To the Ends of the Earth

by Paul Theroux

  But the curfew continued, and what were diversions for the first few days and weeks became habits. Although people usually showed up for work in the mornings, work in the afternoons almost ceased. There were too many things to be done before the curfew began at nightfall: buses had to be caught, provisions found, and some people had to collect children. We visited the bars so that we could get drunk in the company of other people; we played the slot machines and talked about the curfew, but after two weeks it was a very boring subject.

  The people who never went out at night before the curfew was imposed—some Indians with large families used to matinees at the local movie houses, the Africans who did manual labor, and some settlers—felt none of the curfew’s effects. And there were steady ones who refused to let the curfew get to them; they were impatient with our daily hangovers, our inefficiency, our nervous comments. Our classes were not well attended. One day I asked casually where our Congolese student was—a dashing figure, he wore a silk scarf and rode a large old motorcycle. I was told that he had been pulled off his motorcycle by a soldier and had been beaten to death with a rifle butt.

  We left work early. In the afternoons it was as if everyone was on leave but couldn’t afford to go to Nairobi or Mombasa, as if everyone had decided to while away his time at the local bars. At the end of the month no one was paid because the ministry was short-staffed. Some of us ran out of money. The bar owners said they were earning less and less: it was no longer possible for people to drink in bars after dark. They would only have been making the same amount as before, they said, if all the people started drinking in the middle of the morning and kept it up all day. The drinking crowd was a relatively small one, and there were no casual drinkers. Most people in the city stayed at home. They were afraid to stay out after five or so. I tried to get drunk by five-thirty. My memory is of going home drunk, with the dazzling horizontal rays of the sun in my eyes.

  The dwindling of time was a strange thing. During the first weeks of the curfew we took chances; we arrived home just as the soldiers were drifting into the streets. Then we began to give ourselves more time, leaving an hour or more for going home. It might have been because we were drunker and needed more time, but we were also more worried: more people were found dead in the streets each morning when the curfew lifted. For many of us the curfew began in the middle of the afternoon when we hurried to a bar; and it was the drinkers who, soaked into a state of slow motion, took the most chances.

  Different prostitutes appeared in the bars. Before the curfew there were ten or fifteen in each bar, most of them young and from the outskirts of Kampala. But the curfew was imposed after two tribes fought; most of the prostitutes had been from these tribes and so went into hiding. Others took their places. Now there were ones from the Coast, there were half-castes, Rwandans, Somalis. I remember the Somalis. There was said to be an Ethiopian at the Crested Crane, but I never saw her; in any case, she would have been very popular. All these women were old and hard, and there were fewer than before. They sat in the bars, futile and left alone, slumped on the broken chairs, waiting, as they had been waiting ever since the curfew started. Whatever other talents a prostitute may have she is still unmatched by any other person in her genius for killing time and staying on the alert for customers. The girls held their glasses in two hands and followed the stumbling drinkers with their eyes. Most of us were not interested in complicating the curfew further by taking one of these girls home. I am sure they never had to wait so long with such dull men.

  One afternoon a girl put her hand on mine. Her palm was very rough; she rubbed it on my wrist and when I did not turn away she put it on my leg and asked me if I wanted to go in the back. I said I didn’t mind, and she led me out past the toilets to the back of the bar where there was a little shed. She scuffed across the shed’s dirt floor, then stood in a corner and lifted her skirt. Here, she said, come here. I asked her if we had to remain standing up. She said yes. I started to embrace her; she let her head fall back until it touched the wood wall. She still held the hem of her skirt in her hand. Then I said no, I couldn’t nail her against the wall. I saw that the door was still open. She argued for a while and said in Swahili, “Talk, talk, we could have finished by now!” I stepped away, but gave her ten shillings just the same. She spat on it and looked at me fiercely.

  Rats in Rangoon

  IN ASIA A CITY SHOULD BE JUDGED NOT BY THE NUMBER OF rats scuttling in its streets but on the rats’ cunning and condition. In Singapore the rats are potbellied and as sleek as housepets; they crouch patiently near noodle stalls, certain of a feed; they are quick, with bright eyes, and hard to trap.

  In Rangoon I sat in an outdoor café toying with a glass of beer and heard the hedge near me rustle; four enfeebled, scabby rats, straight off the pages of La Peste, tottered out and looked around. I stamped my foot. They moved back into the hedge; and now everyone in the café was staring at me. It happened twice. I drank quickly and left, and glancing back saw the rats emerge once more and sniff at the legs of the chair where I had been sitting.

  At five-thirty one morning in Rangoon, I dozed in the hot, dark compartment of a crowded train, waiting for it to pull out of the station. A person entered the toilet; there was a splash outside; the door banged. Another entered. This went on for twenty minutes, until dawn, and I saw that outside splashing and pools of excrement had stained the tracks and a litter of crumpled newspapers—The Working Peoples Daily—a bright yellow. A rat crept over to the splashed paper and nibbled, then tugged; two more rats, mottled with mange, licked, tugged, and hopped in the muck. Another splash, and the rats withdrew; they returned, gnawing. There was a hawker’s voice, a man selling Burmese books with bright covers. He shouted and walked briskly, not stopping to sell, simply walking alongside the train, crying out. The rats withdrew again; the hawker, glancing down, lengthened his stride and walked on, his heel yellow. Then the rats returned.

