Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (46 page)

"It wasn't easy," he said. "We had to get up at four in the morning to clean the dining room and set the tables. Empty the ashtrays. Sweep. Uncle Bernard insisted that we get there at that time. 'Be very quiet, the guests are sleeping.' He was so strict. He checked each table. 'Don't hurry,' he said. 'Do it all correctly.' And he could get really angry."

"What made him angry?"

"If we left the spoon out of the sugar bowl."

***

I WENT BACK TO MANDALAY
. It was then that I searched for and found Oo Nawng and gave him the money. He said, "I'm happy."

Before I left, I made a visit to the Irrawaddy, just to see the river and the boats and the landing stage. It was too far for Oo Nawng to go in his bicycle rickshaw, so I took a taxi. On the way, we passed a big bold sign:
The Tatmadaw Will Never Betray the National Cause.

"What's the Tatmadaw?"

"Damadaw," the driver said, giving it the correct pronunciation. "Is the army."

"Yes?"

"Stupid army."

T
HE GREAT CHALLENGE
in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks, and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal—show up and hop on.

The express trains out of Bangkok were brand-new and comfortable, yet Bangkok was hard to leave. I had thought I would breeze through, but found myself seated in a cool shadowy room with muted gong music playing and a Thai woman washing my feet. She called herself Sky, because her name (she said) was too hard for me to say. I was so moved by the foot-washing I wanted to weep. Then she had me on the table and was kneeling on the backs of my thighs and tugging the kinks out of my arms. They were sore from rocking up and down Myanmar on the ghost trains. She poked her elbows into the small of my back and did a sort of samba along my spine, digging her toes into my vertebrae, and I thought of my trip from Colombo to Galle. She punched my upper back, giving me noogies in the recesses of my muscles, and I thought of the two drunks on the train from Bokhara, their hands in the remains of a tornapart chicken, their eyes glazed with vodka, as I stayed in the corridor trying to remain upright. She worked on my arms, flexed one then the other, twisted them, and I saw the rigid posture of the Muslim sitting stiff-backed on the train from Ashgabat to Mary.

She straddled me, as though playing horsy. This was heaven, having her seated on my back like a child on a pony ride, her knees forward, using them to massage my kidneys as she hammered the kinks out of my
back. I had seen horsemen sitting like this in the desolate fields of Romania, but I was the pony now, and she the rider.

She slipped back, gripped my legs with hers and pressed, a wrestling move, kneading my calves with her heels, and then she took hold of my feet, finding each joint, each muscle, rolling each toe—whose feet are ever venerated and squeezed and chafed in this way, even by a lover? I had a vision of all the people, in India and Sri Lanka and Myanmar, whom I had seen walking—their cracked and tortured feet in broken shoes and shattered sandals.

"Over, please."

Then I was face-up, with a cloth mask over my eyes, as Sky knuckled and punched my legs and made a circular syncopation, open-handed against my inner thighs, playing a percussive tune. All this for almost two hours, a kind of bliss, some of it hurting badly, but when she stopped I wanted more. What lover ever spent that much time appeasing the tension in her lover's body?

Near the end she took my right hand. I write with this hand. It is cramped like a claw most of the time from holding a pen. She used her fingers to pry my hand bones apart, massaging my palm, bending my whole hand backwards, flexing my fingers, and then, finger by finger, cracking my joints, pulling each digit, until my hand stopped being a blunt instrument and acquired an elasticity, opening like a blossom.

"The children's hands bleed, sir!" a carpet seller had told me in Jaipur, unrolling a rug. "Look at the tiny knots!"

And then fruit juice under the stars, and my thinking, I'll stay a little while longer.

The last time I had stayed at the Erawan Hotel—famous, venerable, atmospheric—it was full of American army officers and camp followers of the Vietnam War. There had been only two great hotels in Bangkok then, the other being the Oriental, just as venerable and luxurious. Now there were many posh hotels. Bangkok was a so-called spa destination, and the Grand Hyatt Erawan, on the site of the old hotel, had a whole upper level of spa bungalows, like a village for sybarites and lotus eaters on a high rooftop. My bungalow had its own massage room, steam room, veranda, and bamboo garden. A swimming pool was just outside. Did I want another massage? Was I hungry? What about a cup of tea? How about a banana?

