To the Ends of the Earth (5 page)

I tried to find out where they were going. It was not easy. They seldom ate in the dining car; they often slept; they were not allowed in the fastness of the de luxe sleeping car. Some stood by the windows in the corridor, in the trance-like state the Turkish landscape induces in travelers. I sidled up to them and asked them their plans. One did not even turn around. He was a man of about thirty-five, with dusty hair, a T-shirt that read
MOTO-GUZZI
, and a small gold earring in the lobe of his ear. I surmised that he had sold his motorcycle for a ticket to India. He held the windowsill and stared at the empty reddish yellow flatlands. In reply to my question he said softly, “Pondicherry.”

“The ashram?” Auroville, a kind of spiritual Levite town dedicated to the memory of Sri Aurobindo and at that time
ruled over by his ninety-year-old French mistress (the “Mother”), is located near Pondicherry, in South India.

“Yes. I want to stay there as long as possible.”

“How long?”

“Years.” He regarded a passing village and nodded. “If they let me.”

It was the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation. But Moto-Guzzi had a wife and children in California. Interesting: he had fled his children and some of the girls in his group had fled their parents.

Another fellow sat on the steps of the coach, dangling his feet in the wind. He was eating an apple. I asked him where he was going. “Maybe try Nepal,” he said. He took a bite of the apple. “Maybe Ceylon, if it’s happening there.” He took another bite. The apple was like the globe he was calmly apportioning to himself, as small, bright, and accessible. He poised his very white teeth and bit again. “Maybe Bali.” He was chewing. “Maybe go to Australia.” He took a last bite and winged the apple into the dust. “What are you, writing a book?”

A
GAIN
I
SHOWED THE CONDUCTOR MY TICKET
. “
FIRST-CLASS
ticket,” I said. “You give me first-class couchette.”

“No couchette,” he said. He pointed to my berth in a second-class compartment with three Australians in it.

“No,” I said. I pointed to an empty compartment. “I want this one.”

“No.” He gave me a fanatical grin.

He was grinning at my hand. I held thirty Turkish liras (about two dollars). His hand appeared near mine. I
dropped my voice and whispered the word that is known all over the East,
“Baksheesh.”

He took the money and pocketed it. He got my bag from the Australian compartment and carried it to another compartment in which there were a battered suitcase and a box of crackers. He slid the bag into the luggage rack and patted the berth. He asked if I wanted sheets and blankets. I said yes. He got them, and a pillow, too. He drew the curtains, shutting out the sun. He bowed and brought me a pitcher of ice water, and he smiled, as if to say, “All this could have been yours yesterday.”

The suitcase and crackers belonged to a large bald Turk named Sadik, who wore baggy woolen trousers and a stretched sweater. He was from one of the wilder parts of Turkey, the Upper Valley of Greater Zap; he had boarded the train in Van; he was going to Australia.

He came in and drew his arm across his sweating face. He said, “Are you in here?”

“Yes.”

“How much did you give him?”

I told him.

He said, “I gave him fifteen rials. He is very dishonest, but now he is on our side. He will not put anyone else in here, so now we have this big room together.”

Sadik smiled; he had crooked teeth. It is not skinny people who look hungry, but rather fat ones, and Sadik looked famished.

“I think it’s only fair to say,” I said, wondering how I was going to finish the sentence, “that I’m not, um, queer. Well, you know, I don’t like boys and—”

“And me, I don’t like,” said Sadik, and with that he lay down and went to sleep. He had the gift of slumber; he needed only to be horizontal and he was sound asleep, and he always slept in the same sweater and trousers. He never took them off; and for the duration of the trip to Teheran he neither shaved nor washed.

He was an unlikely tycoon. He admitted he behaved like a pig, but he had lots of money and his career was a successful record of considerable ingenuity. He had started out exporting Turkish curios to France and he seems to have
been in the vanguard of the movement, monopolizing the puzzle ring and copper-pot trade in Europe long before anyone else thought of it. He paid no export duties in Turkey, no import duties in France. He managed this by shipping crates of worthless articles to the French border and warehousing them there. He went to French wholesalers with his samples, took orders, and left the wholesalers the headache of importing the goods. He did this for three years and banked the money in Switzerland.

