The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  Life would’ve been embellished and fresh as a picture on a New Year postcard. You grappled with the work pending, started to research and write dissertations, to consult those books the professors had already glossed and those books the professors had yet to do the groundwork on, to follow lectures without dithering any longer, but before you left the U it was almost nine p.m. because you were so taken up with chess that sometimes you only saw black and white squares when you closed your eyes, a condition you called chess meditation, or else found yourself newspapers or magazines to read in the library. But there were some days when you forgot yourself playing ping-pong until you were drenched in sweat, so that Darreit often had to implore you to come home earlier because she was afraid of ghosts.

  death merely says hello

  Woman was God’s second mistake.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

  As everything was returning to normal, you received a money order from Daen. Actually, this was nothing unusual. Daen sent you a postal order every month, which reached you at the latest on the seventh of the month, assorted with a letter in which he asked how you were doing, urged you to be serious in your studies and sometimes told you what happened in the military camp where you’d lived. And in the letter you received in early September, Daen wrote to you that Nartaya Pisutworrakhun was dead. Nartaya was dead. Dead in her native house upcountry. She’d come back from Bangkok grievously ill, had taken to bed and some two weeks later had died. San had come back from the cremation a few days earlier. That’s what Daen was writing to you and all you found to tell yourself then was, No wonder I didn’t receive any more letters from her. Your next reaction was fear, a really bad scare, because her attempt to follow you to Bangkok had been nothing but a last appeal, the panicked gesture of someone at death’s door. Oh, it was indeed true she’d revealed nothing of her fate to her brother and she hadn’t told the relative at whose house she stayed in Bangkok that she’d come to meet a bastard. Before coming to Bangkok, she must’ve fought against herself until she was too weak and ended up losing, just as she’d fought against herself not to answer your first four letters and ended up losing. What a strange girl she was! She hadn’t told anyone of her torments because she feared that by doing so she’d harm you. She’d always done her best. She’d lost everything. She’d been scared, worried, and had seemed to progressively lose all control over herself even though she had the use of all her mental faculties. She must’ve sought the comfort of the plasticine to the very last minute before she passed away. Her life couldn’t go on because of the battering she’d received and she must’ve been aware of it and resigned to the unavoidable. And many a time must she have tried to grab death rather than wait for death to grab her. She’d died because she no longer wanted to live. She must’ve wasted away, wilted, emaciated to the point of having arms and fingers wrinkled, and dry as splinters, with no longer the will to eat or sleep, letting the flame of life flicker and slowly go out in unspeakable suffering. Nevertheless, she’d struggled to come to see you while you were getting drunk on entertainment, frolicking in happiness like a mad colt, burrowing into happiness like an insect into pollen oblivious of death, sinking into happiness, choking on happiness, plummeting ever deeper into happiness. Although you should’ve taken responsibility for Nartaya’s bleeding and rotten uterus, you only cared about fornicating with Darreit Waeojan. Shame fell on you and numbed your face. But soon the sense of reality repulsed your guilt feelings. You read the letter again, as you were afraid your eyes had betrayed you. Not at all: it was an ordinary letter which announced a death in ordinary terms, devoid of emotion like a news item in a newspaper. Were there other signs of danger? None. None whatsoever. But then, damn it, it meant you were out of the woods! You’d achieved victory by some miracle and you found yourself white as white can be, whereas before through your own stupidity you were about to blunder badly. Your life was still beautiful and your freedom complete – a beautiful life that many times lately Nartaya had made not beautiful at all. Surprise turned into a blunt bewilderment that overwhelmed your senses for a while. How was it possible? You were no longer the accused. The last proof, Nartaya herself, death had destroyed. The secret remained secret. If anyone was in the know, it could only be you and it was unthinkable you’d reveal your villainy to anyone. Stark raving mad though you could be all too often, it was out of the question for you to exhibit your turpitudes in public, given that you were always boasting about your minor virtues. The slipknot of worry had been taken away. The punishing vice of reality that crushed your temples had gone too. A weak being must die. This world is a world made for the strong only. After an extremely harsh struggle, after fierce resistance to pressures so intense that madness threatened, after aeons of crushing crises, finally the name of the winner had been proclaimed. What follows a victory if not its celebration? You hastened to cash in the money order and left the U as if treading on air. The celebration had to match the circumstances: not too exuberant to avoid being a source of gossip. The September sun was scalding. A heap of clouds forecast imminent rain. You lit a cigarette and inhaled avidly. A bit of paper of the unfiltered Gold City stuck to your lip and you spit it out in a rather uncouth way. You walked along the football field covered with lush grass, along the tennis court, where female students were seriously ‘knocking down the