The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  You didn’t even have time to shout, and they said nothing. Nagging pain and the smell of blood filling your nose seemed to keep you conscious rather than make you swoon. The soggy ground on which your body flipped over, huddled up or struggled wildly was rocking as if under an earthquake. You tried to get up, tried to swear, tried to protect yourself, even tried to fight, but there was nothing you could do at all. The rusty taste of blood filled your mouth, increasingly pronounced. Your clearest thought at that moment was that those scum must’ve already sorted Darreit out and it was a thought that gave you unbearable pain. When you tried with great difficulty to move, a leaden foot on one side or another or several feet swung to smash you, to reduce you to a pulp. Your eyes saw lightning strikes in the dark. Your skull weighed tons. Your smashed-up face was all crooked. You had to spare your moves and ended up no longer moving, overcome. You panted as a beast at last brought to heel. You let two of the men drag you to the cement area of the house. A lamp lit up on the ground floor, projecting a dim light. Your feet dragged and bounced on the cement all along and when they released you your body flopped down and merely tried to get on its knees and shake its dangling head. You didn’t understand what was happening to you. The next moment unbearable terror seized you at the thought that that was the end for you. You grabbed an empty beer bottle that lied there and, with a weak and bruised hand, undertook to smash it to turn it into a weapon. Instantly a massive body got close and bent over to snatch it from you, but as you clung to it with the prodigious strength of someone paralysed by the fear of death, a foot of that massive body stomped on your wrist and hand, which drew a strangled groan out of you, and you had a most clear vision of broken bones and nails turned blue with coagulated blood. (Luckily enough it was the right arm, as you were unable to use it for nearly a month.) All you heard was the clink of the beer bottle rolling out of reach like the last hope of a loser, and then Darreit’s desperate sobs. Another lamp lit up. It was a light on the upper floor whose switch was by the doorjamb. You perceived that light even though you kept your eyes closed, just as you perceived the blood in your nostrils which now dripped slowly to your mouth before falling onto the ground. And what followed was Darreit’s intermittent sobbing and then there was nothing but silence. You raised your head and looked around, saw Darreit standing beside a man in his late forties, tall, deathly pale, a spare line of moustache over his lips. His grey hair was streaked with silver and his face had the impassivity of one who controls himself well. There were another four men standing around. You were beginning to understand slowly and arduously that these individuals were not pathological criminals but Darreit’s father and his hired hands, characters as you thought only existed in detective stories you scorned. You tried once again to get up using your hands to lean on the wall and you had to do it several times before you managed to stand. But even then your body was folded forward like a TB sufferer coughing his heart out and your head dangled under its weight of pain. Your misty eyes looked at the few drops of blood on the cement that had fallen from your nose and mouth and saw the mud that soiled your favourite jeans and favourite canvas shoes. The four hired hands didn’t move. One of them was smoking placidly. Not the same as in a movie or a book. Darreit went on sobbing non-stop. Her father walked up to you. He grabbed your hair and pulled it to make you raise your head and you came face to face with him. He held you at arm’s length and you merely looked at him fearfully. He frowned. He breathed heavily. He pulled your hair even harder and shook it without saying anything and flung you to the floor where you fell in a heap like a snake thrashed to death. That was an affront you told yourself you’d seek ways to avenge. Lying down, you looked at Darreit move her belongings and go out with the others, and there was nothing you could do about it. The storm which, actually, had been threatening for some time had gone, taking her with it away from you unexpectedly and pulling down to the ground the sapling that you were. Before that, you’d done nothing but daydream and drift, high-spirited, prancing to your heart’s content, knowing no bridle, and the pain this time was a sudden and stupefying wake-up call. It was a settling of accounts as you’d never imagined, more violent than you could ever have envisioned. Your expertise in looking for trouble was under a cloud and your clumsy genius to ask for it was tarnished and suspect from then on. You were in total mental confusion from the thrashing administered without restraint by the barbarous hoofs of reality and it’d take a long time before everything was back to normal – before your wounds were healed and your bruises subdued, before your tendons had eased back and your muscles recovered from their contusions, and before the black-and-blue sustained by finally hoisting the white flag of defeat had at last faded away. You thought of impending revenge every time you smeared