Table of Contents
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
Map
1 - The Great Railway Bazaar
The Mysterious Mister Duffill
Looking out the Window at Yugoslavia
Dusk in Central Turkey
Sadik
Peshawar
The Village in the Railway Station
Mr. Bhardwaj on the Railcar to Simla
In Jaipur with Mr. Gopal
The Grand Trunk Express to the Real India
“I Find You English Girl”—Madras
Mr. Wong the Tooth Mechanic
Mr. Chatterjee’s Calcutta
The Hopping Man
Memories of the Raj—Mr. Bernard in Burma
Gokteik Viaduct
The Hué—Danang Passenger Train, Vietnam 1973
The Trans-Siberian Express
2 - The Old Patagonian Express
Travel Is a Vanishing Act
On the Frontier
Lost Lover in Veracruz
Magic Names
Earthquakes in Guatemala
The Pretty Town of Santa Ana
Soccer in San Salvador
Holy Mass in San Vicente
To Limón with Mr. Thornberry
In the Zone
Shadowing an Indian
High Plains Drifter
Buenos Aires
Borges
In Patagonia
3 - The Kingdom by the Sea
English Traits
Rambler
Falklands News
John Bratby
Shallys
Bognor
Sad Captain
(1) B & B: Victory Guest House
(2) B & B: The Puttocks
(3) B & B: The Bull
(4) B & B: Allerford
Holiday Camp
Happy Little Llanelli
Tenby
Naked Lady
Jan Morris
Railway Buff
Llandudno
Looking Seaward
Insulted England
Mrs. Wheeney, Landlady
Belfast
Giant’s Causeway
The Future in Enniskillen
Mooney’s Hotel
Cape Wrath
Royal Visit
Trippers
Typical
4 - Riding the Iron Rooster
Belles du Jour
Mongols
Chinese Inventions
Public Bathhouse
Shanghai
The Red Guards and the Violinist
Performing Animals
The Edge of the World
Lost Cities
Fear of Flying
Handmade Landscape
The Terra-cotta Warriors
Endangered Species Banquet
Shaoshan: “Where the Sun Rises”
The Great Wall
Mr. Tian
Cherry Blossom
Driving to Tibet
Lhasa
5 - Down the Yangtze
Trackers
The Yangtze Gorges
6 - Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Edge of the Great Rift
Curfew
Rats in Rangoon
Writing in the Tropics
Natives and Expatriates
His Highness
The Hotel in No-Man’s-Land
The Pathan Camp
Dingle
Nudists in Corsica
New York Subway
Rowing Around the Cape
“AN UNFORGETTABLE TOUR OF THE WORLD WITH THEROUX …
[His] powers of description and knack at turning a phrase are arresting.… Wonderful.”
—The Flint Journal
“A unique view of our global village as experienced through a unique writer’s eyes and ears … Like a modern Ulysses … His writings are proof that getting there may be most of the fun.”
—Houston Chronicle
“An enticing selection of travel writings by one of the premier travel writers in the English language … Theroux has the ability of penetrating to the heart of wherever he journeys.… [He’s] a top-notch travel writer.”
—Magill Book Reviews
“Scintillating … Theroux will never tell you about the best hotel in town because, chances are, he’s never stayed there. He has, however, stayed in working class residences here and there, absorbing local color, prevailing attitudes and prejudices of the inhabitants. TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH offers selections from some truly unique, exotic travel adventures.… [It’s] a super book, a collection of journeys to some strange places, described by a fine writer who couldn’t write a dull, trite line if he tried. Extremely well done.”
—Coast Book Review Service
By Paul Theroux:
Fiction:
WALDO
FONG AND THE INDIANS
GIRLS AT PLAY
JUNGLE LOVERS
SINNING WITH ANNIE and Other Stories
SAINT JACK
THE BLACK HOUSE
THE FAMILY ARSENAL
THE CONSUL’S FILE
A CHRISTMAS CARD
PICTURE PALACE
LONDON SNOW
WORLD’S END
THE MOSQUITO COAST
THE LONDON EMBASSY
HALF MOON STREET
O-ZONE
MY SECRET HISTORY
CHICAGO LOOP
MILLROY THE MAGICIAN
MY OTHER LIFE
KOWLOON TONG
HOTEL HONOLULU
STRANGER AT THE PALAZZO D’ORO
BLINDING LIGHT
THE ELEPHANTA SUITE
A DEAD HAND
Criticism:
V.S. NAIPAUL
Nonfiction:
THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR
THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS
THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA
SAILING THROUGH CHINA
SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS
THE IMPERIAL WAY
RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER: By Train Through China
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA
SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW
FRESH AIR FIEND
NURSE WOLF AND DR. SACKS
DARK STAR SAFARI
GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR
Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.
An Ivy Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1990, 1991 by Paul Theroux
Photographs copyright © 1991 by Carin Riley
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ivy Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
This work was originally published in different form in Great Britain as Traveling the World by Sinclair-Stevenson Limited, London, in 1990. Portions of this work were previously published separately in The Great Railway Bazaar, Sunrise with Seamonsters, The Old Patagonian Express, The Kingdom by the Sea, and Riding the Iron Rooster.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING AND CAREERS—BMG MUSIC PUBLISHING, INC.: Excerpt from “Oh, Carol” by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield. Copyright © 1959, 1960 by Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc. Copyright renewed 1987, 1988 by Screen Gems—EMI Music, Inc./Careers—BMG Music Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC., AND FABER AND FABER, LIMITED: Excerpt from “East Coker” from Four Quarters by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights throughout the world excluding the United States are controlled by Faber and Faber Limited. Reprinted by permission.
Ivy Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-79027-9
v3.1
To Anne Theroux,
who made it possible for me
to go on these journeys.
“My father was full of Sayings,” the Hawaiian said. “He told me once, ‘Kaniela, remember this. No matter where you go, that’s where you are.’ ”
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Map
1 The Great Railway Bazaar
The Mysterious Mister Duffill
Looking out the Window at Yugoslavia
Dusk in Central Turkey
Sadik
Peshawar
The Village in the Railway Station
Mr. Bhardwaj on the Railcar to Simla
In Jaipur with Mr. Gopal
The Grand Trunk Express to the Real India
“I Find You English Girl”—Madras
Mr. Wong the Tooth Mechanic
Mr. Chatterjee’s Calcutta
The Hopping Man
Memories of the Raj—Mr. Bernard in Burma
Gokteik Viaduct
The Hué—Danang Passenger Train, Vietnam 1973
The Trans-Siberian Express
2 The Old Patagonian Express
Travel Is a Vanishing Act
On the Frontier
Lost Lover in Veracruz
Magic Names
Earthquakes in Guatemala
The Pretty Town of Santa Ana
Soccer in San Salvador
Holy Mass in San Vicente
To Limón with Mr. Thornberry
In the Zone
Shadowing an Indian
High Plains Drifter
Buenos Aires
Borges
In Patagonia
3 The Kingdom by the Sea
English Traits
Rambler
Falklands News
John Bratby
Shallys
Bognor
Sad Captain
(1) B & B: Victory Guest House
(2) B & B: The Puttocks
(3) B & B: The Bull
(4) B & B: Allerford
Holiday Camp
Happy Little Llanelli
Tenby
Naked Lady
Jan Morris
Railway Buff
Llandudno
Looking Seaward
Insulted England
Mrs. Wheeney, Landlady
Belfast
Giant’s Causeway
The Future in Enniskillen
Mooney’s Hotel
Cape Wrath
Royal Visit
Trippers
Typical
4 Riding the Iron Rooster
Belles du Jour
Mongols
Chinese Inventions
Public Bathhouse
Shanghai
The Red Guards and the Violinist
Performing Animals
The Edge of the World
Lost Cities
Fear of Flying
Handmade Landscape
The Terra-cotta Warriors
Endangered Species Banquet
Shaoshan: “Where the Sun Rises”
The Great Wall
Mr. Tian
Cherry Blossom
Driving to Tibet
Lhasa
5 Down the Yangtze
Trackers
The Yangtze Gorges
6 Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Edge of the Great Rift
Curfew
Rats in Rangoon
Writing in the Tropics
Natives and Expatriates
His Highness
The Hotel in No-Man’s-Land
The Pathan Camp
Dingle
Nudists in Corsica
New York Subway
Rowing Around the Cape
Introduction
I HAD BEEN TRAVELING FOR MORE THAN TEN YEARS—IN EUROPE, Asia, and Africa—and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book. I had always somewhat disliked travel books: they seemed self-indulgent, unfunny, and rather selective. I had the idea that the travel writer left a great deal out of his or her book and put all the wrong things in. I hated sight-seeing, and yet that was what constituted much of the travel writer’s material: the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, the paintings here, the mosaics there. In an age of mass tourism, everyone set off to see the same things, and that was what travel writing seemed to be about. I am speaking of the 1960s and early 1970s.
The travel book was a bore. A bore wrote it and a bore read it—I could just imagine the sort of finger-wetting spud in carpet slippers who used his library card as bookmark, and called himself an armchair traveler. As for the writer, it annoyed me that a traveler would suppress his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at a taxi driver, or was picked up by a plausible local, or slept until noon. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance—buses breaking down and hotel clerks being rude and market traders being rapacious. The truth of travel was unexpected and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.
Now and then one would find this reality in a book—Evelyn Waugh being mistaken for his brother Alec in Labels, or the good intentions and bad temper in parts of Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, a superbly structured book, deeply personal and imaginative and informative, but wayward, too. I saw it in the humor and the dialogue in Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main.
An unlikely source, Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, vividly illustrates this sort of travel writing. One of the characters says, “A writer for instance talks about India which I have seen, and gushes about dancing girls, tiger hunts, fakirs, betel nuts, serpents: the Glamour of the Mysterious East. But what does it amount to? Nothing. Instead of visualizing India I merely get a bad toothache from all these Eastern delights. Now, there’s the other way, as for instance, the fellow who writes: ‘Before turning in, I put out my wet boots to dry and in the morning I found that a thick blue forest had grown on them (“Fungi, Madam,” he explained) …’ and at once India becomes alive for me. The rest is shop.”
When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.
The trip—the itinerary—was another essential; and so many travel books I read had grown out of a traveler’s chasing around a city or a little country—Discovering Portugal, that kind of thing. It was not travel at all, but rather a form of extended residence that I knew well from having myself lived in Malawi and Uganda and Singapore and England. I had come to rest in those places, I was working, I had a local driver’s license, I went shopping every Saturday. It had never occurred to me to write a travel book about any of it. Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting it. And I felt that television had put the sightseers out of business.
Choosing the right itinerary—the best route, the correct mode of travel—was the surest way, I felt, of gaining experience. It had to be total immersion, a long deliberate trip through the hinterland rather than flying from one big city to another, which didn’t seem to me to be travel at all. The travel books I liked were oddities—not simply Trollope and Naipaul but Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (America, coast to coast, by car), or Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (a lecture tour around the world). I wanted my book to be a series of long train journeys, but where to?
All this speculation took place in the autumn of 1972, when I was teaching for a semester at the University of Virginia. I was working on a novel, The Black House, and awaiting the publication of Saint Jack. In those days I began a new book as soon as I finished the one I was working on. My wife, Anne, was in London with our two children, and she was working—indeed, earning a good living—but I still felt I was the breadwinner and that I was not earning enough. My British advance for Saint Jack came to about $500, and I assumed I would not get much more for The Black House. I kept thinking to myself, Now what?
Money is rather a clumsy subject, but it was a crucial factor in my decision to write my first travel book—simply, I needed the money. And when I mentioned the possibility of such a book to my American editor, she was delighted. She said, “We’ll give you an advance for it.” I had never before received an advance at this stage. Normally, I wrote a book and submitted it and then was paid; I had never asked for, nor been given, money or a contract on an unwritten book.
It is often the case that only when someone asks you very specific questions do you begin to think clearly about your intentions. In my mind this travel book had something to do with trains, but I had no idea where I wanted to go—only that it should be a long trip. I saw a thick book with lots of people in it and lots of dialogue and no sightseeing. But my editor’s questioning made me think hard about it, and I thought, Trains Through Asia. I was determined to start in London, and to take the Orient Express, and when I looked at this route, I saw that I could continue through Turkey, into Iran, and after a short bus ride in Baluchistan, I could catch a train in Zahedan, go into Pakistan, and more or less chug through Asia.
My original idea had been to go to Vietnam, take the train to Hanoi, and then continue through China, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union. Much of this, on closer examination, proved impractical or impossible. The man at the Chinese Embassy in 1972 abruptly hung up on me when I said I wanted a visa to take trains through China. I had to wait fourteen years before I was able to take the trip I described in Riding the Iron Rooster. Then I discovered there was a war in progress in Baluchistan. I rerouted myself through Afghanistan. I decided to include Japan and the whole of the Trans-Siberian. I didn’t mind where I went as long as it was in Asia and had a railway system and visas were available. I saw myself puffing along, changing countries by changing trains.
Meanwhile, I was finishing my novel The Black House. It was set in rural England and it was rather ghostly and solemn. I wanted my next to be a sunny book. I had just about decided on my travel itinerary when I delivered my novel to my British publisher. He suggested we have lunch. Almost before we had started eating he told me how much he disliked The Black House. “It will hurt your reputation” was how he put it. “But I want to publish your travel book.” I had told him that I had signed a contract for this with my American publisher. I said that if he brought out my novel he could have the travel book. “If you twist my arm I’ll publish your novel,” he said. That did it. It made me want to leave him immediately.
For dropping me from his list—after all, what was I costing him?—he became rather a laughingstock. But that was later. I think of the circumstances surrounding my first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, rather than the trip itself. I hated leaving my family behind in London, I had never taken such a deliberate trip before, I felt encumbered by an advance on royalties, modest though it was; and my writer friends, stick-in-the-mud English writers, generally mocked my idea. I never got around to worrying about the trip itself, though I was beset by an obscure ache that was both mental and physical—the lingering anxiety that I was doomed: I was going to die on this trip.
I had always had the idea and still do that my particular exit would be made via an appointment in Samarra: I would go a great distance and endure enormous discomfort and expense in order to meet my death. If I chose to sit at home and eat and drink in the bosom of my family, it would never happen—I’d live to be a hundred. But of course I would head for the hinterland, and pretty soon there would be some corner of a foreign field that would be forever Medford, Mass. And I imagined my death would be a silly mistake, like that of the monk and mystic Thomas Merton, who at last left his monastery in Kentucky after twenty-five secure years, and popped up in Singapore (while I was there), and accidentally electrocuted himself on the frayed wires of a fan in Bangkok a week later. All that way, all that trouble, just to yank a faulty light switch in a crummy hotel!
I left London on September 19, 1973. It was a gray day. I had a cold. My wife waved me good-bye. Almost immediately I felt I had made an absurd decision. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was doing. I became very gloomy. To cheer myself up and give myself the illusion that this was real work I began to take voluminous notes. Every day, from the time I left until the moment I arrived back in England four months later, I wrote down everything I saw and heard, filling one notebook after another. I recorded conversations, descriptions of people and places, details of trains, interesting trivia, even criticism of the novels I happened to be reading. I still have some of those paperbacks—Joyce’s Exiles, Chekhov’s stories, Endo’s Silence, and others—and on the blank back pages are scribbled small insectile notes, which I amplified when I transferred them to my large notebooks. I always wrote in the past tense.
The trip recorded in The Great Railway Bazaar was the trip I took, and the manner of my journey and my way of writing about it became my method in all my future travel books. I changed the names of some people I wished to protect, but many of the names I left as was. My problem in writing the book was finding a form for it—a structure. In the end I simply hung it on a series of train journeys. I had never read a book quite like the one I was writing. This worried me, as well as making me hopeful. The writing of the book took the same amount of time as the trip itself, four months.
That was more than seventeen years ago. The book is still in print and still sells well. Some people think it is the only book I have ever written (which annoys me) or is my best (which is equally untrue). I think the writing in The Old Patagonian Express is more fluent, The Kingdom by the Sea funnier and more knowledgeable, and Riding the Iron Rooster more prescient. For example, in The Great Railway Bazaar, my train passed through Nis in Yugoslavia. I mentioned this but I never bothered to discover anything about Nis. I have just located a copy of The Blue Guide to Yugoslavia and found that it was the birthplace of Emperor Constantine. Reading on, I came to the sentence “Though not a pleasant place in itself, Nis has several interesting monuments” and I realized, perhaps, why I did not linger in Nis.
It has been a satisfaction to me that my Railway Bazaar (I got the title from a street name in Kanpur, India) and the rest of my travel books have fared well. I did not realize when I wrote my first one that every trip is unique. My travel book is about my trip, not yours or anyone else’s. Even if someone had come with me and written a book about the trip, it would have been a different book. This is true of life in general. It bothers me, as it bothers the Borges character Ireneo Funes, “that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).”
Another thing I did not know was that every trip has a historical dimension. Not long after I traveled through those countries there were political changes. (It seems to happen every time.) The shah was deposed and Iran became very dangerous for the traveler. Afghanistan went to war with itself. India and Pakistan restored their rail link. Laos shut its borders to foreigners and exiled its royalty. Vietnam fixed its railway, so that now it is possible to travel by train from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to Hanoi. Many of the individual trains were taken out of service, most notably the Orient Express. The train that plies from London to Venice under that name is for rich, idle people who have selfish, sumptuous fantasies about travel that bear no relation to the real thing. However awful my old Orient Express was, at least I can say that all sorts of people took it—rich and poor, old and young, rattling back and forth between East and West. It was cheap and friendly, and like all great trains, it was like the world on wheels.
