The Great Railway Bazaar

  His melon came. It was cut into cubes. He smiled at it in a pitying way and said, ‘They cut it.’

  I volunteered the information that the Turks at the next table had uncut melon. Whole slices, complete with rinds, rested on their plates.

  The subchief considered this; then he leaned over and looked me in the eye. ‘It’s a strange world.’

  I hoped for his state of mind that it wouldn’t get any hotter. But it did, searing the air, and the shades were drawn in every compartment. Each time I began to read or write I dropped off to sleep, waking only when the train came to a complete stop. These were halts in the desert, a little hut, a man with a flag, a signboard reading MUSH or BUG. I wrote a few lines and was alarmed to see my handwriting assume the anxious irregularity of the lost explorer’s, the desert diary script that is decoded and published posthumously by the man’s widow. The next time the whistle blows, I would say to myself, I will get up and walk to the engine. But I was always asleep when the whistle blew.

  We reached Lake Van at about ten at night, which was annoying. The darkness made it impossible for me to confirm the stories I had heard of the swimming cats, the high soda content of the water that bleaches clothes and turns the hair of Turks who swim in it a bright red. I had another regret: it was the end of the line for this express. The sleeping car was taken off and I had no idea what the arrangements were for the rest of the journey. The diesel engine was removed; a steam locomotive pulled us down to the ferry landing and for several hours shunted the cars two at a time on to the ferry itself. While this was going on I found the new conductor, an Iranian; I showed him my ticket.

  He pushed it aside and said, ‘No couchette.’

  ‘This is a first-class ticket,’ I said.

  ‘No room,’ he said. ‘You go down dere.’

  Down there. He was pointing to the cars just being loaded on to the ferry, the third-class coaches. After three days of passing through them on my way to the dining car, I thought of them with pure horror. I knew the occupants: there was a bandy-legged gang of dark Japanese with bristly hair who travelled with a dwarf squaw, also Japanese, whose camera on a thong around her neck bumped her knees. Their chief was a fierce-looking young man in military sunglasses who sucked an unlit pipe and wore rubber shower sandals. There was also a Germanic tribe: bearded boys and porcine girls with crew cuts. Their chief was a gorilla who loitered in the passage and sometimes refused to let anyone pass. There were Swiss and French and Australians who slept, waking only to complain or ask the time. And there were the Americans, some of whom I knew by name. The chiefs were having a powwow on the ferry; the others were watching from the rail.

  ‘Go,’ said the conductor.

  But I didn’t want to go, for besides the overcrowded compartments of Europeans and Americans there were the compartments of Kurds, Turks, Iranians, and Afghans, who slept on top of each other and cooked stews between their berths over dangerously flaring kerosene stoves.

  The ferry moved off, hooting into the black lake. I chased the conductor from one deck to the other, trying to continue my argument. It was past midnight, I said, cornering him down below where the huge railway cars clanked against the chains that held them to the tracks in the deck: where was my compartment?

  He put me in second class with three Australians. It was a situation I grew to recognize over the next three months. At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom. This trio on the Lake Van ferry considered me an intruder. They looked up surprised in their meal: they were sharing a loaf of bread, hunched over it like monkeys, two boys and a pop-eyed girl. They grumbled when I asked them to move their knapsacks from my berth. The engines of the ferry rattled the compartment windows and I went to bed wondering how, if the ferry sank, I could scramble to safety, out of the compartment and the car and up the narrow stairs to the boat deck. I did not sleep well, and once I was awakened by the harsh antipodean groans of the girl, who, not two feet from me, lay beneath one of her snorting companions.

  At dawn, in the rapid light of early morning, we arrived at the eastern shore of the lake. Here the train becomes the Teheran Express. The Australians were breakfasting, pulling the remainder of their loaf to bits. I went into the corridor to count out what I thought the conductor might accept as a bribe.

