Travels with Myself and Another (9 page)

Madame Chiang and U.C. were hitting it off all right until I thrust my oar in. I asked Madame Chiang why they didn’t take care of the lepers, why force the poor creatures to roam the streets begging. She blew up. The Chinese were humane and civilized unlike Westerners; they would never lock lepers away out of contact with other mortals. “China had a great culture when your ancestors were living in trees and painting themselves blue.” Which ancestors? Apes or ancient Britons? I was furious and sulked. To appease me, Madame Chiang gave me a peasant’s straw hat which I thought pretty and a brooch of jade set in silver filigree which I thought tacky. I didn’t know how to refuse these gifts and was not appeased. U.C. behaved with decorum until we had done our bowing and scraping and departed. Then he said, laughing like a hyena, “I guess that’ll teach you to take on the Empress of China.”

“Why don’t they do something for their people, instead of bragging about their past? All the big shots we’ve met don’t give a damn about anything except their perks and their power. I wouldn’t trust any of them. This is a rotten place. What’s the matter with them?”

“Whatchumacallit. Maybe. More or less.”

In the market, a tall blonde Dutch woman, wearing a man’s felt hat and a flowered cotton dress over trousers, approached me furtively and asked if we wanted to see Chou En-lai. The name Chou En-lai meant nothing to me; I said I would ask U.C. I told U.C. that some sort of loon had sidled up to me in the market with this proposition and he said, “Oh yes, he’s a friend of Joris.” Joris Ivens, a darling man, is a Dutch documentary filmmaker who worked in China in 1938 or 1939. The Dutch woman had instructed me to return to the market with my answer. There followed a scene straight from James Bond but long preceding James Bond.

Our orders were to wander around the next day, until sure we were not tracked by our own thugs or any others, and meet in the market. The Dutch lady then led us through a maze of alleys, further throwing off pursuit. Finally we were bundled into rickshaws and blindfolded for the last lap. Blindfolds removed, we found ourselves in a small whitewashed cell, furnished with a table and three chairs, Chou En-lai behind the table. I was semi-stuffy, as I thought we were playing cops and robbers, and was always quick to disapprove silliness in others. I have no idea what Chou was doing or how he handled his life in Chungking where he was in constant danger.

Chou wore an open-neck short-sleeved white shirt, black trousers and sandals, the dress of an underpaid clerk. He too had a translator. We spoke French but knew by his brilliant amused eyes that he understood without translation. Unneeded interpreters may have been an inscrutable Oriental custom or maybe they served as living tape recorders. In any case, none of the stickiness of translation hampered us. For the first and only time we were at home with a Chinese. We laughed at the same jokes. I suppose U.C. told him about the Canton front. Neither of us could have asked intelligent questions about the Long March, the Communists, where they were and how they were operating, because we didn’t know anything about these subjects, nor know who Chou was. He was a Communist living underground which made sense, thinking back belatedly and dimly to Malraux’s
La Condition Humaine,
wherein Chiang was depicted ordering Communists to be thrown live into the boilers of locomotives. (I blush to remember my ignorance.)

U.C. was knowledgeable in exact detail about anything that interested him but China had not been on his list. Chou must have thought us brainless boobs of the first water, though that didn’t affect our shared merriment. I wish I had Chou quotations to pass on to posterity but don’t remember a word. Anyway, we had listened to words until we were punch-drunk. It wasn’t what Chou said, but what he was. He sat in his bare little room, in his nondescript clothes, and he
was
Somebody. We thought Chou a winner, the one really good man we’d met in China; and if he was a sample of Chinese Communists, then the future was theirs. As for me, I was so captivated by this entrancing man that if he had said, take my hand and I will lead you to the pleasure dome of Xanadu, I would have made sure that Xanadu wasn’t in China, asked for a minute to pick up my toothbrush, and been ready to leave.

