by John Burdett
She stares out over her garden, sighs. “A child is born, the first thing you worry about is how to keep it alive, feed it, take care of it, live with it for the next fifteen years. You don’t worry about unimportant points of history.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“That it was just easier to let you believe the simple version—the version everyone else also believes. That way you wouldn’t grow up confused. All along Soi Cowboy there are women around my age who had leuk kreung kids with farang men who disappeared as soon as they fell pregnant. All those women were on the game at the time. It was just easier to let you see it that way.”
“I don’t follow.”
She nods. “Naturally. That’s the whole point. If you can’t follow now, after fifteen years as a cop, how would you have been able to follow at age seven, or ten, or even fourteen? And after that there was no point, you were off having sex and stealing cars and doing drugs—you’d lost interest in your personal history. Like all teens you were only interested in your personal present.”
“Will you just get on with it? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Think about it. I had only just started in that bar in Pat Pong. The mamasan was going to hold an auction for my virginity, as was the custom. She expected to make a fat profit, half of which she would share with me—or one of my uncles would have killed her. It was that kind of arrangement. Considering my good looks, she was going to ask one hundred thousand baht—there are always men with a virginity fetish willing to pay that kind of money, not all of them Japanese. Then your father walked in. Fresh-faced, tall, handsome to die for, weirdly innocent, on five days R&R from Vietnam. He’d never hired flesh, least of all taken part in an auction for a virgin. He wanted me, though, without actually realizing what wanting me might mean. Just like America had to save the world from communism, so he just had to stop the mamasan from selling me, and the only way he could do that was by buying me himself. I’d never seen a man in such a state. All I did was sit with him for an hour, holding his hand, wondering when he was going to take me upstairs to the cubicles, while his face went through all those weird moods: you know, when men have the hots and feel guilty? He kept eyeballing me and telling me very earnest things in English which I couldn’t understand. All I could think of was how big he was and if his dick was in proportion, it was really going to hurt and maybe I should send out for some painkillers and K-Y Jelly in advance.”
Her cigarette has gone out. She lights another and contemplates her garden.
“He certainly seduced himself, though. By the time he was through with the eyeballing he was sobbing his heart out. He found another girl to interpret and said he’d never set eyes on a woman so perfect in body, face, and soul. Buddha knows where he got the soul part from. I think he was blown away by my being a virgin—it hit him in some special place. He told the mamasan that if she would only hold off for a couple of days, he would find the money. He went into the big performance and the mamasan agreed to wait for him to come back with the dough: there weren’t any immediate offers for my body from other customers at that price. So a couple of days later he’s borrowed the money, most of it from Bobby da Silva, his best friend. Now he pays the mamasan, and everyone, including me, assumes he’s going to take me upstairs to the cubicles, but when the mamasan tells him he can have a room without charge for an hour considering what a good customer he’s just become, he gets upset all over again. You have to bear in mind, Thais at that time had very little exposure to Western thinking. We had no understanding of the kind of man who would hire a girl just to gawp at her, like an exotic pet. As you know, the fee would have given him the right to have me whenever he wanted for a month afterward, any way he liked.”
Nong takes a long sip of Mekong and stares out over her garden. It is one of her contradictions that this consummate businesswoman never thinks of redeveloping her land to build an apartment building on it and make a big fat profit. She loves simply owning it.
“Even today it’s kind of unreal to me, how he wouldn’t touch me without my permission. But now I understand he was acting honorably according to his culture. There were times when I wished he’d just get on and screw me, instead of that sickly self-restraint they use to make themselves feel virtuous.” She sighs. “But that’s the way it was. After a couple of days, I had to ask, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ I couldn’t very well go back to the bar, after he’d paid all that money. And he had to return to the war.” She takes a toke on the Marlboro Red. “Screw me? Bust my hymen?—oh, no, that would be exploitative. So he has me undress in front of him ten times a day. He loves to take pictures, but he’s especially creepy about nude photos. He lets me see how he tortures himself about me. I am the sex toy he daren’t have sex with. In his fantasies he exploits every inch of my young body—but no sin is ever committed, apart from masturbation. Perhaps he wanted to be able to say that he never had sex with a prostitute. He even tells me that if I like, I can remain a virgin until the day we get married.”
I pause over my Mekong. “Married?”
Nong calls her maid again to ask for that box. Maymay returns with a container like a portable safe or a large jewelry box made of steel with a small key in the lock. I have never seen it before. Now she digs out a pile of yellowing correspondence and some old faded photos. She hands me one.
My mother, still very young, is standing wearing a sarong between two men. Her hair—and demeanor—are in the way of old Thailand, for the devastation of the late twentieth century had not yet ruined our culture. She is projecting fierceness and courage as she stands between two young American soldiers on R&R—one of them towering over her—who could have been on a jaunt to Coney Island to judge from their dumb grins. Bobby da Silva is a smooth-faced handsome young man with Latin features.
