“What were your dreams once you became an adult?”
“What were my dreams?” Boonsong said with a sneer. “Why, I dreamed of becoming prime minister!”
The woman tried to stifle a smile and neutralize her expression as she continued listening.
Boonsong threw back his drink and poured himself another. “Go ahead. Go ahead and laugh at me all you want! If you didn’t laugh, that would be remarkable. I can tell you the whole story. You’ll fall off your chair laughing. I probably don’t even have to tell you very much for you to get it. You see what kind of state I’m in. Yes—I dreamed of getting into politics, of becoming prime minister. Things were going swimmingly for a while, too. I was the boss’s confidant. My future was bright; I could do anything. I’d started off small, running for municipal and then provincial councils, and then from there, parliament. And what happened? Now you can start laughing. The boss died! I was like a dog falling down the stairs, tumbling one step at a time. In the end, no one even voted for me at the municipal level. I wouldn’t be so cut up about it except this rookie—you know the guy I’m talking about, the one who’s speaker of the house now? Him. He was even poorer than me; he had no one backing him, no one helping him. Hmph, how could this have happened! Why aren’t you laughing? Laugh! Oh, and there’s more. I also owned a printing house. I had my mistress handle the accounting, and that bitch stole from me. She took so much that I didn’t see the point of keeping the business, and ended up giving the whole damn thing to her. How about that?”
Boonsong kept pouring himself drink after drink, his speech starting to slur. Tense in her seat, the woman mumbled as if unconscious of her words, “Then why did you come looking for the second book?”
“The second book?” Boonsong feigned a surprised expression. “You haven’t forgotten about it yet? Just let it go. Don’t think about it anymore. It’s all a lie anyway.”
“A lie? You were lying to me?”
“Yes, I lied to you, even more to myself. Look, I’d hit rock bottom. I’d lost the will to go on, so I revived that silly little dream I’d had as a boy and tried to see it through. For one thing, I pity that poor boy. It’s not like I can’t remember how much he suffered, not being able to read the second book and see how it ended. And he never got to build his library. I told myself that if I could successfully follow through on this dream that had been left unresolved, I would go back and start pursuing my current dream once again.”
“Well, you should be happy that you succeeded. You’ve found the second book. There’s nothing left unresolved now.”
“But it’s a lie. I told you. It’s all meaningless. I was lying to myself. I fooled myself, fooled you, fooled all kinds of people that it was something important, you know? I acted like getting the second book was a matter of life and death! But do you know why? I’d assumed from the beginning there was no way I’d find that book again, and if I couldn’t find it, that would mean I failed, do you get it? I know you get it. It’s so much easier for me to keep living life as a failure, letting each day go by—like a stray dog. But you—you had to go and actually bring me the second book, telling me to have faith. How terribly cruel. What am I supposed to do? In my situation, what could I possibly do?” Boonsong broke into bitter laughter, his body swaying. Face flushed and hair disheveled, he turned to find the waiter and shouted for more alcohol.
The woman looked at him speechless. She wasn’t angry: in his current state, he could hardly keep himself in check. She thought back to the time she’d watched the shop for her sister, and, with naive faith, had sold the first book to a boy. That boy had promised that he would return to buy the second book. The memory became clearer as she called it to mind. She remembered how she had then had to buy the second book herself, so as to make her sister think that she had sold the whole set, and after that she had volunteered to watch the store for her sister every day in order to wait for the boy, and wait she did until all the unsold books from that lot had been shipped back. Bitterly, she had had to take the book home. She had kept wondering, didn’t he want to know how the story ended? And then she had gone ahead and read it, even though she didn’t like to read. She had read it to get even with that boy. He would never learn what became of the characters, how the story ended. He would never know—but she would, and in her head she had compared their predicaments: Who suffered more, a person who knew only the first half of a story or a person who knew only the last?
How childish, the woman thought, smiling to herself. She recalled how she had kept telling herself that she didn’t want to know the backstories of the characters, had kept stamping out the urge to go look for the first book so she could read it, and had kept fooling herself that she wasn’t suffering because of it. But whether that boy suffered, how could she have known? It was possible he had somehow gotten his hands on the second book and read it, and that was the reason he hadn’t returned. She had vowed to put the whole ordeal behind her by hiding the book somewhere in the house out of sight. Eventually, she had completely forgotten about it, for a long, long time, until today. Suddenly that boy had returned—it was a shame the man he’d become was such a wreck. He still didn’t know and didn’t want to know how the story unfolded in the second book, and how it ended, because now he lacked even the willpower to better his life in some small way. His little childhood dream … what a shame.
As the woman sat there observing the broken man who no longer wanted anything from life, a desire reignited in her. It had been left unsatisfied for an excessively long time, and now she had the opportunity: that first book, that young girl. No matter that today she could no longer remember the contents of the second book, she could still clearly recall the desire she had had back then, the desire to know the backstories of the various characters that appeared in the second volume.
Forcing a smile, the woman eyed the two books on the table, took them in her hands, and said, “I’ll help ease your mind. If you don’t want the second book, I’ll hold on to it again.” She stood up carefully, her right hand hugging the two books to her chest and her left reaching for the umbrella. “You don’t mind if I take the first book as well, do you? Since neither book is of use to you anymore … but they’re still of use to me.” She kept her gaze fixed on Boonsong as she backed away from her chair, worried that he might have a change of heart.
The woman opened her umbrella and hurried out of the restaurant. Boonsong set his glass down as he watched her walking off with the two books. It suddenly occurred to him what was happening. He scrambled to get up, knocking his chair over in the process. Scurrying after her, he yelled, garbling his words, “Give it back! Give the book back! Don’t take it. I want the second book!” Several waiters rushed him and fought to extract money from his pocket as he squirmed and wrestled. They snatched his wallet, but he didn’t care. He struggled to regain his balance in an attempt to chase after her but ended up falling on the sodden ground. Refusing to give up, he slipped and crawled through the mud, all the while blurting gibberish.
From a distance, he could see her walking under her umbrella toward the light of the streetlamp, passing the pole, and disappearing, once again, into the dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DUANWAD PIMWANA is one of Thailand’s preeminent contemporary women writers. She won the S.E.A. Write Award, Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2003. Known for fusing touches of magical realism with social realism, she has penned nine books, including a novella and collections of short stories, poetry, and cross-genre writing.
MUI POOPOKSAKUL is a lawyer turned translator. Her first book-length translation, The Sad Part Was, won an English PEN Translates Award. She is also the translator of Duanwad Pimwana’s novel Bright.
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