Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  The people on the tour were still getting acquainted with each other. They asked me questions, too. Where was I from? What did I do? Was I married? Did I have children? Why was I taking this trip? What was that book in my lap? What were my plans in Paris? First time in China?

  I was Paul, I was unemployed, I was evasive, and—how does Baudelaire put it?—"The real travelers are those who leave for the sake of leaving," and something about not knowing why but always saying Allons! An appropriate sentiment here in the environs of Amiens.

  What I wanted to reply to these questions was something I heard a man say to an inquisitive woman at a dinner party in London.

  "Please don't ask," he said softly."I don't have anything interesting to tell you. I've made a terrible mess of my life."

  What kept me from saying that was that it was a sad memory, because about six months later that man killed himself. It seemed unlucky, and unkind to his memory, to repeat it.

  The sad man called Blind Bob fumbled with the flap of his valise—his eyesight was terrible: his nose was against the hasp—and brought out two rolls of toilet paper.

  People asked him what it was for—surely not Europe?

  "For China," he said.

  I decided not to say that the great sinologist Professor Joseph Needham had proven that the Chinese invented toilet paper. In the fourteenth century they were making perfumed toilet paper (it was three inches square) for the Imperial family, and everyone else used any paper they could lay their hands on. But some Chinese knew where to draw the line. In the sixth century a scholar, Yen Chih-t'ui, wrote, "Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes."

  Ashley Relph said, "He's taking bog-roll to China!"

  Mr. Cathcart said, "I think they've heard of loo paper in China."

  "Sure, they've heard of it. Lots of people have heard of it. But do they have any, is the question. I'll bet they don't have any on the Trans-Siberian, and how much do you think they'll have in Mongolia, huh?"

  No one was laughing at Blind Bob now. The thought of crossing Asia without toilet paper made everyone thoughtful; there was a sort of hum of reflection in the carriage after he had spoken.

  We came to Paris and were met by a bus and brought to a hotel. This was in the 14th arrondissement, near the end of the Métro line, in a district that was indistinguishable from the outskirts of Chicago or South Boston. It was mainly postwar apartment blocks that had once been light stucco and were now gray. There were too many of them, and they were too close together, and people said: Is this Paris? Is this France? Where's the Eiffel Tower? The center of Paris is a masterpiece of preservation, but the suburbs such as this one are simple and awful. The brutal pavements and high windows of St.-Jacques seemed designed to encourage suicide.

  Then I was told ("funnily enough") that Samuel Beckett lived in one of those apartment houses and indeed had been in it for years. That was where he wrote his stories and plays about the sheer pointlessness and utter misery of human existence. I thought, No wonder! I was told that he often came over to our hotel, the Hôtel St.-Jacques, to have a morning coffee. The hotel was a newish spick-and-span place that resembled the lonely hotels that are found just outside American airports, where people stay because there is nowhere else. Beckett came here for pleasure?

  I walked the streets, I lurked in the coffee shop, I prayed for him to appear; but, nothing. It was a lesson though. When people read Samuel Beckett lives in exile in Paris they did not know that it meant a poky little apartment on the fifth floor of No. 32—a tall gray building in which residents waited for Godot by watching television. And it was a dozen stops on the Métro from the center of Paris, the Left Bank, the museums.

  We went to the Jeu de Paume, the museum devoted to the Impressionists. I wandered behind the group, listening and looking at pictures.

  In a room full of Sisleys, Richard Cathcart said, "I don't like any of these."

  We passed Monet's series of Rouen Cathedral, bluish and purply and rose tinted.

  "Now I would not mind having something like them in my home," Mrs. Wittrick said, and the Gurneys agreed and said they'd like to cart them back to Tasmania, except that they'd probably be arrested!

  Of Rousseau's La Guerre. La Chevauchée de la Discorde, Rick Westbetter said, "Hey, I like these. These are good. These are more like American pictures."

  A child staggering behind his parents in the Van Gogh room said, "But why was he mad?"

