by Paul Theroux
I sat down. A soldier muttered. The rain increased, making a boiling sputter on the roof.
The soldier put down his Sten gun and came over to me. He showed me the message. It was written in pencil, rows and rows of Burmese script that resembled the code in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’. But in the middle of all the dancing men, those crooked heads and arms, those kicking legs, were two English words in capital letters: ‘PASS BOOK’.
‘You have pass book?’
‘No pass book,’ I said.
‘Where you going?’
‘Gokteik, Naung-Peng,’ I said. ‘Just for the ride. Who wants to know?’
He thought a moment; then folded the paper over and with the stub of a pencil wrote very carefully in a wobbly column, Name, Number, Country, and Pass book. He handed me the paper. I gave him the information, while the rest of the soldiers – there were six altogether – gathered around. One peered over my shoulder, sucked his teeth, and said ‘American’. The others verified this, putting their heads close and breathing on to my hand.
The message was taken to the wooden shed. I stood up. One of the soldiers said, ‘Sit down.’
Two hours passed, the coach dripped, the roof boiled in the downpour, and the soldiers who had been speaking in whispers, perhaps fearing that I knew Burmese, resumed their eating, shelling peanuts, peeling bananas, slicing betel nuts. I don’t think time can pass more slowly than in a railway carriage parked in the rain between two low walls of jungle in Upper Burma. There was not even the diversion of hawkers, or the desperate antics of pariah dogs; there were no houses; the jungle was without texture or light; there was no landscape. I sat chilled to the bone watching raindrop rings widen in a pool of water next to the track, and I tried to imagine what had gone wrong. I had no doubt that I was the cause of the delay – there was an objection to my being on the train; I had been seen boarding in Maymyo. I would be sent back; or I might be arrested for violating security regulations, thrown into jail. The effort of getting so far seemed wasted; and, really, had I come all that way to find a jail, as people travel in the greatest discomfort to the farthest ends of the earth, through jungles and bad weather for weeks and weeks, to hurry into a doomed plane or step into the path of a bullet? It is ignominious when a person travels a great distance to die.
It wasn’t death that worried me – they wouldn’t be silly enough to kill me. But they could inconvenience me. Already they had. It was past ten o’clock, and I was on the point of resigning. If the sun had been out I would have volunteered to walk back to Maymyo, turning the whole fiasco into a hike. But it was raining too hard to do anything but sit and wait.
Finally the tall soldier with the Sten gun returned. He was accompanied by a small fellow, rather young, in a wet jacket and wet hat, who mopped his face with a handkerchief when he got inside the carriage. He said, ‘You are Mister Paul?’
‘Yes. Who are you?’
‘Security Officer U Sit Aye,’ he said, and went on to ask when I had entered Burma, and why, and for how long. Then he asked, ‘You are a tourist?’
‘Yes.’
He thought a moment, tilting his head, narrowing his hooded eyes, and said, ‘Then where is your camera?’
‘I left it behind,’ I said. ‘I ran out of film.’
‘Yes, we have no film in Burma.’ He sighed. ‘No foreign exchange.’
As he spoke another train drew up beside the one we were in.
‘We will get in that train.’
In the last armed coach of this second train, sitting with a new batch of soldiers, U Sit Aye said he was in charge of railway security; he had three children; he hated the rainy season. He said no more. I assumed he was my escort, and, though I had no idea why we had changed trains, we were on the move, travelling in the direction of Gokteik.
A haggard Burmese man in a woollen cap took a seat across from us and began emptying a filtertip cigarette on to a small square of paper. It was the sort of activity that occupied the foreign residents of Afghanistan hotels, a prelude to filling the empty tube with hashish grains and tobacco. But this man didn’t have hashish. His drug, in a small phial, was white powder, which he tapped into the tube, alternating it with layers of tobacco. He stuffed the tube with great care, packing it tight, smoothing and tapping it.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘I do not know,’ said U Sit Aye.
The man peered into his cigarette. It was nearly full; he poked it down with a match.
‘He’s putting something inside.’
‘I can see,’ said U Sit Aye.
‘But it’s not ganja.’
‘No.’
Now the man was finished. He emptied the last of the powder and threw the phial out of the window.
I said, ‘I think it’s opium.’
The man looked up and grinned. ‘You are right!’
His English, clear as a bell, startled me. U Sit Aye said nothing, and as he was not wearing a uniform the man had no way of knowing he was making an opium cigarette under the nose of a security officer.
‘Have a puff,’ said the man. He twisted the top and licked the whole cigarette so that it would burn slowly. He offered it to me.
‘No thanks.’
He looked surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘Opium gives me a headache.’
‘No! Very good! I like it – ’ He winked at U Sit Aye. ‘– I like it for nice daydreamings!’ He smoked the cigarette to the filter, rolled up his jacket, and put it behind his head. He stretched out on the seat and went to sleep with a smile on his face. He was perfectly composed, the happiest man on that cold rattling train.
U Sit Aye said, ‘We don’t arrest them unless they have a lot. It’s so much trouble. We put the chap in jail. We then send a sample to Rangoon for tests – but his is number three; I can tell by the colour – and after two or three weeks they send the report back. You need a lot of opium for the tests – enough for lots of experiments.’
Towards 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 travelling in a slow plane with the windows open, and I envied the opium-smoker his repose.
‘The views are clouded,’ said U Sit Aye.
