Strum

by Nancy Young

  Parking her mother’s Renault a short distance from the cabin she picked her way down carefully along the wooded path to the front door. She sat in silence on the veranda for hours watching brook trout nip out of the water at unsuspecting flies. The riotous autumn colors of the birches and maples scattered like confetti low across the water-fringing landscape. Sheaves of bright yellow, garnet, and sunset-struck orange mellowed the deep evergreen overhang of the tall and shadowy conifers.

  Finally, she descended down the path to the edge of the lake, as the whirring noise of a wood lathe met her ears like a little gasp from a sleeping baby confirming its precious life. Accompanying the whir was a faint music which resonated from somewhere deep within the cabin. It had an unfamiliar ring and the tune was cheerless, sending a thin unexpected shiver down her spine. Was it self-reproach? The sound was deep, but not fearful. Like a tear it descended, heavy with restraint like a mother’s sacrifice.

  7

  Joël (Chiang Rai), 1960–1976

  Like a bull in the pit of European politics, Joël became impassioned to keep his petition alive after his first effort to gain the Hanoi position proved unfruitful, dispatching brilliant internal mini-campaigns dramatically in the halls of the French parliament and in the Paris social press. He refused to believe that the failure of negotiations to secure his rightful office was purely geo-political, not personal. But to prove to himself and the others that a failure at the start of his career was an aberration, he channeled his energies into perfecting the art of power politics. His powers of subversive and not-so-subtle manipulation won him a reputation throughout the extensive French diplomatic network as Le Taureau. The Bull.

  By the mid-point of the 1970s, however, Joël’s reputation had grown and he became better known as a consummate strategist. His effective behind-the-scenes negotiations during the high-profile Paris Peace Accords of 1973 reflected his own personal intent to establish peace in Vietnam. As early as 1968, he was instrumental on behalf of the French government in negotiations that led to the Accord. As a result of the treaty, the United States National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese politburo member Lê Duc Thọ were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, although Lê refused to accept it, and Joël felt he and his French colleagues were slighted.

  He assigned himself to a special mission during the summer of 1976, to accompany a French and Belgian medical team traveling to a besieged refugee camp on the Laotian border set up by the Thai government to intercept the tide of Lao and Hmong refugees flooding into Thailand not unlike the muddy waters of the Mekong after a relentless season of monsoons. He would then move on to Hanoi, where it was arranged through tentative diplomatic channels for him to gain an audience with representatives of the Communist leadership.

  It was a politically subversive operation and later branded a secret war, but French intelligence reports told of hundreds and thousands of refugees fighting their way haplessly through the bullet-infested jungles to possible freedom, in hot pursuit by Pathet Lao soldiers intent on stopping their progress. All but a handful were picked off by the gunmen before they could reach safe haven. It was Joël’s job to ensure that the Thai army could guarantee protection for the humanitarian medics searching these perilous jungle tracks for survivors injured en route to the camps.

  For six days he sat in negotiation first with low- to medium-ranking Thai officers, backing them against linguistic and diplomatic walls until they caved and called in their superior. More than once he endured tedious waits in a visitor’s chair ending at long last with the arrival of a young houseboy gingerly bowing to him in apologetic gestures, and presenting him at the end of a long hallway to an officious middle-aged bureaucrat in the long white uniform of the Thai military official, who would invariably be seated behind a heavy darkly ominous mahogany desk, strangely devoid in Joël’s mind, of the piles of official documentation, correspondence, and bits of paperwork and writing utensils that cluttered his own industrious desk back at home. This official’s shiny jet black hair would be oiled to perfection and not a strand would waft as the whirring rattan ceiling fans swirled laboriously above them.

  Joël launched immediately into his main demands, not waiting for the coffee or tea to be offered, making deals and brokering promises in French and English, and resorting to Vietnamese, and then rudimentary Thai when no other words seemed to make the connection. He paced the humid yet sterile room with its wall-length rows of portraits. Thai royalty looked down sternly upon the Frenchman as he resolutely walked the line of the carpet, refusing to be seated and waving off the houseboy, leaving his opponent silently fretting over the sanctioned iced tea. They put up ever weakening blockades to his demands, and then only after signs of imminent capitulation began to show did the diplomat allow the tea to be poured. After three afternoons and one evening of masterful entreaties, it was the Thai General himself who approved the use of an armored convoy of six military jalopies headed by one tank to protect and carry the doctors and their supplies.

  It was a successful negotiation and a potent win for Joël and he felt he was at last at the height of his diplomatic powers. But most of all he was relieved that his mission was accomplished and he could now focus on his long-awaited return to the one place he felt most at home. As he prepared the official dossier on the mission, he also made enquiries into the state of travel and safety in the former French colony. His colleagues, now well aware of his power and influence within the diplomatic channels, responded to his questions with alacrity, and obliquely voiced their hopes for a recommendation by him for the Home Office. In due course, he secured a special diplomatic flight to Hanoi from Chiang Rai.

