Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux

growing cities of Turkey. On my first trip I had summarized Turkey as a peasant economy with colorful ruins, but modernized, mechanized, it had undergone a transformation: it was an exporter of food, literacy was high, and the trains had improved, though most people took buses because the roads were so good.
    There was no train to Trabzon; I'd have to take a bus, I was told as soon as I arrived in Ankara and announced my intention of traveling northeast to Georgia and Azerbaijan. My plan was to circumvent Iran while staying on the ground.
    I'd been invited to give a talk in Ankara, and it was hinted to me that the setting would be formal. That meant I'd need a necktie, an article I did not possess. I bought one for a few dollars, and that night, to the invited guests, I enlarged on my theme of the return journey, how it reveals the way the world works, and makes fools of pundits and predictors. How it showed, too, the sort of traveler I had been, what I'd seen, what I'd missed the first time. I was not in search of news—had never been, I said. I wanted to know more about the world, about people's lives. I wasn't a hawk in my travels; more a butterfly. But revelation was granted to even the most aimless traveler, who was happier and more receptive to impressions.
    "An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats.
And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.
    Ankara, which had seemed to me long ago a dusty outpost at the edge of the known world, had become a thriving city, important for its manufacturing, bright, youthful, sprawling across the dusty hills and ravines, with three large universities at its periphery. Culturally it had reclaimed its past, the golden age of bull worshipers and philosophers who had flourished thousands of years before, to the west of Ankara at Hatusa.
    Mingling with the people who'd attended my talk, many of them
academics or politicians, I was told in confidence by a whispering man that they were against the war in Iraq and wished the United States had never invaded.
    This mustached man tapped the air with his finger and said to me, "Not a single person in this room is in favor of what America is doing in Iraq." Perhaps self-conscious of his generalization, he turned to look at the hundred or so people in the room he had just characterized, and noticing some Americans, he added, "The Turkish ones, anyway. All of us are against it."
    "We were a Turkoman family in Iraq," a woman said to me, and introduced herself as Professor Emel Dogramaci of Çankaya University. "We were powerful in Kirkuk." By powerful, she meant wealthy. The family had become philanthropic in Ankara, having departed Kirkuk, a Kurdish area now. "We left because we were not happy with Saddam."
    "Were you glad to see him overthrown?"
    "Of course, but not at the cost of this war," she said. "This war is dreadful. It will not help. We don't see when or how it will end. The only certainty is civil war. Well, that is happening now, isn't it?"
    I said, "The depressing thing is that it could go on for years."
    "I dislike Bush. I prefer Clinton, for all his failings," she said. I admired her confidence, her fluency, her style. She was a woman of a certain age, well dressed, glittering with jewels, opinionated and forthright. "Bush doesn't know anything, but who are these people who are advising Bush? They gave him very bad advice. Did they know what they were doing?"
    "Rumsfeld was one of them."
    "We know Rumsfeld!" the woman said, snorting at the name. "He was supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. He was supporting Saddam! He was telling us to do the same!"
    From their home in Kirkuk her family had observed Donald Rumsfeld paddling palms and pinching fingers with Saddam, and selling him weapons, among them land mines. The Iranian response was to send small children—because children are numerous, portable, and expendable—running, tripping into the minefields to detonate the bombs with their tiny feet, to be blown