Paul Theroux - My Secret History

He scratched his hairy forearm and started to intimidate me. He had blue unfriendly eyes and pale eyelashes.

I put my book down. It was Arthur Waley’s translation of The Secret History of the Mongols .

“Is this all you have?”

“Yes.”

He clutched my customs declaration with stubby fingers and leaned over the counter to see whether I was lying.

“This is all you have?”

I hated nags who repeated the same question.

“I just answered that,” I said, and seeing his neck shorten in sudden anger I added, “Right. A history book. Thirteenth century.”

“Where are you coming from?” He flipped the pages of his thick book, looking for my name on his wanted list.

“London.”

He scribbled on my customs declaration, not looking up.

“Business or vacation?”

“Both.”

“How long were you away?”

“Two months.”

He looked up again and took a sip of air through his small mouth.

“You’re away two months and you don’t have any bags?”

“I have a house in London.”

“Yeah?”

“I have everything I need there.”

“What’s this address in Barnstable?”

“My house,” I said. “My other house.”

He looked angry in anticipation, and envious — his envy showing in his small bunched-up mouth, as though he had been thwarted in something he wanted to eat.

“You don’t even have a toothbrush.”

“I own two toothbrushes.”

He was still looking at me in that hungry and disgusted way, and I hated him for being obstructive. This is my country, I thought. I am home.

“That’s nice. You got two toothbrushes.”

“I have two of everything,” I said. “One here, one there.”

“That’s very nice,” he said. “What business are you in?”

“Writing. I write books.”

“Have I heard of you?”

“Obviously not.”

But he hesitated. “What kind of books? Thrillers — stuff like that?”

“Not exactly.”

He was still initialing my customs declaration. He glanced aside and saw that arriving passengers were waiting.

“My wife’s the reader,” he said, and lost interest in me. He hammered my passport with a rubber stamp and slipped the customs declaration inside it. “Give that to the officer at the door.”

I pushed my book in my pocket and went outside, where it was clear and cold, with a faint kerosene tang of airplane fuel in the air. I cut across Central Parking to the Eastern Airlines terminal and caught the early afternoon PBA flight to Hyannis — just me and a noiseless Yankee woman and her bulging L.L. Bean canvas shopping bag in the eight-seater plane. The Osterville Taxi was waiting in the deserted parking lot.

When I gave the driver the address and some directions he said, “I’ve driven you before.”

“Right.”

“Big house. Top of the hill.”

“Right.”

“Nice spot.”

I disliked his showing an interest in my privacy, so I said no more. I cracked the window open and smelled the air — pine needles and salt marsh and damp leaves. The creamy dunes showed like surf across the marsh under a blue sky.

The driver knew the way. When I paid him he said again, “Nice spot.”

It always made me apprehensive when strangers praised the house. I feared their interest, because I knew they would always remember it. It was that sort of towering house on its own hill. I wanted it to remain secret.

I watched him go, so that he wouldn’t linger, and then I went inside. Everything was as I had left it. It was warm from the sun through the huge windows, my book was on the table where I had been reading, my slippers by the front door, my teapot and teacup next to the sink, the refrigerator door ajar. I tore two months off the calendar, and I called Eden.

“I’m here.”

She let out a little scream of delight and said, “Oh, Andy, it’s so wonderful to hear your voice. When can I see you?”

I unrolled the carpets and squared them off. I carried the framed Japanese prints that were stacked in the library and rehung them. I dug out the statues from the attic — the gold Tara, silver lama and bronze Buddha — and set them on their pedestals. I opened the windows, dusted the tables, and made the bed. I switched on the refrigerator and the hot water heater. I walked around the yard — picked up a few fallen branches and threw them into the woods, swept the pine needles out of a storm drain, picked some pebbles off the muddy lawn and tossed them on the path. I examined the shrubs. The magnolia blossoms were just blowing open, the tulips were rising, the azaleas were in bud. And there were small, hard, blood-colored buds on most of the bushes and trees. I unlocked the garage and looked for signs of mice: there were no corpses and yet all the poison had been eaten from the trays I had set out in January. I took the canvas cover off my rowing skiff, I pumped up a soft tire on the boat trailer. I reconnected the battery in the Jeep and let the engine run, while I cleared the spiders from the Jacuzzi. By then the household water was hot. I filled the tub and sat in the turbulence, easing my muscles; and then dressed in my Cape clothes — a sweatshirt and blue jeans, and moccasins that were cool from the closet.

I found a beer in the pantry and lay on the chaise lounge facing west and reading The Secret History of the Mongols . I became engrossed in the career of the Ong Khan, the supreme ruler of a people called the Keraits. He was a resourceful and imaginative leader and I began fantasizing about him and seeing myself on horseback, urging my warriors forward and ranging over great tracts of Mongolia. I wondered why someone as powerful as the Ong Khan had not posed a greater challenge to Genghis Khan.

And then I knew. The Ong Khan was unexpectedly defeated in a short battle. He lost his horse and all his equipment. He hurried away empty-handed, but he was safe — and he believed there would be more battles. He traveled a great distance — I looked up and saw the sunset reddening over Sandwich.

The Ong Khan [I read] was thirsty after this long journey and was going down to the stream to drink when a Naiman scout called Khori-subechi seized him.

He said, “I am the Ong Khan,” but the scout did not believe him, and killed him.

I stopped reading, I closed the book, I considered my life. I had not used it much in my writing. The sunset was still in my face, and I watched it, thinking of the Ong Khan and myself, until the daylight was gone, until the last drop was wrung out of the sky by the night, and my house was in darkness.

In that darkness, without a book, I watched for Eden. At the foot of the hill was a distant solitary streetlamp, and its old-fashioned blob of light showed on the road. It was an austere and moody Edward Hopper, like the undecorated gas station down the road, like the white clapboard house on the marsh to the north. I listened to the foghorn from the Cape Cod Canal entrance — one low hoot every fifteen seconds. For the moment it all seemed perfect — my solitude, the sky full of stars through the high windows of my house, the streetlamp standing like a single daffodil, and the foghorn sounding in the blackness beyond it while I lay, propped up on one arm and drinking. I had forgotten the Ong Khan; I was thinking only of Eden. To me anticipation was bliss, and nothing was better than waiting in the warm shadowy house for this woman to arrive. It wasn’t anything like repose. It was all motion, like a vivid journey, producing wave upon wave of fantasies and sensations.

In a random and disorderly world of hectic days and long nights this was a sure thing — certain happiness. The foretaste was so sweet that I became wistful when I saw the lights of Eden’s car in the long drive and knew that the thrill of my wait was over. The two wheels with golden cogs that had been turning against each other in my mind slowed and stopped.