Months later, we were convoked to Washington to answer questions about China. We went surlily and told those desk Intelligence Officers that the Communists would take over China, after this war. Why? Because the Chiang lot were hell and it was hypocritical bilge to talk about Chinese democracy, there was less than none, and the people would welcome any change, even two-headed men from Mars, but as it happened the best man in the country was a Communist and it was safe to assume he had some comrades like him. We were called Cassandras as usual and branded fellow travellers as usual. I was astonished when Chou surfaced as Foreign Minister of the new China, that lovely man from the whitewashed cellar in Chungking. All documentary films and travel books about Chou’s China show that it is an immeasurable, almost inconceivable, improvement over Chiang’s China. Never mind that it would be deadly for people like us; people like us were a drop in that remembered ocean of human misery.

At some point during this Chungking interval, I got China Rot on my hands. It was a very common and distasteful disease, a violent form of athlete’s foot (I think). Suddenly I observed that the skin between my fingers was rotting away in a yellowish ooze laced with blood. U.C. took one look at this mess and said for God’s sake find a doctor, call the U.S. Embassy, do something; this might be the first step to losing your nose. The details are now hidden in the usual mists of time but the result was that I wore large white motorman-type gloves over a malodorous unguent; the unguent stained the gloves and I was about as alluring as a leper. The doctor had assured me that I would not lose my fingers but the disease was highly contagious. U.C. lacked sympathy.

“Honest to God, M.,” he said, “you brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash.”

Even an unsurpassed and unsurpassable horror journey must one day end, though I often thought it would not. We planned to fly to Rangoon with CNAC, where U.C. would catch the Clipper for home. My assignment was not finished, I had to look at the defences of neighbouring countries and meant to whisk round Singapore and Java and return to the newly glamorous Occident a month later. I skipped down the long steps from Chungking to the river and the plane. Farewell forever to awful China. U.C. was prepared for the flight with half a bottle of gin and his Lily Cup. Where and how U.C. acquired his Lily Cup, I never knew. He carried it, folded in the breast pocket of his jacket; he was inseparable from it; he guarded it jealously; he shared it with no one, it was his dearest private property.

The plane was almost full of Chinese passengers, very jolly to be leaving. For a brief spell they remained sprightly, but the plane was soon behaving like a butterfly in a hurricane, tipping from wing to wing and floating in large zig-zags over the scenery. That quieted the passengers. Then we hit the up and down draughts over the Burma Road. Instead of moving ahead we seemed to be in an express elevator. The passengers began to wail loudly. U.C. and I, not subject to airsickness, admired the pilot. We were well strapped in and U.C. had just carefully filled his Lily Cup when the plane was seized by a colossal current and hurled upwards like a rocket. Despite strapping we rose in our seats. Screams of fear rent the air, mixed with sobs and the sound of violent vomiting. Having soared into outer space, the plane now dropped, like a descending rocket.

Folk wisdom claims (by what proof I’d like to know) that a drowning person sees his whole life in a flash before the final fatal swallow. I can testify that in however many seconds of that descent, I did a lot of thinking. I knew the wings had to fall off. Possibly we would crash before the wings ripped away but, in any case, survival was impossible. I wanted to tell U.C. that I regretted bitterly having nagged him into this horror journey and would never forgive myself for causing his death, cut off in his prime, his work unfinished, his children fatherless; my heart was breaking with sorrow for U.C. and racked by guilt. U.C., in a strange rigid position, held his Lily Cup with both hands, his eyes fixed on the cabin ceiling. Except for the Lily Cup, he might have been praying. In the tumult of passenger shrieks, I laid my oozing gloved hand on his sleeve and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as I had no time to make a speech. U.C. did not hear or notice. I closed my eyes, because I thought I’d rather not actually see a wing take leave of the fuselage.

The plane, close to ground level, slowly rose complete with wings. We regained whatever normal flying height was, though nothing was normal on a CNAC flight, and the plane advanced in butterfly style. U.C. smiled happily.

