Disco for the Departed

by Colin Cotterill

  There was a rumbling sound and the ceiling came crashing down on their heads. The floor beneath them gave way and they tumbled slowly downward like leaves falling from a tree. A cockerel joined them in their descent. It looked into Siri’s eyes and crowed hoarsely.

  A pale light was seeping in through the nylon curtain. Above Siri’s head, the corpses of a dozen flying beetles lay bottoms up on the top of the netting. Although the spirits had been known to spring trick endings on him, this second awakening had a feel of reality about it. The falling chicken crowed again and was joined by a howling dog. From somewhere close, the sound of a klooee, a green bamboo flute, began. It was a simple tune, executed with technical accuracy but with little heart. As he listened, he squirmed around under the quilt to discover which of his bones and muscles would ache that day. He had no say in this. He often overexerted himself in his dreams and suffered for it the next morning. But today, even as he stood, everything seemed to work fine.

  He walked over to the spare bed and looked at the unruffled quilt that covered it. For no logical reason he could think of, he pulled it back. There was nothing there. Of course. This was real life. What did he expect? He was in the process of putting it back when he squashed something beneath his bare foot. He heard the squelch and wondered whether he might have put the nonsticking lizard out of its misery, but it was just a berry. It had fallen from the dish of fruit on the table. It was a small red currant. He’d seen its kind before but couldn’t put a name to it. A few years earlier he would have thrown it out. But everything that happened these days seemed to have relevance to some other thing. There were no coincidences. “Take notice of what you see.” He wrapped the berry in a sheet of tissue from the roll on the table and put it into his bag.

  ***

  Mr. Geung had heard of Luang Prabang and Dr. Siri’s adventures there from the doctor himself. It was a place, like Paris, like Mrs. Kit’s Broom and Brush Factory, like the moon. These were all only words to Geung. Visiting them was unthinkable and unnecessary. He had his own world and had no need to visit any other. So, when the convoy arrived in Luang Prabang province, he was neither impressed nor glad to be there. The journey had been a bone-jarring ordeal for all of them, but especially for Geung Hopelessness sat heavily upon him. As he was unable to cope with all the new information he was being exposed to, he sat where he’d been put, on the wooden bench, and stared, bemused, at the passing scenery, a mountainous vista like nothing he’d ever seen in his limited life.

  Whenever the truck stopped and the soldiers all climbed down to stretch their aching muscles, Geung followed them off into the forest to relieve himself. He’d become so docile and uncommunicative that the soldiers had begun to treat him more like a kit bag than a prisoner. He’d off-load himself from the truck and they’d stand him in a corner. They’d lead him to the mess tent or to the bunks. Wherever they put him, they knew that’s where he’d be if they needed him. There was so little thought invested in him that by the time they reached the barracks at Xieng Ngeun, he’d been totally forgotten.

  The sergeant ran up the wooden steps and knocked on the frame of the open door to the officers’ rec room. He walked straight in and found his superior officer reading the Huksat Lao newsletter.

  “Captain Ouan, sir?”

  “What is it?”

  “The retarded man.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “We … we don’t actually know, sir. When the trucks arrived here, he wasn’t on any of them.”

  The captain threw down his paper. “You were supposed to be keeping an eye on him.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. He was in the habit of climbing up onto any truck he felt like. We got used to him just being there somewhere.”

  “Oh, you did, did you? When was the last time anyone saw him?”

  “Just before Xieng Ngeun. We stopped to shoot rabbits.”

  The captain sighed. “Well, he isn’t likely to go far, is he, Corporal? Take a jeep back and find him.”

  “Yes, sir.” He saluted but paused before leaving. “Actually, it’s ‘sergeant,’ sir.”

  “Not anymore it’s not.”

  The Amateur Interpreter of English

  The old Pathet Lao driver was at Siri’s disposal for as long as he was needed. The jeep pulled up in front of the new regional hospital in Xam Neua at 8:00 AM. Four years earlier, this capital of Huaphan province had been a pile of rubble and splinters. Not a house had remained standing after a dozen years of blitz. The noncombatant Air America forward air controllers had guided in the bombers and choreographed the destruction, but it was mostly Lao and Hmong pilots with their fingers on the buttons. It was a symbolic gesture. The civilian inhabitants had fled long before the city was flattened.

