Four women with open mouths paraded past my table. The Angels of the Annunciation. The announcement on the radio suddenly broke off and someone started playing variations on the theme of ‘My Hat, It Has Three Corners’ on the trumpet. I got up and walked through the restaurant to the toilets. Twice I passed a sign with the legend ‘Private’.
A confection of coloured tiles and marble-clad walls that look in the mirror. Fifty wash basins, fifty mirrors, fifty soap dishes all at the same height, ten paper hand towel dispensers, plus hand driers and skylights all create a coldly endearing atmosphere. A man who’s in there picks up his guitar from the floor and walks out. I turn on a couple of the taps. Gradually the skin grows accustomed to any temperature. It reminds me of something forgotten, the passage of the seasons, the way it passes over a treetop and conveys itself to materials, to stone, leather, wax. Nothing, only the light swims on the skin. Locking myself in the first available cubicle, I sit down on the lavatory seat fully clothed. How delighted I am to be here.
And how beautiful the city is! When was the last time I could cross an avenue, stand on a square and look up at the sky, and see all the buildings around me soaring up into the ether and pointing out into the great expanse above wherever I turned? And where did I last see cascades of banners plunging down the façades of buildings, then taking flight and wandering off over all the rooftops? A thin strip of artificial light shone through the crack between the top of the door and the ceiling. It was very yellow, indifferently yellow, and slashed across the edge of the door like those ethereal bridges in Renaissance paintings that saints use to ascend to heaven. Then I went back to my table, laid my knife and fork on the plate and dabbed my mouth with my napkin. Its hem was instantly soaked with blood. But when I looked again, it wasn’t blood after all, just a set of red Chinese characters spelling out the name of the restaurant.
As I left the eatery, darkness was beginning to fall between the buildings. Determined to visit the post office again, I set off for the harbour. At this time of day, the traffic was so light it was like the streets had been closed. The official from my first visit was back behind the counter. He only seemed to remember me when he saw the photo in my passport. Then it took him barely twenty seconds to deal with my request.
His look was set to expressionlessness, but even so the ghost of a smile hovered around his lips. I stood there at the counter, scanning the piles of tied-up letters on the shelf, just like all those who just can’t believe that they have been forgotten. The official, too, stood quite motionless next to this still life of uncollected letters, postcards, telegrams and special delivery items – a bundle of trapped voices clamouring in all the world’s languages to be heard. Some had grown old, while others had just been overtaken by the present.
It was pointless.
So it’s out onto the square once more, which now has the atmosphere of a cathedral where the sexton is gradually lighting the candles. I waited until a beggar had sidled up, bent double but with the theatrically agonized bearing common to both genuine and pretend paupers. Even genuine beggars have no option but to act out their poverty to their best ability. But instead of giving him a response, I inadvertently kicked a can so violently across the tarmac that it flew through the air and left a tiny, sharp dent in the hubcap of a parked car. The beggar decided against approaching me.
As soon as I began to concentrate, the emotion welled up in me. I’d been left in the lurch. I saw myself tramping the streets, like millions of others, in clothes that grew ever shabbier. I’ll shuttle back and forth a few more times on the ferry, and eat mangoes, and the juice will dribble down onto my shirt collar; to cool off, I’ll start sitting in the air-conditioned draught at the entrance to department stores; the stains on my clothes will tell the tale of increasing neglect, and behind it the other story, invisible, which I’m staring into, first on a daily basis and then without any time or measure. Now I’m resting, and have, like all those who’ve ever gone bust, attributed my woes to a single, key episode in my life. I’ll sit at the Star Ferry Pier and accost tourists, ready to reel off my hard-luck story and give them sightseeing tips. The ferries will cast off, and I’ll be left behind in my disreputable clothes. The tourists will think: ‘He’s still talking away to himself, telling himself his story, but he seems completely compos mentis.’ Maybe they’ll start imagining how my story continues. The image of a stranded paranoiac gripped by his obsessions, always going on about the same people, the same situations.