  Cheroots are handy in such a situation. Around me in the compartment smiling Burmese puffed away on thick green cheroots and didn’t seem to notice the stink of the growing yellow pool just outside. At the Shwe Dagon Pagoda I saw a very old lady, hands clasped in prayer. She knelt near a begging leper whose disease had withered his feet and abraded his body and given him a bat’s face. He had a terrible smell, but the granny prayed with a Churchillian-sized cheroot in her mouth. On Mandalay Hill, doorless outhouses stand beside the rising steps, and next to the outhouses are fruit stalls. The stink of piss is powerful, but the fruitseller, who squats all day in that stink, is wreathed in smoke from his cheroot.

  Writing in the Tropics

  THE BEST JOB FOR A WRITER, A JOB WITH THE FEWEST HOURS, is in the tropics. But books are hard to write in the tropics. It is not only the heat; it is the lack of privacy, the open windows, the noise. Tropical cities are deafening. In Lagos and Accra and Kampala two people walking down a city street will find they are shouting to each other to be heard over the sound of traffic and the howls of residents and radios. V. S. Naipaul is the only writer I know of who has mentioned the abrading of the nerves by tropical noise (the chapter on Trinidad in The Middle Passage). Shouting is the Singaporean’s expression of friendliness; the Chinese shout is like a bark, sharp enough to make you jump. And if you are unfortunate enough to live near a Chinese cemetery—only foreigners live near cemeteries, the Chinese consider it unlucky to occupy those houses—you will hear them mourning with firecrackers, scattering cherry bombs over the gravestones.

  Sit in a room in Singapore and try to write. Every sound is an interruption, and your mind blurs each time a motorcycle or a plane or a funeral passes. If you live near a main road, as I do, there will be three funerals a day (Chinese funerals are truckloads of gong orchestras and brass bands playing familiar songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”). The day the Bengali gardener mows the grass is a day wasted. Hawkers cycle or drive by and each stops; you learn their individual yells, the bean-curd man with his transistor and sidecar, the fish
-ball man on his bike, the ice-cream seller with his town crier’s bell (a midaftemoon interruption), the breadman in his Austin van, leaning on the horn; the elderly Chinese lady crouching in her sam foo and crying, “Yeggs!” through the door, the Tamil newsboy, a toddy alcoholic, muttering, “Baybah, baybah.” Before the British forces left there was a fish-and-chip van; it didn’t beep, but there were yells. The Singaporean doesn’t stir from his house. He waits in the coolness of his parlor for the deliverers to arrive. The yells and gongs, at first far off, then closer, console him. It is four-thirty, and here comes the coconut seller ringing his bicycle bell. He has a monkey, a macaque the size of a four-year-old, on the crossbar. The coconut seller is crazy; the buyers make him linger and they laugh at him. A crowd gathers to jeer him; he chases some children and then goes away. After dark the grocery truck parks in front of your house; the grocer has a basket of fish, a slaughtered pig, and the whole range of Ma-Ling canned goods (“Tripe in Duck Grease,” “Chicken Feet,” “Lychees in Syrup”), and for an hour you will hear the yelp and gargle of bartering. You have written nothing.

  The heat and light; you asked for those in coming so far, but it is hotter, though less bright, than you imagined—Singapore is usually cloudy, averaging only six hours of sunshine a day. That persistent banging and screeching is an annoyance that makes you hotter still. You are squinting at the pen which is slipping out of your slick fingers and wondering why you bothered to come.

  Natives and Expatriates

  THE ENGLISH SENSE OF ORDER, THE RESULT OF AN HABITUAL reflex rather than a systematic decree, gives the impression of a tremendous solidity and balance. It was carried abroad and it reassured those who could enter into it. English attitudes traveled without changing much, and to a large extent this accounts for some of the Englishman’s isolation. The English overseas are accused of living a rather narrow existence, but the point is that they associate themselves deeply with a locality: in this sense all Englishmen are villagers. It shows in the special phrases they use when they are away, among “natives” or “locals.”

  “We’ve lived here for donkey’s years, but we’ve never been invited to one of their houses,” says the Englishman, adding, “though we had them around to tea.”

  “They’re very secretive and awfully suspicious,” says his wife.

  “They seem very friendly, but they’re not interested in us. They lack curiosity.”

  “They keep to themselves.”

  “An odd lot. I can’t say I understand them.”

  You might think they are talking about Kikuyus or Malays, but they aren’t. They are Londoners who moved to Dorset eight years ago and they are talking about ordinary folk in the village. I knew the locals: I was neutral—just passing through, stopping for five months. The locals had strong opinions on outsiders who had settled in that part of Dorset.

  “They come down here and all the prices go up,” one old man said. He might have been a Kenyan, speaking of settlers. There were other objections: the outsiders didn’t bother to understand the village life, they kept to themselves, acted superior, and anyway were mostly retired people and not much use.