In a much too big, humid city, still with a traffic problem, even with
most of the klongs (canals) and creeks paved over, and questionable sights—newly painted temples and the murky Chao Phraya River—the hotel had become the destination. People checked in and simply stayed for a week, being waited on and pampered, without leaving. The Oriental was more palatial, with its spa and cooking school in a villa across the river, its five gourmet restaurants. The same general manager, Kurt Wachtveitl, had been there all those years ago.

"Ten million tourists come here," Kurt told me. "But it won't be long before there are twenty million, because the Chinese are starting to arrive—to shop, mainly for gemstones."

The city itself is still busy and bright, the side streets still sleazy, with grubby bars and brothels in the same districts as before. Tourists come to shop for silks and eat great meals. Some book buyers, too—the five-story Paragon Shopping Center had the best bookstore I'd seen since leaving London. Bangkok had been a destination for sex tourists and soldiers on R and R. Though the city is now prosperous from manufacturing—sweatshops and outsourcing—that rosy dimension remains. Pat Pong Road, which used to have a seedy charm, good-natured in its pimping, is now just scuzzy, and raucous, with loudly contending whores.

I was on my way to see a tailor. The taxi driver said, "You like sandwich?"

"I'm not hungry."

"No. Sex—two women."

"Sandwich?"

"One front, one back, very nice." He found my face in his rear-view mirror. "Or you want lady-boy?"

What I wanted was to buy a train ticket, be fitted for two shirts, get some film developed, buy a present for my wife's birthday, and have my laundry done. When I marveled to an American teacher in Bangkok that I managed all of these inside of an hour, he said, "But you probably got them all done at the same place, right?"

He was roughly my age, and that day he was in a hurry to get to his Thai girlfriend's birthday party.

"She's turning twenty," he said, knowing I would ask.

"So you're in heaven."

"Tell you a story," he said in a cautioning voice. "A
farang
met a Thai woman and fell in love with her. They got married. When the woman
got her American visa, they moved to the States, to the guy's hometown. They were really happy. The Thai woman learned English, got a job, and was a devoted wife. The ideal woman—the guy's dream. Like you said, heaven. This lasted five years.

"Then one day the woman says, 'I have to go back to Thailand. My husband is very sick. I have to be with him.'
Husband?
Yes, she explained. She'd been married before and had never gotten a divorce. But that was a detail.

"'When will you be back?' the guy asks.

"'I can never come back. I don't know how long he will be sick. Better to say goodbye now. If he dies, I'll have to look after his family.'"

I said, "And the moral is?"

"She was young, but there was a lot the
farang
didn't know."

The youthfulness of Bangkok is a surprise: the bright faces, the smiling sylph-like beauties working as shop clerks, staffing hotels and restaurants, filling the new metro and sky train. It is a city of schools and colleges, and so a city of beautiful students. I found myself staring. The wok stirrer at the smallest noodle stall might be a ravishing woman, the more lovely for her strenuously paddling the noodles, her skin glowing from her effort, dampened and strangely lit by the cooking fire.

The bar girls were as fresh-faced as the college students, though most of them were a bit younger, more like artful schoolgirls, and just as casually dressed, their small breasts pressing against their T-shirts. The masseuses in the red-light district, in their efficiency and charm, were almost indistinguishable from the massage therapists in the spas. There was nothing particularly whorish-looking about the whores or meretricious-seeming about the tarts; any of them could have passed for bookstore staff at Paragon or clerks at Robinsons Department Store, and their English was as good. Hostesses in the wildest saloons were as demure as hostesses at the coffee shops in the great hotels. Bowing and politeness were common to all these women, not as a sign of submission but a ritual show of respect, and self-respect. No matter their work, these women walked with upright and stately grace because Buddhists believe the head is sacred and should be held erect.

