He hoped that, with time, enough courage would gather inside him that he could bring up the question of their future together. If not, he would swig one of those energy potions truck drivers drank to stay awake, and he would down a shot of the strongest, dirtiest rum, and he would tell her that they needed to talk, and he would be ready for whatever she might say.
He was thinking of bringing up the subject as they lay next to each other in his rented room the night they heard the news on the radio. The field marshal had flown back from his exile in Singapore. It was October 1976.
When Siripohng turned to face Nee, he sensed that it was not her love for him that had blanked her eyes but shock that was quickly turning into rage. He knew their student friends wouldn’t allow for this: the man whom they held responsible for the death and suffering of so many of their classmates, setting foot again in this country—in the guise of a monk, no less. He told her he was afraid of what could happen in Krungthep now, and she rebuked him for having any fear at all. When she got dressed and left, he couldn’t tell if she was more angry at the news or at him.
He didn’t tell her that he feared nothing for himself. Ever since the protests three years ago, he had been waking from nightmares. In those dreams, the streets of the city had emptied, save for the lone passing figure of a night watchman, who did not acknowledge him and whose cymbal claps would fade to reveal the sound of approaching footsteps. He knew to launch into a sprint, as he had done through alleys that October day, only this time there wasn’t an old woman to pull him inside to safety. As he looked over his shoulder to see the men behind him, their faces obscured by shadow, he worried for the woman he loved. They would also come for her, he was sure.
“Run, Nee!” he would scream to her, always waking himself. “Run!”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Nee knew she had to leave before six in the morning, the hour her mother rose to water the myrtle in front of the shop and bring in the bundle of wholesale newspapers, still delivered in her late husband’s name. During the last protests, when Nee was just a first-year, her mother had been able to evoke the memory of her father with effect. Your father would have wanted to see his daughter graduate, intact and alive, she’d said. Nee had stayed away from the batons and bullets that time.
The antigovernment rallies since the field marshal’s return had intensified, and a few days before, two people putting up protest posters were beaten to death, the police unable, they said, to determine the parties responsible.
Nee guessed that her mother had prayed to higher deities and land spirits that her father’s name wouldn’t lose its power. It hadn’t, but she wasn’t going to stay home anymore. A dead father could only hold back so much, and a living mother for only so long. Her mother must have suspected so. She’d known that Nee had been staying late after classes to go to the demonstrations, but now that more blood had been shed and more protests were erupting in provinces north and south, she told Nee how familiar it all looked: the gabbers in suits on the TV and the gun-wielding men iterating the usual about national stability and the enraged young people vowing not to let their friends die in vain. Her mother again invoked her father’s name and implored her to stay home. Nee assured her mother that she would, knowing that she had lied.
When Nee tried to leave her bedroom the next morning, she found the door locked from the outside.
Her mother should have known better than to underestimate her resolve. Nee stood on a desk and climbed through the transom as quietly as she could, imitating the little yellow lizards that silently darted across her bedroom walls and ceiling at night. On reaching the floor, she was careful not to step where the boards creaked, and then she tiptoed down the stairs.
She commanded herself not to look in the direction of her father’s photo, but she needn’t have looked there to see her father’s face. He used to get up about now, waking earlier than her mother did to help ready the shop before heading out to teach at a secondary school. She often woke a little after her father, and she’d go down to help him set up the newsstand. She restocked packs of cigarettes in the glass case and cough drops in their tall tins. She mopped the floors and threw away dead roaches. How she resented Nok, who never bothered to do the same and yet never seemed to suffer any loss of love from their father. She figured that her father had applied to his daughters a position of neutrality similar to the one he maintained in the classroom, doing his best to avoid favoring any child over the other. She didn’t blame him; she blamed her sister, now absconded overseas.
Nee had spoken to Nok a few nights before. Nok worried, like their mother, but Nok wasn’t as persistent. It took very little to change the subject with her. This time it was the hor mok their mother had cooked the weekend before.
“She made it with knife fish from Brother Whiskers and banana leaves from Grandmother’s trees,” Nee said.
“Oh, I would lick the phone if I could taste it that way.”
She loved hearing Nok gasping and moaning with jealousy five thousand kilometers away.
After promises to ship some Thai magazines, Nee said her good-byes and hung up. Now it occurred to her that the phone call with her sister might have been their last. The same with this walk through the unlit store in the near morning. She should appreciate it: the ordinary and mundane that was hers, like her knowledge of where to step forward in the dark to avoid the shelves and the stacks of rice sacks, and how much she loved to hear the muffled call to prayer being sung from the nearby mosque at this hour—the things that wouldn’t matter to anyone else if her mother’s fears were to come true.
It was very early, but customers would soon be on their way—the housekeepers for the rich stopping in for detergent and cooking oil, the pedal cabdrivers for their morning bottle of Red Bull. The day bloomed with gossip and laughter among neighbors and customers. They complained about the weather, they asked after daughters and sons, they traded last night’s leftovers saved in rubber-banded bags.
