The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  ‘That’s the Ashau Valley,’ said Cobra One, who until then had been doing an amusing imitation of Walter Brennan. The ridges mounted into the mist; below them, in the smoke and sun, were deep black gorges marked by waterfalls. Cobra One was shaking his head: ‘A lot of good men died there.’

  Dazzled by the scenery, I walked through the train and saw a blind man feeling his way to the door – I could hear his lungs working like a bellows; wrinkled old ladies with black teeth and black pyjamas clutched wicker bales of spring onions; and soldiers – one ashen-faced in a wheelchair, one on crutches, others with new bandages on their hands and heads, and all of them in the American uniforms that suggested travesty in its true sense. An official moved through the coaches checking the ID cards of civilian males, looking for draft evaders. This official got tangled in the piece of string held by a blind man and attached to the waist of a child leading him. There were many armed soldiers on the train, but none looked like escorts. The train was defended by concentrations of soldiers at those bridge emplacements, and this is perhaps why it is so easy to blow up the line with command-detonated mines. These mines are slipped under the rails at night; when the train goes over one of them, a hidden man – who might be a Viet Cong or a bomber hired by a trucker in Danang – explodes the charge.

  Twice during that trip, at small station sidings, children were offered to me by old ladies; they were like the pale-skinned, light-haired children I had seen in Can Tho and Bien Hoa. But these were older, perhaps four or five, and it was strange to hear these American-looking children speaking Vietnamese. It was even stranger to see the small Vietnamese farmers in the vastness of a landscape whose beautiful trees and ravines and jade crags – these launched from cloud banks – hid their enemies. From the train I could turn my eyes to the mountains and almost forget the country’s name, but the truth was closer and cruel: the Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism. The tragedy was that we had come, and, from the beginning, had not planned to stay: Danang was to be proof of that.

  The train was under the gigantic Hai Van Pass (‘The Pass of Clouds’), a natural division on the north side of Danang, like a Roman wall. If the Viet Cong got past it, the way would be clear to Danang, and already the Viet Cong were bivouacked on the far slopes, waiting. Like the other stretches between Hué and Danang, the most scenically dramatic mountains and valleys were – and are still – the most terrible battlefields. Beyond the Hai Van Pass we entered a long tunnel. By this time I had walked the length of the train and was standing on the front balcony of the diesel, under the bright headlights. Ahead, a large bat dislodged itself from the ceiling and flapped clumsily this way and that, winging against the walls, trying to keep ahead of the roaring engine. The bat swooped, grazing the track, then rose – more slowly now – as the end of the tunnel came into view, flying closer to the engine with every second. It was like a toy of wood and paper, its spring running down, and at last it was ten feet from my face, a brown panicky creature beating its bony wings. It tired, dropped a few feet, then in the light of the tunnel’s exit – a light it could not see – its wings collapsed, it pitched forward, and quickly tumbled under the engine’s wheels.

  ‘The Street without Joy’ was above us as we raced across a treeless promontory to the Nam Ho Bridge, five dark spans secured against underwater sappers by great rusting wreaths of barbed wire. These were the outer wastes of Danang, a grim district of supply bases that has been taken over by ARVN forces and squatters; shelters – huts and lean-tos – made exclusively with war materials, sandbags, plastic sheeting, corrugated iron stamped U.S. ARMY, and food wrappers marked with the initials of charitable agencies. Danang was pushed next to the sea and all the land around it had been stripped of trees. If ever a place looked poisoned, it was Danang.

  Raiding and looting were skills the war had required the Vietnamese to learn. We got out at Danang Station and after lunch drove with an American official to the south side of the city, where GIs had been housed in several large camps. Once there had been thousands of American soldiers; now there were none. But the barracks were filled to bursting with refugees; because there had been no maintenance, the camps were in a sorry condition and looked as if they had been shelled. Laundry flew from the flagpoles; windows were broken or boarded-up; there were cooking fires in the roads. The less lucky refugees had set up house in wheelless trucks and the sewage stink was terrible – the camps could be smelled two hundred yards away.

