Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (47 page)

At dawn, I kicked the shade up and saw flooded paddy fields and the great flat landscape of northern Thailand. I opened the window and the train stopped at a small station where there were handsome families, a smiling monk wrapped in his ocher robe, and pretty girls in T-shirts and white shorts—on this entire trip, Thailand offered me my first glimpse of women's bare legs. The stations were swept and tidy, no litter, everyone in clean clothes, children playing, and adding to the calmness and serenity there were plenty of benches and chairs where people waited for the next train. The cleanliness seemed to represent a kind of optimism and self-esteem, and all this order was framed by green fields and polyphonic birdsong.

I tend to evaluate places according to habitability—whether I can live in them. Passing an idyllic glade, I saw a hammock strung between two palm trees and myself swinging in it. This self-centered impulse I put down to my escapist fantasies inspired by distant places, but it's only human to look for an ideal location to live in, the great good place we all seek. A lovely landscape, I think, but if I am able to put myself into it, surely it is lovelier.

On the way to Nong Khai on this train I saw a sunlit bungalow on stilts on a side road, a hammock underneath it, some banana trees and chickens near it, a vegetable garden behind it, rice paddies beyond it, an ox in a meadow and low jungle all around, and I thought: Yes, it would be nice to live there. Except for a flicker of temptation in Sri Lanka, I had never had a serious thought of this anywhere else so far. But in the north of Thailand, I entertained the notion of simply dropping out of the world and fitting myself into this version of pastoral, walking up and down in my pajama bottoms.

When I arrived in Nong Khai, on the Mekong River, as though to prove the validity of this impression, who should get out of the train but two big wheezy
farangs,
red-faced and chain-smoking, with their Thai wives and a sister-in-law. They had boarded the train some way down the line, perhaps at the very place I was having escape fantasies.

Miles was from England. He wore a heavy suit and tie in spite of the
heat. Rudi—tattooed, quite fat, in a black T-shirt and boots—was from Rotterdam.

"We got on the train at Khon Kaen."

"Visiting there?" I asked.

"We live there," Rudi said.

"It's heaven," Miles said. "About a hundred expats—all good chaps. We look after each other. We're all brothers in Khon Kaen."

Rudi said, "But I go back to Holland."

Miles was only half listening. He was speaking to the three Thai women, seeming to berate them, going, "Bumpity-bump, bop-bop."

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"You really should learn the language, old chap. Makes life so much easier. Kon-kap. Bop-bop. Bumpity-bip."

Miles made it sound like Martian, pursing his lips, nodding, widening his eyes. His face was slick with perspiration.

The women smiled patiently and murmured among themselves.

I met the
farangs
again later on in the morning, nearer the river, in an open-fronted shed called Alex's Travel Service, where Laotian visas were being processed and sold. This was efficiently done—you could have your photo taken, or send a fax, or have a meal, for it was also a noodle stall. I had my breakfast noodles while my visa application was being initialed and stamped. Then I wandered outside.

"Is that your wife?" I asked Rudi.

"Yes," he said. "Well, not my wife but the woman I liff wiz."

The three women were middle-aged, beginning to thicken, but with the warm Thai smile and the placid, self-contained serenity, talking among themselves, without complaint, and now and then acknowledging Miles's approximation of Thai.

"We have everything in Khon Kaen," Miles said to me. "Even a hospital."

"I have to go back to Holland every muntz or so to collect my pension," Rudi said. "Dey won't send it to me. Also to see my grandchildren. But always I come back here."

"Bumpity-bump," Miles said, reddening.

"Beer is cheaper in Laos," Rudi said. "So we go dere. Go down the river. Drink beer. Eat sumsing. Ferry nice."

"Pip-pip," Miles said. He was dressed as though for an outing in
Brighton with the bowling club, sweating profusely, smoke coming out of his ears and nose. He was a life-of-the-party type who told jokes in funny foreign accents. "Sap-songg!"

He squinted as he twanged the words, straining and pursing his lips. Was this Thai? If so, his wife, or girlfriend, didn't get it. She smiled and twisted her face in embarrassment.

"Sip-bip-bip!"

Now she hid her face in her hands.

But Miles just snorted and puffed his cigarette and said, "Can't beat it. Makes things so much easier. Kap-ko!"

