T A B L E_T A L K

Travel to Cuba from the U.S.: How did you get there? Share tips and tales in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

The Mystical High Church of Luck
By Rolf Potts
How I went to Las Vegas with $5 and ended up losing $100
(04/28/98)

Naples in a new light
By Deb Fellner
An island encounter transforms a wanderer's impressions
(04/27/98)

Mondo Weirdo
Toilet tricks in Asia; aircraft flambé in Toronto
(04/24/98)

Africa Solo
By Kevin Kertscher
A filmmaker learns a lesson about giving from three small children in the heart of West Africa
(04/23/98)

Absinthe makes the heart grow
By Taras Grescoe
On a pilgrimage in Barcelona's bohemian barrio
(04/22/98)

BY KARL TARO GREENFELD | Our train had set out near dawn from Tashkent, belching its way from the station at an anemic 6 miles per hour, leaving the immense fortresses, brilliant minarets and dilapidated Stalin-era tractor factories behind to enter a stretch of vacant anti-terrain where, about 20 miles out of the city, the train came to an inexplicable two-hour halt. We sat for a while in our stuffy compartments, staring from the windows for as long as we could tolerate, before impatiently pacing the passenger and baggage cars, stepping off the train and padding for a few moments through the hot sand until the oppressive midday sun, coupled with the unyielding monotony of the landscape, forced us all to clamber back inside the train to sit fanning ourselves in our compartments. Legend had it that Tamerlane had led his horde through this desert and been so bored by the ubiquitous sameness of the treeless, topographically challenged wasteland that in retribution he had slaughtered the entire population of the next unlucky village he came across.

A few of us listened to our cassette players, others flipped through out-of-date magazines or new collections of the complete works of Maxim Gorky or Anton Chekov -- vast, multi-volume sets printed on cheap paper that retailed for a few cents here in the Soviet Union. Barnett, the hulking, barefoot University of Alabama graduate who had recently gone off the wagon, slipped a liter of hot vodka from his duffel and unfolded a brand new pocket knife to gouge at his ingrown toenail. (He had rationalized his decision to stumble around Soviet Central Asia barefoot by pointing out that he was destined for the podiatrist's office anyway because of his absurdly swollen big toe.) Now, he swigged the hot vodka and probed his foot with the knife, slicing away at the bulbous flesh that had swollen up around his nail. The train lurched forward, causing Barnett to cut a larger than anticipated hunk from his foot, splattering the side of the compartment with blood.

We made steady, albeit painfully slow, progress for an hour, then came to another halt in another similarly landscapeless patch of earth where the conductor stomped down the corridor, ordering everyone off the train. We gathered our shoulder bags and day packs, making our way along the narrow passageway to the rusted, metal-grill steps to the sand. An impromptu nomadic migration seemed to be in progress: Hundreds of passengers marched alongside the train, their bundles of clothes and wicker cages of chickens and hog-tied goats all moving along with them in shambling piles beneath the blistering afternoon sun. We were changing trains, word came down, to another train up ahead along the same track. So we joined the classless processions from third class and second class after being assured that, as we were first-class passengers, the rest of our luggage would be moved by the porters from the baggage car to the new train. Passing our still hissing, navy-blue locomotive, we came across a rusted, derelict, derailed hulk whose chassis was so twisted the rear coupler hung 10 meters over the desert. The locomotive had been torqued into such a gravity-defying angle it seemed it would collapse at any moment. But as we skirted around the engine rather than risk walking under it, I saw that a few tiny gray and brown birds, the first I had seen in this desert, had made nests in the shadowy undercarriage.

Just beyond was our new train, a series of light green passenger cars, in repose behind another engine, this one a living version of the tangled, skeletal conglomeration of wheels, axles and gears that lay dead in the tracks behind us. By the familiarity with which the great mass of passengers climbed aboard this new train and retook their seats, and the un-Soviet efficiency of the entire act, one had the impression that this transfer had been going on for years, that the rusted locomotive had been here as long as most of us had been alive and had become a regular part of the Tashkent-Samarkand run.

By the time we resettled into our compartments aboard the new train -- slightly less dilapidated than the last train but with the same cigarette butts crammed into every possible corner and the same coating of soot on every surface -- and were under way, it was already dark and Barnett had once again flipped out his pocket knife and was setting to work on his infected toe.

