The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

by Colin Cotterill

  Stephan opened the envelope in front of him and produced a fax. He explained the complicated process of obtaining a visa for Laos with the embassy in Paris closed. The applicant had to travel to another country which had an active embassy and apply from there; in this case the applicant had travelled to Thailand. But, due to strained relations between Laos and Thailand, the Lao embassy in Bangkok was not currently offering consular services. The French embassy in Thailand had to apply directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vientiane if one of its citizens wished to travel to Laos. A copy of the application would be sent from there to the German embassy. Siri and Daeng were getting bored.

  ‘So, is his photograph on the fax?’ Daeng asked as she reached for the file.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Seksan. ‘They have a Russian fax machine at the ministry. It makes all the photographs look like Jesse Owens. You’d certainly never forget this character if you saw him walking down the street.’

  Daeng stared at the picture trying to see through the smudge of ink. It was true. He looked like the character on the Darkie toothpaste tube. You wouldn’t recognize your own mother in a MoFA fax.

  ‘According to the application, his name is Hervé Barnard and he’s a consultant on the Swedish roads project down in Takek,’ said Seksan. ‘Judging by the date of the first contact he’d been waiting in Bangkok for his visa for almost a month. He’s French, born in Marseille. Age sixty-six. Engineer. Single. Any of this ring a bell, Madame Daeng?’

  She was still staring at the photograph.

  ‘Where’s the original application?’ she asked.

  ‘At the French embassy in Bangkok, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Would they do a better job of faxing it here?’

  ‘No doubt. I’ll call them in the morning if I can get a line out.’

  ‘Meanwhile, do you have any contacts at the Swedish roads project?’ Siri asked.

  ‘We might need another glass,’ said Seksan.

  In half an hour the SweRoad director, Lars Stiegsson was banging on the side gate. By then the white burgundy had given way to schnapps and the mood was light. The group had been joined by an exhausted Comrade Inthanet and his girlfriend, Bébé, and Seksan’s young lady, Mrs Fah’s niece, Tong. They cheered at Stiegsson’s arrival. He was a wiry character with a shock of white hair. He carried a bottle of akvavit and an envelope. They all looked on in amazement as Seksan welcomed him and engaged in a long question-and-answer session in Swedish.

  ‘I presume there are one or two languages you don’t speak,’ said Siri to Seksan as they were arranging the newcomer a seat and a glass.

  ‘I never really had an ear for Cantonese,’ said Seksan, suggesting that everything else was a piece of cake.

  ‘So what about our visiting Frenchman?’ Daeng asked.

  To their delight, Stiegsson spoke reasonable Lao and he answered them directly.

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ he said. ‘We haven’t had any new consultants of any nationality for months.’

  He opened his envelope and pulled out a letter.

  ‘And I have some disturbing news for you. This letter was handed to me by my Lao counterpart at the Public Works Department. It is purportedly from me asking for the ministry to expedite the visa application of the same Hervé Barnard. There was a CV and job description attached. My Lao colleague told me yesterday that everything had been taken care of. The wheels of the system roll slowly here. I didn’t write this letter. This is not my signature. Your friend Mr Barnard is an imposter.’

  Siri and Daeng staggered along the river road arm in arm, each holding the other up. Ugly trotted along behind.

  ‘So, what’s the missing part of your story, my husband?’ she asked.

  ‘Why should there be anything missing?’ he replied.

  ‘You would make a terrible secret agent, Dr Siri. I can tell when you’re holding something back from me just as I can tell when you find me irresistible but forget to inform me.’

  ‘You know I always find you irresistible.’

  ‘I need constant reminders.’

  ‘I shall make a point of doing so.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He asked for me, didn’t he?’

  Once more, Siri was astounded at his wife’s instincts.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘About being alone in the dark with me?’

  ‘About Barnard.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But you think you know who he is.’

  She was silent for a long time.

  ‘I hope not,’ she said.

  ‘Were you lovers?’

  Daeng stopped walking and swung around clumsily to face Siri.

  ‘Why on earth would you say that?’

  ‘I’m psychic.’

  ‘You are not. You just carry spirits around. You’re a … a suitcase.’

  ‘I am certainly not a suitcase, madam. I have innate gifts. And I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Do you really want this to be the moment that I confess to the tens of thousands of men I’ve had in my bed?’

  ‘No, only this one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s unsettled you. I’ve never seen you ruffled before.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  She took his arm and they continued to stagger.

  ‘Then why did you try so hard to get visa information on him?’ Siri asked.

  ‘A girl my age doesn’t get too many men asking for her. I was flattered. I wanted to check him out.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me the story?’

  ‘I can. I mean, I will, Siri. But you need to give me some time to organize it. It’s an important story.’

  ‘Then don’t tell it. Write it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Really. Consider it the first instalment of your memoires. The Women’s Union has been on at you since you arrived to start documenting those years. And we’re always complaining that there’s nothing to read in our language. You and I should start the presses rolling.’

