The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  Water covered the streets and splashed and waved with every passing car. It was nearly nine when Nart and you jumped out of the bus near the entrance to the street to walk back to your rooms at Seewiang. The two of you looked utterly weary because of the long bus trip. The two of you bent down to fold up your trouser legs. Nart took off his sandals to hold them and walk barefoot, as they were finely crafted items made in India, but you didn’t take off your white canvas shoes because it was time to clean them anyway. Do you remember? It was drizzling and you looked at the sky so that you had your mouth agape, as when we look at fireworks or anything overhanging that forces us to raise our heads full tilt, and your forehead was pleated like the forehead of a dog in doubt. You let out two or three swearwords and put your bag, made from faded jeans cloth, over your head, then led the way. You didn’t need to turn round: you knew Nart was behind you, wading through the water phlegmatically, if wearily. The main road at the entrance to the street was still teeming with people and cars. Houses and shops were barricaded with sandbags. You stopped to buy cigarettes and lipped one and handed one to Nart, who said Thanks in a low voice – it felt like you were busy reading. You talked about the film you’d just seen as if to discuss it, but Nart merely grunted Mm-mmm sotto voce. You walked away from the grocer’s at the bus stop while smoking and entered the street. It was rather cold and the cigarette was delicious. There were lots of people in front of the noodle cart, the rice with red pork cart, the coffee and bread-and-custard cart. It was drizzling non-stop. Under a canopy, one cart sold fruit, one cart sold swallows’ nests, one cart sold soymilk. Almost all the vendors wore rubber boots, looking busy over their fare, aprons around their paunches. Vapour rose from the cooking pots, warm and fragrant vapour, that smelled good and sugary, that smelled good and meaty. The buyers held umbrellas aloft or else protected their heads with newspapers or else stood holding their ribs. Most of them bought foodstuffs to eat at home. Hardly anybody ate at the laid-out tables. You stopped by your usual bookshop. Its newspapers and magazines section had a kiosk upfront. You asked for permission to use the toilets inside and, once you came out again, you flipped through a book or two, a magazine or two and loitered over a nudie. The bookshop also sold tapes but the tapes section was inside and Nart urged you to leave before it poured for good. Past a shop selling imported booze and tobacco, three or four bars, a veterinary clinic, a hairdresser’s, a dry cleaner’s, then a turn to the right. There was nothing any longer but puddles and Nart put his sandals back on. Yours oozed with each step a creamy froth with a repugnant noise of suction, chick chook, chick chook, and your hands were ghostly pale and the tips of your fingers all wrinkled. The street narrowed, with fewer and fewer cars, fewer and fewer people. Past a large house surrounded by a high white wall crested with broken glass surmounted by a fence of barbed wire. Interminable. Past the next-door house, just as big, with a dense row of hibiscus behind a very high barbed-wire fence, an Indian guard in front of the entrance and a gibbon in a cage near the fence on the inside. You told the guard Hey, fella, let me play with the gibbon, then you pulled apart the hibiscus to peer at the gibbon in a cage as big as a cage at the zoo and you imitated the shout of the gibbon wooooo wooooo wooooo wooooo. It turned round, took a look at you then turned back, uninterested, and you cussed him between your teeth Stupid gibbon! Ghastly gibbon! Nart had already overtaken you. After the row of hibiscus, you walked some length past a tall building unfinished for lack of funds, the scaffolding still in place and the walls unpainted, it took a while to walk past it, a strong odour of cement offending your nose, the dirty grey of the cement offending your eyes. There were shoring planks piled up everywhere and iron bars dumped everywhere. There was a wheelbarrow leaning to one side and a clothesline stretched sideways. Across the street, there was also a row of cement adjoining houses just finished with people in four of the units. Inside you could see bluish ceilings and television screens almost identical, except that they showed pictures from different broadcasts. You lit another cigarette. A middle-aged woman carrying a plastic basin came out to throw used water in the street in a wide circle and then hastened back in. Turning the corner of the building, you saw Nart who walked far upfront, about fifty yards away. You were about to shout at him to wait for you, but you started when someone suddenly popped up from a dark corner of the building. A man. Another. Black sky. The street right there unlit. The building dark, but these two even more so. As dark as phantoms, but even more so. The man who stood up in front of you, you felt you knew him. As for the other, you only had a glimpse at his face. At Donut in Siam Square. Alarm. Fleeting thought. Fear. Recalling that other time when you’d been given a beating, beaten up with hard objects. Visual thought, not aural. No words. Recalling the sudden aggression in the dark that had translated into pain, stupor, searing shooting pains on skull, face, chest, belly, shoulders, arms and legs. Maybe it wasn’t even a thought but a mere memory. Eye on the alert. Surprise. Fear. Wanting to scarper but unable to move, as when incoercible angst seizes you in a dream; knowing perfectly well what you were faced with, as when, in that dream where everything moves, you’re stuck with a cramp or ankylosis or paralysis. Incapable of moving, incapable of emitting a sound, as if under a spell. Very much like that. Those two are too close and it’s too dark. Right there, it’s too dark. You stretch out your arm towards them and say in a loud voice What do you want? I can see you, you know. You see a flash. You say Knife. Don’t tell yourself Beware. Tell yourself only Knife.

