Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "No. Sex—two women."

  "Sandwich?"

  "One front, one back, very nice." He found my face in his rear-view mirror. "Or you want lady-boy?"

  What I wanted was to buy a train ticket, be fitted for two shirts, get some film developed, buy a present for my wife's birthday, and have my laundry done. When I marveled to an American teacher in Bangkok that I managed all of these inside of an hour, he said, "But you probably got them all done at the same place, right?"

  He was roughly my age, and that day he was in a hurry to get to his Thai girlfriend's birthday party.

  "She's turning twenty," he said, knowing I would ask.

  "So you're in heaven."

  "Tell you a story," he said in a cautioning voice. "A farang met a Thai woman and fell in love with her. They got married. When the woman got her American visa, they moved to the States, to the guy's hometown. They were really happy. The Thai woman learned English, got a job, and was a devoted wife. The ideal woman—the guy's dream. Like you said, heaven. This lasted five years.

  "Then one day the woman says, 'I have to go back to Thailand. My husband is very sick. I have to be with him.' Husband? Yes, she explained. She'd been married before and had never gotten a divorce. But that was a detail.

  "'When will you be back?' the guy asks.

  "'I can never come back. I don't know how long he will be sick. Better to say goodbye now. If he dies, I'll have to look after his family.'"

  I said, "And the moral is?"

  "She was young, but there was a lot the farang didn't know."

  The youthfulness of Bangkok is a surprise: the bright faces, the smiling sylph-like beauties working as shop clerks, staffing hotels and restaurants, filling the new metro and sky train. It is a city of schools and colleges, and so a city of beautiful students. I found myself staring. The wok stirrer at the smallest noodle stall might be a ravishing woman, the more lovely for her strenuously paddling the noodles, her skin glowing from her effort, dampened and strangely lit by the cooking fire.

  The bar girls were as fresh-faced as the college students, though most of them were a bit younger, more like artful schoolgirls, and just as casually dressed, their small breasts pressing against their T-shirts. The masseuses in the red-light district, in their efficiency and charm, were almost indistinguishable from the massage therapists in the spas. There was nothing particularly whorish-looking about the whores or meretricious-seeming about the tarts; any of them could have passed for bookstore staff at Paragon or clerks at Robinsons Department Store, and their English was as good. Hostesses in the wildest saloons were as demure as hostesses at the coffee shops in the great hotels. Bowing and politeness were common to all these women, not as a sign of submission but a ritual show of respect, and self-respect. No matter their work, these women walked with upright and stately grace because Buddhists believe the head is sacred and should be held erect.

  "Massage?" was the first question from every taxi driver. It was a question I was to hear hundreds of times over the next month in Southeast Asia from taxi drivers, rickshaw men, chair men, scooter boys, kids on the street, whisperers in bars, and touts in hotel lobbies. But they didn't mean the sort of massage I'd gotten at the Erawan or the Oriental. A massage was a euphemism for sex, any kind of sex, agreed upon downstairs, then negotiated upstairs.

  Nokh—it means bird in Thai—had worked at Robinsons. She told her family in Pattaya that she still worked there. Her father was a farmer. She went home once a month for a ritual meal and to pay her respects and visit the temple. She had lived in Bangkok for two years. She was the eldest of four children, had just turned twenty-five, and had responsibilities.

  One of her responsibilities was to pay for the education of her younger sister Boonmah, who (unlike Nokh) had finished school and was attending college. Nokh and Boonmah lived together in a small room in a northern district of Bangkok, Nokh paying for everything.

  Clerking in the women's clothing department paid so poorly that Nokh couldn't make ends meet. "Small money," she said. ("A lot of Thai girls work at Robinsons to meet marriageable farangs" an American farang told me.) One of her friends told her she could earn more money in a massage parlor, so she gave it a shot.

  "You should talk to her," my friend said.

  "Is she out of the ordinary?"

  "No. That's why you should talk to her. She's typical. There are tens of thousands just like her."

