The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  the white star

  There are several protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

  Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

  Ten years before you met Nartaya Phisutworrakhun, you lived in a military camp and you’d got well enough acquainted with the discipline and coarseness of military life. Ten years before you met Nartaya, your father had yet to lose his mind, your mother had yet to commit suicide and Daen Chartiya-wan still had both his legs. You were but an ordinary little boy like all ordinary little boys. Your father wanted for you to succeed in life, learn to read and write fluently. He didn’t want you to be like him, a mere Phraek Narm Daeng cowherd who could hardly spell. He very much hoped that one day, as his son, you’d put on a uniform, with grade or rank before your name, state lodgings, end-of-month pay and the ability to shoot someone lawfully – whereas he, when he wanted to shoot someone, had to think twice and at times, once he’d pulled the trigger, run for his life. In this blessed country, lots of fathers have this kind of grand and unrealistic dream. Ten years before you met Nartaya, Daen was a young officer fresh from military school, always ready for high-spirited capers, always carousing, and pally with all sorts of people. How did he manage to befriend your father, given that he was so young he could’ve been taken for his youngest sibling? This kind of relationship you didn’t understand. After your fourth year of primary at the Phraek Narm Daeng temple school, you took your first long trip, from your native village to the Phra Jomklao military camp in Phetchaburi. Nevertheless you were able to return to Phraek Narm Daeng at the end of every term. Daen would take you there or else, if he wasn’t free, your father would come and fetch you. At the time, Phraek Narm Daeng hadn’t become the least of your worries as would be the case later. A few days before the new term, Daen would come and fetch you or, if he wasn’t free, your father would take you back to the military camp. You were a little country bumpkin similar to the tens of thousands of little country bumpkins that had the opportunity to carry on their studies by staying with an older relative. You had no inkling you’d grow into a hoodlum. You had no inkling Phraek Narm Daeng, your father and your mother would drop out of reality. You had no inkling you’d meet a young girl named Nartaya Phisutworrakhun ten years later. She too certainly had no idea she’d meet you. Even though you were aware from a tender age of the hostility between your parents, even though you knew that as soon as she was pregnant your mother had secretly resolved to get rid of you through an abortion, even though you knew she had smeared her tits with a bitter vine decoction to wean you ahead of time, you were nonetheless an ordinary child: you liked to read illustrated tales – Rart Leursuang’s Black Lion, Por Bangphlee’s The coprophagic zombie, Phanom Thian’s Phet Phra Uma – which were serialised under soft covers; you liked to watch westerns; and you were beginning to remember that this star was named Clint Eastwood, that one Lee Van Cliff, that other Montgomery Wood, this villain Fernando Sancho and that egghead Yul Brynner, who was alternately a villain and the romantic lead. You had yet to see the hell of life or feel the darkness that was to turn your heart hemiplegic. Daen did all a sound man must do to prevent you from revisiting that hell and keep you out of that blackness. He never talked to you again about your father or your mother or about Phraek Narm Daeng either. Nartaya Phisutworrakhun had grown up in a totally different manner. Her world had neither oppressive atmosphere nor leaden colours. It was a world that ignored catastrophe until she met you. The first time she heard your name, what did she think? Did she tell herself it was the name of someone who was going to lead her life astray into a labyrinth of aberration whose exit she’d never be able to find? The first time she saw you, did she have the premonition this was the man who was going to drag her into the jungle of abomination and leave her there surrounded by monsters and demons from hell? Hadn’t there been anyone to tell her you weren’t someone worth associating with in any way? Anyone to get frightened? Anyone to have the least suspicion? Did she know your father was a cowherd endowed with great bodily strength and great mental debility and your mother a desperate whore? Did she know your mother had killed herself and your father drifted into madness? Did she know that as a child you’d been left to Daen Chartiya-wan’s guardianship simply because Daen was your father’s friend? Or did she really believe you were his little brother, because that’s what he always said to spare you from nurturing an inferiority complex? Write to Daen, write to him this instant. You should write to him. So write to him tonight, and post the letter tomorrow. He needs help. He needs someone to take him places and he can’t see who else would do it but you. Without him what would your life have been, hey? Maybe you’d have become a stray child or lost your mind as of the moment you saw your mother and your mother’s lover fitted into each other. You were an uprooted sapling discarded in the sun and condemned to wither away. He picked you up and transplanted you. That saved you from the jaws of fate as if by magic. In the Architha camp in Pattani, he took care of you as much as his occupations allowed. He had little time to spare for you. Young and unattached, crazy over football and boxing, swearing by women, drinks and games, he savoured the pleasures and thrills of life to the full. Sometimes he’d lie prostrate in bed for three or five days because he’d hurt himself playing football, a time he spend smoking and reading quietly. He read stories about the jungle, the sea, hunting, fishing, war and sometimes crime. He was fascinated by everything that had to do with knives and firearms. He was interested in the history of great warriors and, though unable to play any musical instrument, he encouraged you to make music by offering you a harmonica and a flute, and later a guitar, which you handled, dumped, took up again and forsook without ever achieving anything. He himself was both intent on and annoyed by the discordant sounds you drew out of each of the instruments you were training on. For fuck’s sake, it sounds like a dog pissing on a tin roof! he’d say light-heartedly. Maybe it was annoyance that prompted him to buy you a racing bike, which you pounced on and would never part from and day after day you’d ride it and wander here and there, so that sometimes jumping off the saddle you’d fall flat on your face and the bike would crash on top of you and you’d end up bruised all over your back, shoulders and legs. Having a bike meant you hardly stayed at home, which was fine with him as he often had young female visitors and oftener still would invite his pals for a drink and a chat about what it is young men are so adept at chatting about among themselves. You were sun-broiled and so fat that when you ran or walked or moved your belly shook. You came and went on your bike in the cool shade of the Indian almond trees along the road that ran by the officers’ quarters, trying to show off with daredevilry as he stood watching you from the balcony, a fag between his fingers, wearing only sports shorts, and shouting out to you as you were doubled up, chin to the handlebars, Hey, stop screwing your neck like that, will you. Come on; try to put your ear to the ground, crouching like Preeda Junlamonthon. At the time you were sold on Preeda. Lots of kids were sold on Preeda, four gold medals and two silver at the Fifth Asian Games. And that very bike made you childishly dream you’d use it as your mount to go all the way to Europe, like Sumet Kaeothipphayaneit had done. You were a little boy with a cropped head, ate like a horse and grew up fast. You never stopped eating. You always had something in your mouth. You never stopped sweating. Your knees and elbows and hands and legs were covered with cuts and scratches from sundry mischief. Sometimes Daen woke you up at dawn to go jogging, taking along a football in its red net. You were a kid who knew nothing. The flower of gaiety was little by little reviving and messily thrusting through the bitter compost of Phraek Narm Daeng memories: you seemed all set to be a normal child like the others. He taught you how to play football, how to shoot, loft the ball, intercept it with your chest, stop it with your foot. He taught you how to calibrate the trajectory and strength of a shot. He insisted on your being able to play with both feet with equal ease. At daybreak the football field in the military camp was deserted; there were but t
he two of you. The grass was a lush green and wet with dew. The ball was wet with dew and slippery. You ran and panted like a puppy hankering after motherly tits, and you were tired from shouting and laughing as well. What has become of that child? He’s disappeared without trace as if he’d never existed. That child head bent over his homework at his desk in a corner of the room – the first desk in your life, it was he who’d bought it for you. And sometimes you went to ask him to explain some maths or English problem. That child for whom, when he first came to stay with him, he’d had to find a soldier to keep him company at night because the silly billy was scared shitless of ghosts. That child whom he reminded to say his prayers every night before sleep. He told you the exploits of Pelé, Eusebio, Uwe Seeler and Geoff Hurst. He told you the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia, Shane, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. And that he took you to see The Bridge on the River Kwai no fewer than three times was testimony enough to what kind of heart he had. If you’re crazy about books and films, it’s to him you owe it. He subscribed to Chao Krung and Fa Mueang Thai magazines as well as to Chaiyaphruek just for you. And you took shameless pleasure reading Dr Doolittle, and each time, the most exciting moment came at the end of the page, To be continued, and you grunted in frustration. He bought you a piggybank and you used your accrued savings to treat yourself to Chaiyaphruek Students Popular Edition. He tried to handle you with patience and understanding. If you later stopped purchasing that magazine, it wasn’t out of consideration for him but because you