Attempting to write my travel experiences for the first time, I was groping in the dark—although I was careful to disguise the fact. I am told that I often seem self-assured in my travel writing, but that is usually my way of whistling to keep my spirits up. I know that I have hijacked a venerable form, the travel book about a grand tour, and am steering it my own way, to suit myself, and my peculiar trip and temperament. Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different from writing a novel: fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act—like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence. When I finished a novel I never knew whether I would be able to write another one. But I knew, when I finished my first travel book, that I would be able to do it again.
Someday I hope to complete a shelf of travel books, which, between bookends, will encompass the world. In the meantime, this selection, drawn from six of my books, can stand as a set of traveler’s tales.
—Paul Theroux
East Sandwich
May 1991
The Great
Railway Bazaar
The Mysterious
Mister Duffill
I REMEMBER MISTER DUFFILL BECAUSE HIS NAME LATER BECAME a verb—Molesworth’s, then mine. He was just ahead of me in the line at Platform 7 at Victoria, “Continental Departures.” He was old and his clothes were far too big for him, so he might have left in a hurry and grabbed the wrong clothes, or perhaps he’d just come out of the hospital. He walked treading his trouser cuffs to rags and carried many oddly shaped parcels wrapped in string and brown paper—more the luggage of an incautiously busy bomber than of an intrepid traveler. The tags were fluttering in the draft from the track, and each gave his name as R. Duffill and his address as Splendid Palas Hotel, Istanbul. We would be traveling together. A satirical widow in a severe veil might have been more welcome, and if her satchel was full of gin and an inheritance, so much the better. But there was no widow; there were hikers, returning Continentals with Harrods shopping bags, salesmen, French girls with sour friends, and gray-haired English couples who appeared to be embarking, with armloads of novels, on expensive literary adulteries. None would get farther than Ljubljana. Duffill was for Istanbul—I wondered what his excuse was. I was doing a bunk, myself. I hadn’t nailed my colors to the mast; I had no job—no one would notice me falling silent, kissing my wife, and boarding the 15:30 alone.
The train was rumbling through Clapham. I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts, but by the time we had left the brick terraces and coal yards and the narrow back gardens of the South London suburbs and were passing Dulwich College’s playing fields—children lazily exercising in neckties—I was tuned to the motion of the train and had forgotten the newspaper billboards I had been reading all morning: BABY KRISTEN: WOMAN TO BE CHARGED and PLAN TO FREE STAB GIRL AGED NINE—none lettered NOVELIST VANISHES, and just as well. Then, past a row of semidetached houses, we entered a tunnel, and after traveling a minute in complete darkness we were shot wonderfully into a new setting, open meadows, cows cropping grass, farmers haying in blue jackets. We had surfaced from London, a gray sodden city that lay underground. At Sevenoaks there was another tunnel, another glimpse of the pastoral, fields of pawing horses, some kneeling sheep, crows on an oasthouse, and a swift sight of a settlement of prefab houses out one window. Out the other window, a Jacobean farmhouse and more cows. That is England: The suburbs overlap the farms. At several level crossings the country lanes were choked with cars, backed up for a hundred yards. The train passengers were gloating vindictively at the traffic and seemed to be murmuring, “Stop, you bitches!”
The sky was old. Schoolboys in dark blue blazers, carrying cricket bats and schoolbags, their socks falling down, were smirking on the platform at Tonbridge. We raced by them, taking their smirks away. We didn’t stop, not even at the larger stations. These I contemplated from the dining car over a sloshing carton of tea, while Mr. Duffill, similarly hunched, kept an eye on his parcels and stirred his tea with a doctor’s tongue depressor. He had that uneasy look of a man who has left his parcels elsewhere, which is also the look of a man who thinks he’s being followed. His oversized clothes made him seem frail. A mouse-gray gabardine coat slumped in folds from his shoulders, the cuffs so long they reached to his fingertips and answered the length of his trampled trousers. He smelled of bread crusts. He still wore his tweed cap, and like me was fighting a cold. His shoes were interesting, the all-purpose brogans country people wear. Although I could not place his accent—he was asking the barman for cider—there was something else of the provinces about him, a stubborn frugality in his serviceable clothes, which is shabbiness in a Londoner’s. He could tell you where he bought that cap and coat, and for how much, and how long those shoes had lasted. A few minutes later I passed by him in a corner of the lounge and saw that he had opened one of his parcels. A knife, a length of French bread, a tube of mustard, and disks of bright red salami were spread before him. Lost in thought, he slowly chewed his sandwich.
At the Gare du Nord my car was shunted onto a different engine. Duffill and I watched this being done from the platform and then we boarded. It took him a long time to heave himself up, and he panted with effort on the landing. He was still standing there, gasping, as we pulled out of the station for our twenty-minute trip to the Gare de Lyon to meet the rest of the Direct-Orient Express. It was after eleven, and most of the apartment blocks were in darkness. Duffill, on boarding the Direct-Orient Express, had put on a pair of glasses, wire-framed and with enough Scotch tape on the lenses to prevent his seeing the Blue Mosque. He assembled his parcels and, grunting, produced a suitcase, bound with a selection of leather and canvas belts as an added guarantee against its bursting open. A few cars down we met again to read the sign on the side of the wagon-lit: DIRECT-ORIENT and its itinerary, PARIS-LAUSANNE-MILANO-TRIESTE-ZAGREB-BEOGRAD-SOFIYA-ISTANBUL. We stood there, staring at this sign; Duffill worked his glasses like binoculars. Finally he said, “I took this train in 1929.”
It seemed to call for a reply, but by the time a reply occurred to me (“Judging from its condition, it was probably this very train!”) Duffill had gathered up his parcels and his strapped suitcase and moved down the platform. It was a great train in 1929, and it goes without saying that the Orient Express is the most famous train in the world. Like the Trans-Siberian it links Europe with Asia, which accounts for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself (“As I couldn’t take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was buy a record of Honegger’s Pacific 231,” Greene writes in the introduction to Stamboul Train). The fictional source of the romance is La Madone des Sleepings (1925) by Maurice Dekobra. Dekobra’s heroine, Lady Diana (“the type of woman who would have brought tears to the eyes of John Ruskin”), is completely sold on the Orient Express: “I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may step off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the color of the eyes of my neighbor in the compartment.”
My compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. I swung my suitcase in and, when I had done this, there was no room for me. The conductor showed me how to kick my suitcase under the lower berth. He hesitated, hoping to be tipped.
“Anybody else in here?” It had not occurred to me that I would have company; the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.
The conductor shrugged, perhaps yes, perhaps no. His vagueness made me withhold my tip. I took a stroll down the car: a Japanese couple in a double couchette—it was the first and last time I saw them; an elderly American couple next to them; a fat French mother breathing suspicion on her lovely daughter; a Belgian girl of extraordinary size—well over six feet tall, wearing enormous shoes—traveling with a chic French woman; and (the door was shutting) either a nun or a plump diabolist. At the far end of the car a man wearing a turtleneck, a seaman’s cap, and a monocle was setting up bottles on the windowsill: three wine bottles, Perrier water, a broad-shouldered bottle of gin—he was obviously going some distance.
Duffill was standing outside my compartment. He was out of breath; he had had trouble finding the right car, he said, because his French was rusty. He took a deep breath and slid off his gabardine coat and hung that and his cap on the hook next to mine.
“I’m up here,” he said, patting the upper berth. He was a small man, but I noticed that as soon as he stepped into the compartment he filled it.
“How far are you going?” I asked gamely, and even though I knew his reply, when I heard it I cringed. I had planned on studying him from a little distance; I was counting on having the compartment to myself. This was unwelcome news. He saw I was taking it badly.
He said, “I won’t get in your way.” His parcels were on the floor. “I just have to find a home for these.”
A half hour later I returned to my compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a gray corpse-like look, and his pajamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn’t sleep at first; my cold and all that I’d drunk—the fatigue itself—kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.
Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.
IN THE MORNING DUFFILL WAS GONE. I LAY IN BED AND worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I traveled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.
At Vevey I restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He’d be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn’t say what he’d be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much older than he had in the grayness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.
He looked out at the Alps and said, “They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they’d be rather flatter.”
Duffill ate the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.
“Try the lights,” he said. “I can’t eat in the dark. I can’t taste it.”
I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.
Duffill said, “Maybe they’re trying to save electricity.”
His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels’ drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill’s woolens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sinkhole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.
Duffill said, “This must be the Simplon.”
I said, “I wish they’d turn the lights on.”
I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.
I said, “What do you aim to do in Turkey?”
“Me?” Duffill said, as if the compartment was crammed with old men bound for Turkey, each waiting to state a reason. He paused, then said, “I’ll be in Istanbul for a while. After that I’ll be traveling around the country.”
“Business or pleasure?” I was dying to know and in the confessional darkness did not feel so bad about badgering him; he could not see the eagerness on my face. On the other hand, I could hear the tremulous hesitation in his replies.
“A little of both,” he said.
This was not helpful. I waited for him to say more, but when he added nothing further, I said, “What exactly do you do, Mr. Duffill?”
“Me?” he said again, but before I could reply with the sarcasm he was pleading for, the train left the tunnel and the compartment filled with sunlight and Duffill said, “This must be Italy.”
Duffill put on his tweed cap. He saw me staring at it and said, “I’ve had this cap for years—eleven years. You dry-clean it. Bought it in Barrow-on-Humber.” And he dug out his parcel of salami and resumed the meal the Simplon tunnel had interrupted.
At nine thirty-five we stopped at the Italian station of Domodossola, where a man poured cups of coffee from a jug and sold food from a heavily laden pushcart. He had fruit, loaves of bread and rolls, various kinds of salami, and lunch bags that, he said, contained, “tante belle cose.” He also had a stock of wine. An Englishman, introducing himself as Molesworth, bought a Bardolino and (“just in case”) three bottles of Chianti; I bought an Orvieto and a Chianti; and Duffill had his hand on a bottle of claret.
Molesworth said, “I’ll take these back to my compartment. Get me a lunch bag, will you?”
I bought two lunch bags and some apples.
Duffill said, “English money, I only have English money.”
The Italian snatched a pound from the old man and gave him change in lire.
Molesworth came back and said, “Those apples want washing. There’s cholera here.” He looked again at the pushcart and said, “I think two lunch bags, just to be safe.”
While Molesworth bought more food and another bottle of Bardolino, Duffill said, “I took this train in 1929.”
“It was worth taking then,” said Molesworth. “Yes, she used to be quite a train.”
“How long are we staying here?” I asked.
No one knew. Molesworth called out to the train guard, “I say, George, how long are we stopping for?”
The guard shrugged, and as he did so the train began to back up.
“Do you think we should board?” I asked.
“It’s going backward,” said Molesworth. “I expect they’re shunting.”
The train guard said, “Andiamo.”
“The Italians love wearing uniforms,” said Molesworth. “Look at him, will you? And the uniforms are always so wretched. They really are like overgrown schoolboys. Are you talking to us, George?”
“I think he wants us to board,” I said. The train stopped going backward. I hopped aboard and looked down. Moles worth and Duffill were at the bottom of the stairs.
“You’ve got parcels,” said Duffill. “You go first.”
“I’m quite all right,” said Molesworth. “Up you go.”
“But you’ve got parcels,” said Duffill. He produced a pipe from his coat and began sucking on the stem. “Carry on.” He moved back and gave Molesworth room.
Molesworth said, “Are you sure?”
Duffill said, “I didn’t go all the way, then, in 1929. I didn’t do that until after the second war.” He put his pipe in his mouth and smiled.
Molesworth stepped aboard and climbed up—slowly, because he was carrying a bottle of wine and his second lunch bag. Duffill grasped the rails beside the door and as he did so the train began to move and he let go. He dropped his arms. Two train guards rushed behind him and held his arms and hustled him along the platform to the moving stairs of Car 99. Duffill, feeling the Italians’ hands, resisted the embrace, went feeble, and stepped back; he made a half-turn to smile wanly at the fugitive door. He looked a hundred years old. The train was moving swiftly past his face.
I never saw Mr. Duffill again. When we were buying more food on the platform at Milan, Molesworth said, “We’d better get aboard. I don’t want to be duffilled.” I left his suitcase and his paper bags at Venice with a note, and I wondered whether he caught up with them and continued to Istanbul.
One of the few things Mr. Duffill had told me was that he lived in Barrow-on-Humber, in Lincolnshire.
It was a tiny place—a church, a narrow High Street, a manor house, and a few shops. It had an air of rural monotony that was like the drone of a bee as it bumbled slowly from flower to flower. No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.
I walked down the street and saw a man.
“Excuse me, do you know a Mr. Duffill?”
He nodded. “The corner shop.”
The corner shop had a small sign that said DUFFILL’S HARDWARE. But it was locked. A square of cardboard in the window was lettered GONE ON HOLIDAY. I said out loud, “Goddamn it.”
A lady was passing. She saw that I was exasperated. She wondered if I needed directions. I said I was looking for Mr. Duffill.
“He won’t be back for another week,” she said.
“Where has he gone this time?” I asked. “Not Istanbul, I hope.”
She said, “Are you looking for Richard Duffill?”
“Yes,” I said.
Her hand went to her face, and I knew before she spoke that he was dead.
“HIS NAME WAS RICHARD CUTHBERT DUFFILL. HE WAS A most unusual man,” said his sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Duffill. She lived at Glyndbourne, a bungalow just beyond the churchyard. She did not ask who I was. It seemed only natural to her that someone should be inquiring about the life of this strange man, who had died two years before, at the age of seventy-nine. He had been as old as the century—seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. Mrs. Jack said, “Do you know about his adventurous life?”
I said, “I don’t know anything about him.” All I knew was his name and his village.
“He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard’s father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. Those were the days of servants. The Hall was the manor—Mr. Uppleby was the Lord of the Manor—and of course the Duffills were servants, and rather poor.…”
But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at math, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian, and Spanish while still a teenager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when Richard was twelve his father died. Mr. Uppleby took an interest, but the young boy usually just stayed inside and read and did his lessons, or else he went for long solitary walks.
His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with Howson and dragged him to shore, saving the boy’s life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline A PLUCKY BARROW BOY.
For this, Duffill, a Boy Scout, was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honor had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterward, the Carnegie Heroes’ Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch “for gallantry,” and gave him a sum of money “to help him in his education and future career.”
In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebiscite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One—sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klagenfurt (Austria) and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia—now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving—fleeing, some people said—for England.
Politically, he was of the left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. (“One felt he would have made the ideal agent,” an old friend of Duffill’s told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly, it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents or wolves from the Sturm Abteilung. He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany (“an exceedingly clever and daring feat,” another friend told me. “His fortune was considerable.”).
He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, reemerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company. Two years later, a letter of reference said that Duffill was “thoroughly acquainted with various sides of the film trade.” In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly—but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, “Richard never discussed his working life or his world traveling with us.”
In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and traveled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, “for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration.”
After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser—waistcoat, plus fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stickpin. A characteristic of natty dressers is that they wear too many clothes. Duffill’s snapshots showed this; and he always wore a hat.
He wore a rug-like wig, I was told. “It stuck out in the back.” He had had brain surgery. “He once played tennis in Cairo.” He had gone on socialist holidays to Eastern Europe. He hated Hitler. He was very “spiritual,” one of his old friends said. He became interested in the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and was a close friend of the great Gurdjieff scholar John Godolphin Bennett. “And after a while Richard got frightfully steamed up about dervishes,” Bennett’s widow told me. That was why Duffill was on his way to Istanbul, she said—to renew his acquaintance with some whirling dervishes!
But what I wanted to know was what had happened to him after the Orient Express pulled out of Domodossola.
Mrs. Jack said, “He got out at a station. He didn’t tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He had inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time—five o’clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant P.M. and they actually meant A.M.—five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to—where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage”—the paper bags I had left with the controllore—“and eventually got to Istanbul.”
So he had made it!
I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.
She said, “Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor’s son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, ‘I think you should see this—I think this is our Mr. Duffill.’ And then everyone in Barrow read it.”
I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.
“I wanted him to see it,” Mrs. Jack said. “I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn’t too good. He didn’t see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—”
Thank God for that, I thought.
What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been—brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected—that he had almost certainly been a spy.
Looking out the Window at Yugoslavia
THERE WERE WOMEN, BUT THEY WERE OLD, SHAWLED against the sun and yoked to green watering cans in trampled cornfields. The landscape was low and uneven, barely supporting in its dust a few farm animals, maybe five motionless cows, and a herdsman leaning on a stick watching them starve in the same way the scarecrows—two plastic bags on a bony crosspiece—watched the devastated fields of cabbages and peppers. And beyond the rows of blue cabbage, a pink pig butted the splintery fence of his small pen and a cow lay under goalposts of saplings in an unused football field. Red peppers, as crimson and pointed as clusters of poinsettias, dried in the sun outside farm cottages in districts where farming consisted of men stumbling after oxen dragging wooden plows and harrows, or occasionally wobbling on bicycles loaded with hay bales. Herdsmen were not simply herdsmen; they were sentries, guarding little flocks from marauders: four cows watched by a woman, three gray pigs driven by a man with a truncheon, scrawny chickens watched by scrawny children. “In Yugoslavia we have three things,” I was told, “freedom, women, and drinking.” A woman in a field tipped a water bottle to her mouth; she swallowed and bent from the waist to continue tying up cornstalks. Large ocher squashes sat plumply in fields of withering vines; people priming pumps and swinging buckets out of wells on long poles; tall narrow haystocks, and pepper fields in so many stages of ripeness I first took them for flower gardens. It is a feeling of utter quietness, deep rural isolation the train briefly penetrates. It goes on without a change for hours, this afternoon in Yugoslavia, and then all people disappear and the effect is eerie: roads without cars or bicycles, cottages with empty windows at the fringes of empty fields, trees heavy with apples and no one picking them. Perhaps it’s the wrong time—three-thirty; perhaps it’s too hot. But where are the people who stacked that hay and set those peppers so carefully to dry? The train passes on—that’s the beauty of a train, this heedless movement—but it passes on to more of the same. Six neat beehives, a derelict steam engine with wildflowers garlanding its smokestack, a stalled ox at a level crossing. In the heat haze of the afternoon my compartment grows dusty, and down at the front of the train Turks lie all over their seats, sleeping with their mouths open and children wakeful on their stomachs. At each river and bridge there were square brick emplacements, like Croatian copies of Martello towers, pocked by bombs. Then I saw a man, headless, bent over in a field, camouflaged by cornstalks that were taller than he; I wondered if I had missed all the others because they were made so tiny by their crops.