At home, Ricarda sits up in bed, breathless; her grey eyes are expressionless, she draws her knees up to her body and hugs them, thin arms, round knees, and lowers her head, her eyes fixed on me. I’ll never be rid of this image. For a moment she keeps still, feeling my embarrassment, which rises up her body, alienated and dispassionate.
Instead, I find myself in this skyscraper graveyard, sleep-walking. Cut off from my own past, and with no connection to people or the chain of events that have brought me here. Gently and therapeutically disengaged from myself while I’m still alive, exposed to viewpoints, unforgettable moments.
That same evening, I wandered through Wan Chai, disappeared a couple of times into bars on Lockhart Road, staying for almost two hours on both occasions, and making the fleeting acquaintance of one of the hosts:
‘Come inside, sir, come inside.’
I looked at him uncomprehendingly. Seeing this, the host slumped back into himself and shook his head. As I came through the hotel lounge, the night porter saw from the intense concentration I was giving to walking that his guest was drunk. I waved him away peremptorily and lurched into the lift with a movement that I hoped would appear casual, even when I stumbled halfway through executing it. Upstairs, I didn’t wash or undress. Just once I dragged myself to the end of the bed to switch off the heavily snowing TV.
Crusts of bread with butter; the kids sitting in the back; eat up, says the motherly mouth; you’ll get home just as the streetlights are coming on, it also says; his fame spreads far and wide, over the lanes and the sports fields; the path to school is lined with asters; water is dripping from a pipe into a barrel where, fluffily bloated, a mole is floating. The girl unbuttons the boy’s shirt over his midriff so far that her cool hand can get right inside it, and then slips down under his belt to his genitals. All the while, the boy’s face is suffused like he’s running – a distraught face that later takes on a look of amused resignation.
The boy only comprehends his childhood in the minutest isolated elements, say in images from the periphery of larger events. Or in nature, when he lay on the floor of the forest and imagined: if I play dead and make myself just like the wood, then it’ll forget me and go back to how it was before, when it just existed for itself. The wish to be overlooked, to be forgotten and to learn what happened next.
The following day I ventured beyond Nathan Road, penetrating deep into the alleyways of the exclusively Chinese quarter. Here the apartment blocks are even closer together; their façades are crumbling and outside the doors stand huge piles of rubbish and other waste, which the derelicts rummage through and leave strewn all over the place. Occasionally a lorry comes by and washes down the pavements. The water evaporates off the hot asphalt. Then the veil comes down again and the rubbish is lying around like before, only now thoroughly drenched. The woman on the hoarding advertising Good Companion Cigarettes looked down dismissively at me from her perch ninety metres above.
That afternoon, I crossed three metropolitan zones: the quarter between Nathan and Jordan Road with the night market and the Star Ferry Pier in Kowloon; Connaught Place with its pier; and the harbour loop road between the New World Centre and Harbour Village on the Victoria side. My skin exuded streams of sweat, opening itself up to the heat and soaking up the dirt, then contracting again in the coolness of shopping malls, service counter areas and waiting rooms, sealing the grime in.
In today’s paper: no news from Germany. In the back section was the Pen Pals column. Under ‘Interests’, you coul
d read ‘cycling, cooking, making clothes’; ‘making friends, picnics, listening to the radio’; and ‘outdoor games’. I became embarrassed, even though I was the only person in the room. I looked out of the window until the feeling passed.
Turning over the page, I came across an advertisement for an Escort Service. The powerful heads of local women were perched on narrow shoulders, their collarbones as delicate as chicken bones, and all with fierce looks on their faces. The old ones in buttoned-up silk pyjamas scarcely look at you, and name you every name like a price. Although in reality they’re never touchy-feely, on the television they appear sailing boats across the waters of the harbour and singing imploringly ‘let’s keep this Hong Kong clean’. Today, I longed to be treated with the warmth of advertising, too.
