Thought Crimes (33 page)

A pair of intensely pretty girls, each wearing State Rail uniforms, were accompanied by an elegant older woman, a government-appointed chaperone. The girls could scarcely contain their excitement as they told me that they had been chosen from several thousand applicants in their province to take part in a tunnel-cleaning detail. After travelling two hundred kilometres to a State Rail camp, they would spend four weeks cleaning tunnels with one hundred successful applicants railed in from all across the nation. At the camp, they would receive tuition in engineering, cartography and the use of explosives. But the bulk of their time would be spent scrubbing the inside of tunnels and singing the songs traditionally sung by tunnel-detailers.

I couldn't resist asking what the point was in scrubbing the inside of tunnels, since the filth or cleanliness of a tunnel couldn't be discerned by those passing through. For a moment the chaperone seemed likely to intercept my question, but the smaller of the two girls, with a delightful smile and a mop of carrot-red hair, told me it was vital that guests should be able to imagine that their tunnels are pristine.

This girl told me that tunnel-cleaning details are intended to teach the young to respect the potency of the imagination.

When I joked that it was a pity someone couldn't scrub clean their guests' imaginations, the young redhead flushed with embarrassment, and the chaperone fired off a rebuke.

‘Our people never have any trouble with their imaginations. And we regard it as good manners to think well of our guests. We prefer to believe that nothing from an outsider's imagination could possibly contaminate the thoughts of someone who respects the imagination's potency. And we can hope that because we know our tunnels are clean.'

For the next hour the compartment was silent. Finally, a guard opened the door to advise the three women that they would soon arrive at a junction where they would be required to change trains. This news elevated their mood sufficiently for me to forget my
faux pas
and ask if they could show me on the map where their tunnel-cleaning activities would take place.

The chaperone withdrew a State Rail map from her shoulder bag and pointed to a division of lines at the north-eastern extreme of the dividing range. This confused me. I was certain that we were then travelling on the north-western side of the dividing range, from whence we would begin the slow descent into the capital. Producing a map that I had photocopied from an international guide book, I asked the chaperone to indicate our current position.

‘But this isn't a map of our country.'

‘Of course it is,' I told her, pointing to the title at the top of the map, the name of the capital, and several other territories.

‘Where is the ocean?'

I pointed to the coast, but this didn't satisfy her. On her own map she indicated a large inland sea, and a very differently shaped southern coastline. Her map situated the capital two hundred kilometres to the west of where it appeared on mine. Other than four or five placenames, there were no points of exact correspondence.

‘May I have this?' she asked. ‘I'd like to show it to my friends at the ministry.'

‘Without it, I won't know where I am.'

‘You don't know where you are anyway,' she said, pressing her map into my hand. As the train slowed on its approach to the junction, she slipped my map into her shoulder bag, and pulled her suitcase down from the rack. Then each of the young women kissed me on the cheek and wished me a happy journey. I told them not to get hoarse from too much singing.

Mention of singing spread broad smiles across the young faces. The redhead said that it was a pity she couldn't sing for me because the tunnel-cleaning songs are the most poignant and melodic songs in the world, but it is forbidden to sing songs of the tunnel to guests.

As they left the compartment, the chaperone told me, ‘You'll love the capital. Once you've experienced the capital, you'll never need to travel again.'

According to guide books, the most luxurious hotel in the capital is the Railway Grand. This is also the only hotel that caters to outsiders. Situated on platform 4 of Grand Central Station, the Railway Grand is comprised of twenty-two expertly renovated railway carriages once privately owned by an aristocrat in the years before the revolution. Lavishly appointed, it is the hotel favoured by wealthy locals when celebrating their honeymoons.

Although praised by guide books, the food is, to foreign tastes, bland. Yet the Railway Grand's cuisine is a source of pride to the locals. Even those who have never dined there praise the freshness of the produce and the cleanliness of the kitchen. Visitors from the provinces who cannot afford the Railway Grand's steep tariff are encouraged to take guided tours of the hotel's kitchen. For newlyweds, the photograph of a kiss reflected in the giant saucepan has become a cliché that signifies future prosperity.

You might imagine that fatigued travellers would prefer not to sleep close to revelling honeymooners. But here the honeymoon is a solemn occasion where a couple spends more time pledging fidelity and responsibility than physically engaged.

A waiter told me that it was customary for experiments in sexual intercourse to begin at puberty. By the time a couple elects to marry in their late twenties, they will have satisfied their curiosity in a variety of styles with a broad array of partners. Most likely, the girls I'd met en route to tunnel-cleaning were also approaching their sexual initiation. Yet marital infidelity is almost unknown here. A convicted adulterer faces imprisonment, and repeat offenders can expect the death sentence.

Little wonder that the newly married couples in the dining room quietly held hands and sipped wine as they contemplated a life of resisted temptations.

On the first evening of my stay, I was joined by a handsome couple whose broad accents indicated that they had travelled some distance from the south-western province, a scenic, largely rural part of the country where the man taught history in a college, and his partner hoped to join her father in medical practice once she had completed her studies in surgery.

While happy to speak of their lives and hopes, they were reluctant to engage in discussion of broader social or political matters. Such discussion is regarded as the height of bad manners.

Locals argue that it is necessary to believe things are already as good as they might be in order to focus upon, or amplify, that goodness. And my companions demonstrated a typical uninterest in events, persons or cultures outside their nation. Any attempt to bring my personal history into the conversation was met with interruption or glazed indifference. Even when I told a favourite anecdote about how my mother was assaulted by a polar bear that escaped its enclosure in Melbourne Zoo, the young doctor cut across me, saying quite dismissively, ‘I know, something similar happened to my mother. Now we find that we have no need of zoos.'

Perhaps guests satisfy the locals' need for zoos. Although they are welcomed, guests are too foreign to be understood. If locals are flattered by our curiosity about them, they never feel inclined to reciprocate. They contend that no amount of information would enable a guest to reach a true understanding of what it is to live here. An eminent travel writer calls it ‘psychical apartheid', an embrace that refuses to accept foreign ways of seeing. The local instinct is one for intimate deflection.

The more accustomed you become to these tendencies, the less you resist. You coddle your hosts by asking them to flesh out their observations and reminiscences. Fortunately, the local wine obscures the sterility of these one-sided conversations.

After dinner, the teacher began to tell me very personal details about his sexual relationships prior to meeting his new wife. Neither of them was nearly so embarrassed as they would have been had the conversation been about economics, politics or educational philosophy. At the school they both attended, teachers allowed young couples to leave the classroom in order to fornicate, believing that releasing sexual tension frees students from distraction in class.

I found these lurid stories less engaging than the bride's tales of her childhood fear of school. She used to fake illness to persuade her mother to keep her at home. There, she spent the day reading, or playing complicated number games, an experience that was uncannily similar to my own.

‘I used to double,' she told me. ‘You know: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two … I could double to figures of more than twenty digits in a few minutes.'

‘The same with me! I was obsessed with doubling. I'd stay at home in a bed made up on the couch in the lounge, and I'd double during the ad breaks on television.'

Naturally, the couple disregarded my outburst. A guest's only role in conversation is to be a catalyst, to invite locals to recall or elaborate details from their own experience.

Shortly after this, the young doctor told me that she had once begun training as a secondary teacher, having wished to teach literature, but she abandoned teaching when a student she'd taught on her practice rounds shot dead eight strangers as they drove home along a major highway.

By that stage, I was shaking.
This young woman's memories
were mine
. The same thing happened when I trained to be a teacher. Though I tried to tell them that these coincidences were astonishing, the notion of coincidence meant nothing to them.

Their word for coincidence is the same as their word for exchange, or transact. I found it impossible to persuade my hosts of the distinction between these concepts. They have no word for the unique, or discrete. I argued that without the notion of pure separateness, of parallels that don't merge or intersect, rail travel would be impossible. In their eyes, I was a madman. The teacher insisted that intersection, collision and conjunction are the cornerstones of nature, human association and intelligence.

At that point, the honeymooners chose to call it a night. The next morning they were making a long journey to visit the bride's sister in the interior, and I imagined that they still had serious undertakings to make in their bridal compartment.

I wished them a long and happy life together, to which the young doctor replied, ‘The life we have will be the intersection of all possible lives, and the happiness we know will be the happiness we create.'

I knew then that there could be nothing more disturbing than to be penetrated by someone you couldn't feel, to be transparent and insubstantial as a ghost.

The trip to the border takes just ninety minutes, with the train reaching high speeds as it powers across flat, unpopulated territories. I counted no more than seven stations, and the train stopped at just three. In my compartment, there were two guests who may have been Middle-Eastern or North African. They spoke a language I didn't recognise, and never failed to point out a tree when one was spotted across the plain.

We were accompanied by a local woman, a diplomat returning to her posting in Thailand. She hoped to persuade foreign governments and firms to invest in new rail lines that were being built into the interior. This project would involve the construction of tunnels, bridges and viaducts, and the laying of thousands of kilometres of track.

It seemed to me that this extended rail network was conceived with a total disregard for economic viability.

‘Sometimes you need to disregard economic viability,' the diplomat told me. ‘This is a dream we share. You'll never determine the value of a dream if you are too timid to realise its potential.'

The local notion of a shared dream, of sharing, of sharing in, is very different from the idea of sharing
with
. The diplomat told me that they had no single word for what we would understand as generosity, just a curious aphorism, ‘The true gift doesn't know its shadow.' She said that I couldn't be expected to understand.

The train made a prolonged stop at the last station before the border, providing the sellers of trinkets and souvenirs a chance to move through the carriages. My two fellow guests bought a bottle of steam produced by the old locomotives that carry goods into the interior. Needing to dispose of local currency, I bought a porcelain model of a young State Rail volunteer, a tunnel-detailer who resembled one of the girls I'd met earlier on the trip.