There was a drama outside Nis. At a road near the track a crowd of people fought to look at a horse, still in its traces and hitched to an overloaded wagon, lying dead on its side in a mud puddle in which the wagon was obviously stuck. I imagined its heart had burst when it tried to free the wagon. And it had just happened: children were calling to their friends, a man was dropping his bike and running back for a look, and farther along a man pissing against a fence was straining to see the horse. The scene was composed like a Flemish painting in which the pissing man was a vivid detail. The train, the window frame holding the scene for moments, made it a picture. The man at the fence flicks the last droplets from his penis and, tucking it in his baggy pants, begins to sprint; the picture is complete.
“I HATE SIGHT-SEEING,” SAID MOLESWORTH. WE WERE AT THE corridor window and I had just been reprimanded by a Yugoslav policeman for snapping a picture of a steam locomotive that, in the late afternoon sun and the whirling dust the thousands of homeward-bound commuters had raised crossing the railway lines, stood amidst a magnificent exhalation of blue vapors mingling with clouds of gold gnats. Now we were in a rocky gorge outside Nis, on the way to Dimitrovgrad, the cliffs rising as we moved and holding occasional symmetries, like remainders of intelligent brickwork in the battlements of a ruined castle. The sight of this seemed to tire Molesworth, and I think he felt called upon to explain his fatigue. “All that tramping around with guidebooks,” he said after a moment. “In those horrible crocodiles of tourists, in and out of churches, museums, and mosques. I just like to be still, find a comfortable chair, absorb a country.”
Dusk in Central Turkey
IT IS DUSK, THE SERENEST HOUR IN CENTRAL TURKEY: A FEW bright stars depend from a velvet blue sky, the mountains are suitably black, and the puddles near the spigots of village wells have the shimmering color and uncertain shape of pools of mercury. Night falls quickly, and it is all black, and only the smell of the dust still settling reminds you of the exhausting day.
“Mister?” It is the green-eyed Turkish conductor on his way to lock the sleeping-car door against the marauders he imagines in the rest of the train.
“Yes?”
“Turkey good or bad?”
“Good,” I said.
“Thank you, mister.”
Hippies lay on their seats lengthwise, hogging half the compartment, and humped under the astonished eyes of Turkish women who sat staring in dark yashmaks, their hands clasped between their knees. Occasionally, I saw an amorous pair leave their compartment hand in hand to go copulate in a toilet.
Most were on their way to India and Nepal, because
The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.
But the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee. Indeed, I had no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high school graduation pictures; MISSING PERSON and HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? These initiates had leaders who were instantly recognizable by the way they dressed: the faded dervish outfit, the ragged shoulder bag, the jewelry—earrings, amulets, bracelets, necklaces. Status derived solely from experience, and it was possible to tell from the ornaments alone—that jangling in the corridor—whose experience had made him the leader of his particular group. All in all, a social order familiar to the average Masai tribesman.
I tried to find out where they were going. It was not easy. They seldom ate in the dining car; they often slept; they were not allowed in the fastness of the de luxe sleeping car. Some stood by the windows in the corridor, in the trance-like state the Turkish landscape induces in travelers. I sidled up to them and asked them their plans. One did not even turn around. He was a man of about thirty-five, with dusty hair, a T-shirt that read MOTO-GUZZI, and a small gold earring in the lobe of his ear. I surmised that he had sold his motorcycle for a ticket to India. He held the windowsill and stared at the empty reddish yellow flatlands. In reply to my question he said softly, “Pondicherry.”
“The ashram?” Auroville, a kind of spiritual Levite town dedicated to the memory of Sri Aurobindo and at that time ruled over by his ninety-year-old French mistress (the “Mother”), is located near Pondicherry, in South India.
“Yes. I want to stay there as long as possible.”
“How long?”
“Years.” He regarded a passing village and nodded. “If they let me.”
It was the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation. But Moto-Guzzi had a wife and children in California. Interesting: he had fled his children and some of the girls in his group had fled their parents.
Another fellow sat on the steps of the coach, dangling his feet in the wind. He was eating an apple. I asked him where he was going. “Maybe try Nepal,” he said. He took a bite of the apple. “Maybe Ceylon, if it’s happening there.” He took another bite. The apple was like the globe he was calmly apportioning to himself, as small, bright, and accessible. He poised his very white teeth and bit again. “Maybe Bali.” He was chewing. “Maybe go to Australia.” He took a last bite and winged the apple into the dust. “What are you, writing a book?”
Sadik
AGAIN I SHOWED THE CONDUCTOR MY TICKET. “FIRST-CLASS ticket,” I said. “You give me first-class couchette.”
“No couchette,” he said. He pointed to my berth in a second-class compartment with three Australians in it.
“No,” I said. I pointed to an empty compartment. “I want this one.”
“No.” He gave me a fanatical grin.
He was grinning at my hand. I held thirty Turkish liras (about two dollars). His hand appeared near mine. I dropped my voice and whispered the word that is known all over the East, “Baksheesh.”
He took the money and pocketed it. He got my bag from the Australian compartment and carried it to another compartment in which there were a battered suitcase and a box of crackers. He slid the bag into the luggage rack and patted the berth. He asked if I wanted sheets and blankets. I said yes. He got them, and a pillow, too. He drew the curtains, shutting out the sun. He bowed and brought me a pitcher of ice water, and he smiled, as if to say, “All this could have been yours yesterday.”
The suitcase and crackers belonged to a large bald Turk named Sadik, who wore baggy woolen trousers and a stretched sweater. He was from one of the wilder parts of Turkey, the Upper Valley of Greater Zap; he had boarded the train in Van; he was going to Australia.
He came in and drew his arm across his sweating face. He said, “Are you in here?”
“Yes.”
“How much did you give him?”
I told him.
He said, “I gave him fifteen rials. He is very dishonest, but now he is on our side. He will not put anyone else in here, so now we have this big room together.”
Sadik smiled; he had crooked teeth. It is not skinny people who look hungry, but rather fat ones, and Sadik looked famished.
“I think it’s only fair to say,” I said, wondering how I was going to finish the sentence, “that I’m not, um, queer. Well, you know, I don’t like boys and—”
“And me, I don’t like,” said Sadik, and with that he lay down and went to sleep. He had the gift of slumber; he needed only to be horizontal and he was sound asleep, and he always slept in the same sweater and trousers. He never took them off; and for the duration of the trip to Teheran he neither shaved nor washed.
He was an unlikely tycoon. He admitted he behaved like a pig, but he had lots of money and his career was a successful record of considerable ingenuity. He had started out exporting Turkish curios to France and he seems to have been in the vanguard of the movement, monopolizing the puzzle ring and copper-pot trade in Europe long before anyone else thought of it. He paid no export duties in Turkey, no import duties in France. He managed this by shipping crates of worthless articles to the French border and warehousing them there. He went to French wholesalers with his samples, took orders, and left the wholesalers the headache of importing the goods. He did this for three years and banked the money in Switzerland.
“When I have enough money,” said Sadik, whose English was not perfect, “I like to start a travel agency. Where you want to go? Budapesht? Prague? Romania? Bulgaria? All nice places, oh boy! Turkish people like to travel. But they are very silly. They don’t speak English. They say to me, ‘Mister Sadik, I want a coffee’—this is in Prague. I say, ‘Ask the waiter.’ They are afraid. They shout their eyes. But they have money in their packets. I say to the waiter, ‘Coffee’—he understand. Everyone understand coffee, but Turkish people don’t speak any language, so all the time I am translator. This, I tell you, drive me crazy. The people they follow me. ‘Mister Sadik, take me to a nightclub’; ‘Mister Sadik, find me a gairl.’ They follow me even to the lavabo and sometime I want to escape, so I am clever and I use the service elevator.
“I give up Budapesht, Belgrade. I decide to take pilgrims to Mecca. They pay me five thousand liras and I take care of everything. I get smallpox injections and stamp the book—sometimes I stamp the book and don’t get smallpox injections! I have a friend in the medical. Ha! But I take good care of them, buy them rubber mattresses, each person one mattress, blow them up so you don’t have to sleep on the floor. I take them to Mecca, Medina, Jiddah, then I leave them. ‘I have business in Jiddah,’ I say. But I go to Beirut. You know Beirut? Nice place—nightclubs, gairls, lots of fun. Then I come back to Jiddah, pick up the hajis, and bring them back to Istanbul. Good profit.”
I asked Sadik why, if he was a Muslim and he was so close to Mecca, he never made the haj himself.
“Once you go to Mecca you have to make promise—no drinking, no swearing, no women, money to poor people.” He laughed. “Is for old men. I’m not ready!”
He was headed now for Australia, which he pronounced “Owstraalia”; he had another idea. It had come to him one day in Saudi Arabia when he was bored (he said as soon as he began making money in a project he lost interest in it). His new idea concerned the export of Turks to Australia. There was a shortage of workers there. He would go, and, much as he had sold puzzle rings to the French, visit Australian industrialists and find out what sort of skilled people they required. He would make a list. His partner in Istanbul would get up a large group of emigrants and deal with the paperwork, obtaining passports, health cards, and references. Then the Turks would be sent on a charter flight that Sadik would arrange, and after collecting a fee from the Turks he would collect from the Australians. He winked. “Good profit.”
It was Sadik who pointed out to me that the hippies were doomed. They dressed like wild Indians, he said, but basically they were middle-class Americans. They didn’t understand baksheesh, and because they were always holding tight to their money and expecting to scrounge food and hospitality they would always lose. He resented the fact that the hippie chiefs were surrounded by such young pretty girls. “These guys are ugly and I am ugly too, so why don’t the gairls like me?”
He enjoyed telling stories against himself. The best one concerned a blonde he had picked up in an Istanbul bar. It was midnight; he was drunk and feeling lecherous. He took the blonde home and made love to her twice, then slept for a few hours, woke up, and made love to her again. Late the next day as he was crawling out of bed he noticed the blonde needed a shave and then he saw the wig and the man’s enormous penis. “ ‘Only Sadik,’ my friends say, “only Sadik can make love to a man three times and think it is a woman!’ But I was very drunk.”
Peshawar
PESHAWAR IS A PRETTY TOWN. I WOULD GLADLY MOVE THERE, settle down on a veranda, and grow old watching sunsets in the Khyber Pass. Peshawar’s widely spaced mansions, all excellent examples of Anglo-Muslim Gothic, are spread along broad sleepy roads under cool trees: just the place to recover from the hideous experience of Kabul. You hail a tonga at the station and ride to the hotel, where on the veranda the chairs have swing-out extensions for you to prop up your legs and get the blood circulating. A nimble waiter brings a large bottle of Murree Export Lager. The hotel is empty; the other guests have risked a punishing journey to Swat in hopes of being received by His Highness the Wali. You sleep soundly under a tent of mosquito net and are awakened by the fluting of birds for an English breakfast that begins with porridge and ends with a kidney. Afterwards a tonga to the museum.
A little distance from the museum, when I was buying some matches at a shop, I was offered morphine. I wondered if I heard right and asked to see it. The man took out a matchbox (perhaps “matches” was a code word?) and slipped it open. Inside was a small vial marked MORPHINE SULPHATE, ten white tablets. The man said they were to be taken in the arm and told me that I could have the whole lot for twenty dollars. I offered him five dollars and laughed, but he saw he was being mocked. He turned surly and told me to go away.
I would have liked to stay longer in Peshawar. I liked lazing on the veranda, shaking out my newspaper, and watching the tongas go by, and I enjoyed hearing Pakistanis discussing the coming war with Afghanistan. They were worried and aggrieved, but I gave them encouragement and said they would find an enthusiastic well-wisher in me if they ever cared to invade that barbarous country. My prompt reassurance surprised them, but they saw I was sincere. “I hope you will help us,” one said. I explained that I was not a very able soldier. He said, “Not you in person, but America in general.” I said I couldn’t promise national support, but that I would be glad to put a word in for them.
Everything is easy in Peshawar except buying a train ticket. This is a morning’s work and leaves you exhausted. First you consult the timetable, Pakistan Western Railways, and find that the Khyber Mail leaves at four o’clock. Then you go to the Information window and are told it leaves at nine-fifty P.M. The Information man sends you to Reservations. The man in Reservations is not there, but a sweeper says he’ll be right back. He returns in an hour and helps you decide on a class. He writes your name in a book and gives you a chit. You take the chit to Bookings, where, for 108 rupees (about ten dollars), you are handed two tickets and an initialed chit. You go back to Reservations, and wait for the man to return once again. He returns, initials the tickets, examines the chit, and writes the details in a ledger about six feet square.
Nor was this the only difficulty. The man in Reservations told me no bedding was available on the Khyber Mail. I suspected he was angling for baksheesh and gave him six rupees to find bedding. After twenty minutes he said it had all been booked. He was very sorry. I asked for my bribe back. He said, “As you wish.”
Later in the day I worked out the perfect solution. I was staying in Dean’s Hotel, one in a chain of hotels that includes Faletti’s in Lahore. I had to pester the clerk a good deal, but he finally agreed to give me what bedding I needed. I would give him sixty rupees and he would give me a chit. In Lahore I would give the bedding and chit to Faletti’s and get my sixty rupees back. This was the chit:
Please refund this man Rs. 60/-(RS. SIXTY ONLY) if he produce you this receipt and One Blanket and One Sheet. One Pillow and Credit it in Dean’s Hotel Peshawar Account.
The Village in the Railway Station
THE SIGNS IN AMRITSAR STATION (THIRD-CLASS EXIT, SECOND-CLASS LADIES’ WAITING ROOM, FIRST-CLASS TOILET, SWEEPERS ONLY) had given me a formal idea of Indian society. The less formal reality I saw at seven in the morning in the Northern Railways Terminal in Old Delhi. To understand the real India, the Indians say, you must go to the villages. But that is not strictly true, because the Indians have carried their villages to the railway stations. In the daytime it is not apparent—you might mistake any of these people for beggars, ticketless travelers (sign: TICKETLESS TRAVEL IS A SOCIAL EVIL), or unlicensed hawkers. At night and in the early morning the station village is complete, a community so preoccupied that the thousands of passengers arriving and departing leave it undisturbed: they detour around it. The railway dwellers possess the station, but only the new arrival notices this. He feels something is wrong because he has not learned the Indian habit of ignoring the obvious, making a detour to preserve his calm. The newcomer cannot believe he has been plunged into such intimacy so soon. In another country this would all be hidden from him, and not even a trip to a village would reveal with this clarity the pattern of life. The village in rural India tells the visitor very little except that he is required to keep his distance and limit his experience of the place to tea or a meal in a stuffy parlor. The life of the village, its interior, is denied to him.
But the station village is all interior, and the shock of this exposure made me hurry away. I didn’t feel I had any right to watch people bathing under a low faucet—naked among the incoming tide of office workers; men sleeping late on their charpoys or tucking up their turbans; women with nose rings and cracked yellow feet cooking stews of begged vegetables over smoky fires, suckling infants, folding bedrolls; children pissing on their toes; little girls, in oversized frocks falling from their shoulders, fetching water in tin cans from the third-class toilet; and, near a newspaper vendor, a man lying on his back, holding a baby up to admire and tickling it. Hard work, poor pleasures, and the scrimmage of appetite. This village has no walls.
Mr. Bhardwaj on the Railcar to Simla
AT SEVEN-FIFTEEN, THE DRIVER OF THE RAILCAR INSERTED A long-handled crank into the engine and gave it a jerk. The engine shook and coughed and, still juddering and smoking, began to whine. Within minutes we were on the slope, looking down at the top of Kalka Station, where in the train yard two men were winching a huge steam locomotive around in a circle. The railcar’s speed was a steady ten miles an hour, zigzagging in and out of the steeply pitched hill, reversing on switchbacks through the terraced gardens and the white flocks of butterflies. We passed through several tunnels before I noticed they were numbered; a large number 4 was painted over the entrance of the next one. The man seated beside me, who had told me he was a civil servant in Simla, said there were 103 tunnels all together. I tried not to notice the numbers after that. Outside the car, there was a sheer drop, hundreds of feet down, for the railway, which was opened in 1904, is cut directly into the hillside, and the line above is notched like the skidway on a toboggan run, circling the hills.
After thirty minutes everyone in the railcar was asleep except the civil servant and me. At the little stations along the way, the postman in the rear seat awoke from his doze to throw a mailbag out the window to a waiting porter on the platform. I tried to take pictures, but the landscape eluded me: one vista shifted into another, lasting only seconds, a dizzying displacement of hill and air, of haze and all the morning shades of green. The meat-grinder cogs working against the rack under the railcar ticked like an aging clock and made me drowsy. I took out my inflatable pillow, blew it up, put it under my head, and slept peacefully in the sunshine until I was awakened by the thud of the railcar’s brakes and the banging of doors.
“Ten minutes,” said the driver.
