Slow Boats to China Page 4
The bedroom had an interesting feature. Over each headboard hung an elaborately framed picture. At first sight, from the writing under them I took them to be Greek, but I soon saw that they were Russian and well pre-Soviet. One was a double close-up portrait of the last czar, Nicholas, in imperial robes, crown and medals, and the czarina, blank-faced and also in full imperial fig. The other showed a densely crowded square in Moscow or St Petersburg at the climax of a grand parade. The czar on a white horse was easily identifiable in the centre of rank upon rank of infantrymen. His hand was raised to salute a glittering phalanx of mounted officers, gorgeous in plumes, helmets and uniforms that might have come from the Hollywood wardrobe of The Prisoner of Zenda. In the distance was a pale queenly head and shoulders at the window of a coach.
1894. I could read the date but not the Cyrillic writing that would have told me whether I was looking at Nicholas’s wedding, his coronation parade, or something else. The pictures were obviously much prized by my landlady and her family; I could tell this from the large new frames and the fact that they occupied pride of place in what I soon saw was the biggest room in the house.
Everything in the room was simple and well cared for. I was glad I wasn’t a party of four Germans, and I had a feeling that my landlady was, too. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t joined in the crush at the ship.
I filled the succeeding days easily enough. There wasn’t much to Skala, but it was pleasant to stroll in. Ships came and went from Piraeus and other islands, including the one to Cos, each arrival creating an atmosphere of minor carnival – and a stampede of hopeful landladies to the dockside.
While waiting for the Samos Express, I was thrown violently into the past. It was curious. I was reading what Ford Madox Ford, in his Memories and Impressions, recollected about international terrorists at the turn of the century:
In the nineties in England – as indeed in the United States, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, and subterraneously in Russia … there were Anarchists … Irish Fenians, and Russian Nihilists.
The outrages in London and the North of England were mostly committed by Fenians. Their idea was to terrorise England into granting freedom to Ireland. They dynamited successfully or unsuccessfully, underground railways, theatres, the Houses of Parliament and docks.
In Russia, nihilists assassinated czars and members of the imperial family, generals, superior officials. I thought of the picture over the bed: the czar and his officers saluting each other on parade. Targets, one and all. Elsewhere, anarchists murdered President Carnot of France, and someone blew up the Prefecture of Police in Paris; naturally, several innocent people were killed.
Political terror is repulsive food for thought – rank with madness, ruin and destruction. To eviscerate a family for the sake of a dream….
I sat with Ford’s book and time on my hands on the big old bedstead in that sunny room in Skala and saw some mementos I had left behind in Europe more vividly than anything around me.
I saw two brightly coloured dancing figures about an inch and a half high. They stand on the window ledge of my flat in Paris, and their pale little faces peer through the curtains. They are garishly painted and dressed in traditional Khmer (Cambodian) costumes made from scraps of red and black brocade-like material in which the gold thread sparkles against the light. Each figure has one leg raised and both hands stretched above its gold headdress in the ritual contortion of Khmer dancing. They wear little painted smiles and stand on small square bases of wood, on the bottom of which are small squares of paper cut from a school exercise book. On one square is written: Kem Sokha, student of Lycée Bungkak. And on the other: Pheth Mouny, Buddhist student of Lycée, Phnom Penh.
They are presents given to me by an eighteen-year-old student and her brother in Phnom Penh not long before the Khmer Rouge armies of Pol Pot entered the city. I had known them for two or three years. They took me sightseeing, and then I met their family in an unpretentious house in a suburb. Their father was a clerk in a ministry. They were studying hard at the Faculty of Medicine despite the war that had already carried off several of their friends.
They invited me to a dance that their fellow students were giving to celebrate some local festival. It was the last time I saw them, only a few months before the fall of Phnom Penh and the beginning of the Great Cambodian Death. A few months later Pol Pot began the purging of the cities, towns and villages he had planned with his cronies in Paris cafés years before: the population driven into the countryside – the sick, the old, the dying, no exceptions. Utter destruction in the service of a dream: the regeneration of Cambodian man.
As the students danced in Phnom Penh under coloured lights, cannon fire sounded close across the river and flares trickled down the sky. ‘You should leave here,’ I said, ‘and go to Bangkok. Just for a holiday. See how things turn out.’
