The Balkan countries have been in my mind quite a lot lately. They're easy to forget. As you might have guessed by now, I like to read about subjects totally foreign to me. I found a book called Lords of the Horizon, a history of the Ottoman Empire. I knew nothing about the Ottoman Empire, what it was, where it was or when it was. It was the world of sultans and viziers and 1001 Nights. Turkey was its political center and Constantinople the center of commerce. It seemed like a civilization that was citizen friendly, a good place to live for the common people. For the ruling families and upper level bureaucrats it was a world of off-with-their-heads and dungeons.

A succession of strange and increasingly decadent sultans over the empire's 600 year span came to just a fading away like morning mist in the time of WWI, not with a bang, but a whimper. I've been remembering a train ride through the Balkans I took on the Orient Express in 1971. It was not a trip I would recommend or repeat, but I'm glad for the one time. If your eyebrows just went up over Orient Express, like it's something exotic, you can let them back down. Exotic it was not, but for being completely foreign. The name Orient Express got its pizzaz in fiction and in the first class cars at that. When the train passed from Italy to Yugoslavia, penetrating the Iron Curtain at Trieste, I noticed the air began to smell like Turkish tobacco. I'd been smoking American cigarettes made of Virginia tobacco. The Turkish tobacco smell was in the air all the way to Athens where it continued. I had no idea at the time why it happened to be that way or any notion of finding out why. The Ottoman Empire extended westward into southeastern Europe as far as Trieste. It was a Turkish empire. They used Turkish tobacco. When the empire faded, the taste for Turkish tobacco remained. More than fifty years after the empire's demise I was able to smell its air, just one part of its spirit that lives on in the customs and traditions of people in that region.

I happened to pass through in the time of their occupation by the Russian empire when the signs with names of villages were written in both Yugoslav and Russian. By some kind of miracle I was able to find the last bunk in the car to sleep on that first night in the great unknown behind the Iron Curtain. Mine was the top bunk of three either side of the window, like in European movies. I shared the room of six bunks with five Yugoslav businessmen or bureaucrats, members of the ‘Party' I figured — they wore suits and had passports. They talked politics. ‘President Nixon' took some jabs and 'Brezhnev' was spoken with respect. Those were the only words I understood. I wasn't so carried away with Nixon myself, but it meant nothing there. I was an American, a token of all that they believed about Americans. I experienced what black people live with all their lives in America. There was no way I could say, "Hey, I don't like him either. "They'd just shrug their shoulders, don't understand.

They were not unfriendly, it was just that none of them knew any English and I didn't know any Yugoslav. I had not eaten anything for well over a day and traded with one of them a cheap English cigar, Virginia tobacco, for an orange. When the two customs officers appeared in the doorway in their green greatcoats to the floor and red star pin on the green hat, the men jumped to their feet and stood at attention. Luggage inspection time. It was just before Christmas and they were returning from shopping in Trieste. One of them had crystal and was given a bill for so much duty he broke down into tears and begged to no avail. It was weird for me to see that happening. The man I gave the cigar to handed it to the customs officer doing the talking and his suitcase was not searched. Extraordinary, I thought, I actually witnessed that. Then it was my turn and I was out of cigars.

There I was on the top bunk, it not three feet from the ceiling, fumbling to get my luggage out of the luggage cubby-hole I'd just wedged it into. The customs man might have taken me for an innocent by observing how I opened the luggage. He told me it was fine, I could close it back up, in sign language. I was seeing myself with Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Siberia writing about the Gulag on toilet paper. He wanted my visa. Didn't have a visa. Just passing through. They told me at American Express in London I would not need a visa to ride the train through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria on the way to Greece. I couldn't say any of that. He took my passport and was gone for a long time. While he was gone I wondered what it must be like in a Yugoslav prison for an American. Something not to my liking I was certain. He brought the passport back and it was OK for me to proceed as planned.

It's uncertain moments like this and some others, like thinking the train went off without me in Milan, that come to mind every time I hear or see the words Orient Express. By this time in my life I'd rather read about those places than go there.

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