The Hotel on the Roof of the World (9 page)

Then it hit me. The very aptly named Mr Pong had the kind of breath that could stun at over ten feet. I was transported to the depths of excrement alley at the Barkhor. This wasn't just bad – there was something rotten down there. Something had crawled in and died. Gunter howled with laughter as he saw the look of horror on my face. It was the best entertainment he had seen since he had watched Chef chasing yaks through the kitchens.

The General Manager banged the table and started the meeting off with a welcome speech.

‘It has been over six months since we have had anyone in the Sales Department, so let's welcome Mr Alec who we are sure can boost our sales and increase business.'

Heather translated into Chinese and everyone nodded.

Jig Me followed with a welcome on behalf of all Party A and wished that, ‘we will have a very good cooperation.'

He spoke in perfect English and Heather again translated everything. I could see that these meetings were going to take a long time.

Jig Me pointed out my deputy, a Miss Tsao, who had cleverly secured a seat down at the far end of the table well away from the breath monster next to me. Mr Liu read out the previous day's financial results and Harry gave the forecast for the coming week – which was rather bleak. After the high occupancy and revenue of the summer months, business had now entered the gradual slide down towards the low winter season. We were still over 70 per cent occupancy which sounded quite respectable to me, but next week we would fall into the sixties.

As I was contemplating the drop in hotel occupancy and what could be done to reverse the trend, a low gurgling noise started its rumble in the chair next to me.

‘Cccccrrrrrrrgggggggkkkhhhhpt.'

Mr Pong was clearing his throat in preparation to speak. This warning signal had already woken every expat around the table and sent them leaning as far back on their chairs as possible. Even Gunter, four chairs away, was not safe, and, panic stricken, he pushed his portly frame as far down the table as he could.

In painfully long statements of Mandarin, Mr Pong pointed out that there had been a problem in the kitchens with some confusion over the purchase of yaks. Heather translated for us. He said that he was sure that it would not happen again, if the expatriates would not argue and if there was a better cooperation. He suggested that perhaps so many expatriates were unnecessary.

It was exactly the kind of calculated attack that Party A tried when they saw disputes amongst the foreigners. The General Manager pointed out that there were only ten expatriates present, instead of the nineteen when the hotel opened and the twenty-seven allowed in the management contract and that any less would severely impair the efficient running of the hotel.

Much to everyone's relief, Mr Pong did not reply, and the Deputy Food and Beverage Manager, a Mr Tu Dian, announced the good news that in the evening there would be a banquet held by the ‘Protocol and Friendship City Division of the Friendship with Foreign Countries Association'.

Mrs Qi Mei followed this with an announcement that I would have to go to the People's Number One Hospital for a health check and the meeting was adjourned. As we walked down the stairs I told Mrs Qi Mei that it was very kind of her to arrange the health check, but it was completely unnecessary as I had already had extensive medicals at the request of Holiday Inn, both in Paris and Hong Kong. She smiled and said, ‘Yes.'

Miss Tsao, my deputy, was having a word with Jig Me after the meeting, about her papers. She had volunteered to come to Tibet twenty years ago and now wanted to return to her home province, but as her papers said that she was resident in Tibet, she was not permitted to move to any other part of China.

I carried on to my office, on the ground floor of the main block behind the gift shop. It was a small room with two desks, one filing cabinet, three chairs and one sofa. A large orange telephone sat on my desk, together with a flask of hot water. I was expected to provide my own jam jar. The floor was entirely covered with piles of paper. I was greeted enthusiastically by Tashi who I had not seen since he picked me up from the airport. ‘This is Mr Alec,' he announced in English to the three other office staff. ‘He is a big potato.'

It transpired that the Chinese have a system of measuring someone's importance in relation to the size of root vegetables. Thus I was the ‘big potato' for the Sales and Marketing Department and my staff were introduced to me as ‘small potatoes'.

Tashi gave me the news that no matter what I had understood, I had to visit the hospital. He had been given orders to accompany me and to be my translator. I was not sure if this would be a good idea.

The hotel Landcruisers were in use, so we took a rickshaw down the tarmac cycle lane, past the cow-filled skips of refuse to the People's Number One Hospital. Another feature of Chinese modernisation stood before us. Short railings around flower beds of grass and litter filled the grounds of an austere, cement-rendered building painted in a sickly shade of ‘garlic grass'. A group of lamentable beggars surrounded the main door, their filthy hands tugging at the clothing of anyone entering or leaving the building, until they received some small change. Two monks sat against the entrance chanting from a pile of woodblock printed prayers. A cardboard shoe box lay in front of them for donations. Whenever they saw a patient or a relative approaching they would speed up their chants and gesture towards the box.

Passing through the open glass door, it was some comfort to be hit by the smell of antiseptic, or disinfectant, or whatever that all-pervading hospital smell is. I wondered if a concentrated dose of it could be injected into Mr Pong's stomach.

The inside walls were painted in a paler shade of sickly green up to the halfway line, and then whitewashed to the ceiling. The grey tiled floor was littered with surgical debris. Two doctors leant against a wall in the foyer, cigarettes in hand.

We were ushered along a dingy corridor to a dimly lit room which contained a table covered with a dirty sheet and shelves lined with glass jars. There were two chairs and a bicycle. We waited for a nurse to arrive.

Clouds of dust rolled along the corridor, followed by a Tibetan lady who was attempting to sweep the hallway filth into a tin can which had been cut in half and nailed onto the end of a stick. It appeared that she was a nurse of some kind, as when she saw us, she came into the room, wiped her hands on her dusty coat and looked around the jars of surgical appliances to find the one containing needles.