were too young to benefit from it. He taught you how to read good books and patiently endeavoured to have you play some musical instrument or other. Maybe he had dreamt when he was a child of becoming a musician. All that was taking place during the overlapping period marked by the scandalous deaths of Suraphon Sombatjarern and Mit Chaibancha, two legendary stars of song and screen, and you were still in the final year of primary at the local school and growing up in the shade of his disinterested love and solicitude, he who lived in a maelstrom of women never the same twice and of friends never twice the same – not only soldiers but people from just about all walks of life. Some were notorious gangsters handling gambling joints’ security. Some were oafish hunters back from the jungle bearing bamboo baskets full of forest produce for him. Some were gunmen for hire. Some were cockfighting wizards and some famed breeders of fighting fish, and there was one who was a boxer and was said to bet on himself between bouts. You were beginning to realise that years earlier your father must’ve been part of Daen’s crowd and that he and Daen must’ve been very close, and that before your father went berserk he’d left you in Daen’s care to be done with his responsibilities. You hardly thought about your father or your mother or Phraek Narm Daeng, for there was always much lively activity in the officers’ quarters. His fellow officers came to live there too, as in that year the Army, short of funds, had adopted the policy of having bachelor officers cohabit for the nonce. Some rooms had as many as three occupants, but his place never had anyone staying for long. The one that stayed the longest was a young, dark-skinned beanpole with a beautiful mouth and perfect teeth because he didn’t smoke, even though he drank like a fish. He’d been transferred sine die from Lopburi because an enlisted man had died by his fault during a training session. His name was San Phisutworrakhun and you were to harm him beyond repair in years to come. A few months after San’s arrival, Daen exiled himself to Vietnam. Exiled himself: that’s how he put it. It seems he’d been aware for quite some time that his life under the uniform wasn’t going anywhere and that besides he didn’t much care for the way it went. So San became your de facto guardian. He was a southerner and had been Daen’s close friend for ages. You wrote to Daen once a month. What war was like you hadn’t the foggiest. You only knew that after one year warring in Vietnam, he was authorised to go back to Thailand on leave but he didn’t do so. Maybe he was afraid that once back he wouldn’t feel like returning to Vietnam. You read each of his letters like a chapter in an adventure story, because what he told was so different from what you could imagine, it could well be said it was like night and day. You had but a vague intuition of what blood and death meant. It was as if he’d gone to seek his fortune somewhere and he’d be back sooner or later. And come back he did eventually. And after he had celebrated for a while, there he was, going to Laos this time as if to challenge death. He got wounded there. You saw him again when he came back to Thailand to be treated. At the time you were entering high school. It was in 71. Back from school one day, you found him lying in the room, sleeping like a log. A thick blanket covered him from feet to chest. It was a shock to you. You thought a bad wound had turned him into a cripple. Lying though he was, he returned your greeting, hands folded in front of his chin, and told you in his bright voice, When you’re of age do everything you can not to be a fucking soldier. You didn’t understand why he was talking like that. But less than two weeks later he went back to Laos. And news from him reached you from time to time from various sources. He quarrelled with some Americans to the point of fighting it out bare-handed with one of them and making sure his valiant opponent would remember for the rest of his days the unstoppable destructive power of Thai boxing. He was the very first to slip the bayonet to the muzzle of his weapon to rush out of the bunker during protracted fighting that turned into a general melee without realising that as he was surging forth a fighter from the other side was similarly charging out of his base yelling like one possessed. And each to rush toward the other, each equally surprised by the sanguinary fury of the other in the catarrhal clamour of AK-47s and M-16s. He and his blood-crazed opponent should have skewered each other flat out and died in each other’s arms as befits valiant knights, for it seemed that’s what his foe wanted. But he loved himself too much to wish to die, so that at the very moment they pounced on each other, a swift twist of the torso had him avoid in the nick of time the bayonet at the end of his opponent’s weapon while he plunged his own in with all his strength. This became a bitter experience for him when the general melee ended and he realised that the brave man was but a seventeen or eighteen year old youth. He led his men in a protest when they received the asinine order to seize a certain hill at all costs, which he denounced as strategic suicide, and his insubordination had him almost sent back to Thailand where draconian disciplinary measures awaited him. He got himself a pony from a Hmong somewhere and came up with the bright idea to casually parade in the exposed base where he was. He put himself in charge of happenings to energise his men and ordered them to shoot flares from one end of the night to the other – terrifying and endless, those nights – never mind expenses, and to even shoot ants if they reckoned the ants’ behaviour was suspicious, because after all the Americans that were footing the war bill could afford it. These anecdotes about him you heard time and again from the mouths of his friends once he was back from Laos; himself never mentioned them before you. You only remember that when he was in Vietnam you wrote to him as a soldier but when he was in Laos you wrote to him as if he were an ordinary civilian residing in Udorn Thani province. And you only knew that, as far as he was concerned, fighting in Vietnam could hardly be considered a risky business. At Bearcat camp there was chewing gum, pipe tobacco, and good movies imported straight from Hollywood and projected outdoors every evening, several of them each time – whereas the fighting in Laos was something else. Nevertheless he was eagerly waiting to know if the Americans would need Thai mercenaries again, this time in Cambodia, and when he was certain his dream to fight in Cambodia wouldn’t come true, he cursed those Yankee sons of bitches for days on end. He didn’t crave war but hankered after experience. During all those years crammed full of events you were growing insensibly all on your own. You were left to your own devices. The old building in which the officers messed in the military camp… the strictly martial, tough, rough, barbarous environment… Male children must grow into toughies, not wimps… But you didn’t like everything in this way of life, as glorious and exalted as it was. With Daen away,
San was your de facto guardian. He it was who thoroughly checked your school reports each term. He it was who gave you money for meals once a week and was always asking solicitously if you needed extra funds for necessary expenses to come, such as travel and boarding fees for your boy scout jamborees, costs related to educational outings when teachers programmed visits to the Emerald Buddha, the National Museum, the Planetarium or the Marble temple, the purchase of materials for lab experiments or implements needed for certain arts, such as chisel, brush, paint or scroll saw. You knew that money was Daen’s or father’s, which Daen managed for him, and you also knew that if San was so strict it was to prevent you from being profligate. And if he questioned the need for such expenses, it was so that you had no opportunity to cultivate deception. But, everything considered, San didn’t take care of you all that much, even if he had the reputation of being a stickler for discipline, for he was busy enough with alcohol, women, technical training courses, field exercises and the various trivial and demanding occupational hazards and duties as all soldiers have. He had to live up to his goddamn rank and, like all soldiers, he was more interested in physical wellbeing than in wisdom and, for him, your indulging in lengthy reading sessions of novels or collections of poems was the silly, laughable doing of a child growing up. With him as with Daen, you were honest like a well-fed cat. Spending your life in a military environment must have had some influence on your feelings, but very little, actually. Indeed, you grew up hating discipline. The freedom that was yours you indulged to the full. After school you went wandering about on your bike with your friends. On Saturdays and Sundays you saw practically all the films on show. The cinema in town was called Pheitkanya. You and your friends changed its name which, when playing with consonants, took a juicily bawdy meaning.4 It was an old building of tired wood, dark as a chicken coop. The seats inside also were made of wood. The floor was dirty and strewn with pools of water from plastic bags of soft drinks on crushed ice, shells of boiled peanuts, fibres of gnawed sugar cane, chewing-gums, cigarette butts, roasted pumpkin rinds, palm-work food containers – so much so that sometimes while you were engrossed in the film cockroaches scuttled from under your legs or, at times, when the whole house was sad in the sad, silent scenes of the film, a rat would start squeaking or, at times, a house lizard would stick to the creamy-white face of the heroine. You and your friends loved Pheitkanya because it only showed Chinese and farang films, which allowed you to discover the cultural oddities of other tribes in other lands. And you loved Mon Fa, the film dubber, who had eloquence to spare and whom everyone in town admired for the way he seldom stuck to the plot and for his comic asides, from humour to farce, all coruscating with the poetic inventiveness of a virtuoso of convoluted and cunning improvisation. His name on the billboard in front of the cinema was written larger than the film title and the names of the leading actors. Folks went to the flicks less to see a film than to listen to him. And you were delighted when the cinema van went out on its quirky rounds, its loudspeakers quacking off Tonight don’t