Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

The only English film I could find in Vientiane was a pornographic one, and the sombre reverence of the Japanese tourists, who watched like interns in an operating theatre, filled me with despair. I shopped for presents, imagining Laotian treasures, but discovered traditional handicrafts there to include aprons, memo pads, pot-holders, and neckties. Neckties! I tried to take a pleasure cruise on the Mekong, but was told the river was only used by smugglers. The food was unusual. One bowl of soup I had contained whiskers, feathers, gristle, and bits of intestine cut to look like macaroni. I told this to a prince I had been urged to visit. He took me to a restaurant where we had – I suppose it was his way of apologizing – a leg of lamb, mint sauce, and roasted potatoes. I asked him what it was like to be a prince in Laos. He said he couldn't answer that question because he didn't spend much time in Laos; he was mainly interested in skydiving and motor racing. His description of political life convinced me that Laos was really Ruritania, a slaphappy kingdom of warring half-brothers, heavily mortgaged to the United States. But there were enemies in Laos, he said that evening. Where were they? I asked. We were now at his house. He pointed out the window, and across the street, silhouetted in the top window of a three-storey building, was a man with a machine gun. The prince said, 'Him. He's a Pathet Lao.'

'So you're taking the train,' said the prince, when I told him about my trip. 'Do you know how fast that Bangkok train goes?'

I said I had no idea.

'Fifty kilometres an hour!' He made a face.

His wife wasn't listening. She looked up from a magazine and said, 'Don't forget we have to be in Paris on the twenty-sixth – '

Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America's expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported; a kingdom with baffling pretensions to Frenchness. What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squashy amoeba, the sort of creature that can't die even when it is cut to ribbons.

Setting out from Nong Khai Station (the Thai children were flying kites along the tracks) I was headed south for Singapore. There is an unbroken railway system from this northerly station to Singapore, via Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, roughly 1,400 miles of jungle, rice fields, and rubber estates. The State Railway of Thailand is comfortable and expertly run, and now I knew enough of rail travel in Southeast Asia to avoid the air-conditioned sleeping cars, which are freezing cold and have none of the advantages of the wooden sleepers: wide berths and a shower room. There is not another train in the world that has a tall stone jar in the bath compartment, where, before dinner, one can stand naked, sluicing oneself with scoops of water. The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.

In the Night Express from Nong Khai were many Chinese and Filipino mechanics, deeply tanned from working on the American airfields, and wearing their baseball caps pulled down over their eyes. Thais gambled in the second-class sleeper, where American servicemen sat sheepishly with Thai girls, looking homesick but very proper as they held hands. I was in a compartment with an American civilian who said he was a salesman. He didn't look like a salesman. His hair was cut so short, I could see a white scar that ran along the top of his head from back to front like a part; he had a Thai charm around his neck and broken fingernails; on the back of his right hand was tattooed tiger, and he talked continually of his 'hog', a Harley-Davidson Electraglide. He had been in Thailand for five years. He had no plans to go back to the States, and said it was his ambition to make $30,000 a year – or, as he put it, 'thirty K'.

'How close are you to that figure?'

'Pretty close,' he said. 'But I think I might have to go to Hong Kong.'

He had just spent a few days in Vientiane. I said I had found the place not exactly to my taste. He said, 'You should have gone to the White Rose.'

'I went to the White Rose,' I said.

'Did you see a tall girl there?'

'It was too dark to tell who was tall or short.'

'This one was wearing clothes. Most of them were bare-ass, right? But this one had long hair and slacks.

The rest of them were putting cigarettes in their cats and puffing on them, but this one just comes over and sits down next to me. She wasn't wearing a bra and she had those nice tits models have. I offered her a beer, but she had a Pepsi and funnily enough I wasn't charged extra for it. I liked that!

'We sat there sort of fooling and I put my hand inside her blouse and gave her a honk. She laughs. "You want massage?" she says. I says forget it. They don't mean massage. Then she says, "Come upstairs – you give mama-san four dollars and she let me."

' "What happens when we go upstairs?"

'She leans over. She says, "Anything. Anything you want to do to me, you can do. Anything you want me to do, I do. I know how." Does this give me a hard-on or what?

'What if a beautiful girl – I mean, a real piece of ass -said that to you? "Do anything you want to me." It's like having a slave. I thought of two or three things – crazy things; I wouldn't even tell you. She's saying, "What? What?" I'm too embarrassed to tell her, but I'm thinking, She's making a bargain and she can't back out of it. I keep thinking these wild things and saying, "Anything?" and she says, "Sure, what you want?" But I didn't want to say.

'Then she says, "Tell me." I say, "I'll tell you upstairs," and I go over to the mama-san, a real hard-faced bitch, and give her four bucks. Then we go upstairs. Her name was Oy. She takes off her blouse, and she's got these fantastic knockers and this beautiful brown back. She says, "What you want?" I says, "Anything?" She says, "For five dollars – anything."

'I gives her a fin and she takes my clothes off and starts washing my process and asking me if I've got the clap. The washing sort of turns me on and I tell her to hurry up. So she turns off the light and pushes me back on the bed, and God I've never been gobbled like that in my life. Her tongue's whirling around and I'm practically fainting. But I pulled it out before I came. Now what? I had these oddball ideas and I just said the first thing that came into my head. "Turn over," I says. "I want to piss on you."

'"Okay," she said. Okay! She gets down on the bed and I knelt over her. But I couldn't do it – I don't think I really wanted to – so I started screwing her ass for all it was worth. I came and rolled her over and that's when I slid my hand up her thigh and touched the biggest process I've ever – Look, I don't want to ruin your dinner.'

i think I've heard that one before,' I said, as we passed down the train to the dining car.

'No, no,' said Tiger. 'You don't understand.'

We each had a Singha Beer. I ordered fried rice with prawns and mixed vegetables, and outside was the perfectly flat, unwrinkled Khorat Plateau. Tiger had been drinking whisky in the compartment and by the time the food came he looked a bit drunk; his face was flushed and even the scar on the top of his head was slightly rosy.