  4. The Teheran Express

  As the new Teheran Express pulls out of the modern supermarket-style frontier station at Qotr on tracks that shriek with newness (Iranian National Railways are modernizing and expanding), the steward in the French-built dining car takes off his crisp white jacket, unrolls a lovely square of carpet, and gets down on his knees to pray. He does this five times a day in a little corner between the cash register and the kitchen, intoning, ‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet,’ while diners slurp lemony soup and pick at chicken kebab. The giant glass and concrete stations house three portraits – the Shah, his queen, and their son. They are fifteen times life-size and the vulgarity of the enlargement makes them look plump and greedy and monstrously regal. The smiling son might be one of those precocious child entertainers who tap-dance in talent shows, singing ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’. It is an old country; everywhere in the gleaming modernity are reminders of the orthodox past – the praying steward, the portraits, the encampments of nomads, and, on what is otherwise one of the best-run railways in the world, the yearning for baksheesh.

  Again I showed the conductor my ticket. ‘First-class ticket,’ I said. ‘You give me first-class couchette.’

  ‘No couchette,’ he said. He pointed to my berth in the Australian compartment.

  ‘No,’ I said. I pointed to an empty compartment. ‘I want this one.’

  ‘No.’ He gave me a fanatical grin.

  He was grinning at my hand. I held thirty Turkish liras (about two dollars). His hand appeared near mine. I dropped my voice and whispered the word that is known all over the East, ‘Baksheesh.’

  He took the money and pocketed it. He got my bag from the Australian compartment and carried it to another compartment in which there were a battered suitcase and a box of crackers. He slid the bag into the luggage rack and patted the berth. He asked if I wanted sheets and blankets. I said yes. He got them, and a pillow, too. He drew the curtains, shutting out the sun. He bowed and brought me a pitcher of ice water, and he smiled, as if to say, ‘All this could have been yours yesterday.’

  The suitcase and crackers belonged to a large bald Turk named Sadik, who wore baggy woollen trousers and a stretched sweater. He was from one of the wilder parts of Turkey, the Upper Valley of Greater Zap; he had boarded the train in Van; he was going to Australia.

  He came in and drew his arm across his sweating face. He said, ‘Are you in here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much did you give him?’

  I told him.

  He said, ‘I gave him fifteen rials. He is very dishonest, but now he is on our side. He will not put anyone else in here, so now we have this big room together.’

  Sadik smiled; he had crooked teeth. It is not skinny people who look hungry, but rather fat ones, and Sadik looked famished.

  ‘I think it’s only fair to say,’ I said, wondering how I was going to finish the sentence, ‘that I’m not, um, queer. Well, you know, I don’t like boys and –’

  ‘And me, I don’t like,’ said Sadik, and with that he lay down and went to sleep. He had the gift of slumber; he needed only to be horizontal and he was sound asleep, and he always slept in the same sweater and trousers. He never took them off, and for the duration of the trip to Teheran he neither shaved nor washed. He was an unlikely tycoon. He admitted he behaved like a pig, but he had lots of money and his career was a successful record of considerable ingenuity. He had started out exporting Turkish curios to France and he seems to have been in the vanguard of the movement, monopolizing the puzzle-ring and copper-pot trade in Europe l
ong before anyone else thought of it. He paid no export duties in Turkey, no import duties in France. He managed this by shipping crates of worthless articles to the French border and warehousing them there. He went to French wholesalers with his samples, took orders, and left the wholesalers the headache of importing the goods. He did this for three years and banked the money in Switzerland.

  ‘When I have enough money,’ said Sadik, whose English was not perfect, ‘I like to start a travel agency. Where you want to go? Budapesht? Prague? Rumania? Bulgaria? All nice places, oh boy! Turkish people like to travel. But they are very silly. They don’t speak English. They say to me, “Mister Sadik, I want a coffee” – this is in Prague. I say, “Ask the waiter.” They are afraid. They shout their eyes. But they have money in their packets. I say to the waiter, “Coffee” – he understand. Everyone understand coffee, but Turkish people don’t speak any language, so all the time I am translator. This, I tell you, drive me crazy. The people they follow me. “Mister Sadik, take me to a nightclub”; “Mister Sadik, find me a gairl.” They follow me even to the lavabo and sometime I want to escape, so I am clever and I use the service elevator.

