1. Murder on the Orient Express

I was İstanbul-bound on the Orient Express when I discovered again the freedom of desperation. I made the discovery at precisely the moment in which I found myself standing in the aisle with a ticket to a seat I could not fit into.

It is not that I am enormous, you understand – though I have been called monstrous from time to time – it’s just that I was plastered and I just couldn’t get my knee to bend into the space. Some people might say that God gave us knees that bend because He was carrying out His marvelously preconceived plan. I could tell them that we animals evolved with knees that bend, because anything with knees that don’t bend is destined for the scrapheap.

And, okay, I’ll admit that it wasn’t the Orient Express, it was just a very slow fourteen-hour trip on the train from Thessaloniki to Pythion on the border between Greece and Turkey, and on across the river, through the slow rolling country of Eastern Thrace (European Turkey) to the fabulous city of İstanbul / Stamboul/ Constantinople/ Byzantium or whatever you want to call the world’s belly-button cobbling up the gap between West and East – though that is nothing more than an arbitrary geography, and not really about people. Anyway, all that came later.

The day had started wet and miserable as we got out of the taxi at the train station in a city, which I had come a long way to see, but was leaving unexplored. Thessaloniki. Salonika, a place easily missed by those who read only the Greek tourist brochures. But I had missed it for other reasons.

Anybody watching would have found the sight painfully comical. Having fought my way up the stairs to platform 1, onto the correct carriage of the Stamboul train, and along the aisle, trying to find a seat that matched something on the ticket, I was confronted by the unavoidable fact that the bloody great plaster cast from my toes to the groin of my left leg would not – absolutely no way at all – fit into the seat I’d been allocated. It was a left hand seat, so my rigid left leg had nowhere to go. But even if the seat had been right of the aisle, there was no way I could leave the leg sticking out into that narrow and much-traveled space for all those hours.

I am not slow to see what my choices are, and the only acceptable one presented itself in the form of the seat in front of mine, which was one of four facing each other. Exhausted by the problem, I tossed myself down and put my great white whale of a leg up on the seat facing mine, while my son, Finn, sat in the space next to my foot – a feat he performed remarkably easily for a 22 year-old body builder.

            It was fine. Nobody seemed to want the seat. Someone else had already taken one of the two seats allotted to Finn and me, so I assumed one of us had taken his and he’d made an intelligent compromise. The train slowly clunked its way down the line and did not pick up speed through the countryside. I’d wondered why the journey was to take more than fourteen hours – I mean, it wasn’t really that far – but I began to see that train speed (or lack thereof) was likely to play a large part. At an area of rough, rocky hillside covered in blooming asphodel, I began to think that the train could take as long as it liked. I was in heaven – Elysian Fields – even in the rain. But then they got on the train.

            There were three of them: woman, man and child. An unholy family. And we had taken their seats. I am not proud of what was about to happen, but neither will I conceal the truth of it.

Neither woman nor man would respond to English or the unspoken language of good intentions. But their intentions were clear. First it was the dark, sour-faced woman who ordered us out of the seats. There was nothing tentative about the manner of her instruction. I smiled sweetly, showed her the leg in plaster up to the groin, and pointed to the other available seats, but her ears and eyes were sealed off from any coupling attempt on the brain. I could see that there was no way I could possibly salvage international relations – though I did, for a moment, entertain the notion of standing up, vacating the seat and sitting down on the floor of the aisle, but then my mouth kicked into action and booted out a loud “Oh bugger off” before I had time to pull it in. It was at that moment that I rediscovered the exhilarating freedom of the desperate. What could I do? What would you have done?

            The woman knew, immediately, that there was no point in going on with it. She folded into the seat next to me and sat her sweet little child (with her long hair bunched at both ears like my six-year-old Talie’s had been) down opposite her. Some very decent young men made a seat available across the aisle for the husband, but He wasn’t going to cave in. His man-hood had been assaulted, his sense of rightful ownership had been challenged. He was a small, short man, so he was probably used to having to give way to other men. Often such men develop either charm or belligerence. I did feel just a little sorry for him, but he had choices, and I really didn’t see what else I could do. He chose to keep standing over me and ordering me (in a tongue I could not decipher, but with body-language in which I am pretty fluent) to leave the seat… or else. So I told him to shut up and sit down, because his behaviour was making his little girl miserable, not mine.