And now I think I understand the message Nong is trying to convey to me: Imagine these three young people. Nothing they have done or suffered so far has really touched the innocence of their souls. If these two young men have killed, it must have been from a distance, under orders, with no real awareness of the darkness that is about to overwhelm them.
Now she chooses another photo from her collection and hands it to me. Two big male hands hold a newborn infant. There are signs that it was taken in a hospital, but the main point seems to be the date when I was born, which has been typed onto the picture in large characters at the top. Now she hands me another.
At first I do not understand the next photo. Unlike the previous two, it has been taken in haste, under battle conditions. With some effort I recognize the tall American in the first photo. His face is so distraught that even from this distance of nearly forty years I feel a pang that anyone of my blood should have suffered such a devastating blow. Now I can make out the scene a little better. There is plenty of smoke, but it is obvious that my father’s company has suffered a terrible defeat. Uniformed men are caught by the camera while they run to and from a helicopter whose tail can just be made out. And those two bloody objects in the foreground, with some of the cloth still clinging to them, are the legs of one Roberto Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo da Silva: there is a caption to that effect.
In the next picture, Nong and the tall American stand on either side of a wheelchair holding Bobby da Silva, minus his legs. On da Silva’s face there is a cripple’s look of extreme contempt for the world and its bitter disappointments. On Nong’s face is a grim determination that this, too, was something to be endured and overcome. I look up and stare at my mother, whose mood has changed now that she has begun to remember.
“Your wife practically begged me to talk to you about this, which is why we’re here, but I didn’t think it would hit me this way.” She gestures toward the picture with the amputee. “You don’t realize how soft you get—I could take it when I was twenty, but not anymore.” She looks me in the eyes. “And you have to think about my strategy as a mother. How easy would it have been to show you a picture of a man you would never mee
t?”
She is right. I really cannot get my mind around the idea that the man in the picture is my father, and yet remains unreachable. I try to think which of the old men in the ward he most resembles, and realize the attempt is useless. Even without bandages a man of seventy or so does not necessarily resemble that same man aged twenty—the distance is too great, the changes wrought by a harsh world too extreme. Maybe some kind of clever isometric software would do it, but I feel helpless. Maybe Chanya was right after all: in some part of me I really don’t want to know. Nong is watching my features, reading me effortlessly.
Despite her reluctance, she hands me another photo. Unlike the other pictures, it has been taken surreptitiously and seems at first to make no sense. It was taken through the open door of what appeared to be a hospital ward or activities area, but there is only one human figure. I cannot say for sure who it is, for it could have been any man—which was just another way of saying it is him: a man still evidently young sitting in a tubular chair, bent forward, turned slightly to the camera with both hands pressed insanely against his ears so that his whole face is squashed as if lamenting the loss of his soul. There are a pile of medications on the table next to him.
Now I really cannot take any more. Nong nudges me and shoves under my nose the photo of her and my father and his friend in the very early days together.
“Look, will you!” She puts her finger on my father, aged about twenty. “Is that an angel or an alien, I never could decide?” I look at the bright—too bright—face, that full smile that seems like an exaggeration to non-Americans; the expression suggests he was wired more into the higher cosmos rather than the Earth. “See, Bobby da Silva is innocent, too, but it’s a different kind. He’s in his body and sex is not a source of torment for him, it’s a thirst he knows how to quench.”
I borrow a cigarette from her, which she lights for me. I lie back on the futon, take a toke on the cigarette, and then raise myself for a good long slug of the rice whiskey.
“So, you were living with my father but not screwing him?”
She shrugs. “Living with? He and Bobby were staying at a cheap hotel while he was on R&R. This all happened in the space of a few days.”
I nod. “Okay. So what happened?”
“What happened? What always happens when a man is confused in that way? All of a sudden, the night before we were supposed to say goodbye, he snapped and jumped on me. It was totally clumsy and he was finished in less than a minute, the whole buildup of the past five days popped in a single spasm. Blood, pain, and sperm is what happened. Then he was gone. But he’d come inside me. Good boys are always the most dangerous. A whoremonger would have banged me the first night and used protection and we all would have lived happily ever after.”
Of course, that makes me feel just great. She catches my forlorn eye and leans over to pat my head. “But then I would never have had you, would I?”
I grunt.
“And I thought afterward the bump that was growing in my womb was a kind of claim of ownership by a man who didn’t want to admit he was made of flesh and blood.”
I cannot say I am overly thrilled to be the product of an incompetently managed spasm that lasted maybe ten seconds—exactly the kind the girls in the bar make fun of after they’ve been paid and the john’s gone home. On the other hand, I wonder who on earth is not the end result of an unsatisfactory beginning. Were you planned, yourself, R?
“So he left you like that? Did he send money?”
“Sure. This was an honorable white boy, sure he sent money. He sent the little money the army gave him, and he even found a close friend in the States who wired me five thousand dollars, which was a huge sum for a Thai girl at that time—and of course I had half the money he’d paid the mamasan. And he wrote every day. Promised he would come see me the minute they discharged him—or the war ended.” She pauses and stares into space. “I couldn’t believe it. Every single day he tells me he’s totally crazy about me, keeps my picture next to his heart, I’m the only reason he can carry on fighting in the filthy war. To a Thai country girl, this is Hollywood dreamland stuff. I couldn’t believe he was serious.”
