But this city was the signal for the attendants to stoke the fires, and as soon as the coach was reasonably warm the passengers threw their clothes off and clomped around in plastic shoes and wrinkled pajamas. They propped themselves in the draft between the coaches and brushed their teeth. Some practiced t'ai chi in the corridors.
The dining car was crowded at lunchtime. Although there were no tourists on the train and everyone wore old clothes—shouting and spitting and blowing smoke into each other's faces—they were also flinging money around. I guessed that they were mainly Cantonese, on this profitable business route: Guangdong was a producer of goods and Peking a lucrative outlet. These scruffy passengers were all in business. The man next to me paid almost 20 yuan for a meal for himself and his wife. Call it five bucks and it doesn't seem much; but for a Chinese it was nearly a week's pay. He was a grizzled man with matted hair. He smoked and ate at the same time—chopsticks in one hand, cigarette in the other. His small boy did not eat. This little irritant dug out all the toothpicks from the plastic holder and threw them on the floor; then tipped over a glass of water; and then began smacking an ashtray against the table and squawking. He was about five or six. His father laughed at this obstreperousness—very un-Chinese. But that was not the only uncharacteristic behavior in this rowdy train. It was also full of drunks, and not only beer drinkers, but also old men getting plastered on the rice wine they had brought with them.
I read and dozed and woke up in the north of Hunan, at the city of Yueyang, which was a gray town surrounded by fat, shadowy mountains. A few hours later we came to Wuhan. I had been there once before, in 1980. It had seemed to me a nightmare city of muddy streets and black factories, pouring frothy poisons into the Yangtze. It was bigger than I remembered it, but not so black. There were dozens of high-level cranes putting up new buildings, including a hospital.
The Yangtze is almost a mile wide at Wuhan, and on its banks it has landing stages and flights of steps that resemble the ghats on the Ganges. On the Hankou side there were also many new buildings, and there were cars in the streets—I remembered the wagons and carts, pulled by old women. The buildings and the traffic jams were not necessarily improvements, but they made a difference. Modernization did not make any Chinese city look less horrific; many cities looked more so as a result of building schemes.
It was cold enough in Wuhan for people to be wearing mittens and boots. That was what the salesmen in my compartment were wearing when they got out, pulling their suitcases through the windows. They did it clumsily. They were bemused by the sight of a girl walking along the platform, carrying a dead fish.
Before we pulled out of Wuhan the sleeping-car attendant roused me and said I had to move.
"You are in the wrong berth," she said.
"I am in the right berth," I said. I knew she wanted to move me, but I saw no reason she should put me in the wrong. I made her compare my ticket with the berth number, and I created a hoo-hah so that I would have the satisfaction of hearing her apologize.
"It is a mistake," she said, ambiguously, and led me to a compartment that held a man, a woman and an infant.
"How old is that baby?"
"Two weeks."
The baby was snoring. After a while it began to cry. The man took a bottle out and fed it, and the child's mother left the compartment.
That was how it went. The man did everything for this baby, which was wrapped in a thick quilt like a papoose. The man fed it, changed it and dandled it. The woman hung around and lazed, and several times I saw her sleeping in the Hard Class coach that adjoined ours. Perhaps the woman was ill. I did not want to ask. The man took charge.
"It's a boy," he said, when he was feeding it.
I hadn't asked.
He was a doctor. His wife was also a doctor. He worked in Peking, his wife in Canton; and he had gone to Canton to be present for the birth. Now they were all going back to Peking for a few months—the woman's maternity leave. There were feeding bottles, baby powder and cans of soluble milk formula all over the compartment. They used disposable diapers, which they discarded in a bucket under my bed. I did not mind; I like the milky smell of babies, and I was very touched by the love and attention that this man gave the child.
I read on my bunk while the man burped his baby and the woman looked on. I drank Cantonese sherry. It was like being in a cabin in the woods with this little family. For dinner I had the speciality of this train, "iron dish chicken pieces"—a hot iron platter of chicken, sizzling in fat. The dining car was very congenial—steam, shouting, beer fizzing, cigarette smoke, waiters banging dishes down and snatching empty plates away.
The two men at my table were young and half-drunk. I liked these crowded dining cars rushing through the night, and the food being dished out, and people stuffing themselves.
"We sell light bulbs and light fittings," one of the men said. "We are heading home after a week's selling."
"Where is home?" I asked.
"Harbin."
"I am going there," I said. "I want to see the ice festival and the forest."
"It's too cold to see anything," the other man said. "You will just want to stay in your room."
"That's a challenge," I said. "Anyway—how cold is it?"
"Thirty below—centigrade," he said, and he poured me some of his beer and clinked glasses.
By then I had taken for granted the friendliness of the Chinese. Their attentions were sometimes bewildering, as when they leaned over my shoulder trying to read what I was scribbling in my notebook, or pressed their damp faces against my book, fascinated by the English words. But their curiosity and good will were genuine.
"Do you travel much?" I asked.
"Yes. All over. But not outside," the first man said. "I'd like to but I can't."
"Where would you go?"
"Japan."
That surprised me. My reaction must have shown on my face, because the Chinese salesman wanted to know what I thought of his choice of country. I said, "I find the Japanese can be very irritating."
"The Americans dropped an atomic bomb on them."
"That was too bad, but they started the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, didn't they, comrade?"
"That's true!" the second man said. "The same day they captured Shanghai."
It was considered bad manners in China to say disparaging things about any foreign country, particularly to someone who was himself a foreigner. That was why the men cackled. It was naughty to run down the Japanese! It was fun! We sat there yakking until the rest of the people left the dining car. Then we stopped by Xinyang. We had gone from Hubei Province into Henan. This station was covered in black ice and slushy snow—quite a change from the palm trees and dragonflies of Canton a few days ago.
In my compartment the man was snuggled up with his infant son, and his wife lay sleeping in the upper berth. All night the man attended to the infant. They slept together, the child snickering and snorting the way babies do. From time to time the man swung his legs over and mixed a batch of Nestle's Lactogen, using hot water from the tea thermos and an enamel cup. He was considerate: he did not switch on the light—he used the light from the corridor. The baby's fussing increased, and then the father eased the bottle into the baby's mouth and there came a satisfied snorting. The father was very patient. The train stopped and started, was delayed at sidings, waiting for a southbound express to go through, and then rattled on to the whistles of lonely freight trains. In the darkness, the man spoke softly to his child, sang to him, and when the child grew sleepy he tucked him into the berth and crept in beside him.