This, of course, only added fresh volleys of belligerence from the short man. So I told him that I felt really sorry for his daughter (true) and even more sorry for his wife (not true): after all, it was clear that he had a very small penis (and I held up my thumb and index finger indicating a length of about two inches) – a very small penis – or he wouldn’t feel the need to behave in this way. “Your poor wife,” I said, “fancy her having to put up with such a very small penis on such a colossal dickhead.”

There was an almost palpably shocked silence for a moment or two, and an intelligent looking young man, sitting a row back in my line of sight, looked at me as though he thought I had done something to which the word committed might be applied. Later, when he got off the train at Alexandroupolis, I learnt that he was studying Genetics and Anatomy, and that he spoke spotless English, so I guessed that the idea of the short man’s very small penis on a colossal dickhead had made his anatomical mind boggle.(Well, the writer in me guessed that. My mental editor told me he was just appalled at my gargantuan rudeness.) He might even have considered a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome.

Either way, the short man went off to get a higher authority and, after a minute or two of peace, his wife began to giggle. But whenever I too showed signs of mirth, she would say something that I could only imagine translating into “Oh yes, you can smile,” or maybe “How dare you laugh, bitch!” So I turned my gaze firmly back to the window, but there were no more asphodels in bloom. I went through as many possible reasons, as my inevitably limited imagination allowed, for the woman’s giggle. Perhaps she saw her husband coming back with as many guards as it would take to pick me up, white whale cast and all, and heft me kicking and screaming from the train. Giggle. Or would they use enough force to break my cast and fit me into the assigned seat? Chop, smash, giggle. Or would they just bundle me in with the checked baggage? No. I just couldn’t defend myself from the notion that the woman knew exactly what the thumb and index finger indicated or had enough English to recognize very small penis when she came up against it.

But she stopped giggling when the short man returned with the Officer, and they all naturally assumed that I would be put in my place properly. The Officer asked to see my ticket. I was about to go through the awkward rigmarole required to get it out, but then I figured that there was no point in his seeing my ticket, as I was not denying that I had been assigned the seat behind mine, so I pointed to my seat and

to my plaster cast and said “I’d be happy to sit in my seat – it’s just that I cannot possibly fit into it.”

Nevertheless, I was to leave the seat I was in. Oh yes? But where was I to sit then? That was apparently immaterial. So I dug my toes in deeper. “Oh bugger off,” I told the Officer. I did consider giving him the thumb and index finger as well, but two inches is not a gesture to be tossed about lightly. I shrugged and tried to ignore him. He clearly wasn’t used to that sort of treatment. Greek officialdom is generally accustomed to being held in awe – or fear. But when you think about it, respect for authority is highly overrated and an awful lot of crimes can be laid at its feet – everything from gassing and burning one’s fellow beings, to becoming the victim of incest or pedophilia. Even the perpetually fragile father-son connection depends on a tight-wire of respect for authority. But I was never scared of my dad (who often used baler-twine to hold up his trousers) and I see men in uniform as very limited individuals. So having told the officer to “bugger off” again, I turned back to the window and sucked in the scenery.

What could he do? The short man would not sit down in the seat across the aisle, so the Officer led the family away and he must have found them seats somewhere else, because I didn’t see them again.

After all that, I found I’d been quite tensed up, and in the subsequent relaxation I discovered a need to go to the toilet. While my seat had been in dispute it had been impossible anyway, but now I wondered if I’d be able to stand up and walk without falling over, then fit my leg into the toilet compartment while seated with the door shut. It’s clear that architects and engineers have little experience of broken legs, and we all have to be grateful to those who have gone in to bat for the disabled and got wheelchair-accessible toilets here and there. But trains in Northern Greece – trains in most places, really – have yet to catch up.

The toilet turned out to be a waterless affair with a sign warning passengers to put the lid down before flushing. I did manage to fit my leg in, but curiosity got the better of me (I’m a writer, I need to know about things) and I sneaked a look at what happens when you flush with the lid up. Let me tell you: it creates a kind of back-draft as it sucks the shit out onto the tracks. I was pleased that I’d exercised a bit of caution and stood back, so I didn’t have an eyeful. But the backdraft had whipped my fringe off my face, so I carefully felt it to make sure I hadn’t copped anything, and I avoided looking up – just in case something wasn’t stuck securely to the ceiling. At least it was clear to me now about the source of the stench that wafted up from the tracks with nauseating regularity.