wall’ and you gawked at the legs and haunches of each of these broads with a practised eye, walked past the classical music section, where someone was playing the piano, past the row of benches under the yellow flame trees, where young couples here and there were fawning on each other. Your heart banged away with an unusual beat like a barbaric drum and you still had the letter in your hand as if it was the very proof of your victory. You walked as one talks in one’s sleep. You walked as if in a dream without realising it. The throng of students massed in front of the cooperative annoyed you, so that when you left the precinct of the university and entered the nearest restaurant, instead of ordering just one bottle of beer, you ordered two at a time, threw the content of the first over your head, chest and back for this almost frozen beer to put out the blaze of your senses, then raised the second to your lips and drank greedily as you wanted to be drunk as soon as possible, and as the beer you drank wasn’t enough to achieve your purpose, you ordered two more and forced yourself to gulp them down as if you wanted to acquire colossal strength to thunder against the clouds pregnant with rain and dissipate the suffocating heat of the approaching midday in a single roar. When you got up after paying the bill, you found yourself in an advanced state of swaying, as after all you were still a rookie in matters of booze. You went out and hailed a taxi with the alternating gestures of a seasoned hitchhiker and quick-tempered cop. A cab stopped for you. You hurriedly explained your destination in detail and you hadn’t been sitting in the taxi five minutes, your head lolling and arms and legs sprawled out, when you slipped into the state you wished, that is, forgetting all and being forgotten by all. Forgetting some dead young girl, forgotten by the very same dead young girl. And soon, caught in the opiate smoke of a delicious somnolence, you fell asleep. That was a fact you’d remember later with pain and shame, because as you slept in the taxi you kept holding firmly in your hand the letter in the same way as Nartaya must’ve kept holding in her hand the plasticine even into her coffin, as if you’d wanted to proclaim to the face of the world that you were innocent. Once in front of your house, the driver woke you up, which made you raise you head and ask What’s up? An earthquake? You got out and stood swaying in the middle of the road without quite realising it was raining by then and, under the downpour, you shouted in English at the driver whose car was jolting along the now flooded potholed road, Long live taxi drivers! You entered the house and just collapsed asleep on the rickety table of the ground floor. When you woke up it was already dusk. An army of Bangkok mosquitoes whose worldwide reputation is well established was mobilising its commandos to harass you with a zaniness that brought to mind the heroic deeds of kamikazes durin
g the Pacific war. Darreit wasn’t back yet. You shook your head to dispel your drowsiness and started to swear when you realised you still held in your fist the letter announcing Nartaya’s death. It was all crumpled and torn, having caught the rain, and the ink had run, so that it was almost unreadable. You slut, you cursed it. That damn thing followed me as if it was alive, as if it wanted to haunt me. You tore it up with your teeth as a primate would raw meat again and again and spit out the bits one by one for them to suffer the rain once again. Nevertheless, the words saying that Nartaya was dead were etched deep on the tablets of your memory like the inscription on a stele. You looked at the pelting rain, appalled, depressed, ashamed, feeling guilty and sloshed. A woman had had to bear the worst sufferings and die because of you, among a sucker’s idle daydreams of your life as a young man, among the grosgrain, coarse truths of your life as a young man, among a moron’s shallow and pretty fantasies of your life as a young man, which a black rash inflicted in a rage now covered over. And you merely asked yourself in a daze – less a question, actually, than a distraught musing requiring no answer – why she’d had to die. You writhed with internalised suffering, your face screwed up as if you were going to weep. You knew you had to be strong. You couldn’t show any weakness. You mustn’t be stupid and you had to stop all of your bullshit to not bay at the moon like a dog. You had to forbid yourself to do what your impulsive mood prompted you to, which was to write to San to confess, to tell him it was you who were the cause of Nartaya’s death, which you almost did there and then. A long letter explaining in detail all you’d done, written at a stroke, sent registered as well, after which you’d go on a trip. The rest of your days would be nothing but aimless wandering. But then you tore that letter in your head and threw it away as if for real. Night after night afterwards you couldn’t find sleep and you almost squeezed out the frustrations of all kinds you’d accumulated like puss out of a malignant wound by explaining to Darreit how evil you were. On some nights you found yourself standing on the balcony, indifferent even to the rain that lashed and drenched you from top to toe and to the sky that roared in furious madness, as if you wished for death. You were beginning to be a bit batty at the time and you soon got used to that aberration. A voice inside you beseeched in distress Nartaya, Nartaya, forgive me, forgive me. You heard that doleful voice and found to it a resonance as beautiful and uncanny as a funeral chant, as an ode to death. You were beginning to understand confusedly why we struggle every which way, tumble about every which way, lament every which way under the spell of the ‘Pharn Yak’ exorcising chant. On some nights the sky in mourning shed tears; under the drizzle, batrachians