We were just below a wooden structure, a doll’s house, its window boxes overflowing with red blossoms, and moss trimming its wide eaves. This was Bangu Station. It had a wide complicated veranda on which a waiter stood with a menu under his arm. The railcar passengers scrambled up the stairs. I smelled eggs and coffee and heard the Bengalis quarreling with the waiters in English.
I walked down the gravel paths to admire the well-tended flower beds and the carefully mown lengths of turf beside the track; below the station a rushing stream gurgled, and signs there, and near the flower beds, read NO PLUCKING. A waiter chased me down to the stream and called out, “We have juices! You like fresh mango juice? A little porridge? Coffee-tea?”
We resumed the rise, and the time passed quickly as I dozed again and woke to higher mountains, with fewer trees, stonier slopes, and huts perched more precariously. The haze had disappeared and the hillsides were bright, but the air was cool and a fresh breeze blew through the open windows of the railcar. In every tunnel the driver switched on orange lamps, and the racket of the clattering wheels increased and echoed. After Solon the only people in the railcar were a family of Bengali pilgrims (all of them sound asleep, snoring, their faces turned up), the civil servant, the postman, and me. The next stop was Solon Brewery, where the air was pungent with yeast and hops, and after that we passed through pine forests and cedar groves. On one stretch a baboon the size of a six-year-old crept off the tracks to let us go by. I remarked on the largeness of the creature.
The civil servant said, “There was once a saddhu—a holy man—who lived near Simla. He could speak to monkeys. A certain Englishman had a garden, and all the time the monkeys were causing him trouble. Monkeys can be very destructive. The Englishman told this saddhu his problem. The saddhu said, ‘I will see what I can do.’ Then the saddhu went into the forest and assembled all the monkeys. He said, ‘I hear you are troubling the Englishman. That is bad. You must stop; leave his garden alone. If I hear that you are causing damage I will treat you very harshly.’ And from that time onward the monkeys never went into the Englishman’s garden.”
“Do you believe the story?”
“Oh, yes. But the man is now dead—the saddhu. I don’t know what happened to the Englishman. Perhaps he went away, like the rest of them.”
A little farther on, he said, “What do you think of India?”
“It’s a hard question,” I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfast, and ask him if he thought there was any truth in Mark Twain’s comment on Indians: “It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life.” But I added instead, “I haven’t been here very long.”
“I will tell you what I think,” he said. “If all the people who are talking about honesty, fair play, socialism, and so forth—if they began to practice it themselves, India will do well. Otherwise there will be a revolution.”
He was an unsmiling man in his early fifties and had the stern features of a Brahmin. He neither drank nor smoked, and before he joined the civil service he had been a Sanskrit scholar in an Indian university. He got up at five every morning, had an apple, a glass of milk, and some almonds; he washed and said his prayers and after that took a long walk. Then he went to his office. To set an example for his junior officers he always walked to work, he furnished his office sparsely, and he did not require his bearer to wear a khaki uniform. He admitted that his example was unpersuasive. His junior officers had parking permits, sumptuous furnishings, and uniformed bearers.
“I ask them why all this money is spent for nothing. They tell me to make a good first impression is very important. I say to the blighters, ‘What about second impression?’ ”
Blighters was a word that occurred often in his speech. Lord Clive was a blighter and so were most of the other viceroys. Blighters ask for bribes; blighters try to cheat the Accounts Department; blighters are living in luxury and talking about socialism. It was a point of honor with this civil servant that he had never in his life given or received baksheesh: “Not even a single paisa.” Some of his clerks had, and in eighteen years in the civil service he had personally fired thirty-two people. He thought it might be a record. I asked him what they had done wrong.
“Gross incompetence,” he said, “pinching money, hanky-panky. But I never fire anyone without first having a good talk with his parents. There was a blighter in the Audit Department, always pinching girls’ bottoms. Indian girls from good families! I warned him about this, but he wouldn’t stop. So I told him I wanted to see his parents. The blighter said his parents lived fifty miles away. I gave him money for their bus fare. They were poor, and they were quite worried about the blighter. I said to them, ‘Now I want you to understand that your son is in deep trouble. He is causing annoyance to the lady members of this department. Please talk to him and make him understand that if this continues, I will have no choice but to sack him.’ Parents go away, blighter goes back to work, and ten days later he is at it again. I suspended him on the spot, then I charge-sheeted him.”
I wondered whether any of these people had tried to take revenge on him.
“Yes, there was one. He got himself drunk one night and came to my house with a knife. ‘Come outside and I will kill you!’ That sort of thing. My wife was upset. But I was angry. I couldn’t control myself. I dashed outside and fetched the blighter a blooming kick. He dropped his knife and began to cry. ‘Don’t call the police,’ he said. ‘I have a wife and children.’ He was a complete coward, you see. I let him go and everyone criticized me—they said I should have brought charges. But I told them he’ll never bother anyone again.
“And there was another time. I was working for Heavy Electricals, doing an audit for some cheaters in Bengal. Faulty construction, double entries, and estimates that were five times what they should have been. There was also immorality. One bloke—son of the contractor, very wealthy—kept four harlots. He gave them whisky and made them take their clothes off and run naked into a group of women and children doing puja. Disgraceful! Well, they didn’t like me at all and the day I left there were four dacoits with knives waiting for me on the station road. But I expected that, so I took a different road, and the blighters never caught me. A month later two auditors were murdered by dacoits.”
The railcar tottered around a cliffside, and on the opposite slope, across a deep valley, was Simla. Most of the town fits the ridge like a saddle made entirely of rusty roofs, but as we drew closer the fringes seemed to be sliding into the valley. Simla is unmistakable, for as Murray’s Handbook indicates, “its skyline is incongruously dominated by a Gothic Church, a baronial castle and a Victorian country mansion.” Above these brick piles is the sharply pointed peak of Jakhu (eight thousand feet); below are the clinging house fronts. The southerly aspect of Simla is so steep that flights of cement stairs take the place of roads. From the railcar it looked an attractive place, a town of rusting splendor with snowy mountains in the background.
“My office is in that castle,” said the civil servant.
“Gorton Castle,” I said, referring to my handbook. “Do you work for the Accountant General of the Punjab?”
“Well, I am the A.G.,” he said. But he was giving information, not boasting. At Simla Station the porter strapped my suitcase to his back (he was a Kashmiri, up for the season). The civil servant introduced himself as Vishnu Bhardwaj and invited me for tea that afternoon.
The Mall was filled with Indian vacationers taking their morning stroll, warmly dressed children, women with cardigans over their saris, and men in tweed suits, clasping the green Simla guidebook in one hand and a cane in the other. The promenading has strict hours, nine to twelve in the morning and four to eight in the evening, determined by mealtimes and shop openings. These hours were fixed a hundred years ago, when Simla was the summer capital of the Indian empire, and they have not varied. The architecture is similarly unchanged—it is all high Victorian, with the vulgarly grandiose touches colonial labor allowed, extravagant gutters and porticoes, buttressed by pillars and steelwork to prevent its slipping down the hill. The Gaiety Theatre (1887) is still the Gaiety Theatre (though when I was there it was the venue of a “Spiritual Exhibition” I was not privileged to see); pettifogging continues in Gorton Castle, as praying does in Christ Church (1857), the Anglican cathedral; the viceroy’s lodge (Rastrapati Nivas), a baronial mansion, is now the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, but the visiting scholars creep about with the diffidence of caretakers maintaining the sepulchral stateliness of the place. Scattered among these large Simla buildings are the bungalows—Holly Lodge, Romney Castle, The Bricks, Forest View, Sevenoaks, Femside—but the inhabitants now are Indians, or rather that inheriting breed of Indian that insists on the guidebook, the walking stick, the cravat, tea at four, and an evening stroll to Scandal Point. It is the Empire with a dark complexion, an imperial outpost that the mimicking vacationers have preserved from change, though not the place of highly colored intrigues described in Kim, and certainly tamer than it was a century ago. After all, Lola Montez, the grande horizontale, began her whoring in Simla, and the only single women I saw were short red-cheeked Tibetan laborers in quilted coats, who walked along the Mall with heavy stones in slings on their backs.
I had tea with the Bhardwaj family. It was not the simple meal I had expected. There were eight or nine dishes: pakora, vegetables fried in batter; poha, a rice mixture with peas, coriander, and turmeric; khira, a creamy pudding of rice, milk, and sugar; a kind of fruit salad, with cucumber and lemon added to it, called chaat; murak, a Tamil savory, like large nutty pretzels; tikkiya, potato cakes; malai chops, sweet sugary balls topped with cream; and almond-scented pinnis. I ate what I could, and the next day I saw Mr. Bhardwaj’s office in Gorton Castle. It was as sparsely furnished as he had said on the railcar, and over his desk was this sign:
I AM NOT INTERESTED IN EXCUSES FOR DELAY;
I AM INTERESTED ONLY IN A THING DONE.
—Jawaharlal Nehru
In Jaipur with Mr. Gopal
“WHAT’S THIS?” I ASKED MR. GOPAL, THE EMBASSY LIAISON man, pointing to a kind of fortress.
“That’s a kind of fortress.”
He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: “You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.” Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts toward the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: “Act normal,” said Mr. Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.
“Whose is it?”
“The Maharajah’s.”
“No, who built it?”
“You would not know his name.”
“Do you?”
Mr. Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr. Gopal’s head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah’s whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with colored frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiseled away.
“What’s this?” I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.
“Ah,” said Mr. Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place—a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.
“A temple?”
Mr. Gopal thought a moment. “Yes,” he said finally, “a kind of temple.”
On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was “forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark or otherwise abuse the walls.” The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped—it looked partly eaten.
Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still, black pool. Insects swimming in circles on the pool’s surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions cut into them in two languages. In the failing light I copied down the English.
The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited
Please do not bring shoes near the tank
It does not suit for women to take bath among male members
Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit
Do not spoil others’ clothes by splitting water while swimming
Do not enter the temple with wet clothes
Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty
“Splitting?” I said to Mr. Gopal. “What is splitting?”
“That does not say splitting.”
“Take a look at number five.”
“It says splashing.”
“It says splitting.”
“It says—”
We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.
“—splitting,” said Mr. Gopal. “I’ve never run across that one before. I think it’s a kind of splashing.”
The Grand Trunk Express to the Real India
THE LUMBERING EXPRESS THAT BISECTS INDIA, A 1,400-mile slash from Delhi south to Madras, gets its name from the route. It might easily have derived it from the kind of luggage the porters were heaving on board. There were grand trunks all over the platform. I had never seen such heaps of belongings in my life, or so many laden people; they were like evacuees who had been given time to pack, lazily fleeing an ambiguous catastrophe. In the best of times there is nothing simple about an Indian boarding a train, but these people climbing into the Grand Trunk Express looked as if they were setting up house—they had the air, and the merchandise, of people moving in. Within minutes the compartments were colonized, the trunks were emptied, the hampers, food baskets, water bottles, bedrolls, and Gladstones put in place; and before the train started up its character changed, for while we were still standing at Delhi Station the men stripped off their baggy trousers and twill jackets and got into traditional South Indian dress: the sleeveless gym-class undershirt and the sarong they call a lungi. These were scored with packing creases. It was as if, at once—in expectation of the train whistle—they all dropped the disguise they had adopted for Delhi, the Madras-bound express allowing them to assume their true identity. The train was full of Tamils; and they had moved in so completely, I felt like a stranger among residents, which was odd, since I had arrived earlier than anyone else.
Tamils are black and bony; they have thick straight hair and their teeth are prominent and glister from repeated scrubbings with peeled green twigs. Watch a Tamil going over his teeth with an eight-inch twig and you begin to wonder if he isn’t trying to yank a branch out of his stomach. One of the attractions of the Grand Trunk Express is that its route takes in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, where the best toothbrush twigs are found; they are sold in bundles, bound like cheroots, at the stations in the province. Tamils are also modest. Before they change their clothes each makes a toga of his bedsheet, and, hopping up and down and working his elbows, he kicks his shoes and trousers off, all the while babbling in that rippling speech that resembles the sputtering of a man singing in the shower. Tamils seem to talk constantly—only toothbrushing silences them. Pleasure for a Tamil is discussing a large matter (life, truth, beauty, “walues”) over a large meal (very wet vegetables studded with chilies and capsicums, and served with damp poori and two mounds of glutinous rice). The Tamils were happy on the Grand Trunk Express: their language was spoken; their food was served; their belongings were dumped helter-skelter, giving the train the customary clutter of a Tamil home.
I started out with three Tamils in my compartment. After they changed, unstrapped their suitcases, unbuckled bedrolls, and had a meal (one gently scoffed at my spoon: “Food taken with hand tastes different from food taken with spoon—sort of metal taste”), they spent an immense amount of time introducing themselves to one another. In bursts of Tamil speech were English words like “reposting,” “casual leave,” “annual audit.” As soon as I joined the conversation they began, with what I thought was a high degree of tact and courage, to speak to one another in English. They were in agreement on one point: Delhi was barbarous.
“I am staying at Lodi Hotel. I am booked months ahead. Everyone in Trich tells me it is a good hotel. Hah! I cannot use telephone. You have used telephone?”
“I cannot use telephone at all.”
“It is not Lodi Hotel,” said the third Tamil. “It is Delhi.”
“Yes, my friend, you are right,” said the second.
“I say to receptionist, ‘Kindly stop speaking to me in Hindi. Does no one speak English around this place? Speak to me in English if you please!’ ”
“It is really atrocious situation.”
“Hindi, Hindi, Hindi. Tcha!”
I said I’d had similar experiences. They shook their heads and added more stories of distress. We sat like four fugitives from savagery, bemoaning the general ignorance of English, and it was one of the Tamils—not I—who pointed out that the Hindi speaker would be lost in London.
I said, “Would he be lost in Madras?”
“English is widely spoken in Madras. We also use Tamil, but seldom Hindi. It is not our language.”
“In the south everyone has matric.” They had a knowing ease with abbreviations, “matric” for matriculation, “Trich” for the town of Tiruchchirappalli.
The conductor put his head into the compartment. He was a harassed man with the badges and equipment of Indian authority, a gunmetal puncher, a vindictive pencil, a clipboard thick with damp passenger lists, a bronze conductor’s pin, and a khaki pith helmet. He tapped my shoulder.
“Bring your case.”
Earlier I had asked for the two-berth compartment I had paid for. He had said they were overbooked. I demanded a refund. He said I’d have to file an application at the place of issue. I accused him of inefficiency. He withdrew. Now he had found a coupé in the next carriage.
“Does this cost extra?” I asked, sliding my suitcase in. I didn’t like the extortionate overtones of the word baksheesh.
“What you want,” he said.
“Then it doesn’t.”
“I am not saying it does or doesn’t. I am not asking.”
I liked the approach. I said, “What should I do?”
“To give or not to give.” He frowned at his passenger lists. “That is entirely your lookout.”
I gave him five rupees.
The compartment was gritty. There was no sink; the drop-leaf table was unhinged; and the rattling at the window, rising to a scream when another train passed, jarred my ears. Sometimes it was an old locomotive that sped by in the night, its kettle boiling, its whistle going, and its pistons leaking a hiss with the warning pitch of a blown valve that precedes an explosion. At about six A.M., near Bhopal, there was a rap on the door—not morning tea, but a candidate for the upper berth. He said, “Excuse me,” and crept in.
The forests of Madhya Pradesh, where all the toothbrushes grow, looked like the woods of New Hampshire with the last faint blue range of mountains removed. It was green, uncultivated, and full of leafy bluffs and shady brooks, but as the second day wore on it grew dustier, and New Hampshire gave way to Indian heat and Indian air. Dust collected at the window and sifted in, covering my map, my pipe, my glasses and notebook, my new stock of paperbacks (Joyce’s Exiles, Browning’s poems, The Narrow Corner by Somerset Maugham). I had a fine layer of dust on my face; dust furred the mirror, made the plastic seat abrasive and the floor crunchy. The window had to be kept open a crack because of the heat, but the penalty for this breeze was a stream of choking dust from the Central Indian plains.
At Nagpur in the afternoon, my traveling companion (an engineer with an extraordinary scar on his chest), said, “There are primitive people here called Gondis. They are quite strange. One woman may have four to five husbands and vicey-versy.”
I bought four oranges at the station, made a note of a sign advertising horoscopes that read MARRY YOUR DAUGHTERS BY SPENDING RS. 12 ONLY, shouted at a little man who was bullying a beggar, and read my handbook’s entry for Nagpur (so-called because it is on the River Nag):
Among the inhabitants are many aborigines known as Gonds. Of these the hill-tribes have black skins, flat noses and thick lips. A cloth round the waist is their chief garment. The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.
To my relief, the whistle blew and we were on our way. The engineer read the Nagpur paper, I ate my Nagpur oranges and then had a siesta. I awoke to an odd sight, the first rain clouds I’d seen since leaving England. At dusk, near the border of the South Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, broad blue-gray clouds, dark at the edges, hung on the horizon. We were headed for them in a landscape where it had recently rained: now the little stations were splashed with mud, brown puddles had collected at level crossings, and the earth was reddened by the late monsoon. But we were not under the clouds until we reached Chandrapur, a station so small and sooty it is not on the map. There, the rain fell in torrents, and signalmen skipped along the line waving their sodden flags. The people on the platform stood watching from under large black umbrellas that shone with wetness. Some hawkers rushed into the downpour to sell bananas to the train passengers.
A woman crawled into the rain from the shelter of the platform. She appeared to be injured: she was on all fours, moving slowly toward the train—toward me. Her spine, I saw, was twisted with meningitis; she had rags tied to her knees and woodblocks in her hands. She toiled across the tracks with painful slowness, and when she was near the door she looked up. She had a lovely smile—a girl’s beaming face on that broken body. She propped herself up and lifted her free hand at me, and waited, her face streaming with rain, her clothes soaked. While I was fishing in my pockets for money the train started up, and my futile gesture was to throw a handful of rupees onto the flooded line.
