* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
“Have you told him?” his mother asked over the phone.
“No, I haven’t spent much time alone with him,” said Sammy.
“Your British accent is partway back. Honestly, I much prefer it to the other ones you’ve had.”
“I’m glad you approve, Mother.”
“You only have to find some opening in a conversation. Has he asked about me?”
“No, he hasn’t inquired at all about you or Krungthep.”
“Well, no matter, you should be happy to hear that my balking has paid off. They’ve increased their offer.”
She waited for his commendation, but he paused as he gathered his arguments and pushed them uphill.
“Here’s a thought. What if we don’t sell?”
“Why wouldn’t we sell? We need three maids just to keep the dust off everything, and with the gardener coming only once a month now, I’m afraid a tiger will creep out of the grass and eat me. And who’s going to live here? You?”
“No.”
“You can, you know.”
“Mother.”
“So it’s settled. I’m going to keep moving forward with the negotiations, whether you tell him or not. The courtesy is more than he deserves.”
After the call ended, he stood up from the daybed and walked to the shelves. His father had thinned his collection, it appeared. He looked for but couldn’t find the two volumes of the Arthurian legends bound in faded red linen. They had looked like any of the other old books. It was understandable why his father had thought it unlikely that someone—his son, for example—would reach for them.
He remembered this well: his boyhood fingers feeling the bulge inside the second book. Dozens of letters were lodged in its spine. The ivory-colored sheets were no longer crisp. They had been folded and refolded rather unevenly, as if in haste, and ink had smudged where a thumb had held them for too long. At first, he thought that he might have found a cache of old love letters between his parents, but these were written in English, not Thai. He suspected that he shouldn’t be reading them, and so he did, facing the wall in the corner of that study. After so many years, he couldn’t be sure of the exact words, but he could retrieve the memory of many memories of them, the words once whispered at his lips later resounding loud as cannon fire in his head.
One letter started:
Last night, I went with Milly and Hannah to a concert at the Conway. Have you much listened to the Ondine movement in Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit? The pianist’s cascade of notes caused me to be lulled into a kind of disembodied trance, and so for the rest of the performance, I sat in the seat, hands clasped on my lap, but some otherwise intangible part of me couldn’t help but ebb and flow to you, oh sweet you.
With each instance of remembering, the words in the letters shed the finality of the past, coming back to him as if they were part of a past he yet lived.
I’ve met no one else who’s as gentle and capacious in spirit as you, Apirak, and it’s only when I’m with you that I can so easily feel less alone in the thoughtless, unfeeling world.
The hair at the back of his neck stood up, he remembered, when he’d realized that the letters meant for his father hadn’t been written by his mother. This was how he’d first met Helen.
What had he done with the letters? He put them back where he found them and returned the books to their place. He made no mention of the letters to his mother. If he let them lie buried between some dusty pages about mythical knights, he might also bury their fate in his life, and the life of his family. His mother was right. He was a foolish boy.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
In the morning, he left the house with his father. Their simple agenda was to return his father’s library books.
With a camera hanging from his neck, Sammy put on his tourist guise and was able to catch the attention of a taxi at the corner. His father, unused to his new frailty, had tried to insist that they take the Tube, but the rain had only just ended, and the many steps down into the station were unlikely to have dried. One misstep, and the opportunity for indignation would be all Freddie’s.
“You haven’t said a word,” his father said in the car.
“Just taking it all in.”
“You were last here when?”
“It’s been a while.”
“You haven’t missed much. It’s all gotten expensive, and every day’s the same—strikes, Edward Heath’s bulbous face. I don’t turn on the telly anymore.”
“You? Watch TV?”
“It’s mostly because Helen does.”
“Right. Helen, the corrupting influence.”
When the traffic wouldn’t budge, his father insisted on getting out of the cab, knowing they were close.
They marched up Northumberland, past a newspaper seller shouting, “Standard! Standard!” too loud to the hurried crowd, then wound their way down a narrow alley by Scotland Yard. In front of an overflowing pub, even this early in the day, businessmen from nearby offices stood holding nearly emptied pints at their chests. The smell of burning in the air made Sammy think of Bangkok—of Krungthep.
“Slow down,” he said to his father. “You shouldn’t be walking so quickly.”
His father ignored him. At St. James Square, they passed by bushy-haired ladies in knee-length dresses leaning against the park fence, handbags hung like stilled pendulums at the knees. At the far corner lay the library.
“Hello, Apirak,” said a septuagenarian woman at the desk in the issue hall. “Haven’t seen you in some time.”
“I’ve books to return. I’m afraid they’re long overdue. This is my son,” his father said, glancing his way. Sammy took the books out of the satchel he’d been carrying, three linen-bound volumes from a series on European mercantilism.