“I didn’t lose a drop,” he said. “The gin shot out of my Lily Cup and I watched it and caught it after it hit the roof. Not a single drop.”

“Thank God,” I said, breathless at still having breath.

“You know, M.,” U.C. said, “for someone who doesn’t believe in Him, you’ve sure as hell been in close contact with the Lord since you came to China.”

Rangoon may be the pearl of the Orient for all I know. The heat was indescribable. This must have been the dog days before the monsoon rains. You felt you could cut the heat and hold it like chunks of wet blotting paper. It finished U.C.; he was a beached whale; he couldn’t breathe and I, who love heat, was far from blooming. The only way to sleep or in fact live was to lie naked on the marble floor under the paddle fan in the hotel bedroom. I was never entirely naked since I couldn’t remove my motorman’s gloves even to shower. The catch in China Rot is that you spread it merely by touching your skin; scratch your head and you had another crop of China Rot. I was pretty tired of those gloves and their smell; U.C. tended to stay upwind of me.

I was obliged to visit the airline office but saw none of the famous pagodas, nothing except other heat-crushed people. U.C. had to sign for his ticket so walked beside me once, blinded by sweat, not so blinded that he couldn’t see Burmese priests, languid young men dressed in orange cotton sarongs or orange cloths fastened on one shoulder, brass begging bowls in hand. “Religious bums,” U.C. snarled.

Time resumed its frightful habit of standing still but finally we were gasping through the last night. I wanted to praise U.C. for his generosity, above and beyond the call of duty, in coming to China, his forbearance in not murdering me, his jokes, and let him know that I grieved for his time wasted on a season in hell. My brain was boiled; I couldn’t form sentences. With tears in my eyes, I touched his shoulder and said, “Thank you.”

He wrenched away, shouting, “Take your filthy dirty hands off me!” We looked at each other in shocked silence. Were these to be the parting words between us after all the shared horrors of a super horror journey? Then we rolled on the marble floor, laughing in our separate pools of sweat.

U.C. missed the best of the Orient. Singapore and Batavia were a whirl of gaiety, specially Singapore with all the charming chaps in uniform fresh from Britain to defend that bastion of Empire. The gaiety might have been on the feverish side. I think the Dutch consciously and the British unconsciously sensed that they were living in the last act before the fateful curtain. There was much to criticize but, compared to the Chinese Imperial Boss Class as just seen, the European Imperial Boss Class was Florence Nightingale. British colonialists were warped by a colour complex, the meanest stupidity of the British Empire, shaming to newcomers from Britain. The Dutch were not. The Dutch were enlightened and honourable rulers though their good deeds didn’t help them later. I wasn’t hired to study the problems of Empire. Those were not horror journeys and have no place in this book. I lived in luxury, clean as a whistle, cured of China Rot, dashed about on military business and rounds of pleasure with marvellous companions of the road, and concealed my foreboding for those who had to stay.

I was right about one thing: in the Orient, a world ended.

With Captain V. C. Griffin at the Naval Air Station in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1942

Three

MESSING ABOUT IN BOATS

During that terrible year, 1942, I lived in the sun, safe and comfortable and hating it. News reached us at regular hours on the radio and none of it was good. But we didn’t understand how bad it was; piecemeal and (I now see) wisely censored, the news gave us no whole view. The only war I understood or could imagine was war on land and that was enough to shake the heart with the Germans moving like a tidal wave into Russia and Rommel rampaging in the desert. I think my ignorance was typical; the general public, which is most of us, did not realize that the fatal danger was on the sea. We would have lost the war if we went on losing ships at the appalling rate of 1942. Cargo ships, ungratefully neglected in the annals of glory, without which Britain would have starved and our war everywhere from Russia to North Africa halted like an engine out of fuel. 1,508 Allied merchant ships, 8,336,258 gross tons, sank to the bottom of the sea in one year. I can’t make a picture of that for myself let alone for anyone else. The nearest I can come is that it was like bleeding to death.

