dream song
A wounded dear leaps highest.
Emily Dickinson, Poems
You told me that throughout your childhood you kept moving houses and each time you had to move you were taken with melancholy. You missed the places and the people that had become familiar to you, but altogether never really suffered from deep melancholy until your father retired and decided to settle down in Chachoengsao. You were then in the final year of secondary at the provincial college and you still bicycled to school like most other girls. You quickly took to Chachoengsao. It is a town flanked by a river and reputed for the fertility of its orchards and rice fields. You often went to the riverside market with your mother and you took pleasure strolling through it, gazing at the vegetables and local culinary specialties. You remembered as if it were yesterday the first time you saw the old wooden Chinese shophouses all around the market. You liked one grocery in particular, which sold milled rice, palm sugar in cans and freeze-dried coffee. It was a shop with well-displayed goods and the floor, made of large boards, shone, so that you told yourself you’d like to own a grocery. At the market there were shrimps and fish freshly arrived from the sea. There were peas, eggplants and cucumbers freshly arrived from the gardens, and snakeheads, catfish and climbing perch freshly arrived no doubt from the rice fields. You liked it that there was an early produce market and you didn’t like it when people said that before long it would be replaced by a supermarket. In the morning, the riverside market in a provincial town… You always woke up early. That was your only trick to keep in a good mood and you already knew by then that being in a jolly good mood helps push back old age. Sometimes, when you were free, you took a public transport boat to venture outside of the district. Your destination was Bang Khla, another small district along the river. It had nothing but gardens and orchards, fields and rice fields and the fruit in season, starting with oblong and perfumed Thai melons, so ripe their skins burst and their flesh was grainy, and papayas with mottled skins and amber flesh, gourds and mangoes and jackfruits and sapodillas, and an old temple hosting thousands of bats. You liked the river very much. You liked the flow of the river and the soft breeze on the river and the boats plying it. There were market gardeners’ and fishermen’s boats as well as ferries with steering oars and public shuttle boats. You also liked the houseboats that could still be seen from time to time. You looked at the river every day, as your house was by the river. Of course there was also a waterfront pavilion, where you went to revise your lessons, do your homework and sometimes learn the violin with the help of a manual, which didn’t make you progress in any way. In that pavilion sometimes you slept a perfectly sound sleep and woke up all refreshed. You were of sturdy constitution, a little too plump actually, as you didn’t try to curb the urge to nibble that nature bestows upon all women equally. You wished you could have told someone in the empty expanse of your musings that you loved the river and the houseboats. Some of the houseboats had rows of flowerpots on their verandas; some had narrow strips of earth as well flanked with boards and planted with holy basil and sweet basil. They looked like floating gardens. Sometimes, looking through them, you could see a white puppy chasing and barking at the butterflies swarming over the flowers. Sometimes, on some houseboats, you saw an old woman wearing a loincloth folded the old-fashioned way and a sleeveless round-neck blouse, cutting rings of fresh betel she then lined up on a flat bamboo tray or sometimes chewing her betel and coating her lips with perfumed wax while railing against her mischievous grandson busy stripping to splash in the water with mates of his age. Sometimes, on the accommodation ladder, you saw a young woman, her sarong knotted under the armpits, proceed meticulously with her toilet, but as soon as a shuttle boat came by she turned her back to it or slid into the water right up to her neck. And sometimes the boat of the iced coffee vendor drew alongside, and also the boat selling Chinese noodles. Almost all the houseboats had television sets.