miss the sensational Chinese movie Ah Sim the implacable! as narrated by Mon Fa. Listening to Mon Fa is a treat, he of the magic verve. As you appreciated him in Duan the Invincible Lame and Bot the Magic Blind, in Duan the Invincible Lame Versus Bot the Magic Blind or even Duan Singlehanded Conquers the Universe and A Girl’s Body, Kick Butt Assured. You can be sure Mon Fa will be there tonight, live! He improvised at each screening, never the same turns of phrase from one to the next. He’d use his running commentary to criticise the work of municipal employees and annoying behaviour of cops and soldiers. As time went by, you began to give yourself airs. With your big-shot chums you’d pick up actors’ mannerisms and witticisms and repeat them among yourselves no end. We liked film stars that played the parts of adventurers, liked swordfights and gunfights, liked the hero suspended to a chandelier who kicks the ruffians to mush, liked to spy the young couples that groped each other in the auditorium’s dark corners. We liked the titbits of obscene scenes that sometimes the projectionist broadcast on the sly to leave us dazzled. After the film, we went for a swim in the municipal canal or else for an ice cream at our usual parlour, each of us adopting harsh, vulgar, cheeky, stubborn looks, with already the premise of malice as exhibited by ruffians. Each of us was growing up and stuffing himself. In the ice cream parlour each spoke loudly while helping himself to glutinous rice, granulated palm sugar, broken peanuts and flows of fresh milk. Or sometimes the whole gang of us went to the rental bookshop whose old owner sat reading a Chinese adventure story on his own or else hunched over a chessboard with friends his age. This old man was named Peh Weng and it’s this old man who, on a solitary afternoon, taught you how to play chess and little by little explained to you the tricks of the game, so that in the following months and years you were sold on chess as if bewitched and stopped at nothing to challenge one and all to play a game with you. And it’s there you began to no longer be interested in the piles of comics your friends devoured avidly. You got wise to the fact that chess is a much superior entertainment. And it’s through that little old man that you started your acquaintance with white-cover books. Those were books in a parlous state that had obviously gone through very many hands. They were larded with stories of sexual couplings, three or four per volume, and the explicit illustrations left nothing to the imagination : it could be a man coupling with a woman, a man and two women, a woman and two men and sometimes it was such a mix you couldn’t figure who was who. Besides the images of human couplings there were those of couplings between human beings and animals and even of women demonstrating the contracting properties of their vaginas by using them to unstop soda bottles or seize brush or pen and write in English Hello I love you. Some things were so outlandish you couldn’t find the words to explain them to yourself. White-cover books were expensive to rent and the old fogey demanded a stiff deposit and admonished you to above all not damage them or tear off any page either of illustration or of text. Renting those books had to be done furtively. White-cover books were for starters as, soon afterward, even before making it into the fifth form, you found yourself in a brothel. By then you were beginning to have lots of friends and to behave as a ruffian who got constantly into trouble because of frequent brawls and, by the time you were in junior high at the provincial college, you got used to being caned before the flag pole after the collective salute to the colours and prayers – not just because of fights but also for bunking off, smoking fags or joints or being found in possession of white-cover literature. Your decline was swift. You were vicious in an exquisite and prodigal way. You freely enjoyed life with a sad demeanour, like a well-fed cat, the very emblem of your identity. You had lots of close friends older than you who’d been raised by monks, almost all family discards, and you were secretly tickled pink to mix with those rascals to smoke grass on the sly underneath the sermon hall or among the thick bushes under the giant bodhi tree. It was the biggest monastery of the province. The abbot, already very old and tasked besides with the supervision of monks at provincial level, was a monk endowed with a moral authority comparable to that of Venerable Ngeun of Dorn Yai Horm temple. Monk though he was, he was no fool. He expressed himself bluntly with one and all. He had just about everywhere disciples who’d prospered with time and his very first amulets found ready buyers for close to a hundred thousand baht each. Those disciples, once they had children or grandchildren, would in turn come and put them in the good father’s care in the hope that the prodigious ability vested in his venerated whip, thanks to which so many temple boys under his rule had become generals or tycoons or provincial governors in the past, would still be as effective and allow their progeny to similarly succeed. That whip had changed for the better the fate of innumerable temple boys and besides, the atmosphere heavy with incense smells, candle smoke, the metallic rings of the bell that had the horde of dogs hopelessly barking and howling and the pigeons flying off in droves, the scansion of prayers as well as the sacred solemnity of the religious ceremonials ma
de them confident that their children or grandchildren would keep within the traditional bounds that made them proud. But that times had changed a lot didn’t come to their minds. There were hundreds of temple boys, from the cute little things still in nursery school up to the beefy blokes going through vocational or teacher’s training. It was too heavy a burden for the venerable father, who wasn’t getting any younger and was often unwell, so that he could no longer remember who was who and seemed in his immense compassion not to want to. You did think of writing to the old bhikkhu, but you just thought about it; you never wrote a line to him. In his presence, the children were as scared of him as mice are of cats, but as soon as his back was turned, their nature took over and they had a field day, played cards among themselves or went discreetly to practise bodybuilding at the horizontal and parallel bars or smoked grass or spied on the young nuns as they showered. Porn movies in the guise of documentaries on sexual life were shown really very often, as well as open-air movies. They went to see them in droves and climbed over the temple gate when they came back after nightfall. You went with them. And when they went whoring, you went with them. And when they caught diseases you caught them too, sometimes so abominable that you had to contrive to be treated right away, your throat tight with terror. When the older ones became passionate about billiards, so did you, even though you had no mind for it and they fleeced you regularly. And when a football team was formed under the name Temple Children you volunteered to play left-winger. After training and getting used to one another, one of the temple children proclaimed himself team manager and, just for laughs, challenged the other teams, with betting on the side, so that sometimes, when we couldn’t win we started to play dirty, kicking the players of the opposite team or finding a pretext to punch them openly, or, sometimes, they ganged up on us and we had to run away with our tails between our legs. And when your seven or eight temple-boy friends invited you to hitchhike lorries all the way up north to Chiang Mai, you accepted without hesitation. It was the first time in your life you were riding lorries. You’d hardly reached Nakhon Sawan that all wallets were flat, but it was no cause for worry. By eating and sleeping in monasteries along the way, you finally made it to Chiang Mai. And during the hot season of your last year at junior high, the same gang of chums invited you to go south with them all the way to Phuket. After much wandering, you went to the quay of the fishing port and got a job as crewman on a big trawler. Whereas all of your friends had already gone back and it had been three months that you’d enjoyed yourself at sea, you almost decided not to turn back, and when you did go back school had started. You’d never been for so long on the run, so that Daen, who by then was back from Laos, had begun to worry, all the more so as he had no idea where you’d gone, and had undertaken to search for you. You learned later that he’d trailed you down to Phuket but your trawler had already left by the time he arrived. You did think of writing to some of those close friends but never did. From what you’ve been told since, some have taken the cloth for good, some have disappeared, some have become hired hit men, others assiduous junkies and others still, criminals who even now kill time in jail. You went through your high school studies in a college almost at the very bottom of the country because Daen was transferred there overnight at the same time as lots of other commissioned and warrant officers to stop the growth of the separatist movement, then of unprecedented vigour and daring. By then you were a young man who had piled up more than enough vile acts of all kinds and you were waiting lustily for them to burst out… Nartaya! How many years has it been since you died, you pitiful young woman? Before you did, what torments didn’t you suffer? If you were still alive would you still be able to forgive me? Before expiring, did you call out to me in your delirium? Your last letters were full of reproaches, flooded with laments. You wrote to me from your native town, Surat Thani, that big city in the South. As I read it in my room in Bangkok, you were begging, imploring to meet me one last time. Idiot! It sounded as false as the words falling off the mouth of an actress on stage, maybe because you were well and truly dying. I read it hurling insults at you, furious and terrified. And, overcome with bestiality, with the burning tip of my cigarette I perforated each line I read again and again and went on reading the rest of the sentences until the light blue sheet of paper with a flower pattern was riddled with holes and gave out a revolting smell of burning. And of course I never answered your letters. Nineteen seventy-five. Blink a few times so you can see yourself more clearly in the Archita military camp in the deep