Then American news broadcasts began to tell, with great excitement, of German submarines sinking ships along the eastern seaboard of the U.S., and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and as far south as Brazil. I was leery of the tone; it sounded boastful as if suggesting that we too, in our impregnable safety, were endangered. Which we weren’t. There has been no war on American soil since 1865. The suffering in Europe and the Orient was and is beyond American conception; no one can know what modern war means until it happens at home. But I was going into a decline from hearing about the war on the radio instead of being where I wanted to be, with the people whose lives were paying for it. I could get a short leave of absence from private obligations and domestic duties and at least escape the radio by roaming around the Caribbean to report on this sideshow, this minor if any submarine warfare in nearby waters.

Thirty-four years late, I bestirred myself to look up the facts and found with amazement that 251 merchant ships were sunk in 1942 in the Caribbean alone. In August and September, the months when I was dawdling through the area, the losses were heaviest, seventy-one ships in sixty-one days. As I had no idea of this at the time, nor could have had since it was highly classified information, I intended to do my best with the mild material at hand. I love journalism, it is always a chance to see and learn something new and I was interested by everything I saw, though hardly overcome by the importance of the assignment.

In Haiti, interned Nazis, German residents, well treated and swelling with pride, expected Germany to win next year and expected to be powerful Gauleiters. Puerto Rico had become a huge naval and air base; I begged a ride in a Flying Fortress on anti-submarine patrol. The crew was fun but the trip was like bus travel, flying with CNAC had spoiled me. The small brown gentle Puerto Ricans, who lived and died too young in shameful slums, were the people I liked best. Their sons volunteered eagerly for the U.S. Army, fifty dollars a month and as much as they wanted to eat was the first chance they’d ever had for a decent life.

All survivors, sailors from the torpedoed merchant ships, were brought to Puerto Rico before being sent off on other ships. You could recognize them at once in the waterfront bars, gaunt men in new cheap civilian clothes, suffering a different kind of shell-shock. I hung about listening with pity and admiration but knew that I wasn’t understanding. Lifeboats were outside my experience.

“I guess the tenth day was about the worst. I just about gave up hope that day.” “One of the chaps went a little wacky about the fourteenth day, remember, Bert?” “You didn’t look too good yourself, John.” “You can see it around their eyes, see, they get sort of a cuckoo look in their eyes. Had one chap wanted to kill hisself.” A boy alone at the Condado bar kept telling me that kapok was much better than the old lifebelts, they ought to have it in all ships. He came from Brooklyn. He’d been adrift for eighteen days in a lifeboat. He spoke of a man who got caught in the ropes of a lifeboat just after the torpedo struck. “The guy must of jumped or something but not far enough and he was hung there, see what I mean, you know, dead.” What was it like in the lifeboat? “I don’t remember, I guess it was all right.”

I wrote of these matters as I was employed to do and Charles Colebaugh, the angelic editor of
Collier’s,
was pleased but I was not. By now I knew there was a real war on, in these parts, though it was invisible beneath the bright blue water and it seemed tame and boring to report a war without action or eye-witness news. There must be a better way to go about the job.

To justify the
Collier’s
expense account, I told myself I might pick up survivors from torpedoed ships or find stashes of supplies for submarines or hidden enemy radio transmitters and anyway, since the war hereabouts was taking place on the sea, obviously I should travel on the sea too. My private dream, which I had the sense to keep to myself, was that I would actually sight a submarine. St Thomas, an American island, was easy to reach by plane from Puerto Rico. After that, formal transportation ceased until the next American base at Antigua, some 275 miles away as I figured on the map. In between was a string of little islands, with delectable names, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anguilla, St Martin and St Bartholomew, Saba, St Kitts. Whatever else might come of it, I would see an unknown world.