At the next station I was accosted by another beggar. This was a boy of about ten, wearing a clean shirt and shorts. He implored with his eyes and said rapidly, “Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother have been at station platform for two days. They are stranded. They have no food. My father has no job, my mother’s clothes are torn. We must get to Delhi soon and if you give me one or two rupees we will be able.”
“The train’s going to leave. You’d better hop off.”
He said, “Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother—”
He went on mechanically reciting. I urged him to get off the train, but it was clear that apart from his spiel he did not speak English. I walked away.
It had grown dark, the rain was letting up, and I sat reading the engineer’s newspaper. The news was of conferences, an incredible number of gatherings in the very titles of which I heard the clack of voices, the rattle of mimeographed sheets, the squeak of folding chairs, and the eternal Indian prologue: “There is one question we all have to ask ourselves—” One Nagpur conference was spending a week discussing “Is the Future of Zoroastrianism in Peril?” On the same page two hundred Indians were reported attending a “Congress of Peace-Loving Countries.” “Hinduism: Are We at a Crossroads?” occupied another group, and on the back page there was an advertisement for Raymond’s Suitings (slogan: “You’ll have something to say in Raymond’s Suitings …”). The man wearing a Raymond suit was shown addressing a conference audience. He was squinting, making a beckoning gesture; he had something to say. His words were, “Communication is perception. Communication is expectations. Communication is involvement.”
A beggar’s skinny hand appeared at my compartment door, a bruised forearm, a ragged sleeve. Then the doomed cry, “Sahib!”
At Sirpur, just over the border of Andhra Pradesh, the train ground to a halt. Twenty minutes later we were still there. Sirpur is insignificant: the platform is uncovered, the station has two rooms, and there are cows on the veranda. Grass tufts grow out of the ledge of the booking-office window. It smelled of rain and wood smoke and cow dung; it was little more than a hut, dignified with the usual railway signs, of which the most hopeful was TRAINS RUNNING LATE ARE LIKELY TO MAKE UP TIME. Passengers on the Grand Trunk Express began to get out. They promenaded, belching in little groups, grateful for the exercise.
“The engine has packed up,” one man told me. “They are sending for a new one. Delay of two hours.”
Another man said, “If there was a cabinet minister on this train they would have an engine in ten minutes’ time.”
The Tamils were raving on the platform. A native of Sirpur wandered out of the darkness with a sack of roasted chickpeas. He was set upon by the Tamils, who bought all the chickpeas and demanded more. A mob of Tamils gathered at the stationmaster’s window to howl at a man tapping out Morse code with a little key.
I decided to look for a beer, but just outside the station I was in darkness so complete I had second thoughts. The smell of rain on the vegetation gave a humid richness to the air that was almost sweet. There were cows lying on the road: they were white; I could see them clearly. Using the cows as road markers I walked along until I saw a small orange light about fifty yards away. I headed toward it and came to a little hut, a low poky shack with mud walls and a canvas roof. There was a kerosene lantern hanging over the doorway and another inside lighting the surprised faces of half a dozen tea drinkers, two of whom recognized me from the train.
“What do you want?” one said. “I will ask for it.”
“Can I buy a bottle of beer here?”
This was translated. There was laughter. I knew the answer.
“About two kilometers down the road”—the man pointed into the blackness—“there is a bar. You can get beer there.”
“How will I find it?”
“A car,” he said. He spoke again to the man serving tea. “But there is no car here. Have some tea.”
We stood in the hut drinking milky tea out of cracked glasses. A joss stick was lit. No one said a word. The train passengers looked at the villagers; the villagers averted their eyes. The canvas ceiling drooped; the tables were worn shiny; the joss stick filled the room with stinking perfume. The train passengers grew uncomfortable and, in their discomfort, took an exaggerated interest in the calendar, the faded color prints of Shiva and Ganpati. The lanterns flickered in the dead silence as our shadows leaped on the walls.
The Indian who had translated my question said under his breath, “This is the real India!”
“I Find You English Girl”—Madras
THIS WAS WHAT I IMAGINED: SOMEWHERE PAST THE BRICK-and-plaster mansions of Madras, arrayed along Mount Road like so many yellowing wedding cakes, was the Bay of Bengal, on which I would find a breezy seafront restaurant, palm trees, flapping tablecloths. I would sit facing the water, have a fish dinner and five beers, and watch the dancing lights of the little Tamil fishing smacks. Then I would go to bed and be up early for the train to Rameswaram, that village on the tip of India’s nose.
“Take me to the beach,” I said to the taxi driver. He was an unshaven, wild-haired Tamil with his shirt torn open. He had the look of the feral child in the psychology textbook: feral children—mangled, demented Mowglis—abound in South India. It is said they are suckled by wolves.
“Beach Road?”
“That sounds like the place.” I explained that I wanted to eat a fish.
“Twenty rupees.”
“I’ll give you five.”
“Okay, fifteen. Get in.”
We drove about two hundred yards and I realized that I was very hungry: turning vegetarian had confused my stomach with what seemed an imperfect substitute for real food. Vegetables subdued my appetite, but a craving—a carnivorous emotion—remained.
“You like English girls?” The taxi driver was turning the steering wheel with his wrists, as a wolf might, given the opportunity to drive a taxi.
“Very much,” I said.
“I find you English girl.”
“Really?” It seemed an unlikely place to find an English whore—Madras, a city without any apparent prosperity. In Bombay I might have believed it: the sleek Indian businessmen, running in and out of the Taj Mahal Hotel, oozing wealth, and driving at top speed past the sleepers on the sidewalk—they were certainly whore fodder. And in Delhi, city of conferees and delegates, I was told there were lots of European hookers cruising through the lobbies of the plush hotels, promising pleasure with a cheery swing of their hips. But in Madras?
The driver spun in his seat and crossed his heart, two slashes with his long nails. “English girl.”
“Keep your eyes on the road!”
“Twenty-five rupees.”
Three dollars and twenty-five cents.
“Pretty girl?”
“English girl,” he said. “You want?”
I thought this over. It wasn’t the girl but the situation that attracted me. An English girl in Madras, whoring for peanuts. I wondered where she lived, and how, and for how long; what had brought her to the godforsaken place? I saw her as a castaway, a fugitive, like Lena in Conrad’s Victory fleeing a tuneless traveling orchestra in Surabaya. I had once met an English whore in Singapore. She said she was making a fortune. But it wasn’t just the money: she preferred Chinese and Indian men to the English, who were not so quick and, worse, usually wanted to spank her.
The driver noticed my silence and slowed down. In the heavy traffic he turned around once again. His cracked teeth, stained with betel juice, were red and gleaming in the lights from the car behind us. He said, “Beach or girl?”
“Beach,” I said.
He drove for a few minutes more. Surely she was Anglo-Indian—“English” was a euphemism.
“Girl,” I said.
“Beach or girl?”
“Girl, girl, for Heaven’s sake.” It was as if he were trying to make me confess to an especially vicious impulse.
He swung the car around dangerously and sped in the opposite direction, babbling, “Good—nice girls—you like—little house—about two miles—five girls—”
“English girls?”
“English girls.”
The luminous certitude had gone out of his voice but still he nodded, perhaps trying to calm me.
We drove for twenty minutes. We went through streets where kerosene lamps burned at stalls, and past brightly lit textile shops in which clerks in striped pajamas shook out bolts of yellow cloth and sequined saris. I sat back and watched Madras go by, teeth and eyes in dark alleys, nighttime shoppers with full baskets, and endless doorways distinguished by memorable signboards, SANGADA LUNCH HOME, VISHNU SHOE CLINIC, and the dark, funereal THOUSAND LIGHTS RESTAURANT.
He turned corners, choosing the narrowest unlighted lanes, and then we stayed on dirt roads. I suspected he was going to rob me, and when we came to the darkest part of a bumpy track—we were in the country now—and he pulled over and switched off the lights, I was certain he was a con man: his next move would be to stick a knife in my ribs. How stupid I’d been to believe his fatuous story about the twenty-five-rupee English girl! We were far from Madras, on a deserted road, beside a faintly gleaming swamp where frogs whistled and gulped. The taxi driver jerked his head. I jumped. He blew his nose into his fingers and flung the result out the window.
I started to get out of the car.
“You sit down.”
I sat down.
He thumped his chest with his hand. “I’m coming.” He slid out and banged the door, and I saw him disappear down a path to the left.
I waited until he was gone, until the shush of his legs in the tall grass had died out, and then I carefully worked the door open. In the open air it was cool, and there was a mingled smell of swamp water and jasmine. I heard voices on the road, men chattering; like me they were in darkness. I could see the road around me, but a few feet away it vanished. I estimated that I was about a mile from the main road. I would head for that and find a bus.
There were puddles in the road. I blundered into one, and, trying to get out, plopped through the deepest part. I had been running; the puddle slowed me to a ponderous shamble.
“Mister! Sahib!”
I kept going, but he saw me and came closer. I was caught.
“Sit down, mister!” he said. I saw he was alone. “Where you going?”
“Where you going?”
“Checking up.”
“English girl?”
“No English girl.”
“What do you mean, no English girl?” I was frightened, and now it seemed clearer than ever.
He thought I was angry. He said, “English girl—forty, fifty. Like this.” He stepped close to me so that in the darkness I could see he was blowing out his cheeks; he clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders. I got the message: a fat English girl. “Indian girl—small, nice. Sit down, we go.”
I had no other choice. A mad dash down the road would have taken me nowhere—and he would have chased me. We walked back to the taxi. He started the engine angrily and we bumped along the grassy path he had taken earlier on foot. The taxi rolled from side to side in the potholes and strained up a grade. This was indeed the country. In all that darkness there was one lighted hut. A little boy crouched in the doorway with a sparkler, in anticipation of Diwali, the festival of lights: it illuminated his face, his skinny arm, and made his eyes shine. Ahead of us there was another hut, slightly larger, with a flat roof and two square windows. It was on its own, like a shop in a jungle clearing. Dark heads moved at the windows.
“You come,” said the taxi driver, parking in front of the door. I heard giggling and saw at the windows round black faces and gleaming hair. A man in a white turban leaned against the wall, just out of the light.
We went inside the dirty room. I found a chair and sat down. A dim electric bulb burned on a cord in the center of the low ceiling. I was sitting in the good chair—the others were broken or had burst cushions. Some girls were sitting on a long wooden bench. They watched me, while the rest gathered around me, pinching my arm and laughing. They were very small, and they looked awkward and a bit comic, too young to be wearing lipstick, nose jewels, earrings, and slipping bracelets. Sprigs of white jasmine plaited into their hair made them look appropriately girlish, but the smudged lipstick and large jewelry also exaggerated their youth. One stout, sulky girl held a buzzing transistor radio to the side of her head and looked me over. They gave the impression of schoolgirls in their mothers’ clothes. None could have been older than fifteen.
“Which one you like?” This was the man in the turban. He was stocky and looked tough in a rather grizzled way. His turban was a bath towel knotted on his head.
“Sorry,” I said.
A thin man walked in through the door. He had a sly, bony face and his hands were stuck into the top of his lungi. He nodded at one. “Take her—she good.”
“One hundred rupees all night,” said the man with the turban. “Fifty for one jig.”
“He said it costs twenty-five.”
“Fifty,” said the grizzled man, standing firm.
“Anyway, forget it,” I said. “I just came for a drink.”
“No drink,” said the thin man.
“He said he had an English girl.”
“What English girl?” said the thin man, now twisting the knot on his lungi. “These Kerala girl—young, small, from Malabar Coast.”
The man in the turban caught one by the arm and shoved her against me. She shrieked delightedly and hopped away.
“You look at room,” said the man in the turban.
The room was right through the door. He switched on the light. This was the bedroom; it was the same size as the outside one, but dirtier and more cluttered. And it smelled horrible. In the center of the room was a wooden bed with a stained bamboo mat on it, and on the wall six shelves, each holding a small tin padlocked suitcase. In a corner of the room a battered table held some medicine bottles, big and small, and a basin of water. There were scorch marks on the beaverboard ceiling, newspapers on the floor and on the wall over the bed charcoal sketches of dismembered bodies, breasts, and genitals.
“Look!”
The man grinned wildly, rushed to the far wall, and threw a switch.
“Fan!”
It began to groan slowly over the filthy bed, stirring the air with its cracked paddles and making the room even smellier.
Two girls came into the room and sat on the bed. Laughing, they began to unwind their saris. I hurried out, into the parlor, through the front door, and found the taxi driver. “Come on, let’s go.”
“You not liking Indian girl? Nice Indian girl?”
Skinny was starting to shout. He shouted something in Tamil to the taxi driver, who was in as great a hurry as I to leave the place: he had produced a dud customer. The fault was his, not mine. The girls were still giggling and calling out, and Skinny was still shouting as we swung away from the hut and through the tall grass onto the bumpy back road.
Mr. Wong the Tooth Mechanic
THE TRAIN FROM GALLE WINDS ALONG THE COAST NORTH TOWARD Colombo, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reaches the broken windows of the battered wooden carriages. I was going third class, and for the early part of the trip sat in a dark, overcrowded compartment with people who, as soon as I became friendly, asked me for money. They were not begging with any urgency; indeed, they didn’t look as if they needed money, but rather seemed to be taking the position that whatever they succeeded in wheedling out of me might come in handy at some future date. It happened fairly often. In the middle of a conversation a man would gently ask me if I had any appliance I could give him. “What sort of appliance?” “Razor blades.” I would say no and the conversation would continue.
After nearly an hour of this I crawled out of the compartment to stand by the door and watch the rain dropping out of a dark layer of high clouds just off the coast—the distant rain like majestic pillars of granite. To the right the sun was setting, and in the foreground were children, purpling in the sunset and skipping along the sand. That was on the ocean side of the train. On the jungle side it had already begun to pour heavily, and at each station the signalman covered himself with his flags, making the red one into a kerchief, the green one into a skirt, flapping the green when the train approached and quickly using it to keep the rain off when the train had passed.
A Chinese man and his Singhalese wife had boarded the train in Galle with their fat dark baby. They were the Wongs, off to Colombo for a little holiday. Mr. Wong said he was a dentist; he had learned the trade from his father, who had come to Ceylon from Shanghai in 1937. Mr. Wong didn’t like the train and said he usually went to Colombo on his motorcycle except during the monsoon. He also had a helmet and goggles. If I ever went back to Galle he would show them to me. He told me how much they cost.
“Can you speak Chinese?”
“Humbwa—go, mingwa—come. That’s all. I speak Singhalese and English. Chinese very hard.” He pressed his temples with his knuckles.
Simla had been full of Chinese dentists, with signboards showing horrible cross sections of the human mouth and trays of white toothcaps in the window. I asked him why so many Chinese I had seen were dentists.
“Chinese are very good dentists!” he said. His breath was spiced with coconut. “I’m good!”
“Can you give me a filling?”
“No, no stoppings.”
“Do you clean teeth?”
“No.”
“Can you pull them?”
“You want extraction? I can give you name of a good extractionist.”
“What kind of dentist are you, Mr. Wong?”
“Tooth mechanics,” he said. “Chinese are the best ones for tooth mechanics.”
Tooth mechanics is this: you have a shop with a shelf of English putty, a pink semiliquid; you also have drawers filled with teeth in various sizes. A person comes in who has had two front teeth knocked out in a food riot or a quarrel over a coconut. You fill his mouth with pink putty and make a mold of his guns. A plate is made from this, and, when it is trimmed, two Japanese fangs are stuck to it. Unfortunately, these plastic dentures are valueless for chewing food with and must be removed at mealtime. Mr. Wong said business was excellent and he was taking in between 1,000 and 1,400 rupees a month, which is more than a professor gets at Colombo University.
Inside the train the passengers were banging the windows shut to keep the rain out. The sunset’s fire was tangled in leaden clouds, and the pillars of rain supporting the toppling thunderheads were very close; the fishermen were fighting their catamarans ashore through high surf. The train had begun to smell awful; Mr. Wong apologized for the stink. People were jammed in the compartments and pressed in the corridors. I was at the door and could see the more nimble ones clinging to the steel ladders, balanced on the coupling. When the rain increased—and now it was really coming down—they fought their way into the carriages and slammed the doors and stood in the darkness while the rain hit the metal doors like hail.
My door was still open, and I was against the wall, while blurred gusts of rain beat past me.
Mr. Chatterjee’s Calcutta
FROM THE OUTSIDE, HOWRAH STATION LOOKS LIKE A SECRETARIAT, with its not quite square towers and many clocks—each showing a different time—and its impenetrable brickwork. The British buildings in India look as if they have been designed to withstand a siege—there are horn-works and cannon emplacements and watchtowers on the unlikeliest structures. So Howrah Station looked like a fortified version of a mammoth circumlocution office, an impression that buying a ticket there only confirms. But inside it is high and smoky from the fires of the people who occupy it; the ceiling is black, the floor is wet and filthy, and it is dark—the long shafts of sun streaming from the topmost windows lose their light in dust on the way down.
“It’s much better than it was,” said Mr. Chatterjee, seeing me craning my neck. “You should have seen it before they cleaned it up.”