croaked, insects droned. You felt the icy wind of death constantly on your body, so you couldn’t sleep a wink. You looked downcast and harrowed as if you couldn’t drive Nartaya out of your mind. Demons help us! Someone dies: nothing to do with the fake deaths in the films you’d seen or in the novels you’d read. Demons help us! Why did you still feel so much pain, to the point that your chest was like a field racked with deep cracks? She’d come to the world one day, gentle and dignified like a princess in a fairy tale, had grown under mum and dad’s loving protection, had given happiness to her dear and near and borne their hopes – such a beautiful life, such a tenuous life; something sacred and precious, something able to blossom in all directions without limits just like the rays of the sun. A life, a soul, more marvellous than any marvel. The life of a single child is more marvellous than all the marvels of the world. The birth of a life has more meaning than the pyramids of Egypt, than Angkor itself. Biology has the same essence as poetry. Oh, at the time you didn’t know it yet, you didn’t understand it yet. You ached by instinct rather, and that instinct, in any case, you should be thankful for. Besides, you lacked words to express what you felt and only knew you were guilty and merely wove the net of your perceived culpability to wrap yourself in it. Nartaya’s death was for you a shocking experience which almost turned you into an old man… Goodbye, pure and innocent dreams – the dream to be a virgin, the dream to be an ascetic. Goodbye Nartaya. Can you see me, half-sitting halfreclining, chin against chest, eyes closed like the dead, in the desolate solitude of a Northern hamlet open to icy winds, fog and moonlight – the place I’ve selected to hold my own funeral. The cruellest death is death in desolate solitude. I’m defying death to see what will happen and I know death is glad to take up the challenge. Can you hear my voice? Can you see the evolution of my aberrant and confused feelings? That’s me, the loser who deserves the loss, the culprit who deserves the rod. I understand it’s your decision to no longer live that had you accept your defeat and I myself had a part in that decision. I didn’t answer your letters. I fled like a coward even though I’ve enough good sense to admit that, had we been calm and circumspect enough, we could no doubt have found a better solution. You were too young. You were afraid. You panicked. You didn’t understand at all what you were confronted with. You couldn’t control yourself. Oh, did you kill yourself? That question haunts me so much. But probably not. Probably I’m overestimating your tendency to selfpunishment. I only know you died because you no longer wanted to live, that’s all… Do tell them what happened to you after that. You’ve been nurturing your guilty feelings for far too long. You moron! You must remember what happened to you. And do tell them how you were paid back, interest and principal. You do remember. You must remember. Don’t pretend to be amnesic, as in reality if you don’t remember it’s because you don’t want to. They aren’t really curious to know how you’ll die a violent death, where or why, because they’re reduced to silence, because you reduce them to silence, and because your memories are the spoiled memories of someone about to die. But because of their very indifference to you, you must find a means to take your revenge on them, to hurt their feelings and, by the same token, hurt yourself as well. Ah, you’re tired. You breathe feebly as if you were exhaling your last breath. Your face is a puzzle of wrinkles. You’re an old man curled up like an old baby in the old womb of old-age solitude. You can’t stand the aggression of your memories, memories similar to big cats in a dim cage that are shaking the rails to be set free, pulling on their rustsoiled chains to be free, that are seething with resentment, roaring so much that the earth shakes in liquid waves to be free. Your memories are now beyond your control and are your enemies. Your memories are at times like panthers, at times like lions, at times like buffalos, at times like cows, at times like venomous snakes, at times like crocodiles, at times like dogs. Rabid dogs. Vindictive memories, memories of a criminal, memories imponderable like the shadow of a lapsed soul, memories at times heavy with the weight of the whole world. The best is to liberate those memories and follow them. Who knows? Maybe they’ll go back where they started from. Back into their home, their grotto, their lair. Let them go, just let them go. Nothing is easier. And then follow them, watch them. Nartaya was dead and you couldn’t help feeling hurt every time you thought of her death. San was still alive somewhere or maybe he was dead, you didn’t know. But you were angry and ashamed with yourself to have caused his sister’s death. And what you did was to run away into the world of emotional adventures, with books, chess, friends and women, booze-ups sometimes and travels as well, to forget that Nartaya’s death was irremediable. You still attended lectures, you went back home every day, but no longer at a fixed time, and increasingly late. More than ten days after you learned of Nartaya’s death, you found yourself confronted with a new event, which was actually ancient history but reached a degree of violence you’d never have imagined. It was a very ordinary day which began in a very ordinary way and went on in a very ordinary way with a light drizzle which turned Bangkok so wet, soiled and muddy it was annoying. After class, you loitered talking with a female friend for quite a while and she took you to listen to Beethoven’s Sixth at the music department, which you did not for Beethoven but because she sat next to you. You were in no mood to listen to pure music of that kind and you hardly enjoyed it. Before you left her, it was dark.