At St Thomas, I tried to hire a sloop. An old black man, agent for pre-war island trading boats, explained that no one on St Thomas was fool enough to leave port in the hurricane season. Neither he nor any of the locals worried about submarines but worried hard about hurricanes and their Bible, a regional almanac, predicted a bad hurricane this month. When I asked advice of resident whites they asked whether I hadn’t heard of the submarines, almost next door in the Anegada Passage. They also said that no white person could travel in the native sloops; I better wait until after the war and hire a yacht like everyone else.

Word of my scheme got around and resulted in a visit from a burly Texas Major in charge of guarding the island. He brought me a miniature pearl-handled silver-plated derringer. It looked just the weapon for a crackpot wearing a négligée trimmed in ostrich feathers who planned to shoot her lover. He gave me four bullets, blunt-nosed 32s, showed me how to load this lethal toy, told me earnestly that it would cut a man in half and not to hesitate to use it. “You don’t know what can happen, all alone out there.”

I said I could not accept his expensive pistol, had never used a hand-gun, and was never anxious about my honour. He insisted until finally I thanked him, wrapped the pretty thing in Kleenex, put the bullets in an airmail envelope and the lot at the bottom of my suitcase. Somewhere during the journey, I must have given it away. On this note of comedy, I departed in an ancient motorboat for Tortola, a four-hour trip.

My heart rose like a bird at once. It always did incurably, except in rain, as soon as I felt I had fallen off the map. The motorboat dumped me, soaked by spray and chirpy, at Roadtown, a cluster of unpainted shacks and a single dust street. There were ten white residents on the island and seven thousand blacks, no cars, few bicycles, and one taxi, which was a rowboat. The British Commissioner who also served as doctor, dispensing their small stock of medicines, and magistrate and editor of the mimeographed newspaper, deplored my scheme but passed me on to the local grocer, Mr de Castro, a white-haired dignified black man.

Mr de Castro introduced me to his son Carlton, owner of a potato boat, a thirty-foot sloop called the
Pilot.
A potato boat is an overgrown rowboat, with one sail and a hold for potatoes, which sold its cargo from island to island and returned carrying whatever could be bought en route, preferably rum and tobacco and preferably smuggled back into the home island.

Carlton de Castro was the Tortola glamour boy, aged twenty-five, coffee-coloured, with curling eyelashes, curling sideburns, and gold front teeth. He wore his captain’s cap over one ear and had a droll style as if he were a Parisian nightclub Apache playing sailor. His boat, he said, was “clean as fire” but he wasn’t crazy about making the trip because of the “hurry-cane.” I waved
Collier’s
dollar bills under his nose and corrupted him. We would leave the next morning.

In the meantime I shopped since I had to feed myself. Carlton would lay in two casks of water and some stones for ballast; the rest was up to me. I bought the usual sustaining grim assortment of tinned beans, sardines, tea, crackers and an object called Superware Sanitary Pail, made of shining grey enamel, and a large black umbrella to ward off sunburn. The Commissioner generously loaned me two army blankets and a pillow.

Rain then poured down as if here to stay. The sea looked like churned cement. I was marooned in the Social Inn, an inexplicable hostelry—why would anyone come here?—two dirty bedrooms, with beer bottles swept into corners and drifts of cigarette butts, mementoes of survivors off an English ship who had been moved on to Puerto Rico a few days earlier. Rain blew through the shutters and under the door. There was no electric light, hardship for a reader as the only place to perch was beneath the stained mosquito net on the boards of the four-poster bed and I thought I might set fire to the place with a kerosene lamp in that tent. The Social Inn reminded me sadly of the Palace Hotel in Kweilin but there were no bedbugs and one must always be grateful for small mercies. The rain went on and on. I sat amidst my canned goods, eating them from time to time, and read detective stories while the dim daylight lasted.