I asked Tashi to inform the lady that I had already had all my tests both in Paris and in Hong Kong so that there was really no need for any more. Tashi said ‘Yes' to me and spoke to the nurse in Tibetan. She nodded. Smiling, she approached me with a large needle she had found in one of the jars. She made a poking gesture, smiled and nodded again to me. I told Tashi that it wasn't anything to do with a lack of confidence in their health system – it was just that I had already had all the tests I needed. Tashi again said something in Tibetan to the nurse. She laughed and wiped the needle on her sleeve to demonstrate that it was clean.

I was saved momentarily by the interruption of a dog running into the room. It had picked up something out of the dustpan and was looking for a quiet corner where it could stay undisturbed and chew its find. Our nurse chased it from the room, brandishing my needle at it and shouting at the two cigarette-smoking doctors as the dog ran past, tail between its legs and prize between its teeth.

Foolishly I consented to the blood test, but only when the nurse had found another needle in a sealed packet. For all future examinations I took a supply of my own needles bought in the West.

After a drop of blood was collected from my ear lobe, Tashi and I were taken to the X-ray room. Heavy doors marked ‘Danger – Radiation' stood wide open, and to my surprise I found the room filled with patients queuing up in front of the X-ray machine. Flashes of X-rays went off around the room as pregnant women, nomads and small children lined up expectantly in front of this modern technology. It seems that someone had lost the operating handbook – where it clearly states that you should stand behind the lead shield. After a single chest X-ray I was taken to a further examination room.

An elderly nomad from northern Tibet was seated by a low table, with a contraption for testing eyesight on his head. He wore a long sheepskin
chuba
, with the fur innermost and the rough cut skin on the outside to face the elements. The trailing edge of the
chuba
was finished with an inch-wide hem of brightly coloured braid. He looked up at us as we entered the room and smiled a toothless grin as a greeting. I tried out a
tashi delai
and he beamed with delight, sticking his tongue out in reply.

The nurse shouted at him, removed the machine from his matted hair and put it straight on my forehead. At the same time a doctor stirred in the corner of the room. He had being enjoying his morning snooze on the examination couch and had been woken by the disturbance. He stood up, rubbed his eyes and stretched into a lengthy yawn. The nomad watched with keen interest as the doctor took a filthy probe out of his pocket and stuck it into my ears. The doctor said something to Tashi in Tibetan.

‘Sorry, Mr Alec, I don't know the words in English.'

Tashi continued to apologise to me, shrugging his shoulders as he excused himself for not being able to translate. He then started an elaborate mime that the nomad enjoyed tremendously. From Tashi's actions, I was concerned that the doctor had found a large lump of something very, very bad in one of my ears, but it turned out after further miming that he was saying I had to give a stool test. Our nomad friend loved every minute of it.

The nurse rushed back into the room brandishing her empty dustpan, hot on the heels of the mangy dog that had crept back into the hospital in search of further treasures. It ran past the nomad and caught the side of a brimming spittoon pan, knocking it clean over. The slippery contents trickled across the tiled floor and over the doorstep into the corridor. Strangely, this did not seem to bother anyone except for myself.

I asked Tashi to tell the doctor that I had already had a stool test, and for once, the doctor seemed satisfied with this answer. I suppose that he was looking forward to making the examination even less than I was to producing the sample in those conditions.

I gave the eyesight contraption back to our nomad friend and, treading around the pool on the floor, Tashi and I were able to leave the hospital with no further questions or prods. I made a note never to return if I became ill. Nothing could be less likely to lead to recovery than spending any time in there.

Back at the hotel I had a surprise when I entered my room. There was a joke in the hotel to the effect of: ‘What is small, grey and wrinkled?' I thought this would be a run of the mill joke about elderly elephants, but the answer is; ‘Your returned laundry.'

On my bed lay a plastic bag of small shirts, flattened beyond recognition and tinged with a colour that was not there before they were sent for cleaning. Buttons also suffered under the Lhasa laundry technique and every week one or two would be reduced to a fine powder. Sometimes they would look deceptively good until you touched them, whereupon they would disintegrate in your fingers. My suit jacket had also undergone considerable changes. The wool was pressed razor thin and now shone like the high gloss finish of a used-car salesman's favourite jacket. I complained to Charlie that he had told me we had the finest laundry equipment west of Beijing.

‘Yes, but I did not tell you we have local washing powder and local labour,' was his rather inadequate reply.

I was not impressed by the Peoples' powder that washed greyer than grey, but why should I have been? We were in Tibet. I thought of the nomad's sheep skin
chuba
. It had not had a clean since it had been taken off the sheep. Everything has to be taken in perspective, and doubtless, his life on the plateau involved more significant concerns than the whiteness of his wash.

Gunter, the Food and Beverage Manager, was also having more important issues to come to terms with than his washing. Despite his immaculate preparation, the banquet for the Protocol and Friendship City Division of the Friendship with Foreign Countries Association, had not been a success. The tables were set with the hotel's finest glass and silverware, the waitresses and waiters were all at their stations on time and Chef had prepared a fine display of Western cuisine. It was difficult to eat a whole steak with a pair of chopsticks but this was not a problem for the guests.

They had been invited to honour the retirement of the Association chief and Western food had been ordered especially to highlight the importance of the banquet. Western dishes added prestige and the Chinese were suitably impressed with the alien and inedible food. Bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label were disappearing in rapid bouts of drinking – all the signs showed that the dinner had started well.