To the Ends of the Earth (10 page)

“I stood to attention.

“ ‘You are Bernard?’ Lady Slim asked me.

“I said, ‘Yes, Madam.’

“She said it was a good meal and very tasty. It was glazed chicken, vegetables, and trifle.

“I said, ‘I’m glad you liked it.’

“ ‘That is Bernard,’ General Slim said, and they went out.

“Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang came as well. He was very tall and did not speak. I served them. They stayed for two days—one night and two days. And the viceroy came—that was Lord Curzon. So many people came—the Duke of Kent, people from India, and another general—I will think of his name.

“Then the Japanese came. Oh, I remember that very well! It was like this. I was standing in the bush near my house—outside Maymyo, where the road forks. I wore a singlet and a
longyi
, as the Burmese do. The car was so huge, with a flag on the hood—the Japanese flag, rising sun, red and white. The car stopped at the fork. I didn’t think they could see me. A man called me over. He said something to me in Burmese.

“I said, ‘I speak English.’

“ ‘You are Indian?’ says this Japanese gentleman. I said yes. He put his hands together like this and said, ‘India-Japan. Friends!’ I smiled at him. I had never been to India in my life.

“There was a very high official in the car. He said nothing, but the other man said, ‘Is this the road to Maymyo?’

“I said it was. They drove on, up the hill. That was how the Japanese entered Maymyo.”

T
OWARD NOON WE WERE IN THE ENVIRONS OF
G
OKTEIK. THE
mist was heavy and noisy waterfalls splashed down through pipe thickets of green bamboo. We crawled around the upper edges of hills, hooting at each curve, but out the windows there was only the whiteness of mist, shifted by a strong wind to reveal the more intense whiteness of cloud. It was like traveling in a slow plane with the windows
open, and I envied the opium-smoker seated across from me his repose.

“The views are clouded,” said my escort, Security Officer U Sit Aye.

We climbed to nearly four thousand feet and then began descending into the gorge where, below, boat-shaped wisps of cloud moved quickly across from hillside to hillside and other lengths of vapor depended in the gorge with only the barest motion, like veils of threadbare silk. The viaduct, a monster of silver geometry in all the ragged rock and jungle, came into view and then slipped behind an outcrop of rock. It appeared again at intervals, growing larger, less silver, more imposing. Its presence there was bizarre, this man-made thing in so remote a place. Competing with the grandeur of the enormous gorge and yet seeming more grand than its surroundings, which were hardly negligible—the water rushing through the girder legs and falling on the tops of trees, the flights of birds through the swirling clouds and the blackness of the tunnels beyond the viaduct. We approached it slowly, stopping briefly at Gokteik Station, where hill people, tattooed Shans and straggling Chinese, had taken up residence in unused railway cars—freight cars and sheds. They came to the doors to watch the Lashio Mail go past.

There were wincing sentries at the entrance to the viaduct with rifles on their shoulders; the wind blew through their wall-less shelters and the drizzle continued. I asked U Sit Aye if I could hang out the window. He said it was all right with him, “but don’t fall.” The train wheels banged on the steel spans and the plunging water roared the birds out of their nests a thousand feet down. The cold had depressed me, and the journey had been unremarkable, but this lifted my spirits, crossing the long bridge in the rain, from one steep hill to another, over a jungly deepness, bursting with a river to which the monsoon had given a hectoring voice, and the engine whistling again and again, the echo carrying down the gorge to China.

The tunnels began, and they were cavernous, smelling of bat shit and sodden plants, with just enough light to illuminate the water rushing down the walls and the odd nightblooming
flowers growing amid fountains of creepers and leaves in the twisted stone. When we emerged from the last tunnel we were far from the Gokteik Viaduct, and Naung-Peng, an hour more of steady traveling, was the end of the line for me. This was a collection of wooden shacks and grass-roofed shelters. The “canteen” where the food was found was one of these grass-roofed huts: inside was a long table with tureens of green and yellow stew, and Burmese, thinly clad for such a cold place, were warming themselves beside caldrons of rice bubbling over braziers. It looked like the field kitchen of some Mongolian tribe retreating after a terrible battle: the cooks were old Chinese women with black teeth, and the eaters were that mixed breed of people with a salad of genes drawn from China and Burma, whose only racial clue is their dress, sarong or trousers, parasol coolie hat or woolen cap, damp and shapeless as a mitten. The cooks ladled the stews onto large palm leaves and plopped down a fistful of rice; this the travelers ate with cups of hot weak tea. The rain beat on the roof and crackled on the mud outside, and Burmese hurried to the train with chickens bound so tightly in feather bundles they looked like a peculiar kind of native handicraft. I bought a two-cent cigar, found a stool near a brazier, and sat and smoked until the next train came.