The aerials stuck out of the cabin roofs. Sometimes forktails or mynah birds landed on them and sang softly to each other, but sometimes they fought like cats and dogs, especially the mynah, and you noticed that each time they quarrelled they did so fiercely, screaming and flying at each other with a will, and you tried to guess what they quarrelled about and translated what each mynah said into human language, saying this one said it was like that before that one cut in saying No way, in fact it was like this, and another seemingly older barged in trying to find a compromise and yet another intervened to say separation was out of the question so common ground had to be found. You told me it was like family members having a row. And sometimes there was a sky-blue fish eater with a long beak perched on a black plum tree and when it saw a fish surface it let itself fall down like a spear. Sometimes it caught the fish, in haste ensured its catch in its beak and on a flapping of wings flew away, but often it missed and had to fly back to its perch, shake itself dry at length and start its vigil all over again. Sometimes there were songs of blackbirds. Blackbirds are black like crows but smaller, and they have red eyes like angry ogresses. When you were over there, someone had brought one to your father. It was a female. You observed it, trying to understand it, but for all your cogitations, you couldn’t understand why it gave its eggs to the female crow to brood. It sang mainly at night. It was locked up in a large cage but it proved hard to tame and sometimes it would lie belly up, protesting against you didn’t know what. Even when you entered university, it refused to be tamed and was still obdurate, lying belly up as before. You liked birds. You dreamed of having an aviary bigger than the ones at the zoo and you would’ve liked all birds to let themselves be tamed by you as they had let themselves be tamed by Saint Francis of Assisi. You would’ve liked all animals to let themselves be tamed by you, but that was seldom the case. Snakes filled you with horror, and yet you tried to rear an inoffensive green snake. I liked it that you liked birds and maybe it is thanks to you that I like birds. By the river over there, you only saw needlefish. You would’ve liked to see tiger perch, which hunt by squirting water from their mouth at insects, but you never saw any. You weren’t sure whether their species had disappeared or not and not knowing left you dissatisfied. Living over there you practised paddling and ended up paddling skilfully. Being able to manoeuvre a boat with a paddle isn’t as easy as it sounds. It is as difficult as learning to ride a bicycle, or even more difficult, and you tire quickly. It’s over there you learned how to wear a sarong neatly tied at the armpits. Women these days are used to wearing skirts, trousers or shorts to the point of no longer knowing how to wear a sarong, but you do and, later on, you wore one often and liked to select materials with unusual patterns and pretty colours, which you sometimes made into tablecloths to cover your desk with or decorated the walls with. Sometimes you mischievously rode your bike without holding the handlebars as you tried to sing or whistle, and your mother would tell you off. There was a time when you were crazy about badminton, so much so that, as soon as you had some spare time, you grabbed a racket. It’s a sport that has its own rhythm and its own charm, you told me. With good players, you told me, just watching their footwork is fascinating. It’s like a kind of dance. And you went to play at the civil servants’ club with your father in the late afternoon. You were embarrassed, you were afraid of showing your legs, so you wore long trousers. It was the only sport you practised with ease and liked to watch. At times you would’ve liked to be a boy. You would’ve liked to know what it was like being a boy. You thought that, if you were a boy, you’d start smoking a pipe and then, mind you, you’d play billiards day and night. You could cook all sorts of simple dishes and you made them rather well. You tried to play Thai music at one time, starting with the alto fiddle and the soprano fiddle, each of which you could play a little, and later the Thai zither, on which you spent the most time and which you could play a little also. What you would most have liked to play was the three-stringed fiddle, but you knew it was very hard to play, so hard it was hopeless. What you most preferred t
o listen to was the alto xylophone, but you knew it was out of the question for you to be able to play the xylophone. Those who can play it must be truly patient and dedicate themselves to it totally. You knew the tunes of several old Thai songs and, when you hummed them to me, I realised those tunes sounded familiar to me too. When we began to be intimate, you photocopied Sutjit Wongtheit’s71 short story ‘The sound of the lyre in the wind’ specially for me, told me you liked it, that the story had deeply moved you, but I read it and it didn’t impress me one way or the other. That’s because I am of those ruminants that forget their pasture and have never been enthused by their own culture. On the first times we spoke to each other, I used to tell myself, It’s amazing how many old-fashioned ideas that chick has, for all her diligent airs learning the piano and listening to classical music. And when you spoke of eccentric monks and royals, I split my sides silently. But as it happened, you were a real student and you didn’t lack intellectual courage, two qualities