The sun went down, the temperature dropping from above 90 degrees to somewhere in the 40s. Barnett's sister Melissa stood up, wrapping herself in her light-brown alpaca coat and heading out into the passageway. Wearing only the T-shirt and jeans I had boarded the train with -- the rest of my clothes were in my luggage -- I found Melissa standing in the narrow walk at the end of the car, on a grated shelf that connected over the coupler to form a walkway to the next car. The train had finally achieved a decent pace, and was now bashing along so that we could barely make out the small tumescences of sand alongside the tracks. Melissa stood against the back of the car. I slid in alongside her, my shoulder touching hers.

"I can't be around him when he does that," she said, barely audible over the screeching and buckling of train wheels.

"Jabs at his toe?" I asked.

She nodded. I needed to get the conversation around to us, or to make a pass, or somehow transgress the space between us to instigate the fling I was desperate to have.

"What do you think we should do?" I asked.

"About what?"

"About your brother's toe."

At the outset of the trip there had been a faculty chaperone, a German philosophy professor named Werner von Semperoff, whose charge it had been to lead us about the Soviet Union. During the earlier, Moscow leg of the trip he had been plentifully in appearance, at the head of our straggling band of students as we wandered past Lenin's tomb or through the GUM department store.

He had introduced us to a lovely, middle-aged Russian woman with gun-metal gray eyes who was so much prettier than the Russian women we had seen in the streets that we assumed she worked for the KGB or some similar government agency. And evidently von Semperoff had better things to do than lead us through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the two Soviet Central Asian Republics we were scheduled to visit on this trip; for he hadn't boarded the Aeroflot Tupelov-72 that had turbulently hurtled us from Moscow to Tashkent.

We heard from Sergei, the portly Intourist agent assigned to lead us through Central Asia, that von Semperoff would rejoin us at some later date at some distant city -- when he said the name of the place, none of us had been familiar enough with Soviet place names to remember it

We were college students on our spring break from the American College in Paris, moneyed brats mostly, expecting to take a peek into what was then the Evil Empire. Gorbachev had been in office only a year, and all we knew of him for sure was that he had a stain on his forehead that we conjectured was shaped like Afghanistan. It was then still a rarity for Westerners to visit the Soviet Union and when we entered the country our passports had been taken from us and we had been issued yellow Intourist cards that we had to carry everywhere with us and present at hotels, train stations and airports. Our parents had shelled out something like $2,000 so that we could sit in sweltering train compartments, listen to Motörhead cassettes and drink hot vodka. It had been advertised as a study trip, but thus far the only class had been an impromptu lecture by von Semperoff back in Moscow on the perils of passing out drunk on the Moscow subway system.

During the first few days of wandering around Moscow in the slush and mud of spring thaw, trading dollars and francs for bootlegged Beluga caviar and canned Kamchatka crab legs because the food at the Hotel Cosmos had been stubbornly inedible, I had taken to making sure I was walking alongside Melissa or somehow seated next to her during bus rides and meal breaks. Prior to the trip, I had noticed her several times around school, but I had only met her the day before we left Paris, while I was standing next to the pinball machine in the American College Café. She wore her black hair long in the back with bangs falling to her eyebrows -- Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders had prominently sported this style a few years earlier. Her cheeks were full but rested on high cheekbones, lending symmetry to the thin layer of baby fat that had yet to be burned away by the real world and real life. Her eyes were blue-green, her nose a sturdy isosceles triangle and her lips a parted, flattened rose.

Her body was a solid combination of muscle and girlish curves. She had been an athlete at whatever girl's prep school she had attended; if I had to guess her sport it would have been field hockey, so she surprised me when she later told me she played volleyball. She was not long and sinewy, as were the volleyball players I had known; she was evenly proportioned with ample hips, a narrow waist the circumference of a long playing record and generous, upstanding breasts.

I had overheard her telling another girl she was going on this trip, and that her brother had flown over from Alabama to join her. I introduced myself. I swear I noticed something in the way she looked at me; I knew then the primary purpose of this trip.

N E X T+P A G E+| At the mercy of the military

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ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF CROSBY