The train I had taken to Naung-Peng didn’t leave for Lashio until the “down” train from Lashio arrived. Then the escort from Maymyo and the more heavily armed escort from Lashio changed trains in order to return to the places they had set out from that morning. Each train, I noticed, had an armored van coupled just behind the engine; this was a steel box with gun sights, simplified almost to crudity, like a child’s drawing of a tank, but it was empty because all the soldiers were at the end of the train, nine coaches away. How they would fight their way, under fire, eighty yards up the train during a raid, I do not know, nor did U Sit Aye supply an explanation. It was clear why the soldiers didn’t travel in the iron armored van: it was a cruelly uncomfortable thing, and very dark, since the gun sights were so small.

The return to Maymyo, downhill most of the way, was
quick, and there was a continuous intake of food at small stations. U Sit Aye explained that the soldiers wired ahead for the food, and it was true, for at the smallest station a boy would rush up to the train as soon as it drew in, and with a bow this child with rain on his face would present a parcel of food at the door of the soldiers’ coach. Nearer to Maymyo they wired ahead for flowers, so when we arrived each soldier stepped out with curry stains on his shirt, a plug of betel in his mouth, and a bouquet of flowers, which he clutched with greater care than his rifle.

“Can I go now?” I said to U Sit Aye. I didn’t know whether I was going to be arrested for going through forbidden territory.

“You can go,” he said, and smiled. “But you must not take the train to Gokteik again. If you do there will be trouble.”

F
ROM THE AIR, THE GRAY UNREFLECTING WATER OF THE
South China Sea looked ice cold, there were round Buddhist graves all through the marshes, and the royal city of Hué lay half-buried in drifts of snow. But this was wet sand, not snow, and those circular graves were bomb craters. Hué had a bizarre appearance. There had been plenty of barbed wire on the barricades but little war damage in Saigon; in Bien Hoa there were bombed-out houses; in Can Tho stories of ambushes and a hospital full of casualties. But in Hué I could see and smell the war; it was muddy roads rutted by army trucks and people running through the rain with bundles, bandaged soldiers tramping through the monsoon slime of the wrecked town or peering across their rifle barrels from the backs of overloaded
trucks. The movements of the people had a distressed simultaneity. Barbed wire obstructed most streets, and houses were sloppily sandbagged. The next day, in the train, my American host, code-named Cobra One (who had come with his wife, Cobra Two, and my translator Dial for the ride) said, “Look—every house has its own bullet hole!” It was true: few houses were without a violent gouge and most had a series of ragged plugs torn out of their walls. The whole town had a dark brown look of violation, the smirches of raids among swelling puddles. It held some traces of imperial design (Vietnamese, French) but this delicacy was little more than a broken promise.

And it was very cold, with the sodden chill from the low sky and the drizzle clinging in damp rooms. I paced up and down, hugging myself to keep warm, during my lecture at the University of Hué—a colonial building, in fact, not academic at all, but rather what was once a fancy shop called Morin Brothers, which outlying planters used as a guest house and provisioner. I lectured in one of the former bedrooms, and from the windy balcony I could see the neglected courtyard, the cracked fishpond, the peeling shutters on the windows of the other rooms.