He grimaced in the heat, dabbing at his dripping forehead with a gray hanky. His tight shirt collar was sodden. The Dutchman too was sweating in his T-shirt and black biker jeans. When Miles started up again, tittering and cheeping with his explosive syllables, the three women fled to the shade of a mango tree.

"Take my advice—what did you say your name was?"

"Paul."

"Paul. You won't get anywhere if you don't bip-kai-bip, kap-ko." I had finished my noodles and was waiting for my passport, which Alex, in the shed, soon gave me.

"Is that
farang
speaking Thai?" I asked.

"A little bit. But it's rude to say
kap-ko"

My last time here I had walked down a path to the Mekong and been ferried over in a small sampan propelled by a farting outboard motor, and my passport had been stamped under a tree on the far bank. Today we were taken in Alex's van across the Friendship Bridge, from Thailand to Laos, over the wide river, and to the border post. There was hardly any traffic.

The decadent Vientiane of Vietnam War days, which had catered to servicemen on furlough, had become a sleepy place, a capital yet hardly a city, more of a backwater than it could have been a hundred years ago. I remembered it as a wide-open town: whores gathered in hotel lobbies who greeted new arrivals by smiling and snatching at them. In Vientiane, the very word "hotel" was a euphemism for a cathouse, and the debauchery in the bars was celebrated throughout Southeast Asia—the live sex shows, the nude dancers, the stark-naked waitresses who managed amazing feats with cigarettes. At the White Rose, the most notorious bar, I saw a drunken man flicking his Zippo and setting fire to a waitress's pubic hair. She slapped herself with one hand and pushed him away with the other, demanded a tip, then moved on to the next table.

Vientiane had not grown any bigger, yet the contrast could not have been greater. The change was a testament to what the Vietnam War had done to Laos. I saw Vientiane then (and described it) as the most corrupt and dissolute place I'd ever traveled to. Diminutive Laotian whores and big whooping American soldiers dominated the place. Drugs were easy to buy, and so was porno. "Anything you want," pedicab drivers said. "What you want, Joe?"

But the riotous Americans who had sexualized the place, turning Vientiane into a fleshpot, had left, and it was now a sleepy town on the banks of the muddy river, famous for its cheap beer, attractive to backpackers. One of the characteristics of backpackers—careful with their money, socially conscious on the whole—is that they have sex with each other and resist the locals. Vientiane's streets were mostly empty, so were its shops, and its bars could not have been more sedate. Just 25-cent beers and $3 hotel rooms, pedestrian-friendly with quiet, hospitable folks, yet strangely colorless.

"Mistah?"

Two Lao girls approached me as I was taking an evening stroll by the river. They were so slender-hipped and grubby they might have been boys. They did not speak English except for one unambiguous verb.

"Where do you live?"

They giggled and tugged my arms and tried to tempt me by pointing to a grove of trees at the riverbank, an obvious haunt of rats and snakes.

They recognized the futility of tempting me and didn't persist. I kept walking. Vientiane still proclaimed itself a capital, yet it was no more than a dusty riverside town, with warm weather and friendly people and a government with obscure intentions. Its glory was its temples, dating from the early nineteenth century, not ancient but built in an ancient style, with bonnet-like triple-pitched roofs, sometimes five or six of them overlapping, and amateurish murals inside, in courtyards with glazed tile walls. Children played outside while their parents were inside, devout in their prostrations, imploring the gold Buddhas with incense sticks and flower petals.

After two days I had caught up my diary and finished my Simenon and was considering going to the Vientiane museum when I met Fiona,
a backpacker. She was thirty, traveling alone, and like a lot of solitary travelers, resourceful, also shrewd, direct, opinionated, and full of misinformation. She didn't read much, she said; she got her facts from other travelers like herself, on buses, in hostels, waiting under trees in the rain. She had just arrived in Laos.

"I'm a traveler. That's all I want to do. But I ran out of money," she said. "I have to go back to England, but I'm only going so that I can make some money. I want to come back here, or somewhere. I just want to travel. I don't want to do anything else."

We were in a noodle shop. I offered to buy her a beer, but she said tea was fine.

"Thing is, when you're trying to save money, you need a flatmate. My last flatmate, Roger, was gay. When I say gay, I mean not just gay but, um, know much about S and M?"