South, practically on the border. Like all of your new batch of close friends, the adolescent you were had all the characteristics of a ruffian, a scum with a damaged personality, ignorant and weak, stuck-up and cruel, with universal worry in his eyes and formidable, monstrous and puerile destructive impulses, so smug as to deserve kicks up the backside, inviting ridicule with your looks and clothes a la American teenager that were de rigueur with Thai youngsters then: Converse sneakers or Clark leather shoes, Levi’s jeans, cowboy-style light-blue cotton shirts and Hang Ten t-shirts authenticated by their twin footprints at tit level, underground music like Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, and grass, coffee and flicks, billiards and knocking-shops. Our walls were papered over with posters of idols of those days, Tracy Hyde, Olivia Hussey, Jimi Hendrix, Mao Zedong, Jit Phoomisak5, Che Guevara. The Americans were still in Thailand, the student movement was growing, political liquidations were turning endemic, the implacable war going on was tearing people apart between right and left, all sorts of demonstrations and all sorts of counterdemonstrations were happening here, there, all over the country, so that the calendar had almost no room left. Like all your close friends, you perceived and soaked up all of this without any percolation in your cervical cavity, which was only coated with the deposits left by tobacco and hemp, while we remained convinced that school was undeniably the most boring place in the world. The teachers, all as reactionary as they come and of incorrigibly dictatorial nature, seemed to behave as if they knew everything better than we did. Young girls our age discouraged the least advances with their stuck-up airs and left practically no room for approach, with the exception of three or four shameless hussies. And only three or four sissies were able to approach those haughty damsels. In spite of our more or less welcome audacities and weird pranks to attract their attention, they kept their distances and remained stonily indifferent. So that we didn’t dare tell them as we wanted to tell them frankly that we loved them, see, that we wanted them, see. But cowardice and shame put paid to our feelings every time and we contented ourselves with dreaming secretly about them to no avail. They just kept to themselves. Most of them dedicated themselves wholly to their studies, gossiped and nibbled during breaks while talking TV shows and star mags, borrowed light reading from the library, did their homework entirely and presented it on time. As for us, so daring of speech when we were in a group, we became incredibly weak-kneed when we had to walk past them alone. We wrote their names and drew their profiles on the walls of the toilets where we hid for a smoke and under that scribbling in a few words we formulated our desires, platonic or as obscene as could be. And we used those same toilet walls to express all the hate we felt for some teachers and the janitors were very diligent in removing our ravings. We went over the wall and changed our favourite hangouts as soon as we felt they weren’t secure enough. We went for kicking and punching bouts with other gangs, but at times, adjourning all bones of contention temporarily, we joined forces to give a working over to other gangs from other schools. As soon as we saw a blank wall, we pitched in with our graffiti just to let off steam. As soon as we saw a sturdy tree, we pulled out our paper knives and carved its bark with gaping female pudenda or else two hearts pierced by the one arrow. We were eaten up with the envy to grow our hair long and slip into jeans and t-shirts instead of the school uniform we loathed. If we went on studying at all it was for our parents’ or our guardians’ sake, not ours. Sometimes we argued about politics, books, music
or school matters and it invariably ended talking about women. We were beginning to drink in earnest. We smoked grass discriminately. And many were the times when we lost much time and much money (for us, it was always much money) at Chinese ten, rummy or even high-low craps. Down there, in that small old-fashioned town, a river ran through it, a river with slow, turbid white waters. Koleh boats daubed with striking patterns came and went; old men sitting motionless in small barques riding at anchor fished placidly and from time to time came up with the silver coin of a barb two spans long or else a catfish almost the size of my calf. Prayers purred out of the mosque reflected in the current. Under the bridge that spanned the river there was a public park where we went to sit and look at billing and cooing lovers or other passersby and we came up with all manner of scornful comments just to laugh at them uproariously. Sometimes we went to see the Vietnamese who had fled their country in crummy makeshift boats and were detained by the river in front of the police station, each one of them haggard and ashen, some with crucifixes on their chests whose ribs protruded. We communicated with them in broken English and broken French and bought them something to eat to satisfy the sudden impulse that took us to do a good deed. Everything considered, for us the world wasn’t nice so that, when we stumbled onto something good, we looked for ways to degrade it, and what was already bad we made worse – in both cases not intentionally but rather instinctively, it seemed. Once, with three or four friends you caught a train to Hat Yai, meaning primarily to see a film with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman (Towering Inferno, a really trashy movie), and after that we gawped at this and that and bought this and that and dawdled in this town crammed full of smuggled goods and Malaysian tourists until we ran out of dough. At night, we went to the railway junction and, dodging the station staff, sneaked into an empty carriage to sleep and we left the next day riding on the roof of the carriage posing as smugglers. And on another occasion, we hitched rides to the Malaysian border on the Betong side under the pretext of acquiring experience. The town is two hundred kilometres away from where we were. We travelled leisurely, ignoring our watches. We were eager to savour the authentic taste of life. We walked when no car would stop to give us a lift and when we were very tired we simply lay down in the shade of a tree. We all looked fed up when we shared the water and the fags. Once in the Tharn To district of Yala province, we met a group of soldiers who gave us food and let us sleep in their tent. The next morning we forced ourselves to resume our walk, though we had only a few baht left. Most cars wouldn’t stop to take us because they were afraid of being held up and plundered. So we only travelled a few miles at a time whenever a good soul took us over a short distance. We bathed naked in the streams. We pilfered jackfruit and young coconuts in the orchards. And it’s only on the fifth day of travel that we reached our destination as if by some miracle. We went to the border line just so we could piss on it – that’s what we told ourselves. We wanted to go far. We wanted to do cool, daring, risky stuff. After hitchhiking that time, we dreamed big-time about hitchhiking our way round the world. We dreamed of running away from the palinodes of civilisation to go far from it all in some godforsaken place deep in the jungle where we’d be free to be armed, with a jeep to go places and a gang of tough underlings to fell trees or maybe exploit a mine and one day we’d meet a young woman who’d drift into the dust of hostile looks from all these outcasts, but we’d raise above her expectations by proffering to her one of our white handkerchiefs as we could see she was coughing, and it’d be the beginning of a fabulous love story. We wanted to be killers – the sort that make hotels their home, make restaurants their kitchens, have loose women for wives, beer and whisky for religion, and money for god – and our mission would be to shoot down some big shot. We wanted to be professional thieves that prepare their heist and getaway meticulously before helping themselves to a billion in diamonds or some world-famous work of art. We wanted to be dandies, always immaculately dressed womanisers and lovers of flowers and poetry, but reckless enough to rob in broad daylight the headquarters of the bank whose symbol is the lotus flower6. We were fearless. We had lots of energy in stock. But we didn’t know what to do with our lanky arms and legs and the merest pimple threw us into incredible agony. With our school uniforms on, we had to pull on our socks all the time because we were ashamed of the black hair sprouting on our shins. Our already short hair we were forced to cut even shorter when we started the preparatory military course. We were routinely punished for not sticking to regulation dress. Each time, the director rained slaps and cane strokes on us, holding the microphone as close as he could so that the amplified noise of our punishment would give the others a salutary dread of breaching discipline. We gave him all manner of nicknames, Fucking Virus, Bloody Lizard, Fascist Buffalo, Dog Coach. We were wayward. We all got slapped by him time and time again. That bastard, by dint of slaps, got himself promoted. We’d bark out For fuck’s sake, if that bugger thinks he can succeed by hitting children, we’ll be glad to oblige. You were no longer interested in your studies, even though you still did well in some subjects. You were growing up alone and learning alone. On some nights in the old lodgings of the military camp, you revised your lessons and did your homework, but after a while you pushed away books and exercise books, opened your diary and poured your heart into it in the form of sad-sad poems and solitary ranting, sometimes copied from someone else, sometimes improvised or else adapted from the writings of a third party. Things like The flower of love blooms / In other people’s hearts / Which in mine is but sorrow. Things like My heart is well and truly broken. / O my precious, take pity on me. Then you’d sink into a daydream or else turn melancholy, without even being aware that melancholy and indolence are six of one and half a dozen of the other. Then, still sitting still, you rolled your pencil between your fingers and cast an empty glance through the window and, as in the South it rains often or at any rate rain always threatened on those evenings when enthusiasm for work took you, as soon as a few drops fell, lots of