  Joël was prepared for anything to happen, but he was not prepared for the news he received by telephone the night before his departure. He had retained his neutrality in the great political debate of the time, enabling him to negotiate with less difficulty, and underneath his crisp white shirt, his heart did not beat for any Fascist, Communist, or Socialist. A conservative by nature and a true believer in the Keynesian School of Economics, Joël was as distanced from the proletariat as he was cosseted by the wealth and refinement of his family and diplomatic position. He was a sophisticated and well-educated connoisseur of fine French wine, cognac, Scandinavian beer, and all things intellectual. That his only son was interested in Asia for its disruptive political and social upheavals was a complete anathema to the diplomat.

  When Philippe was six, the family left Europe for diplomatic assignments in Tunisia and Senegal, and after nine years in Africa they had returned to Paris. Philippe was now nearly seventeen and through the tinny, cacophonous transcontinental noise of the embassy telephone call from Paris, he beseeched his father to allow him to join him on the next step of his diplomatic assignment in Southeast Asia. He was on the verge of completing his terminal year and graduating early from the lycée, and had already secured his Communist membership through some sort of underground student network. He had received an official letter of endorsement from the regional Party Chief in Paris. Knowing his father was a senior official in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Party Chief had allowed special dispensation for his age, making him the youngest official member of the Socialist Party in France. The young man was convinced that if his father would grant him his wish to travel to Hanoi to meet the Communist leadership, he would be assured of a great career like his father. While the father haunted the halls of power like a man possessed, the son sought to level the playing fields of the underclass.

  It was the beginning of the monsoon season in northern Thailand, yet Joël clutched the phone with uncharacteristically cold and clammy hands. His son was his most formidable opponent and against the younger man’s precocious negotiation skills he was sometimes left quite astonished and without a retort. It seemed Philippe had learned through proximity the art of persuasion, enough to sway the seasoned diplomat to agree to a three-week trial pe
riod. He was not to wear his red armband in public or identify himself as a Party member to anyone. The diplomatic attaché would postpone his departure from Thailand for one day only. If the boy was not at the Chiang Rai airport the next day at the designated time, he was on his own. The Embassy would see to it that he had a return air ticket back to Paris, but that was his only concession.

  So, while the son made his excited departure for Thailand to follow in his father’s footsteps, the mother prepared to leave Paris for Québec for the last time. Through nearly two decades of global unrest, Lorraine had supported her increasingly irritable husband through his internal political contests and pursuits of career advancement. She kept an immaculate house and single-handedly homeschooled their son both in French and English before he became not only matchless in scholarship but fearless in his pursuit of social justice. She felt her work had been done and she was prepared to retire gracefully from public life in France to her home in Québec.

  •

  On the tarmac of the Chiang Rai airfield the small plane alighted. The first to exit was a young man with tousled hair in crinkled shirt, dungarees, and a fisherman’s cap, followed by a long snaking queue of slightly less disheveled older men, and the occasional woman — volunteer medics who would soon be transported into the jungle to implement their rescue mission. Only when Philippe waved to him did Joël realize that the tall, wiry young man dressed in the faded worker’s blues was indeed his son. A blood red kerchief encircled a thin neck above his wide square shoulders. He did not on this occasion look like a diplomat’s son but more like a dock hand or a street musician. He carried a black leather case over one shoulder and a small khaki rucksack over the other. His rusty black-brown locks tumbled in waves across his forehead and over one eye below the black felt of the mariner’s cap. On approaching his father, however, he tossed his head back and the unruly locks parted to reveal the intensely green eyes of a young Party member on a mission. It seemed the generation gap had widened like the maw of an angry lion while his son was away at lycée, and now the father felt uncomfortably hot and overdressed in the intense humidity.

  The letter sent by the Paris Regional Party Chief was full of praise of the young man’s early achievements, having recruited a full eight times as many new members from the inner and outer arrondissements — from the furthest suburbs and from the university student ranks — as any other member. Everyone lured into his sphere of influence was charmed and impressed by this young man, whose rhetoric and arguments made so much emotional and logical sense that it was impossible to reject his invitation to attend a local meeting just to see what his enthusiasm was all about. Even young women who under normal circumstances would not have engaged in such political discussion were enlightened to the rights of workers, what the labor unions were advocating for, and why they should support the ground floor movement that would eventually change the direction of the national leadership.

  He tirelessly recruited the local clergymen and invited schoolteachers and headmasters to attend lectures and meetings, and when the opportunity was offered to make a speech and talk on behalf of lycée and university students across France, he did not hesitate. Once he brought along his guitar to a large gathering and led the rally with stirring patriotic ballads he composed impromptu as the ever-enlarging crowds gathered. During the less impassioned speeches of the other Party leaders, the guitar seemed to play itself in low dulcet tones as he strummed quiet chords in accompaniment to the instrument’s stirring melody.

