddy soccer field.

"Sharsh."

We passed a round church with an elaborate spire and a sharp-edged Christian cross on top.

"
Shakmat
club."

Shakmat
is Persian for checkmate: "king death." The chess club, a big building and one of the newest in Batumi.

We kept going, and Sergei conveyed to me in broken English that the train station was not in Batumi but farther up the coast in a village called Makinjauri, where passengers boarded and tickets could be bought.

This, the last, westernmost stop on the Trans-Caucasian Railroad, was not a station but rather a rural platform under a grove of leafless trees and bright lights. Near it stood a ticket booth, the size and shape of one of those narrow little carnival sheds that offer tickets to the merry-go-round. I bought a first-class berth to Tbilisi for about $15 and felt I had lucked out, for the train was not leaving for hours. I paid off Sergei and enthusiastically tipped him for being helpful, then wandered around, looking for a place to eat.

Babushkas in aprons, bulky skirts, headscarves, and thick leggings welcomed me into a cold, lamp-lit one-room restaurant, and one of
them, explaining with gestures, made me a Georgian dish—a big round puffy loaf filled with cheese and baked in a pan, then cut into wedges. Peasant food, simple and filling. I drank two soapy-tasting bottles of beer and asked for more detail, which they cheerfully gave me: as we were in Batumi, this was
Adjaruli
cuisine—west Georgian style.

Some factory workers stopped in, and their English was sufficient for them to explain to me that they came here every evening at this time for the stew; so I ordered some of that, too, and like them, ate it with a wheel of bread.

"What country?"

"America."

"Good country. I want to go!"

A sense of out of this world,
I scribbled in my notebook between bites.
Cold, dirty room, old beaky women with raw hands in thick clothes; poor lighting, jumping shadows, a sputtering samovar, people talking in low voices; all weirdly pleasant.
At the ragged edge of Georgia—the ragged edge of Turkey, too—I was happy.

At some point the rain stopped. The darkness turned frigid, the night glistening with frost crystals that were star-like, and overhead, stars were visible above the Black Sea. At Makinjauri Station, on the exposed platform, a hundred or so people waiting for the train were stamping their feet and chafing their hands to keep warm, yawning because it was so late and so cold.

I had a compartment to myself. I bought some bottled water from a stall on the platform. Two blankets and a quilt were piled on my berth, and after punching my ticket the conductor gave me a sealed package: bed sheets with bunnies printed on them.

So I lay down and read the opening pages of Conrad's
The Shadow-Line
and fell asleep as we traveled north along the coast and then headed inland.

It was an old noisy train with clanging wheels, and couplings that banged as we went through the mountains; but it rocked like a cast-iron cradle, and I slept so well on the ten-hour trip I did not awake until we were almost at Tbilisi.

Even on the outskirts of the capital the full moon lighted the huts in the hills, giving it all the look of a Gothic landscape, darkness and blunted shadow, and rooftops and hilltops bluey white from the cold moon. As I watched from the window outside my compartment, I nod
ded to another watcher, a man in a blue suit, plump, a head of white hair, a cell phone to his ear, and when I smiled he sprang forward and shook my hand. The clamminess of his handshake made me guess that he was a Georgian politician. He acknowledged that he was, of President Mikhail Saakashvili's party.

Tbilisi Station was grim, poorly lit, stinking of ragged squatters, littered with blowing papers, and on a frosty morning in March not a place I wanted to linger. I took a taxi and, choosing a hotel at random, checked in and went for a walk.

***

IN THE COURSE OF IDLING THERE
, I found that Georgians do not call their country Georgia. They give it its ancient name, Sakartvelo, after its legendary founder. "Georgia" is from the Persian Gorjestan, Land of the Wolf. Armenians call the place Vir, another ancient name, a variation of "Iberia." But by whatever name, it was a supine and beleaguered country of people narcissistic about their differences.

