by Paul Theroux
It was the barge at Caia, big enough to serve as a drive-on ferry for trailer trucks. Made "from next to nothing," Chris Marrow told me—twelve Uniflote pontoons and four engines that had been assembled from eight scrap engines—this brainchild of the Mariners was the only way across the Zambezi for the 260 miles between Tete and the ocean.
I approached a trailer truck loaded with sacks of beans as it rumbled off the barge at Caia. "Yes, we are going to Beira," the driver, Gilberto, told me. And, yes, he said, he had room for my folding boat, my camping equipment, my duffel bag. But he waved his hand when I began to get into the cab.
"You ride on top," he said. "Only the owner can ride in here."
He gave me a freshly picked pineapple as consolation, and I tossed my gear up, then climbed to the top of the truck's load. Think of this as a hayride, I told myself, as I shared the pineapple with the twenty or so Africans who also clung to the tarp that had been thrown over the bags of beans.
It was early afternoon when we set off. Then it began to rain. Fourteen hours later, in darkness and drizzle, we arrived in Beira and the air was briny. The distance had not been great, but the road was appalling.
Livingstone had believed that the whole Zambezi was navigable. He had been mistaken. He would be surprised that no ships ply the river, and probably startled by the hydroelectric projects at Kariba and Cabora Bassa, and by the towns on either side of the falls. But much of the river would be instantly familiar, for so little had changed. His scrupulous notes, his cartography, his taxonomy of the river's flora and fauna, still stand, and his descriptions of its topographical wonders and its dramatic weather cannot be improved upon.
Livingstone constantly referred to the beauty of the Zambezi, but he was a relative latecomer in this regard. The Africans have always seen the Zambezi as a river of mythic power, something lovely that was also a vital force, endlessly pouring from the heart of Africa.
The True Size of Cape Cod
THE CAPE COD that people write about I seldom recognize. I constantly think about the place. It is my home, so it is in my dreams, a landscape of my unconscious mind, perhaps my mind's only landscape. Paddling between islands in New Guinea, I often think, That's no worse than Falmouth to Oak Bluffs. Swimming in a bad chop or a swift current anywhere, I think of Woods Hole or the harbor entrance at Lewis Bay. Living on the Cape has given me a good notion of wind speed and air temperature. This complex landscape has taught me ways of measuring the world of risk.
But the word "landscape" presents a problem on the Cape. I find it hard to separate the land from the water, or the water from the winds. The stranger walks or drives to the shore and looks across to the Vineyard, or on the bay side to Wellfleet, or wherever, always seeing divisions. The local does not distinguish between land and water, and keeps going, actually or mentally seeing shoals and eddies and sunken ships and the rocks that are exposed only at low tide—not barriers but features. There are calm days, of course, and the prevailing winds are often reliable, but the weather is eccentric, and it is not unusual for the winds on successive days to blow from all points of the compass, and these winds determine the weather and the condition of land and water.
To a stranger, Cape Cod seems like many simple separate places according to the time the person has visited, seeking the jolly, the quaint, the charming, the historical. When such strangers describe the place, they are very choosy. It seems odd for a local to hear such selective descriptions of the terminal moraine of the Cape, of the dunes and woodlands and harbors. Or of Nantucket Sound as a sort of moat that protects the island of Martha's Vineyard. Or how Nantucket Island is some distance to sea—too flat and far to be visible. Or how Woods Hole is like a spillway, and farther south in the sound there are ship-swallowing currents and the hidden rocks that holed the QE II. These are just versions of the Cape, simplified portraits of its peculiarities.
To me, knowing the true size of the Cape means knowing ways of navigating it: finding routes into the marshes and up the tidal creeks; knowing the offshore shoals and sandbars, such as Egg Island off Hyannis, the Billingsgate Shoal off Wellfleet, and the three serpent-shaped shoals that make the crossing from Cape to Vineyard so unpredictable: L'Hommedieu Shoal, Hedge Fence Shoal, and Middle Ground. Even on a flat day with no wind there are standing waves on the shoals, making a specific contour, and the waves range from a foot-high embankment of water to five or six feet of irregular fury, more like white water in a narrow river than anything in an ocean. Muskeget Channel, between Chappaquiddick and Nantucket, can be terrifyingly swift, full of whirlpools or rocks, and yet that is the same world of the Cape—just its nether side. These waves and swells have their analog in the dunes of Truro or Sandy Neck, or the wooded ridge of the upper Cape.