His remark was unanswerable. Yet at every pillar squatters huddled amid the rubbish they had created: broken glass, bits of wood and paper, straw, and tin cans. Some infants slept against their parents; others were curled up like changelings in dusty corners. Families sought refuge beside pillars, under counters and luggage carts: the hugeness of the station intimidated them with space and drove them to the walls. Their children prowled in the open spaces, combining their scavenging with play. They are the tiny children of tiny parents, and it’s amazing how, in India, it is possible to see two kinds of people in the process of evolution, side by side, one fairly tall, quick, and responsive, the other, whose evolution is reduction, small, stricken, and cringing. They are two races whose common ground is the railway station, and though they come quite close (an urchin lies on his back near the ticket window watching the legs of the people in line) they do not meet.
I walked outside, into the midday chaos at the western end of the Howrah Bridge. In Simla, rickshaws were retained for their quaintness: people posed in them. In Calcutta, rickshaws, pulled by skinny running men in tattered clothes, are a necessary form of transport, cheap, and easy to steer in narrow back lanes. They are a crude symbol of Indian society, but in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauling his plump passengers. Ponies harnessed to stagecoaches labored over cobblestones; men pushed bicycles loaded with hay bales and firewood. I had never seen so many different forms of transport: wagons, scooters, old cars, carts and sledges and odd, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles that might have been barouches. In one cart, their white flippers limp, dead sea turtles were stacked; on another cart was a dead buffalo, and in a third an entire family with their belongings—children, parrot cage, pots and pans. All these vehicles, and people surging among them. Then there was panic, and the people scattered as a tottering tramcar marked TOLLYGUNGE swayed down the bridge. Mr. Chatterjee said, “Too much of people!”
Mr. Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humorless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr. Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta’s prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a million) had been “somewhat overdramatized,” and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta’s garbage was “most intensively recycled.” It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap; vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter (“But everyone dies eventually,” said Mr. C.), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined—he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr. Chatterjee saw my shock. “Oh, him! He is always here!”
Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr. Chatterjee said, “I love this city.” We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr. Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.
The Hopping Man
I WAS ON MY WAY WHEN I SAW THE HOPPING MAN IN THE crowd on Chowringhee. He was very strange: in a city of mutilated people only the truly monstrous looked odd. This man had one leg—the other was amputated at the thigh—but he did not carry a crutch. He had a greasy bundle in one hand. He hopped past me with his mouth open, pumping his shoulders. I went after him, and he turned into Middleton Street, hopping very fast on one muscular leg, like a man on a pogo stick, his head rising above the crowd, then descending into it. I couldn’t run because of the other people, black darting clerks, swamis with umbrellas, armless beggars working their stumps at me, women proffering drugged babies, strolling families, men seeming to block the sidewalk with their wide flapping trousers and swinging arms. The hopping man was in the distance. I gained on him—I saw his head clearly—then lost him. On one leg he had outrun me, so I never found out how he did it. But afterward, whenever I thought of India, I saw him—hop, hop, hop—moving nimbly through those millions.
Memories of the Raj—Mr. Bernard in Burma
THE OLD MAN NEXT TO ME ON THE LOCAL TO MAYMYO SAID, “How old do you think I am? Guess.”
I said sixty, thinking he was seventy.
He straightened up. “Wrong! I am eighty. That is, I passed my seventy-ninth birthday, so I am in my eightieth year.”
The train switched back and forth on curves as sharp as those on the way to Simla and Landi Kotal. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it ground to a halt, starting up without a warning whistle, and it was then that the Burmese who had jumped out to piss chased after the train, retying their sarongs as they ran along the track and being whooped at by their friends in the train. The mist, the rain, and cold, low clouds gave the train a feeling of early morning, a chill and predawn dimness that lasted until noon. I put a shirt over my jersey, then a sweater and a plastic raincoat, but I was still cold, the damp penetrating to my bones. It was the coldest I had been since leaving England.
“I was born in 1894 in Rangoon,” said the old man suddenly. “My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the 1870s. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in 1888. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma—I’m sure you have heard of the Japanese war—all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things.”
He was eager to talk, glad to have a listener, and he didn’t need prompting questions. He spoke carefully, plucking at the cloth bundle, as he remembered a clause, and I hugged myself in the cold, grateful that all that was required of me was an occasional nod to show I was interested.
“I don’t remember much about Rangoon, and we moved to Mandalay when I was very young. I can remember practically everything from 1900 onward. Mr. MacDowell, Mr. Owen, Mr. Stewart, Captain Taylor—I worked for them all. I was head cook in the Royal Artillery officer’s mess, but I did more than cook—I did everything. I went all over Burma, in the camps when they were in the field. I have a good memory, I think. For example, I remember the day Queen Victoria died. I was in the second standard at Saint Xavier’s School in Mandalay. The teacher said to us, ‘The Queen is dead, so there is no school today.’ I was—what?—seven years old. I was a good student. I did my lessons, but when I finished with school there was nothing to do. In 1910 I was sixteen and I thought I should get a job on the railways. I wanted to be an engine driver. I wanted to be in a loco, traveling to Upper Burma. But I was disappointed. They made us carry coal in baskets on our heads. It was very hard work, you can’t imagine—so hot—and the man in charge of us, one Mr. Vander, was an Anglo-Indian. He shouted at us, of course, all the time; fifteen minutes for lunch and he still shouted. He was a fat man and not kind to us at all. There were a lot of Anglo-Indians on the railway then. I should say most of them were Anglo-Indians. I imagined I would be driving a loco and here I was carrying coal! The work was too much for me, so I ran away.
“I liked my next job very much. This was in the kitchen of the officers’ mess in the Royal Artillery. I still have some of the certificates, with RA written on them. I helped the cook at first and later became a cook myself. The cook’s name was Stewart and he showed me how to cut vegetables in various ways and how to make salad, fruit cup, the trifle, and all the different kinds of joints. It was 1912 then, and that was the best time in Burma. It will never be nice like that again. There was plenty of food, things were cheap, and even after the First World War started things were still fine. We never knew about the First World War in Burma; we heard nothing—we didn’t feel it. I knew a little bit about it because of my brother. He was fighting in Basra—I’m sure you know it—Basra, in Mesopotamia.
“At that time I was getting twenty-five rupees a month. It doesn’t sound so much, does it? But, do you know, it only cost me ten rupees to live—I saved the rest and later I bought a farm. When I went for my pay I collected one gold sovereign and a ten-rupee bank note. A gold sovereign was worth fifteen rupees. But to show you how cheap things were, a shirt cost four annas, food was plentiful, and life was very good. I married and had four children. I was at the officers’ mess from 1912 until 1941, when the Japanese came. I loved doing the work. The officers all knew me and I believe they respected me. They only got cross if something was late: everything had to be done on time, and of course if it wasn’t—if there was a delay—they were very angry. But not a single one was cruel to me. After all, they were officers—British officers, you know—and they had a good standard of behavior. Throughout that time, whenever they ate, they wore full-dress uniforms, and there were sometimes guests or wives in evening dress, black ties, and the ladies wore gowns. Beautiful as moths. I had a uniform too, white jacket, black tie, and soft shoes—you know the kind of soft shoes. They make no noise. I could come into a room and no one could hear me. They don’t make those shoes anymore, the kind that are noiseless.
“Things went on this way for some years. I remember one night at the mess. General Slim was there. You know him. And Lady Slim. They came into the kitchen. General and Lady Slim and some others, officers and their wives.
“I stood to attention.
“ ‘You are Bernard?’ Lady Slim asked me.
“I said, ‘Yes, Madam.’
“She said it was a good meal and very tasty. It was glazed chicken, vegetables, and trifle.
“I said, ‘I’m glad you liked it.’
“ ‘That is Bernard,’ General Slim said, and they went out.
“Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang came as well. He was very tall and did not speak. I served them. They stayed for two days—one night and two days. And the viceroy came—that was Lord Curzon. So many people came—the Duke of Kent, people from India, and another general—I will think of his name.
“Then the Japanese came. Oh, I remember that very well! It was like this. I was standing in the bush near my house—outside Maymyo, where the road forks. I wore a singlet and a longyi, as the Burmese do. The car was so huge, with a flag on the hood—the Japanese flag, rising sun, red and white. The car stopped at the fork. I didn’t think they could see me. A man called me over. He said something to me in Burmese.
“I said, ‘I speak English.’
“ ‘You are Indian?’ says this Japanese gentleman. I said yes. He put his hands together like this and said, ‘India-Japan. Friends!’ I smiled at him. I had never been to India in my life.
“There was a very high official in the car. He said nothing, but the other man said, ‘Is this the road to Maymyo?’
“I said it was. They drove on, up the hill. That was how the Japanese entered Maymyo.”
Gokteik Viaduct
TOWARD NOON WE WERE IN THE ENVIRONS OF GOKTEIK. THE mist was heavy and noisy waterfalls splashed down through pipe thickets of green bamboo. We crawled around the upper edges of hills, hooting at each curve, but out the windows there was only the whiteness of mist, shifted by a strong wind to reveal the more intense whiteness of cloud. It was like traveling in a slow plane with the windows open, and I envied the opium-smoker seated across from me his repose.
“The views are clouded,” said my escort, Security Officer U Sit Aye.
We climbed to nearly four thousand feet and then began descending into the gorge where, below, boat-shaped wisps of cloud moved quickly across from hillside to hillside and other lengths of vapor depended in the gorge with only the barest motion, like veils of threadbare silk. The viaduct, a monster of silver geometry in all the ragged rock and jungle, came into view and then slipped behind an outcrop of rock. It appeared again at intervals, growing larger, less silver, more imposing. Its presence there was bizarre, this man-made thing in so remote a place. Competing with the grandeur of the enormous gorge and yet seeming more grand than its surroundings, which were hardly negligible—the water rushing through the girder legs and falling on the tops of trees, the flights of birds through the swirling clouds and the blackness of the tunnels beyond the viaduct. We approached it slowly, stopping briefly at Gokteik Station, where hill people, tattooed Shans and straggling Chinese, had taken up residence in unused railway cars—freight cars and sheds. They came to the doors to watch the Lashio Mail go past.
There were wincing sentries at the entrance to the viaduct with rifles on their shoulders; the wind blew through their wall-less shelters and the drizzle continued. I asked U Sit Aye if I could hang out the window. He said it was all right with him, “but don’t fall.” The train wheels banged on the steel spans and the plunging water roared the birds out of their nests a thousand feet down. The cold had depressed me, and the journey had been unremarkable, but this lifted my spirits, crossing the long bridge in the rain, from one steep hill to another, over a jungly deepness, bursting with a river to which the monsoon had given a hectoring voice, and the engine whistling again and again, the echo carrying down the gorge to China.
The tunnels began, and they were cavernous, smelling of bat shit and sodden plants, with just enough light to illuminate the water rushing down the walls and the odd nightblooming flowers growing amid fountains of creepers and leaves in the twisted stone. When we emerged from the last tunnel we were far from the Gokteik Viaduct, and Naung-Peng, an hour more of steady traveling, was the end of the line for me. This was a collection of wooden shacks and grass-roofed shelters. The “canteen” where the food was found was one of these grass-roofed huts: inside was a long table with tureens of green and yellow stew, and Burmese, thinly clad for such a cold place, were warming themselves beside caldrons of rice bubbling over braziers. It looked like the field kitchen of some Mongolian tribe retreating after a terrible battle: the cooks were old Chinese women with black teeth, and the eaters were that mixed breed of people with a salad of genes drawn from China and Burma, whose only racial clue is their dress, sarong or trousers, parasol coolie hat or woolen cap, damp and shapeless as a mitten. The cooks ladled the stews onto large palm leaves and plopped down a fistful of rice; this the travelers ate with cups of hot weak tea. The rain beat on the roof and crackled on the mud outside, and Burmese hurried to the train with chickens bound so tightly in feather bundles they looked like a peculiar kind of native handicraft. I bought a two-cent cigar, found a stool near a brazier, and sat and smoked until the next train came.
The train I had taken to Naung-Peng didn’t leave for Lashio until the “down” train from Lashio arrived. Then the escort from Maymyo and the more heavily armed escort from Lashio changed trains in order to return to the places they had set out from that morning. Each train, I noticed, had an armored van coupled just behind the engine; this was a steel box with gun sights, simplified almost to crudity, like a child’s drawing of a tank, but it was empty because all the soldiers were at the end of the train, nine coaches away. How they would fight their way, under fire, eighty yards up the train during a raid, I do not know, nor did U Sit Aye supply an explanation. It was clear why the soldiers didn’t travel in the iron armored van: it was a cruelly uncomfortable thing, and very dark, since the gun sights were so small.
The return to Maymyo, downhill most of the way, was quick, and there was a continuous intake of food at small stations. U Sit Aye explained that the soldiers wired ahead for the food, and it was true, for at the smallest station a boy would rush up to the train as soon as it drew in, and with a bow this child with rain on his face would present a parcel of food at the door of the soldiers’ coach. Nearer to Maymyo they wired ahead for flowers, so when we arrived each soldier stepped out with curry stains on his shirt, a plug of betel in his mouth, and a bouquet of flowers, which he clutched with greater care than his rifle.
“Can I go now?” I said to U Sit Aye. I didn’t know whether I was going to be arrested for going through forbidden territory.
“You can go,” he said, and smiled. “But you must not take the train to Gokteik again. If you do there will be trouble.”
The Hué—Danang Passenger Train, Vietnam 1973
FROM THE AIR, THE GRAY UNREFLECTING WATER OF THE South China Sea looked ice cold, there were round Buddhist graves all through the marshes, and the royal city of Hué lay half-buried in drifts of snow. But this was wet sand, not snow, and those circular graves were bomb craters. Hué had a bizarre appearance. There had been plenty of barbed wire on the barricades but little war damage in Saigon; in Bien Hoa there were bombed-out houses; in Can Tho stories of ambushes and a hospital full of casualties. But in Hué I could see and smell the war; it was muddy roads rutted by army trucks and people running through the rain with bundles, bandaged soldiers tramping through the monsoon slime of the wrecked town or peering across their rifle barrels from the backs of overloaded trucks. The movements of the people had a distressed simultaneity. Barbed wire obstructed most streets, and houses were sloppily sandbagged. The next day, in the train, my American host, code-named Cobra One (who had come with his wife, Cobra Two, and my translator Dial for the ride) said, “Look—every house has its own bullet hole!” It was true: few houses were without a violent gouge and most had a series of ragged plugs torn out of their walls. The whole town had a dark brown look of violation, the smirches of raids among swelling puddles. It held some traces of imperial design (Vietnamese, French) but this delicacy was little more than a broken promise.
And it was very cold, with the sodden chill from the low sky and the drizzle clinging in damp rooms. I paced up and down, hugging myself to keep warm, during my lecture at the University of Hué—a colonial building, in fact, not academic at all, but rather what was once a fancy shop called Morin Brothers, which outlying planters used as a guest house and provisioner. I lectured in one of the former bedrooms, and from the windy balcony I could see the neglected courtyard, the cracked fishpond, the peeling shutters on the windows of the other rooms.
AT HUÉ STATION THE NEXT MORNING A TINY VIETNAMESE MAN in a gray gabardine suit and porkpie hat rushed forward and took my arm. “Welcome to Hué,” he said. “Your carriage is ready.” This was the stationmaster. He had been notified of my arrival and had shunted onto the Danang passenger train one of the director’s private cars. Because Vietnam Railways has been blown to pieces, each separate section has a director’s car on one of its sidings. Any other railway would have one such car, but Vietnam Railways is six separate lines, operating with laborious independence. As at Saigon, I boarded the private coach with some misgivings, knowing that my hand would tremble if I ever wrote anything ungenerous about these people. I felt loutish in my empty compartment, in my empty coach, watching Vietnamese lining up to buy tickets so that they could ride in over-crowded cars. The stationmaster had sped me away from the ticket window (“It is not necessary!”), but I had caught a glimpse of the fare: 143 piastres (twenty-five cents) to go to Danang, perhaps the cheapest seventy-five-mile ride in the world.
Dial, the translator, and Cobras One and Two boarded and joined me in the compartment. We sat in silence, peering out the window. The blocky whitewashed station building, a version of the Alamo, was riddled with bullet holes that had broken off pieces of the stucco, revealing red brickwork beneath. But the station, the same vintage as the USIS official’s bay-windowed villa and Morin Brothers’ shop, had been built to last—a far cry from the patch of waste ground and cement foundations just outside Hué, where the First Marine Division’s collapsed barracks and splintered obstacle course lay sinking in the mud. It was as if all the apparatus of war had been timed to self-destruct the day the Americans pulled out, leaving no trace of the brutal adventure behind. In the train yard, several armored vans showed rips in their steel sides where mines had punched them apart. These vans were the homes of a number of sad-looking children. In most tropical countries adults stand, like those posed by William Blake, at the fringe of the echoing green, watching children at play. In Vietnam the children play alone, and the adults appear to have been swept away; you look for the parents among large groups of children, for the background figure of an adult. But (and this distorts the landscape) they are missing. That old woman carrying a child on her back, with the long muddy skirt and rain-drenched hair, is another child.
“Have you seen the sink in the w.c.?” asked Dial.
“No.”
“You turn on the faucet and guess what comes out?”
“Rust,” I said.
“Nothing,” said Cobra Two.
Dial said, “Water!”
“Right,” said Cobra One. “Paul, take that down. The faucets work. Running water available. What do you think of that?”
But this was the only sink in the train.
The stationmaster had said that the line to Danang had been open for four months, having been out of action for five years. So far there had been no recent disruptions. Why its reopening coincided with the American withdrawal no one could explain. My own theory was that there were now no American trucks plying back and forth along the only road that goes between Hué and Danang, Highway One, the poignantly named “Street Without Joy”; this shrinking of expensive road traffic had forced the Vietnamese into the more sensible course of opening the railway. The war had become not smaller but less mechanized, less elaborate. Money and foreign troops had complicated it, but now the Vietnamese had reverted from the corporation-style hostilities of the Americans to the colonial superstructure, slower communications, a return to farming, housing in the old buildings, and a transport system based on the railway. The American design of the war had been abandoned—the empty firebases, the skeletons of barracks, and the tom-up roads showed this to be a fact, visible from the passenger train clanking toward Danang with its cargo of Hué-grown vegetables.
