by Paul Theroux
“You want tea?”
I said yes, and we all sat in the small kitchen. Tatyana brushed her hair and put on makeup as she boiled the kettle and made tea.
There were magazines on the table: two oldish copies of Vogue, and last month’s Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar. Seeing them in that place gave me what I was sure would be a lasting hatred for those magazines.
“My friend from Italy brings them for me,” Tatyana said.
“She has many foreign friends,” Olga said. “That is why I wanted you to meet her. Because you are our foreign friend. You want to change rubles?”
I said no—there was nothing I wanted to buy.
“We can find something for you,” Olga said, “and you can give us U.S. dollars.”
“What are you going to find?”
“You like Natasha. Natasha likes you. Why don’t you make love to her?”
I stood up and went to the window. The three women stared at me, and when I looked at Natasha she smiled demurely and batted her eyelashes. Beside her was her shopping basket with a box of detergent, some fresh spinach wrapped in newspaper, some cans of food, a pack of plastic clothespins, and a box of disposable diapers.
“Here?” I said. “Now?”
They all smiled at me. Out of the window people were sweeping the pavements, and raking leaves, and shoveling up piles of rubbish—a little unselfish demonstration of civic pride for Lenin’s birthday.
“How much will it cost me to make love to Natasha?”
“It will cost one hundred and seventy U.S. dollars.”
“That’s rather a precise figure,” I said. “How did you arrive at that price?”
“That’s how much a cassette recorder costs at the Berioska shop.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You have to decide now,” Olga said sternly. “Do you have a credit card?”
“You take credit cards?”
“No, the Berioska shop can.”
“That’s an awful lot of money, Olga.”
“Hah!” Tatyana jeered. “My boyfriends give me radios, tape recorders, cassettes, clothes—thousands of dollars. And you’re arguing about a few hundred dollars.”
“Listen, I’m not boasting—believe me. But if I like someone I don’t usually buy her before we go to bed. In America we do it for fun.”
Olga said, “If we don’t have dollars we can’t buy radios at the Berioska. It closes at six o’clock. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like being hurried.”
“All this talk! You could have finished by now!”
I hated this and had a strong desire to get away from the nagging. It was hot in the kitchen, the tea was bitter, all those people raking leaves sixteen floors down depressed me.
I said, “Why don’t we go to the Berioska shop first?”
Tatyana dressed and we found a taxi. It was a twenty-minute ride and well after five by the time we arrived. But for me it was simply a way of saving face—and saving money. I had been disgusted with myself back there in the flat.
Before we went into the shop the three women started bickering. Olga said that it was all my fault for not making love to Natasha when I should have. Tatyana had to meet her daughter at school, Natasha was due home because she was going to the Black Sea tomorrow with her husband and small child—and was counting on having a cassette recorder; and Olga herself had to be home to cook dinner. “Vremya,” Natasha said, “vremya.” Time, time.
I had never seen such expensive electronic equipment—overpriced radios and tape decks, a Sony Walkman, for $300.
“Natasha wants one of those.”
Olga was pointing to a $200 cassette machine.
“That’s a ridiculous price.”
“It’s a good cassette. Japanese.”
I was looking at Natasha and thinking how thoroughly out of touch these people were with market forces.
“Vremya,” Natasha said urgently.
“These are nice.” I began trying on the fur hats. “Wouldn’t you like one of these?”
Olga said, “You must buy something now. Then we go.”
And I imagined it—the cassette recorder in a Berioska bag, and the dash to Tatyana’s and the fumble upstairs with Natasha panting “Vremya, vremya,” and then off I’d go, saying to myself: You’ve just been screwed.
I said, “Tatyana, your daughter’s waiting at school. Olga, your husband’s going to want his dinner on time. And Natasha, you’re very nice, but if you don’t go home and pack you’ll never make it to the Black Sea with your husband.”
“What are you doing?”
“I have an appointment,” I said, and left, as the Berioska shop was closing.