  Expatriates and natives: the colonial pattern repeated in England. There was a scheme afoot to drill for oil on a beautiful hill near a picturesque village. The expatriates started a campaign against it; the natives said very little. I raised the subject in a pub one night with some natives of the area, asking them where they stood on the oil-drilling issue.

  “That bugger——,” one said, mentioning the name of a well-known man who had lived there for some years and was leading the campaign. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “What would you say to him?” I asked.

  “I’d tell him to pack his bags and go back where he came from.”

  So one understands the linguistic variations in England, the dialect that thickens among the natives when an expatriate enters a pub. No one recognizes him; the publican chats with him; the talk around the fireplace is of a broken fence or a road accident. The expatriate is discussed only after he leaves the room: Where does he live? What does he do? The natives know the answers, and later when he buys a round of drinks they will warn him about the weather (“We’ll pay for these warm days!”). It is a form of village gratitude, the effort at small talk. But in England a village is a state of mind. “Are you new in the village?” a friend of mine was asked by a newsagent. This was in Notting Hill.

  His Highness

  THERE IS A SULTAN IN MALAYSIA WHOSE NICKNAME IS “BUFFLES” and who in his old age divides his time between watching polo and designing his own uniforms. His uniforms are very grand and resemble the outfit of a Shriner or thirty-second-degree Mason, but he was wearing a silk sports shirt the day I met him on the polo ground. The interview began badly, because his first question, on hearing I was a writer, was “Then you must know Beverley Nichols!” When I laughed, the sultan said, “Somerset Maugham came to my coronation. And next week Lord Somebody’s coming—who is it?”

  “Lewisham, Your Highness,” said an Englishwoman on his left.

  “Lewisham’s coming—yes, Lewisham. Do you know him? No?” The sultan adjusted his sunglasses. “I just got a letter from him.”

  The conversation turned quite easily to big-game hunting. “A very rich American once told me that he had shot grizzly bears in Russia and elephants in Africa and tigers in India. He said that bear meat is the best, but the second best is horse meat. He said that. Yes!”

  We discussed the merits of horse meat.

  The sultan said, “My father said horse meat was good to eat. Yes, indeed. But it’s very heating.” The sultan placed his hands on his shirt and found his paunch and tugged it. “You can’t eat too much of it. It’s too heating.”

  “Have you ever eaten horse meat, Your Highness?”

  “No, never. But the syces eat it all the time.”

  The match began with great vigor. The opposing team galloped up to the sultan’s goal with their sticks flailing.

  The sultan said, “Was that a goal?”

  “No, Your Highness,” said the woman, “but very nearly.”

  “Very nearly, yes! I saw that,” said the sultan.

  “Missed by a foot, Your Highness.”

  “Missed by a foot, yes!”

  After that chukka, I asked the sultan what the Malay name of the opposing team meant in English.

  The sultan shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ll have to ask Zayid. It’s Malay, you see. I don’t speak it terribly well.”

  The Hotel in No-Man’s-Land

  “CUSTOMS OVER THERE,” SAID THE MOTIONING AFGHAN. But the Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier at Tayebad, we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran. It was the sort of bedraggled oasis that features in Foreign Legion films: a few square stucco buildings, several parched trees, a dusty road. It was getting dark. I said, “What do we do now?”

  “There’s the No-Man’s-Land Hotel,” said a tall hippie, with pajamas and bangles. His name was Lopez. “I stayed there once before. With a chick. The manager turned me on.”

  In fact the hotel was nameless, nor did it deserve a name. It was the only hotel in the place. The manager saw us and screamed, “Restaurant!” He herded us into a candlelit room with a long table on which there was a small dish of salt and a fork with twisted tines. The manager’s name was Abdul; he was clearly hysterical, suffering the effects of his Ramadan fasting. He began to argue with Lopez, who called him “a scumbag.”

  There was no electricity in this hotel; there was only enough water for one cup of tea apiece. There was no toilet, there was no place to wash—neither was there any water. There was no food, and there seemed to be a shortage of candles. Bobby and Lopez grumbled about this, but then became frightfully happy when Abdul told them their beds would cost thirty-five cents each.

  I had bought an egg in Tayebad, but it had smashed in my jacket
pocket, leaked into the material, and hardened in a stiff stain. I had drunk half my gin on the Night Mail to Meshed; I finished the bottle over a game of Hearts with Lopez, Bobby, and a tribesman who was similarly stranded at the hotel.

  As we were playing cards (and the chiefs played in an unnecessarily cutthroat fashion), Abdul wandered in and said, “Nice, clean. But no light. No water for wash. No water for tea.”

  “Turn us on, then,” said Lopez. “Hubble-bubble.”

  “Hash,” said Bobby.

  Abdul became friendly. He had eaten: his hysteria had passed. He got a piece of hashish, like a small mudpie, and presented it to Lopez, who burned a bit of it and sniffed the smoke.

  “This is shit,” said Lopez. “Third-quality.” He prepared a cigarette. “In Europe, sure, this is good shit. But you don’t come all the way to Afghanistan to smoke third-quality shit like this.”