  ‘The people were waiting at the gates and over by those fences when the Americans started packing,’ said the American official. ‘Like locusts or I-don’t-know-what. As soon as the last soldier left they rushed in, looted the stores, and commandeered the houses.’

  The refugees, using ingenuity, looted the barracks; the Vietnamese government officials, using their influence, looted the hospitals. I kept hearing stories in Danang (and, again, in the southern port of Nha Trang) of how, the day the Americans left, the hospitals were cleaned out – drugs, oxygen cylinders, blankets, beds, medical appliances, anything that could be carried. Chinese ships were anchored off shore to receive this loot, which was taken to Hong Kong and resold. But there is a just God in Heaven: a Swiss businessman told me that some of these pilfered medical supplies found their way, via Hong Kong, to Hanoi. No one knew what happened to the enriched government officials. Some of the looting stories sounded exaggerated; I believed the ones about the raided hospitals because no American official could tell me where there was a hospital receiving patients, and that’s the sort of thing an American would know.

  For several miles on the road south the ravaged camps swarmed with Vietnamese, whose hasty adaptations could be seen in doors knocked through barracks’ walls and whole barracks torn down to make ten flimsy huts. The camps themselves had been temporary – they were all plywood panels, splitting in the dampness, and peeling metal sheets, and sagging fence posts – so none of these crude shelters would last. If one felt pity for the demoralized American soldiers who had lived in these horrible camps, one felt even sorrier for the inheritors of all this junk.

  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 cosy 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 re-enactment 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, batlike Vietnamese girl appeared from t
he 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 acknowledgement, 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.’

  That evening I met Colonel Tuan who, under the name Duy Lam, writes novels. He was one of about ten writers in Vietnam who told me how severe censorship was under Thieu’s regime – not simply political censorship, for A Street-car Named Desire is also banned. Afraid that their own books will be censored, Vietnam’s novelists have chosen the safer course of translating inoffensive novels: Saigon’s bookshops are full of Vietnamese versions of Jane Eyre, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the works of Washington Irving and Dorothy Parker. Colonel Tuan said he liked writing in Vietnamese, although he could write with equal ease in French or English.

  ‘Vietnamese is a very beautiful language,’ he said. ‘But it is hard to translate. For example, if a man is addressing his wife there are so many ways he can do it. He might say “You” – but this is considered rude. Or he might call her “Little sister”, and she will call him “Brother”. The most beautiful is when a man calls his wife “Myself” – “How is myself?” he will say to her. And there are others. He might call her “Mother”, and she will call him “Father” –’

  ‘ “Mother, Father”,’ said Cobra One. ‘Why, Mister and Mrs Front-Porch America say that!’

  Before he left I asked Colonel Tuan what the general feeling in Vietnam was towards Americans after so much war, disruption, and death, after all the years of occupation.

  Colonel Tuan thought a long time before he replied, and when he did he chose his words carefully. ‘We think the Americans,’ he said, and stopped. ‘We think they are well disciplined … and they made many mistakes in the war. And of course we think they are generous. But we also believe they are people without culture – none at all, none that we have seen. I am not speaking for myself: I have read Faulkner and many other American writers. I am thinking of the average person – most of the people in Vietnam. That is what they think.’

  I flew from Danang to Nha Trang to take a train to Thap Cham, but the day I arrived there ‘was an attack by a squad of sappers on the oil depot outside Saigon, at Nha Be, and 50 per cent of Vietnam’s fuel was wiped out in a morning. Fuel rationing started and I cancelled my trip. It was an unnecessary extravagance, since I would have to be driven a hundred miles back in a car. I got a bicycle and pedalled around the town of abandoned villas, then ate eels at a sea-front restaurant. The next day I waited hours at Nha Trang airport for a Saigon plane; and finally one came, a C-123 laden with Kleenex, Kotex, beans, toilet paper, grapefruit juice, a huge crate of Port of Call Extra Fancy Cal-Rose Rice (odd, since Nha Trang is in a rice-growing area), and a 1967 Dodge, belonging to one of the Americans there.