  But now a new city was taking shape with pretentious boulevards as wide as the Champs-Elysées and grand plans for another communist show town. The hospital was a temporary field of whitewashed barracks while the staff all waited for a move to a more splendid home. The front office housed the administrators, and Siri and Dtui found Dr. Santiago buried behind a rockery of files and books. He was a skinny man around Siri’s age with a hairstyle modeled on that of Albert Einstein. He wore porthole spectacles with glass as thick as the bottoms of gin bottles. A cigarette burned in an ashtray beside him and he seemed to hover there in its smoke. Obviously, he was used to people walking in and out of his office because he did-n’t look up from his work when the visitors arrived.

  “Dr. Santiago?” Siri said when he spotted him through the canyons of paper.

  “Da?” The old Cuban still pored over his lists. Siri wasn’t surprised to hear him speak Russian. After almost ten years as head of foreign medical aid in Huaphan, Santiago still refused pointedly to learn Lao or Vietnamese. He spoke Spanish, English, and Russian fluently and had reached an age when he considered himself sufficiently full of languages. He hadn’t asked to come to Laos, or to work with the Vietnamese, whom he disliked. He certainly wasn’t about to make an attempt to cross the cultural divide. He was the expert, and everyone had to make the effort to communicate with him. All in all, not unlike Siri, he was a stubborn but engaging old coot.

  “Dosvidanya,” Siri said. It was his only Russian word and he wasn’t actually sure what it meant.

  Santiago finally looked up and squinted through his glasses. It seemed to take him a few moments either to focus or to place his old friend in his memory. “Dr. Siri? Is that you?” he asked in English. He jumped up from his chair and ran around the desk to embrace a respected colleague. They smiled and laughed a lot as they hugged, but Dtui noticed they weren’t actually conversing. On the journey, Siri had told her that he’d worked with Santiago, on and off, for five years without the benefit of a common language. Siri spoke French and Vietnamese quite fluently but he, too, had reached his linguistic quota. When there was no English/Lao interpreter available, the two had merely observed one another’s surgical skills and socialized with the aid of diagrams and mime. It had been such a peculiarly pleasant relationship, Siri wondered whether a common language might have spoiled it in some way.

  Siri finally broke away and pointed to his assistant. “Nurse Dtui,” he said.

  “Hello, Dr. Santiago. Pleased to meet you,” she said in English.

  Both Siri and Santiago looked at her with astonishment for a few seconds before the Cuban went across to hug her also. It was a culturally inappropriate gesture that seemed to fit into the spirit of the moment. He told her she spoke English well.

  “I read and write,” she said. “I don’t really speak it.” It was true. She’d never used the language to converse. It was just a medium for study. In fact, she was a little surprised to find it coming from her mouth so happily.

  He assured her that whether she read it or spoke it, it was still the same language. And, from that moment, despite the fact that she’d never heard herself using it before, English became their language of comm
unication and Dtui its novice interpreter. She knew her pronunciation was awful, but Santiago had no problem with that because his own accent was equally horrible. He, too, had learned English from American textbooks. Siri was full of admiration for his talented assistant.

  Throughout the morning, the two old doctors caught up with each other’s lives since last they’d met. Santiago was spending more time on administering Cuban aid, he told them, and had less and less time available for the job he was actually trained for. Farmers continued to get blown up in their fields, and there were fewer and fewer qualified medical staff members to care for them. There were under a hundred qualified doctors in the entire country so the PL medical staff was spread thinly to fill the roles of the Royalist physicians who’d fled to Thailand. Santiago had funding but nobody to hire.

  Through Dtui, whose confidence increased as time passed, Siri finally got around to the mystery of his cement man. The Cuban thought about it for a moment and asked whether he was certain the incident had taken place early that year.

  “January 21, to be exact,” Siri told him.

  “Dr. Santiago says that if it had been a few months earlier, he’d have had two very good candidates for us,” Dtui said. “At least that’s what I think he means. But he reckons that by last October, they’d already gone back to Cuba.”