an unguent on your wounds, with every pill you took and with every spoonful of light macrobiotic-style food you swallowed. The attraction of violence solicited you increasingly each time, and the dogged certainty that a life of danger is a life tempered in the fire of immortality led you to seek ways and means to pay back the detective story characters in question. You found your happiness in the spirit of revenge and your supreme entertainment consisted in making them look ridiculous. You floated above your bodily pain like an angel moving above clouds. You considered yourself an adventurer of the twentieth century whose body swings on the cable of destiny stretched above the chasm of death. When you dragged yourself up to a doctor’s on the night of the thrashing, you explained without batting an eyelid that you were a penniless student who’d competed in a boxing match to finance his studies and lost. When you resumed classes, your friends at the U asked you how come you were so badly bruised. You answered them you’d quarrelled with hoodlums around Bang Kapi and the contusions they saw resulted from a beating you’d managed to survive all by yourself. You ignored their concern and the looks they gave you. But when you found yourself alone you worried your brain might’ve been damaged. With Nart’s help, you moved to Seewiang, the block of flats where he lived. It was an old house which was in fact a hostel but didn’t dare acknowledge itself as such for fear of having to pay more taxes. For five hundred baht a month, which was rather stiff, you got a fairly large corner room. The tenants were technical school and university students as well as petty civil servants, ladies of the night and taxi drivers. There was also a family from the Northeast, who cooked their own food whose pungent smells spread throughout the house morning and evening. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a bad place at all for the capital and, furthermore, it was close to the U. About two weeks later, you went to see Darreit’s friends at Ailada to find out about her. That good old Or promptly turned her back on you. She must’ve known what had happened to you, as it was she undoubtedly who’d told Darreit’s uncle where she lived and Darreit’s uncle of course had informed the mayor of Mahachai, Darreit’s father. You went to Ailada in a most pitiable state, taciturn, reserved, broken-hearted and at times looking oddly absent as someone starting to lose his mind. And when you asked about Darreit, you learned she’d gone to live at her uncle’s and was there under strict surveillance at her father’s insistence. She had to go to classes and come back at specific times and had almost no possibility to go wherever she pleased any longer, and all that was her own fault. Her girl friends told you that the best she could do was phone them up and she’d keep complaining about the restrictions imposed on her freedom, which made them very sad. Talking about telephone led to your getting her phone number. Your stupefied and almost absent looks got you many protestations of sympathy, many words of comfort and encouragement as well as pieces of advice about being patient, strong and determined in the pursuance of life, which you welcomed with extreme gratitude, although to tell the truth you felt like puking there and then instead, as you knew perfectly well that once your back was turned those cows would tear you to pieces through spiteful mockery. Maybe they fancied the lesson you’d received would make you colourless, odourless and tasteless for life. So be it, you told yourself rancorously, let them think so to
begin with! And you went on living as usual, attended lectures, spent your spare time finding things to read in the library, taking roots in coffee shops, doing the rounds of second-hand bookstands and seeing good films, listening to intellectual debates, writing soap bubble poems and sending them to sundry magazines which published some of them, but very few actually compared to the number of poems turned down. All of that you did to be an exemplary trendy young man, with the help of much simulation, intellectual arrogance and provocation. And even though you’d for long mixed with groups debating political, artistic and literary issues, you were close to no-one in particular, which stemmed from the fact that you were too pretentious to be anyone’s friend. Without the least self-examination, you could see that the juvenile faces and eyes of the friends taking part in the debates were riddled with the rust of stupidity furred up so thick it was indelible forever. Ranting on about what you yourself using big words understood but vaguely, behaving with the distraught frenzy of the infantile leftwing kind which endeavoured to ape the senile leftwing, expressing opinions which in the end turned to invective, including giving oneself undue importance – all of that was to demonstrate a high school student sensibility, which led you to think that in reality university was but a larger-size high school. You didn’t know you were hardly different from those you despised, even if it was from another standpoint, and in many respects you were actually much more disgusting, much more revolting. Frequenting those ‘progressives’ led you to understand little by little that you were no political animal.