"Massage?" was the first question from every taxi driver. It was a question I was to hear hundreds of times over the next month in Southeast Asia from taxi drivers, rickshaw men, chair men, scooter boys, kids on
the street, whisperers in bars, and touts in hotel lobbies. But they didn't mean the sort of massage I'd gotten at the Erawan or the Oriental. A massage was a euphemism for sex, any kind of sex, agreed upon downstairs, then negotiated upstairs.

Nokh—it means bird in Thai—had worked at Robinsons. She told her family in Pattaya that she still worked there. Her father was a farmer. She went home once a month for a ritual meal and to pay her respects and visit the temple. She had lived in Bangkok for two years. She was the eldest of four children, had just turned twenty-five, and had responsibilities.

One of her responsibilities was to pay for the education of her younger sister Boonmah, who (unlike Nokh) had finished school and was attending college. Nokh and Boonmah lived together in a small room in a northern district of Bangkok, Nokh paying for everything.

Clerking in the women's clothing department paid so poorly that Nokh couldn't make ends meet. "Small money," she said. ("A lot of Thai girls work at Robinsons to meet marriageable
farangs"
an American
farang
told me.) One of her friends told her she could earn more money in a massage parlor, so she gave it a shot.

"You should talk to her," my friend said.

"Is she out of the ordinary?"

"No. That's why you should talk to her. She's typical. There are tens of thousands just like her."

She was small, slim, doll-like, fragile-looking. What appealed to me immediately was that when I met her for our appointment she was reading a magazine, with much the same absorption as the bar girl I'd seen in Istanbul. She didn't look up. The sex worker is attentive above all, restless, with a bird-like alertness, partly to look for a mark, partly for self-protection. Reading was not only unproductive, but because it caused inattention, it was dangerous. She had been startled into anxious giggles when I interrupted her. I said that to talk to her, I'd give her what a customer would.

She laughed. She said, "Customers give big man six thousand baht. Big man give me one thousand baht."

That was $25, so I doubled it, and she was happy and forthcoming.

"Does your sister know where you work?"

"I tell her I work in a karaoke."

"What about your parents?"

"I tell them I work at Robinsons. They be sad if they know where I work."

"Why doesn't your sister work?"

"She does small work. But she has to study."

"Is she pretty like you?"

"She very fat!"

"After she graduates, what will you do?"

"Save money. I want to have a coffee shop in Chon Buri."

Nokh looked at her watch, but was embarrassed when I asked if she had to go. It was five in the afternoon. She was due at work at six, which meant that she would pin her disk to her blouse, displaying her number. She would sit behind a wall of glass, in the fish-tank arrangement of the Bangkok brothel, and would wait, smiling, until a man chose her. She passed the time this way until two in the morning. And the man who chose her might go later to a restaurant and for his meal choose a fish from an aquarium in just the same way.

"I read magazine!" she said, as though to reassure me that she wasn't killing time.

I found her situation depressing. Nokh was wasting her youth in a whorehouse, not for her own gain but, because she was the number one child, to support her sister. She was so small, so polite and pleasant, intelligent too. I asked a few more inconsequential questions and then off she went, into the cruel world.

***

SOLVING THE PROBLEM
of how to leave the enormous city, one night I took a taxi to the railway station at the center of Bangkok. I had a ticket on the 2045, the night train to the Laotian border at Nong Khai. At the station there were no formalities, no security, no ticket check, no warnings, no friskings. I bought a big bottle of water and some beer, saw from the departure board that my train would be leaving from platform 3, found my sleeper, and climbed aboard. This was about thirty minutes before we left. I was seated, drinking a beer, when the conductor knocked on my door, said hello, and punched my ticket. Then he made my bed. And soon after, we slid away from the station, headed north.

I had found a Simenon paperback in one of the big Bangkok book
stores,
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By.
I got into bed and enjoyed one of the most pleasant experiences I know in travel, tucked into a wide berth on an Asiatic train, in a private compartment, reading as the coach gently rocks, and knowing that I won't have to stir for twelve hours, when I will be at the edge of another country, a new frontier.