What Am I Doing Here? Read online

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Sexuality.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Don’t touch her.’ He clawed at my sleeve. ‘I touch girl twice in life. Never touch girl again.’

  ‘I won’t touch her,’ I said. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

  It was equally hot at breakfast, although the fans in the restaurant were ruffling the grimy white curtains. The Chinese came in, smiled nervously and asked if he could sit at my table. He had on a freshly laundered shirt. His hair was slicked across his forehead. He put the attaché case on a free chair and ordered coffee and fried eggs.

  He was tired, he said. He had worked all night on his order book. He was a travelling salesman from Hong Kong. Selling poplins was his family business and now it was bad business, because Hong Kong poplins were undercut by cheaper poplins from Colombia, North Korea, Poland and China.

  ‘Bad situation,’ he said. ‘My poplin ten pence yard fortyeight inch wide and black man want pay seven half pence only. Not possible continue.’

  He blinked through his horn-rimmed spectacles at the waiter who brought the eggs.

  ‘Cameroonian people,’ he whispered. ‘Bad! All want is money. Money and not work. Black man not like yellow man.’

  He reached for the tomato sauce bottle and unscrewed the lid. His hand was shaking.

  ‘Yellow man not like black man,’ he went on. ‘Cameroon bad, but no so bad. Nigeria very bad! Bad trouble with customs. Customs officer make me pay on samples only and keep money for self.’

  And it was sad and lonely, he said, alone in Africa, away from his family, so long away on the world tour. Married one year only, the wife and the mother living together, and the baby boy born two days before he left.

  ‘She kill me,’ he said.

  He was close to tears. He held onto the sauce bottle. He had not poured from it and the eggs were going cold.

  ‘My wife kill me if she find out.’

  ‘Kill you?’

  ‘I cannot return until my blood is pure. I not go with girls again. Not never. One emission only. One half minute only!’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Five week.’

  ‘In Douala?’

  ‘In Fleetown. I have one friend in Fleetown. Nepalese. Also merchant. He giving drink. He getting girls. I write him what he has done.’

  I asked for clinical details and, assuming a cheerful manner, assured him that syphilis in its primary stage was a complaint that well-travelled men, such as himself, took in their stride. A blood-test, a course of injections, another blood-test. The cure, I said, was final. No reason for his wife to find out. No reason why he shouldn’t father lots more baby boys.

  ‘All I want is certificate of pure blood.’

  ‘You want a cure,’ I said. ‘A certificate is paper and syphilis is syphilis. You have been to a doctor?’

  ‘He gave me paper of pure blood but the wound not go.’

  ‘Who recommended him?’

  ‘Confidence Trading Company. Give me no confidence at all! No confidence in African doctor. He take the money and the wound not go.’

  ‘Some African doctors are excellent,’ I said, ‘but there are different kinds of doctor. I hope he gave you an injection?’

  ‘He gave me remedies. Please, Sir! You come with me! You explain doctor. Speak French with him.’

  We went out into the street. It was grey with the sky overcast. There were shabby concrete buildings, some limpleaved trees coated with dust, tangles of electric wires and kite-hawks hovering over the refuse dumps. There were ash-grey puddles, iridescent at the edges, and pot-bellied children with green mucus round their noses. There were men going in and out of bars, and old women shuffling round shacks that had been bashed out of oil-drums. Near the railway station, the Chinese found the pharmacy of Dr Shere Malhalua Meji.

  I looked at the billboard that advertised the doctor’s Isis Pins and ‘other celebrated remedies for modern men and women’.

  We did not go to that doctor.

  We turned up a tree-lined avenue, past the old Lutheran Cathedral, its granite tombs untended now; past the newer Catholic Cathedral; past houses with well-kept gardens and red front gates, and cafés with awnings and bookshops full of students. In the big shopping street, Germans were buying safari equipment and Belgian art dealers were buying old fetish figures, piled head first and feet first like the photos of bodies in Belsen. There were shop-signs announcing the latest imports – Belons, Camemberts, haricots verts – and in that street there were other kinds of doctor.

  The Chinese winced when the doctor said how much the injection would cost. But I said something about secondary and tertiary stages and, in the end, he took it well, the injection and the payment. He was very methodical. He made notes in Chinese about the timing of future doses.