  ‘I give up Budapesht, Belgrade. I decide to take pilgrims to Mecca. They pay me five thousand liras and I take care of everything. I get smallpox injections and stamp the book – sometimes I stamp the book and don’t get smallpox injections! I have a friend in the medical. Ha! But I take good care of them. I buy them rubber mattresses, each person one mattress, blow them up so you don’t have to sleep on the floor. I take them to Mecca, Medina, Jiddah, then I leave them. “I have business in Jiddah,” I say. But I go to Beirut. You know Beirut? Nice place – nightclubs, gairls, lots of fun. Then I come back to Jiddah, pick up the hajis and bring them back to Istanbul. Good profit.’

  I asked Sadik why, if he was a Muslim and he was so close to Mecca, he never made the haj himself.

  ‘Once you go to Mecca you have to make promises – no drinking, no swearing, no women, money to poor people.’ He laughed. ‘Is for old men. I’m not ready!’

  He was headed now for Australia, which he pronounced ‘Owstraalia’; he had another idea. It had come to him one day in Saudi Arabia when he was bored (he said as soon as he began making money in a project he lost interest in it). His new idea concerned the export of Turks to Australia. There was a shortage of workers there. He would go, and, much as he had sold puzzle rings to the French, visit Australian industrialists and find out what sort of skilled people they required. He would make a list. His partner in Istanbul would get up a large group of emigrants and deal with the paperwork, obtaining passports, health cards and references. Then the Turks would be sent on a charter flight that Sadik would arrange, and after collecting a fee from the Turks he would collect from the Australians. He winked. ‘Good profit.’

  It was Sadik who pointed out to me that the hippies were doomed. They dressed like wild Indians, he said, but basically they were middle-class Americans. They didn’t understand baksheesh, and because they were always holding tight to their money and expecting to scrounge food and hospitality they would always lose. He resented the fact that the hippie chiefs were surrounded by such young pretty girls. ‘These guys are ugly and I am ugly too, so why don’t the gairls like me?’

  He enjoyed telling stories against himself. The best one concerned a blonde he had picked up in an Istanbul bar. It was midnight; he was drunk and feeling lecherous. He took the blonde home and made love to her twice, then slept for a few hours, woke up and made love to her again. Late the next day as he was crawling out of bed he noticed the blonde needed a shave and then he saw the wig and the man’s enormous penis. ‘ “Only Sadik,” my friends say, “only Sadik can make love to a man three times and think it is a woman!” But I was very drunk.’

  Sadik was good company on a dull stretch of the journey. We had taken on thirty freight cars and the train moved very slowly through northwestern Iran towards Teheran, across the most infertile soil I have ever seen. Here, in a baking desert, one is grateful for a good train, and the Teheran Express could not have been better. The dining car was a clean cheerful place, and there were vases of red gladioli on each starched tablecloth. The food was excellent, but unvarying; always the lemony soup, the kebab, and a stack of flat, square, blotterlike bread. The sleeping car was air-conditioned to such a degree that one needed two blankets at night. The farther one got from Europe, it seemed, the more sumptuous the trains became. At Qazvn, another oversized supermarket station in the desert, I discovered that we were running ten hours late, but I had no deadline to meet and in any case have always preferred comfort to punctuality. So I sat and read and over lunch I listened to Sadik’s plan to make a killing in Australia. Outside, the landscape had begun to acquire features – hills rose, a plateau appeared, then a blue-green range of mountains to the north; villages grew more frequent, and there were refineries spouting flames and shortly we were in Teheran.

  Sadik bought a ticket for a train to Meshed that was leaving that same day. He hadn’t planned to, but as he was standing in line he overheard two pretty girls buying third-class tickets and saw the clerk assign them a compartment. In third class on Iranian Railways no distinction is made as to sex. Sadik asked for third class and was put in the same compartment: ‘So we see what can happen! Wish me luck.’