You parted at the bus stop after walking side by side under the same umbrella (hers) and as you walked you had lewd thoughts about her and even after you’d parted you kept on having them, whereas she kept you company as a friend who, everything considered, was not particularly close. When you got out of the bus it was already very late. You entered the street leading to your house, which was five or six hundred yards away. Darreit must be waiting for you there, probably unhappy that you were late, you told yourself, and you’d better find yourself an excuse of some kind. She must be lying on the bed reading a novel for women. Maybe she’d taken a shower and would already be in her nightdress. Songs were wafting out from some lit-up houses and there was also a distinctive noise of backwash. The foliage above the fences was saturated with raindrops which drenched you when you hit a branch as you walked by. It was drizzling on and the sky promised a downpour. You pressed your books against your chest and hurried amid a ruction of rowdy crickets. A smell of rot floated up from the gutters. A ricefield crab come out of nowhere hobbled near a rubbish bin. You even stopped to look at it for a moment, surprised to meet a ricefield crab in Bangkok. You’d forgotten to tell yourself you were in the outskirts of town, and you still remember that when you pushed it with the tip of your sandal, it reared its claws, and you also remember it was drooling rainbow bubbles like suds from some washing powder. You turned it over on its back and knew then it was a male and you gave it a little smile. Some of the lamps along the street were off and those that were lit were assailed by swarms of bugs. The sky was dark, starless, moonless. Far in the soggy open country, fishermen’s lamps flickered. It was a cosy night which was going to give blanket and bed extra meaning. You weren’t aware whether there was anyone walking before or after you. On the puddle-riddled road from time to time a car would pass, which made you run up and jump to avoid being spattered as it whooshed past. You could see the fine hatching of the rain in the headlight beams as the car got away and, at one time, a posse of mosquitoes began to drone over your head and you had to whirl your arms about to chase them. But when you turned into the path that led to your rented house, you started in bewilderment as you could see not a single light in the house was lit. You hurried on, almost running. Not a light, no song on the radio which Darreit was in the habit of turning rather loud to keep her company when she was alone. You felt a rush of anger at yourself for coming back home so late. A young woman all alone in a house. Had something happened? Those human louses that bum around the motorbiketaxi stand, maybe they’d been waiting for such an opportunity for several nights and had found it tonight. You broke into a run. Thunder rumbled in your back as if to unnerve you. Passing in front of the three, longvacant little houses nearest to yours, their foreground taken over by grasses and a dense tangle of creepers and wild cannas, your anxiety grew all the more and you threw yourself into the darkness of an event you didn’t want to anticipate. Darreit was in no way able to defend herself if attacked. You thought about the public phone booth that stood two electricity poles away and didn’t work and stank of mould and piss, and about the neighbours, all minding their own business, and you even saw in your mind the headline and her picture in the papers. The white latticed wooden gate was wide open. You stopped there. You observed the house and its narrow surroundings steeped in darkness. You called her two or three times as you rushed to the entrance at the sound of a scuffle followed by a strangled shout from Darreit, Stay away, don’t come in! What happened next was, in short, rather natural: your head came into contact with something that crashed into you full-force and almost knocked you senseless. The books you carried went flying as your body collapsed on the ground. You had the impression of dreaming with open eyes; you had the impression of being dead while still alive. Two or three persons stood and moved like shadows around you, and feet and fists pummelled your body, your face, your arms, your legs without discrimination or restraint.