I went to the Bolshoi, and I noticed at the cloakroom and the buffet and the bar Russian women gave me frank looks. It was not lust or romance, merely curiosity because they had spotted a man who probably had hard currency. It was not the sort of look women usually offered. It was an unambiguous lingering gaze, a half smile that said: Maybe we can work something out.
Mongols
THE MONGOLS REACHED THE EASTERN LIMITS OF CHINA. They rode to Afghanistan. They rode to Poland. They sacked Moscow, Warsaw, and Vienna. They had stirrups—they introduced stirrups to Europe (and in that made jousting possible and perhaps started the Age of Chivalry). They rode for years, in all seasons. When the Russians retired from their campaigns for the winter, the Mongols kept riding and recruiting in the snow. They devised an ingenious tactic for their winter raids: they waited for rivers to freeze and then they rode on the ice. In this way they could go anywhere and they surprised their enemies. They were tough and patient and by the year 1280 they had conquered half the world.
But they were not fearless, and looking at these great open spaces you could almost imagine what it was that spooked them. They had a dread of thunder and lightning. It was so easy to be struck by lightning here! When an electric storm started, they made for their tents and burrowed into layers of black felt. If there were strangers among them they sent these people outside, considering them unlucky. They would not eat an animal that had been struck by lightning—they wouldn’t go near it. Anything that would conduct lightning they avoided—even between storms; and one of their aims in life, along with plundering and marauding and pillaging, was propitiating lightning.
As I was watching this wilderness of low hills, the city of Ulaanbaatar materialized in the distance, and a road hove into view, and dusty buses and trucks. My first impression of the city was that it was a military garrison, and that impression stayed with me. Every block of flats looked like a barracks, every parking lot like a motor pool, every street in the city looked as though it had been designed for a parade. Most of the vehicles were in fact Soviet army vehicles. Buildings were fenced in, with barbed wire on the especially important ones. A cynic might have said that the city resembled a prison, but if so the Mongolians were very cheery prisoners—it was a youthful, well-fed, well-dressed population. They had red cheeks, and wore mittens and boots; in this brown country they favored bright colors—it was not unusual to see an old man with a red hat and a purple frock coat and blue trousers stuck into his multicolored boots. But that way of dressing meant that the Russians were more conspicuous, even when they weren’t soldiers. I say the city looked like a garrison, but it was clearly not a Mongolian one—it was Russian, and there was little to distinguish it from any other military garrison I had seen in Central Asia. We had been passing such big, dull places all the way from Irkutsk: barracks, radar dishes, unclimbable fences, batteries, ammo dumps, and surely those mounds that looked like tumuli were missile silos?
The hotel was bare and smelled of mutton fat. That was the smell of Ulaanbaatar. Mutton was in the air. If there had been a menu, it would have been on the menu. It was served at every meal: mutton and potatoes—but gristly mutton and cold potatoes. The Mongolians had a way of making food inedible or disgusting, and they could transform even the most inoffensive meal into garbage, by serving it
cold, or sprinkling it with black carrots, or garnishing it with a goat’s ear. I made a point of visiting food shops, just to see what was available. I found fat black sausages, shriveled potatoes and turnips, black carrots, trays of grated cabbage, basins of yellow goats’ ears, chunks of rancid mutton and chicken feet. The most appetizing thing I saw turned out to be a large bin of brown unwrapped laundry soap.
Chinese Inventions
THE CHINESE ARE THE LAST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD STILL manufacturing spittoons, chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, bed warmers, claw hammers, “quill” pens (steel nibs, dunk-and-write), wooden yokes for oxen, iron plows, sit-up-and-beg bicycles, and steam engines.
