Read Online Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux - Free Book Online

come.' After Ceausescu. 'The Americans will come.' We hated our government. We wanted to be saved."
    "How do you know this?"
    "One of my projects is oral history. I interviewed many people, not just my relatives but people from all over Romania. One man was in solitary confinement for seventeen years, for a petty offense. Another man I spoke to was walking down a street in Bucharest. He was carrying a French book—literature, maybe Flaubert. The police stopped him. They seized the book and they framed it as 'antisocial.' He got a year in prison—this was in the 1980s!"
    "Weren't people angry, being treated like this?"
    "They said, 'The Americans will come. They will save our soul.'"
    "Has it happened?"
    "We have a right-wing government. It is opportunistic. We have U.S. military bases, and the people approve it. We have seen worse, much worse."
    Eventually we got to the window. I bought a Turkish visa for $20 and we had our passports stamped. Then, completely wet and very cold, I re-boarded the train and went to sleep. It was then around four-thirty, and by the time I woke, dawn had broken and we were passing the Sea of Marmara, muddy fields on one side, ships beyond the tracks, the big bold city of domes and minarets in the distance.
    Nikolai had crept out of his compartment, his face pressed to the window. He had never been to Turkey before; he had never been out of Romania. He looked alarmed.
    "What do you think?"
    "More modern than I thought."
    He was dazzled and swallowing hard, for it was not just the enormous mosques and churches that were impressive but the density of the building in these southwestern suburbs of Istanbul. I was impressed too, as much by the extent of the new construction as by its modernity. It made Romania seem the muddiest Third World backwater.
    I said, "Isn't it unfair that Turkey can't join the EU for another ten years or more?"
    Nikolai said, "They have problems with human rights of the Kurds and the Armenians."
    "The Kurds want to secede and start their own country, which is a little unreasonable. And the Armenian business was a hundred years ago. Look at this city—imagine the power of this economy."
    "But in the countryside is different. Poor people," Nikolai said, thinking of the poverty in rural Romania.
    "You've seen them?"
    "No."
    "What about the Gypsies in Romania?"
    "Is a problem. How integrating? We don't know. Some live in tents. We call
zidane
" he said, using the Russian word for the people, called Rom or Romany all over Europe.
    "What's the biggest problem in Romania?"
    "Maybe Gypsies. Maybe poverty."
    "What's the cost of living?"
    "Is the same as Toronto. My uncle lives there."
    He was appalled by what he was seeing, Istanbul rising all around us, the train screeching past the old city wall and new tenements. We were racing towards Seraglio Point and the sight of the Bosporus—Asia looming on the far side.
    Nikolai was speechless. It was obvious that he had prepared himself for a shabby Asiatic city of oppression and torture, crumbly mosques and fez-wearing Turks and backward-looking Muslims. Instead he was greeted by a grand and reimagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by the Islamic republics. It was a city of ancient gilt and impressive modernization. He could see that the old city had been preserved—we were passing through it, approaching Sirkeci Station in the old-fashioned but carefully preserved quarter of Sultanahmet; and beyond the Golden Horn were the bluffs of Beyoglu and the tooting ferries to the Asian side, which was lined with magnificent sea-front houses, the villas they called
yalis,
and the rain still coming down hard. Nikolai shriveled into a country mouse and, with his forehead pressed against the train window, looked as though he were going to weep with frustration.

THE FERRY TO BESIKTAS
    I STANBUL IS A WATER WORLD , and your first view of it, stepping out of Sirkeci