  The flight back to Saigon in a thunderstorm scared the life out of me; I was strapped against the stomach wall of this pitching whale, and the three Chinese pilots gave me no reassurance. I recovered sufficiently to give two more lectures of which I remember little apart from what Auden described in ‘On the Circui’ as

  A truly asinine remark,

  A soul-bewitching face.

  And then I was off and waiting at Tan Son Nhut Airport to go to Japan. In better times I would have taken the train to Hanoi, changed for Peking, and gone via Shenyang and Seoul to Pusan for a boat linking to one of Japan’s Kyushu expresses. Or I could have gone straight from Peking to Moscow via Ulan Bator in Mongolia, and then home. The way is clear, by rail, fr
om Hanoi Junction to Liverpool Street Station in London. Perhaps at some future date …1

  26. The Hatsukari (‘Early Bird’) Limited Express to Aomori

  IN Japan I planned to outfit myself for Siberia. There were the trains, of course, and the lectures to pay for them; but clothing for my onward journey was my initial concern. I arrived in Tokyo with the clothes that had served me for three months in the tropics, my drip-dry wardrobe. These clothes, stained with curry juice, somewhat threadbare, the trouser seats worn shiny by my sedentary travelling, were inadequate for the freezing Japanese weather, which augured ill for what I had been forewarned (Soviet railway timetables give average temperatures) would be thirty below in Khabarovsk. It was then December. Tokyo’s winter was aggravated by wind-blown grit and exhaust fumes and those choking updrafts between buildings that characterize big-city winters. I spent two days searching for warm clothes. But Japanese clothes are not designed for the Siberian winter, and they are made only in small sizes, and they cost the earth.

  It is with a kind of perverse pride that the Japanese point out how expensive their country has become. But this is as much a measure of wealth as of inflation, and I began to wonder if it was as crippling as people claimed. I asked about it, but this timid inquiry is the foreigner’s first question and the knowing resident is prepared to shock you with joke prices. How much does a kimono cost? ‘You can get a good one for a thousand dollars.’ A meal? ‘At most restaurants you can get away with paying about twenty dollars – for one person.’ A bottle of gin? ‘Imported stuff might set you back twenty dollars or more.’ And when I laughed derisively, an American turned on me with what I thought was unwarranted savagery and said, ‘Listen, you can’t get a cup of coffee here for less than a dollar!’ There was, I learned later, a place in the Tokyo outskirts where a cup of coffee (including cream and sugar) was said to cost forty dollars. This information, offered so casually, is like a form of fagging at schools where the seniors’ automatic response to the new boy is to exclude him by horrifying him. Americans in Thailand initiate you by saying, ‘Never pat a Thai on the head – the head is sacred here. You could be killed for that.’ The retailing of the Thai religious mystique, like the money mystique in Japan, is supposed to make you think twice about staying. No one says you can live cheaply in Japan – but it’s possible, by staying in Japanese inns and developing a taste for the large bowls of noodle soup called ra-men (no charge for the tea) and using the train. Fruit is also inexpensive since Japan buys cut-price oranges, apples, and tangerines from the South Africans, who are so grateful to get radios in return, they have officially declared the Japanese to be white. And there is a McDonald’s hamburger joint on the Ginza. Winter clothes were a different story. Most coats I saw were well over $100 and the one I settled for, a tight-fitting number with a rabbit-fur collar, cost me $150. Gloves, scarf, woollen hat, and so forth exhausted the fee I got for my first lecture, but I was prepared not only for Siberia but also for my speaking engagement in the December snows of Hokkaido, two train trips north.