The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  In comparison, Hong Kong is one big overstatement, with signs everywhere, and with the buildings all around the harbour and at the airport looking like they’ve been constructed out of cigarette packets or packaging material for rolls of film and crispbread. As I’m drifting off to sleep again, I see clouds piling up on the skyline. Then it starts raining, inaudibly, and the cars’ tyres slice through the puddles with a melting glissando.

  I sit up, swing my feet onto the floor and, leaning over from the edge of the bed, switch the air-con from ‘cool’ to ‘very cool’. Instantly, the cover of the unit shudders and, from the grating, long filaments of dust, stuck together in a damp film, flicker out towards me in the airflow. These hotel rooms may well be in high demand, but in fact all they do is testify to the absence of everyone and everything. No one was here. Their chairs are never heavily used, their blankets never touched and their pictures never looked at. The taste of their décor is not that of any individual, and if you were to ask anyone what he’d done behind his room door, he’d only be able to describe the ways in which he’d been absent from it.

  It’s still morning back in Germany, and people are breathing the air of the working day. In the corridors of office blocks, women carrying files are dodging men carrying files. And in the bright sunshine, someone is crossing the empty car park to retrieve something they’d left behind on the back seat of their car – more files. From the distance, these movements look like episodes from a charade, performed as though they were preceded by a conditional like in a children’s game: if you’d walked across the car park, you would have … you wouldn’t know – an anticipated and imitated story.

  A boy comes down the corridor wheeling a tea trolley; with every irregularity in the floor surface, bottles clink against bottles, spoons against saucers, and cutlery rattles on dirty plates.

  ‘Get stuffed!’ someone outside bellows.

  I trudge to the bathroom. The oppressive humidity surges towards me with a smell of warm adhesive and mushrooms. As I approach, before the mirror steams up, it reminds me of my face. I stick a toothpick in the frozen corner of my mouth and sit down on the side of the bathtub while the sink fills. The light is as colourless as the water, the contours blurred, and the plastic shower curtains are matt like frosted glass. Gradually, the mirror clears; now you can make out the curtain in it and the extractor fan, mended with black insulating tape, on the ceiling. Then I catch sight of my knees, covered with scars from childhood and a patch of inflamed skin, no doubt caused by an insect bite. Beneath the last coat of plaster on the ceiling, greenish blisters are beginning to appear; coated in dusty paint slapped on without any primer, they seem on the point of crumbling. We are all made from the same material.

  There’s a newspaper on the table, an exercise book, brochures, pictures of a roof terrace … the water in the bathtub has left a taste of bitter almonds in my mouth … the open hotel brochure proudly displays a photo of the breakfast lounge, the ‘Five Diamonds Bar’, flanked by images of casual guests and smiling, uniformed Chinese staff. Right at the back, the head chef is standing in front of a mirror – a king, a gourmet.

  Someone opens the window in the room next door, then closes it again. An empty plastic cup drops down a chute into the yard. These rear courtyards are like chicken coops, all fenced off and covered with muck, not to mention soot-black from all the exhaust emissions, coal-fired ovens and grills. All around the yard is a system of emergency exits down fire-escapes and corridors, but at the same time there are tripwires in the form of washing lines that are frequently hauled up and taken down, hung with hand towels and pyjamas that have turned grey. The clothes are gathered into the interior of the building by a single arm that appears from under a blind jammed in a diagonal position. Once a year, the mayor makes a point of visiting one such rundown backyard. All you can make out in the picture accompanying the report of his visit in the newspapers is an affable man standing in his light suit in the darkness, surrounded by others wielding cameras and umbrellas.

  It’s half-past four.

  From the foot end of the bed, which is just eighteen inches away from the TV, I wait and watch while the picture resolves itself amid much crackling. The screen goes from anthraciteblack, to grey, to dark blue, to blue; then flecks of yellow, red, light green, and purple begin to emerge against the blue. Clothes now appear, but the dazzle off them colours the faces of the people wearing them. Cheeks redden in an instant, while eyes darken to a shouting violet. Foreheads and hands sometimes look brown, and sometimes the colour of aubergine or even curry; the television doesn’t seem to be able to decide – first it imposes a uniform brown patina, then changes the skin tones in quick succession.