“Let’s have a look around,” his father said, and waved him in. His father’s cane clacked on the floor as they crossed into a large reading room. Windows that opened on a shady courtyard let in softened sunlight for the silent readers hunched at tables. Wiry brass lamps lit halos on the books in front of them.
“They’ve been wanting to tear down the wall over there and add more space for periodicals, perhaps higher windows for light,” his father said softly. It had always been that way. Being surrounded by old books calmed his father’s demeanor, dispelled the usual impatience and severity. The man had been born and raised a Buddhist in a faraway country, but this was his true temple. It had taken the end of his parents’ marriage to make Sammy realize that for his father, they weren’t merely books but prized transmissions from somewhere “siwilai,” as Thais of that generation liked to say of newfangled things from overseas. In London, his father no longer had to be content with reading about a “siwilai” society that he dreamed to reach. Here, he could be born anew within it.
“Is there something you’re looking for? Maybe someone can fetch it for you,” Sammy said. “We ought to head back soon.”
“Just a while longer.”
He followed his father to an ancient lift, and they rode it up a floor. There were fewer people in this reading room. They passed a student-aged man asleep in an armchair and a professorial woman who didn’t look up. The silence was interrupted only by the buzzing of an electric wall clock.
“My table—unofficially, but they all know it’s mine,” his father said, pointing to a cranny by a window. “I thought about it as they were loading me on the gurney, worried that someone else would claim it if I was infirm for too long.”
“It’s a nice spot.”
“Who knows if the next time I come here I’ll be a sprinkle of ashes. Will you take a photo and send it to me?”
His father sat down at the table, and Sammy lifted the camera to his eye and centered the brackets on his father’s face in the viewfinder. He pressed the shutter.
�
�You met Helen here.”
“She was putting away books from a cart. She saw me watching her, and I looked away.”
“Obviously it didn’t end there, did it?”
His father continued to gaze at the shelves and gave no impression of having heard him.
“We were terrible to each other,” his father finally said.
“Who?”
“Your mother and I.”
“My memory tells me that you were the one to leave us.”
“You can blame me all you like, but I wasn’t the only one who transgressed.”
His father thought that he hadn’t known. A boy knew more than his parents expected him to know: the alien scents they carried home under their coats, the phone calls behind closed doors, the swings in their attention, the overly emotive compensation in their voices when trying to sound honest. They kept their secrets, and he did, too, for them. In the end, he’d sided with his mother because that had long been their arrangement.
Why did his father think to mention any of it now? He couldn’t tell whether it was because his father enjoyed petty cruelty, their shared familial trait, or whether his son’s opinion now mattered to him.
“Fine,” his father said. “I’m finished here. Let’s leave.”
On the ground floor, the reading room looked emptier than before. The woman who had greeted them at the front desk stood with a few others around a portable radio. His father waved his good-byes. The woman looked up to say, “Be careful out there. There’s been a bombing at Parliament.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It was chilly outside, even with the fuller sun, and the air stank of burnt rubber and matches. Sirens blared, unseen, and then dimmed. The old women still stood leaning against the fence. Either they hadn’t heard the news or they, like his father, had resolved to remain unruffled.
“We better bash on,” his father said, and began walking to the Tube.
Sammy tried to wave down one of the passing taxis, but none were available.
“Do you want to stand here until afternoon?” asked his father. They made their way to Whitehall, but the police had cordoned off the intersection with blue tape.
“A suspicious something of some sort up there,” said a stranger.
“Maybe we should head back to the library,” Sammy said to his father.
“Nonsense. There are plenty of routes around this.”
A constable waved the crowd away from the intersection but could not tell them where they might be able to cross.
“My father, as you can see, isn’t well,” Sammy said. “Won’t you make this one exception?” The constable continued blowing his whistle.
“Sorry, but did you hear me?”
Sammy’s wishes seemed simple: to deposit his father with Helen, to make telephone inquiries regarding a return flight to Los Angeles, and then to remove himself from everyone’s ordeals. All these contests of territory, of suffering and vengeance, and the ensuing mistrust and enmity—they weren’t his business.
“Samart, you mustn’t get so agitated. I’ve taught you to be stronger than that,” said his father, putting a hand on Sammy’s back for emphasis.
The touch of his hand there took Sammy to a morning in 1948. He’d been at the old house, a small boy standing over the small circular pond where he had spent many other mornings watching swirls of orange and silver koi send sudden ripples through the reflection of a high-pitched roof with fish-scale tiles and arched windows designed by an Italian architect and shaped by half-Portuguese masons. Leaves from the thick, braided trunks of the banyan tree above skimmed the water in scattered flotillas.
His father, then a towering giant, patted his back. “Will you miss our relatives like they said you would?” he asked.
Sammy shook his head, even though the day before he had clutched his grandmother’s wrist, not wanting to let go.
“It’s a great opportunity for me. And for you. None of your cousins will have this kind of education and experience abroad. Can’t you appreciate that?”