The train passed through towns in Western Thrace – towns with official names that are on the maps and tourist brochures, but towns that are called by secret names that the Greeks never tell you. We know them as Alexandroupolis and Xanthi and Komotini…. But they are Dedeağaş, Iskeçe, Gümülcine to a large percentage of the people who live there, left behind (like the Greeks of İstanbul) in the enforced population exchange by order of the Treaty of Lausanne. The 130,000 Turks who still live in Western Thrace were not subjected to Kemal Atatürk’s banning of the fez and insistence on secularization, equality for women, western-style school uniforms, and all those other things designed to bring Turkey kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

Up in the hills here are villages where Turkish is taught in schools, the men wear hats shaped rather like fezzes – they certainly have no brims – and the Greek government pretends the people will eventually be assimilated into Greek society. Turks in Western Thrace do not think so. More likely it is that the culture of the twenty-first century will assimilate both Greeks and Turks – though it seems that the Greek Turks are less amenable to the modern world than the Turkish Turks who have taken to Western dress and Western technology like ducks to puddles – well, in Western Turkey, at least.

I guess I was too busy puddling about in my own thoughts to notice that all the international travelers had abandoned the train at one stop, and Finn and I had carried on, with the locals, to where the line ended at the next. After five minutes of farce we were obliged to leap (if you could call anything with a full leg plaster cast leaping) into a taxi and take a fast fifteen-minute journey back to Pythion where our baggage and the Stamboul train might or might not still be waiting.

If getting into a car with a great white whale of a leg is pure comedy for all but those intimately involved, getting out of a car is even funnier – especially when the great white whale is attached to some poor bugger whose anxiety is feeding an Ahab-sized bad temper. Yes, the train was still there, but our baggage? What baggage? Exhausted by the stress, all I could do was sit down on a planter-box on the platform, give Finn the baggage receipt, and ask him to go and find someone who could find the baggage. He came back without the receipt and without the baggage.

Naturally, being an infinitely wise and patient person, I fly into a rage. “You don’t give up the receipt,” I yell at the poor boy, “until you’ve got the bloody bags! So take me to the person who took the receipt off you.” He sets off with Ahab following and the white whale tossing wildly alongside. And it’s a common enough story: nobody knows anything about anything until you’ve screamed and shaken your sticks at them a bit (or thumped your crutches on the floor, in this case), and they’ve said, “No problem, Lady,” enough times, and you’ve said that, yes, there is a bloody problem, a bloody big problem, because those bags have a two month supply of drugs which are essential to the preservation of my life – since I happen to be a brittle, insulin-dependent diabetic with hypoadrenalism and hypothyroidism and polymyalgia rheumatica and gastroparesis and polyneuropathy and chronic pain and I am not going anybloodywhere without those bags so you’d better bloodywell find them now! (thump!) And suddenly, miraculously, those sadists are smiling their triumphant smiles, and the bags are (of course) exactly where they are supposed to be. The wind is knocked out of my Pequod sails, and I go out on deck (well, platform) and sit on my drug-filled baggage and sob with fury, relief and exhaustion. And I’m not even in Turkey yet.

Eventually, I pull my face out of the Macdonald’s serviette left over from last night’s dinner of Greek salad and chicken nuggets. I reflect on how the word drugs had included the codeine which is illegal in Greece and Turkey, but when you have to carry the number of prescription-drugs that I do, a bottle of codeine here and there is hardly going to excite attention – especially in the possession of a harpy like me. I mean – I don’t exactly fit the profile of a serious drug-smuggler. On the other hand, the Greeks will sometimes get caught up in the pursuit of an absurdity from which they cannot back down, so that the hapless tourist might suddenly find herself in a cell with a group of mad British Plane Spotters whose real crime is not spying but common or garden British daftness. I wondered if any real spies would take the Stamboul train these days.