only to be found among the oddballs of the circle under the pines. Another reason for me to despise you was that you were eager to study and you did very well too. In the circles I frequented, whoever got good marks in class was the target of mockery. Over there, you lived in a small peaceful community. You gave alms to the monks before going to school every morning. The shirt of your uniform was a boy’s shirt but without the front placket, with the initials of your school and your first name and family name: Kangsadarn Sakarwarat. It wasn’t a blouse-style shirt whose neckline must be covered by a knotted bow to avoid being indecent. You were already a young woman and your eyesight was rather bad and from that time on you’ve had to wear glasses, which you thought gave you the look of a precocious child. It was from the time you changed from blouse to shirt that you were uneasily conscious that you were becoming a young woman. On the one hand, you wanted it to happen fast; on the other, you wished to remain a child and do what you wanted without pressure, without being permanently on your guard. You were divided. You liked to be a young woman to be able to dress prettily and buy loads of stuff in modern shops in town, but at the same time you wanted to remain a child to go to the ferry boat landing at dawn and look at the sunrise and at the boats coming from the other bank without anybody finding fault with it. You liked to look at the boats. Sometimes they were long-tailed boats, sometimes they were paddleboats. Those boats transported vegetables and fruit from the gardens and orchards on the other side of the river. You liked to sit in the huge motor tricycles that went so fast your mother had to tell the driver to slow down. The nights were of a collected calm. You heard the drone of the boat engines plying the river. All in all, you were happy, fresh-faced and cheerful. But as early as the fourth year of secondary, you began to worry about the preparation of the university entrance exam. When you went over your girlhood memories, you realised you didn’t like moving so often. Your mother and you had to follow your father. When it was time to move, what a fuss it was to handle belongings, plants and domestic animals and books, your heart heavy at having to leave familiar people and places behind and at soon having to make the effort to get used to new people and places. And you did your final year of secondary school in that small riverine town where you have many intimate friends you still write to or go and see often. One of them was Fueang, to whom I too was close. She was the daughter of the owner of the biggest souvenir shop in the province. The shop was called Fueang Kanok, a name derived from Fueang, who was an only child. She had the same exquisite and refined artistic tastes as you had. The only difference was that she was richer than you were. The objects in her shop for the most part were bamboo wickerwork. You still sort of pretended to be jealous that I showed more interest in Fueang than was proper and you still took me out and we went to sit in the coffee shop that was a houseboat where on some days you had sat and we went on a river shuttle to the small district that was a vast orchard with its temple full of bats. You were born in February, the month we are now in, on the thirteenth that’s just passed, and I forgot to send you a greetings card, so that it was Khwan who reminded me of it, but even with this reminder I pretended I had forgotten.
You know perfectly well, don’t you, that for a mother the day of birth is just another day of suffering. These days, even monks insist on celebrating their birthday anniversaries, isn’t that something! On the thirteenth of February, being sixteen years old, you received as a gift a violin. You tried for several days to play it as one does when one is thrilled by something new. You bought several manuals and trained according to their instructions but you weren’t able to play a complete piece, not even an easy tune, even though you could read notes, so that finally you got discouraged and gave up to focus on schoolbooks. By nature, you took your studies seriously. You are a person of discipline. You went to bed at ten thirty and got up at five every day. Like all the children that follow the literary course of study, you were weak in arithmetic and made special efforts in that subject. At the beginning of the term you realised you had plenty of spare time. You thus decided to learn music as an option, even though it wasn’t a compulsory subject and you had to join a junior high school class to do so. You didn’t mind. You only wanted to get a solid grounding in music. In any case, you announced that decision to your mother, who at the time was all excited by the new source of income represented by the sale of coconut jelly, and your mother merely smiled and said As you wish. As for your father, who was busy trying to grow superior varieties of pomegranate and heliconia, he didn’t merely approve but encouraged you. It was that decision to learn music that brought you into contact with him, the music teacher of the school. You couldn’t quite figure out his age – around forty probably, but his neglected and decrepit looks made him seem older still. He was taciturn, but in that taciturnity you felt he was of unstable moods. He seemed to have known increasingly bitter disappointments to the point that it was obvious he didn’t dare hope for anything out of life anymore. Besides, he was someone with extremely bad human relations, be it with the other teachers