‘Oh, we have exams,’ they said. ‘Very important exams. Our father would never forgive us.’
I bought the brother a beer, and when, as Asian faces do, his turned red with the alcohol, I tried again. ‘Just go to Bangkok for a while. Just see how things will be.’
‘Oh, non,’ he said. ‘Mon père ne nous permettrait jamais!’
‘Please, excuse,’ his sister said as we parted. ‘These are for souvenirs. Until you come back.’ She handed me a small box made of bamboo strips; inside lay the two dancing dolls.
A month or two later she wrote me a letter and I opened it in Paris. ‘Things here are not normal, less calm…. It is difficult to live. Do you think next year it will still be possible to go to school? … Oh, how hard it is!’
Things are not normal, less calm…. By the time of her writing, Pol Pot’s rockets were falling in a regular stream onto the city. How far could these children of a doomed land go in dedication to their exams? They were like children playing with sand castles in the path of a tidal wave. I don’t suppose they ever received my last urgent letter telling them to run – run – for the Thai border. ‘Take a bus or a train if there is such a thing by now. Walk, crawl, if necessary. By any means possible leave the country. I beg you. Exams are dead! Save yourselves.’ I underlined the last words several times.
I don’t think they can be alive. Thousands of Cambodian refugees reached Thailand, but there is no sign of either of them, so I suppose they died of starvation or from the exhaustion of hard labour. Or perhaps of machete blows for disobeying the Organization of Pol Pot.
At any rate, all that is left is a letter in my drawer, a photograph of a happy brother and sister posing beside a stone lion in a Phnom Penh garden, and the two dancing dolls on my windowsill, waving their hands, smiling their tiny painted smiles and staring with blind eyes at the Paris boulevard outside. In Cambodia the experiment in the regeneration of man is over.
*
My second morning in Patmos I had breakfasted and fought the wasps with no more success than Don Quixote battling his windmill, when a large steamer entered the bay. Through my binoculars I read Odysseus on her bow and lazily watched her draw alongside.
To my surprise, I recognized the first man to appear at the head of her gangway. A tall, elderly, professorial figure, evoking, even in the inappropriate eastern Mediterranean sunlight, memories of warm sherry in cold wet England, deep armchairs and tall austere windows overlooking the carefully mown lawns of Trinity College, Oxford; and the sound of my own uncertain voice reading uncertain essays on Stubbs’s Charters, mortmain and nisi prius. Michael Maclagan, Oxford don, medieval historian and Portcullis Pursuivant at the College of Arms in London, looked greyer, but stepped spryly ashore. I closed Ford’s Memories and waved, and Michael waved back and came over with his wife. They sat down and had a drink.
Michael had been my gentle, genial tutor all those years ago; and he had been more. Trinity, my college, had, as well as a president, a dean whose duty was to watch over the behaviour of the undergraduates. Michael was dean – although a less likely college police chief it would be hard to imagine. His spindly figure encased in baggy e
xpensive tweed, his moustache and his preoccupation with the Middle Ages combined to remind me of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass. He may have been an effective dean; certainly he was merciful. One festive night an undergraduate friend of mine, awash with high spirits, took a pot-shot with a sporting rifle at a don in a neighbouring college. The don was standing up in his bathtub at the time and his naked silhouette against the frosted glass of the bathroom window apparently presented an irresistible target. The .22 pellet passed close to his head and lodged in the ceiling. In due course Michael appeared, looking stern and demanding some sort of explanation. It was only a joke, my friend said contritely; he had placed the bullet very precisely; he was an expert shot. Obviously the excuse was inadequate. My friend had perpetrated a misdemeanour serious enough to merit dismissal from the university. Nevertheless, Michael had perceived an excellence in his work, and he also knew that the case was not one of attempted homicide but of horseplay, however outrageous. The indignant don was somehow pacified; my friend’s grovelling apologies, orchestrated by Michael, were magnanimously accepted; perhaps some relatively minor punishment was imposed. At any rate, my friend’s academic career was saved, thanks to Michael.
Now we sat in the sun of Patmos. Michael was in charge, he said, of a Swan’s tour party of three hundred, lecturing them on the Christian sites of the eastern Mediterranean. Two weeks in the sun; he did it every year; they were in Patmos for a few hours to see the monastery on the hill. They seemed in a holiday mood, but there was something else….
