The Third World stink and disorder were strong in Bucharest, its suburbs looked blighted, its farms muddy and primitive. Romania was another country people were leaving, all of them headed west. The look of Bucharest was desperate and naked, that look which is without shame or self-consciousness: everyone struggling, everyone dressed as though for a hike on a rainy day or dirty job.
No one I spoke to made any money. Nikolai, the university teacher—assistant professor—earned the equivalent of $200 a month. That is exactly what a clerk at a fast-food pizza restaurant told me he earned. His name was Pawel and his English was better than Nikolai's. Neither man had been out of the country. The average national wage was $100 a month. No wonder that Romania, like Albania, is furnishing western Europe with factory workers, hookers, and car thieves.
***
"MISTER PAWEL" —it was Nikolai, hailing me on the platform. He introduced me to the people seeing him off, his university colleagues, threadbare scholars.
"What is your business?" one asked.
"I'm retired," I said.
"Many retired people come here!" he said, being hearty. What did that mean?
"Would you like to be going to Turkey with us?" I said.
"We would rather be going there," one said, and pointed to where the sun, like a coddled egg, was slipping through the sooty sky in the west.
Apart from Nikolai and a big grouchy-looking man with a mustache like a small animal attacking his nose, there was a mother and small daughter—the mother shaking her head and saying "Bulgaristan," because we had to pass through this (she said) unfriendly place. Clearly the route of the Bosfor Express was not popular; I kept noticing that few people wanted to travel east.
Seeing no dining car, I hurried back to the station lobby and bought beer, bottled water, and sandwiches. And then I found my sleeping compartment and watched Bucharest recede from view.
We traveled across the flat plain that is the southeast of Romania, through the immense fields of wheat that, besides orphans, is Romania's only export. The farming villages could have been illustrations from Grimm's Fairy Tales—cottages, huts, outbuildings, barns, all of them aslant, surrounded by fields, no trees, the occasional flock of ducks or turkeys, and the only human a hurrying man who, seeing a cast-off plastic bottle, drank from it—the dregs someone had left—and flung it away when he saw another one, which he snatched and drank from, and tossed to the ground, where he pounced on another and greedily drank. But in a huge homogenized world, this seemed like a novelty, because it was a throwback to a much earlier time: nothing happening except the rain falling on the desperate man and the village in the background, beyond the railway ditch, the witch's house, the woodchopper's hut, the Gray Dwarf's cottage.
Just at dusk the border, Giurgiu Nord: a decayed façade of a station that turned out to have nothing behind it but wasteland, some leafless trees, a snippy immigration official, and a miserable three-legged dog.
Giurgiu is a river town at the edge of the great flat Danubian Plain, which is the southern third of Romania. The Danube River (second only to the Volga in length) has a different name in each country it flows through; it's called the Dunav here. Past a settlement of filthy apartment houses, a garbage dump next to them heaped with plastic bottles and blowing plastic bags, then a truck depot.
The edges of countries are often visual facts. The southern plain of Romania ended at the river, which was the border, but for greater emphasis the other side, the south bank of the Danube, was high ground, a long irregular bluff, which was the edge of Bulgaria, like a castle wall straggling to the horizon east and west. Across the river we went, the flow a hundred yards wide at this point, into Russe, the big river port of Bulgaria—power plant, cranes, chimneys, much bigger and more prosperous than any city I saw in Romania, new tenements as well as grotty ones, buildings in much better condition. Even the railway station was big and solid, unlike the purely symbolic one on the other side of the river in Romania.
One polite and one silly Bulgar examined my passport, and when they left my compartment an old man and three nasty-faced boys leaped into view and rapped on my window, making begging gestures, hand to mouth.
"You don't see this in airports," I said to Nikolai, who stopped by to see if the Bulgars had searched me. He too called it Bulgaristan. He said you'd never find people begging like this in Romania, but I knew for a fact he was wrong.
The border guards hadn't searched me. No one had taken an interest in my bag since I'd entered Romania, and that had been perfunctory, just a sniff-and-sort routine to satisfy a deprived and underpaid border guard. I'd hardly been searched since leaving London and had changed trains five times so far.
The train lost itself in the Bulgarian plateau and the higher ground south of the river, among the hills, where trees were like a sign of wealth, not needed for farmland or fuel, and the stations sheltered little clusters of pale Bulgars, scowling men, mustached old women. And then long sweeping hills, startling, lovely, because I had been expecting more Romanian decrepitude; finally sunset over Veliko Turnovo, and more beer.
I was woken by a sudden knock at two-thirty the next morning. I sprang awake, still half drunk, and a slight but fierce Bulgar woman shone a flashlight in my face.
"Pusspoot."
But that was all there was to the Bulgarian border. In the past, the passports were handled by the conductor, who then demanded a tip at the end of the journey. I didn't mind the interruption; I found it revelatory and vaguely exciting: a fierce foreign woman in a peaked cap and leather coat and boots appearing in the middle of the night at the foot of my bed, insisting that I obey her.
Half an hour later we were at the Turkish border, in a town called Kapikule, the heavy rain lashing the open platform and the glittering lights. The night was cold, and big shrouded Turks marched up and down. Three in the morning and all the officialdom of Kapikule had turned out to greet the train. In spite of the score of policemen and soldiers, only one man was processing the train passengers who were entering the Turkish Republic: he sat in a little lighted window while we stood in the rain. I was last, Nikolai next to last. And now I could see the passengers: Romanians, Bulgars, Turks, big families, children in modest clothes, small Slavic boys no more than ten with mustaches as visible as those of their grannies, beetle-browed men—no tourists. With the driving rain, the old train, the intimidating border guards, and the shadowy town behind the prison-like station, it could have been forty years ago, all of us squeezing into the far edge of Turkey like refugees, soaking wet.
Nikolai said, "Is not modern!"
"Why are you going to Istanbul?"
"Attending conference on European enlargement. I am reading paper."
"Romania's being allowed to join, right?"
"Will join in January 2007."
"But not Turkey?"
"Turkey is problem. Human rights." He shrugged, rain pouring down his face.
"Romanian human rights are better?"
"Improving now, because we want to join EU."
"America is capturing people in places like Tanzania and Albania and sending them to Romania for interrogation."
"Who tell you this?"
"It's called extraordinary rendition. They can be tortured in Romania."
"We are friendly with America now. Also with Britain. We have U.S. military bases. Romanians are against the war in Iraq, but we like Americans."