Everyone was still waiting on what passed for the platform. The sun was shining and I struggled to remember when the rain, which had been so heavy, had slipped away. I dragged my white whale painfully over to the café and tried to buy a Diet Coke, but had no luck, so I decided we might as well board the train and find suitable seats – this time they were not reserved. A well-worn gravel path took us straight across the tracks. After our travels across America and Europe, it did not feel quite right to cross railway lines like that, but there was no other way, and the absence of a platform meant that I had difficulty clambering aboard. Finn had to more-or-less lift me.

It was one of those old trains with quite roomy compartments off a narrow corridor. I opened the door of the first compartment and was astonished to find an Asian man and woman sitting opposite each other by the window. I asked if the seats were taken and the woman, who seemed very tired, said they weren’t. Finn, who had followed me in with the bags, started putting them up in the overhead racks. I had to tell him to put my large bag behind one of the vertical bars so that a sudden stop wouldn’t bring it crashing down to kill someone. At least there was plenty of room for my leg.

            There was a lot of waiting involved in the crossing from Greece to Turkey. Crossing the webbed bridge on a rather ordinary, slightly muddy-looking river, did not take long. Each wooden strut on the Greek side had a little patch of blue and white – so you knew you were still in Greece. Then, in the middle, there was a patch with blue on the left and red on the right. It was obviously put there by the Greeks, because the Turks hadn’t bothered with any red patches on their side of the bridge. But there were red flags on the buildings. And one of the first things we saw was a turkey.

            I had, on previous trips to Turkey, not seen any turkeys – though I knew the Turks had a word for them, and it wasn’t turkey. The Turks passed the buck for this silly bird onto another people, by calling them hindi. It’s a confused world.

When the mad comptroller appeared, I tried to place his hooting and yodeling in the avifauna arena. Turkey wasn’t quite right. Kookaburra-coot, maybe. Drongo? It was impossible to think of him as a Conductor – or, as we were in Turkey, maybe it should be Konduktor. He was a hoot without any hint of an owl. I liked him a lot – especially after all the border officials who had held up the train on both sides of the bridge. We now knew that the couple with whom we shared the compartment were Korean because the Greek police had taken all our passports off us, taken them away, and then brought them back – just in time for the Turkish police to repeat the ritual. Both sets of officials were a dour lot, and I’ve never liked men in uniform.

The Khoot komptroller, however, wore his uniform as though it were a costume he’d put on to play his hooting and bellowing role. And I figured he was just enjoying that role when he appeared in the doorway and announced, in the jolliest of stentorian tones, that he was “commandeering” our compartment. “Sorry, sorry,” he hooted, “but as Komptroller of this train, I am commandeering this compartment (hoot, hoot). You will find other seats on the train.”

It took me a moment to realize that he was actually serious. It didn’t seem to bother the Koreans. They had no luggage to speak of – just a small, almost empty backpack each, the kind you might take for a casual stroll. Finn, on the other hand, had a large backpack, two trolley bags, and a small pack to handle. I had my small leather pack, the beaded bag I’d bought from an old woman in Meteora, and the white whale. I stood in the corridor, with Moby Dick protesting, wondering which curtained compartment to venture into.

Mr Khoot saved me the trouble of deciding. In one of his perpetual patrols, he decisively opened a door and ushered me in. I had been expecting a lot of strange and slightly resentful faces, but there were only the Koreans, sitting as before. We took up the same positions as we had done in the first compartment and, as soon as my mind had finished tinkering with the question of why Mr Khoot and his followers had felt the need to change compartments, it was as though we had never changed at all.

Soon I began to be preoccupied by the story that I could see the Koreans were concealing. It was only after we had settled in, that I realized that something important was going on between our fellow travellers, and I began to re-jig my thinking on them. I hadn’t seen them at the station in Pythion, and when I’d dragged the whale over the tracks and up into the train, I was not thinking about romance: I was thinking about getting a comfortable seat where I would be unmolested by anything too boisterous with life. When I’d seen the couple in the compartment I’d been surprised. You don’t see a lot of East Asians in that part of the world. I took them to be a married couple. At first glance they seemed merely bored and tired and middle-aged. I had assumed they had boarded the train early because of some small anxiety like my own. It was the absence of luggage that had set me wondering about them.

I rediscovered a first impression that there was something clandestine in their body language. I wondered if they were spies. Had they been to Greece for a weekend? – it was Sunday afternoon.