or with the pupils, as if the term ‘human relations’ didn’t exist in his personal dictionary. He played all sorts of musical instruments but he was particularly proficient with string instruments, especially the violin and the guitar. He had no deep knowledge of music at a theoretical level, having never attended a conservatory, but he played several pieces like a virtuoso and everyone said that, if only he took the trouble of practising, he could become a professional able to provide for himself without having to rely on his modest emoluments as a teacher. His position as a secondary school music teacher, everything considered, was most unstable, as he wasn’t interested in teaching and absented himself often without advance notice and took days off at the drop of a hat beyond the leaves tolerated each year. Everybody said that if he insisted on behaving like that, before long he’d be dismissed. It seemed to you that he had the reputation of being the town drunkard, a gambler without cunning who merely waited for luck, and thus more or less indebted here and there, rather than as a music teacher, whereas his wife, who was so young she could have been his daughter, was no less notorious for her sexual capers that shook the morality of the entire district. He came from another town, the pupils didn’t know exactly which. It was said he came from Bangkok, where he reportedly had earned a living as a musician. It had been ten years since he had settled down there as the secondary school music teacher. The other teachers made fun of him in front of their pupils, even in front of him. As a teacher, he was most unpredictable. He spoke slowly, thought slowly. The way he behaved and dressed wasn’t proper, so that it could be said he had none of the qualities that make a teacher, even though he had something in his favour, which was that he had never laid a finger on his pupils. He was said to have once severely thrashed a female pupil with a cane but the stubborn pupil had suffered the punishment without turning a hair and it was he in the end who had dissolved into tears and left the room, a behaviour that earned the child a second punishment, her classmates accusing her of having hurt their teacher’s
feelings. At the beginning of term, when you went to study with him, he patiently took an interest in the progress of his pupils, even though at certain hours neither he nor his shadow showed up. He looked like someone who easily loses his grip despite all his efforts at self-control. But, as time went by, his inability to overlook the children’s least error made him irritable and full of anger and that much became increasingly obvious with every passing day. And finally, when the rumour had it that his wife had bolted with a man yet again, the children then understood why his temper was increasingly foul. At times he seemed to realise what he was doing, to the point of apologising to the pupils, and not so much as a teacher who apologises to his pupils than as an equal. Everybody knew that his wife kept looking for a bit of trousers, leaving her daughter in his charge, but it wasn’t long before she ran back to him. Instead of him being sympathised with, it was his wife rather who was pitied. Many people wished she’d leave him for good. She was still young and pretty. They wanted her to go away once and for all and never come back, as everyone knew she had much to bear with a heavy drinker like him, his egocentrism, his violent fits of anger that manifested themselves at times through sarcasms, at times through vulgar diatribes and at times through physical blows which, her patience exhausted, she returned with equal violence in words and in gestures but also at times through silence, at times through tears and at times through elopement with yet another man. The rumours were all of the kind: she’s been gone for seven days with the Engineers battalion, for ten days in a rented house which is a joint for hoodlums and druggies, for a fortnight with a police sergeant who often gets drunk and fires shots to intimidate people, for a month or thereabouts with a bus driver with an anchor tattooed on his biceps, and even for a few days with the gym teacher who is frisky with his female pupils and is a coarse young man, a gambler and a womaniser, or even sometimes with dissolute, fast-growing schoolboys that are her husband’s pupils. Those rumours, though not all true, were not all wrong either. And each time he ran all over the place in search of her – as folks said: like a dog after his master. And no matter how he swore to God he was going to stop drinking, it never came to anything. It was seemingly just idle talk. On several occasions he had sworn in front of this or that altar of local deities and even in front of the town’s sacred Buddha image to which people from all corners of the land come to make their devotions. The couple had been seen buying sets of flower, incense and candle and gold leaves to make a solemn promise in front of the pavilion of the Buddha image of which local lore said it came floating upriver three hundred years ago under the protection of a multitude of giant crocodiles big as pirogues and the people at the time had invited it to come on firm land where they had promised to erect a sanctuary in its honour; and in the end he had perjured himself in everything (which is the reason why he was hated all the more when he found himself at his lowest, as he hadn’t ‘kept his word’, which people held to be an affront to the most sacred things they venerated, and some said repeatedly that the