  Three Chinese men are proceeding through a mountainous landscape; their lavish ancient costumes are extravagant, with wide sleeves, hats with intricately embroidered edges, and shoulder pads and bodices cumbersomely stiffened. They are conversing affably and walking stiffly in a circle on their high wooden sandals, endlessly thanking the woman who has appeared in their midst.

  Quarter-past five.

  Then the woman starts talking to the men. She is perfectly composed. Even though she’s the empress, she regards the men kindly, and they in turn indicate that she is an acceptable woman and very prettily turned out, with her gay headdress and her dainty little steps. The woman tells them that it mustn’t happen, that on no account should it be allowed to happen. Saying this, she shakes her head, then repeats it, and again a third time. No, the men answer in measured tones, no. And now they’re laughing and resuming their perambulation; rest assured, they tell her, it won’t happen, on no account, they’re all agreed on that.

  Now the face of one of the men is shown in close-up – a decisive, melancholic and pronouncedly comic face that one’s happy to take a closer look at. Then a group of servants with trays appear on the scene, and in the next frame it’s raining.

  The laundry belches another plume of steam into the courtyard.

  Now the empress is wearing a diadem, scaly and domed like the skin of a pineapple. Her companions are nowhere to be seen. Maybe that’s why she’s so agitated, because she’s twisting her upper body this way and that and peering about so comically that she’s scarcely recognizable as the empress anymore. She’s quite out of breath and keeps listening intently – perhaps there’s some kind of conspiracy afoot? Then, coming to a sudden decision – it’s plain to see that she feels she’s waited long enough – she comes directly towards me, so close that I can make out every last curve of her nose, the cracks in her lips and all the minutest details of her face, which look like they’re composed of graphic little bits of shorthand, and even the whitish fleshiness of her raised hand, above which she’s just in the process of pursing her lips. Frozen in this photogenic expression, she falls silent. And as the screen fades out from this image, really elegant, sharp and colourful graphics start to appear, briefly forming writing before dissolving once more, then repeating this cycle all over again until the orchestra is past the crescendo. As the picture fades and the music starts to build to another climax, it too is faded out.

  The day has done its duty, the head chef is still smiling in the table drawer, all the shards of glass have been cleared from the courtyard, and the image on the television screen has dwindled to a dot …

  In the foyer of the Shamrock Hotel, the bags of guests who are checking out are covered with a net and secured with a padlock. Open up, store some more luggage in the net, close up, open up again, remove some luggage, close up once more: presiding over this procedure is Mister Fo, as the name badge on his lapel indicates. He arrives every morning at seven and leaves every evening at seven, and spends more than half of his working day keeping an eye on the luggage in the net. Once upon a time, he provided room service on the ninth floor, but then some guests complained, mainly about the noise he made at night. Since then, Fo has been responsible solely for the luggage. Three times a year, the air-conditioning gives him a bout of bronchial catarrh and
he has to take a week off to recuperate, for which he isn’t paid. As soon as he can breathe soundlessly again, he’s back at his post.

  When I stepped out of the lift into the lobby that evening, Mister Fo was nudging the bellboy sitting beside him, but on catching sight of me his facial expression reverted to normal, namely completely expressionless. His face, now reduced to an abstract entity, betrayed as little character as that of an ideal clown. At reception, they took my key without looking up. Then, quite unexpectedly, Fo stood up and yanked open the glass door for me. Flopping back down into his faux leather seat, he gave his companion a look of ironic deference, finally revealing he was human after all.

  I took the next Star Ferry, and in an effusion of idiotic communicativeness poured my heart out to a Canadian called Stephen. From below, the ship’s engines were thudding through the deck, as the ferry slowed down a hundred metres off Kodak House.