They still make grandfather clocks—the chain-driven mechanical kind that go tick-tock! and bong! Is this interesting? I think it is, because the Chinese invented the world’s first mechanical clock in the late Tang Dynasty. Like many other Chinese inventions, it was forgotten about; they lost the idea, and the clock was reintroduced to China from Europe. The Chinese were the first to make cast iron, and soon after invented the iron plow. Chinese metallurgists were the first to make steel (“great iron”). The Chinese invented the crossbow in the fourth century B.C. and were still using it in 1895. They were the first to notice that all snow-flakes have six sides. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding calipers, porcelain, the magic lantern (or zoetrope), and the stink bomb (one recipe called for fifteen pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane, and cantharides beetles). They invented the chain pump in the first century A.D. and are still using it. They made the first kite, two thousand years before one was flown in Europe. They invented movable type and devised the first printed book—the Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra, in the year A.D. 868. They had printing presses in the eleventh century, and there is clear evidence that Gutenberg got his technology from the Portuguese, who in turn had learned it from the Chinese. They constructed the first suspension bridge and the first bridge with a segmented arch (this first one, built in 610, is still in use). They invented playing cards, fishing reels, and whisky.
In the year 1192, a Chinese man jumped from a minaret in Guangzhou using a parachute, but the Chinese had been experimenting with parachutes since the second century B.C. The Emperor Gao Yang (reigned 550–559) tested “man-flying kites”—an early form of hang glider—by throwing condemned prisoners from a tall tower, clinging to bamboo contraptions; one flew for two miles before crash-landing. The Chinese were the first sailors in the world to use rudders; westerners relied on steering oars until they borrowed the rudder from the Chinese in about 1100. Every schoolboy knows that the Chinese invented paper money, fireworks, and lacquer. They were also the first people in the world to use wallpaper (French missionaries brought the wallpaper idea to Europe from China in the fifteenth century). They went mad with paper. An excavation in Turfan yielded a paper hat, a paper belt, and a paper shoe, from the fifth century A.D. I have already mentioned toilet paper. They also made paper curtains and military armor made of paper—its pleats made it impervious to arrows. Paper was not manufactured until the twelfth century in Europe, about fifteen hundred years after its invention in China. They made the first wheelbarrows, and some of the best Chinese wheelbarrow designs have yet to be used in the West. There is much more. When Professor Needham’s Science and Civilization in China is complete, it will run to twenty-five volumes.
It was the Chinese who came up with the first design of the steam engine in about A.D. 600. And the Datong Locomotive Works is the last factory in the world that still manufactures steam locomotives. China makes big black choo-choo trains, and not only that—none of the factory is automated. Everything is handmade, hammered out of iron, from the huge boilers to the little brass whistles. China had always imported its steam locomotives—first from Britain, then from Germany, Japan, and Russia. In the late 1950s, with Soviet help, the Chinese built this factory in Datong, and the first locomotive was produced in 1959. There are now nine thousand workers, turning out three or four engines a month, of what is essentially a nineteenth-century vehicle, with a few refinements. Like the spittoons, the sewing machines, the washboards, the yokes, and the plows, these steam engines are built to last. They are the primary means of power in Chinese railways at the moment, and although there is an official plan to phase them out by the year 2000, the Datong Locomotive Works will remain in business. All over the world, sentimental steam railway enthusiasts are using Chinese steam engines, and in some countries—like Thailand and Pakistan—most trains are hauled by Datong engines. There is nothing Chinese about them, though. They are the same gasping locomotives I saw shunting in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1948, when I stood by the tracks and wished I was on board.
Public Bathhouse
I FOUND OUT THAT PEKING WAS FULL OF PUBLIC BATHHOUSES—about thirty of them, subsidized by the government. They are one of the cheapest outings in China: for 60 fen (15 cents) a person is admitted and given a piece of soap, a towel, and a bed; and he is allowed to stay all day, washing himself in the steamy public pool and resting.
The one I found was called Xing Hua Yuan. It was open from eight-thirty in the morning until eight o’clock at night. Many people who use it are travelers who have just arrived in Peking after a long journey and want to look presentable for their friends and relatives—and of course who don’t want to impose on them for a bath.