  Afterwards, over coffee, he brightened up and talked about the baby boy. From Douala he was going to Yaoundé, and from Yaoundé to Bangui. Then he’d go downriver to Kinshasa and drive across Zaire by car. Zaire was a bad place. Bad people and lions in jungle. I said he might have to watch for elephants on the road. The idea of elephants alarmed him, but somehow he’d get through to Lusaka, and up to Dar es Salaam, and along the coast to Mombasa and inland to Nairobi. Kenya was a not-so-bad place. Other Chinese merchants in Kenya. And from Nairobi he’d fly back home if, by that time, his blood was clean and pure.

  1977

  THE CHINESE GEOMANCER

  The man I had arranged to meet was standing by one of the two bronze lions that snarl in the forecourt of the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He wore a blue silk Nina Ricci tie, a gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap, and an immaculate worsted grey suit.

  He handed me his card on which was written, in embossed letters:LUNG KING CHUEN

  Geomancer

  Searching and fixing of good location for the burial of passed-away ancestors; surveying and arranging of good position for settling down business and lodging places, in which would gain prosperity and luck in the very near future

  The building - to which workmen were adding the final touches – has forty-seven storeys (including the helipad on the roof) and stands on the site of the Bank’s former Head Office – overlooking the Cenotaph, on the south side of Victoria Square. It is the work of the English architect, Norman Foster, and is, by any standards, an astonishing performance.

  I heard the bank called, variously, ‘The shape of things to come’; ‘An act of faith in Hong Kong’s future’; ‘Something out of Star Wars’; ‘A cathedral to money’; ‘A maintenance nightmare,’ and ‘Suicides’ leap’.

  Having exceeded its budget three times over, to the tune of $600 million U.S., the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank has also earned the distinction of being the most expensive office block ever built.

  Architecturally, I felt it was less a ‘vision of the future’ than a backward, not to say nostalgic look at certain experiments of the Twenties (when buildings were modelled on battleships, and Man himself was thought to be a perfectible machine): buildings such as the PROUNS of El Lissitzky; Vesnin’s project for the offices of Pravda – the unrealised dreams of the Early Soviet Constructivists.

  Mr Lung, on the other hand, is a modest practitioner of the venerable Chinese art of geomancy, or feng-shui. At the start of the project, the Bank called him in to survey the site for malign or demonic presences, and to ensure that the design itself was propitious. Whichever architect was chosen, there was bound to be some anxiety; for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is the pivot on which Hong Kong itself stands or falls. With 1997 in sight, prosperity and luck must either come ‘in the very near future’ – or not at all.

  The afternoon was overcast and a sharp wind was blowing off the harbour. We rode the escalator to the first floor, and took shelter in the Cash Department. It was like entering a war-machine: the uniform grey, the absence of ‘art’, the low hum of computerised activity. It was also cold. Had the building been put up in Soviet Russia there would at least have
been a touch of red.

  Behind a gleaming black counter sat the tellers – unscreened and unprotected, since, in the event of a bank-raid, a kind of portcullis slices sideways into action, and traps the raiders inside. A few potted palms were positioned here and there, apparently at random.

  I sat down on a slab of black marble which, in less austere surroundings, might have been called a banquette. Mr Lung was not a tall man. He stood.

  Obviously, the surroundings were too austere for many of the Bank’s personnel, and already – in the executive suites on high - they had unrolled the Persian carpets, and secretaries sat perched on reproduction Chippendale chairs.

  ‘This’, Mr Lung began, in a proprietorial tone, ‘is one of the Top Ten Buildings of the World. Its construction is particularly ingenious.’

  ‘It is,’ I nodded, glancing up at the cylindrical pylons and the colossal X-shaped cross-braces that keep the structure rigid.

  ‘So first,’ he continued, ‘I would like to emphasise its good points. As far as feng-shui is concerned, the situation is perfect. It is, in fact, the best situation in the whole of Hong Kong.’

  Feng-shui means ‘wind-and-water’. From the most ancient times the Chinese have believed that the Earth is a mirror of the Heavens, and that both are living sentient beings shot through and through with currents of energy – some positive, some negative – like the messages that course through our own central nervous systems.