  And now, as the snaking queue of medics and nurses began to converge at the entrance of the hangar, Joël dutifully offered cordial embraces, kissing both cheeks of the ladies as if they were his own family members. He voiced his welcome with as much enthusiasm as he could manage, while beyond him the Royal Thai Army officers rounded them up indecorously, ushering the doctors into the building while cursing silently under their breaths. Philippe saw the waiting limousine and for a moment hesitated before turning toward the building and disappearing through the doors in the wake of the médecins. Once inside he quickly caught up with an older woman whose pale silver-blonde hair was swept up into a weary chignon, her blue eyes tinged with red after a long sleepless night. But she smiled warmly as Philippe reached her from across the long warehouse, clearly surprised but pleased to see he had not disappeared into the conspicuous black vehicle that pulled onto the tarmac near the entrance of the building as they landed.

  Sophie Morens had sat in the narrow seat beside Philippe during the arduous journey and their camaraderie was at once conspiratorial and familial. They embraced like old friends, kissing each cheek with a tender reverence. Sophie was forty-six, recently widowed and without children. As a trained pediatrician, she was one of the rare female doctors that worked at the Paris National Hospital, and she had taken a six-month sabbatical to volunteer on this urgent medical mission. She had heard about the horrors in Southeast Asia and beyond, and had a clear opinion about Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and their collective ruthlessness in the false name of Socialism. During the relentlessly long flight, conversations with this disarmingly charming and convincing young man at first put her on edge, and then slowly they made her think critically once more about the many sides of any given story, and she was struck by the contradictions of the atrocities.

  “In my opinion, any violence and torture inflicted on innocent people, particularly children, is evil,” she retorted vehemently to her seat companion on the small plane en route from Bangkok. The parameters of her life’s work, and the Socratic oath which bound her profession, were immutable. To prevent death and alleviate suffering was the sole impetus for her volunteerism.

  “I do not condone violence, per se,” Philippe replied. “But when the masses have been lied to for centuries, what can one do to resist the constant brainwashing?”

  “Your political philosophy,” she continued, “is perhaps a wide-eyed idealism.”

  “You may see me as an idealist, but the reality is that change to the status quo must always be preceded by violence. Extreme methods must be employed when complacency achieves nothing, which is exactly what the elite want … ”

  Listening to his oration on the utopian ideals of students everywhere from Paris to Copenhagen to Beijing, she nodded silently in agreement to those ideals. And their philosophical and political debate and discourse ensued across the transcontinental flight, and only when the plane experienced turbulence did they call a truce and offer each other a comforting hand until the shaking of their seats and rattling of their teeth abated. Sophie never enjoyed traveling by plane, forever plagued as she was by memories of old pre-war two-seater prop planes that flew her and her husband across the sands of Africa to tend to critically ill patients in remote sites in Algiers and Tunisia. She looked on in awe as the young man sat nonchalantly in his seat as the plane pitched and rolled through storm clouds. He was a veteran of the small military plane, having traveled with his parents to nearly twelve countries in less than seventeen years. She wondered to herself about his experiences and perceived that he was mature beyond his years.

  His youthful enthusiasm reminded her of her late husband during the early years of their courtship. Jean Luc had been a brilliant philosophy and biology student at the Université d’Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand 1, where they both matriculated. Two years of military service in Tunisia and another two years of travel and research in Papua New Guinea and East Timor prior to commencing medical studies had given him a maturity that she respected, and when they served together at the maternity hospital in Auvergne, she felt his worldliness was a badge of honor. For nearly a decade in Africa they undertook hospital work together and then married just before returning to France and settling in Paris at the National Hospital, where he was offered a new position in internal medicine and surgery, and she in the infant ward.

  During their first years in Paris they tried for children, but never conceived. The bitter disappointmen
t faded as the years passed by, both busy with their important work and the satisfaction of saving lives and helping others. Then Jean Luc was abruptly struck down by a brain aneurysm at the age of forty-six. He was gone within three days. Eighteen months later Sophie herself turned forty-six and she knew that she could not continue her routine any longer, and felt that a guardian angel must have heeded her call when she received news that a group of French doctors had put out a call for more volunteers to travel with them in aid of the unfortunate victims in war-torn Indochina.

  Sophie did not hesitate. The very next day she called the colleague who knew the organizer and readily signed on. They were glad of her credentials in infant medicine and particularly relieved to finally induct the first woman onto their team. She had only three weeks to receive permission to leave the hospital and settle her private affairs for her long absence. And as she sat now next to this boy, barely out of lycée but already a citizen of the world, she felt a pang of reminiscence for her youth and the heady days of young love with Jean Luc, her lost soul mate, her guiding light.

  Philippe opened the case on his lap, his young face breaking into a broad smile as the guitar gleamed presciently under the dim glow of the cabin lights. Sophie watched him in silence, her tidy pale head leaning against the window, its shade pulled closed in front of it. She glanced across the aisle to see the other passengers’ eyes closed against the light.

  “You might disturb the others … ” she began, but Philippe put his finger to his lips and silenced her. “No,” he whispered. “I hear the music others don’t. Those times are the best; the vibrations go deep.”

  “Like now?” she asked, curious that perhaps he was joking with her, but no jest seemed suggested in his serious demeanor, the charm of his liquid eyes still intact.