  A little crowd formed around a Monet of Venice.

  Bud Wittrick was saying, "That's the Grand Canal. That's Saint Mark's. That's where the Bridge of Sighs is—down that canal. And see, that's the hotel we stayed at. Of course it wasn't a hotel in those days. That's where we walked, and there's where we had the spaghetti, that's where I bought the postcards."

  It rained, it snowed, and the snow silenced both pedestrians and traffic. Early one morning we left for Berlin.

  It was a wet, black morning in Paris, the street sweepers and milkmen doing their solitary rounds by the light of the street lamps, and just as dawn broke over the eaves and chimney pots we plodded out of the Gare de l'Est. I thought we had left the suburbs behind in the Rue St.-Jacques, but there were more, and they were deeper and grimmer. The people in the group, with their faces at the windows of the train, were shocked and disillusioned. It wasn't gay Paree, it wasn't even Cleveland. The Americans looked very closely. We were unused to this. We put up suburbs too quickly and cheaply for them to wear well. We expected them to decline and collapse and be replaced; they weren't built to last, and they look temporary because they are temporary. But French suburbs—villas, terrace houses and apartment blocks—are solid and fairly ugly, and their most horrific aspect is that they look as though they will last forever. It had been the same in outer London: How could houses so old look so awful?

  'That was a battlefield," Morris said, as we crossed into Belgium. He had been telling war stories since we crossed the Channel. "Some buddies of mine died there."

  "—And over there, too," Morris said, looking at a map, and meaning more dead buddies in a wartime battlefield.

  He was smirking at the bare trees, the young poplars standing like switches and whips; the dark sludge and stained froth in the black canals.

  I was still reading Sinclair Lewis and scribbling notes on the flyleaf.

  "Making notes?" Mrs. Wittrick said.

  I denied it.

  "Keeping a diary?"

  I said no.

  I hated being observed. One of the pleasures of travel is being anonymous. I had not realized how everyone was conspicuous in a group, and the person who kept to himself was a threat. I decided to make notes on those big blank postcards that look like filing cards.

  Wilma, the bald girl, said, "I haven't seen anyone use those postcards for years."

  And then I regretted that I had told her I was sending them back home, because it gave her the excuse to ask me where I was from.

  "I do a little teaching," I said to Wilma.

  As far as I could tell there were no readers in the group, no one likely to buttonhole me after lunch to talk about American fiction, or to be threatened by my scrutiny. I liked being a teacher. I liked the way the others looked at me and thought: Poor guy, doesn't seem to have a lot to say, might as well leave him alone.

  It was extremely hard for me to appear to be a quiet, modest, incurious person. These people seemed to be illiterate, which was a virtue, because they didn't know me. But neither could they be trusted with the slightest piece of information. Not long after I told Wilma I happened to be living in London, Richard Cathcart came up to me and said, "I hear you live in London..."

  At Namur, Bud Wittrick confided to me that Belgium was a hell of a lot uglier than America, and when I agreed that it did look hideous, he said, "You said it, Paul!"

  When had I told him my name?

  The only empty seat in the dining car at lunch was next t
o Wilma. It seemed as though everyone was avoiding her, but when I sat with her everyone avoided me. She told me she had been fired from her job, selling toys somewhere in London. She complained that the New Zealanders had made a hoo-hah about her immigrating, but that she was going there just the same, probably for good. She said she liked a challenge.

  I made a note of the fact that we had just stopped at Liège. I had an idea that I could look it up later and write We passed Liège, famous for its lacemaking and its sausages, birthplace of Georges Simenon...

  Wilma said, "You're always writing."

  "No, I'm not," I said, too quickly, and I thought: Stop looking at me!

  I dozed after lunch and was awakened by Morris saying, "Hey, Kicker, it's Aachen!" And both men stood in the aisle, blocking the traffic.