He nodded, but he also must have suspected that later, when he ate and slept and played at the London house, he would feel as if he were only a distant refraction of himself at this house, before which there was nothing.
“Go now. You mustn’t let your mother worry,” his father said. “You’re braver than you appear.”
He had tried to believe his father then. He wouldn’t now, stranded behind a police line, with a bomb gone off a few streets over and his own luxurious dissatisfaction at how most things had turned out for him.
A white lorry with the Metropolitan Police insignia pulled up at the curb. Sammy thought it might have come from the coroner’s office, its arrival having quieted the crowd and suffused the scene with an air of solemnity. The back door swung open to let out two older policemen in regular uniform, and then a rough human shape, its limbs padded thickly in drab-colored material. Only the hands were of normal proportion, almost naked but for thin gray gloves. The figure wore a helmet that looked like a motorcyclist’s except for the Plexiglas plate screwed over the face—a man’s, it appeared, though Sammy could barely make it out through the thick shield and the mist that pulsed when the face breathed. The figure stood heavily on the pavement as the others inspected the suit.
Sammy raised his camera and began taking photos.
“Samart, you’re still cross about that bit at the library,” his father said.
“I’m not.”
“Never be afraid to announce one’s mind. You need to learn this.”
There he was again, the dispenser of paternal wisdom. It felt to him that his father was offering both a suggestion for his son’s character and an explanation for his earlier insult to his ex-wife. No need to say anything in response, Sammy told himself.
“She’s selling the old house,” he said to his father. “It’s going to become a condominium.”
His father’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second, but all he said was, “I imagine it’ll fetch a fair price.”
“More than fair.”
“Will you see any of it?”
“A good sum to tide me over.”
“Then it’s for the best.”
His father’s calm reception caught him off guard. It would have been satisfying to see a sudden swell of disbelief or disappointment— or both—break across that face.
“I told her that we didn’t have to sell.”
“Shush,” said his father. “It’s done. Nothing more to say.”
One privilege Sammy enjoyed about his line of work was that it allowed him to disappear, bodiless, into the rectangular world within his camera. As the man in the bomb suit walked away from the lorry, Sammy raised his camera again and pressed the shutter without bothering to adjust the depth of vision. A police wagon pulled in and blocked his view, and he moved closer to get another shot from between shoulders and parked cars.
“Stay here,” he shouted to his father, without taking his eyes off the viewfinder. As the man walked farther ahead, Sammy followed.
He noticed how easily the man swung his limbs, even with the thick padding. He lurched forward, under the airy winter clouds and the Edwardian-era shopfronts with the touristy merchandise in their windows, bringing the fear of obliteration into focus on this otherwise mundane weekday and ordinary street. Sammy wondered how the man might gauge the probable course of electrical current wired from a car battery or what preparations he had made to deal with it, or how much confidence he had in the steadiness of his hands. He pressed the shutter again and again, trying to capture the vision of a courageous knight, persistent in the protection of life and property from devastation.
His father. Sammy looked back to see an old man leaning forward on his cane. His father wasn’t looking at or for him. His gaze seemed fixed on someplace invisible to everyone else. It was
the same expression his father had while reading—the concentrated attention that had always made Sammy want to call out to him, to return him to the world they’d shared. But each time he’d been afraid to go through with it, not for fear of reprimand but for fear of fraying whatever fibril still attached his father to them—his mother and him. It turned out that his father had been elsewhere all along.
Sammy turned back, but the man in the suit had rounded the corner and was out of sight. When he turned again, so was his father.
OUTPOUR
There were a few thousand people crowded in the streets at first, and each day their number grew by thousands more. This many people, some swore they could feel the roads sag beneath their shoes. They moved together like a giant animal, each tiny human a cell of the beast. Strangers became dearest friends, ready to die for one another. Nemeses from rival schools passed around cellophane bags of milky iced tea and, later, bottles of cane rum.
It was supposed to rain, they in the animal had heard. When it didn’t, they saw it as an auspicious sign that the heavenly deities were with them, and when it did rain the next day, they took it as a test of their heart and commitment. They sat and squatted in makeshift newspaper ponchos and under umbrellas, listening to the impassioned speeches of their friends and fellow citizens.
The animal obliterated silence with its chants and roars. It demanded a constitution. The arrested student leaders must be released at once.
These disturbances to the nation’s peace and prosperity, as the officials would refer to the animal, started as murmurs at university lunch tables that within a few months grew to megaphoned outdoor speeches. The military government, led by the field marshal who had overthrown the previous government, had promised that power would soon be restored to the people, but in the two years that had since passed, the prospect of a civil democracy had faded and discontentment had grown. Every cup of rice cost more than the last. Workers had to keep walking out of factories to have a chance at fair wages. The influence of the Americans and the Japanese was ruining everything.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 6