The bridges on that line speak of the war; they are recent and have new rust on their girders. Others, broken, simulating gestures without motion, lay beyond them where they had been twisted and pitched into ravines by volumes of explosives. Some rivers contained masses of broken bridges, black knots of steel bunched grotesquely at the level of the water. They were not all recent. In the gorges where there were two or three, I took the oldest ones to be relics of Japanese bombing, and others to be examples of demolition from the later terrorism of the fifties and sixties, each war leaving its own unique wreck. They were impressively mangled, like outrageous metal sculptures. The Vietnamese hung their washing on them.
It was at the rivers—at these bridges—that soldiers were most in evidence. These were strategic points: a bombed bridge could put the line out of action for as long as a year. So at each side of the bridge, just above it on outcrops of rock, there were igloos of sandbags, and pillboxes and bunkers, where sentries, most of them very young, waved to the train with carbines. On their shelters were slogans flying on red and yellow banners. Dial translated them for me. A typical one was GREET THE PEACE HAPPILY BUT DON’T SLEEP AND FORGET THE WAR. The soldiers stood around in their undershirts; they could be seen swinging in hammocks; some swam in the rivers or were doing their washing. Some watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms, a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men—these boys—had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
“That’s VC up there,” said Cobra One. He pointed to a series of ridges that grew, off in the distance, into hills. “You could say eighty percent of the country is controlled by the VC, but that doesn’t mean anything because they only have ten percent of the population.”
“I was up there,” said Dial. I kept forgetting that Dial had been a Marine. “We were on patrol for about three weeks. Christ, we were cold! But now and then we’d luck out and get to a village. The people would see us coming and run away, and we’d use their huts—sleep in their beds. I remember a couple of times—it really killed me—we had to burn all their furniture to keep warm. We couldn’t find any firewood.”
The mountains had begun to rise, acquiring the shape of amphitheaters with a prospect of the China Sea; eerie and bare and blue, their summits smothered in mist, they trailed smoke from slash-and-burn fires. We were on the narrow coastal strip, moving south on the patchy shoreline that still belonged to the Saigon government, between the mountains and the sea. The weather had changed, or perhaps we had finally been dragged free of the drizzle that was constant in Hué. Now it was sunny and warm: the Vietnamese climbed up to the roofs of the coaches and sat with their legs hanging past the eaves. We were close enough to the beach to hear the pounding surf, and ahead in the curving inlets that doubled up the train, fishing smacks and canoes rode the frothy breakers to the shore, where men in parasol hats spun circular webbed nets over the crayfish.
“God, this is such a beautiful country,” said Cobra Two. She was snapping pictures out of the window, but no picture could duplicate the complexity of the beauty: over there, the sun lighted a bomb scar in the forest, and next to it smoke filled the bowl of a valley; a column of rain from one fugitive cloud slanted on another slope, and the blue gave way to black green, to rice green on the flat fields of shoots, which became, after a strip of sand, an immensity of blue ocean. The distances were enormous and the landscape was so large it had to be studied in parts, like a mural seen by a child.
“I had no idea,” I said. Of all the places the railway had taken me since London, this was the loveliest.
“No one knows it,” said Cobra Two. “No one in the States has the slightest idea how beautiful it is. Look at that—God, look at that!”
We were at the fringes of a bay that was green and sparkling in bright sunlight. Beyond the leaping jade plates of the sea was an overhang of cliffs and the sight of a valley so large it contained sun, smoke, rain, and cloud—all at once—independent quantities of color. I had been unprepared for this beauty; it surprised and humbled me in the same degree the emptiness had in rural India. Who has mentioned the simple fact that the heights of Vietnam are places of unimaginable grandeur? Though we can hardly blame a frightened draftee for not noticing this magnificence, we should have known all along that the French would not have colonized it, nor would the Americans have fought so long, if such ripeness did not invite the eye to take it.
“That’s the Ashau Valley,” said Cobra One, who until then had been doing an amusing imitation of Walter Brennan. The ridges mounted into the mist; below them, in the smoke and sun, were deep black gorges marked by waterfalls. Cobra One was shaking his head: “A lot of good men died there.”
Dazzled by the scenery, I walked through the train and saw a blind man feeling his way to the door—I could hear his lungs working like a bellows; wrinkled old ladies with black teeth and black pajamas clutched wicker bales of spring onions; and soldiers—one ashen-faced in a wheelchair, one on crutches, others with new bandages on their hands and heads, and all of them in the American uniforms that suggested travesty in its true sense. An official moved through the coaches checking the ID cards of civilian males, looking for draft evaders. This official got tangled in the piece of string held by a blind man and attached to the waist of a child leading him. There were many armed soldiers on the train, but none looked like escorts. The train was defended by concentrations of soldiers at those bridge emplacements, and this is perhaps why it is so easy to blow up the line with command-detonated mines. These mines are slipped under the rails at night; when the train goes over one of them, a hidden man—who might be a Viet Cong or a bomber hired by a trucker in Danang—explodes the charge.
Twice during that trip, at small station sidings, children were offered to me by old ladies; they were like the pale-skinned, light-haired children I had seen in Can Tho and Bien Hoa. But these were older, perhaps four or five, and it was strange to hear these American-looking children speaking Vietnamese. It was even stranger to see the small Vietnamese farmers in the vastness of a landscape whose beautiful trees and ravines and jade crags—these launched from cloud banks—hid their enemies. From the train I could turn my eyes to the mountains and almost forget the country’s name, but the truth was closer and cruel: the Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism. The tragedy was that we had come, and, from the beginning, had not planned to stay: Danang was to be proof of that.
The train was under the gigantic Hai Van Pass (“The Pass of Clouds”), a natural division on the north side of Danang, like a Roman wall. If the Viet Cong got past it the way would be clear to Danang, and already the Viet Cong were bivouacked on the far slopes, waiting. Like the other stretches between Huè and Danang, the most scenically dramatic mountains and valleys were—and are still—the most terrible battlefields. Beyond the Hai Van Pass we entered a long tunnel. By this time I had walked the length of the train and was standing on the front balcony of the diesel, under the bright headlights. Ahead, a large bat dislodged itself from the ceiling and flapped clumsily this way and that, winging against the walls, trying to keep ahead of the roaring engine. The bat swooped, grazing the track, then rose—more slowly now—as the end of the tunnel came into view, flying closer to the engine with every second. It was like a toy of wood and paper, its spring running down, and at last it was ten feet from my face, a brown panicky creature beating its bony wings. It tired, dropped a few feet, then in the light of the tunnel’s exit—a light it could not see—its wings collapsed, it pitched forward, and quickly tumbled under the engine’s wheels.
“The Street Without Joy” was above us as we raced across a treeless promontory to the Nam Ho Bridge, five dark spans secured against underwater sappers by great rusting wreaths of barbed wire. These were the outer wastes of Danang, a grim district of supply bases that has been taken over by ARVN forces and squatters; shelters—huts and lean-tos—made exclusively with war materials, sandbags, plastic sheeting, corrugated iron stamped u.s. ARMY, and food wrappers marked with the initials of charitable agencies. Danang was pushed next to the sea and all the land around it had been stripped of trees. If ever a place looked poisoned, it was Danang.
Raiding and looting were skills the war had required the Vietnamese to learn. We got out at Danang Station and after lunch drove with an American official to the south side of the city, where GIs had been housed in several large camps. Once there had been thousands of American soldiers; now there were none. But the barracks were filled to bursting with refugees; because there had been no maintenance, the camps were in a sorry condition and looked as if they had been shelled. Laundry flew from the flagpoles; windows were broken or boarded up; there were cooking fires in the roads. The less lucky refugees had set up house in wheelless trucks and the sewage stink was terrible—the camps could be smelled two hundred yards away.
“The people were waiting at the gates and over by those fences when the Americans started packing,” said the American official. “Like locusts or I-don’t-know-what. As soon as the last soldier left they rushed in, looted the stores, and commandeered the houses.”
The refugees, using ingenuity, looted the barracks; the Vietnamese government officials, using their influence, looted the hospitals. I kept hearing stories in Danang (and, again, in the southern port of Nha Trang) of how, the day the Americans left, the hospitals were cleaned out—drugs, oxygen cylinders, blankets, beds, medical appliances, anything that could be carried. Chinese ships were anchored offshore to receive this loot, which was taken to Hong Kong and resold. But there is a just God in Heaven: a Swiss businessman told me that some of these pilfered medical supplies found their way, via Hong Kong, to Hanoi. No one knew what happened to the enriched government officials. Some of the looting stories sounded exaggerated; I believed the ones about the raided hospitals because no American official would tell me where there was a hospital receiving patients, and that’s the sort of thing an American would know.
For several miles on the road south the ravaged camps swarmed with Vietnamese whose hasty adaptations could be seen in doors knocked through barracks’ walls and whole barracks torn down to make ten flimsy huts. The camps themselves had been temporary—they were all plywood panels, splitting in the dampness, and peeling metal sheets, and sagging fence posts—so none of these crude shelters would last. If one felt pity for the demoralized American soldiers who had lived in these horrible camps, one felt even sorrier for the inheritors of all this junk.
The bars, with flyblown signs advertising COLD BEER, MUSIC, GIRLS, were empty and most looked bankrupt, but it was in the late afternoon that I saw the real dereliction of Danang. We drove out to the beach where, fifty feet from the crashing waves, a fairly new bungalow stood. It was a cozy beach house, built for an American general who had recently decamped. Who was this general? No one knew his name. Whose beach house was it now? No one knew that either, but Cobra One ventured, “Probably some ARVN honcho.” On the porch a Vietnamese soldier idled with a carbine, and behind him a table held a collection of bottles: vodka, whisky, ginger ale, soda water, a jug of orange juice, an ice bucket. Laughter, slightly drunken and mirthless, carried from inside the house.
“I think someone’s moved in,” said Cobra One. “Let’s have a look.”
We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical—both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad’s dark reenactment of colonialism, “Outpost of Progress,” were made into a comedy, it would have looked something like that.
“Hey, we got company!” said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.
While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, bat-like Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, “Howdy,” and made for the front door.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt your picnic,” said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.
“You’re not interrupting nothing,” said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.
“This is the head of security,” said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.
As if in acknowledgment, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m the head spook around here. You just get here?” He was at that point of drunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.
“You took the what?” asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hué on the train. “You’re lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.”
“That’s not what the stationmaster in Hué told us,” said Cobra One.
“The stationmaster in Hué doesn’t know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,” said the CIA man. “I’m telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don’t know how many wounded.”
“With a mine?”
“Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.”
The CIA man, who was head of security for the entire province, was lying, but at the time I had no facts to refute the story with. The stationmaster in Hué had said there hadn’t been a mining incident in months, and this was confirmed by the railway officials in Danang. But the CIA man was anxious to impress us that he had his finger on the country’s pulse, the more so since his girlfriend had joined us and was draped around his neck. The other fat man was in the bungalow, talking in frantic whispers to one of the girls, and the black man was a little distance from the porch, doing chin-ups on a bar spliced between two palms. The CIA man said, “There’s one thing you gotta keep in mind. The VC don’t have any support in the villages—and neither do the government troops. See, that’s why everything’s so quiet.”
The Vietnamese girl pinched his cheek and shouted to her friend at the edge of the beach who was watching the black man swing a heavy chain around his head. The man inside the bungalow came out and poured himself a whisky. He drank it worriedly, watching the CIA man rant.
“It’s a funny situation,” the CIA man was saying. “Like you say this village is clean and this village is all Charley, but there’s one thing you gotta understand: most people aren’t fighting. I don’t care what you read in the papers—these journalists are more full of shit than a Christmas turkey. I’m telling you it’s quiet.”
“What about the mine?”
“Yeah, the mine. You should stay off the train; that’s all I can say.”
“It’s different at night,” said the man with the whisky.
“Well, see, the country kinda changes hands after dark,” said the CIA man.
“I think we’d better go,” said Cobra One.
“What’s the rush? Stick around,” said the CIA man. “You’re a writer,” he said to me. “I’m a writer too—I mean, I do a little writing. I pound out articles now and then. Boy’s Life—I do quite a bit for Boy’s Life, and, um—”
The girls, shouting in Vietnamese and giggling, were beginning to distract him.
“—anyway, where’d you say you’re going? Marble Mountain? You wanna stay away from there about this time.” He looked at his watch. It was five-thirty. “There might be Charley there. I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to be responsible.”
We left, and when we got to the car I looked back at the bungalow. The CIA man waved his cigar at us; he seemed to be unaware that a Vietnamese girl still clung to him. His friend stood on the porch with him, agitating in his hand a paper cup full of whisky and ginger ale. The black man had returned to the high bar: he was doing chin-ups; the girls were counting. The sentry sat hugging his rifle. Beyond them was the sea. The CIA man called out, but the tide was coming in and the noisy surf drowned his words. The refugees in Danang had taken over the barracks; these three had the general’s beach house. In a sense they were all that remained of the American stake in the war: degenerate sentiment, boozy fears, and simplifications. For them the war was over: they were just amusing themselves, raising a little cain.
Four miles south of this, near Marble Mountain, our car stalled behind a slow ox cart. While we were waiting, a Vietnamese boy of about ten rushed over and screamed through the window.
“What did he say?” asked Cobra One.
“ ‘Motherfucker,’ ” said Dial.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The Trans-Siberian Express
AFTERWARD, WHENEVER I THOUGHT OF THE TRANS-Siberian Express, I saw stainless-steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive—from Skovorodino onward its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smoldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yacht-like snowplows at Zima; the ocherous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran toward the lighted station—something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin’s white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odor, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped onto the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women (“No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments”—Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat on opposite bunks, mustached male mirroring mustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o’clock in the morning.
The Rossiya was not like the Vostok; it was new. The sleeping cars of East German make were steel syringes, insulated in gray plastic and heated by coal-fired boilers attached to furnace and samovar that gave the front end of each carriage the look of a cartoon atom smasher. The provodnik often forgot to stoke the furnace, and then the carriage took on a chill that somehow induced nightmares in me while at the same time denying me sleep. The other passengers in Soft were either suspicious, drunk, or unpleasant: a Goldi and his White Russian wife and small leathery child who rode in a nest of boots and blankets, two aggrieved Canadians who ranted to the two Australian librarians about the insolence of the provodnik, an elderly Russian lady who did the whole trip wearing the same frilly nightgown, a Georgian who looked as if he had problems at the other end, and several alcoholics who played noisy games of dominoes in their pajamas. Conversation was hopeless, sleep was alarming, and the perversity of the clocks confounded my appetite. That first day I wrote in my diary, Despair makes me hungry.
The dining car was packed. Everyone had vegetable soup, then an omelet wrapped around a Wiener schnitzel, served by two waitresses—a very fat lady who bossed the diners incessantly, and a pretty black-haired girl who doubled as scullion and looked as if she might jump off the train at the next clear opportunity. I ate my lunch, and the three Russians at my table tried to bum cigarettes from me. As I had none we attempted a conversation: they were going to Omsk; I was an American. Then they left. I cursed myself for not buying a Russian phrase book in Tokyo.
A man sat down with me. His hands were shaking. He ordered. Twenty minutes later the fat lady gave him a carafe of yellow wine. He splashed it into his glass and drank it in two gulps. He had a wound on his thumb, which he gnawed as he looked worriedly around the car. The fat lady gave his shoulder a slap and he was off, moving tipsily in the direction of Hard. But the fat lady left me in peace. I stayed in the dining car, sipping the sticky wine, watching the scenery change from flat snow fields to hills—the first since Nakhodka. The drooping sun gilded them beautifully and I expected to see people in the shallow woods. I stared for an hour, but saw none.
Nor could I establish where we were. My Japanese map of the Soviet Union was not helpful, and it was only in the evening that I learned we had passed through Poshkovo, on the Chinese border. This added to my disorientation: I seldom knew where we were, I never knew the correct time, and I grew to hate the three freezers I had to pass through to get to the dining car.
The fat lady’s name was Anna Feyodorovna and, though she screamed at her fellow countrymen, she was pleasant to me, and urged me to call her Annushka. I did and she rewarded me with a special dish, cold potatoes and chicken—dark sinewy meat that was like some dense textile. Annushka watched me eat. She winked over her glass of tea (she dipped bread into the tea and sucked it) and then cursed a cripple who sat down at my table. Eventually she banged a steel plate of potatoes and fatty meat in front of him.
The cripple ate slowly, lengthening the awful meal by sawing carefully at his meat. A waiter went by and there was a smash. The waiter had dropped an empty carafe onto our table, shattering the cripple’s glass. The cripple went on eating with exquisite sang-froid, refusing to acknowledge the waiter, who was muttering apologies as he picked up pieces of broken glass from the table. Then the waiter plucked an enormous sliver of glass from the cripple’s mashed potatoes. The cripple choked and pushed the plate away. The waiter got him a new meal.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” asked the cripple.
“Yes, but very badly.”
“I speak a little,” he said in German. “I learned it in Berlin. Where are you from?”
I told him. He said, “What do you think of the food here?”
“Not bad, but not very good.”
“I think it is very bad,” he said. “What’s the food like in America?”
“Wonderful,” I said.
He said, “Capitalist! You are a capitalist!”
“Perhaps.”
“Capitalism bad, communism good.”
“Bullshit,” I said in English, then in German, “You think so?”
“In America people kill each other with pistols. Pah! Pah! Pah! Like that.”