As Nee slid open the shutters, she reached out to put her palm on the wall. Along with her family, she would most miss this place, should some ghost of herself persist in another realm.
Siripohng was waiting outside, in a white shirt and dark pants, student attire. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“Nothing. Speak more quietly. My mother has very good hearing,” she said, wiping the corners of her eyes by pretending to smooth her hair.
“We don’t have to go today,” Siripohng said. “I think things might get even worse than last time.”
“I’m a nursing student. I need to be there, especially if people start to get hurt. You can stay here with my mother if you want.”
When her mother realized that she was missing, she would hurry to the store’s altar and light incense sticks with her husband’s old lighter, before clasping her hands at her forehead to make pleas to the deities. Listen, and help us, your humble calves, her mother would mutter, her eyes closed.
Nee looked at Siripohng. He hadn’t said anything after she’d hissed at him. Her friends had told her that she was the cruel one in the relationship. After the fights and the horrible things they’d say to each other, she could count on him to circle back, repentant and yielding. She didn’t know if this was how love should be, but it was what they had, and she had had her heart torn up before by men unlike Siripohng, whom she could read with nothing more than a glance at his face. He looked nervous this morning, and she was mad at him for giving her own cowardice the excuse to scratch at her.
She padlocked the shutters closed and said to him, “Hey, stop being so scared. Let’s go.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
They walked for hours that morning. To avoid paramilitary groups rumored to be harassing students, they had thought it safer to take a route through back alleys, wearing staffers’ jackets from the hotel where Siripohng worked over their student clothes and wanderin
g through innards of the old city that she’d never known were there. Siripohng had claimed to know where he was going in the endless maze of shopfronts and homes, and when she realized that they were lost, she wasn’t angry. Here they were shielded from the horns and engine rumbles of the main roads, and as they walked farther into the alleys, the air around them seemed to change. The sun no longer scorched them; trees and overhanging roofs shaded their path. It might have been evening, in this dimmed quietude. The shops inside the teak houses they passed seemed open for business but unlit. A girl in a pah toong dress, her features obscured by the hang of her long hair, leaned against a table, mending a bamboo birdcage. Pale-skinned women stood behind salon chairs, trimming the hair of ancient customers who sat blank-faced in front of mirrors. Shirtless, pigtailed children ran loops in the streets and disappeared into the shadows of deeper alleys.
Nee and Siripohng didn’t speak to anyone, not wanting questions to be asked, and no one spoke to them. They walked and walked, until the alleyways, the shops, and the faces they walked past all began to feel familiar. At times, they wondered if they might be walking in circles, yet some part of them wished that they could keep wandering through the alleys, never get to where they had set out for. They would diverge to a separate place, removed from the society and people they’d cared for or even loved, so they could finally feel unburdened by the weight of the future they’d dreamed to be theirs. After a turn that they recognized to be informed more by chance than by certitude, they emerged into a produce market and were again welcomed by the searing noise of the city.
It was almost noon when they reached the campus and entered the quad through a little-used entrance. Their feet ached and they were thirsty, but their discomforts couldn’t outmatch their elation at joining the thousands of students already there. At the football field, they met up with friends who unrolled a spare rattan rug for them, and for the rest of that afternoon Siripohng held an umbrella over Nee as he sat watching satirical plays performed on the stage and she lay napping beside him.
When evening came, they ate chicken-fat rice from newsprint bundles unwrapped across their laps. They laughed at the comedic performances and sang more songs and clapped for the speakers who got up to rile the crowd. They talked idly with friends about telenovela episodes and books, as the half-moon arced above them, and then they went to sleep on the dew-touched rug to regain their strength.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It sounded like thunder, but there was no storm. Early that morning, two bombs landed on the football field and shrapnel tore through the crowd. Many were still asleep. The ones woken by the noise screamed for their friends to wake up, and some never would.
Sulfurous smoke poured from the university fences. From the loudspeakers, a desperate young man’s voice cried out, “Please stop shooting! Please stop shooting! We’re only students!,” over and over, but the gunfire went on.
Siripohng lay spilling out on the ground. Nee dragged him behind a concrete wall and tore off his shirt, revealing two torrential holes under his ribs. She didn’t know if he could hear her, but she told him that his wounds weren’t bad and she was going to get him to the student medics. He only needed to stay calm, she told him, but he kept trying to say something as blood gurgled from his mouth. Run, he was saying. She refused, but he insisted, gasping. To stop the bleeding, she bunched his shirt over his wound and pushed, but he continued to pour out. His shirt was red, as were her hands and the ground around them. He asked why the sound system was getting so loud. She didn’t understand what he meant, hearing only terrified shouts and more gunfire, closer. Then his eyes rolled back and he stopped speaking. His body began to shudder. His legs kicked.