  She was small, slim, doll-like, fragile-looking. What appealed to me immediately was that when I met her for our appointment she was reading a magazine, with much the same absorption as the bar girl I'd seen in Istanbul. She didn't look up. The sex worker is attentive above all, restless, with a bird-like alertness, partly to look for a mark, partly for self-protection. Reading was not only unproductive, but because it caused inattention, it was dangerous. She had been startled into anxious giggles when I interrupted her. I said that to talk to her, I'd give her what a customer would.

  She laughed. She said, "Customers give big man six thousand baht. Big man give me one thousand baht."

  That was $25, so I doubled it, and she was happy and forthcoming.

  "Does your sister know where you work?"

  "I tell her I work in a karaoke."

  "What about your parents?"

  "I tell them I work at Robinsons. They be sad if they know where I work."

  "Why doesn't your sister work?"

  "She does small work. But she has to study."

  "Is she pretty like you?"

  "She very fat!"

  "After she graduates, what will you do?"

  "Save money. I want to have a coffee shop in Chon Buri."

  Nokh looked at her watch, but was embarrassed when I asked if she had to go. It was five in the afternoon. She was due at work at six, which meant that she would pin her disk to her blouse, displaying her number. She would sit behind a wall of glass, in the fish-tank arrangement of the Bangkok brothel, and would wait, smiling, until a man chose her. She passed the time this way until two in the morning. And the man who chose her might go later to a restaurant and for his meal choose a fish from an aquarium in just the same way.

  "I read magazine!" she said, as though to reassure me that she wasn't killing time.

  I found her situation depressing. Nokh was wasting her youth in a whorehouse, not for her own gain but, because she was the number one child, to support her sister. She was so small, so polite and pleasant, intelligent too. I asked a few more inconsequential questions and then off she went, into the cruel world.

  ***

  SOLVING THE PROBLEM of how to leave the enormous city, one night I took a taxi to the railway station at the center of Bangkok. I had a ticket on the 2045, the night train to the Laotian border at Nong Khai. At the station there were no formalities, no security, no ticket check, no warnings, no friskings. I bought a big bottle of water and some beer, saw from the departure board that my train would be leaving from platform 3, found my sleeper, and climbed aboard. This was about thirty minutes before we left. I was seated, drinking a beer, when the conductor knocked on my door, said hello, and punched my ticket. Then he made my bed. And soon after, we slid away from the station, headed north.

  I had found a Simenon paperback in one of the big Bangkok book stores, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. I got into bed and enjoyed one of the most pleasant experiences I know in travel, tucked into a wide berth on an Asiatic train, in a private compartment, reading as the coach gently rocks, and knowing that I won't have to stir for twelve hours, when I will be at the edge of another country, a new frontier.

  At dawn, I kicked the shade up and saw flooded paddy fields and the great flat landscape of northern Thailand. I opened the window and the train stopped at a small station where there were handsome families, a smiling monk wrapped in his ocher robe, and pretty girls in T-shirts and white shorts—on this entire trip, Thailand offered me my first glimpse of women's bare legs. The stations were swept and tidy, no litter, everyone in clean cl
othes, children playing, and adding to the calmness and serenity there were plenty of benches and chairs where people waited for the next train. The cleanliness seemed to represent a kind of optimism and self-esteem, and all this order was framed by green fields and polyphonic birdsong.

  I tend to evaluate places according to habitability—whether I can live in them. Passing an idyllic glade, I saw a hammock strung between two palm trees and myself swinging in it. This self-centered impulse I put down to my escapist fantasies inspired by distant places, but it's only human to look for an ideal location to live in, the great good place we all seek. A lovely landscape, I think, but if I am able to put myself into it, surely it is lovelier.

  On the way to Nong Khai on this train I saw a sunlit bungalow on stilts on a side road, a hammock underneath it, some banana trees and chickens near it, a vegetable garden behind it, rice paddies beyond it, an ox in a meadow and low jungle all around, and I thought: Yes, it would be nice to live there. Except for a flicker of temptation in Sri Lanka, I had never had a serious thought of this anywhere else so far. But in the north of Thailand, I entertained the notion of simply dropping out of the world and fitting myself into this version of pastoral, walking up and down in my pajama bottoms.