  ‘I’ve never written anything longer than a shopping list.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same but with a few verbs and adjectives thrown in. We can work on it together until you feel confident.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  The pop-pop-pop of a Lambretta emerged from the silence behind them. There was a shout. Something like, ‘Hey, you!’ Siri and Daeng staggered on.

  ‘I do believe we’re about to be arrested by the People’s militia,’ said Daeng.

  ‘Well, you will keep me out late.’

  ‘Should I handle it?’

  ‘No. Allow me.’

  The pop-pop got closer and the shouting more aggressive. Siri and Daeng laughed and wheeled around to face their pursuers. Two skinny young men with the scent of the northern hills still on them skidded their motor scooter in front of the couple. They were draped in washed-out Lao People’s Revolutionary Army uniforms like scarecrows. Their armbands said they were security police. They had their weapons at the ready: the driver an ancient rifle, the pillion rider a night stick. It seemed they hadn’t long graduated from the course in how to terrorize citizens out after curfew. They were still yelling obscenities, drowning each other out. Pillion slapped the truncheon against his own palm, most certainly causing himself pain. Perhaps they were used to violators trembling with fear before them but they certainly weren’t sure how to react to two smiling old folk.

  Siri disengaged himself from his wife and stepped up to the boys. The driver bravely raised his rifle. Siri reached forward and pushed the barrel to one side. All the time he glared at the young policeman. A Siri glare could be a powerful thing.

  ‘Listen,’ he said calmly. ‘Stop shouting, the pair of you, and look at this face.’

  His confidence disoriented the boys. A nervous silence fell over them.

  ‘Have you not seen this face before?’ Siri asked.

  ‘I …’ began the dr
iver.

  ‘Think carefully before you answer,’ said Siri. ‘Think about this year’s national games. Think about the covered stand with the ribbons. Think about the VIP box where the politburo members and their wives sat.’

  ‘I didn’t go,’ said the driver.

  ‘Perhaps you’re missing the point then,’ said Siri, taking one more intrusive step into their insecure space. ‘The point is, do you think I would be walking the streets after curfew if my face wasn’t in every newspaper? If my voice wasn’t broadcast on public radio day after day?’

  ‘I …’ began the driver.

  ‘I’m sure to a boy of your age … what are you, thirteen, fourteen?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘Right. To your generation all grey-haired old men look alike …’

  ‘Comrade, it’s not—’ began the pillion.

  ‘… which I can forgive,’ said Siri. ‘But use some common sense. Did we flee in panic at the sound of your little motorcycle? Am I quivering here before you?’

  ‘No, Comrade.’

  ‘And what does that tell you?’

  ‘That you’re … somebody?’

  ‘Good. I won’t embarrass you by asking what my name and my position are. But, next time you see my wife and me strolling beside the river after dark, show a little respect. I won’t report this. You can go now.’

  There was a pause. Thailand seemed to be watching with bated breath.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Siri asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the driver. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘We’re sorry,’ said the pillion.

  The driver engaged and revved up his scooter with enough gusto to send it through to the next time zone and the boys were gone in a cloud of exhaust smoke. Siri and Daeng watched them go before taking one another’s arms and resuming their promenade.

  ‘You’ll notice I didn’t lie this time,’ said Siri.

  ‘I’m impressed. I find honesty in a man very erotic.’

  As if by magic, their pace quickened.

  4

  How To Kill a Frenchman

  I was two months short of my fourteenth birthday when I killed my first Frenchman.

  ‘Do you think it’s all right to start like that?’

  ‘It’s your story. Start any way you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to sound racist.’

  ‘You could qualify it.’

  I was two months short of my fourteenth birthday when I killed my first Frenchman.

  At the time it didn’t matter that he was French, or European, or even a man for that matter. I killed him because he was evil. Because I had no choice. It was several more years before I developed a penchant for killing men just because they were French.

  ‘That might be considered just a tad …’

  ‘I’ll cut it out later.’

  There were those who said I’d been driven to it by the Fates. I was born in December 1911, slap in the middle of the Chinese revolution. My grandfather named me Daeng to mark the event. Daeng is usually a nickname but he told everyone his granddaughter of the revolution would be known to everyone as Red. The bamboo hut in which I first opened my eyes was in a minority Lao Teung village in Savanaketh Province. Ours was a district famous for a three year uprising against French taxes. Very few of our men lived to boast of their bravery. My father had been one of the unlucky ones.

  I was born into a country called Laos that had already spent a quarter of a century as a jewel in the French colonial crown – a crown that included the three provinces of Vietnam, Cambodia, and us. We were a small, particularly dull jewel. Our French lords described us as The least urgent souls on earth with a thousand obstacles and superstitions to interfere with the accomplishment of work. Their profits from Laos never amounted to more than one per cent of their total revenue from Indochina. We were a terrible disappointment. In fact we weren’t even a country before the French came along, just a hotchpotch of diffuse tribes stirred together to make the paperwork easier. As I grew up in my mother’s house it seemed like the most natural thing in the world that the pale-skinned, easily sunburned gods should be our masters and mistresses. Like the deaths of newborn babies from preventable diseases and the enslavement of our healthy men, that was just the way of it. It was our penance for being a country too stupid to administer itself. Too lazy to work. Too indifferent to rebel. How fortunate we were that the masters recognized our inadequacies early. They shipped in Vietnamese labourers to build, farmers to work our land, and administrators to keep us in our place. None of the clerks or the section heads at our regional government office spoke Lao. Vietnamese and French were the languages of administration.