I noted down the address and telephone number of the Escort Service and lay back on the bed. Another image from childhood came back to me: the biggest boy in the class, hand in hand with his mother, who always brought her son to school, so the teacher could hit him with a ruler. As the boy approaches the school, his mouth opens ever wider, pleading and whining, but the mother knows no mercy. She’s a widow. The ruler whistles down onto the calves of the big boy, who thrusts back his knees in ecstasy …
Through the window I could see as far as the New Territories, a region which at that time was under lease to Hong Kong from China, and which formerly had been marshland, where peasants planted rice or ran chicken farms. But satellite towns have been growing up there for a long time now, and the shacks are a thing of the past. Villages of two hundred skyscrapers rise from depressions and bays, without any limits or any centre. To the right and left of the unmade roads a kind of science-fiction rurality is developing.
I waited in my room until eleven o’clock, deliberately killing time so as to give the post office ample time to sort the newly arrived letters. So I lay abed behind closed curtains for ages, pulling up my knees and fending off room service twice:
‘No, I’m not ready yet.’
And the second time:
‘No, no thank you, no.’
The breakfast room was already closed, so I stalked into the restaurant, ordered rice and two eggs, ate half of it and then went back to my room. The girls from housekeeping had finally given up. A sweet smell of rotting mangoes was coming from my bin, so I chucked the magazine on top of them. It landed with the back cover facing upward. A woman’s profile was set off against bleached hair, and her open mouth spoke to the dark brown ceiling of the room: ‘My colour is cream hair colour’. I pulled my notebook from my bag and jotted down on a fresh page: ‘my colour is cream hair colour’.
The steam from the laundry was hissing from the mouth of a pipe into the courtyard and rising up again through the duct. The two Chinese ironing ladies watched it. I too was looking up when, at a very high altitude, a small aeroplane crossed the clear blue sky. The sunlight was reflecting beautifully and playfully off its wings. But as the aircraft climbed, the wings clouded over, and the fuselage plunged into the darkness of the more distant sky, creeping upwards, shrinking and gradually dissolving into the blank tableau of the atmosphere. The speed of the city, by contrast, is that of the observer’s eye, which by turn finds itself repelled and attracted and moves on relentlessly.
I reached the post office with one leg limping and dragging. In the interim, I’d clearly become less of an irritant to the official than I had been at the beginning. His ‘No’ was as much an integral part of his job as putting on his blouson at the start of the working day. Now he began shaking his head when I was still five metres away from his counter. But I fancied that he’d started to feel a bit sorry for me.
The street behind the post office ended in a scuffed-up grass bank strewn with refuse and various shredded, bent and scrunched-up objects. Up on the platform above, a few pensioners were gyrating in slow, narcissistic movements. Old women in pyjamas and hair nets gesticulated at something invisible and with military precision dissected the air first into cuboids and then into strips, always speaking from the strength of their own body axis. I clambered up the bank to watch them.
On the park bench to my left, their instructress was drinking a can of Schweppes. Next to her was a sword in a scabbard, a large ritual sword with a heavy blade. As soon as she caught sight of me, she put the can down and advanced on me with both arms outstretched. The invisible had taken on a tangible form, namely mine. The entire group turned on its collective axis to face me, with Kabuki faces, a gaze concentrated in the root of the nose, and a lunge-step which involved lifting their feet slowly from the ground and bringing them down again noiselessly.
‘Go away!’ hissed the old lady at the head of her troop.
I stepped back two paces, teetering on the edge of the bank.
‘Go away! Away!’
An index finger suddenly projected from her shooing-away arm, flying down the bank and on across the city, maintaining a certain height over the sea and over the horizon, and on around the curvature of the earth. Then her arms were flung wide again like they’d been hit by a gust of wind or a wave. This wasn’t my park.