hideous and terrifying insects from the wide wild word twirled around your lamp and you, who’ve hated insects ever since you were in your mother’s womb, sighed in exasperation and went on cursing those obstacles that prevented you from being good. You switched off the lamp on your desk reluctantly, pulled the mosquito net out of the rack, unrolled it, lit up at the head of the bed and you read anything that wasn’t a schoolbook until you fell asleep under the thick, warm, comfortable blanket in the sustained drumming of the rain. You practically never thought of your father, your mother or Phraek Narm Daeng. You’d never told anyone anything about your family and never told anyone, not even your most intimate friends, that your father was a cowherd and a pusillanimous killer and your mother a frivolous and affected woman with the soul of a whore. You were no longer really trying to recall your childhood memories – the smoke of the wet-stubble fire surging forth like a watercourse, coming down and flooding the dirty stable that smelled musty that late afternoon of the rainy season, on a day when soft blond-russet sunshine slanted from behind a clutter of clouds as you sat by the window and looked at the fields, the very day you saw a mynah perched on a tree vigorously flutter its wings and feathers and with one foot carefully preen its crest; the huge fields spreading to the confines of the sky; the dense line of sugar palm trees forming a profuse and unequal mass as seen from afar; and the goshawk which knew how to position its body to glide in the air for a long time effortlessly; your father’s cowherd shouts emitted from a throat as powerful as an ox’s gullet and imitating the growl of a tiger; the black cow being struck right between the eyes by a mallet going down on its front legs, bellowing miserably through a mouth crammed with straw, blood gushing out of the mouth and nostrils, and the body skinned, red with blood, lying sideways on its own hide already torn apart; the deafening gunshot in the night of lunar eclipse and your father’s fall and spasms amid exorcist prayers loaded with threats – all of that was nothing but dead memories or mummified carcasses of reality. But there were st
ill moments when you were able to see clearly in your mind your demented father dazed in the middle of the fields under a whistling hot wind and red dust. All around him were bare earthen hillocks that had but trees with stunted branches as tortuous and gnarled as their roots, tufts of singed grass and a ground of worn-down cracks, and in that bareness there stood your father, dressed only in ample loose black trousers, bare-chested, bare-handed, and at times he yelled with a voice as high-pitched as an eagle’s shriek. Sometimes you wondered whether the man you saw in your imagination wasn’t you in the future rather than your father in the past. You kept this kind of thought to yourself and never talked about it, not even to Daen. He and you seldom met, at most once a month, and each time you had little opportunity to talk to each other or no opportunity at all, as most of the time his leaves didn’t last longer than three days. The separatist movement boosted by a vast underground network was at its rashest and clashes were getting so frequent as to become banal. The long-established Chinese communist movement kept growing thanks to the incoherence of Thailand’s and Malaysia’s repressive policies. The names of Hajji Surong, Poh Su, Poh Yeh, Bunlert Lertpreecha, Pattani United Liberation Organisation, Dusongyor and Chin Peng7 kept cropping up when you talked about those problems. But each encounter seemed to make you conscious of your true situation and you promised yourself to behave better. Alas, it soon transpired that such a promise was worthless. On the days you didn’t go to school, you woke up late and lingered in bed. You had nothing much to do. You’d hired someone to wash your clothes and your meals were brought to you in a mess kit. You practised the guitar and the harmonica without the least talent for either. You only remembered a few guitar chords, finding a tutor would’ve been a hassle given that you’re left-handed, and you played a few tunes on the harmonica in barely passable fashion. Then you tried for a while to learn to play the flute by taking a bawdy song as your theme. After not even a couple of verses you finally came to the conclusion that the best as far as you were concerned was to whistle. You readily let the musical instruments gather dust, grabbed a bamboo fishing rod and turned toward the stream behind the camp to go fishing, an activity you found distinctly more entertaining. You used earthworms as bait, or else crabs that were muting or had just muted and whose blood had turned milky white, or else dragonflies. Waiting for a fish to take the bait, you read pocket books by Arjin Panjaphan or ’Rong Wongsawan8 and you read nude mags, happy and trouble-free like a budding Hemingway. The stream was flanked with thick bamboo groves. The sun seeped through branches and leaves in bars of light that swayed to and fro as wind moods dictated. This stream wasn’t very wide. The clear, clean water ran without conviction. You read with teeth clenched, intent on the plot, looked at the sky, looked at the flights of birds or, sometimes, lying down, ate fruit you’d gone and bought at the camp’s market – oranges, rambutan, mangosteen, langsat, longkong , lookoo – ate and spit out the seeds in the current hardly focused on catching any fish. The sunlight made you happy, the belly of the sky made you happy, the ceaseless swish of the bamboo and the insistent squeak of their stems made you happy. It was a happiness you had no words to express yet and you merely moaned and fussed in your heart. You caught snakeheads, climbing perches, catfish and barbs, handsome fishes all, and quite a few each time; in that stream anyone could be a fisherman. So that when you caught enough you went to sell them at the camp’s market and when you didn’t catch many you went and gave them out to neighbours. Near the camp there was a sizable Muslim community with its own atmosphere, patois and colour. Every Saturday morning a market was held there, with its displays of strange goods, clothes, dishes and fruit which called to mind middle-eastern bazaars. The clamours of local parlance melt with the disconcertingly swift lilt of Thai as spoken in the South. Jeans mingled with sarongs. The discordant tunes of blaring western pop songs assaulted the august murmur of prayers. Commercials yelled into mikes raped the mosque’s serenity. Multicoloured parasols mushroomed everywhere, their gaudy colours subdued the sky blue of the pha sin which the young Muslim girls of the Islamic school wrapped round them down to their heels. Threesomes of youngsters riding revved-up Hondas slalomed between barbecue-chicken stalls and hand-drawn carts that sold salim9 or oxtail soup. Old men, pushing men’s bicycles on whose iron carriers unperturbed pig-tailed macaques held court, frantically skulled the handlebars to steer clear of the pickup vans’ tetchy honking. Red dust floated and rose surreptitiously and surreptitiously fell back on containers of rice dishes or khanom jeen10 or on glasses of sweet iced coffee or on quarters of halal beef whose still fresh red meat quavered as if still alive. On house walls there were photographs of buildings in Egypt or Libya or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or else photographs of the solemn and sacred Hajj ceremony, but in almost all coffee shops there were posters of Indian movies. Sunil Dutt, Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendar, Amitabh Bachchan, Saira Banu, Vaijayantimala, Mumtaz, Mehmood – those names of Indian stars were as familiar to you as their faces. That peaceful Muslim community woke up every Saturday and welcomed in the name of progress the high-frequency broadcast of vendors from Hat Yai, Sadao, Padang Besar or even Malaysia. It was at that Saturday market that you bought a couple of small parrots with gay feathers. You fed them seeds and rice grains dipped in water and tried to teach them to speak. For a while you were crazy about them and then you left them behind to spend a few days with friends and they died of hunger. You felt a little guilty as well as irritated and you made amends by buying yourself a yet to be weaned cub tiger cat to rear it too. It stayed with you for a long time and loved you as if you were its mum. Back from school you had it out of its cage and it growled with pleasure. Every night it climbed up to sleep on the same bed as you, nestled against your shoulder, and it liked to nibble for fun at your ear with its little fangs until it fell asleep and purred like a cat. It was still very small and did really look like a kitten but, small as it was, as soon as it saw a duck or a chicken, its tail fluffed, the hair of its spine bristled and it crouched ready to pounce. You called it Cutie Cub. You had to wake up at dawn every day to mix its milk. It smelled foul. Every time you bathed it, it shook pitifully. You took it along when you went fishing. With half-daring half-fearful steps it explored copses and tufts of grass. Sometimes it disappeared god knows where for a long time but as soon as you called out it always came back. One morning you woke up late. It was so famished that when you held out the piece of cotton wool soaked in milk, it bit into it and wouldn’t let go and finally swallowed it. (It was Daen himself who had trained it to such a method because it was too small to lap up the milk on a saucer; each time it did, it sank its nose into the milk and choked.) You tried to pull on the piece of cotton wool but its fangs were too well sunk into it. The cotton wool it swallowed made its paunch swell and it took him three days of torment to die. You were inconsolable for a while and told yourself you’d never buy pet animals again, but then came a fine day when you swapped a fountain pen for a ground squirrel with a Muslim boy who caught rare animals to sell them at the morning market. You fed it rose apples and guavas, jujubes and young coconuts. It was an animal easy to raise. It wasn’t long before it was tame, so that you slipped it into your satchel and took it to school. It stayed with you for quite a long time. At night you shut it into the glass cabinet at the head of your bed. One evening, as soon as you slid the glass pane open, it darted out. You caught it by the tail and the tail remained in your fist. Seemingly desperate at having lost its beautiful bushy tail, it wasted away, hardly ate and finally died too. That was your last pet and you kissed goodbye to the hope of possessing a wonder pet animal or a bird with bright feathers able to speak the human language. But then, one night of the nineteen seventy-five rainy season came to you the determination to return to Phraek Narm Daeng. This dawned on you out of the blue, as if by accident. That rainy season night was unbearable. You kept tossing and turning in the dark. Your memories of Phraek Narm Daeng weren’t dead as you thought and hadn’t shrunk either as you fancied. Actually they were