  “They completed their tours?”

  “Not exactly. He says it’s a little complicated. They came in 1971 to help with the setting up of some project at kilometer 8.”

  “Xieng Muang,” Siri said. “That’s the hospital. It was an amazing project. They had to drill out the centers of two mountains. They built two complete hospital wards that were invisible from the air but were able to accommodate a thousand patients. It was an impressive piece of engineering. The Vietnamese military took care of the labor; the Cubans provided nurses and orderlies.”

  “He thinks you may remember the two men he means. Their names were Isandro and Udon.”

  “Odon,” Santiago corrected her.

  “Sorry, Odon. He says they were here from the beginning.”

  Siri nodded his head. He’d only been invited to Xieng Muang from time to time to help with surgery, and on those occasions he’d always brought his Lao team with him, but he did recall the sight of black orderlies running around the wards. He’d had no opportunity to talk to them.

  “While the work was going on,” Dtui continued, “Dr. Santiago says they took care of the wounded in temporary caves here and there. Isandro and Odon were part of that project. They were the head nursing orderlies. When the Kilometer 8 Hospital was ready, they moved everyone into the mountains. After the two of them finished one four-year tour, they volunteered for a second. It seems that was quite unusual. Most of the Cubans were in a hurry to return home. But these two were good workers and they had made friends with the locals. They’d studied the Lao language, even acquired a taste for the local food.” Dtui added, for Dr. Siri’s benefit, “Of course, I might be making half of this up.”

  “So why were they sent back early?” Siri asked, ignoring her disclaimer.

  There followed a long spell while Dtui clarified points with the old Cuban.

  “Apparently,” Dtui said, “there were complaints.”

  “Who from?”

  “A senior Vietnam Army officer said one of the men, Isandro, was making advances to his daughter. He made it very clear: if he found the man anywhere near her again, he’d shoot him.”

  “And Dr. Santiago passed this message on to Isandro and Odon?”

  “He says he did but they defied him. They said they weren’t afraid of him or the colonel. He couldn’t believe it. The situation just got worse and worse. The doctor couldn’t have Cuban workers getting shot by a Vietnamese for messing around with his daughter, so he had no choice. He ordered them home.”

  “And is he absolutely sure they went?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And no other dark-skinned Cubans went missing from any other Cuban projects?”

  “He says this was the only one in the region.”

  “Could you ask Dr. Santiago to describe Isandro for me?”

  Again Dtui and the Cuban doctor went into a huddle.

  “As far as I can make out,” Dtui said, “he was built like a tree—tall and broad shouldered like an American basketball player—and strong.”

  Siri shrugged. This wasn’t at all the description of their cement man. Dtui asked about Odon.

  “This is more like it,” she told Dr. Siri. “Odon was smaller. Santiago says he was ugly as a goat but had a permanent smile that endeared him to everyone. He says it’s unusual for the natives—and I guess that includes you and me—to get along with dark-skinned foreigners, but Odon and Isandro really made an effort and people responded. Then he said something I couldn’t really get—something like ‘more fool the natives’ but don’t quote me on that.”

  Siri considered Odon a more likely candidate than his bigger friend, but as they’d both left Laos, it appeared he’d either have to look elsewhere for their mummy’s identity or prove that for some reason one of the orderlies had stayed behind.

  Although there was an enormous refrigerator in one corner of the office, upon inspection it was found to contain nothing but jar upon jar of culture specimens. It was a fascinating collection, they all agreed, but the contents were not likely to be particularly filling. So Santiago invited his guests to join him for lunch at the new Lao Houng Hotel. He gladly abandoned his paperwork and seemed rejuvenated by this unexpected visit. As they were leaving the building, the Cuban stopped to speak to a nurse who looked too young to have completed the nursing certificate. Siri noticed the old man take her hand in his and give her a rather unprofessional peck on the cheek. Although the girl blushed, she didn’t pull away as one would expect of a Lao girl receiving an unwanted kiss. It appeared there was still a Latin fire burning in Santiago’s grate.

