The train was creaking along, gaining altitude. We were now at about 7000 feet — it was chilly, the air was thin, the wind was strong. In the cliffs above the track there were caves, an opening on every cliff face, with its own shelf and precarious stairs cut into the rock. Some cave dwellers were sitting in the sunshine, others hanging laundry, hacking at troughlike gardens that seemed magnetized to the mountainside. They were cooking, too. Why think of this as a mountain when you could just as easily think of it as a tenement? That wasn't a cliff — it was the west wing, and that summit was a penthouse. There was a whole world of troglodytes here in Qinghai.
Only its altitude made Xining breathtaking. In other respects it looked like what it was, a frontier town: square brown buildings on straight streets, surrounded by big brown hills. All the water on the creeks and streams had turned to ice. It was an ugly, friendly place, and its bantering people had chafed red cheeks, like bruised peaches. Its terrible weather gave it drama. Its rain was black and very cold. But it did not rain long. Most of the time it was notoriously dry — too arid for growing vegetables outside the plastic greenhouses. Snow also fell, in big, wet plopping flakes. And the wind had torn off all the topsoil. Inside of a week I experienced all those conditions — rain, dust storms, blinding sunlight and snow. If I climbed stairs too quickly, I had to stop and get my breath. I developed a plodding way of walking that enabled me to keep going. There were Muslims all over town, wearing a sort of chef's cap and side-whiskers, and there were also spitting Hans, and Tibetans who favored cowboy hats and frock coats.
"What's that music?" I asked the driver, as we traveled to the hotel from the station.
The driver said nothing, but his pal said, "Beethoven."
"Beethoven," the driver said. "I like Beethoven."
The driver's name was Mr. Fu. He said he could drive me to Tibet. It would be about five days to Lhasa, through the Qinghai desert and then into the mountains. Sleep in army camps on the way. How about it?
I said I was very interested.
Mr. Li, his pal, said, "I think it's Symphony Number Two."
"Isn't it Six — the Pastorale?"
Mr. Li laughed. He had yellow teeth. His laugh simply meant Wrong! It was a barklike noise. He said, "The Pastorale goes dum-dum-dee-dee-dum. No, this isn't Number Two. I know Two, Five, Six, Seven and Nine. This isn't a symphony. It is an overture."
Mr. Fu went fossicking in his glove compartment. He brought out the cassette holder and showed us. It was the Coriolan Overture. Mr. Fu said it was a Beethoven work he particularly liked.
"This is the best hotel in Xining," Mr. Fu said.
Mr. Li laughed in a stern correcting way. "This is the only hotel in Xining."
This hotel reminded me of something I could not quite place — a building I had known in the distant past. It had been built by the Russians, and it retained its fiftyish look. It was very musty, it was mildewed. Why did all Chinese carpets stink with decay? I hated the hotel hours. Dinner at six, no hot water until eight at night. The room girl kept the keys. The toilet didn't flush until you emptied two buckets of water into it — and that bucket was the wastebasket.
And then I remembered the old Northampton Hospital, where I had worked as a student, and thought, Of course! The Xining Guest Hotel was exactly like a madhouse. The tiny rooms, the smells of food and disinfectant and sewage, the sudden squawks from locked rooms, the TV no one watched, the scarred walls suggesting violence, the bars on the windows, the eternal figure down the shadowy corridor slowly toiling with a mop, the silent inmate squatting on a chairseat, roosting like a chicken. It was all a reenactment of life inside the old-fashioned hospital I had known. Even the room girls were more like fearless, untalkative madhouse orderlies than they were compliant Chinese fuwuyuan. And in this loony-bin-like hotel, I could not decide whether I was a patient or a visitor; but I sometimes suspected that I would be like one of those poor creatures who is taken in for observation and somehow forgotten, and twenty years later discovered behind a bolted door, driven totally insane by the place.
These anxieties impelled me to make plans for Tibet. I told Mr. Fu I wished to discuss this matter.
"My father went to Tibet," Mr. Li said.
But I asked him more questions and realized that the man had gone there twenty years ago, on horseback, as a volunteer teacher.
"There was no road then," Mr. Li said.
"There's a good road now," Mr. Fu said. "I've driven to Lhasa a few times."
But my questions elicited only vague answers from Mr. Fu, and I could not tell whether he really had driven there or not.
"And it's a lovely drive from here to Golmud," Mr. Fu said.
"I can take the train to Golmud."
I had wanted to do that. The train to Golmud was the ultimate Chinese train. The line had been constructed as far as this town, and then because of the impossibility of penetrating the Tibetan plateau, it had been abandoned, in the middle of nowhere. I would not have missed that ride for anything.
"It's a horrible train," Mr. Fu said. "It's a steam locomotive. It goes through the desert. It is very slow."
That was music to my ears.
"You drive to Golmud," I said. "I'll meet you there and we'll both go to Tibet. We'll stop on the way. I'll bring some food. We'll listen to Beethoven."
Mr. Fu did some figuring and presented me with a bill for the Chinese equivalent of $600. That included his little Japanese car and his labor as driver and all the gas. I would pay for meals.
"It's a deal," I said, and we shook on it.
The car seemed rather fragile for such a difficult trip—1200 miles across the bleakest part of Tibet. It was a Galant. I hated the name. It was a car you saw on scrap heaps. When the wind blew through Xining, Mr. Fu's Galant swayed. It was not a vehicle for Tibet. Mitsubishi said another plate. It looked like a Dodgem car.
"You think it'll make it?"
"This is a good car," Mr. Fu said.
"Remember to bring two spare tires," I said.
He swore that he would. There was something in the heartiness of his assurance that made me think he was lying to me.
After that I decided to spend my time in Xining making preparations for the journey. I bought dry noodles and canned goods and fruit and soup. I bought storage containers and canteens and thermos jugs. I bought another hat. I found a place that sold jars of quails' eggs and bought a case. The food was so cheap I did not bother keeping track of the cost — it was a few dollars, no more. In my wandering around town I discovered that a special sort of dumpling was made in Xining. It was a stuffed pancake, fried in a wok — a dough bun crammed with scallions, and they served them fresh out of the pan, hot and dripping, just the thing for a snowy day in Qinghai.
Xining was the sort of simple ramshackle place I had come to like in China. It was not pretty, but that didn't matter. The food was delicious in an unremarkable way: not fancy but good to eat. The weather was full of surprises. The people said hello to me and were pleasant to each other. I liked Xining as I had liked Langxiang in Heilongjiang — and for the same reason: it was a country town. By degrees I realized that I was the only barbarian in the place. It was off-season, the middle of March in the back of beyond. That was also the reason people talked to me. It was a novelty to see a barbarian so far from his home.
Xining had department stores — of a kind. It had movie theaters — at least two. It had an enormous mosque. But Mr. Fu's was one of only about twenty cars in the place, and as the main streets were four lanes wide, one had the impression of almost no traffic at all. The buses were the broken, rusted kind found in all parts of rural China.