Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
22. Istanbul
Katz and I went from Sofia to Istanbul on the Orient Express. I had thought that it would be full of
romance - I rather imagined some turbanned servant coming round with cups of sweet coffee and
complimentary hot towels - but in fact it was awful in every way: hot, foetid, airless, threadbare, crowded,
old, slow. By 1973, the Orient Express was just a name on a rusty piece of metal on the side of any old train
between Belgrade and Istanbul. A couple of years later it was discontinued altogether.
We had a compartment to ourselves as we left Sofia, but about two stops later the door slid brusquely
open and an extended family of noisy fat people, looking like a walking testimonial to the inadvisability of
chronic inbreeding, barged in laden with cardboard suitcases and string bags of evil-smelling food. They
plonked themselves down, forcing me and Katz into opposite corners, and immediately began delving in the
food bags, passing round handkerchiefs full of little dead fish, hunks of dry bread, runny boiled eggs and
dripping slabs of pungent curdled cheese whose smell put me in mind of the time my family returned from
summer vacation to discover that my mother had inadvertently locked the cat in the broom cupboard for the
three hottest weeks of the year. They ate with smacking lips, wiping their stubby fingers on their shirts,
before sinking one by one into deep and spluttering comas. By some quirk of Balkan digestion, they
expanded as they slept, squeezing us further and further into our respective corners until we were pressed
against the wall like lumps of Blu-Tack. We had twenty-two hours of this to get through.
By this point on our trip Katz and I had spent nearly four months together and were thoroughly sick of
each other. We had long days in which we either bickered endlessly or didn't speak. On this day, as I recall,
we hadn't been speaking, but late in the night, as the train trundled sluggishly across the scrubby void that is
western Turkey, Katz disturbed me from a light but delirious slumber by tapping me on the shoulder and
saying accusingly, 'Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?'
I sat up a fraction. 'What?'
'Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?'
'I don't know, the lab report's not back yet,' I replied drily.
'I'm serious, is that dog shit?'
'How should I know?'
Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. 'It
is
dog shit,' he announced
with an odd tone of satisfaction.
'Well, keep quiet about it or everybody'll want some.'
'Go and clean it off, will ya? It's making me nauseous.'
And here the bickering started, in intense little whispers.
'You go and clean it off.'
'It's your shoes.'
'Well, I kind of like it. Besides, it kills the smell of this guy next to me.'
'Well, it's making me nauseous.'
'Well, I don't give a shit.'
'Well, I think you're a fuck-head.'
'Oh, you do, do you?'
'Yes, as a matter of fact. You've been a fuck-head since Austria.'
'Well, you've been a fuck-head since birth.'
'Me
?' A wounded look. 'That's rich. You were a fuck-head in the
womb,
Bryson. You've got three kinds
of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head.'
And so it went. Istanbul clearly was not destined to be a success for us. Katz hated it and he hated me. I
mostly hated Katz, but I didn't much care for Istanbul either. It was, like the train that took us there, hot, foetid,
crowded and threadbare. The streets were full of urchins who snatched anything you didn't cling to with both
hands and the food was simply dreadful, all foul-smelling cheese and mysterious lumps of goo. One night
Katz nearly got us killed when he enquired of a waiter, 'Tell me, do you have cows shit straight onto the plate
or do you scoop it on afterwards?'