            Slowly it dawned on me that they were star-crossed lovers. It was the voices: they made Korean – not the most sympathetic of tongues – sound like the softest, most plangent of languages on Earth. It became clear to me that they wished to be alone. I would have obliged them, except that having intruded not once, but twice, it would have seemed very odd – and I was both exhausted and fascinated. When I had asked if there was anyone sitting in the obviously spare seats, she had replied, in perfectly round English, that, no, nobody was sitting there – but now, in retrospect, I remembered a note of resignation in the voice.

            He was not a handsome man, but his face was kind and his smile sunny. We only communicated the once – when we heard Mr Khoot yodeling down the corridor yet again, and we shared a smile. She did not actually speak to me again after that resigned “No, there’s no one sitting there”, but she too had a bright and genuine smile that lit up her whole face. She gave it to me when I suggested she could have more space on our shared seat. She had been very pretty and she was still beautiful – though not with any flashy sort of beauty. She would not have stood out in a crowd. Neither of them was tall. His legs were slightly bowed, his brow irreparably lined. But their subterranean heat was greater than any flash-in-the-pan of youth.

            They didn’t talk much after we entered the compartment. They sat, their bodies facing each other across the little table under the window, but their heads were turned, looking out. Slowly, though, the talk began. I did not understand a word of it, but the gist was unmistakable. She was quietly pleading with him but he was unable to meet her wishes. Still, his longing was almost palpable. She wept a little. At first I thought she must have a cold, but then I saw that she was crying. They were not touching, but their desire swelled the air around them.

            Mr Khoot distracted me for a while, by bringing me a cup of black Turkish tea in a polystyrene cup. But when the heat of it began to burn my crippled fingers, I clumsily dropped the whole thing, and it made a suggestive puddle in the corridor. Mr Khoot was nice about it, though, and he went and got me another one. Later, when he came back for the 1 Euro coin I owed him, he was pleased to pose for my camera, so I now have his photograph, his staunch grin, his eyebrows meeting the middle, his almost dementedly cheerful face almost handsome. But I have no photograph of the Koreans.

            The train moved with almost painful slowness through the Turkish landscape, and the lovers looked out on lush fields and trees glorious with spring green. There were herds of sheep and cows with shepherds and cowherds and dogs and rough-tiled, sagging farm buildings with wet earth and cesspools and muck. The filthy toilets on the train and the filthy railway lines lent their pungency to a land already rich with fecundity and frogspawn in ditches and birth and death and hawthorn in bloom, and the two of them looked out as if this was the last sight of Earth that they would ever share. The talk was all over.

            İstanbul got nearer, and a kind of gloom settled over them. I was unsure about whether they wanted to prolong this exquisite agony or have it over with. They settled into a sort of resigned sleepiness. Her legs found his for a while, but then she put them up, away from him. His hands interlocked on the little table – each finger splayed as if in supplication, but she had retreated into a gentle sullenness: a sort of you’ve-made-your-choice-now-live-with-it…. Even so, the passion between them was as intense as it was unspoken.

            And slowly, slowly (but too quickly) the last of earth was swallowed up in the dark. She lay back on her side of the compartment and he sat slumped on his. He pulled his jacket-hood over his face and went to sleep with his hands in his groin and his cock softly prodding his trousers as if it was reaching dumbly out to her. I felt unable to look at them, to intrude on what was still – even in sleep – so intense between them. Later I saw that his feet had swung over and were touching her legs. But then sleep came deeper on them both and his legs fell back.

            As the train bumped slowly through the lights and darks of İstanbul, he woke suddenly and leaned over and shook her gently. He said her name, but I missed it. She seemed not to respond at all, and he did not press it.

            We approached the Sirkeci terminus, coming around the shore of Sultanahmet where, in the late 1800s, the city walls and some of the Topkapi Palace kiosks (a Turkish word, that) and gardens had been demolished to make way for the train lines. I was busy getting my belongings in order and looking for landmarks. I had a sudden, disconcerting moment of thinking that all cities look the same in the dark – I could have been anywhere. I noticed that she was sitting now, slumped, as if she had lost all joy or will. Then we pulled to a halt. I did not look back as I left the compartment and walked off down the corridor of the train. But I did wait for Finn on the platform, and I saw the two of them walking away, hand in hand, their heads bowed under the hoods of their nylon jackets.