Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (3 page)

After the tunnel, rain falling from the French sky on the tiled roofs and the tiny cars driving on the right, but apart from that it could have been Kent: the same smooth hills and chalky plateau, and the same blight, the same warehouses, the low industrial outbuildings and workshops, the rows of bare poplars in the misty midafternoon.

It was such a swift train trip, and so near was France to England, that it was hard to think of it as a separate country, with its own food and its peculiar scandals and language and religion and dilemmas. Enraged Muslim youths setting cars on fire was one of the current problems; only one death but lots of blazing Renaults.

Why is the motorway culture drearier in Europe than anywhere in America? Perhaps because it is imitative and looks hackneyed and unstylish and ill fitting, the way no European looks quite right in a baseball cap. While the gas stations and industrial parks matched the disposable dreariness of American architecture, set against a French landscape they looked perverse, with Gothic spires and haywains and medieval chalets in the distance, like a violation of an old trust, the compact villages and plowed fields and meadows set off by ugly roads and crash barriers.

Because of what Freud called "the narcissism of minor differences," all these open fields, battlegrounds since ancient times, were the landscapes of contending armies, a gory example of civilization and its discontents. And so whatever else one could say, it was a fact that the route of this railway, once soaked in blood and thick with the graves of dead soldiers—millions of them—had been serene for the past half century, perhaps its longest period of peace.

We crossed a river with a tragic name. One day in July ninety years ago, where the soft rain fell on the lovely meadows and low hills, in sight of the distant spires of Amiens on one side of the train and the small town of Péronne on the other, the valley of this river, the Somme, had been an amphitheater of pure horror. On that first day of battle, 60,000 British soldiers were killed, plodding slowly because of the 66-pound packs on their backs. They advanced into German machine-gun fire, the largest number of soldiers killed on one day in British history. In the four months of this bloodbath, the first battle of the Somme, which ended in November 1916, more than one million soldiers were killed—British 420,000; French 194,000; German 440,000. And to no purpose. Nothing was gained, neither land nor any military advantage, nor even a lesson in the futility of war, for twenty-five years later—in my own lifetime—the same armies were at it again, warring in these same fields. All of them were colonial powers, which had annexed vast parts of Africa and Asia, to take their gold and diamonds, and lecture them on civilization.

The colors and clothes of the pedestrians on the streets nearer Paris reflected French colonial history—Africans, West Indians, Algerians, Vietnamese. They were kicking soccer balls in the rain. They were shoppers in the street markets, residents of the dreary tower blocks and tenements, the public housing at the edge of Paris that the Eurostar was passing and penetrating. We entered the city of mellow cheese-like stone
and pitted façades and boulevards. London is largely a low city of single-family homes—terraces, cottages, townhouses, mews houses, bungalows, semi-detached villas. Paris is a city of rococo apartment buildings, bosomy with balconies, not a house to be seen.

With my small bag and a briefcase I looked such a lightweight that the porters at the Gare du Nord ignored me. I passed through the station to the front entrance, in the floodlit glow of the lovely façade with its classical-looking statues representing the cities and larger towns of France. They were sculpted in the early 1860s by (so a sign said) "the greatest names in the Second Empire."

The streets were thick with unmoving cars and loud honking and angry voices. I asked a smiling man what the problem was.

"
Un manifestation
" he said.

"Why today?"

He shrugged. "Because it's Tuesday."

Every Tuesday there was a large, riotous demonstration in Paris. But for its size and its disruption this one was to be known as Black Tuesday.

A
NATIONAL CRISIS
is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness. Purgatorial as a crisis sometimes is for a traveler, it is preferable to public holidays, which are hell: no one working, shops and schools closed, natives eating ice cream, public transport jammed, and the stranger's sense of being excluded from the merriment—from everything. A holiday is an occasion for utter alienation; a crisis can be spectacle, seizing the stranger's attention.

The reason Paris has the luminous quality of being a stage set is that it was redesigned with that theatrical aim in mind, around 1857, by Georges Haussmann (hired by Louis Napoleon, calling himself emperor), who destroyed its houses and slums in mass evictions, flattened its alleyways and lanes, and gave it wide boulevards, soaring mansion blocks, monuments and fountains, and the big-city conceit of seeming to be at the center of the world. The city was remade in a single style.

Paris's ornate backdrop of beautiful biscuit-colored buildings and extravagant arches and obelisks—the imperial city, complete with floodlights—is so fixed in people's minds, especially people who've never seen it, that describing it is irrelevant. And anyway, who bothers? In the fiction of Paris, it is enough for the writer to state the name of a boulevard or a district. Take Simenon. I happened to be reading his novels, for their portability and their oddness. "He returned to Rue des Feuillantines by a long detour in order to go to Montsouris Park"—no
more than that; the place is taken for granted, as fixed as a picture on a calendar. The mention of evocative names is description enough. Nothing to discover, nothing to show; the city looms, but instead of feeling dwarfed, the big-city dweller feels important.

Yet this apparent familiarity, one of the powerful attractions of Paris, is an illusion. "
Couleur locale
has been responsible for many hasty appreciations," Nabokov once wrote, "and local color is
not
a fast color." The brilliant Parisian stage set has a long history of insurrections, mob violence, unrest, and the extreme humiliation of foreign occupation—in the experience of many Parisians alive now, the memory of Germans in charge, the betrayals, the shame of surrender. Once a city's boulevards have been marched by triumphant Nazis, they never look quite so grand again. Like many of its decorous women, Paris, while appearing inviolate, has had a turbulent past, been raped and pillaged and bombed and besieged, and has gone on changing, like its sister city, London, and the other cities on my itinerary: Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Ankara, Tbilisi, Baku, and the rest of the glittering anthills of Asia, as far as Tokyo.