"A little bit," I said. "Was that Roger's thing?"

"Roger's thing was parties. There are these S-and-M parties all over London. I went to some. The people were quite nice! Barristers. Company directors. Jobs in the City, stock market blokes. Roger was a clerk in chambers. But they have this one thing in common?"

"Pain," I said.

"Not just pain. Spanking. Whipping."

"Does nothing for me," I said.

She wasn't listening. "Roger had these two friends. One was really tall with a metal spike through his nose and tattoos and piercings. A bloke. The other was a very small frizzy-haired girl with Deirdre Barlow glasses. She was the weirdest of the lot."

"In what way?"

"They all went to bed together. I called them the Circus People. 'Circus people coming this weekend, Roger?' When they showed up, the flat stank. They didn't wash."

"But weird in what way?"

"They got Roger into cutting and scarification. They took these sharp knives and cut him all around one leg. Roger said, 'When they put the salt water on it, I was in heaven.'"

I said, "I'm losing my appetite."

Fiona said, "But it got me thinking. What about the people who are really in pain? Poor people. People in prison. That's a kind of insult to them in their suffering."

"Good point." I hadn't thought of that. I said, to change the subject, "So you want to go on traveling?"

She said, "Yes. My hero is Michael Palin. The BBC guy? He goes all over the world."

I said, "With a camera crew and someone to do his makeup and buy his tickets. He's got people who tell him where to stand!"

"He's a real world traveler. And he's funny, too."

"I'll give you that. He makes jokes."

"He's clever too!" She leaned over. "I'd never heard of Lhasa until he went there."

"Fiona, it's the capital of Tibet. I was there once."

She didn't care. She said, "I'll bet Michael Palin has been here in Laos."

"Or maybe not."

"That's what I want to do."

"Be Michael Palin? That's your ambition?"

"Wouldn't you want to be Michael Palin?" she asked.

The next day, as I was having lunch at an outdoor café in Vientiane, an old American woman entered with two young men. They sat near me, and from their conversation I gathered that one was her son and the other his Indian lover. The woman sat queening it for a while, and the young men talked intimately. And then a waiter approached her.

"Ask them. They make all the decisions," she said. "I'm just along for the ride."

Strange little dramas occurred, the glimpses I got as a traveler, not a short story but a fleeting look of something else. I always knew that there was much more, and so these people appeared like characters waiting for me, as some Americans had in India, to assign them parts in a bigger story.

I was satisfied that the depraved Vientiane of whores and stoners I had known was gone, replaced by a Vientiane of budget travelers and backpackers. Meanwhile the Laotians themselves did their best to escape across the river to Thailand, where there were opportunities for work and real money.

A pedicab, locally known as a tuk-tuk, passed me as I was walking down a street. The man said, "Where?"

I thought that I might go to the museum or see some more temples. But I said, "How much to the bridge?"

He named a price, and not long after that I was back at Nong Khai Station, waiting for the Bangkok train, thinking about the little dramas. A woman smiled at me.

"Anyone sitting here?"

"Be my guest."

She was American, tubby and short, duck-butted, about fifty or so, in black capri pants, her hair drawn back but most of it fluttering around her sweaty face. She was pale, unnaturally so in this bright sunshine. She carried a misshapen duffle bag, which she unzipped, taking out a ten-inch baguette sandwich wrapped in paper. Pulling off the paper, holding the sandwich in two hands, like a tool, she tilted her head and began eating, working on it from its narrower end.

"Real good," she said, chewing.

"What's in it?"

"Usual stuff. Mystery meat and salad." She laughed. She seemed sure of herself, and here she was, alone in an empty railway station on the Thai-Laos border on a hot afternoon.

"You from the States?"

"Missouri. But I live in Khon Kaen."

Another one. I didn't say anything for a while. I was content. I'd just had some noodles across the road from the station, and the Thai noodle seller had said I should stay, live here, lots of
farangs
had done that and were happy. Eating noodles on the border in a shady open-sided restaurant, waiting for the Bangkok train, was a kind of bliss. Plenty of women here would want to move in with you, he said, promising me romance too. Now I was on the platform with the fat woman from Missouri as she gnawed at her sandwich.