  White. Darting at you. Your body, crashed into, loses its balance over two or three steps and falls on the bitumen. A shooting pain as if from a mild electric shock. Brutal cold in the abdomen and then the cold ceases, leaving nothing but pain which radiates around the perforated area. Panic and confusion. The pain spreading like ants darting away from a fire, spreading everywhere and withdrawing and spreading anew, closer than before, more distant than before. Pain. Heart that swells, that knocks, as if the ground is being hammered again and again on an irregular rhythm. From the wound the ants of pain reach the heart, the arms, the legs, the hands, the feet, the face and even the palms, the arches of the feet and the nails of the fingers and toes. Pain. Your bag sent flying since you don’t know when. Hear in one ear the sidekick’s voice telling the knifeman, Throw it away, you fool! The knife, I mean. The knifeman suddenly stupefied, maybe because he hears the scaring moan you utter. Time is paralysed. You don’t know for how long you’ve been shouting. You don’t know for how long you’ve been lying huddled up like a baby hurt in the womb of pain. Your two hands clutching your wound since when? That smell of blood that reaches you, since when? Those desperate throes of a bashed-up snake, of a sandscoured eel, since when? You see the knife fall. Stretch out to get hold of it. Very near, yes, and yet so far away. Time is paralysed. Time is stiff forever. Time has a cramp forever. You try to crawl. Your face furrows the ground, once, twice. Must get there, you tell yourself, must reach it. Torn between fear and anger. Fear of dying, anger that pulses like the blood spurting from your wound. Aching but pleased. Pleased with your anger. You see the knifeman still standing dumbfounded but his sidekick has disappeared God knows where or maybe not yet but you can’t see him. Why isn’t he leaving? Clear off! What more are you going to do? Finish me off? The paralysed man starts to churn out curses in a voice that gives the impression he’s crying as if he’d lost his mind. You son of a bitch, you bastard, you shit, why did you oblige me to do this? His loud voice intervenes between the pulsations that make as if the ground is being hammered again and again on an irregular rhythm. You grab the knife and attempt to raise yourself up to brandish it as you crawl. Shaking, stiff, knotted body. Your head flops. You plunge forward. Try to raise your head. If you don’t kill me I’m going to kill you, you tell yourself, but not a word comes out. Words without sound. Anger pulses like stomach cramps in your entire body. You see the knifeman take two or three steps backwards and blend in with the darkness, and then violent strikes of lightning explode, re
d, orange, yellow, green then orange again then red again then green again then black. Bloody black. You hear curses and footsteps slowly decreasing. You flop down again, huddle up, hold yourself and groan. At that moment you’re afraid your heart, having to pump blood more and more violently, will be clogged. You gesticulate, struggle like a snake being beaten up, wriggle and writhe, face against the ground. The bitumen is cold. Lying like that’s too rough, shucks, damn uncomfortable. Try again to turn over. To forget everything. Don’t know what to do. Don’t know where to go. Can’t even think, don’t think. Maybe I’ll keep wriggling, I’ll keep struggling until I have no strength left. You hear a rumour of curious people around you, see a face looming in close-up that screens off the sky and, at the idea you’re going to die, you thrash about, fling your arms back and forth, panic, frantic, bawl in refusal of death. No way out any more. Here I am, me, dying. Come have a look. There’s nothing anymore but pain, a demented dark red pain as if a giant brush dipped in blood is applying long, hard, furious strokes on black material, a pain which rises and falls and goes from left to right to left to right in a square, a circle, a zigzag, a dripping red pain, red as when you stare at a flame for a long time and then close your eyes and see but red and then black. That damned black… Darreit, I’ve almost completely forgotten you after all this time. You’ve almost no meaning in my life anymore. Neither you nor your brother, Phamorn, that motherfucker. I’d met him only