‘Are your tourists giving you problems?’
‘No, not at all. But I don’t suppose you’ve heard the news?’
‘I haven’t seen a newspaper or heard a radio since I left Athens.’
‘Yesterday the IRA murdered Mountbatten and several members of his family, including a young grandson and another boy. Blew them to pieces in Mountbatten’s launch while they were on holiday in Sligo Bay. Pretty shattering, isn’t it? As a herald, I’ll have to go back to London for the funeral.’
Next morning I took one of the island’s few taxis up the steep hill to the monastery. From Skala it had looked like a fortress, and it looked just as forbidding at the foot of the massive, castellated walls that soared up out of the narrow streets and white houses of the tiny town that encircled it. Below, I could see Skala like a fistful of knucklebones scattered on the bay, and the deep-blue peace of the Mediterranean – ‘the cradle of overseas traffic and of the art of naval warfare,’ Conrad called it – stretching away and out of sight. Small white launches moved slowly in the bay – not unlike, I supposed, the once-trim little vessel bits of which now floated on the surface of Sligo Bay.
The monks padded or shuffled about the ancient stones of St John over the still more ancient, hidden stones of Diana, the Huntress, and Goddess of the Moon.
A couple of tourists I met in a café warned me that leaving Patmos wasn’t always easy. Sailing home to Piraeus, the Alcheon is sometimes overbooked, and passengers have been left behind. Sometimes the captain took a horrified look through his binoculars at the crowd of tourists waiting on the quay and quickly dodged away. So there was the possibility that I might be delayed still further.
But prospects looked brighter in the shipping office in Skala. The manager smiled confidently and said, ‘Come back here at four o’clock tomorrow. The Santos Express will sail, definitely, at seventeen hundred hours.’ Best of all, he allowed me to buy a ticket.
The tourists had also said, ‘There is a nice British actor here called Clarence Standing.’ I had never heard of a Clarence Standing, but I had seen a John Standing several times, most recently in London in Plunder, a revival of a Ben Travers farce of the thirties. As it happened, on my last evening, walking on the quay, I met a man wearing a T-shirt with Plunder written on it in big letters.
‘I saw Plunder,’ I said. ‘You were excellent, Mr Standing. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.’
‘Not Mr Standing, please,’ he said genially. ‘The name’s –’
‘Clarence. You’re the first Clarence I’ve ever met.’
‘Clarence?’
I explained where the Clarence came from and, when he had thought it over, he came to the conclusion that he rather liked it. We had a drink, and the next day he brought his son down to the quay to see me off. We found a bar where we drank beer under colour prints of skirted and scimitar-bearing Greeks in embroidered jackets slashing their victorious way through bloody barricades of Turkish bodies. Would old enemies never forget? The few Turks still standing were easily distinguishable from the Greeks by their turbans.
*
The Samos Express had arrived on time, a stubby little vessel despite its dashing name. Toward sailing time I hurried to the pension to collect my washing from the bathroom: underclothes and T-shirt. From my first-floor room I heard the Samos Express hooting twice; she seemed eager to be off. As I ran to the bathroom a priest forestalled me; bearded, with a black chimney-pot hat, muttering ‘Kali mera’, he shot in ahead of me and bolted the door.
Two minutes, five minutes, passed. The door remained locked with the priest and my washing inside. My landlady climbed the stairs to say goodbye, saw my predicament and rattled the door handle in a commanding way. Inside we heard a shuffling, a small sound of breaking wind and, oddly, someone whistling several bars of the Warsaw Concerto. The Samos Express hooted again.
I had to go: to miss the Samos Express was unthinkable. Providence intervened. At the last possible moment, the priest emerged, straightening his hat with dignity. Like a fireman rescuing a baby from a burning house, I snatched my washing from the bathroom, seized my luggage and hurried breathlessly to where John Standing waited for me on the quay.
Tourists who had come across from Samos in the morning were back on board with their plastic bags of souvenirs and envelopes of picture postcards. When I had dumped my bags on the deck and looked around, I recognized some of the Germans from the daily queues in the shipping office, bowed like blond Atlases under their knapsacks.