I thought: If you simply flew into Tbilisi, you'd take this to be a pleasant if elderly-looking city of some lovely buildings and quite a few decaying older ones; of many—perhaps too many—gambling casinos; of boulevards and genteel tenements and ancient churches sited with emphatic plumpness on the rocky splendor of low hills; a presentable city divided by the gull-clawed Kura River. And you would be utterly deceived by this look of prosperity.

Overland from Turkey, through Hopa and Sarp and muddy Batumi, from the frosty platform at Makinjauri and onward, passing the towns and villages of Kutaisi, Khashuri, Kaspi, and Gori—Gori, where Iosif Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin, was born in 1879, "a lame, pock-marked, web-toed boy," urchin, street fighter, and choirboy at Gori Church School, before going to a seminary in Tbilisi and becoming a gang leader and bank robber—the railway line showed that Georgia is essentially a peasant economy, struggling, backward-looking, Russophobic, mildly discontented, riven by dissent over the breakaway province of Abkhazia, and, in the raw dark days of late winter, proud but hard-pressed.

Many people in Tbilisi mentioned to me how, less than two months before, in one of the coldest winters in memory, the Russians had cut off Georgia's supply of natural gas. Within hours, the heat vanished from all households and factories, and a black frost descended. Other
than firewood—and even that was in short supply in the deforested countryside—Georgia had no energy of its own. The country was without power, Tbilisi seized up, the traffic lights went off, businesses shut down, schools and hospitals were in darkness. The Russians claimed that terrorists had blown up the gas pipeline, but President Saakashvili loudly denounced the Russians, accusing them of deliberate malice—after all, Ukrainians had not long before suffered the same frozen fate when their energy payments to Russia were in arrears.

Politicians in the Georgian cabinet ostentatiously handed out cans of kerosene. Less ostentatiously, trucks dumped loads of firewood on street corners for people to fight over. But the temperature remained below freezing, the river was iced over, the snow was deep, and fresh snowfalls blocked the thoroughfares.

"People were building fires in the streets to keep warm," a woman told me.

Russophobia in Georgia reached new levels of intensity as the whole country shivered; and at last, after a week of suffering, Tbilisi looking as if doomsday had come—snowbound, frozen, corpse-like, frostbitten—the gas supply returned. But Georgia was reminded of its vulnerability, its poverty, its desperation, its dependence on Russia, and its lack of adequate resources.

The weather was still cold and foggy when I arrived, but out of curiosity I decided to stay put for a few days. The hotel I'd found was near the center of the city; I set off walking. I had arrived on a weekend, when people from Tbilisi and the suburbs hold a collective flea market on the streets near the river and across the bridge—and so I was able to see people parting with light fixtures and lamps, faucets, postcards, plastic souvenirs, photographs, brassware, radios, candlesticks, samovars, and religious paraphernalia, including crucifixes and paintings. Business was slow; there were many more sellers than buyers. The hawkers were older people, obviously trying to raise money, and it was obvious too that in many cases they were offering heirlooms for sale, literally the family silver—plates, spoons, salt shakers, teapots. The items that interested me were the icons, some of them silver or silver-plated, and after a few days of browsing, I bought a silver icon.

Big central Asian porches of shaped wooden gingerbread and carved screens jutted from some older buildings, and one whole district of traditional houses—and mosques, and a synagogue, too—had been reno
vated. But walking in a drearier part of the city, I passed a large crowd of people jostling on a sidewalk, an irregular line of contending humans in ragged clothes trying to squeeze themselves against a narrow door that gave onto David Agmashenebeli Avenue.

A young man appeared from inside the door and held up a square of cardboard with a number on it. I could read it: 471. As though she'd just won at bingo, an old woman, looking pleased, screeched and waved a scrap of paper—her number was 471—and she pushed herself through the crowd and into the doorway.

This happened two more times while I watched. More numbers were announced—472, 473—and the winners admitted to the building. The building had an air of elegance, though like many others in this district it had fallen into ruin. But there was no sign on the building, only the crowd of people out front, each person waiting for his or her number to be called. What exactly was happening?