Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2 page)

You could ask, "Why should they bother?" but the fact is that each of these travelers, grown older, would have discovered what the heroic traveler Henry Morton Stanley found when he recrossed Africa from west to east ten years after his first successful crossing from east to west from 1874 to 1877—a different place, with ominous changes, and a new book. Richard Henry Dana added a chastened epilogue to
Two Years Before the Mast
when, twenty-four years after its publication in 1840, he returned to San Francisco (but no longer traveling in the forecastle) and found that it had changed from a gloomy Spanish mission station with a few shacks to an American boom town that had been transformed by the Gold Rush. Dana was scrupulous about reacquainting himself with people he'd met on his first visit and sizing up the altered landscape, completing, as he put it, "acts of pious remembrance."

Certain poets, notably Wordsworth and Yeats, enlarged their vision and found enlightenment in returning to an earlier landscape of their
lives. They set the standard in the literature of revisitation. If it is a writer's lot to repeat the past, writing it in his or her own way, this return journey might be my own prosaic version of "The Wild Swans at Coole" or "Tintern Abbey."

My proposed trip to retrace the itinerary of
The Great Railway Bazaar
was mainly curiosity on my part, and the usual idleness, with a hankering to be away; but this had been the case thirty-three years before, and it had yielded results. All writing is launching yourself into the darkness, and hoping for light and a soft landing.

"I'm going to do a lot of knitting while you're away," my wife said. That was welcome news. I needed Penelope this time.

Though I had pretended to be jolly in the published narrative, the first trip had not gone as planned.

"I don't want you to go," my first wife had said in 1973—not in a sentimental way, but as an angry demand.

Yet I had just finished a book and was out of ideas. I had no income, no idea for a new novel, and—though I didn't know what I was in for—I hoped that this trip might be a way of finding a subject. I had to go. Sailors went to sea, soldiers went to war, fishermen went fishing, I told her. Writers sometimes had to leave home. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

She resented my leaving. And though I did not write about it, I was miserable when I set off from London, saying goodbye to this demoralized woman and our two small children.

It was the age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. I wrote home often. But I succeeded in making only two phone calls, one from New Delhi and another from Tokyo, both of them futile. And why did my endearments sound unwelcome? I was homesick the whole way—four and a half months of it—and wondered if I was being missed. That was my first melancholy experience of the traveler's long lonely evenings. I was at my wits' end on the trip. I felt insane when I got home. I had not been missed. I had been replaced.

My wife had taken a lover. It was hypocritical of me to object: I had been unfaithful to her. It wasn't her sexual exploit that upset me, but the cozy domesticity. He spent many days and nights in my house, in our bed, romancing her and playing with the children.

I did not recognize my own voice when I howled, "How could you do this?"

She said, "I pretended you were dead."

I wanted to kill this woman, not because I hated her, but (as homicidal spouses often say) because I loved her. I threatened to kill the man who, even after I was home, sent her love letters. I became an angry brute, and by chance I discovered a wickedly helpful thing: threatening to kill someone is an effective way of getting a person's attention.

Instead of killing anyone, or threatening it anymore, I sat in my room and wrote in a fury, abusing my typewriter, trying to lose myself in the book's humor and strangeness. I had a low opinion of most travel books. I wanted to put in everything that I found lacking in the other books—dialogue, characters, discomfort—and to leave out museums, churches, and sightseeing generally. Though it would have added a dimension, I concealed everything about my domestic turmoil. I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my children, my wife, my happy household.

The book succeeded. I was cured of my misery by more work—an idea I had on the trip for a new novel. Yet something had been destroyed: faith, love, trust, and a belief in the future. After my travel, on my return, I became an outsider, a ghostly presence, with my nose pressed against the window. I understood what it was like to be dead: people might miss you, but their lives go on without you. New people take your place. They sit in your favorite chair and dandle your children on their knees, giving them advice, chucking them under the chin; they sleep in your bed, look at your paintings, read your books, flirt with the Danish nanny; and as they belittle you for having been an overindustrious drudge, they spend your money. Most of the time, your death is forgotten. "Maybe it was for the best," people say, trying not to be morbid.

