Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The lesson in my Tao of Travel was that if one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier. I thought that anyone who has lived through the latter half of the twentieth century is unshockable, and so has a better time of it, with lower expectations, a contempt for political promises. After a certain age the traveler stops looking for another life and takes nothing for granted.

And this time my wife was on the phone. She had prevailed on me to bring a hand-held device that doubled as cell phone and Internet receiver. I had resisted. I had traveled for more than forty years without feeling the need to be in close touch. And I hated the sight of people using cell phones as much as I hated the sight of people eating and walking at the same time—the unembarrassed indulgence, making a private ceremony into a public act, almost as a boast, braying into the damned thing and to the world at large: Hey, honey, I'm on a train! Pretty soon I'm going to be in a tunnel!

I had forgotten I had the instrument. I switched it on and got a screen message, Welcome to Hungary, and soon after that it rang again.

"I miss you," my wife said. "But I want you to know that I'm on your side. I know you have to take this trip."

"How's the knitting?"

"I haven't started. I'm still looking over the patterns."

I found her procrastination oddly reassuring, and we talked a little more, she at home and I on a train, looking out at the snowy fields outside a city of factories and tenements called Tatabanya, less than an hour from Budapest.

***

THE SIGHT OF THE old pockmarked city of puddles, smutty under the snowmelt, Keleti Station looming like a Hungarian madhouse in the rain, the slushy streets and muddy sidewalks, defrosting and dripping after the long winter—all of it made me hopeful. I wasn't looking for glamour or a version of home, but rather something altogether different, as proof that I'd covered some distance. Grim-faced women in old clothes, carrying shopping bags, scuffing through the slush in dirty boots, held out signs lettered Zimmer, offering their houses or apartments for home stays, to make a little money in an economy that had tanked so badly that people were leaving in droves—mobbing Keleti Station for the trains going west to Austria and Germany and Britain. I was crowded by taxi touts and pimps, not pestiferous but merely desperate for money.

I dumped my bag at Left Luggage—my train to Romania was not due to leave until late that evening—and walked out to look at the grandiose edifice of the station, with its statues and winged chariot, stallions and feather-and-floral motifs, dated 1884, an Austro-Hungarian extravaganza, grandiose and pompous, seeming to mock the weary travelers in wet raincoats and the footsore pedestrians with shopping bags.

"How's business?" I asked a woman at a bookstore.

"Is bad," she said.

I kept on asking as I strolled from the station, through the city to the Danube, for the pleasure of taking it all in, with the confidence that in eight or nine hours I would be back at the station to claim my bag and board a new train for Bucharest, the continuation of my own Orient Express.

It was about this time in my previous trip that I'd met the traveling companion I called Molesworth. He was a theatrical agent and bon vivant, unmarried, and his being a little fruity and familiar added to his twinkle. His clients had been some of the acting Cusacks and Warren Mitchell. A former officer in the Indian army, he had traveled widely in Asia. He winked into a monocle when he read a menu, and had a gentle habit of calling every man "George," as when speaking to the Turkish conductor: "George, this train has seen its better days." After my book came out, he said people recognized him in the text, even through a pseudonym. I saw him now and then in London and invited him to parties, where he made himself popular with his theater stories, all about luvvies, and afterwards my friends would say, "Terry is splendid." Before he died, he said the trip in 1973 to Istanbul was one of the best he'd ever made, and often added, "You should have mentioned my name." But his real name was too good to be true: Terrance Plunkett-Greene.

I trudged through the downpour with all the other trudgers until I came to a plausible-looking hotel called the Nemzeti, and went in, just to get out of the rain.

The restaurant was empty except for two women, wearing leather coats and smoking.

Wasn't I hungry? the pale waiter asked me. Wouldn't I be happier sitting in the warm restaurant and having the lunch of the day?

I agreed. Goulash was on the menu.

"Foreign people think goulash is stew. No. Goulash is soup."

"But what does the word mean?"

"I don't know in English. But a goulash is someone who looks after sheep."