A Fortune-Teller Told Me (50 page)

This train for the Chinese border was even more modest than the one on which I had come from Saigon; the straw mats on the wooden seats were even dirtier and more tattered. My presence created a great problem for the authorities: how should they protect me and my baggage? They decided to evict all the passengers from two rows of seats near the ones reserved for the police, so I would never be out of their sight. Anyone who tried to come near my seat was sent packing. Perhaps the fortune-teller was right after all, and the train was beset by bandits. Or was the danger in the policemen themselves? The court fortune-teller in Phnom Penh had also said that traveling at the end of July would be risky.

The train pulled out of the station at 5:30. It was just dawn, and from my window I saw Hanoi waking up, a desolate panorama of shanties, pigsties, garrets, hovels and patched huts—a vast rabbit warren. Every shack was ringed with barbed wire and walls topped with broken glass, to protect each pauper’s miserable patch from the pauper next door.

We crossed the Red River—red with silt that turned the water to mud. Old men were doing exercises on the bridge, in the lanes reserved for bicycles. It was there that the guerrilla fighters entered Hanoi in
1954, and that the defeated French departed. It was on that bridge that a Vietminh soldier gave a French officer a contemptuous kick in the backside.

The train was extremely slow. For hours we chugged through rice fields, and after the grayness of Hanoi I was comforted by their orderly calm and their age-old green beauty. At one station a man with a bamboo water pipe boarded the train. He had a basket containing an oil lamp, a teapot and two small glasses. You put a pinch of tobacco in the pipe, you inhale, you hear the water gurgling as the smoke passes through it, you breathe deeply and you remain in a daze. It is a bit like fainting, but the little glass of tea, strong and bitter, restores you.

Two boys caught riding without tickets were brought to sit next to me, handcuffed to the seat, and slapped by the policemen. One of them cried, but the other was stonily defiant as if he meant to get his own back some other time.

At the Dong Mo station the train stopped for half an hour to give everyone time to eat at stalls on the platform. When it started again the track led up a mountain. The train climbed so slowly that some youngsters were able to get off, drink from a fountain and jump on again. The mountains were wooded and damp. This was the strip of land that the Chinese occupied in 1979 to punish Vietnam for invading Cambodia and overthrowing Pol Pot. When they withdrew they destroyed everything in their path. In former times the line crossed the border and linked up with the Chinese railway system, but during the incursions the Chinese ripped up and carted away the last few miles of track, so when the train reached Dong Dan it could go no further. It had taken us exactly eight hours to travel the hundred miles from Hanoi.

I covered the last miles to the border on the back of a moped. The Vietnamese officials gave me a thorough going-over. The customs officers insisted on searching my rucksack, and the police, arrogant and rude, examined my overland visa with a magnifying glass.

The border posts of Vietnam and China are a little over half a mile apart. The road runs uphill through a dense wood, and I walked alone toward China, sweating, with the trepidation one feels when going to meet a beloved that one has not seen for a long time. Again the excitement of crossing a frontier that I could see and feel physically; again the joy of arriving in a different country, a joy I felt I had earned with the
effort of walking slowly toward one of its passes. I rounded a curve, looked up, and there was China—its history, its culture, its greatness—in the shape of a grand old fortress whose high, studded wooden door bore three elegant characters: “Friendship Pass.” All around was a sober, ancient stillness. I felt a strong emotion, like coming home. The contrast could not be more explicit. I had left behind a poor, hard-bitten, stubborn little country, and was now entering a majestic empire, confident and full of itself.

This old, gigantic empire still called itself socialist, but by now even China seemed to know only one god.
“Qian”
was the first word that greeted me;
qian
, money, was the word I heard in every conversation during the five days I spent crossing China from south to north. The customs officers at Friendship Pass quarreled with the Liberation Army men for the privilege of changing my dollars on the black market. Passengers on the minibus that took me to the first railway station offered me, in exchange for
qian
, tiny monkeys, fat snakes and other rare jungle animals, most of them no doubt in the Red Book of endangered species. I didn’t buy any and they all traveled on, in their bamboo cages, toward the cooking pots of the great restaurants of southern China.

