Anyway, it was not empty. It swarmed with tourists. They scampered on it and darkened it like fleas on a dead snake.
That gave me an idea. “Snake” was very close, but what it actually looked like was a dragon. The dragon is the favorite Chinese creature (“just after man in the hierarchy of living beings”) and until fairly recently — eighty or a hundred years ago — the Chinese believed they existed. Many people reported seeing them alive — and of course fossilized dragon skeletons had been unearthed. It was a good omen and, especially, a guardian. The marauding dragon and the dragon slayer are unknown in China. It is one of China’s friendliest and most enduring symbols. And I found a bewitching similarity between the Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China — the way it flexed and slithered up and down the Mongolian mountains; the way its crenellations looked like the fins on a dragon’s back, and its bricks like scales; the way it looked serpentine and protective, undulating endlessly from one end of the world to the other.
Mr. Tian
“IS IT COLD OUTSIDE?” I ASKED.
“Very,” said Mr. Tian. His eyeglasses were opaque with frost.
It was five-thirty on a Harbin morning, the temperature at minus thirty-five Centigrade and a light snow falling — little grains like seed pearls sifting down in the dark. When the flurry stopped, the wind picked up, and it was murderous. Full on my face it was like being slashed with a razor. We were on our way to the railway station.
“And you insist on coming with me?” I asked.
“Langxiang is forbidden,” Mr. Tian said. “So I must.”
“It is the Chinese way,” I said.
“Very much so,” he replied.
In this darkness groups of huddled people waited in the empty street for buses. That seemed a grim pastime, a long wait at a Harbin bus stop in winter. And, by the way, the buses were not heated. In his aggrieved account of his Chinese residence, the journalist Tiziano Terzani, writing about Heilongjiang (“The Kingdom of the Rats”), quotes a French traveler who said, “Although it is uncertain where God placed paradise, we can be sure that he chose some other place than this.”
The wind dropped but the cold remained. It banged against my forehead and twisted my fingers and toes; it burned my lips. I felt like Sam McGee. I entered the station waiting room and a chill rolled against me, as if my face had been pressed on a cold slab. The waiting room was unheated. I asked Mr. Tian how he felt about this.
“Heat is bad,” he said. “Heat makes you sleepy and slow.”
“I like it,” I said.
Mr. Tian said, “I once went to Canton. It was so hot I felt sick.”
Mr. Tian was twenty-seven, a graduate of Harbin University. There was humor in the way he moved. He was self-assured. He didn’t fuss. He was patient. He was frank. I liked him for these qualities. The fact that he was incompetent did not matter very much. Langxiang was a day’s journey by train — north, into the snow. He seemed an easy companion and I did not think he would get in my way.
He had no bag. He may have had a toothbrush in his pocket, where he kept his woolly cap and his misshapen gloves. He was completely portable, without any impedimenta. He was an extreme example of Chinese austerity. He slept in his long johns and wore his coat to meals. He rarely washed. Being Chinese he did not have to shave. He seemed to have no possessions at all. He was like a desert Bedouin. This fascinated me, too.
The train pulled in, steaming and gasping, just as the sun came up. It had come from Dalian, six hundred miles away, and it stopped everywhere. So it was sensationally littered with garbage — peanut shells, apple cores, chewed chicken bones, orange peel, and greasy paper. It was very dirty and it was so cold inside that the spit had frozen on the floor into misshapen yellow-green medallions of ice. The covering between each coach was a snow tunnel, the frost on the windows was an inch thick, the doors had no locks and so they banged and thumped as a freezing draft rushed through the carriages. It was the Heilongjiang experience: I crept in out of the cold and inside I felt even colder. I found a small space and sat hunched over like everyone else, with my hat and gloves on. I was reading Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and I scribbled on the flyleaf:
In the provinces every train is like a troop train. This is like one returning from the front, with the sick and wounded.
Even with three pairs of socks and thermal-lined boots my feet were cold; nor did I feel particularly cozy in my heavy sweater, Mongolian sheepskin vest, and leather coat. I felt like an idiot in my hat and fleece-lined mittens, but it annoyed me that I was still cold, or at least not warm. How I longed for the summer trains of the south and the sweltering trip on the Iron Rooster when I had lounged in my blue pajamas.
Mr. Tian said, “You come from which city in the States?”
“Near Boston.”
“Lexington is near Boston,” Mr. Tian said.
“How did you know that?”
“I studied American history in middle school. All Chinese study it.”
“So you know about our war of liberation, Mr. Tian?”
“Yes. There was also a Paul who was very important.”
“Paul Revere.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Tian said. “He told the peasants that the British were coming.”
“Not just the peasants. He told everyone — the peasants, the landlords, the capitalist-roaders, the stinking ninth category of intellectuals, the minorities, and the slaves.”
“I think you’re joking, especially about the slaves.”
“No. Some of the slaves fought on the British side. They were promised their freedom if the British won. After the British surrendered these blacks were sent to Canada.”
“I didn’t read about that,” Mr. Tian said, as the door blew open.
“I’m cold,” I said.
“I’m too hot,” Mr. Tian said.
The cold put me to sleep. I was wakened later by Mr. Tian, who asked me whether I wanted to have breakfast. I thought some food might warm me up so I said yes.
There was frost on the dining-car windows and ice on the dining-car floor, and a bottle of water on my table had frozen and burst. My fingers were too cold to hold any chopsticks. I hunched over with my hands up my sleeves.
“What food do they have?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want noodles?” I asked.
“Anything but noodles,” Mr. Tian said.
The waiter brought us cold noodles, cold pickled onions, diced Spam, which looked like a shredded beach toy, and cold but very tasty black fungus — a specialty of the province. Mr. Tian ate his noodles. It was the Chinese way. Even if it was not to your taste, when there was nothing else on the menu you ate it.
After several hours of crossing flat snowfields this train entered a mountainous region. The settlements were small — three or four short rows of bungalows, some of brick and some of mud and logs. They were the simplest slant-roofed dwellings and looked like the sort of houses that children draw in the first grade, with a narrow door and a single window and a blunt chimney with a screw of smoke coming out of it.
The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before, but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down it you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air rushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that is seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard.