To the Ends of the Earth

I asked Mr. Cong what had happened to his commune.

“It was canceled,” he said. “It was dissolved.”

“Did the peasants go away?”

“No. Each was given his own plot to till.”

“Do you think that’s better?”

“Of course,” he said, but it was impossible for me to tell whether he meant it. “Production is much greater. The yields are larger.”

That seemed to settle it. Any policy that increased production was a good thing. I thought: God help China if there’s a recession.

The town was in darkness. The hotel was very cold. My room was cold. What to do? Although it was only six-thirty I went to bed—anyway, I got inside with most of my clothes on, and I listened to my short-wave radio under the blankets. That was how I was to spend all of my nights in Langxiang.

I went up the logging line on the narrow-gauge railway the next day, but I was disappointed in the forest. I had expected wilderness, but this was filled with lumberjacks cutting and bulldozing trees.

“One day we will go to the primeval forest,” Mr. Tian said.

“Let’s go today.”

“No. It is far. We will go another day.”

We went to the locomotive shed, where we met Mrs. Jin, a local guide. The shed was full of smoke and steam, and it was dark; but it was also warm, because the boilers were being stoked and the fire in the forge was blazing. As I walked along Mrs. Jin threw herself at me and pushed me against the wall, and then she laughed hysterically, a kind of chattering—one of the more terrifying Chinese laughs. I saw that she had saved me from stepping into a deep hole in which I would almost certainly have broken my back.

I was so rattled by this I had to go outside and take deep breaths. All over this town the snow was packed hard. No street or pavement was clear of ice. They habitually pedaled on the ice, and they had a way of walking—a sort of shuffle—that prevented them from slipping.

“This town is forbidden,” Mr. Tian boasted. “You are very lucky to be here.”

All the while in Langxiang my feet and hands were frozen—stinging and painful. My eyes hurt. My muscles were knotted. There was an icy moaning in my head. Mr. Tian asked me whether I wanted to see the ski slopes. I said yes and we drove four miles outside town just as the sun slipped below the distant mountains and an even greater cold descended with the darkness.

There on the black and white mountains were ten sluices—frozen chutes cut into the slope. People hauled small boxes up the mountain—they were like little coffins; and then they placed them into a chute and went banging down, cracking from side to side and screaming. I hopped up and down in the cold and said I wasn’t interested.

Mr. Tian went thrashing up the slope with a splintery coffin and came down showing his teeth. He did it again. Perhaps he was developing a taste for this.

“Don’t you like skiing?” he said.

“This isn’t skiing, Mr. Tian.”

In a shocked voice he said, “It’s not?”

But he kept doing it just the same.

I walked down the path and found a shed, a sort of watchman’s shack. There was a stove inside. This was a vivid demonstration of heating in Langxiang. The stove was so feeble that there was half an inch of frost on the walls of the shed. The walls (wood and mud bricks) were entirely white.

I kept a record of temperatures. Minus thirty-four Centigrade on the main street, freezing in the lobby, just above freezing in the dining room. The food went cold a minute after it was plunked down, and the grease congealed. They served fatty meat, greasy potatoes, rice gruel, great uncooked chunks of green pepper. Was this Chinese food? One day I had cabbage stuffed with meat and rice, and gravy poured over it. I had eaten such dishes in Russia and Poland, when they were called golomkis.

It was very tiring to be cold all the time. I began to enjoy going to bed early. I listened to the BBC and the VOA under my blanket. After a few hours I took one of my sweaters off, and one layer of socks, and by morning I was so warm in the sack that I forgot where I was. Then I saw the layer of frost on the window that was so thick I could not see outside, and I remembered.

No one spoke of the cold. Well, why should they? They reveled in it—literally, dancing and sliding on the ice. I saw children in the dark one evening pushing each other off a shelf of ice onto the frozen surface of the town’s river. (Other people chopped holes in this ice and drew water from it.) Those children frolicking in the darkness and the perishing cold reminded me of penguins frisking on the ice floes through the long Antarctic night.

WHEN I TRAVEL I DREAM A GREAT DEAL. PERHAPS THAT IS ONE of my main reasons for travel. It has something to do with strange rooms and odd noises and smells, with vibrations, with food, with the anxieties of travel—especially the fear of death—and with temperatures.