A small local train took me to Nanning. From there the tracks apparently continued without interruption to Europe, to Florence. One had only to buy a ticket.

Until a few years ago foreigners in China were privileged, treated as guests of honor. Their tickets were sold at special windows. Today it is no longer so. “Foreigners? In the queue like everyone else!” I was ordered by the first railway employee I turned to at Nanning Station. A few thousand people crowded before tiny hatches protected by steel gratings. Hefty policemen armed with electric batons kept the surging, sweaty, quarrelsome crowd at bay. Everyone was trying to find a way to jump the queue, to claim some privilege. When an army officer pushed in front of me I told him off in Maoist style, reminding him that the meaning of his uniform was to serve the people. Everybody laughed, as if that famous phrase of Mao’s, with which generations of Chinese had been brought up, had become a joke. But it worked, and the poor fellow beat a retreat.

It took me three hours to buy my ticket—time to experience a hostility
which I had never before felt in China. The impatience between foreigners and Chinese is mutual, and in the Chinese it is now mixed with envy, anger, and an ever less concealed racial aspiration to settle old scores with outsiders.

Nanning is a southern Chinese city in full expansion. Its skyscrapers mimic those of Hong Kong. Luxurious new hotels, sparkling restaurants, nightclubs and massage parlors are the oases of a new privileged class who move about in Mercedeses, escorted by bodyguards and with portable phones glued to their ears.

From Nanning to Xian is 1,500 miles, and the train journey took two days and two nights. The ticket I had managed to get was valid only for the “hard seats,” but the head conductor was a self-styled “collector of foreign banknotes,” and by contributing a few dollars to his collection I managed to get a couchette.

The train was chock-full, but at every station more masses of thin, dirty people, loaded with baggage, threw themselves at the doors and tried to get on. In Mao’s day a Chinese who wanted to travel needed a special permit from the Party Secretary of his work unit. Today anyone is free to go where he likes, but with that freedom goes an absence of protection. The pressure of ideology has disappeared, and no other system of values or social norms has taken its place. Everywhere one sees a progressive lapse into anarchy. People with
qian
are increasingly powerful and aggressive, while those without it are more and more defenseless.

The train itself was a perfect illustration of this change. Gone are the days when the teapots, even those of the “hard” compartments, were constantly refilled with boiling water, when the corridors were swept regularly and women employees with pigtails jumped off at each stop to wipe the door handles. On my train nobody took care of anything. As the hours and days went by, the smell from the kitchens grew more and more similar to that of the toilets, outside which there was always an impatient, noisy queue of people banging on the doors.

As we passed through the Guilin region I saw the famous mountains, but what struck me most, as in Vietnam, were the rice fields and the accumulated labor embodied in them. Everywhere I go, agriculture gives me a sense of strength; I have the impression that these countries hold together because the peasants hold out. Mao regimented them and
involved them in politics; his successors will have quite a task to keep them at bay.

Xian announced itself with a yellowish cloud of dust and smog. On the walls of the houses along the tracks, where once you could read the latest political slogans, were big posters urging you to buy cigarettes, wine, motorcycles and beauty creams. The city appeared to be seething with activity. The minute I stepped out of the station I was accosted by a young girl in a miniskirt.

“My name is Milly,” she said in English. “Do you want sex?”

“Sex? Where?”

“Over there, in the Liberation Hotel.”

Smiling women, plastered with makeup, touted for business in dark corners. Young men with megaphones invited passersby into their “video halls.” Never in the five years I lived in China had I felt so much like an outsider, so insecure, so in danger of being attacked and robbed, as I did then.