I seldom feel uplifted in a city; on the contrary, I feel oppressed and confined. In my travels I have been more interested in the places that lay between the great cities than the cities themselves: the hinterland, not the capital. It is my suspicion that people who are glamoured by big cities and think of themselves as urbane and thoroughly metropolitan are at heart country mice—simple, fearful, overdomesticated provincials, dazzled by city lights.

So the car burnings of a month before and the present crisis in Paris were revelations. I don't believe in the immutability of cities. I think of them generally as snake pits, places to escape from. But this
manifestation
—a huge noisy mob at (so the smiling man had told me) the Place de la République—had brought the city to a halt. Perhaps something to see—certainly a rowdy mob was more of a draw than anything I might look at in the Louvre.

I found a taxi. The driver was sitting comfortably, listening to the radio, his chin resting on his fist.

"Place de la République," I said, getting into the car.

"Not easy," he said. "It's the
manifestation.
"

"What's the problem?"

"They're angry," he said, and he mentioned the debonair prime
minister, who wrote and published his own poetry, and who wanted to change the labor laws.

More minutes passed, during which the driver made a call on his cell phone. Predictably, he reported that he was stuck in traffic.

"Also, it's raining."

Recognizing a fellow taxi driver, he leaned out the window and began bantering. Then he interrupted himself, saying to me, "And there's road-work on the Boulevard Saint-Germain."

When we had gone nowhere and the meter showed 10 euros—$13, for about fifty yards—I said, "Then I think I'll go to the Gare de l'Est."

"Better to walk there—it's just past that street and down some steps."

I got out, walked back to the Gare du Nord, bought a newspaper, and saw signs to the Gare de l'Est. Crossing the street, I was distracted by a pleasant-looking restaurant, the Brasserie Terminus Nord, the sort of warm, well-lighted, busy eatery that made me hungry on this cold wet day.

I told myself that this was a farewell meal, and ordered a half bottle of white burgundy, salad, and
bouillabaisse marseillaise
—a big bowl of fish, mussels, large crabs, small toy-like crabs, and prawns in a saffron-tinted broth, with croutons and rémoulade. The waiters were friendly and went about their business with eficiency and politeness and good humor.

Noticing my bag, one said, "Taking a trip?"

"Going to Istanbul. On the train." And I thought: Also Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and onward...

"Nice trip."

"To Budapest tonight, then tomorrow night to Romania. I have a question." I tapped the newspaper. "What is the meaning of
licenciement?
"

"It means losing your job."

"That's what the
manifestation
is about?"

"Exactly."

He explained: The prime minister proposed changing the law to make it easier to fire workers who, in France, had jobs for life, since firing them was almost impossible. But the young people had risen up against the change—as did the unions, the communists, and workers generally, because job security was considered sacred. If French jobs were not protected (it was argued), they would be taken by immigrant Poles and Al-banians, leaving the social order in tatters and cultural life under siege by foreigners.

I finished my meal, talked with the waiters, and made a few notes. From these few hours in France I could conclude that French waiters are friendly and informative, French food is delicious, French taxi drivers have a sense of humor, and Paris is rainy. In other words, generalize on the basis of one afternoon's experience. This is what travel writers do: reach conclusions on the basis of slender evidence. But I was only passing through; I saw very little. I was just changing trains en route to Asia.

I continued on my way, walking to the Gare de l'Est, found a steep old staircase that was cut into the slope of the narrow road. A stenciled sign in French on the pavement said,
The greatest danger is passivity.

Inside the station, at the far end of this road, a milling crowd with upturned faces searched the departure board for platform assignments. I saw my train listed—to Vienna. This information was confirmed by a voice on the loudspeaker: "
Platform nine, for the Orient Express to Mulhouse, Strasbourg, and Vienna
"

My train was called the Orient Express? I was surprised to hear that. All I had was a set of inexpensive tickets: Paris-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul, necessitating my changing trains in each city, three nights on sleeping cars. There are two ways by train to Istanbul—my rattly roundabout way, on three separate trains, and the luxurious way. It so happened that the luxury train was at an adjacent platform, its sleeping cars lettered
Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits,
a grand sendoff, with an old-fashioned limo parked on the platform lettered
Pullman Orient Express—pour aller au bout de vos rêves
(to take you to the limit of your dreams).

This waiting train, which was not my train, was the sumptuous, blue and gold Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, which had run from Paris to Istanbul from 1883 until 1977. It was a ghost of its former self (one sleeping car, no dining car, grouchy conductor) when I took it in 1973, and it was canceled altogether four years later. Its rusted and faded carriages were offered at auction in Monte Carlo, and all of them, all its rolling stock, bought by an American businessman. He plowed $16 million into restoring the coaches and bringing back the luster. He bought a version of the name, too, and restarted this luxury train in 1982. It has been a success with the nostalgic rich.

It was not my train because, one, it was too expensive: it would have cost me around $9,000, one way, from Paris to Istanbul. Reason two: luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living—indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.

I was on the other Orient Express, traveling through eastern Europe to Turkey. The total was about $400 for the three days and three nights, not luxurious (from the looks of the train at the Gare de l'Est) but pleasant and efficient.

"You will take this seat," the conductor said, indicating a place in a six-seat compartment. "You will change at Strasbourg for the sleeping car."

Only one other passenger so far, an elderly woman. I sat down and drowsed until I was woken by a few toots on the train whistle, and off we went, this other Orient Express, pulling out of the Gare de l'Est without ceremony. After a mile or so of the glorious city, we were rushing through a suburb and then along the banks of the River Marne, heading into the hinterland of eastern France in the lowering dusk.