sacred things they venerated had real power as they believed, since this perjurer had run to his ruin in a way which could only be viewed as exemplary, and therefore this disaster was expected as it was ineluctable). As far as drinking was concerned, he had consulted a modern doctor and made the sacrifice to go for treatment by borrowing right and left, but he had a relapse yet again. He had then turned to the concoctions of traditional medicine ladled out of the big caldron of a reputed practitioner. But he had soon resumed drinking. He was mortified to have started drinking again and he had to drink fast and a lot to forget this disappointment. The girl whom his wife in her escapades left behind for him to rear was a slight child, with a dirty face and body, both her thumbs permanently wrapped in a piece of cloth or a bit of plaster as she had the incorrigible habit of sucking them until she drew blood so that the infected nails eventually fell off, for which she was often told off by her father. When he told her off, she took her thumb out of her mouth, but as soon as his back was turned, she plucked it in her mouth again. It was as though this gave her a little bit of happiness for as much as she could find. That child followed him to school as soon as the rumour had it that his wife had left him once more – a rumour has the same nature as fire, you remarked to yourself, as it spreads fast and nasty. So much so that you often heard it said that the girl wasn’t his daughter, but the daughter of one of the lovers and even the mother wasn’t sure which one it was. But for all that, he hadn’t taken a sudden dislike to her and behaved with her as if she really was his daughter, even though he told her off or beat her when he happened to be displeased. Regarding the calumnies that circulated, he was no doubt aware of them but didn’t pay attention to them and greeted their bitterness with silence, which seemed to make him seethe increasingly every time. His wife was one of his former pupils. No, she hadn’t become his wife while still his pupil, but later on. She was dissolute and wild even before she finished the first cycle of secondary studies and her education didn’t go any further. She had slept around as soon as she was old enough to have an identity card or even before. He had pulled her out of the gutter and had tried to straighten her up, but to no avail. No, she wasn’t the pupil he had punished and who had hurt his feelings. He had only taught her music for a while, three or four months only and only a few hours per month. And when he met her again in a gambling joint, she was a croupier and no longer a pupil. She had almost become a prostitute, an already gamey nymphet with only a few naïve strings to her bow, but compassion urged him to take her to his home. The two of them knew happiness for a while. It was a period during which he was very happy. He was all smiles and radiant when people met him. Another proof was his marvellous violin which, from early evening to very late at night, strung along deeply moving melodies of love. He could be seen taking his wife to the most chic restaurants of the province for almost every meal. He drank French brandy, smoked American cigarettes, had expensive suits made to measure. They could be seen going together to Bangkok for the weekend to do the rounds of nightclubs and dance, stay in luxury hotels, watch the best shows, visit all the places of entertainment he had frequented during his youth, all of this testifying to unusually refined tastes in conflict with his modest salary. His wife was happy. She was a young woman dressed in the latest fashion, sprightly and outspoken. She was rumoured to be planning to open a fashion house or a beauty salon for which her husband was endeavouring to borrow money from a certain patron, as borrowing from the teachers’ cooperative seemed full of fussy and dilatory formalities. But before the plan could take shape, dissentions between the two of them formed like a purulent wound which soon burst into irreconcilable quarrels. She almost got pregnant as soon as she went to live with him and when she effectively found herself pregnant, he went back to heavy drinking. They started to tell each other a few home truths and to wash their dirty linen in public. What was already known clearly became even clearer in the fire of wrath, as if each wanted to give proof of the utter uselessness of keeping a secret, so that their most intimate secrets were known to all, even to those who had no desire to know them and to those, such as the pupils, who should never have known them. The teachers who stayed in lodging houses close to theirs complained to their pupils during classes that those were the ways of the rabble. As for you, you learned all about him without batting an eyelid. He was your teacher and all the rest had to do with his private life. But in spite of his increasingly scandalous behaviour and whatever his dereliction of duty, the headmaster would only give him a warning from time to time and endeavoured to give him a chance. Thanks to the music teacher, the school band had gained a repute one could only be proud of. The band, which he directed, was permanently booked. They knew how to play and sing old and modern tunes alike. Even difficult pieces which no one thought could be interpreted by children had received the frantic applause of the notables, from the provincial governor and the local representative at the National Assembly to the members of the town council and even the civil servants and their spo
uses. Many a time during the big fetes you noticed the band was requested to play piece upon piece until late into the night so that the participants could dance. And if you noticed it was because you were there in the company of your father and mother. And it was on such occasions that you saw him strain his ears to listen to the requests of the listeners and acquiesce with a nod and sometimes turn round, say something to his musicians and play the requested tunes. Sometimes young men offered him a glass of alcohol and he gulped it down as if his life depended on it. Almost every time there was someone to ask him to play the violin and he lowered his head to desist, reluctant to show his talent, but after much insistence, he played old Thai tunes whose melody everyone knew for having heard them innumerable times. And the sounds of his violin compelled the people to listen in ecstatic silence. In the night, those sounds carried far and gave everything a magical appearance. People kept quiet until the violin sound ceased and each time sustained applause took over and sometimes went on and on to demand that he play an encore. Sometimes, when he played ‘Sleepy lagoon’, you dreamed of Ing Orn’s novel and of the Songkhla lake under the moonlight, and his ‘Nang Khruan’ made you melancholic and you wondered vaguely what you’d do if one day you had a lover and he deserted you. Seated in silence, deep into the musings where his violin took you, you were saddened by the sufferings you imagined, but at the same time you were happy, which gave your sadness a silvery shimmer. And his ‘Lao moon’ carried you away into those nights in the jungle full of flowers when it is time for the lovers to part, when the stars shed tears and paradise sheds tears of dew to decorate the icy night. You were moved, you were overwhelmed. Maybe it was because of his violin that your parents wished you could play the violin. Or maybe it was yourself who had let out aloud your wish to one day play the violin. But you saw from time to time and heard from time to time that he was dead drunk as he directed the band, which threw the children, the members of the choir as well as the members of the band, into utter confusion. And there was that time when he shouted coarsely at a senior civil servant who had asked him to play the same song three times on the violin, in the presence of all the guests, and it was that night, once the fete was over, that he was beaten up by three or four strangers, and he swore it was for sure on orders from that senior civil servant, and it happened more than once that, even though all arrangements had been made, he didn’t show up in the vicinity of the fete and let the children play as best they could. In any case, there were still people to appreciate his importance. Before the inter-school sporting event on the occasion of the candle procession festival marking the start of Buddhist lent, during the ceremony of the presentation of wreaths on the Day of the Beloved King, which is the day when the bands of the various schools are there to outdo one another, a great many people impatiently waited for the splendid procession of your school, its flag bearers and its band in ceremonial dress and each musician marking time with a haughty bearing and playing flat out while on both sides of the road the crowd huddled together, sometimes under pelting rain, sometimes under scorching sun. The music teacher attracted as much attention as the drum-major, a pretty young girl outrageously made up who projected her baton breathtakingly high in the air and caught it back each time in masterly fashion and who wore a short skirt setting off the curves of her thighs that made you pant. For that festival, it was exceptionally demanded of him not to drink. And there he was marching in solemn style on one flank of the procession, sometimes mixing with the crowd, chain-smoking, giving some musicians withering looks as if to tell them Mind you don’t get it wrong again! or gesturing in some agreed way to some for them to play more enthusiastically. And there was another event that would be remembered later on: during the annual cold season festival of the province, he played ‘Soi Sondat’ on the violin for which he received from the hands of the governor a flower garland, its tails dangling with three five-hundred-baht notes pinned onto each, and as he went up to receive the garland, the governor complimented him no end, patted him on the shoulder and hugged him cordially under the envious stare of officialdom. Some who knew him well couldn’t help pointing out in a rather tipsy way that it was because ‘His Excellency’ didn’t know him well enough, that’s all. In any case, after the salute to the colours and the prayers the next morning, the headmaster related all that to the pupils and the teachers. That day, the headmaster was in a jolly good mood and showed greater satisfaction, it seemed, than the music teacher, who had been congratulated the previous day and who at that particular time was nowhere to be found – obviously he hadn’t yet woken up as he had been seen after receiving his reward getting thoroughly drunk, having handed over the three thousand baht to the owner of a luxurious restaurant of the festival and told him he was going to eat and drink there until the cost of food and beverage reached the said amount, which, with the three thousand baht and the five hundred odd baht he had in his pocket, resulted in his staying at table until dawn, after having despatched one of the waiters to his friends who must still be in the vicinity of the