  The positive currents – those carrying good ‘chih,’ or ‘life force’ – are known as ‘dragon-lines’. They are thought to follow the flow of underground water, and the direction of magnetic fields beneath the Earth’s surface.

  The business of a geomancer is to make certain, with the help of a magnetic compass, that a building, a room, a grave or a marriage-bed is aligned to one or other of the ‘dragon-lines’ and shielded from dangerous cross-currents. Without clearance from a feng-shui expert, even the most ‘westernised’ Chinese businessman is apt to get the jitters, to say nothing of his junior staff.

  At a lunch I happened to tell an ‘old China hand’, an Englishman, that the Bank had taken the advice of a geomancer.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s the kind of thing they would believe in.’

  Yet we all feel that some houses are ‘happy’ and others have a ‘nasty atmosphere’. Only the Chinese have come up with cogent reasons why this should be so. Whoever presumes to mock feng-shui as a superstitious anachronism should recall its vital contribution to the making of the Chinese landscape, in which houses, temples and cities were always sited in harmony with trees and hills and water.

  Perhaps one can go a step further? Perhaps the rootedness of Chinese civilisation; the Chinese sense of belonging to the Earth; their capacity to live without friction in colossal numbers – have all, in the long run, resulted from their adherence to the principles of feng-shui?

  ‘Now it so happens,’ Mr Lung said, ‘that no less than five “dragon-lines” run down from The Peak and converge on the Central Business District of Hong Kong.’

  We looked across the atrium of glass, towards the skyscrapers of the most expensive patch of real estate in the world.

  Some of the lines, he went on - not by any means all – were punctuated here and there with ‘dragon-points’ or ‘energy-centres’, like the meridian-points known to acupuncturists: points at which a particularly potent source of chih was known to gush to the surface.

  ‘And the site on which the bank stands’, he added, ‘is one of them. It is, in fact, the only “dragon-point” on the entire length of the line.’

  Other lines, too, were known to have branches, like taproots, which tended to siphon off the flow of chih, and diminish its force.

  ‘But this line’, he said, ‘has no branches.’

  Yet another favourable point was the bank’s uninterrupted view of the mountain. Had there been naked rocks or screes, they might have reflected bad chih into the building.

  ‘But The Peak’, he said solemnly, ‘is covered in trees.’

  Similarly, because the new building was set well back from the waterfront – and because the sun’s course passed to landward – no malign glitter could rise up from the sea.

  Mr Lung liked the grey colour which, he felt, was soothing to the nerves. He also liked the fact that the building absorbed light, and did not reflect glare onto its neighbours.

  I questioned him carefully on the subject of reflected glare, and discovered that glass-curtain-wall buildings which mirror one another – as they do in every American city, and now in Hong Kong – are, from a feng-shui point of view, disastrous.

  ‘If you reflect bad chih onto your neighbours,’ Mr Lung said, ‘you cannot prosper either.’

  He also approved of the two bronze lions that used to guard the entrance of the earlier building. During the War, he said, the Japanese had tried to melt them down:

  ‘But they were not successful.’

  I said there were similar lions in London, outside the Bank of England.

  ‘They cannot be as good as these two,’ he answered sharply: so sharply, in fact, that I forgot to ask whether the lions had been put away in storage three years ago, when Mrs Thatcher made her first, ill-informed foray into Chinese politics - and gave the Hong Kong Stock Exchange its major nervous breakdown.

  The result, of course, was the historic slap from Deng Xiaoping himself.

  ‘So what about the bad points?’ I asked Mr Lung.

  ‘I’m coming to them now,’ he said.

  The Hong Kong waterfront was built on reclaimed land and there were stories . . . No. He could not confirm them but there were, nevertheless, stories . . . of sea-monsters and other local ghouls, who resented being dumped upon and might want to steal into the building.

  This was why he had recommended that the escalator to the first floor – which was, after all, the main public entrance – should be so angled, obliquely, that it ran along a ‘dragonline’. The flow of positive chih would thus drive the demons back where they belonged.