  When I arrived in Nong Khai, on the Mekong River, as though to prove the validity of this impression, who should get out of the train but two big wheezy farangs, red-faced and chain-smoking, with their Thai wives and a sister-in-law. They had boarded the train some way down the line, perhaps at the very place I was having escape fantasies.

  Miles was from England. He wore a heavy suit and tie in spite of the heat. Rudi—tattooed, quite fat, in a black T-shirt and boots—was from Rotterdam.

  "We got on the train at Khon Kaen."

  "Visiting there?" I asked.

  "We live there," Rudi said.

  "It's heaven," Miles said. "About a hundred expats—all good chaps. We look after each other. We're all brothers in Khon Kaen."

  Rudi said, "But I go back to Holland."

  Miles was only half listening. He was speaking to the three Thai women, seeming to berate them, going, "Bumpity-bump, bop-bop."

  "What are you saying?" I asked.

  "You really should learn the language, old chap. Makes life so much easier. Kon-kap. Bop-bop. Bumpity-bip."

  Miles made it sound like Martian, pursing his lips, nodding, widening his eyes. His face was slick with perspiration.

  The women smiled patiently and murmured among themselves.

  I met the farangs again later on in the morning, nearer the river, in an open-fronted shed called Alex's Travel Service, where Laotian visas were being processed and sold. This was efficiently done—you could have your photo taken, or send a fax, or have a meal, for it was also a noodle stall. I had my breakfast noodles while my visa application was being initialed and stamped. Then I wandered outside.

  "Is that your wife?" I asked Rudi.

  "Yes," he said. "Well, not my wife but the woman I liff wiz."

  The three women were middle-aged, beginning to thicken, but with the warm Thai smile and the placid, self-contained serenity, talking among themselves, without complaint, and now and then acknowledging Miles's approximation of Thai.

  "We have everything in Khon Kaen," Miles said to me. "Even a hospital."

  "I have to go back to Holland every muntz or so to collect my pension," Rudi said. "Dey won't send it to me. Also to see my grandchildren. But always I come back here."

  "Bumpity-bump," Miles said, reddening.

  "Beer is cheaper in Laos," Rudi said. "So we go dere. Go down the river. Drink beer. Eat sumsing. Ferry nice."

  "Pip-pip," Miles said. He was dressed as though for an outing in Brighton with the bowling club, sweating profusely, smoke coming out of his ears and nose. He was a life-of-the-party type who told jokes in funny foreign accents. "Sap-songg!"

  He squinted as he twanged the words, straining and pursing his lips. Was this Thai? If so, his wife, or girlfriend, didn't get it. She smiled and twisted her face in embarrassment.

  "Sip-bip-bip!"

  Now she hid her face in her hands.

  But Miles just snorted and puffed his cigarette and said, "Can't beat it. Makes things so much easier. Kap-ko!"

  He grimaced in the heat, dabbing at his dripping forehead with a gray hanky. His tight shirt collar was sodden. The Dutchman too was sweating in his T-shirt and black biker jeans. When Miles started up again, tittering and cheeping with his explosive syllables, the three women fled to the shade of a mango tree.

  "Take my advice—what did you say your name was?"

  "Paul."

  "Paul. You won't get anywhere if you don't bip-kai-bip, kap-ko." I had finished my noodles and was waiting for my passport, which Alex, in the shed, soon gave me.

  "Is that farang speaking Thai?" I asked.

  "A little bit. But it's rude to say kap-ko"

  My last time here I had walked down a path to the Mekong and been ferried over in a small sampan propelled by a farting outboard motor, and my passport had been stamped under a tree on the far bank. Today we were taken in Alex's van across the Friendship Bridge, from Thailand to Laos, over the wide river, and to the border post. There was hardly any traffic.

  The decadent Vientiane of Vietnam War days, which had catered to servicemen on furlough, had become a sleepy place, a capital yet hardly a city, more of a backwater than it could have been a hundred years ago. I remembered it as a wide-open town: whores gathered in hotel lobbies who greeted new arrivals by smiling and snatching at them. In Vientiane, the very word "hotel" was a euphemism for a cathouse, and the debauchery in the bars was celebrated throughout Southeast Asia—the live sex shows, the nude dancers, the stark-naked waitresses who managed amazing feats with cigarettes. At the White Rose, the most notorious bar, I saw a drunken man flicking his Zippo and setting fire to a waitress's pubic hair. She slapped herself with one hand and pushed him away with the other, demanded a tip, then moved on to the next table.

