To the Ends of the Earth Page 9

  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, g
rinning.

  “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.