once. By accident, actually. In a fast-food in Siam Square. He was there with a tableful of mates of his, with looks that gave me a furious urge to kick his you-know-what. He and his underlings, all of them worth a cheerful kick in the you-know-what, each in his own way, all of them young louts gone astray, devoid of any future and wasting their lives away day after day, indulging in all manner of debaucheries, from what you’d told me. I had a fairly good idea of what ailed him. Actually, he was about the same age as me, but indulging in drink, hash, heroin, amphetamines or even other narcotics such as lacquer or thinner he wouldn’t give up had made him look seedy prematurely. Disappointment corroded his heart as rust erodes scrap iron. He was a shame to his parents. He met me as I sat brushing against you in that fast-food outlet and he gave me an insistent, hostile and threatening stare for me to acknowledge his power. I was savvy enough about scum to know what that meant and I held his gaze in defiance. He got up from his table and walked straight up to me. But once there, he turned instead towards you to ask how you were, did you go back home often and how were your parents, without paying the least attention to me as if I didn’t exist. It was getting a bit much, and I blew the smoke of my cigarette right into his face and looked him up and down with a superior air. When he looked away, I sniggered, disdainful. Having thus pleased myself, I started to yawn, looking annoyed, and to stretch myself in a provocative way. I knew his friends were watching him and he didn’t know what to do. Finally, he brazened it out and asked Oh, so, you’re together again, are you? The question was addressed more to you but, fearing you’d be embarrassed, out of courtesy for you it was I who answered by uttering a Right! worthy of a vicious dog. And where are you, these days? he asked me. I answered right away we were at Seewiang, Sukhumvit 23, to which he said one of these days he’d pay us a call. And this is what he truly did, in a totally unexpected manner so far as I was concerned, and the knife in his hand caused me to find myself lying writhing on the bitumen, a shiny, well sharpened knife I keep as a souvenir, even now. He probably didn’t mean to kill me, but only wanted to make me suffer to give himself more importance, to be better accepted by his peers, that’s all, like all those youngsters deprived of the opportunity to follow a path approved by society and who, to compensate, gather in dark corners and slowly turn into social outcasts. Darreit, it strikes me as rather unjust to have practically never thought about you during all of these past years, and if I chanced to think about you, it was never in a positive way. When I left you, I was kept busy by other things. Can you imagine? I no longer know if I’d recognise you if I met you or how long it’d take me to pronounce your name correctly. Looking at the past with a critical eye, I can see it was a good thing we split, as if we hadn’t done so then, we’d have done it later. We were too different in everything. You were beautiful, you were lovely, you were stupid, you were a sexual masterpiece, but I couldn’t love you and you’d soon have been fed up with my poverty. In your eyes, the poor are those who have no money for lavish expenses and one day or another you’d have denigrated my poverty and I’d have decried your extravagant habits. I see nothing praiseworthy in a young girl without income, and who besides didn’t try to have any, who managed to spend four to five thousand baht a month. I wouldn’t have been able to stand your luxurious clothes conceived any old how by designers, most of them faggots and super-faggots, who charge staggering prices with glee and also hold sway in handbags, shoes, belts and lots of other trinkets of various shapes and colours which only fools create to have fellow fools buy and wear – the work of macaques for macaques exclusively. I myself haven’t given up luxury at all, but I can’t stand stupidity, and it isn’t that I’m supremely intelligent, but I can’t stand anyone who doesn’t know how to think by themselves a little. You never showed interest in the substance of things and were merely intent on how to be through with your studies, how to dress up to be beautiful, how to do everything to be fashionable, and