  They ate bland Vietnamese food beneath huge posters of unknown Chinese film stars and joked about the new Oz of Vieng Xai. Then, as they drank warm, lightly scented beer for dessert, Santiago turned his attention to Dtui. He asked if she was a qualified nurse. When she said she was, he asked whether she thought her “Papa Siri” would be able to spare her for a day or two. It appeared that after the cease-fire they had moved the Kilometer 8 Hospital outside the mountain and into some old French buildings that stood in front of it. It was still a hospital but nobody working there had more than six month’s basic medical training. Dr. Santiago was expecting two new Cuban doctors to arrive before the weekend but, as things stood, he was desperate for somebody who could make decisions. The doctor went there whenever he was able, but he believed they really needed a big sister on the site.

  She put the proposal to Siri.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m just a nurse.”

  “Dtui, you’ll never be just a nurse. I could probably play detective here on my own for a bit—but the decision’s yours. The living always take precedence over the dead in my book. Just don’t tell any spirits I said that.”

  She turned back to Santiago and asked how certain he was the Cuban doctors would be there by the weekend. He told her he was positive. She told him she would help, and then translated her decision for Siri.

  “Good for you,” he said. “I’ll come by and lend a hand whenever I can. But I’m sure you’ll have the place organized in no time. And Dtui … ?”

  “Yes?”

  “You won’t forget these bodies are alive, will you? Don’t try to store anyone in the freezer overnight.”

  “Dr. Siri!”

  “Sorry.”

  Mr. Geung wasn’t designed for walking. His ankles turned outward and his legs were short. But the notion had entered his mind that he should walk back to Vientiane. He knew it was far, but not that it was over three hundred kilometers by road. He knew he didn’t have any money in his pocket to pay for a bus ticket, nor did he have a concept of how
else he could get to the morgue to keep his promise. So, when the soldiers stopped to take a pee, he walked to the last truck in the convoy and looked back at the road that snaked down through the mountains. He took a deep breath, as the doctor had taught him, and set off for home. Nobody noticed him go.

  After only five minutes, he was alone on the deserted road. Mr. Geung wasn’t one for doing things alone. He was good at joining in with others or doing what he was told, but he had hardly a trace of initiative. The trucks were barely out of sight before he realized he wouldn’t be able to undertake such a journey by himself. He needed a friend. He needed a logical friend to keep him company. And, as if by magic, he looked back over his shoulder and saw Dtui just a few paces behind him. It was a relief. She was the most sensible woman he knew and he was sure she’d guide him back.

  “I … I’m sorry, little sis-ter,” he said and smiled at her.

  She laughed and took his hand, and walked with him along the badly potholed road. At one point she whispered into his mind that the sun was directly overhead and they didn’t have hats. They decided to walk through the groves of peculiar trees, keeping the road within sight. Having her beside him gave him confidence. As they walked, he reminded her of all the jokes she’d told for the past year. She was impressed that they’d remained stored in his memory. He didn’t know where he’d be without Dtui and her common sense there to guide him.

  The image of Mr. Geung appeared so clearly in Dtui’s mind it was as if he were there in the room with her. She opened her eyes and looked around. In the closetless room her clothes hung from the four posts of the bed like pallbearers. The darned holes in the mosquito netting gathered the mesh into fairy stars, adding to her feeling that Guesthouse Number One was mystical in some way. The klooee piper played the same dirge over and over in the distance and, even in late afternoon, the mist had begun to roll against the glass of the window. She realized she must have dozed and dreamed of her friend, but she felt uneasy for him.

  She knew that but for the mystery guests in the far wing and the staff sitting around in the empty dining room, the guesthouse was deserted. Siri would be down on the veranda describing their visit with Dr. Santiago to the small-minded security head. What a letdown he’d turned out to be. Before he’d suddenly turned into a raging communist Nazi, Dtui had even considered him as a prospective mate. His cool smile and lean frame fitted her ever-shrinking list of requirements. Unfortunately, she held firmly to the belief that the man for her had to have a mind of his own, an increasingly difficult order to fill. Now that she had ruled him out, she thought it best to opt out of the evening’s briefing downstairs.