like a felled giant tree left to sink in the ground whose branches, bark and sap were rotten or pulverulent but whose apparently indestructible heart would keep living forever, even when your flesh was eaten away by worms and your bones disintegrated in the tomb. You were restless. You paced the floor, confused and lost within your suffering, hot to the point of dripping with sweat, chilled to the point of shaking from top to toe, faced with the cruelty of your past. Night after night you clutched a bayonet, stared at it, talked to it, held its sharp top lightly and brought it down onto your face, neck, chest, shoulders and underbelly, while imagining fancifully how much daring you’d need to slash yourself and how much it’d hurt and how much it’d thrill. At times you’d see your mother in your dreams again, her body bathed in perspiration, her hand clutching a knife. You almost never dreamt of your mother when you slept soundly, only when you were between dream and wake. In those dreams you cried and refused to put around your neck the jasmine garland your mother was holding out. You could see your mother’s tears. They looked so authentic you could feel their limpidity – minute, round blobs that little by little changed shape, stretched, ran, spread on your mother’s cheeks, which had the deathly pallor of a mask, as she came and leaned towards you, comforting you, imploring you in her silence to wear the stone-hard, inert, evil garland. You shook your head, sobbing bitterly. You instinctively knew that to wear that garland would be to hang yourself. When you raised your head and looked outside, the panorama of fields, groves, dead trees, bare hillocks with clumps of cacti and euphorbia, rows of sugar palm trees and herds of emaciated cows of Phraek Narm Daeng went by slowly before your eyes like those scenes you saw when you were delirious with fever. And sometimes you dreamt you saw your father as well, a massive, swarthy body in a farmer’s dark or black clothes, shouldering a rifle, one hand holding a dry palm leaf above his head to protect himself from the burning sun. Sometimes he moved noiselessly, furtive like a shadow; sometimes he stood still like a tree. His lips, which never smiled and almost never let out words, were wide open on a shout. Whether it was a shout at the herd or a shout of challenge to the void and solitude stalking him all around, you weren’t sure, but you were perfectly aware that his shout was mute like the scream of a stone ghost out of pain and rejection, and rasping because of the desolation of life. It was a shout vibrating with aggressiveness and menace. That mute’s howling spread over a wasteland of dried-up canals and swamps. You had to pinch yourself hard to imagine where your father was at that time and what his existence was like as he rested, ate, laboured like a slave or was beaten to a pulp or roamed aimlessly, stark raving mad. But his picture in your head faded out like a mirage in heat haze or sometimes was blurred as if there were cobwebs in your eyes. What you felt for him was exactly what you felt for your mother. You couldn’t say whether it was love or hate. Supposing you punished these two, be it only in your mind, you’d feel wrong every time. But if you forgave them, that wouldn’t be right either. Sometimes, when your father and your mother had been out of your mind for a long time and you started thinking of them again, you were astounded at the fact your mother was no longer alive and your father had taken leave of his senses. Daen never talked to you of your parents or of Phraek Narm Daeng, as if he wanted you to forget them, and you’d never asked. You knew he didn’t want you to ask. He’d never told you so in so many words, but you understood instinctively. And in any case Daen and you didn’t talk with each other that often. You merely listened to what he told you occasionally. You only knew that he was stuck on a young woman who taught at the teachers’ training college and was planning to get married. You heard gossip about how he got plastered right, left and centre, and those were spectacular benders each time. He quarrelled with an undercover cop so heatedly that they almost killed each other. He lost big on boxing and cockfighting bets. He played sepak-takroh and played it well, and he had formed a team to take on Muslim players as a way to foster good neighbourly relations. He had danced with a captain’s wife so assiduously that he was put on notice by his superiors as the husband had flown off the handle. He totally abstained from drinking and smoking during the three months of Lent. He’d walk before his men through a jungle larded with mines by the ‘Chinese bandits’, while some officers had soldiers carry them on their shoulders. The jeep he drove overturned in a ditch and the woman who sat by his side was ejected. He, safe and sound, undertook to curse and kick his vehicle for a fairly long while before it dawned on him he should help the woman get out of the mire. He was the oldest lieutenant of his promotion and had been nicknamed ‘paleo-left’, which he received with a fatalistic shrug as he had received with a fatalistic shrug the ‘paleo-sec-left’ nickname that had been his previously. It was that same year that San Pisutworrakhun was transferred along with many commissioned and warrant officers because the situation at the southern border was increasingly worrisome. He didn’t stay in the same quarters as Daen, but in a nearby bungalow because he’d come accompanied by his younger sister. Her name was Nartaya. She was a young girl with big bright eyes and pulpous lips. Her soft, honey-coloured skin denoted excellent health and her white teeth shaped like grains of corn sparkled like pearls, but when she spoke standard Thai she did so with a southern accent. Not just the accent, actually, but some words and turns of phrase as well. She became a mother at the tender age of seventeen by your doing, whereupon you turned away from her and took to your heels. Now, in your dreams, you try to restore her virginity in order to alleviate your fault. You’re deceiving yourself. You’ve urged yourself to erase her from your memory, but you haven’t succeeded. The child in your belly that died before term, was it a girl or a boy? If it were alive, it’d be about eight or nine. I miss you, Nartaya. When I reach out my hand to touch you, there you are slipping away, dissolving as if you’d never existed, as if you were but a dream of my warped and excessively weak soul. Isn’t it you who told me one night If you ever leave me I’ll kill you? Your voice saying this was threatening and your eyes serious. That was indeed a young girl’s cry from the heart uttered in the darkness of despair. That kind of comment sounded like a vindictive threat and at the same time it sounded like a plea. And then there was that other time, the time when you asked me What’s that noise? We sat by the stream, under the bamboo, with the feeling we were emerging from a dream. Gunshots, I answered. Gunshots from the firing range. – I’d like one of ’m bullets to come this way, you let out bitterly, and for it to go right through here. You pointed at your temple. It was at a time when you and I were confronted by an insoluble problem I was the only one to get off scot-free by letting you burn and turn to ashes in its blaze: I turned away from you and took to my heels. I raised my head to look at the sky and thanked the heavenly powers for having kindly provided me with the opportunity to slip away… It was San himself who introduced her to you. Oh, had he only known what you were going to do to his little sister! Cruelty – what you did to her was pure cruelty and you’d deserve to be paid back with equal cruelty… She and you were in situations that weren’t very different in this that each lived alone and had to take care of oneself. San, when he was transferred, fell into Daen’s arms and lost no time partaking in his exploits of all kinds, so that he too wasn’t able to go back to the bungalow except only once in a while. Nartaya must have felt rather lonely. Shortly after her arrival, some female friends came to see her every evening after school and on holidays. She went to bed with the chickens and got up at dawn. Spending nights all alone must have been scary. San, taken up by his various duties, was aware, it seemed, of the danger there was of leaving his sister all by herself. He thus endeavoured to visit her as often as he could, at whatever time. Sometimes he came in the morning, dropped off by some fellow soldier’s car. He talked with her for a while, then left her in haste when someone came to fetch him. Sometimes he came in the evening, driving himself – a filthy jeep driven by a filthy chap. He brought her fruit and kept seated for about ten minutes before leaving at full throttle. Sometimes, to your surprise,
