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 armoured van coupled just behind the engine; this was a steel box with gun slits, 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 armoured van: it was a cruelly uncomfortable thing, and very dark since the gun slits 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 still 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.'
Chapter Twenty
The fast train from Bangkok had taken me to Nong Khai, in the far north of Thailand. Nong Khai is unexceptional – five streets of neat houses; but a boat ride across the Mekong River takes you to Vientiane in Laos. Vientiane is exceptional, but inconvenient. The brothels are cleaner than the hotels, marijuana is cheaper than pipe tobacco, and opium easier to find than a cold glass of beer. Opium is a restful drug, the perfect thing for geriatrics, but the chromatic snooze it induces corrects fatigue; after an evening of it the last thing you want to do is sleep again. When you find the beer at midnight and are sitting quietly, wondering what sort of place this is, the waitress offers to fellate you on the spot, and you still don't know. Your eyes get accustomed to the dark and you see the waitress is naked. Without warning she jumps on to a chair, pokes a cigarette into her vagina and lights it, puffing it by contracting her uterine lungs. So many sexual knacks! You could teach these people anything. There are many bars in Vientiane; the decor and the beer are the same in all of them, but the unnatural practices vary.
The only English film I could find in Vientiane was a pornographic one, and the sombre reverence of the Japanese tourists, who watched like interns in an operating theatre, filled me with despair. I shopped for presents, imagining Laotian treasures, but discovered traditional handicrafts there to include aprons, memo pads, pot-holders, and neckties. Neckties! I tried to take a pleasure cruise on the Mekong, but was told the river was only used by smugglers. The food was unusual. One bowl of soup I had contained whiskers, feathers, gristle, and bits of intestine cut to look like macaroni. I told this to a prince I had been urged to visit. He took me to a restaurant where we had – I suppose it was his way of apologizing – a leg of lamb, mint sauce, and roasted potatoes. I asked him what it was like to be a prince in Laos. He said he couldn't answer that question because he didn't spend much time in Laos; he was mainly interested in skydiving and motor racing. His description of political life convinced me that Laos was really Ruritania, a slaphappy kingdom of warring half-brothers, heavily mortgaged to the United States. But there were enemies in Laos, he said that evening. Where were they? I asked. We were now at his house. He pointed out the window, and across the street, silhouetted in the top window of a three-storey building, was a man with a machine gun. The prince said, 'Him. He's a Pathet Lao.'
'So you're taking the train,' said the prince, when I told him about my trip. 'Do you know how fast that Bangkok train goes?'
I said I had no idea.
'Fifty kilometres an hour!' He made a face.
His wife wasn't listening. She looked up from a magazine and said, 'Don't forget we have to be in Paris on the twenty-sixth – '
Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America's expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported; a kingdom with baffling pretensions to Frenchness. What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squashy amoeba, the sort of creature that can't die even when it is cut to ribbons.
Setting out from Nong Khai Station (the Thai children were flying kites along the tracks) I was headed south for Singapore. There is an unbroken railway system from this northerly station to Singapore, via Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, roughly 1,400 miles of jungle, rice fields, and rubber estates. The State Railway of Thailand is comfortable and expertly run, and now I knew enough of rail travel in Southeast Asia to avoid the air-conditioned sleeping cars, which are freezing cold and have none of the advantages of the wooden sleepers: wide berths and a shower room. There is not another train in the world that has a tall stone jar in the bath compartment, where, before dinner, one can stand naked, sluicing oneself with scoops of water. The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.
In the Night Express from Nong Khai were many Chinese and Filipino mechanics, deeply tanned from working on the American airfields, and wearing their baseball caps pulled down over their eyes. Thais gambled in the second-class sleeper, where American servicemen sat sheepishly with Thai girls, looking homesick but very proper as they held hands. I was in a compartment with an American civilian who said he was a salesman. He didn't look like a salesman. His hair was cut so short, I could see a white scar that ran along the top of his head from back to front like a part; he had a Thai charm around his neck and broken fingernails; on the back of his right hand was tattooed tiger, and he talked continually of his 'hog', a Harley-Davidson Electraglide. He had been in Thailand for five years. He had no plans to go back to the States, and said it was his ambition to make $30,000 a year – or, as he put it, 'thirty K'.
'How close are you to that figure?'
'Pretty close,' he said. 'But I think I might have to go to Hong Kong.'
He had just spent a few days in Vientiane. I said I had found the place not exactly to my taste. He said, 'You should have gone to the White Rose.'
'I went to the White Rose,' I said.
'Did you see a tall girl there?'
'It was too dark to tell who was tall or short.'
'This one was wearing clothes. Most of them were bare-ass, right? But this one had long hair and slacks.