“When I have enough money,” said Sadik, whose English was not perfect, “I like to start a travel agency. Where you want to go? Budapesht? Prague? Romania? Bulgaria? All nice places, oh boy! Turkish people like to travel. But they are very silly. They don’t speak English. They say to me, ‘Mister Sadik, I want a coffee’—this is in Prague. I say, ‘Ask the waiter.’ They are afraid. They shout their eyes. But they have money in their packets. I say to the waiter, ‘Coffee’—he understand. Everyone understand coffee, but Turkish people don’t speak any language, so all the time I am translator. This, I tell you, drive me crazy. The people they follow me. ‘Mister Sadik, take me to a nightclub’; ‘Mister Sadik, find me a gairl.’ They follow me even to the lavabo and sometime I want to escape, so I am clever and I use the service elevator.

“I give up Budapesht, Belgrade. I decide to take pilgrims to Mecca. They pay me five thousand liras and I take care of everything. I get smallpox injections and stamp the book—sometimes I stamp the book and don’t get smallpox injections! I have a friend in the medical. Ha! But I take good care of them, buy them rubber mattresses, each person one mattress, blow them up so you don’t have to sleep on the floor. I take them to Mecca, Medina, Jiddah, then I leave them. ‘I have business in Jiddah,’ I say. But I go to Beirut. You know Beirut? Nice place—nightclubs, gairls, lots of fun. Then I come back to Jiddah, pick up the
hajis
, and bring them back to Istanbul. Good profit.”

I asked Sadik why, if he was a Muslim and he was so close to Mecca, he never made the
haj
himself.

“Once you go to Mecca you have to make promise—no
drinking, no swearing, no women, money to poor people.” He laughed. “Is for old men. I’m not ready!”

He was headed now for Australia, which he pronounced “Owstraalia”; he had another idea. It had come to him one day in Saudi Arabia when he was bored (he said as soon as he began making money in a project he lost interest in it). His new idea concerned the export of Turks to Australia. There was a shortage of workers there. He would go, and, much as he had sold puzzle rings to the French, visit Australian industrialists and find out what sort of skilled people they required. He would make a list. His partner in Istanbul would get up a large group of emigrants and deal with the paperwork, obtaining passports, health cards, and references. Then the Turks would be sent on a charter flight that Sadik would arrange, and after collecting a fee from the Turks he would collect from the Australians. He winked. “Good profit.”

It was Sadik who pointed out to me that the hippies were doomed. They dressed like wild Indians, he said, but basically they were middle-class Americans. They didn’t understand
baksheesh
, and because they were always holding tight to their money and expecting to scrounge food and hospitality they would always lose. He resented the fact that the hippie chiefs were surrounded by such young pretty girls. “These guys are ugly and I am ugly too, so why don’t the gairls like me?”

He enjoyed telling stories against himself. The best one concerned a blonde he had picked up in an Istanbul bar. It was midnight; he was drunk and feeling lecherous. He took the blonde home and made love to her twice, then slept for a few hours, woke up, and made love to her again. Late the next day as he was crawling out of bed he noticed the blonde needed a shave and then he saw the wig and the man’s enormous penis. “ ‘Only Sadik,’ my friends say, “only Sadik can make love to a man three times and think it is a woman!’ But I was very drunk.”

P
ESHAWAR IS A PRETTY
TOWN
. I
WOULD GLADLY MOVE THERE
, settle down on a veranda, and grow old watching sunsets in the Khyber Pass. Peshawar’s widely spaced mansions, all excellent examples of Anglo-Muslim Gothic, are spread along broad sleepy roads under cool trees: just the place to recover from the hideous experience of Kabul. You hail a
tonga
at the station and ride to the hotel, where on the veranda the chairs have swing-out extensions for you to prop up your legs and get the blood circulating. A nimble waiter brings a large bottle of Murree Export Lager. The hotel is empty; the other guests have risked a punishing journey to Swat in hopes of being received by His Highness the Wali. You sleep soundly under a tent of mosquito net and are awakened by the fluting of birds for an English breakfast that begins with porridge and ends with a kidney. Afterwards a
tonga
to the museum.