“But you replied?”
“Sure.”
“But you told me you didn’t know his family name.”
She makes a scoffing noise. “Don’t turn into a junior detective all over again. I had enough of that when you were at the academy. Listen: I didn’t know his family name because I didn’t know about farang family names, and anyway I couldn’t write in English any more than I could speak it. You know very well I still don’t write it. I had someone read me the letters.”
“Who?”
“I took them to the Wat and asked Phra Tatatika—you remember that farang monk?”
I remember: her favorite monk was an American former marine, almost the first in a trickle that became a steady stream of farang men looking for a way of escape in a Thai monastery. I guess a former marine would not have been shocked by my father’s letters.
“But you said you replied?”
She takes a pen out of her box. Carefully and slowly she writes down one of the few phrases she knows in written English on the back of one of the envelopes: I miss you. I smile. It is a translation of exactly the Thai phrase she would have used. We tend to say I miss you where farang might say I’m crazy about you.
“That’s all you wrote, each time?”
“Once a week. There was no use writing in Thai, was there?”
“And during that time, were you—”
“No, I wasn’t. So long as he sent money and paid my bar fine after the down payment ran out, I didn’t work. I was a good Buddhist girl, a deal is a deal.”
“But the envelope,” I exclaim triumphantly. “How did you write the address?”
“Huh! Some detective after all! You need to check your facts. Nobody in the world could remember such an address, with all those military numbers, codes, stuff like that. He sent stamped addressed envelopes, the military stuff was already printed on the front.”
“Every day?”
She opens her arms. “Maybe there was nothing else to do. You know what they say about war, ninety-nine percent boredom, one percent terror? He couldn’t keep writing to his mother to tell her not to worry and that he’d be home soon.”
“But he did write, just like he said he would. He did love you?”
“Was it love? I don’t know. I’m not sure either of us was mature enough to use that word, but we were very excited by each other. And of course I thought I’d escaped the poverty trap for life on my very first night on the game. I was in a kind of dream.”
I give her time to review the memory. When she fails to continue, I say, “So, I still don’t understand. You had everything you wanted, you scored the jackpot in your first week, he thought he’d bagged the most fantastic woman in the world. It doesn’t sound tragic. He was writing to you every day, telling you how much he adored you.” I raise my hands and shoulders.
She takes the wad of photos from her box and flips through them until she comes to the one with Bobby da Silva in a wheelchair. “That happened.”
Now she shows me the inside of the box where letters are neatly stacked. “See, this is before.” A pile of jagged envelopes where she had opened them. “And this is after”: perhaps as many as a hundred unopened envelopes.
“You didn’t open them?”
“I got sick of what he was saying. I couldn’t stand it.” She looks me in the eye. “You have to remember, I couldn’t read English. I was embarrassed to have someone else read me that junk.”
Now she is finally ready to deliver her punch line. “It was a different man with a different name. He told me I may as well keep calling him Jack, but in fact he had changed identity. I may have been a no-good bar girl with poor karma, but I was still a Buddhist. I couldn’t take all that hatred, that endless poisoning of his mind, all those promises to ‘get back at Charlie for me and Bobby.’ And the killing of the
‘gooks’ and the ‘slope-heads.’ ” She stares at me. “He didn’t seem to notice the Vietnamese were almost the same race as me. He had volunteered for Special Forces. When I say he was a different man, I mean totally different, unrecognizable. I had the instincts of a new mother. I didn’t want my child contaminated. I told him he wasn’t going to see you anymore. I told him I didn’t want you to inherit a murderer’s karma.”
It is a hot day here in the garden. A cold shiver shakes me to the bones. “But he visited you afterward—or not?”
She has straightened her back and is sitting cross-legged like an Isaan girl, her strong chin jutting, her eyes closed. “This is as much as I can take, Sonchai. I don’t want to talk about it anymore today. You have enough to go on for the moment.”
I see that she has made up her mind to say no more. But when I prepare to leave she starts talking again. It is strange behavior. She does not look at me and could have been complaining to the Bodhi tree.
“So, Roberto Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo da Silva lost his legs, this was tragic, a catastrophe, very, very hard to look at. But in war men lose limbs. Thai men don’t totally give up on who they are just because their best friend lost his legs. It’s because something happened that the white man couldn’t control. The gooks were winning—that’s what he couldn’t stand. The one thing that never occurred to any of them until it was too late, that they might actually lose the war.”
“What happened to da Silva?”
“Bobby? I’ll tell you what happened to Bobby. He borrowed money from his family to come back here to Bangkok, where he drank and whored himself to death—deliberately. But by then he and your father weren’t talking. See, even da Silva hated what your father turned into. He never wanted revenge, he only wanted his legs back, and when he couldn’t achieve that, he decided to go out with a bang. Lots of them.”