Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux Page A

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