From time to time I ventured into the downpour under my new umbrella to call on the only patient in the one-room hospital, a Jewish refugee from Vienna whom I believed to be dying, he was so yellow and so thin, burning with fever. Probably he had malaria and jaundice. Having escaped the Nazi gas chambers, he outlived the Blitz in London as a fire warden. By one of the wild vagaries that mark war, the British government then sent this man, whose original business was the manufacture of perfumes, to Tortola to start a tobacco industry. Of course tobacco could not be grown here and he wanted either to die, as release from the hopeless boredom of the island, or get back to England and join the British Army. He had a clearer idea than anyone else in the area of the reason for this war and a fierce need to take active part in it.

I felt callous leaving him to die there, among kind but uncomprehending strangers. At least he could talk to me, we both knew the Nazis, we had the bond of hatred for them. But when the rain stopped after three days I said goodbye, falsely assuring him of future health. Perhaps a year later, he sent a photograph of a plump smiling man. Christmas cards followed. He had settled on St Thomas, married, was employed in some business connected to perfumery and delighted with his new life. I love happy endings, and specially from that war; there were all too few.

The
Pilot
set sail at seven in the morning, me waving graciously to the public, Mr de Castro Senior and an elderly American whose son was stationed in Australia. The American had shaken my hand in the way one salutes bereaved relatives after a funeral and said, “My dear, I hope you know what you’re doing.” Having before me two small snapshots, brownish, out of focus, showing the
Pilot
and the crew and me, I understand his farewell-forever manner.

The
Pilot,
pictured upon the sea, looks like the celluloid sailboats children play with in bathtubs. The other photo records me, centre front, dressed in my comfy kit of short shorts, shirt, sandals, surrounded by barefooted black men: Carlton (Cahltin) with a bandana tied about his neck for extra swank, George (Gawge) a lovely giant wearing a felt hat without brim and ragged trousers to mid calf, Walter (Walteh) in dirty singlet and shorts, Voosten bare to the waist and Irvine in a shirt which he wore open and flapping like a coat over underpants. They look villainous. I thought them sweet apart from Carlton who was too vain, and had no qualms about that dubious boat.

The
Pilot
had once been white. The deck sloped downwards without guardrail. The deckhouse was five feet high and five feet square, in which I could neither stand nor lie nor even sit since it was like a sauna. Amidships on the port side a small dinghy was lashed to the deck. You could see worm holes in it and they had one oar; at best it would have held three people before it filled and sank. There were no lifebelts, no sextant, no log, no barometer and no charts. A compass wobbled on the stern by the tiller. The single sail resembled a patchwork quilt.

The dinghy was not as long as I am. Carlton put the hatch cover in it, making a peculiar seating or lying arrangement, a convex curve for two thirds of the length then a drop to a concave curve. I spread the blankets on this surface, placed the pillow at one end, slid my legs under the seat and established myself with umbrella for sunshade. All I had to do was duck when the boom swung over.

The sea looked flat calm, a deception. Long swells moved like muscles under the skin of the water. The
Pilot
dipped and rose, in short jerky movements. Reclining as much as possible in the dinghy, I didn’t feel too good but refused to think about it. If this was the
Pilot
’s best behaviour in the best weather, I preferred not to look ahead. Hours later, still sailing along the shores of Tortola, we were accosted by another smaller sail-boat.

Carlton called to the passers-by, an old man and his son: “Whatsaysay, Mon, whatsaysay?” shouted Carlton.

The old man shouted, “Oh good, Mon, where you goin?”

“Right roun de globe, boy.”

“What you cargo?” asked the son.

“De lady,” said Carlton and all men on both boats shrieked with laughter.

Five hours later the crew began to bellow at each other which was the way orders were given and obeyed. It was mid-afternoon and we tied up to the pier on the beautiful beach at Virgin Gorda because Irvine had to get money from his wife. “She de cashier,” he said. With
Collier
’s dollars, divided according to rank, and their own, each man would buy what he could and sell where he could; free enterprise trading.