The beds were in little cubicles, and men wrapped in towels were resting or walking around talking. It was like a Roman bath—social, with the scalded Chinese, pinkish in the heat, sloshing themselves and yelling at each other in a friendly way. It was also possible to get a private room, for about double the ordinary rate.
I was thinking how Roman and Victorian the bathhouse looked (there was a women’s bathhouse next door), how useful for travelers and bathless residents, how like a club it was and how congenial, when a homosexual Chinese man set me straight.
“Most people go there to take a bath,” he said. “But it is also a good place to go if you want to meet a boy and do things with him.”
“What sort of things?”
He didn’t flinch. He said, “One day I was in Xing Hua Yuan and saw two men in a private room, and one had the other one’s cock in his mouth. That sort of thing.”
Shanghai
SHANGHAI IS AN OLD BROWN RIVERSIDE CITY WITH THE LOOK of Brooklyn, and the Chinese—who are comforted by crowds—like it for its mobs and its street life. It has a reputation for city slickers and stylishness. Most of China’s successful fashion designers work in Shanghai, and if you utter the words Yifu Sheng Luolang, the Shanghainese will know you are speaking the name of Yves Saint-Laurent. When I arrived in the city, there was an editor of the French magazine Elle prowling the streets looking for material for an article on China called “The Fashion Revolution.” According to the Chinese man who accompanied her—whom I later met—this French woman was mightily impressed by the dress sense of the Shanghai women. She stopped them and took their picture and asked where they got their clothes. The majority said that they got them in the Free Market in the back streets or that they made the clothes themselves at home, basing them on pictures they saw in western magazines. Even in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the women workers showed up at their factories with bright sweaters and frilly blouses under their blue baggy suits; it was customary to meet in the women’s washroom and compare the hidden sweaters before they started work.
Because it is a cosmopolitan city and has seen more foreigners—both invaders and friendly visitors—than any other Chinese city, it is a polyglot place. It is at once the most politically dogmatic (“Oppose book worship,” “Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work”: Mao) and the most bourgeois. When changes came to China, they appeared first in Shanghai; and when there is conflict in China, it is loudest and most violent in Shanghai. The sense of life is strong in Shanghai, and even a city hater like myself can detect Shanghai’s spirit and appreciate Shan
ghai’s atmosphere. It is not crass like Canton, but it is abrasive—and in the hot months stifling, crowded, noisy, and smelly.
It seemed to me noisy most of all, with the big-city, all-night howl that is the sound track of New York (honks, sirens, garbage trucks, shouts, death rattles). Peking was rising and would soon be a city of tall buildings, but Shanghai had been built on mud and was growing sideways and spreading into the swamps of Zhejiang. All day the pile drivers hammered steel into this soft soil to fortify it, and one was right outside my window—a cruel and dominating noise that determined the rhythm of my life. Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It affected the way I breathed and walked and ate: I moved my feet and lifted my spoon to Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It orchestrated my talking, too, it made me write in bursts, and when I brushed my teeth I discovered I did it to the pounding of this pile driver, the bang and its half echo, Zhong-guo! It began at seven in the morning and was still hammering at eight at night, and in Shanghai it was inescapable, because nearly every neighborhood had its own anvil clang of Zhong-guo!
I walked the back streets in order to keep away from the traffic and the crowds. And I realized that it would be dishonest to complain too much about noise, the pile drivers, and the frantic energy, because on my first visit to Shanghai I felt it was dreary and moribund and demoralized. Why was it that they never knew when to stop? Even the back streets were crowded, with improvised stalls and households that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the pavement.
Toward the Bund—Shanghai’s riverbank promenade—I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was St. Joseph’s Church, and the man I took to be the caretaker, because he was so shabbily dressed in a ragged jacket and slippers, was the pastor, a Catholic priest. He was both pious and watchful, soft-spoken and alert—it is the demeanor of a Chinese Christian who had been put through more hoops than he cares to remember. The church had been wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, daubed with slogans, and turned into a depot for machinery, and the churchyard had been a parking lot.