Some betrayals are forgivable, but others you never quite recover from. Years later, when my children were out of the house, I left that life, that marriage, that country. I began a new life elsewhere.

Now, thirty-three years older, I had returned to London. To my sorrow, about to take the same trip again, I relived much of the pain that I thought I'd forgotten.

***

NOTHING IS MORE SUITABLE
to a significant departure than bad weather. It matched my mood, too, the rain that morning in London, the low brown sky leaking drizzle, darkening the porous city of old stone, and because of it—the rain descending like a burden—everyone was hunched, their wet heads cast down, eyes averted, thinking, Filfy wevva. Traffic was louder, the heavy tires swishing in the wet streets. At Waterloo Station I found the right platform for the Eurostar, the 12:09 to Paris.

Even at Waterloo, the reminders of my old London were almost immediate. The indifference of Londoners, their brisk way of walking, their fixed expressions, no one wearing a hat in the rain yet some carrying brollies—all of us, including honking public school hearties, striding past a gaunt young woman swaddled in dirty quilts, sitting on the wet floor at the foot of some metal steps at the railway station, begging.

And then the simplest international departure imaginable: a cursory security check, French immigration formalities, up the escalator to the waiting train, half empty on a wet weekday in early March. In 1973 I had left from Victoria Station in the morning, got off at the coast at Folkestone, caught the ferry, thrashed across the English Channel, boarded another train at Calais, and did not arrive in Paris until midnight.

That was before the tunnel had been dug under the channel. It had cost $20 billion and taken fifteen years and everyone complained that it was a money loser. Though the train had been running for twelve years, I had never taken it. Never mind the expense—the train through the tunnel was a marvel. I savored the traveler's lazy reassurance that I could walk to the station and sit down in London, read a book, and a few hours later stand up and stroll into Paris without ever leaving the ground. And I intended to go to central Asia the same way, overland to India, just sitting and gaping out the window.

This time, I had been refused a visa to enter Iran, and civilians were being abducted and shot in Afghanistan, but studying a map, I found other routes and railway lines—through Turkey to Georgia and on to the Islamic republics. First Azerbaijan, then a ferry across the Caspian, and then trains through Turkmenistan, past the ancient city of Merv, where there was a railway station, to the banks of the Amu Darya River—Oxiana indeed—and more tracks to Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, within spitting distance of the Punjab railways.

After that, I could follow my old itinerary through India to Sri Lanka
and on to Burma. But it was a mistake to anticipate too much so early in the trip, and anyway, here I was a few minutes out of Waterloo, clattering across the shiny rain-drenched rails of Clapham Junction, thinking: I have been here before. On the line through south London, my haunted face at the window, my former life as a Londoner began to pass before my eyes.

Scenes of the seventies, along this very line, through Vauxhall, and making the turn at Queenstown Road, past Clapham High Street and Brixton and across Coldharbour Lane, a name that sent chills through me. Across the common, in 1978, there had been race riots on Battersea Rise, near Chiesman's department store ("Est. 1895"), where clerks sidled up and asked, "Are you being served?" I bought my first color TV set there, near the street on Lavender Hill where Sarah Ferguson, later the Duchess of York, lived; on the day her marriage to Prince Andrew was announced, my charlady, carrying a mop and bucket, sneered, saying, "She's from the gutter."

We were traveling in a deep railway gully, veering away from Clapham Junction, and from the train I got a glimpse of a cinema I had gone to until it became a bingo hall, the church that was turned into a day-care center, and beyond the common the Alfarthing Primary School, where my kids, all pale faces and skinny legs, were taught to sing by Mrs. Quarmby. These were streets I knew well: one where my bike was stolen, another where my car was broken into; greengrocers and butcher shops where I'd shopped; the chippie, the florist, the Chinese grocer; the newsagent, an Indian from Mwanza who liked speaking Swahili with me because he missed the shores of Lake Victoria; the Fishmonger's Arms—known as the Fish—an Irish pub where refugees from Ulster swore obscenely at the TV whenever they saw Prince Charles on it, and laughed like morons the day Lord Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA, and where, every evening, I drank a pint of Guinness and read the
Evening Standard;
this very place.