women like you can be found by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. By now you must be the stupid wife of a stupid husband and maybe the stupid mother of one or two stupid children – stupid wife of a stupid husband and mother of one or two stupid children perpetuating the lineage of stupidity for it to grow and multiply. Man made to be a slave, woman made to be a prostitute. Our history is the history of slavery, and for slaves that don’t care for freedom what is there awaiting them but destruction pure and simple? But no matter what, I must thank you, thank you very much and from the bottom of my heart, to have had the gesture, before leaving me never to be back, to leave with me some money which, when I came out of hospital, allowed me to have not too many debts. It is thanks to you that this haunted knife became my property. I keep it on myself almost all the time as a souvenir. It almost caused me to die. How amazing that it almost caused me to die! I love it to madness because it almost caused me to die. A most ordinary knife but nonetheless for me it’s a haunted knife, pernicious and vile. Since I picked it up I’ve hardly ever parted from it. It lies in my shoulder bag among the books, manuscripts, pencils, pens, inkpot and other small objects when I go somewhere or else it stays behind a stack of books or else I slip it under the pillow when I’m in the room. I should throw it away but it’s close to my heart – a senseless infatuation. Many a time I’ve forgotten it completely but many a time I’ve grabbed it firmly and brought the flat of its blade close to my lips, cheeks, chest and abdomen and many a time in nights of solitude I’ve taken it in my mouth, bit, licked and kissed it. A knife with a sharp, shiny cutting edge. I keep its cutting edge sharp at all times. Its back is thin. The blade is about one span long, and I always ask myself how many inches of it, two or three or more, entered my abdomen, which caused me to fall flat on the ground and wriggle and groan like an evil soul in jail. Its handle is made of the horn of some animal like a stag and its weight balances the weight of the blade. On one side of the blade in the thickest part is incrusted the word ‘Aranyika’50. It’s a shallow, almost erased inscription. Maybe that’s why I often tell myself it’s a very old knife, maybe centuries-old, and I see a village of old where the knife is caught in the smoke of war and the mephitic smell of patriotic blood, with a group of mightily muscled warriors, a short loincloth round their rumps, amulets hung at their waists, magic armbands round their biceps and magic headbands round their heads, eager to fight as they mobilise to repulse the foreign foe. I’ve gone as far as rambling and wishing without hope it was the knife of a shaman made from nails taken from a coffin and endowed with magic powers strong enough to drive out a spirit. Or even that it’d be the knife of a cro
codile hunter who’d already killed innumerable such beasts, including the king of crocs in its dim underwater palace. Whereas in fact it may just be a knife with a blade made of inferior-quality metal meant for the kitchen or for a boy scout to carry for the fun of it or, at best, nothing but an ordinary knife found in the drawer of an old sideboard in an old house. If I give it excessive importance, it’s only because it’s the knife that almost took my breath away and it’s the knife that almost turned me into a murderer. And it’s because of it that during a period lived in a state of semi-delirium I bought myself a chain to bind myself with. I found that chain in a display of old objects at the Royal Esplanade among loads of other stuffs, winding lamps, primitive electric torches, whetstones, prehistoric flints I wasn’t sure were authentic, chunks of flints from which came the lighters, old keys of all kinds, trilobite fossils, arrowheads. It was an iron chain so old its rust was green, three to four yards long, with a ring at either end. I bought it for thirty baht only, hoping that if the roman candle of my madness came to burst, I’d bind myself in time. Actually, it was but a gesture born of a passing impulse, like the passing impulses that many times since have made me want to untangle my hair, raise the tips of my moustache skywards, daub my body and face with paint or go out and kill someone.