  Furthermore, since all good chih came from the landward, he had advised that the Board Room and Chief Executive offices should turn away from the sea: away, that is, from the view of Kowloon and the mountains of China; away from the cargo-ships, tugboats, ferries, drifters, coaling-barges, junks; away from the White Ensign, Red Ensign and that ‘other’ red flag – and turn instead to face the ‘Earth Spirit’ descending from The Peak.

  The same, equally, applied to the underground Safe Deposit – which has the largest, circular, stainless-steel door ever made.

  Finally, Mr Lung said, he had to admit there were a number of danger zones in the structure – ‘killing-points’ is what he called them – where, in order to counteract negative chih, it had been necessary to station living plants: a potted palm at the head of the escalator ‘in case of a fall’; more potted palms by the lift-shafts; yet more palms close to the pylons to nullify the colossal downward thrust of the building.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’d like to ask you one thing. I believe that “dragon-lines” never run straight, but are curved.’

  ‘True,’ he said.

  ‘And isn’t it also true that traditional Chinese buildings are almost always curved? The roofs are curved? The walls are curved?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Chinese architecture – like Chinese art, Chinese language and the Chinese character – abhors the rigid and rectilinear.

  ‘Now, as a feng-shui man,’ I persisted, ‘how would you interpret this rigid, straight-up-and-down Western architecture? Would you say it had good or bad chih?’

  He blanched a little, and said nothing.

  ‘These cross-braces, for example? Good or bad? Would you consider putting plants underneath them?’

  ‘No,’ he said, blandly. ‘Nobody sits there.’

  My question, I have to confess, was most unfair, for I had heard on the grapevine that the cross-braces were terribly bad feng-shui.

  It was obvious
I had overstepped the mark. At the mere mention of cross-braces, Mr Lung moved onto the defensive. He back-pedalled. He smiled. He re-emphasised the good points, and glossed over the bad ones. He even left the impression that there were no bad ones.

  At the foot of the escalator he shook my hand and said:

  ‘I have done feng-shui for Rothschilds.’

  1985

  3

  FRIENDS

  GEORGE ORTIZ

  For Olivier on his twenty-first birthday

  Olivier, your father and I have known each other since I was eighteen and he was thirty-one and I always associate him with hilarious moments. None was more hilarious than our visit to the Soviet Union which coincided with your arrival.

  You will have been told a thousand times how your greatgrandfather was a Bolivian hacendado, who, one day, found two American trespassers with bags of mineral specimens on their backs. He locked them in a stable, thinking the minerals might be gold or silver. Finally they confessed the specimens were tin. That is one side of your family history.

  In the spring, twenty-one years ago, your father learned that I had an official invitation to visit archaeological museums in the Soviet Union and also to meet Soviet archaeologists. The man who invited me I had met the year before in Sofia where I assured him that a treasury supposed to have been found at Troy was either a fake or a fake on paper. The rest of the party was to include my professor of archaeology and a lady Marxist archaeological student from Hampstead.

  We met in Leningrad. G.O. was Doctor O of the Basel Museum. For the first days he behaved like Dr O. He listened patiently – although he nearly exploded afterwards – to the rantings of an orthodox Marxist archaeologist. The museum impressed him greatly. He saw Greek objects, but he saw objects he had never seen before, treasures from the frozen tombs of Siberia, objects from the Siberian taiga.

  On our last day in Leningrad we had an interview with the Deputy Director of the Hermitage Museum. The Director himself was away in Armenia excavating the site of Urartu. It would not be fair to say that your father only reached the door handle, but he is not a tall man, and the space suited him ideally. We were, after all, in the Tsar’s reception room. The Deputy Director greeted us with great kindness, but was plainly shocked by his previous visitor. As we entered a notorious pedlar of fakes from Madison Avenue went out. He had told the Deputy Director, in the name of his own foundation for the investigation of forgeries, that the celebrated Peter the Great Gold Treasure had been made by a jeweller in Odessa in 1898. Your father rose to the occasion and assured the man that his visitor had been a complete fraud. He then got carried away. The mask of Dr O vanished. He said, ‘This is the greatest museum in the world, right? I am the greatest collector of Greek bronzes in the world. If I leave you my collection in my will, will you appoint me Director of this museum for a number of years?’