A little distance from the museum, when I was buying some matches at a shop, I was offered morphine. I wondered if I heard right and asked to see it. The man took out a matchbox (perhaps “matches” was a code word?) and slipped it open. Inside was a small vial marked
MORPHINE SULPHATE
, ten white tablets. The man said they were to be taken in the arm and told me that I could have the whole lot for twenty dollars. I offered him five dollars and laughed, but he saw he was being mocked. He turned surly and told me to go away.

I would have liked to stay longer in Peshawar. I liked lazing on the veranda, shaking out my newspaper, and watching the
tongas
go by, and I enjoyed hearing Pakistanis discussing the coming war with Afghanistan. They were
worried and aggrieved, but I gave them encouragement and said they would find an enthusiastic well-wisher in me if they ever cared to invade that barbarous country. My prompt reassurance surprised them, but they saw I was sincere. “I hope you will help us,” one said. I explained that I was not a very able soldier. He said, “Not you in person, but America in general.” I said I couldn’t promise national support, but that I would be glad to put a word in for them.

Everything is easy in Peshawar except buying a train ticket. This is a morning’s work and leaves you exhausted. First you consult the timetable,
Pakistan Western Railways
, and find that the Khyber Mail leaves at four o’clock. Then you go to the Information window and are told it leaves at nine-fifty
P.M
. The Information man sends you to Reservations. The man in Reservations is not there, but a sweeper says he’ll be right back. He returns in an hour and helps you decide on a class. He writes your name in a book and gives you a chit. You take the chit to Bookings, where, for 108 rupees (about ten dollars), you are handed two tickets and an initialed chit. You go back to Reservations, and wait for the man to return once again. He returns, initials the tickets, examines the chit, and writes the details in a ledger about six feet square.

Nor was this the only difficulty. The man in Reservations told me no bedding was available on the Khyber Mail. I suspected he was angling for
baksheesh
and gave him six rupees to find bedding. After twenty minutes he said it had all been booked. He was very sorry. I asked for my bribe back. He said, “As you wish.”

Later in the day I worked out the perfect solution. I was staying in Dean’s Hotel, one in a chain of hotels that includes Faletti’s in Lahore. I had to pester the clerk a good deal, but he finally agreed to give me what bedding I needed. I would give him sixty rupees and he would give me a chit. In Lahore I would give the bedding and chit to Faletti’s and get my sixty rupees back. This was the chit:

T
HE SIGNS IN
A
MRITSAR STATION
(T
HIRD-CLASS
E
XIT, SECOND-CLASS LADIES’ WAITING ROOM, FIRST-CLASS TOILET, SWEEPERS ONLY
) had given me a formal idea of Indian society. The less formal reality I saw at seven in the morning in the Northern Railways Terminal in Old Delhi. To understand the real India, the Indians say, you must go to the villages. But that is not strictly true, because the Indians have carried their villages to the railway stations. In the daytime it is not apparent—you might mistake any of these people for beggars, ticketless travelers (sign:
TICKETLESS TRAVEL IS A SOCIAL EVIL
), or unlicensed hawkers. At night and in the early morning the station village is complete, a community so preoccupied that the thousands of passengers arriving and departing leave it undisturbed: they detour around it. The railway dwellers possess the station, but only the new arrival notices this. He feels something is wrong because he has not learned the Indian habit of ignoring the obvious, making a detour to preserve his calm. The newcomer cannot believe he has been plunged into such intimacy so soon. In another country this would all be hidden from him, and not even a trip to a village would reveal with this clarity the pattern of life. The village in rural India tells the visitor very little except that he is required to keep his distance and limit his experience of the place to tea or a meal in a stuffy parlor. The life of the village, its interior, is denied to him.

But the station village is all interior, and the shock of this exposure made me hurry away. I didn’t feel I had any right
to watch people bathing under a low faucet—naked among the incoming tide of office workers; men sleeping late on their
charpoys
or tucking up their turbans; women with nose rings and cracked yellow feet cooking stews of begged vegetables over smoky fires, suckling infants, folding bedrolls; children pissing on their toes; little girls, in oversized frocks falling from their shoulders, fetching water in tin cans from the third-class toilet; and, near a newspaper vendor, a man lying on his back, holding a baby up to admire and tickling it. Hard work, poor pleasures, and the scrimmage of appetite. This village has no walls.