I beat a retreat down the same road I’d come along. On the first billboard I passed, three girls in short nightdresses were bending over an oversized newspaper. They were all laughing uproariously; this was the first time in Hong Kong that women hadn’t avoided my gaze. I could still see the sword lying on the park bench. At the beginning of a tai-chi session, it is lifted up and displayed to the assembled group like some religious monstrance.
The television was screening European football matches from the year before, and Chinese operas in 1950s costumes and settings. Today, I found myself missing the charm of TV advertising, the genial ingratiation of posters, and the intimate superficiality which took its cue from Western consumer culture.
Overnight, my knee swelled up so badly that I couldn’t leave the room the next day, nor on subsequent days. I didn’t call a doctor, and for a whole week, room service supplied me with all my needs. Mister Fo even dropped by once, a real act of friendship, since his allotted place was in the lobby, and besides we had nothing to say to one another. Even so, he’d bought me a pound of plums from a shop called ‘International Fruits’, and declined to have any himself.
I spent most of my enforced leisure learning poems off by heart or gazing at the ceiling, where I found my interest drawn primarily by the frosted glass lampshade, at the edge of which there was a pale shadow, around ten centimetres long, which I found myself at a loss to explain.
Travelling, it occurred to me at that moment, was like projecting your homeland onto a foreign wallpaper. There, you can find the house that you left and put out of your mind, and feel the anchorage that you wanted to cast into oblivion. You overturn the shelf, you tear down the curtains, but it’s no use. When you’re abroad, home puffs itself up ever more theatrically: Leave me, it says, destroy me! Find something that isn’t the same old familiar routine! And then you find yourself lying in a hotel room in Hong Kong and feeling as though you haven’t left home at all, but that everything’s been transformed into your childhood room; the last straw is that you see on the room service waiter’s menu the description ‘Wintery salads’ and you burst into tears.
When, after a week of being bedridden, I’d finally regained some sense of balance when I was standing upright, I propped a chair up on my bedstead and investigated the lampshade. It was hanging so loosely from the ceiling that an animal could easily have crawled in through the narrow gap on the right-hand side and met its end there. I switched the light on, and the shadow darkened visibly, but only like a shrivelled leaf on a St Martin’s Day lantern. So I unscrewed the whole casing from the ceiling and peered inside.
What had once been a gecko had, under the influence of heat, light rays and hot air, been transformed into a husk, a simple gecko structure, a stick figure made of gecko bones, hair-thin at its extremities, but as intricately structured as the living animal. The heat had burned off a bit of flesh every da
y and evaporated it. Now there was nothing left but the time-scoured skeleton of a reptile that had strayed into the wrong place and come to grief there.
So, was that ‘my Hong Kong’, then? Where was I really, and what remained? While, viewed from my sickbed, the city had melted into a diffuse mass of impulses, only the empty PO Box and the gecko had any real presence, and for all I knew maybe there really was some connection between them. It struck me then that, seen from a certain foreign standpoint, your own home can be the ends of the earth, and this being the case, these far-flung places, these ends, aren’t portals through which you can exit this world. Yet at least sometimes it can seem that way, I thought, and left the next day without even bothering to go to the post office again.
The Amu-Darya
On the Frontiers of Transoxania
From history, short-maned horses burst forth, steppelands stretch into the distance and morasses loom threateningly. Travellers throughout the centuries have gravitated to this river, which marks the border between northern Afghanistan and the former Russian Empire – modern Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; their journey was arduous, with many of them suffering great hardships and failing to reach their destination because they were waylaid by ambushes, privations, malaria, worm infections or epidemics. Mulberry and tamarisk trees were the first harbingers of the distant river. Traders travelled across the sand dunes in caravans, while other caravans approached from Transoxania, the land on the far side of the Amu-Darya. Their camels were laden with canisters of petrol, one of the many commodities that people on the Afghan side of the river obtained from the former Russian territories.
The Ends of the Earth Page 29