  Teheran, a boom town grafted on to a village, is a place of no antiquity and little interest, unless one has a particular fascination for bad driving and a traffic situation twenty times worse than New York’s. There is talk of building a subway system, but the plumbing in Teheran is of the village variety; the sewage is pumped into the ground beneath each building, so the process of tunnelling would very likely produce a cholera epidemic of gigantic proportions. One man I met verified this by claiming that you had to dig down only ten feet anywhere in the city and you would strike sewage; in a few years it would be five.

  In spite of its size and apparent newness it retains the most obnoxious features of a bazaar, as Dallas does, and Teheran has all the qualities of that oil-rich Texas city: the spurious glamour, the dust and heat, the taste for plastic, the evidence of cash. The women are lovely; they skitter around holding other women’s hands – even the most chic – or else they are bent sideways, on the arm of a small shrouded granny. Wealth has allowed the Iranian little except the single excess of being overdressed; indeed, the freezing air conditioning seems to be designed for no other purpose than permitting rich Iranians to wear fashionable English clothes, for which they have a special fondness. There is about this decadence a peculiar absence of the physical that begins to look uncivilized in the most limiting way. Women are seldom seen with men; there are few couples, no lovers, and at dusk Teheran becomes a city of males, prowling in groups or loitering. The bars are exclusively male; the men drink in expensive suits, continually searching the room with anxious eyes, as if in expectation of a woman. But there are no women, and the lugubrious alternatives to sex are apparent: the film posters showing fat Persian girls in shortie pyjamas; nightclubs with belly dancers, strippers, kick lines, and comedians in ridiculous hats whose every Farsi joke is a reference to the sex the patrons are denied. Money pulls the Iranian in one direction, religion drags him in another, and the result is a stupid starved creature for whom woman is only meat. Thus spake Zarathustra: an ugly monomaniac with a diamond tiara, who calls himself ‘The King of Kings’, is their answer to government, a firing squad their answer to law.

  Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.

  Because of the oil, Teheran is very much a city of foreigners. There are two daily papers in English, a French daily, Journal de Teheran, and a German weekly, Die Post. Not surprisingly, the sports page of the English-language Teheran Journal is taken up with such non-Persian news as a profile of Hank Aaron (‘A Great Player – A Great Person’), who was then about to break Babe Ruth’s lifetime homer record of 714 before an uninterested Atlanta crowd (‘Atlanta is the
disgrace of baseball’); the rest of the sports news was similarly American, except for one small item about Iran’s cycling team. You do not have to go far in Teheran to find out whom these newspapers are written for. There is no shortage of Americans in the city, and even the American oil-rig fitters in outlying areas of the country are allowed seven days in Teheran for every seven they spend on the site. Consequently, the bars have the atmosphere of Wild West saloons.

  Take the Caspien Hotel Bar. There are tall Americans lounging on sofas drinking Tuborg straight from the bottle, a few hard-faced wives and girlfriends chain-smoking near them, and one man holding forth at the bar.

  ‘I go up to the son of a bitch and say, “X-ray them welds,” and he just looks at me kind of dumb. Ain’t been no X-raying here for three weeks. Whole goddamned thang gonna fall down sure as anything. He says to me –’

  ‘We saw the Albrights down in Qom. She had just the prettiest dress,’ says the lady on the sofa. She had kicked off her shoes. ‘Bought it right here, she said.’

  ‘Well, shit, I didn’t know what to do,’ says the man at the bar. ‘I told him I wouldn’t leave the site if it didn’t look okay to me. If he keeps it up he can have his damned job. I can go back to Saudi any old time I want.’

  A big middle-aged man in blue jeans comes in. He staggers a bit, but he is smiling.

  ‘Gene, you old son of a bitch, get in here,’ calls the man from the bar.

  ‘Hi, Russ,’ says the big man, and as he says it a few Iranians move aside.

  ‘Sit down afore you fall down.’

  ‘Buy me a drink, ya dirty bastard.’

  ‘Your ass I will,’ says Russ. He pulls out a lumpy wallet and shows Gene. ‘Only got a hundred rials to my name.’

  ‘They’re Texas,’ says the lady on the sofa. ‘We’re Oklahoma.’