  Of course, to learn French it would have helped to have gone to school. There was one down in the town. But it was exclusively for the children of the gods and the sons of the wealthy Vietnamese. So, we Lao of little ability struggled as best we could, picked up words here and there and kept our fingers crossed that we didn’t get ill. There was a small regional hospital but that too was reserved for the service of the French and Vietnamese. Growing up in my small Lao Teung village, this was my normal.

  ‘Siri. I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon,’ said Seksan. ‘Madame Daeng not with you?’

  ‘Her head’s giving her some trouble. In fact she can’t find it.’

  Seksan laughed. He had an infectious giggle.

  ‘I’m afraid we hit the bottles a little too hard last night,’ he said, opening the embassy gate to let his friend in. ‘In fact, I’m surprised to see you up so early. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I was wondering whether I could take a quick peek at the embassy’s top secret files.’

  Seksan laughed again but noticed that Siri wasn’t smiling.

  ‘You’re serious.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re asking me whether I’d allow an ex-member of the Lao Issara, a sworn enemy of the French colonists, who proceeded to wage war against my adopted country for twenty years, to thumb through the embassy’s secret files?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You do realize there are several legal and diplomatic arguments as to why I probably shouldn’t allow it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Siri. ‘If they’d made you ambassador I’d listen to those arguments. But they gave you a broom and a toilet brush and told you to keep the place clean. Right now this is just a sprawling compound of quaint little buildings with no diplomatic status at all. I’m betting the staff didn’t bother to take anything with them because they’re expecting us to beg them to come back any time soon. I mean, if they left the wine …’

  Seksan smiled at him.

  ‘There’s a store building full of files,’ he said.

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘I have orders to set light to it if the compound is taken over.’

  ‘If they’re prepared to burn them, they can’t be worth that much, can they now? Give me an hour.’

  ‘I might come and have a look for myself.’

  In its heyday, the two-tier C’est La Vie had plied between Vientiane and Luang Prabang during the high-river months, taking joyful French families and off-duty squaddies on an exotic Mekhong River cruise, a highlight of their time in Indochina. Until the river started to attract snipers, the C’est La Vie, now renamed King Burom, did the same trip with Americans, who, you may recall, were technically not in Laos at all. They would hire the good old King and escort their ‘girlfriends’ and crates of bourbon on romantic overnight cruises. Take photographs of one another’s backsides and throw up over the side. Good for the fish, they said. But now the old girl had lost that international romance. There were so many layers of paint on her she’d become amorphous. Under the Party moniker of Voyage of Harmony, she chugged up and down the river picking up chickens in rattan cages and trussed pigs and burlap sacks of dried manure. And every now and then she’d take a passenger, the few whose laissez-passers were in order. And then there’d be someone for the old river pilot to converse with on
the eighteen-hour journey from the new capital to the old.

  Rather than sit cross-legged on the splintery deck, Siri, Daeng and Mr Geung had brought their own folding chairs. They’d even been thoughtful enough to bring along a fourth for Comrade Civilai. He was on his way to Luang Prabang on one of his many post-retirement functions. He’d refused the helicopter ride, arguing that his haemorrhoids acted up at altitude. Instead he would leave a day early and enjoy a leisurely cruise with his best friends. He liked to grumble about the assignments they gave him here and there yet, to be honest, that feeling of being needed was a drug. But, of late, this cooperative bunkum was getting him down. He’d sit for hours in meetings with sensible farmers trying to convince them that socialism would make them all equally wealthy. And he’d wait for that old-timer to put up his hand and ask, ‘And will the system share the poverty just as fairly?’ Civilai wanted to shout ‘Yes.’ The floods and the droughts would distribute misery evenly to all the co-op members. And the politburo would sit back and scratch its head and come up with a new system for next year.

  Civilai’s enthusiasm for the doctrine he believed in had won hearts in those early years. He was a communicator. He was a faithful party member. And then he got old and one day over breakfast – it was eggs lightly fried in soy sauce with a sprinkling of grated onion, he remembered quite clearly – he’d looked up from his plate and said to his wife, ‘It isn’t working.’

  Peasants didn’t want to wait a year or two for group rewards. They wanted profits now, or at least enough to feed the family tomorrow. They’d do whatever it took to succeed. There wasn’t one system that would keep everybody happy. You needed a mix. But as soon as he started to advocate eclecticism his future in the politburo began its downward slide. It reached a hell that he was lucky to have escaped from with his head on his neck. So now, here he was heading off into rural villages that had survived quite nicely for hundreds of years without once hearing of this Karl Marx fellow, and reading to the elders from the manual. He didn’t ask for questions at the end of his talks. They gave him a drink, asked after his family and waved him off. Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.