  Vientiane had not grown any bigger, yet the contrast could not have been greater. The change was a testament to what the Vietnam War had done to Laos. I saw Vientiane then (and described it) as the most corrupt and dissolute place I'd ever traveled to. Diminutive Laotian whores and big whooping American soldiers dominated the place. Drugs were easy to buy, and so was porno. "Anything you want," pedicab drivers said. "What you want, Joe?"

  But the riotous Americans who had sexualized the place, turning Vientiane into a fleshpot, had left, and it was now a sleepy town on the banks of the muddy river, famous for its cheap beer, attractive to backpackers. One of the characteristics of backpackers—careful with their money, socially conscious on the whole—is that they have sex with each other and resist the locals. Vientiane's streets were mostly empty, so were its shops, and its bars could not have been more sedate. Just 25-cent beers and $3 hotel rooms, pedestrian-friendly with quiet, hospitable folks, yet strangely colorless.

  "Mistah?"

  Two Lao girls approached me as I was taking an evening stroll by the river. They were so slender-hipped and grubby they might have been boys. They did not speak English except for one unambiguous verb.

  "Where do you live?"

  They giggled and tugged my arms and tried to tempt me by pointing to a grove of trees at the riverbank, an obvious haunt of rats and snakes.

  They recognized the futility of tempting me and didn't persist. I kept walking. Vientiane still proclaimed itself a capital, yet it was no more than a dusty riverside town, with warm weather and friendly people and a government with obscure intentions. Its glory was its temples, dating from the early nineteenth century, not ancient but built in an ancient style, with bonnet-like triple-pitched roofs, sometimes five or six of them overlapping, and amateurish murals inside, in courtyards with glazed tile walls. Children played outside while their parents were inside, devout in their prostrations, imploring the gold Buddhas with incense sticks and flower petals.

  After two days I had ca
ught up my diary and finished my Simenon and was considering going to the Vientiane museum when I met Fiona, a backpacker. She was thirty, traveling alone, and like a lot of solitary travelers, resourceful, also shrewd, direct, opinionated, and full of misinformation. She didn't read much, she said; she got her facts from other travelers like herself, on buses, in hostels, waiting under trees in the rain. She had just arrived in Laos.

  "I'm a traveler. That's all I want to do. But I ran out of money," she said. "I have to go back to England, but I'm only going so that I can make some money. I want to come back here, or somewhere. I just want to travel. I don't want to do anything else."

  We were in a noodle shop. I offered to buy her a beer, but she said tea was fine.

  "Thing is, when you're trying to save money, you need a flatmate. My last flatmate, Roger, was gay. When I say gay, I mean not just gay but, um, know much about S and M?"

  "A little bit," I said. "Was that Roger's thing?"

  "Roger's thing was parties. There are these S-and-M parties all over London. I went to some. The people were quite nice! Barristers. Company directors. Jobs in the City, stock market blokes. Roger was a clerk in chambers. But they have this one thing in common?"

  "Pain," I said.

  "Not just pain. Spanking. Whipping."

  "Does nothing for me," I said.

  She wasn't listening. "Roger had these two friends. One was really tall with a metal spike through his nose and tattoos and piercings. A bloke. The other was a very small frizzy-haired girl with Deirdre Barlow glasses. She was the weirdest of the lot."

  "In what way?"

  "They all went to bed together. I called them the Circus People. 'Circus people coming this weekend, Roger?' When they showed up, the flat stank. They didn't wash."

  "But weird in what way?"

  "They got Roger into cutting and scarification. They took these sharp knives and cut him all around one leg. Roger said, 'When they put the salt water on it, I was in heaven.'"

  I said, "I'm losing my appetite."

  Fiona said, "But it got me thinking. What about the people who are really in pain? Poor people. People in prison. That's a kind of insult to them in their suffering."