“I don’t have a pistol.”
“What about the Negroes? The black people?”
“What about them?”
“You kill them.”
“Who tells you these things?”
“Newspapers. I read it for myself. Also it’s on the radio all the time.”
“Soviet radio,” I said.
“Soviet radio is good radio,” he said.
The radio in the dining car was playing jazzy organ music. It was on all day, and even in the compartments—each one had a loudspeaker—it continued to mutter because it could not be turned off completely. I jerked my thumb at the loudspeaker and said, “Soviet radio is too loud.”
He guffawed. Then he said, “I’m an invalid. Look here—no foot, just a leg. No foot, no foot!”
He raised his felt boot and squashed the toe with the ferrule of his cane. He said, “I was in Kiev during the war, fighting the Germans. They were shooting—Pah! Pah!—like that. I jumped into the water and started swimming. It was winter—cold water—very cold water! They shot my foot off, but I didn’t stop swimming. Then another time my captain said to me, ‘Look, more Germans—’ and in the snow—very deep snow—”
That night I slept poorly on my bench-sized bunk, dreaming of goose-stepping Germans with pitchforks, wearing helmets like the Rossiya’s soup bowls; they forced me into an icy river. I woke. My feet lay exposed in the draft of the cold window; the blanket had slipped off, and the blue night light of the compartment made me think of an operating theater. I took an aspirin and slept until it was light enough in the corridor to find the toilet. That day, around noon, we stopped at Skovorodino. The provodnik, my jailer, showed a young bearded man into my compartment. This was Vladimir. He was going to Irkutsk, which was two days away. For the rest of the afternoon Vladimir said no more. He read Russian paperbacks with patriotic pictures on their covers, and I looked out the window. Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed an imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall.
At one bend outside Skovorodino I saw we were being pulled by a giant steam locomotive. I diverted myself by trying (although Vladimir sucked his teeth in disapproval) to snap a picture of it as it rounded curves, shooting plumes of smoke out its side. The smoke rolled beside the train and rose slowly through the forests of birch and the Siberian cedars, where there were footprints on the ground and signs of dead fires, but not a soul to be seen. The countryside then was so changeless it might have been a picture pasted against the window. It put me to sleep. I dreamed of a particular cellar in Medford High School, then woke and saw Siberia and almost cried. Vladimir had stopped reading. He sat against the wall sketching on a pad with colored pencils, a picture of telephone poles. I crept into the corridor. One of the Canadians had his face turned to the miles of snow.
He said, “Thank God we’re getting off this pretty soon. How far are you going?”
“Moscow; then the train to London.”
“Tough shitsky.”
“So they say.”
There was a young black-haired man who swept the floor and rarely spoke to anyone. Viktor, a waiter, pointed him out to me and said, “Gitler! Gitler!”
The man ignored him, but to make his point Viktor stamped on the floor and ground his boot as if killing a cockroach. Vassily Prokofyevich, the manager, put his forefinger under his nose to make a mustache and said, “Heil Gitler!” So the young man might have been an anti-Semite or, since Russian mockery is not very subtle, he might have been a Jew.
One afternoon the young man came over to me and said, “Angela Davis!”
“Gitler!” said Viktor, grinning.
“Angela Davis karasho,” said Gitler and began to rant in Russian about the way Angela Davis had been persecuted in America. He shook his broom at me, his hair falling over his eyes, and he continued quite loudly until Vassily banged on the table.
“Politics!” said Vassily. “We don’t want politics here. This is a restaurant, not a university.” He spoke in Russian, but his message was plain and he was obviously very angry with Gitler.
The rest were embarrassed. They sent Gitler to the kitchen and brought another bottle of wine. Vassily said, “Gitler—ni karasho!” But it was Viktor who was the most conciliatory. He stood up and folded his arms, and, shushing the kitchen staff, he said in a little voice:
Zee fearst of My
,
Zee ’art of sprreng!
Oh, leetle seeng
,
En everyseen we do
,
Remember always to say “pliz”
En dun forget “sank you”!
Later, Viktor took me to his compartment to show me his new fur hat. He was very proud of it, since it had cost him nearly a week’s pay. The pretty waitress, Nina, was also in the compartment, which was shared by Vassily and Anna—quite a crowd for a space no bigger than an average-sized clothes closet. Nina showed me her passport and the picture of her mother and, while this was going on, Viktor disappeared. I put my arm around Nina and with my free hand took off her white scullion’s cap. Her black hair fell to her shoulders. I held her tightly and kissed her, tasting the kitchen. The train was racing. But the compartment door was open, and Nina pulled away and said softly, “Nyet, nyet, nyet.”
On the day before Christmas, in the afternoon, we arrived at Sverdlovsk. The sky was leaden and it was very cold. I hopped out the door and watched an old man being taken down the stairs to the platform. While he was being moved, the blankets had slipped down to his chest, where his hands lay rigid, two gray claws, their color matching his face. His son went over and pulled the blankets high to cover his mouth. He knelt in the ice and packed a towel around the old man’s head.
Seeing me standing nearby, the son said in German, “Sverdlovsk. This is where Europe begins and Asia ends. Here are the Urals.” He pointed toward the back of the train and said, “Asia,” and then toward the engine, “Europe.”
“How is your father?” I asked, when the stretcher bearers arrived and put on their harnesses. The stretcher was a hammock, slung between them.
“I think he’s dead,” he said. “Das vedanya.”
My depression increased as we sped toward Perm in a whirling snowstorm. The logging camps and villages lay half-buried, and behind them were birches a foot thick, the ice on their branches giving them the appearance of silver filigree. I could see children crossing a frozen river in the storm, moving so slowly in the direction of some huts, they broke my heart. I lay back on my berth and took my radio, its plastic cold from standing by the window, and tried to find a station. I put up the antenna—the zombie now sharing my compartment watched me from behind his clutter of uncovered food. A lot of static, then a French station, then “Jingle Bells.” The zombie smiled. I switched it off.
The next morning, Christmas, I woke and looked over at the zombie sleeping with his arms folded on his chest like a mummy’s. The provodnik told me it was six o’clock Moscow time. My watch said eight. I put it back two hours and waited for dawn, surprised that so many people in the car had decided to do the same thing. In darkness we stood at the windows, watching our reflections. Shortly afterward I saw why they were there. We entered the outskirts of Yaroslavl and I heard the others whispering to themselves. The old lady in the frilly nightgown, the Goldi man and his wife and child, the domino-playing drunks, even the zombie who had been monkeying with my radio: they pressed their faces against the windows as we began rattling across a long bridge. Beneath us, half-frozen, very black, and in places reflecting the flames of Yaroslavl’s chimneys, was the Volga.
… Royal David’s city
,
Stood a lowly cattle shed …
What was that? Sweet voices, as clear as organ tones, drifted from my compartment. I froze and listened. The Russians, awestruck by the sight of the Volga, had fallen silent; they were hunched, staring down at the water. But the holy music, fragrant and slight, moved through the air, warming it like an aroma.
Where a Mother laid her Baby
In a manger for His bed …
The hymn wavered, but the silent reverence of the Russians and the slowness of the train allowed the soft children’s voices to perfume the corridor. My listening became a meditation of almost unbearable sadness, as if joy’s highest refinement was borne on a needle point of pain.
Mary was that Mother mild
,
Jesus Christ her little Child …
I went into the compartment and held the radio to my ear until the broadcast ended, a program of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day. We traveled in thick fog and through whorls of brown blowing mist, which made the woods ghostly. It was not cold outside: some snow had melted, and the roads—more frequent now—were rutted and muddy. All morning the tree trunks, black with dampness, were silhouettes in the fog, and the pine groves at the very limit of visibility in the mist took on the appearance of cathedrals with dark spires. In places the trees were so dim, they were like an afterimage on the eye. I had never felt close to the country, but the fog distanced me even more, and I felt, after six thousand miles and all those days in the train, only a great remoteness; every reminder of Russia—the women in orange canvas jackets working on the line with shovels, the sight of a Lenin statue, the station signboards stuck in yellow ice, and the startled magpies croaking in Russian at the gliding train—all this annoyed me. I resented Russia’s size; I wanted to be home.
The Old
Patagonian Express
Travel Is a Vanishing Act
TRAVEL IS A VANISHING ACT, A SOLITARY TRIP DOWN A pinched line of geography to oblivion.
What’s become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip?
But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words. That sort of disappearance is elemental, but few come back silent. And yet the convention is to telescope travel writing, to start—as so many novels do—in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without having first guided him there. “The white ants had made a meal of my hammock,” the book might begin; or “Down there, the Patagonian valley deepened to gray rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods.” Or, to choose actual first sentences at random from three books within arm’s reach:
It was towards noon on March 1, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa.
(The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
, by Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson)
“Welcome!” says the big signboard by the side of the road as the car completes the corkscrew ascent from the heat of the South Indian plains into an almost alarming coolness.
(Ooty Preserved
, by Mollie Panter-Downes)
From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra, capital of Ghana.
(Which Tribe Do You Belong To?
by Alberto Moravia)
My usual question, unanswered by these—by most—travel books, is: how did you get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet, because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, “From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra …”
Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step (now past the cuckoo clock, now down Fulton to the Fellsway) brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway laborers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as riveting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.
The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane’s tilted fuselage. The joke opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody. How does it go? “Below us lay the tropical green, the flooded valley, the patchwork quilt of farms, and as we penetrated the cloud I could see dirt roads threading their way into the hills and cars so small they looked like toys. We circled the airport and, as we came in low for the landing, I saw the stately palms, the harvest, the rooftops of the shabby houses, the square fields stitched together with crude fences, the people like ants, the colorful …”
I have never found this sort of guesswork very convincing. When I am landing in a plane my heart is in my mouth; I wonder—doesn’t everyone?—if we are going to crash. My life flashes before me, a brief selection of sordid and pathetic trivialities. Then a voice tells me to stay in my seat until the plane comes to a complete stop; and when we land the loudspeakers break into an orchestral version of “Moon River.” I suppose if I had the nerve to look around I might see a travel writer scribbling, “Below us lay the tropical green—”
Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? Perhaps there is nothing to say. There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives. You didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time-traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright—from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, “What I’d really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.”
But apologies are not necessary. An airplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston—but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport. If the passenger conceives of this species of transfer as travel and offers the public his book, the first foreigner the reader meets is either a clothes-grubbing customs man or a mustached demon at the immigration desk. Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that airplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armor.
This is obvious. What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as the trains run from Medford, Massachusetts; to end my book where travel books begin.
I had nothing better to do. I was at a stage I had grown to recognize in my writing life. I had just finished a novel, two years of indoor activity. Looking for something else to write, I found that instead of hitting nails on the head I was only striking a series of glancing blows. I hated cold weather. I wanted some sunshine. I had no job—what was the problem? I studied maps and there appeared to be a continuous track from my house in Medford to the Great Plateau of Patagonia in southern Argentina. There, in the town of Esquel, one ran out of railways. There was no line to Tierra del Fuego, but between Medford and Esquel rather a lot of them.
In this vagrant mood I boarded that first train, the one people took to work. They got off—their train trip was already over. I stayed on: mine was just beginning.
On the Frontier
IT WAS A RAINY NIGHT IN LAREDO—NOT LATE, AND YET THE place seemed deserted. A respectable frontier town, sprawling at the very end of the Amtrak line, it lay on a geometric grid of bright black streets on a dirt bluff that had the clawed and bulldozed look of a recent quarry. Below was the Rio Grande, a silent torrent slipping past Laredo in a cut as deep as a sewer; the south bank was Mexico.
The city lights were on, making the city’s emptiness emphatic. In that glare I could see its character as more Mexican than Texan. The lights flashed, suggesting life, as lights do. But where were the people? There were stoplights on every corner, WALK and WAIT signs winked on and off; the two-story shop fronts were floodlit, lamps burned in the windows of one-story houses; the streetlights made the puddles bright holes in slabs of wet road. The effect of this illumination was eerie, that of a plague city brightened against looters. The stores were heavily padlocked; the churches lit up in cannonades of arc lamps; there were no bars. All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.
No traffic waited at the red lights, no pedestrians at the crosswalks. And though the city was silent, in the drizzly air was an unmistakable heart murmur, the threep-threep of music being played far away. I walked and walked, from my hotel to the river, from the river to a plaza, and into the maze of streets until I was almost certain I was lost. I saw nothing. And it could be frightening, seeing—four blocks away—a blinking sign I took to be a watering hole, a restaurant, an event, a sign of life, and walking to it and arriving soaked and gasping to discover that it was a shoe store or a funeral parlor, shut for the night. So, walking the streets of Laredo, I heard only my own footsteps, the false courage of their click, their faltering at alleyways, their splashes as I briskly returned to the only landmark I knew—the river.
The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine from which every bush and tree had been removed in order to allow the police to patrol it. Three bridges linked the United States to Mexico here. Standing on the bluff I heard the threep-threep louder: it was coming from the Mexican side of the river, a just-discernible annoyance, like a neighbor’s radio. Now I could see plainly the twisting river, and it struck me that a river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.
Looking south across the river, I realized that I was looking toward another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there—music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people did things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope—the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.
A car drew up behind me. I was alarmed, then reassured when I saw it was a taxi. I gave the driver the name of my hotel and got in, but when I tried to make conversation he responded by grunting. He understood only his own language.
In Spanish I said, “It is quiet here.”
That was the first time on my trip that I spoke Spanish. After this, nearly every conversation I had was in Spanish. But in the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English. I have no patience with sentences that go, “ ‘Caramba!’ said the campesino, eating his empanada at the estancia …”
“Laredo,” said the taxi driver. He shrugged.
“Where are all the people?”
“The other side.”
“Nuevo Laredo?”
“Boys’ Town,” he said. The English took me by surprise, the phrase tickled me. He said, now in Spanish again, “There are one thousand prostitutes in the Zone.”
It was a round number, but I was convinced. And that of course explained what had happened to this city. After dark, Laredo slipped into Nuevo Laredo, leaving the lights on. It was why Laredo looked respectable, even genteel, in a rainswept and mildewed way: the clubs, the bars, the brothels, were across the river. The red-light district was ten minutes away, in another country.
BUT THERE WAS MORE TO THIS MORAL SPELLED OUT IN TRANSPONTINE geography than met the eye. If the Texans had the best of both worlds in decreeing that the fleshpots should remain on the Mexican side of the International Bridge—the river flowing, like the erratic progress of a tricky argument, between vice and virtue—the Mexicans had the sense of tact to keep Boys’ Town camouflaged by decrepitude, on the other side of the tracks, another example of the geography of morality. Divisions everywhere: no one likes to live next door to a whorehouse. And yet both cities existed because of Boys’ Town. Without the whoring and racketeering, Nuevo Laredo would not have had enough municipal funds to plant geraniums around the statue of its madly gesturing patriot in the plaza, much less advertise itself as a bazaar of wickerwork and guitar-twanging folklore—not that anyone ever went to Nuevo Laredo to be sold baskets. And Laredo required the viciousness of its sister city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had the airport and the churches, Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist David Ricardo (1772–1823).
At first glance, this looked like the typical sort of mushroom-and-dunghill relationship that exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. But the longer I thought about it the more Laredo seemed like all of the United States, and Nuevo Laredo all of Latin America. This frontier was more than an example of cozy hypocrisy; it demonstrated all one needed to know about the morality of the Americas, the relationship between the puritanical efficiency north of the border, and the bumbling and passionate disorder—the anarchy of sex and hunger—south of it. It was not as simple as that, since there was obviously villainy and charity in both, and yet crossing the river (the Mexicans don’t call it the Rio Grande; they call it the Rio Bravo de Norte), no more than an idle traveler making his way south with a suitcase of dirty laundry, a sheaf of railway timetables, a map, and a pair of leakproof shoes, I felt as if I was acting out a significant image. Crossing a national boundary and seeing such a difference on the other side had something to do with it: truly, every human feature there had the resonance of metaphor.
Lost Lover in Veracruz
I HAD PLANNED TO GET TO BED EARLY IN ORDER TO BE UP AT dawn to buy my ticket to Tapachula. It was when I switched the light off that I heard the music; darkness gave the sounds clarity, and it was too vibrant to be coming from a radio. It was a strong, full-throated brass band:
Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free
,
How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
“Pomp and Circumstance”? In Veracruz? At eleven o’clock at night?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet
.
I dressed and went downstairs.
In the center of the plaza, near the four fountains, was the Mexican Navy Band, in white uniforms, giving Elgar the full treatment. Lights twinkled in the boughs of the laburnum trees, and there were floodlights, too—pink ones—playing on the balconies and the palms. A sizable crowd had gathered to listen—children played near the fountains, people walked their dogs, lovers held hands. The night was cool and balmy, the crowd good-humored and attentive. I think it was one of the prettiest sights I have ever seen; the Mexicans had the handsome thoughtful look, the serenity that comes of listening closely to lovely music. It was late, a soft wind moved through the trees, and the tropical harshness that had seemed to me constant in Veracruz was gone; these were gentle people, this was an attractive place.
The song ended. There was clapping. The band began playing “The Washington Post March,” and I strolled around the perimeter of the plaza. There was a slight hazard in this. Because the carnival had just ended, Veracruz was full of idle prostitutes, and as I strolled I realized that most of them had not come here to the plaza to listen to the band—in fact, the greater part of the audience was composed of dark-eyed girls in slit skirts and low-cut dresses who, as I passed them, called out, “Let’s go to my house,” or fell into step with me and murmured, “Fuck?” This struck me as comic and rather pleasant—the military dignity of the march music, the pink light on the lush trees and balconies of the plaza, and the whispered invitations of those willing girls.
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