If a place is home, most years it offers 365 faces. Whether it is a Cape marsh, a creek, a pepperidge tree, a dune, or the sea itself, it is different every day of the year. Knowing the differences keeps you fascinated and may make you safe. Not understanding a current or an offshore wind or a shoal in a channel can lead to death. That is also why I have a problem rhapsodizing about the Cape or using the quick-to-fade colors of hyperbole. I would not want to paint a pretty portrait only to mislead someone into thinking he is safe when he is not.
Yet if the Cape were not dangerous, it would lose much of its reality for me. The water of the Cape is seen from shore as seemingly featureless and deceptive as moorland, which is why it has claimed so many lives. In a hubristic way, people plant their houses by the shore. Nearly always, these people are from off Cape, and when they return in late spring they sometimes see that the house has been undermined if not swept away by winter storms.
When Henry David Thoreau walked the length of the Cape and wrote about it, he remarked on how the world's true wildernesses lie under the sea. It goes without saying that, like everywhere else, a portion of the marine world of the Cape has been tainted and littered. More and more I have come to see that the single-species fanatics, like the protectors of certain stretches of beach, are missing the point. The Cape is its total sum of land and water. The much-too-big houses and pretensions of Osterville have to be balanced against the rural poverty of the woodlots of Mashpee. Oak Bluffs is black, Edgartown is white, but both are middle class. The little reckless alewives make their way every April up creeks in Brewster to spawn. The Cape has taught me that we live in one world, fragile and failing, and it is the whole that must be understood, not any fragment of it.
German Humor
IT WAS A COMPLETE coincidence that I happened to be reading Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious the day I was summoned to West Germany not long ago. It was just prior to the present eruption of nationalistic feeling, the mutual embrace of the two Germanys, the breach in the Wall. Before I left, people kept asking why I was going. It seemed too boring to say I was on the circuit for my own Das Chinesische Abenteuer: Reise durch das Reich der Mitte, so I lied and said I was compiling an anthology of German humor. The axiom in joking is: a person's favorite joke is the key to that person's character, and so it is for a culture. A traveler profits by such insights, and many travelers recognize the querying faces and the silence that descends after he or she has told a joke in a distant land.
Like most jokes, and especially German jokes, this little wheeze had a serious side. Freud says "the factor of 'topicality'...is a fertile source of pleasure in a great many jokes." I wondered how East Germans might figure in this. What had begun as a piece of frivolity developed into a preoccupation: I found myself asking questions, making notes, and inquiring into nuances. Many Germans maintain that humor is nonexistent in their country—the formality of German life and speech does not lend itself to joke telling, and I suppose one could seriously question (as Freud does) whether jokes constitute humor at all. In my experience, most joke tellers are nags, bores, racists, sadists, boasters, blasphemers, look-at-me types. And since they comprise nearly the whole of humanity, surely such people could not be unknown in Germany.
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p; "One Person in Four in Munich Is Unhappy," the Süddeutsche Zeitung announced in its main headline the day I arrived. No one found that the least bit funny, nor did anyone laugh over an enormous demonstration, thousands of students protesting over inadequate provision for their brass-band practice. In Rosenheim at the Klepper folding-boat factory, I was staring at a pair of antlers mounted on a trophy board when Herr Walther, the owner, said, "There are ten mistakes on that thing. Can you guess them?"
The inscription read "Shot by Enrico Caruso at Monte Gran Sasso, 31.11.1876" and there were other details about Caruso's having been a member of a paddling club in Naples.
"The antlers are upside down," I said.
"Good. First mistake. Go on."
"How old was Caruso in 1876?"
"Three years old. Excellent. Continue."
It was a thunderously labored joke—there is no thirty-first of November, there are no elk in Italy, and so forth—but it was the genuine homegrown item.