  It was obvious that the Germans on the train were very irritated by these two loud Americans, and would probably have been very glad to throw them off. It was unlikely that the Germans were able to follow the loud twanging monologue in which Morris revealed that he had been in the three-week battle for Aachen during the war. This monkey was a liberator! It seemed poetic justice that he had returned to bore the pants off everyone within earshot.

  At Cologne I noticed that there were four new people on the tour. They were French—three women and a man. They stayed together. They spoke to no one except themselves for almost the whole trip. They quarreled a great deal, but no one knew why. About one month later, in southern Mongolia, I saw one of these French women standing alone on a railway platform. We had just eaten a disgusting meal of cold potatoes and mutton fat.

  I smiled and said in a companionable way, "Isn't the food dreadful?"

  "When I am traveling I don't notice the food," this woman said. "But of course when I am in Paris I am very particular about what I eat and demand only the best."

  That was all she ever said to me.

  Even here in Germany I could tell that the French members of the tour were not extroverts. But that was fine. I was also keeping to myself, and it was agreeable not to be pestered with questions.

  It was near the end of a long day. We passed Wuppertal, piled against a hillside—full of steep ugly tenements. There were slag heaps at Unna, and farther on at Hamm and Gütersloh, it seemed as though the Germans had succeeded in miniaturizing Indiana and putting it down here. The rain blackened Bielefeld, and I prayed for night to fall and simplify this landscape with darkness. Prosperity had disfigured Germany, and the whole country looked blighted with industrial civilization. Under the brown sky of Münsterland there were factories called Droop und Rein and Endler und Kumpf, which seemed like doom-laden names. The peculiar dreariness about this part of Germany was the absence of trees. The Germans identified with forests, but acid rain had killed half of them and the other half had been chopped down; the trees had been replaced with factory chimneys.

  Earlier in the day, the people in the group had been talking like patients in a hospital. The travel had frightened and tired them. They dozed, and when they woke they asked each other questions. How did you sleep? How was the meal? What time is dinner? They began to describe the progress of their bowels. They reported on how they felt, and whether they were tired or hungry.

  I watched closely for meaningful changes—women who begin to screech, men who stop shaving, or anyone who puts on a tracksuit.

  At Helmstedt we crossed the border into East Germany. The train passed between a pair of barbed-wire fences, a passageway about as wide as a turnpike. Every few hundred yards there was a watchtower and bright lights and the silhouettes of soldiers standing sentry duty.

  Beyond the border was a landscape of snow and mud—the spring mess in the slender trees of the postwar woods. What cities I could see seemed far drearier than any I had seen in West Germany, but the countryside was noticeably wilder and more wooded, with huddled farms and poorly lit roads. There were not many people visible, but those I saw here really did look like peasants.

  We arrived at Zoo Station ("Hold on to your handbags, this place is full of drug addicts") in the dark. With its twinkling lights and the traffic, Berlin seemed romantic and lively to some members of the group—they regarded it as the last frontier of civilization. After this was Poland, then Russia, then Mongolia. Berlin was gaiety and sex, bookstores and fatsos. It looked richer than America.

  But Berlin seemed to me a monstrosity and not much fun. It is such an odd specimen, such a special example of metropolitan schizophrenia, that its conceits and hypocrisies are fascinating. But it is also a fool's paradise, and it is hard to think of anyone living there for any length of time and remaining sane. It is an ancient city, and it was itself for 700 years; but under the Nazis it cracked, it stopped being a city and became a symbol, and then an idea, and after the war it was rethought and the idea reduced to an absurdity. It is still a bad idea and it is growing worse. Any sensible person has to find it a monumental illustration of stupidity, petulance and stubbornness. It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic, for as Nathanael West said, nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.

  Helmut Frielinghaus, a Düsseldorfer, was himself a visitor to the city. He said to me, "Do you want to see the most interesting place in Berlin?"

  I said yes.

  He took me to the "Ke De We," a huge department store that is known by its initials rather than its full name, Kauíhaus des Westens. What he wanted to show me were the floors devoted to food, and in particular the stalls and shops that retailed expensive and pretty delicacies.