you saw him standing on the terrace of the bungalow in the morning. He shouted hello to you and told you he’d arrived around two in the morning the night before riding pillion on someone’s motorcycle and, in his own words, drunk as a skunk, let me tell you, me boy. San and Nartaya looked so much alike – faces, eyes, smile, and above all the teeth – that you could see at a glance they were brother and sister. If we’re in trouble, we’ll help each other, right? San told you during the dinner Daen had hosted at the officers’ club to celebrate his arrival. It was on that day you met her for the first time. Throughout the meal she did nothing but eye her dinner plate and when you were introduced her hand shook a little. Her reserve as a young woman was obvious. Don’t you think it’s too hot? she told her brother, the only sentence she uttered that day without being asked anything. By then the rain was only beginning to threaten and it wasn’t as muggy as all that. But soon after that day, you often had the opportunity to enter the bungalow where she lived. It was a very dilapidated-looking house, for all its numerous repairs and its being well maintained. San kept complaining about the damage he noticed just about everywhere and swore to God that as soon as the house he was having built was ready he’d move out. It’s through him you learned that the lock of one of the downstairs windows didn’t work, the bolt no longer biting into the frame, and was merely closed to. Though you went to see her at her place often, you didn’t stay long and hardly spoke. You didn’t know what to say to her and she used her reserve both as a breastplate and as a weapon to protect herself and keep you at a distance. You asked a question and she answered, and then silence on both sides. A new question, a new answer, and silence again, so that finally you left, resigned, smiling sheepishly. All of the words you’d prepared to be of use in your conversation with her had evaporated. In the morning, when you each went out to catch the school bus, which stopped in front of the battalion’s headquarters, some five hundred yards away from your places, you always let her walk ahead and followed her at a respectful distance. In late afternoon, when you got out of the vehicle to return home, same thing. A good month went by before the two of you walked side by side. She contributed to your staying longer at home and showing more willingness to study. Late in the evening, you looked out to see if her window was still lit and if she still sat by her desk. Looking through a white lace curtain at a young girl engrossed in arithmetic or writing filled you with both happiness and pain. You were dreaming that if she became your girlfriend you’d attend to her every need, you’d venerate her with all your heart, fulfil her every wish and never ever make her suffer in any way whatsoever – and everything that happened afterwards turned out to be the exact opposite of what you had dreamt. I love her, that’s what you told yourself. You were happy to walk by her side, sometimes under the same umbrella or sometimes drenched the both of you as you’d forgotten to take one. Morning and afternoon you waited to walk with her. The road, not very large and with a row of pines on either side, ran past the second infantry company, the kitchens, which disgorged clouds of smoke almost all the time, the armoured company, the alignment of warrant officers’ dwellings, the swimming pool and the sports ground. The two of you hardly spoke and almost never of what each of you felt. She was indifferent and her behaviour had nothing special you could’ve put by to dream on and embroider at leisure. So that your relationship really looked like that of a brother and sister. Well, wasn’t her big brother behaving with you as if you were a little brother? And when, two or three times, her parents came to see her, didn’t they behave with you as if you were their son? She was in a different school and wasn’t in the same form as you were: she was one year behind. She wasn’t a good student but made up for that weakness through hard work. When you’d become a little closer, she sometimes confided her fascination with the white uniform of nurses. And you, what do you want to be? she asked. – A singer, you answered jokingly. – How childish of you! I’m more mature than you, even though you’re older than me, she said quite without boasting. – If you become a nurse, you changed your tactics, then I’ll be a patient. What a shoddy way of courting! She laughed and said, as if talking to herself, Maybe I’ll never get married. I’ll remain a virgin dressed in white all my life, a lotus in my folded hands. – In that case, you said, rather perplexed by her notion, why not become a nun ? – No way, she answered. If I must be a nun, then I want to be nothing less than a bhikkhuni. I can’t understand why young girls no longer dream of becoming bhikkhuni. – Yeah, right… You were dubious. A bhikkhuni – a female ascetic… Dreaming to be an ascetic… The quaint fancies of a young girl… – I only remember that Vasitthi11 was one, you told her, except that she was too beautiful to be an ascetic. – The only thing I know is that the first ascetic was Prajapati Gotami, the Buddha’s aunt who raised him when he was little, but even the Buddha hesitated before allowing her to take the habit, she said. – And the last one, then ? you asked. – I don’t know, she answered, looking suddenly at a loss. I really don’t know. She liked white, dreamed of having a life whiter than white. She had a passion for flowers and her knowledge of real and artificial flowers was above average. She loved the whole repertoire of The Impossible and fancied the idea of being Donny Osmond’s girlfriend, and she could sing several songs of The Carpenters and Ann Murray. Besides, she loved children, loved to play with children, girls and boys indifferently. Later, when you’d become more intimate, sometimes, while strolling together, she’d point out such and such a kid and enthuse Oh isn’t he cute! Delightful! Adorable! and made as if she was surprised you didn’t feel for children as she felt. You’d look down on her rather scornfully while telling yourself Is that skirt mad or what? Furthermore, she went through her prayers before going to bed and had the gall to tell you to do likewise, arguing that You feel much better afterwards, you’ll see… Nartaya, you who are so far away, does your life in death make you happy? Are your broken dreams tormenting you? I try in a daze to catch hold of you in the void that keeps us apart in space as well as in time. I think of you in sorrow, regret what I’ve done, ceaselessly implore your forgiveness and confess my past fault so that I might obtain what I miss most, that is, the will to live. I’m here. The curtain of fog tonight is increasingly thick and heavy, soaking me through. The stars are weeping light as candles sweat out tears. The blackness of the night deepens. Yellowed dead leaves fall, drift and whirl before kissing the ground. Yellowed dead leaves fall… One day of the end of the cold season, you’d just taken a shower. Wearing a light-blue flower-patterned sarong, a towel wrapped over your shoulders, you closed the window out of fear of my eyes. Catcalls and shouts came to us from afar. There must’ve been a football match at the sports ground. You and I were but children, neither of us clever enough… You perceived her being a young girl as a challenge. You looked at her furtively in those moments when she let herself go. You listened carefully to what she said. You did everything she asked of you to help – be it going to buy food or some sweets, writing her schoolbook covers in a decorative hand or tidying up her place, doing the cleaning and cutting the grass around the bungalow, or else catching butterflies, and those cockroaches that disgust you, and frogs for her experiments in Biology. You shut up when she ordered you to shut up. You spoke when she ordered you to speak. You lost yourself in sundry daydreams – the both of you lost in the jungle like Raphin Phraiwan and Darrin Worrarit and living in the virgin forest like Tarzan and Jane; or else on a cruise and the ship breaks down for some unstoppable reason and the only survivors are her and you; after an exhausting struggle in waters full of dangers you manage to set foot on a desert island that has but troops of monkeys and flocks of parrots, coconut trees by the thousands and pellucid brooks, and your pathetic imagination went as far as inviting her to climb the mountain behind your hut and of course in your imagination she accepted and at one point during the climb she swooned in fright at the sight of a cobra and it was up to you to revive her and once she was conscious again you had to comfort her and give her heart. You were constantly a
sking yourself what it is exactly being a young girl. Would you ever have the opportunity to find out? The tone of voice, the way to speak, the hands, the tapered fingers, the arms, the legs, the lips, all of the body and soul that merge to form a young girl, all of that was absolutely disconcerting. At some of those moments when you were alone with her, you’d have liked the world to be deserted so that, after a decent interval of solitude, you’d dare to go and take her in your arms, kiss her, do to her all that you felt like doing to feel her chest quake, her heart beat hard and her breath falter. You kept revolving around the hope that, if you sat beside her and enfolded her tenderly in your arms and laid your chin on her head as you’d seen on so many film posters, you’d be deliriously happy, or else stroke her hair slowly and as delicately as the words you’d heard in those corny tunes that were on everybody’s lips, and it’d give rise to ever so tender, noble and warm feelings. Alone with her in her bungalow, you wished for rain to fall in buckets so that you couldn’t go back home, but not once did the rain fall hard enough. When you were alone together late at night, you wished for a power outage, but electricity never obliged. But when she began to be more intimate with you, she started to intimidate you in many ways, first by contradicting you flatly when she didn’t agree and asserting her opinion, which she thought was more correct, you know. She threatened to report to Daen that you smoked and played truant, said derisively you were going out with a colonel’s daughter who was tubby and had pimples all over her face, and spoke with tremors in her voice of some young chaps that were hot on her tail. And it was a bit much when she came to entreat you to pass on a letter to one of those suitors by specifying only that it was on behalf of a woman. You were beginning to run out of patience and dragged her like a millstone in your mind. You went to confide your gloom to your mates; those louses let out a stream of jeers and laughed like drains. None of them took your worries seriously. You avenged yourself of her by deriding her southern accent and barbarisms, such as saying ya nat when she meant sapparot (pineapple) or farang (guava) when she meant chompoo (rose apple) and furthermore called money kauri, said bao (servant) for little brother and khangkhoot for suea dam (panther). To which she retorted that everybody they don’t speak proper, including ministers. You told her ghost stories with the poker face you do so well and with a creepy voice, and she swore to God that no matter what you said she wasn’t scared. You insisted on the rundown state of the bungalow she lived in, saying it had been built during the second world war or even earlier, and stressed how many times it had been left vacant and how many times its occupants had died