Jan Slauerhoff - The Forbidden Kingdom

Yet panting in my cabin, I felt that nonetheless a part of myself had already been stolen from me and transformed, just as the effect and secretion of a malignant tumour, once established, changes an organism. True, I was still the radio operator, who did his work, sending off and receiving telegrams, who talked with the other crew members in time-honoured ways, but my thinking was conducted in long convoluted sentences concerning the consequences of adventures that were alien to me: disappointment, banishment, love of a woman, for a country, both unworthy, both unattainably far away and for that reason attractive.

What country, what woman? I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, because if I knew that too… But then why was I not released from that unbearable existence on board ship?… Yes, and banished to an even more unbearable one. Not that, not that! Rather remain the man, the creature, who sits in his cubbyhole, with the hood on his head, who drifts across the wide, hot, hated water, together with a filthy ship.

Work rattled on under arc lamps. There was a dim light on in the cabin, everything was in its place, so wasn’t it safe here? Wasn’t I free? There was no spot, no person on shore I longed for, I could sign off wherever I wanted. After an hour the loading stopped and all the lights went out. The ship would leave tomorrow at first light. I lay between the silence of the hot iron and the wood, without sleeping. What I had feared did not happen; I felt lucid and free, more than I had for years. Everything would come right, I would be content with my life, and no one would be able to force their way into it and then it would not be bad, then it would be better than anywhere on land. If only one could accustom one’s head not to think and one’s body not to long for movement, then it was all right, it was a good life. I was excited; I stroked the edges of my bunk, into which I fitted so well. I was floating on air and halfway through the night I fell into a light, dreamless sleep.

The next morning my intoxicating sense of freedom had gone. I was once more the radio operator on a tramp steamer, the lowest of the low. My right hand was out of action, so that I had to signal with my left, and now in broad daylight, while the ship was at sea, I was still afraid. After a few days, when my hand was better, it passed, especially once I had firmly resolved never to go ashore in China again, except in Hong Kong, which was still tolerable. In the past China had seemed to me only filthy and disgusting, as I knew nothing but the coolies, the docks and the port areas, and then I suddenly saw what lay beyond them: the vast country with its endless arid fields, which people had to fertilize with their own manure to produce a yield, living, that is, from their own excrement; in the fields the millions of graves, the cities where the overpopulation spilt over into the surrounding area, where the stench of food and corpses competed with miasma emanating from the sick living, and among them were the grimacing dragons and statues of idols, the gnawing, never-ending antiquity of it all.

Now I was far removed from this wretchedness, as resigned and grinning as the Chinese themselves, and I could despise it. It had been my experience that the greatest misery lies not in a starving, fatally ill body, but in a tortured mind. Desperately I clung to what was left of the old life, and sought, in order to strengthen it, the company of those who shared my fate, my fellow-mariners, as if I wanted to surround myself with their din, and joined in their conversations and drank with them.

At first I was warmly accepted into the small circle: just as the pious rejoice at the conversion of a Christian, so the drunks rejoice at the fall of a moderate man. But later they started mocking me, since I did not really belong with my past, which I used arrogantly as a barrier between them and me. I could not do it. It is difficult to assume a cultured personality, and it is even more difficult to appear coarse when one is not. After that they began to avoid me. Life on board became hell, a thousand times more unbearable than the real one, because of its very smallness.

But it became a thousand times worse when I was back in my cabin at night. At the beginning all that happened was that it shrank, becoming narrower and narrower until I was nearly stifled; it became a cell that was detached from the ship, and the immensely deep base of the Chinese mainland pressed against the walls. Sometimes I broke out, went to the radio cabin, was alarmed by the instruments, which had become instruments of torture, primitive and refined. I escaped the narrow cell like a bullet fired from the barrel, and collapsed onto an open, wide, yellow, cruel plain. The only problem was that there was nothing on earth but scattered dots, immovable boulders and grey vultures soaring in the sky.

In the morning, awake, I felt increasingly hopeless; I would become a prey if I could not oppose them with a stronger being, but what was I, the most rootless, most raceless person alive, to do? And then it also came when I was sitting on watch with the headphones on. Signals that cannot have been sent by any transmitter kept intervening between my listening and the other signals. I did not dare write them down, though something sometimes came through that resembled a word, but fortunately I knew only English and French. Two words formed themselves quite often, but I managed to forget them. The dream of the cell and the plain became worse.

After three months we put into Hong Kong, and in all that time I had not set foot on shore. I was summoned to the company office. I was unused to walking, and had become like the others: after ten paces I got into a rickshaw, and without saying or asking anything the coolie rode me to the red-light district, where I spent half an hour in one of the houses with a Japanese woman. For the first time in months, a moment’s life. Would it be the last? Softness, melancholy and the bitter, wry aftertaste it all leaves. At the office, I was offered a position on a ship bound for England: the Captain had reported that that I was mentally disturbed. I reflected for a moment and refused, and made out that it was nothing. It was too late: a few months ago I would have seized that chance of saving myself, but now I could no longer escape, being pursued at a great distance was worse.

I was kept on the ship. It moored in the bay for two nights, close to Stonecutter’s Island; I slept soundly and well, as do many condemned men, the night before. I still had time.

IN THE EVENING we steamed back out of the bay. The weather was bad, and a mixture of foam and rain blew over the bow, and sometimes over the bridge. The white patch of Waglan Island was like a ghost in the dark and as we passed it, the buoy that always sounds there let out, at long intervals, a bellow like a slaughtered cow. Then came the Lingding rocks, then the Ladrones islands, and we were out in the open sea, in the dead of night.

I was able to get four hours’ sleep and had to take down the weather reports. I woke up on time, but it was as if I had been asleep for months and for the time being would need no further sleep, so completely rested was I, so certain was I that a new life was about to begin, although we were in the middle of the ocean. I switched on the power and waited, with the headphones inevitably round my head, for the weather report from Zi-Ka-Wei, where the Jesuits observe the atmosphere of the Yellow and South China Sea and warn shipping of storms. They watch over the ships, as others do over the welfare of souls. They have many sins to expiate. It took some time, and I read while I waited, but finally the introductory signals came, and I was ready: typhoon originating north of Luzon, moving south-westwards, speed…