We climbed to nearly 4,000 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 vapour 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 manmade 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 long delay in 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, ov
er 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 night-blooming 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 travelling, was the end of the line for me. This was a collection of wooden shacks and grass-roofed shelters. The ‘canteen’ Tony had told me about 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 cauldrons 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 woollen cap, damp and shapeless as a mitten. The cooks ladled the stews on to large palm leaves and plopped down a fistful of rice; this the travellers 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 armoured van coupled just behind the engine; this was a steel box with gun slits, 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 armoured van: it was a cruelly uncomfortable thing, and very dark since the gun slits 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 still 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.’
20. The Night Express from Nong Khai
THE fast train from Bangkok had taken me to Nong Khai, in the far north of Thailand. Nong Khai is unexceptional – five streets of neat houses; but a boat ride across the Mekong River takes you to Vientiane in Laos. Vientiane is exceptional, but inconvenient. The brothels are cleaner than the hotels, marijuana is cheaper than pipe tobacco, and opium easier to find than a cold glass of beer. Opium is a restful drug, the perfect thing for geriatrics, but the chromatic snooze it induces corrects fatigue; after an evening of it the last thing you want to do is sleep again. When you find the beer at midnight and are sitting quietly, wondering what sort of place this is, the waitress offers to fellate you on the spot, and you still don’t know. Your eyes get accustomed to the dark and you see the waitress is naked. Without warning she jumps on to a chair, pokes a cigarette into her vagina and lights it, puffing it by contracting her uterine lungs. So many sexual knacks! You could teach these people anything. There are many bars in Vientiane; the décor and the beer are the same in all of them, but the unnatural practices vary.
The only English film I could find in Vientiane was a pornographic one, and the sombre reverence of the Japanese tourists, who watched like interns in an operating theatre, filled me with despair. I shopped for presents, imagining Laotian treasures, but discovered traditional handicrafts there to include aprons, memo pads, pot-holders, and neckties. Neckties! I tried to take a pleasure cruise on the Mekong, but was told the river was only used by smugglers. The food was unusual. One bowl of soup I had contained whiskers, feathers, gristle, and bits of intestine cut to look like macaroni. I told this to a prince I had been urged to visit. He took me to a restaurant where we had – I suppose it was his way of apologizing – a leg of lamb, mint sauce, and roasted potatoes. I asked him what it was like to be a prince in Laos. He said he couldn’t answer that question because he didn’t spend much time in Laos; he was mainly interested in skydiving and motor racing. His description of political life convinced me that Laos was really Ruritania, a slaphappy kingdom of warring half-brothers, heavily mortgaged to the United States. But there were enemies in Laos, he said that evening. Where were they? I asked. We were now at his house. He pointed out the window, and across the street, silhouetted in the top window of a three-storey building, was a man with a machine gun. The prince said, ‘Him. He’s a Pathet Lao.’
‘So you’re taking the train,’ said the prince, when I told him about my trip. ‘Do you know how fast that Bangkok train goes?’
I said I had no idea.
‘Fifty kilometres an hour!’ He made a face.
His wife wasn’t listening. She looked up from a magazine and said, ‘Don’t forget we have to be in Paris on the twenty-sixth –’
Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America’s expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported; a kingdom with baffling pretensions to Frenchness. What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squashy amoeba, the sort of creature that can’t die even when it is cut to ribbons.
Setting out from Nong Khai Station (the Thai children were flying kites along the tracks) I was headed south for Singapore. There is an unbroken railway system from this northerly station to Singapore, via Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, roughly 1,400 miles of jungle, rice fields, and rubber estates. The State Railway of Thailand is comfortable and expertly run, and now I knew enough of rail travel in Southeast Asia to avoid the air-conditioned sleeping cars, which are freezing cold and have none of the advantages of the wooden sleepers: wide berths and a shower room. There is not another train in the world that has a tall stone jar in the bath compartment, where, before dinner, one can stand naked, sluicing oneself with scoops of water. The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Singhalese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.
In the Night Express from Nong Khai were many Chinese and Filipino mechanics, deeply tanned from working on the American air fields, and wearing their baseball caps pulled down over their eyes. Thais gambled in the second-class sleeper, where American servicemen sat sheepishly with Thai girls, looking homesick but very proper as they held hands. I was in a c
ompartment with an American civilian who said he was a salesman. He didn’t look like a salesman. His hair was cut so short, I could see a white scar that ran along the top of his head from back to front like a part; he had a Thai charm around his neck and broken fingernails; on the back of his right hand was tattooed TIGER, and he talked continually of his ‘hog’, a Harley-Davidson Electraglide. He had been in Thailand for five years. He had no plans to go back to the States, and said it was his ambition to make $30,000 a year – or, as he put it, ‘thirty K’.
‘How close are you to that figure?’
‘Pretty close,’ he said. ‘But I think I might have to go to Hong Kong.’
He had just spent a few days in Vientiane. I said I had found the place not exactly to my taste. He said, ‘You should have gone to the White Rose.’
‘I went to the White Rose,’ I said.
‘Did you see a tall girl there?’
‘It was too dark to tell who was tall or short.’
‘This one was wearing clothes. Most of them were bare-ass, right? But this one had long hair and slacks. The rest of them were putting cigarettes in their cats and puffing on them, but this one just comes over and sits down next to me. She wasn’t wearing a bra and she had those nice tits models have. I offered her a beer, but she had a Pepsi and funnily enough I wasn’t charged extra for it. I liked that!
‘We sat there sort of fooling and I put my hand inside her blouse and gave her a honk. She laughs. “You want massage?” she says. I says forget it. They don’t mean massage. Then she says, “Come upstairs – you give mama-san four dollars and she let me.”