  Here’s the story. I start telling him about Ricarda, but I run aground. For one thing, she’s an irrelevance now, and secondly it seems to me that everything is already starting to dissolve into objects, body parts: these were her lips, her arms, the colour of her skin was such-and-such, the smell of her handbag lining, the taste of her tongue in my mouth and in the air. She sat in her bed and gave me a dreadful look, in other words a tolerant look. I’d ordered her like she was some fish in a restaurant, and no sooner had she arrived than I wanted to get the hell out. But before I left, I turned to look at her once more, so as not to miss seeing the tears rolling down her cheeks. What on earth was Stephen supposed to make of all that?

  I got off the ferry; it was still sweltering, so I steered a diagonal course across the square, dived into the nearest shadow and from there into the air-conditioned space of the post office. You were permitted to loiter there, looking at the free brochures. The Chinese official at the poste restante counter leafed through my passport to the very last page, before turning back to the page with my photo on and looking up at me. The picture had been taken that summer in a photo booth in Urbino. I was pulling a silly face, because Ricarda had been standing next to the booth at the time and trying to make me laugh. I wasn’t laughing in the picture, but looking kind of optimistic.

  The official furrowed his brow.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ I enquired. He turned over the page.

  ‘What’s your nationality?’

  I turned to page one for him, where it states: ‘The bearer of this passport is a German national.’

  ‘What’s you nationality?’ he repeated.

  Once again, I showed him the first page. He compared my face with the photo once more.

  Then he pointed to the name of the German provincial town on the official stamp, the date, the stamp itself, the validating signature of the passport office employee and the director, important office-holders – clearly concerned in his own mind to exaggerate the importance of people and dates, places, terms, and roles.

  So this Chinese official sat there, staring at the signature of the Rhineland passport office director, which snaked off in an unbroken line right towards the edge of the page. It was evident that he couldn’t envisage any living individual who might match this signature. Eventually, he turned his back on me and started looking at the deliveries under ‘W’.

  The moment I left the post office, the place was closed behind me. There was a group of tourists out on Connaught Place. They had their heads tilted back and were looking at the skyline and trying to decipher the names on the various buildings, the same way as visitors to churches identify depictions of saints or gallery-goers spell out the signatures on paintings.

  I sat down on the edge of a flower tub and flicked through the pages of an English-language magazine. It was a fortnight old. The first thing I read was three paragraphs of an article on the nervous breakdown of an actress, who had won fame some years ago for a nude role. Then came a report on how women found themselves repeatedly taken in by polite fraudsters who came cold-calling at their doors. And under the rubric ‘Culture’ there was a piece about a plane crash and an artist who’d recycled the bits of wreckage into an installation. The red upholstered seats of economy class hung in trees like works of art. The caption to the picture talked about the work being an expression of ‘human failure’. The magazine’s ‘Green page’ showed several pictures of frogs, in the grass, on leaves, and underwater too, where they laid spawn in the mud.

  I took a table at the window of the next best restaurant and, as I ate, found myself involuntarily thinking of Fo. He started his day sitting in his chair, then he was busy rummaging around with the net over the luggage, then he’d leave and walk out into the rain on Nathan Road. I wondered what kind of tiny hole he might live in in this city, where every square metre cost a fortune? I pictured him in front of his television, or leaning over his sink. When I called to mind the mocking faces he pulled, I marvelled at him, the way I marvel at everything dead; my first impression on seeing a picture of a corpse in a newspaper is always how exemplary it looks.

  When I summoned the bill, I noticed the name of the restaurant on the letterhead: ‘Toad In The Hole’. I had drunk three San Miguel beers, and so I placed the money all the more carefully, with the coins piled up neatly, on the saucer provided. At the pier in Kowloon, I hailed a taxi, since by that time it was half-past eleven. Back in my room, I switched on the television straight away, washed my face while the picture was warning up and re-entered right in the middle of a yet another difficult dialogue being played out on screen. The protagonists were deeply troubled about something, shooting each other questioning looks, gazing into the distance when they spoke, knitting their brows in concern and casting their eyes down in a sceptical internal monologue. This was the ‘TV Jade’ channel. I had no wish to see any of it.