and how many times they’d been coming back to the place where they used to live. She retorted that the house where you lived, well, it’s almost as old, so you can talk. And as a bonus she paid you back in your own coin by saying that according to the local folk, in the bungalow where you lived, four or five years before you moved in, a woman about to give birth had hanged herself because her husband had taken a mistress. And in the dead of night, her threats and the stories you told her scared you so much you almost couldn’t find sleep. There were times when you didn’t talk to her for days on end. Sometimes you didn’t feel like going back home and spent the night at some friend’s or other for her to be scared, as you were her nearest neighbour. Finally, one day, she admitted she was scared to the point of having recurrent nightmares and she strictly forbade you to tell her ghost stories ever again. And she began to do things to please you as an elder sister would for her little brother, but this kind of attitude got on your nerves. You opened your heart to your mates about what to do so the woman you love knows you love her and asked for their advice. Those blackguards told you Tell her frankly ‘I love you’; some told you Find yourself a matchmaker; some told you Buy her some flowers and see; some told you Why don’t you find out from a bitch’s rump?; some told you The best is to write her a love letter; and there was even one – that shit Tong – to instruct peremptorily Rape her at the first opportunity. And it was that piece of advice that best fitted what you wanted. You’d been thinking about that for quite a while, without even admitting it to yourself. Night after night that was what you were ruminating. And then it happened on a night of the beginning of the cold season that you found yourself fully awake in the dark without being able to hold yourself tight to go back to sleep as you tossed and turned fitfully. It was a queer night that even today remains sunk in the skin of your memory like a stubborn tick. You were thinking about her, thinking about going to see her, but you were afraid she wouldn’t be alone. That night before going to sleep you’d tried to fight against sleep for a long time, pricking up your ears for some car noise coming from her bungalow, a car San would drive or get a lift in. But then you drifted into sleep for a few hours, which was most unfortunate, inasmuch as that night you’d taken the firm resolution to enter her place come what may. You’d duly warned yourself you’d be better off giving that caper up. But you couldn’t get the window with the broken bolt out of your mind. It was over there like an invitation to the realm of libido, as dim as a big cat’s den and practically within reach. That kitchen window downstairs in her house was within the realm of your libido. Actually, you could foresee it was more likely to be the access to a bitter experience, but by then you no longer had enough self-restraint. You’d opened and closed that window often enough yourself to know how to go about it. It was waiting for you to open and close it one more time. An old window in an old house in the dead of night… You got out of bed and went downstairs like a sleepwalker caught in a nightmare. Your goddamn heart was ticking harder and harder as you went down each cold step. You were telling yourself that at the bottom of the stairs you’d stop and then turn round and walk back up again. You wouldn’t allow yourself to go any further, by not a single step. But once you found yourself there, you began to pace the floor of the downstairs room pretending to ask yourself if it wouldn’t be better to drink a glass of cold water and find something to read for a while before you went back up. Yet you did none of this. You didn’t even turn on the light. Your eyes shone in the dark like the eyes of a big cat. Half-bravely and half-scared to death, you opened the back door. A puff of cold wind slapped you in the face. The flatland at the foothills of the mountain, strewn with clumps of grass and trees, stretched peacefully in the moonlight. Beyond it there was the sooty green of the jungle and rubber-tree plantations and the mountain on whose summit a stupa held the ashes of soldiers fallen during the landing of the Japanese expeditionary corps. You went out and closed the door behind you. Your feet led you straight to her bungalow without almost your realising it through the stillness and a diffuse hail of dewdrops. That night the moon gave forth fine gentle light and the remains of the poet in you emerged from their torpor only to go back to slumber forthwith. From somewhere came to you the faint fragrance of night flowers wafting from the bushes in front of her place. It was a stirring perfume, magical, bewitching even. You stopped and stood still for a moment like a whelp learning its hunting grounds and sniffing out the musk of a prey. You took a deep breath of the chilly air of this month of November into your burning chest, spread out your arms to the utmost and looked at the moon as if about to bay to smother a suffering you didn’t understand. The lane in front of the bungalow was deserted. There were only the shadows of pine trees that swayed at times, offering the shelter of their coolness. In front of the arsenal, a solitary soldier mounted guard, stiff and mute as a statue. A gust of wind came to ruffle the leaves that glimmered with moonlight. You resumed your progression in the shadow of the mango, jackfruit and Indian almond trees that grew in chaos all around and you went up to the ixora thickets and the coconut grove whose every tree towered up slender against the sky, trunk askew, so that it took macaques to pick its nuts, walked along the reservoir – a ring of concrete sunk into the ground, with a cement rim where to do the washing and take showers, it was covered with moss and exuberant weeds where oodles of pit vipers were probably concealed – and eventually came to a stop in front of the wi
ndow with the broken bolt, under the taut threads of self-control, taut and much thinner than cobweb filaments, and you realised you could be seen even from afar. The soldier on guard at the arsenal or any chance passerby could see you if you kept hesitating. So that you hastened to open the window with hands that shook. It didn’t come open easily as you thought. On the contrary, it seemed it wasn’t going to open at all, for all your incantations. You slipped your fingers between window and frame and then, in vexation, pulled with all your might. The screech of wood against wood resounded alarmingly in the chilled seclusion of the night – maybe much farther than you expected. You took fright. That noise similar to a yell of extreme pain, if deep-sleeper San heard it, you wouldn’t be surprised if he woke up. For all you knew, San lying on his bed was waiting for you. Maybe he’d come back for the night during those hours you’d drifted into sleep. But you were so close to keeling over and plunging into darkness that even the most powerful torch would have failed to provide you with light – a darkness as dark as the darkest part of the night. You hurriedly climbed over the windowsill with burglar precautions and pulled the hinged section back in place, trying to make as little noise as possible. Right then a sound of metal hitting metal resounded three times, each beat so disconsolate that it sounded like a sad response to whatever was going on,12 its vibrations powerful enough to intensify your burning sense of guilt. You had to hastily stuff your mind with crushed ice for its biting chill to rub off on your chest. Your next impression was mighty weird. You stood on your tod in the downstairs room of this old house under poor neon light falling from the ceiling through a thin filter of cobwebs. Three or four mayflies twirled listlessly around the tube and a stock-still, tense house lizard ready to gobble these bugs was now shifting its attention away from its preys as if to ask you what brought you here this time of night. You squinted and answered it by raising to it a face blazing with pain. Sleepwalker-walkerwalker, I’m a sleepwalker. That’s right: you felt like you were raving in your sleep. If San asked you why you were there, you’d answer him Sleepwalking as well. You were wrung too taut by the risks you were taking. You were too excited and that’s why your head felt heavy and your brain was muddled, going as far as fantasising you had a nosebleed. Though you’d entered the kitchen many times, you would’ve sworn you’d never set foot in it. Maybe it was someone else’s kitchen somewhere else. Table, plates, glasses, knives and forks, everything was put away neatly at the usual place – the white fridge on its white stand, the military boots and the bootstraps to keep the trousers taut, the polish and the brush in the farthest corner of the room, with close by, haphazardly, a backpack, a portable rice cooker and a military belt. The calendar with the picture of Thanyarat Lo-hanan smiling what she took to be her best smile was still hanging on the wall at the same place. The new maths book under the plastic wrapping of whose cover Nartaya had inserted a picture of David Cassidy was the same as the one you usually saw her with. The white mug with the Snoopy cartoon was the same, bearing the same aphorism: Love turns Monday mornings into Friday afternoons. Yet, even the too clean larder which you’d inspected and from which you’d taken the liberty to help yourself, the washing-up liquid and even the can of ddt, everything looked different. Those things seemed to be observing you with hostility and seemed to be ready to shout or do whatever it took to block your way. Yesterday’s newspaper and a novel for young girls placed on the third step of the stairs were ready to let fly at you like bats. So that you felt like saying sorry, sorry to all those things you were disturbing, and then turning round and leaving, but your feet made you climb the stairs with utmost circumspection. She slept in the biggest room on the first floor and, if her brother was back, he’d also be sleeping in that room, which had a night-blue curtain as a partition wall. You’d gone into that room only twice, once to help her tidy up and on another occasion when San had told you to go up to see pictures of him and of Daen he had taken and kept in a big album (maybe to show you how close he and Daen were). The door of the room faced the stairs on the landing. That night it was wide open as if to welcome you. Was it open like this every night or was it a trap?