From scenes like these I had made my London life. In those days I prayed for rain, because it kept me indoors—writing weather. So much of what I saw today was familiar and yet not the same—the usual formula for a dream. I looked closer. The trees were bare under the gray tattered clouds, and most of the buildings were unchanged, but London was younger, more prosperous. This district that had been semi-derelict
when I moved here—empty houses, squatters, a few aging holdouts—had become gentrified. The Chinese grocer's was now a wine shop, and one of the pubs a bistro, and the fish-and-chip shop was a sushi bar.

But the wonderful thing was that I was whisked through south London with such efficiency, I was spared the deeper pain of looking closely at the past. I was snaking through tunnels and across viaducts and railway cuttings, looking left and right at the landscapes of my personal history and, happily, moving on, to other places that held no ambiguous memories.
Don't dwell on it,
the English say with their hatred of complaint.
Mustn't grumble. Stop brooding. It may never happen.

I loved the speed of this train and the knowledge that it wasn't stopping anywhere but just making a beeline to the coast, past Penge, Beckenham, Bromley—the edge of the London map and the old grumpy-looking bungalows I associated with novels of the outer suburbs, the fiction of twitching curtains, low spirits, and anxious families, especially
Kipps
and
Mr. Beluncle,
by the Bromleyites H. G. Wells and V. S. Pritchett, who escaped and lived to write about it.

In the satisfying shelf of English literature concerned with what we see from trains, the poems with the lines "O fat white woman whom nobody loves" and "Yes, I remember Adlestrop" stand out, and so do the trains that run up and down the pages of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. But the description that best captures the English railway experience for me is Ford Madox Ford's in his evocation of the city, his first successful book,
The Soul of London,
published a hundred years ago. Looking out the train window, Ford speaks of how the relative silence of sitting on a train and looking into the busy muted world outside invites melancholy. "One is behind glass as if one were gazing into the hush of a museum; one hears no street cries, no children's calls." And his keenest observation, which was to hold true for me from London to Tokyo: "One sees, too, so many little bits of uncompleted life."

He noted a bus near a church, a ragged child, a blue policeman. I saw a man on a bike, a woman alighting from a bus, schoolchildren kicking a ball, a young mother pushing a pram. And, as this was a panorama of London back gardens, a man digging, a woman hanging laundry, a workman—or was he a burglar?—setting a ladder against a window. And "the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train win
dows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. It is akin to the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end."

"Little bits of uncompleted life"—what the traveler habitually sees—inspire pathos and poetry, as well as the maddening sense of being an outsider, jumping to conclusions and generalizing, inventing or recreating places from vagrant glimpses.

It was only twenty minutes from soot-crusted Waterloo to its opposite, the open farmland of Kent, many of the fields already raked by a harrow, plowed and awaiting planting in this first week of March.

"Will you be having wine with your lunch?"

A woman in a blue uniform brought me a bottle of Les Jamelles Chardonnay Vin de Pays d'Oc 2004, praised on the menu for its "subtle vanilla from the oak and a buttery finish."

And then the lunch tray:
terrine de poulet et de broccolis, chutney de tomates,
the entrée a fillet of lightly peppered salmon, with
coup de chocolat
for dessert. This was, superficially at least, a different world from the one I had seen on the Railway Bazaar, that long-ago trip to Folkestone, and then standing at the rail of the ferry, feeling guilty and confused, eating a cold pork pie.

The tunnel was a twenty-two-minute miracle, the ultimate rabbit hole, delivering me from my English memories, speeding me beneath the channel to France, where I had only superficial and spotty recollections, of pleasures and misunderstandings, of eating and drinking, of looking at pictures, or hearing oddities, like that of the young pretty French woman who said to me, "I am seeing tonight my fiancé's mistress. I seenk we will have sex. I love stupid women." And then she said, "You are smiling. You Americans!"