  On TV Diamond there was a programme about the dangers of throwing things out of high-rise buildings:

  ‘… every year, hundreds of people in Hong Kong are killed by falling objects, which people have thoughtlessly hurled …’

  The commentator’s voice sounded anxious, like a mother’s. Then a picture of a drinker appeared on the screen, who was first shown sitting in his chair in front of the TV and getting agitated before hurling a bottle backwards over his left shoulder out of the open window. Then silence. Cut to falling bottle. The mother’s voice broke in again, before the imminent catastrophe, desperately warning viewers of the danger. The word ‘victim’ was mentioned several times. Then silence again, and for thirty seconds nothing but a blank, blue-grey screen. Then the trumpet concerto by Charpentier suddenly breaks in, and a violin, quill and artist’s palette come together to form a logo … Once more, a female voice-over announces:

  ‘Now it’s time for the arts. We’re taking you over to Masterpieces. Today’s programme is brought to you by “The Mild One”, the cigarette with the lighter taste, and “Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer”, the original strong ale.’

  TV Pearl was showing a film in Mandarin. But the action and settings were far removed from the reality of the streets here and as formulaic as an American movie; mothers cried when they learned about their daughters’ impending weddings; after women are beaten up by their husbands, they get on the telephone; when one person hangs up abruptly, the other looks into the receiver and presses down repeatedly on the cradle; dying people reveal secrets and signal that they’re dead by staring fixedly into the distance; and you can tell just how evil the bad guy is from the way the camera zooms in on him. And so a few archetypal situations were played out: a reproach, an apology, an accusation. The music soared to great heights. Faced with the prospect of complete emotional hyperbole, I switched off and arranged my insensate body on the sagging mattress. I recalled Ricarda’s shoulder, narrow and bony, and the way she smelt of leather …

  The following day, I was on the ferry to Victoria well before midday. The official behind the post office counter shook his head. Stepping out onto the square, at first I was at a loss what to do. I strolled between the houses
, stood in the entrance to a bank and rolled up my trouser leg to inspect my knee, which had discoloured around the small inflamed patch of skin. I took the tram for two stops up the hill, but it was no good. So I alighted, turned back and took up position in a park, sitting behind a hedge.

  Later, I shifted to a little grandstand and watched some boys playing football. The match was played in an atmosphere of silent professionalism. On both sides, there were no celebrations when goals were scored. I sat there for two hours. By the time I left, the teams had changed their line-up on several occasions, and the score stood at 8–7. There’s something very unmodern about sport. You can achieve its pace and its aims by other means without any fuss – say, by jumping over a bar or running a distance. And yet how satisfying it is that sport is still being played at all.

  I took a bus to Prince’s Building; though it took me twenty minutes, I realized when I got to the restaurant there that all I’d done was come round the corner. Beneath the window, taxis were waiting two-deep for hotel guests. A man wearing a straw hat was sweeping between the cars. Several times he was hit in the back by taxi doors being flung open, but he kept on sweeping, unconcerned. A man in uniform was leaning against the outside wall of a telephone kiosk and talking on the phone. He looked up at me.

  In the farther distance, an unlit neon sign was advertising an amusement park. Small delivery vans parked under the trees. A basket of pastries was lifted out of the back of one of them; immediately rain started blowing in. Nearby, a man in bare feet was working on an engine, while a businessman with a suitcase paced indecisively up and down in front of the taxis. The first driver in the queue waved to him, but he didn’t respond. Now, from far in the back somewhere, a car horn was sounded – a gap had opened up because one taxi driver had popped into the hotel lobby beneath where I was sitting to have a quick rest. Only after his cab had been put into neutral by his colleagues and pushed right up to the bumper of the one in front did he emerge bandy-legged from the hotel lounge, shrugging his shoulders in resignation. Two of the other drivers immediately went up to him. The uniformed man had by now hung up the receiver and made to intervene in the dispute between the three drivers, as a fourth wiped raindrops from the windscreen with a Kleenex.