A
T
H
UÉ
S
TATION THE NEXT MORNING A TINY
V
IETNAMESE MAN
in a gray gabardine suit and porkpie hat rushed forward and took my arm. “Welcome to Hué,” he said. “Your carriage is ready.” This was the stationmaster. He had been notified of my arrival and had shunted onto the Danang passenger train one of the director’s private cars. Because Vietnam Railways has been blown to pieces, each separate section has a director’s car on one of its sidings. Any other railway would have one such car, but Vietnam Railways is six separate lines, operating with laborious independence. As at Saigon, I boarded the private coach with some misgivings, knowing that my hand would tremble if I ever wrote anything ungenerous about these people. I felt loutish in my empty compartment, in my empty coach, watching Vietnamese lining up to buy tickets so that they could ride in over-crowded cars. The stationmaster had sped me away from the ticket window (“It is not necessary!”), but I had
caught a glimpse of the fare: 143 piastres (twenty-five cents) to go to Danang, perhaps the cheapest seventy-five-mile ride in the world.

Dial, the translator, and Cobras One and Two boarded and joined me in the compartment. We sat in silence, peering out the window. The blocky whitewashed station building, a version of the Alamo, was riddled with bullet holes that had broken off pieces of the stucco, revealing red brickwork beneath. But the station, the same vintage as the USIS official’s bay-windowed villa and Morin Brothers’ shop, had been built to last—a far cry from the patch of waste ground and cement foundations just outside Hué, where the First Marine Division’s collapsed barracks and splintered obstacle course lay sinking in the mud. It was as if all the apparatus of war had been timed to self-destruct the day the Americans pulled out, leaving no trace of the brutal adventure behind. In the train yard, several armored vans showed rips in their steel sides where mines had punched them apart. These vans were the homes of a number of sad-looking children. In most tropical countries adults stand, like those posed by William Blake, at the fringe of the echoing green, watching children at play. In Vietnam the children play alone, and the adults appear to have been swept away; you look for the parents among large groups of children, for the background figure of an adult. But (and this distorts the landscape) they are missing. That old woman carrying a child on her back, with the long muddy skirt and rain-drenched hair, is another child.

“Have you seen the sink in the w.c.?” asked Dial.

“No.”

“You turn on the faucet and guess what comes out?”

“Rust,” I said.

“Nothing,” said Cobra Two.

Dial said, “Water!”

“Right,” said Cobra One. “Paul, take that down. The faucets work. Running water available. What do you think of that?”

But this was the only sink in the train.

The stationmaster had said that the line to Danang had been open for four months, having been out of action for
five years. So far there had been no recent disruptions. Why its reopening coincided with the American withdrawal no one could explain. My own theory was that there were now no American trucks plying back and forth along the only road that goes between Hué and Danang, Highway One, the poignantly named “Street Without Joy”; this shrinking of expensive road traffic had forced the Vietnamese into the more sensible course of opening the railway. The war had become not smaller but less mechanized, less elaborate. Money and foreign troops had complicated it, but now the Vietnamese had reverted from the corporation-style hostilities of the Americans to the colonial superstructure, slower communications, a return to farming, housing in the old buildings, and a transport system based on the railway. The American design of the war had been abandoned—the empty firebases, the skeletons of barracks, and the tom-up roads showed this to be a fact, visible from the passenger train clanking toward Danang with its cargo of Hué-grown vegetables.

The bridges on that line speak of the war; they are recent and have new rust on their girders. Others, broken, simulating gestures without motion, lay beyond them where they had been twisted and pitched into ravines by volumes of explosives. Some rivers contained masses of broken bridges, black knots of steel bunched grotesquely at the level of the water. They were not all recent. In the gorges where there were two or three, I took the oldest ones to be relics of Japanese bombing, and others to be examples of demolition from the later terrorism of the fifties and sixties, each war leaving its own unique wreck. They were impressively mangled, like outrageous metal sculptures. The Vietnamese hung their washing on them.

It was at the rivers—at these bridges—that soldiers were most in evidence. These were strategic points: a bombed bridge could put the line out of action for as long as a year. So at each side of the bridge, just above it on outcrops of rock, there were igloos of sandbags, and pillboxes and bunkers, where sentries, most of them very young, waved to the train with carbines. On their shelters were slogans flying on red and yellow banners. Dial translated them for
me. A typical one was
GREET THE PEACE HAPPILY BUT DON’T SLEEP AND FORGET THE WAR
. The soldiers stood around in their undershirts; they could be seen swinging in hammocks; some swam in the rivers or were doing their washing. Some watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms, a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men—these boys—had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.