To get from Xian to Lanzhou I took train No. 44, famous for the mafia that controls it. The “Chief of Chiefs” was sitting in the restaurant car. I introduced myself and explained my problem: “I have a ticket for the hard seats, but as you see I am tall, and I would like to stretch out to sleep.” No problem: for fifty yuan I obtained a place in the “soft” carriage. As he also controlled the kitchen, for a couple of extra dollars I also enjoyed a good dinner, served most exceptionally on a white tablecloth rather than the usual plastic ones, sticky with the remains of previous meals. However, shortly afterward, one of my cameras disappeared. Part of the tip? No use talking to the police. They might have been the ones who took it.

Or was this the robbery I had been told to expect? “This year you will be the victim of a theft. You will lose something very dear to you,” the fortune-teller of Phnom Penh had said. He had not predicted the massacre of one or two million people in his country, but he had predicted the theft of one of my cameras on a Chinese train! Still, if I wanted to rhyme fact with prophecy, this was made to order. After all, I do not remember having suffered another theft in my whole life.

Gradually, as the train rattled along northward, I slowly forgot the new, vulgar, aggressive chaos of the cities and rediscovered the ancient, soul-restoring order of nature, worked for thousands of years by man.
We crossed Gansu, one of the most backward regions of the country. The earth was yellow, the fields small, the donkeys thin, and the peasants, as always, bent to work. This was still the old, poor China which does not make news, which does not have impressive rates of development and where no one goes to invest. On the walls of the mud houses you could still read revolutionary slogans, and red flags still fluttered on the roofs. Seen from the train window, this was a China in which Mao might still have been alive: men and women still wore blue trousers and jackets, and the streets were swarming with bicycles. It was as if Deng Xiaoping’s reforms had never reached these parts.

How long can it all last? My two traveling companions were sure that soon the contradictions would explode. One of them, a major in the Liberation Army, spoke of a possible civil war: province against province, the coastal regions against the interior, peasants against city dwellers. He was not the only one in the army to think that way, he said. The other man was an old Party cadre, now retired. In his opinion the whole system established by the Communists after 1949 was about to collapse. “The teachers go to the market instead of to school because they earn more by petty trading than teaching. The policemen no longer catch thieves because they themselves have become gangsters. How can a country go on like this?” He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. Such freedom of speech would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. “The only way of preventing anarchy,” he concluded, “is for the army and the security forces to take the country in hand and reimpose order by force.” China, he believed, would soon become a fascist country. The major seemed to agree.

For a whole afternoon the train ran through the Gobi Desert, and then for a whole day alongside the Yellow River. The natural environment was very poor and wild, but man had tamed it and made it bear fruit. An endless line of electricity poles stretched to the horizon; for hundreds of miles the railway was protected by wide borders of tenacious grass planted to keep the sand from burying the tracks. Everywhere I saw dikes, bridges, irrigation canals, and incredibly long palisades of green poplars, planted to defend distant Peking from the murderous dust storms. All these works were realized with the collective labor of the last forty years. Who will carry out such projects in the future?

At Huhehot, where my train turned east toward Peking, I got off to take the northbound express train to Mongolia.

I stayed in Huhehot for a day and a night: time to wash my clothes, grimy from the journey, and to sleep in a real bed. Time to walk, not in a narrow corridor but in the streets of a city full of people, bicycles, cars, old carts pulled by donkeys and others pulled by men. I listened attentively to the sounds, comparing them with those I remembered from the past. I still constantly heard that word
qian
, which had greeted me on my arrival in China. A man at a market stall kept shouting it as he displayed a pair of women’s underpants. I did not understand why, and went to look: they were special panties with a secret pocket in the front in which to hide money.

When the station windows opened at six in the morning the tickets were already sold out. I paid double price for one on the black market, and climbed aboard the express for Ulan Bator.

At last a train where one could walk in the corridors, and use the toilets without people constantly banging on the door. The few passengers were mostly Mongolian, and I enjoyed watching their maneuvers. One took a screwdriver out of his trousers, opened the ceiling of the compartment and shoved in a cardboard carton; another, with a long iron rod, started fishing in the belly of the train through a small trapdoor in the corridor. I had heard of a Mongolian drug route from Yunnan to southern China and Ulan Bator, then across Siberia and Poland to Germany. Was I observing its couriers?