Political jokes are predictable enough, but in Germany, curiously, only Chancellor Helmut Kohl is the butt of them. There is no mockery for the far-right Republicans, whose leader is a former member of the Waffen-SS and fairly pleased with himself, having made electoral gains in the most recent election in Berlin. And there are no West German jokes about East Germans—none about the drabness of their lives, the fanaticism of their Olympians, and not one about their coughing, topheavy automobile, the Trabant, little more than a metal blister on wheels, one of the most laughable vehicles on earth. I elicited only pity or silence when I asked for jokes about East Germans.
Most Kohl jokes depict him as a blunderer, and just the mention of his nickname, der Birne — the Pear, mocking his shape—causes laughter. Another joke has Herr Kohl and Mrs. Thatcher toasting each other with a beer. "Here's to your health," Mrs. Thatcher says, and thinking she said "Here's to your hell (light beer), he replies, "Here's to your dunkel (dark beer)."
Blunderers and clowns are regarded as very funny, and in Germany they usually come in pairs: Little Erna and Little Fritz (Klein Erna und Klein Fritzchen) or the duo of Tünnes and Schäl, the Laurel and Hardy of Cologne. One day, they are required to sell a shipment of brassieres at the market. Schäl is amazed by Tünnes having sold hundreds. How did you manage to sell so many? he asks. Tünness replies, "I cut them in half and yelled, 'Hats from the pope!'"
The fact that it is faintly anti-Catholic and that it must be told in a dialect makes this joke hilarious, but only in Cologne.
As for regional jokes, East Frisians are the most mocked of Germans. Why do East Frisians smile during thunderstorms? Because they think they're being photographed. I met an East Frisian from the island of Juist. I asked him who the East Frisians make jokes about. He said, "Other East Frisians." But he went on to say, "These jokes were invented by East Frisians as a marketing technique to popularize East Frisia."
"Germans never make jokes about themselves," a woman told me in Frankfurt. But does any country do that? I assumed that in Saarbrücken, on the French border, there would be French jokes, but there aren't. They are rather in awe of the French there and have even adopted the French habit of making jokes about the Belgians.
Austrians are also mocked. Did you hear the one about the Austrian bank robber who went into a Munich bank and said, "Put your money in the air, give me all the hands you have, because I'm a hostage"? The bank teller replied, "Shall I give it to you in shillings?" because he knew that a fool like that had to be an Austrian.
The commonest jokes, I was told, are those about Turks. "Turkish jokes are now sanctioned, because the feeling against foreigners is very strong at the moment—and I should say that foreigners also include American servicemen, who are resented these days as much for their presumption as for their nuclear arsenal."
Turks in Germany are the perfect victims: they are dark, they are hairy and sinister-looking, they are mostly Muslim, they stick out like a sore thumb, and in general they are on the bottom rung of the workforce. People in factories tell Turkish jokes; kids in school tell them.
Everyone I met had heard Turkish jokes, but no one would repeat one. I solemnly said it was for my research. They said, No, the jokes are stupid, I can't tell jokes, I can never remember the punch line. One person told me, "They are unbelievably cruel jokes. They're awful. They're hard. They're like this: What is the difference between a Bavarian and a Turk? And the answer will be that the Bavarian is a human being and the Turk is an animal."
"I hate these jokes," a woman said to me with real feeling, and the more I asked, the more I seemed to be inquiring not about jokes but about the darker side of the German character. "The joke," Freud says, "is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious." One was risked. "What are the two Turkish holidays?" Answer: "Sommerschlussverkauf and Winterschlussverkauf" (the summer bargain sale and the winter bargain sale).
That seemed pretty tame. I persisted. I was told to lay off. At first I took this for German delicacy. When I kept on asking for examples of Turkish jokes, I was told that there were no real Turkish jokes.
"They are anti-Jewish jokes with the names changed," I was told. "They are horrible. They are even about gas chambers."
As a matter of fact, many of the jokes in Freud's study are about Jews, and I mentioned this. One woman said she knew many such jokes—Turkish, Jewish, the lot.
Racial, ethnic, and xenophobic jokes say a great deal about the teller. I tried to encourage her: "Hear about the [choose victimized group] man who claimed his wife was a terrible housekeeper? He said, Every time I pee in the sink there's dirty dishes in it."
Naturally, she didn't laugh. She said, "I'm not going to tell you any. You'd just put it into one of your books."
Part Four
China
Down the Yangtze
THERE IS NO Yangtze River. The name is unknown to most Chinese, who call it Da Jiang, "Great River," or Chang Jiang, "Long River," unless they live above Chongqing—there, the swift, silt-filled waters are referred to as Chinsha Jiang, "River of Gold Sand." That is only a misnomer now. As recently as the 1930s, in the winter months when the level dropped, the Chinese squatted at its edge and panned for gold, sluicing the mud and gathering gold dust. European travelers reported seeing washerwomen wearing thick gold bangles, made of the metal that had been carried from where the river—let us call it the Yangtze—rises in Tibet.
But it has more moods than names. "I am careful to give the date of each day's notes," Archibald Little wrote in Through the Yangtse Gorges (1887). "The river varies so wonderfully at different seasons that any description must be carefully understood only to apply to the day upon which it is written." Captain Little was overwhelmed by it; he compared it to the Mississippi and the Amazon; he said it was indescribable. The Yangtze has in many stretches a violent magnificence. It is subject to murderous floods, and its winter level creates rapids of such turbulence that the river captain steers his ship through the foam and travels down the tongue of the rapid, praying that no junk will lie in his path, as it is impossible for him to stop or reverse course. The Yangtze's four divisions are like four separate rivers: above Chongqing, it is mythic and still associated with gold and landslides; the Upper River (Chongqing to Ichang) is the wildest (here are the gorges and the landscape of China's Walter Scottish classic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms); the Middle River (Ichang to Wuhan) is serene and a mile wide; the Lower River (Wuhan to Shanghai) is slow, clouded with silt, and populous.
I sailed fifteen hundred miles downstream, from Chongqing to Shanghai. Every mile of it was different, and there were twelve hundred miles I did not see. It crosses ten provinces, seven hundred rivers are joined to it—all Yangtze statistics are hopelessly huge and ungraspable; they obscure rather than clarify. And since words can have a greater precision than numbers, one day I asked a Chinese ship captain if he thought the river had a distinct personality.
He said, "The mood of the river changes according to the season. It c
hanges every day. It is not easy. Navigating the river is always a struggle against nature. And there is only one way to pilot a ship well." Smiling and blowing cigarette smoke out of his nostrils, he explained, "It is necessary to see the river as an enemy."
Later, a man told me that in the course of one afternoon he had counted nine human corpses bobbing hideously down the river.
The Yangtze is China's main artery, its major waterway, the source of many of its myths, the scene of much of its history. On its banks are some of its greatest cities. It is the fountainhead of superstition. It provides income and food to half the population. It is one of the most dangerous rivers in the world, in some places one of the dirtiest, in others one of the most spectacular. The Chinese drink it and bathe in it and wash clothes in it and shit in it. It represents both life and death. It is a wellspring, a sewer, and a tomb; depthless in the gorges, puddle-shallow at its rapids. The Chinese say if you haven't been up the Great River, you haven't been anywhere.
They also say that in the winter, on the river, the days are so dark that when the sun comes out the dogs bark at it. Chongqing was dark at nine in the morning, when I took the rattling tin tram on the cog railway that leads down the black crags which are Chongqing's ramparts, down the sooty cliffs, past the tenements and billboards (Flying Pigeon Bicycles, Seagull Watches, Parrot Accordions) to the landing stage. A thick, sulfurous fog lay over the city, a Coketown of six million. The fog had muffled the morning noises and given the city an air of frightening solemnity. It also stank like poison. Dr. Ringrose, who was from Leeds, sniffed and said, "That is the smell of my childhood."
There were thirty-three of us, including Ringrose The others were American, most of them millionaires, many of them multimillionaires. "If you have two or three million," one of them told me in the dreary city of Wanxian, "you're not a millionaire—you're just getting by." Another enlarged on this. Not to be a poor millionaire, you needed twenty-five million. "If you have twenty-five," she said crisply, "you're all right." But Lurabelle Laughlin, from Pasadena, had inherited $50 million. Her husband, Harry, told me this. He said Lurabelle could buy and sell every person on board our ship. He wasn't being malicious, only factual. "And I'm not too badly off myself," he said.