fete for them to come and keep him company and royally remunerating the waiter for his time and effort. It was a greater satisfaction than when the PE teacher had seen the volleyball team win the tournament or when the art teacher had seen several of his pupils win prizes in various important children’s artistic competitions. All of this happened in the whirlwind of events of your daily life and of that of the townspeople and has left no trace. You still went to school and met him once a week during the music class, and it was in mid-term during that hour that your friends sitting in the front rows closest to the blackboard began to complain of the smell of alcohol that wafted from all of his orifices and pores, from his every movement, from his very stillness, from his every word, from his very silence and from each breath he took, and it was a most offensive smell to the children’s noses. During that period he had started again to drink in earnest, ruthlessly and continuously, and people saw him staggering about in the streets at night, totally unable to control himself and yelling he’d kill his wife as soon as he could lay his hands on her for all the unbearable miseries she was inflicting on him. He cursed her all over the place but, even though his wrath sounded extreme, nobody paid any attention because everybody knew he spoke like that every time his wife left him. It was only the very first time she had fled from him that his thirst for revenge had truly inspired fear and everybody had thought he’d actually kill her, but when it happened again and again, his threats became meaningless, so much so that some even challenged him to kill her once and for all. Besides, he still smoked almost non-stop, which was really distressing for those children who were allergic to smoke, especially the girls, as it made them feel so dizzy and nauseous they had to ask for permission to go and wash their faces outside, and for some it was only an excuse because they actually went out to vomit. On sultry days devoid of the faintest breeze or when a hot wind was blowing, the stench of alcohol and tobacco hovered over the whole classroom and the more than thirty children sat erect and still in this tense stuffy atmosphere and listened to the blurred rambling and prodding of his faint raucous voice as he derided at length the stupid mistakes made by one and all, and for the more than thirty children his voice was the voice of authority. It was a time when insistent rumours were starting to spread that his wife had abandoned him yet again, what else, and, wilfully or not, as if to assess the weight of those floating rumours or else to spite them, he brought his daughter with him to school. During the hours that he didn’t teach, that little girl with tangled, brittle hair turning russet for lack of vitamins sat still in one corner or another of the music room depending on what he ordered, but when the room was being used, she had to go out and sit on the balcony. She usually sat on the floor, her hands on the banister, turning her back to everyone, her feet dangling beyond the railing. Those were small dirty feet covered with scars and those were feet that never stopped fidgeting, and sometimes, after swinging them in the air for a while, one of her slippers got loose and fell or even bo
th of them – the classrooms and music room were on the first floor at the end of the right wing of the old wooden building. Sometimes the grimy girl remained seated without moving for hours on end; sometimes she sang, she spoke to herself; and sometimes she cried. She was a solitary child with a dirty little face no one wanted to play with. The other teachers on some days also brought their children to school, but those children were properly dressed, looked well and the pupils showed interest in them, asked them questions, hugged them, teased them, bought them sweets, in absolute contrast to his daughter, a child who looked permanently frightened, and when some pupils became bold enough to hassle her, she fought back rudely both in gesture and in words. You secretly felt pity for that child. One day that you got near her, you noticed that her thumbs were wrapped in a piece of cloth or a piece of plaster and that their nails were purulent and ingrowing, no doubt for nibbling at them as the rumour had it. That state of affairs took your breath away. Sometimes when your friends and you stayed still in the tense atmosphere of the classroom that was so silent you could hear the children at PE in the gymnasium and you could hear the drone coming out of the room of the Thai classical literature course and you could hear the screech of chalk on the blackboard that set your teeth on edge, that little girl of no more than six started to cry without reason. She cried almost noiselessly and at first she wasn’t heard but soon intermittent stifled sobbing could be perceived. The sound of tears and sobs made the atmosphere even worse and made him even more furious, of a fury he was trying fiercely to contain. It so happened that one day the little one sat at her usual place on the balcony in front of the entrance to the music room, waiting for the current lesson to end. By then it was a little past two in the afternoon. She started to cry and sob again, very softly at first but then more and more audibly, tearing the frail silence of the class. Heads bent over their copybooks, the pupils copied out the lesson on the blackboard. As for the teacher, he stood with an elbow on the window ledge, smoking a cigarette, looking out.
The White Shadow Page 26