Nee knew that he was drowning, and she couldn’t bear to stay. She ran, taking off with a small crowd fleeing down narrow walkways between buildings. They ran past the all-seeing face of the university’s clocktower, and when they made it to the river, they splashed in like children.
Gunboats approached. Nee expected someone to shout out and demand surrender. Instead, muzzles flashed white. Underwater, she could still hear them. She was lucky to be a good swimmer. From her high school meets, she knew how to hold her breath for precious minutes. She broke the surface farther out and hid behind a drifting patch of water hyacinths. Green snakes were said to make homes of them. She had no fear of snakes that day.
Daylight arrived. On the shore, men moved in efficient swarms. Nee watched them drag students by the hair. Up by rope they went, dead or alive, and dangled beneath the dotted shade of bodhi trees. Cans of gasoline appeared. Near the river landing, heaps made jagged with legs and hands blackened, their matter joining the tea-colored smoke rising elsewhere on campus. She couldn’t be sure if it was because her ears were full of water, but by afternoon all sounds had disappeared. It was the quietest she had ever heard the campus, not one sparrow noisy over classroom roofs. She felt like she was somewhere else, watching a terrible silent movie.
Cold and tired, she hung on to the hyacinths for hours. Waiters at a restaurant down the river snagged her in with the same long-handled bamboo stick they used to push floating trash from patrons’ view.
II
FALLING
For most of the year, the swing served no significant function other to provide a tall perch for sparrows and vultures, but at the start of the lunar year, it became the site of great Brahmin festivities in the Siamese capital. Phineas had promised the reverend that he’d go forth and observe the local customs, and so it came to be that, on the appointed afternoon, he went to meet Winston at the gate. Winston was dressed in his usual squalid shirt and vest, but with a cloth wrapped around his hips, the way many natives dressed.
“Doctor, you have to try it for yourself,” he said, pointing to other cloths he had hung to dry outside. “The breeze fans right through.”
Phineas demurred, and so they left the gate, and before long they were proceeding down gravel roads he had not taken before. “It’s a swifty shortcut,” Winston said, with a smirk. His duties as the mission’s printer necessitated visits to ink shops and paper traders all over the city, but Phineas seldom ventured on foot this far from the compound, and when he did, he mostly took the wider, less crowded avenues, with patrolling constables and at least some hope of spotting a threatening gesture before harm arrived.
The capital, the reverend had told him, had been built with heavy inspiration from Ayutthaya, which lay a day’s journey north at the junction of three rivers. The old capital, much like the current one, manifested as an intricate latticework of long bustling thoroughfares lined by grand temples and pagodas. Little of them would survive destruction by Burmese invaders, but the building plans and spatial alignments served as a model for its eventual successor.
Phineas wondered if any of the lunacy before them had also been inherited. The farther they traveled toward the city’s center, the greater the variety and concentration of people and sights. They walked alongside long-robed Chinamen and orderly columns of monks and caged fowl on pushcarts, past vegetable piles and fresh manure not inches apart, past singing girls cracking coconuts with bludgeons, past babies dozing in their hammocks and leashed monkeys and lesion-scarred beggars. At corners, laborers squatted in front of eating houses, digging into bowls with their hands. Sari-wrapped Hindu women beckoned them to step into their crammed fabric shops. Roadside elephants crushing sugarcane stalks in their jaws watched them with indifferent eyes, as did red-mouthed elderly Siamese chewing betel nuts under their stilt-propped shacks. They crossed over canals where canoe-borne vendors sang out their wares and held high assorted fruits and skinned carcasses for inspection.
At a bridge, children spreading their eyelids with their fingers to mock them were soon joined by older youth carrying bamboo sticks and reeking of rice spirits even from afar. Phineas paused to gauge their friendliness. Winston chuckled and advised that they keep walking.
“You thi
nk this little walk is fraught with peril? Let me tell you of my days outside of Madurai, printing scriptures in Tamil. We were surrounded by tigers, with only crabapples to fling for our defense. One would have eaten me if it weren’t for a good throw from this very hand right here.”
“Winston, unlike you, I do not look forward to physical squabbles as part of my daily nourishment.”
“Well, why don’t you then?”
Phineas ignored him and continued forward. He could see by then the red curve of the swing arching over the trees. High on one of its legs, he observed burn marks where lightning must have struck it some time ago, but that damage apparently hadn’t halted the custom. He could hear the roar of the crowd, wild and hungry, as if a battle was about to commence. He and Winston hastened to the viewing area, wedging themselves into the gathered masses.
For the want of silver, men risked flesh and bone to clench their teeth on silken satchels. Phineas saw them carried by the swing through the blue of the sky, as high from the ground as the tallest church steeples in a New England valley.
During upswings, the satchel biter at the front of the plank lunged forward, his body extended beyond the plank, his mouth agape, sharklike. His adjacent companions, one on each side, attempted to steer the plank by shifting their weight, while a fourth man, in the back, squatted down to lend greater velocity to their ascension, to the cheers of the immense crowd.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 8