  'This is the new thing," Helmut said. 'The food culture. People are obsessional about it. You see? Two hundred kinds of cheese, forty kinds of coffee, twenty-eight sizes of sausage, and also food for vegetarians, food for health cranks, a whole shop selling fish eggs."

  They were food boutiques, selling snob food, rare and indigestible items, all prettily arranged and beautifully wrapped. Pastries, fruit juice, ninety kinds of bread, a whole wall of tea caddies, every possible shape of pasta. At first glance it was not food at all, but specialist merchandise set out like expensive clothes. If there was such a thing as designer food, this was it. Perfect penile asparagus, each spear labeled, $20 a pound.

  I developed a horror-interest in the meat section, where stall upon stall was laden with cuts of meat—gleaming red flesh that had been trimmed with great care: legs, shoulders, feet, rumps and elbows, a whole rack of tongues, a case of hearts, a brisket with a paper cap, pigs' heads wearing ruffled collars. Most of the meat was decorated in this way—a sort of dramatic presentation, so that the last thing you thought of was slaughter or butchery.

  There were more browsers than shoppers, which was the weirdest thing of all—people gaping at food, and salivating and moving on ("Look at those fish cheeks, Wolfgang!"), and the effect of this scrutiny and obvious hunger was of the food being used to tempt and titillate, and so it all seemed to me—and the meat especially—the most modern kind of pornography.

  "Good, no?" Helmut said. "If you see that, you understand Berlin."

  We were leaving the "Ke De We" when we saw a stop-press edition of a German paper saying that American planes had bombed Libya. This was in retaliation for the bombing, supposedly by Libyan terrorists, of a dance hall here in Berlin. The news had traveled fast. Already, young Germans had started to gather near the Europa Center for a demonstration, and police vans—about thirty of them—were parked just off the Kurfürstendamm. Policemen were unloading steel barricades and stacking them by the roadside.

  Helmut said, "We have only recently discovered how different we are from the Americans."

  He spoke with slight bitterness. I decided not to remind him of Germany's uniquely horrible history.

  "I think we bombed Libya because we have been dying to bomb someone in the Middle East ever since the hostage crisis," I said. "Iran humiliated us more than any other country has done in recent years. We still haven't gotten over it. I don't think the average American makes much distinction between Iranians and Libyans. T
hey're seen as dangerous and worthless fanatics, so why should we waste our time being subtle with them?"

  'That's the way Americans think about us," Helmut said.

  "Not really."

  If he mentions the war, I thought, I'm going to say You started it. But he didn't. He said he found Berlin very strange and provincial; it was mostly old people and had high unemployment. He said he couldn't wait to go back to Düsseldorf.

  I spent the rest of the day shopping for provisions. I bought mint tea, sherry, chocolates and antibiotics. Tomorrow we would be in Warsaw, where such things might not be available.

  The demonstration began in the early evening when about eight thousand youths chanting anti-American slogans marched towards the American cultural center called Amerikahaus, behind the Kurfürstendamm. The rumor was that they planned to set it on fire. But the police, with riot shields and tear gas, massed in front of it and behind the high steel barricades. The demonstration became unruly and turned into something approaching a riot. Rioters threw stones and broke the windows of American cars, and chased tourists and anyone who looked like an American.

  I missed the riot. I was at the Deutsche Oper on Bismarckstrasse seeing Don Giovanni. I had gone on the spur of the moment when, back at the hotel, I heard the members of the group arguing about the bombing of Libya, and Kicker saying: "Them fucken Arabs have been asking for that." Do I want to listen to this? I asked myself. Mozart seemed preferable.

  I went alone and found it pleasant to have an empty seat next to me, an entire armrest to lean on, and to enjoy this excellent production. But after the intermission the seat was taken by a young woman, and several times in the darkness, while Don Giovanni was gasconading or Dona Anna was singing, this woman was staring at my head.

  "Do I know you?" she asked, when the opera ended.

  I said no.

  "I have this feeling that I do. What is it?"