‘I envy you,’ said Standing from the quay. The Samos Express’s crew had cast off, and the gap between stone pier and vibrating iron bulwark was already beginning to widen.
‘This is the easy part, Clarence,’ I said. ‘This is child’s play. Scheduled steamers. The hard part comes later.’ I had to raise my voice as the distance between us grew. ‘I think it’s going to become nerve-racking somewhere just this side of the Suez Canal, and get rapidly worse after that.’
‘Look at the bright side,’ called Standing.
But, of course, that was how it turned out.
Three
It took me some time to realize that the little paper bags flying out of saloon windows of the Samos Express were full of vomit.
A good many tourists, mainly young and with raw and peeling Dutch, Nordic or Teutonic snub noses, boarded the ship at Patmos wearing T-shirts with slogans like ‘Big Apple’ written on them.
The Samos Express had two decks, and the upper one was also the roof of the saloon, where passengers sat in rows as if in a bus. A tiny bar had a sign over it: RECOMMENDED BY HOLLAND INTERNATIONAL. Whatever that meant, it sounded reassuring. I stood here for a bit and bought a paper cup of the bland Samos Koniak.
When I went out to the rail to look at the view, the bags began to fly. It was rough outside the protection of Patmos’s headlands. We rolled and corkscrewed through a heavy choppiness, and spray formed a mist on the surface of the water. I thought the little bags must contain crusts and cores left over from passengers’ snack lunches. But no, ladies and gentlemen from Berne and Vienna were taking the plastic bags from the ship’s toilet, vomiting into them and throwing them overboard. As I stood on the lower deck they whizzed past me like those little bags of water children sometimes enjoy dropping from windows on heads of passersby. Now and again a spray of unwrapped vomit fell from the top deck, splattering the rail.
I was joined at the rail by a six-foot Austrian lady who t
old me that she had crossed to Patmos from Samos that morning, and it had been rough then, too.
‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I was so sick, and so scared by my face. It was all white. Now I’m awfully well, yes?’
A spatter of vomit fell on us, and I mopped at her coat with my handkerchief. She smiled bravely. ‘No worry, no worry.’
On the upper deck a couple clasped each other and kissed standing up on the heaving deck among friends in sandals and sawn-off jeans. A violent roll sent them spinning across the deck, as if they were waltzing in a speeded-up film sequence, and they cannoned into a seated row of elderly Greeks dozing around the ship’s rail who shouted at them angrily.
From the upper deck I zigzagged to the wing of the little bridge. Beyond the open wheelhouse door, the captain of the Samos Express, dressed in an old blue shirt, grey baggy trousers and gym shoes, stared ahead with a bored expression. A man whose stomach overlapped his shorts stood at the large wooden wheel. Two hunks of bread, a packet of cigarettes, matches and an ashtray on the ledge slid an inch or two back and forth with the rolling of the ship. Through a curtain behind the wheel I could just see part of a cabin, a child asleep on a bunk and a big woman with very white teeth: the captain’s cabin, the captain’s family.
The bulk of Samos eased like a whale through the spray: a big hump of hills, several times bigger than little Patmos; after Patmos, almost intimidating. Presently I could see a fleet of yachts nuzzling a long stone quay.
The Samos Express would take me to the Turkish mainland next morning; then an hour and a half to the small port of Kusadasi. Meanwhile I was left to wish I were there already. I didn’t care much for what I saw of Samos on the long horseshoe quay from which a fairly large town straggled back and up into foothills already swallowed by the evening shadows. Around the harbour, strings of coloured lights had come to life. European yachtsmen strolled in groups between their boats and the café tables that spilled across the busy quay. Glossy women sat with men with pipes and silk scarves. The men’s grey hair was carefully swept back into curls at the nape of the neck, like the wash of a motorboat in a grey-rinse sea. Silk shirts by St Laurent or Cardin with blue anchor patterns seemed popular. There were a lot of deep tans about, and what used to be called ‘expensive complexions’. Bulging blonde women tiptoed on stiletto heels trailing poodles; beautiful girls, with thighs that quivered with every step, trailed men; and there were a number of middle-aged women with bitter mouths and skin like orange tinfoil. I was glad I had been held up on Patmos, not Samos.