Dr Siri Paiboun: Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (2010)

by Colin Cotterill

  “Welcome to Democratic Kampuchea,” he began. There had been no eye contact and even now he stared straight ahead at the driver’s bald patch.

  “And we’re very happy to – ” Civilai began.

  “Our two countries have a great and mutually respectful history,” the guide continued. “As the two honoured guests know, we are the first two Marxist states to have shaken off the shackles of Therevada Buddhism, leaving our peoples free to think without superstition and religious propaganda.”

  “What’s your name, son?” Siri asked.

  There was a confused moment like a tape sticking in an old recorder, but it was fleeting. The boy continued.

  “We are happy to receive such honoured representatives from the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. I am your guide, Chan Chenda and I will be accompanying you during your visit here. While you are – ”

  “I think I detect an accent in there,” Givilai said. “Don’t you, Siri?”

  “I picked it straight off,” Siri agreed. “I’d wager one of your parents is Lao. Am I right?”

  “My family…I am proud to serve Angkar,” the guide said, flustered. He glanced briefly at the two guests then looked away, embarrassed.

  “I bet you are,” Siri said, not really knowing what Angkar was. “Such a lovely place. Travelled around much, have you?”

  “Thank you,” said the guide. It was the type of ‘thank you’ heard at the cinema when somebody’s trying to hush up a chattering couple. Siri and Civilai recognised it at once and they shut up.

  “Here in Democratic Kampuchea,” the guide continued, “we have drawn upon human resources to develop the ambitious aims of our great country. Through direct consultation with our Khmer brothers and sisters, we have reached an exciting period in the development of cooperatives. As laid out in our four-year…”

  The boy droned on like an automaton, leaving the guests with no entertainment but the occasional brown light of a wax lamp glowing from a passing hut. It was too dark to read so Siri left Camus in his bag. The old friends had endured enough government propaganda sessions to know a prepared script when they heard one. The guide was on ‘play’ and they wouldn’t get in a word until he reached the end of the reel.

  “…laid out in our four-year agricultural template for the future, drafted in 1976, collectives will be the key to unlocking the door to independence and prosperity. We have almost tripled our rice yield and in five to ten years we anticipate that eighty per cent of farms will be mechanised. In fifteen years we should have established a base for industry. We currently have…”

  “Any idea how far the airport is from the city?” Civilai asked Siri.

  If the guide was upset by the interruption he didn’t show it.

  “…of our new National Technical college which already has three-hundred students and will…”

  “No more than twenty minutes, according to the map,” Siri replied.

  “Could be one of those Einstein twenty minutes,” Civilai sighed.

  It was only the sight of one or two large buildings showing off with actual electricity that signalled their arrival in Phnom Penh. Most of the city was black blocks and empty unlit streets. There were no other car headlights to guide them. At last, the large wooden sign, HOTEL LE PHNOM was exposed in the full beam. Half hidden beneath untrimmed trees, it seemed to issue a plaintive plea for help rather than a welcome. Siri recalled the hotel from his previous visit. It had been a gay, noisy place then, with elegant French high-socialites taking cocktails around the pool. Fawning French-speaking servants in starched white uniforms running back and forth with trays. Floodlights flaunting the new white paint of the façade and highlighting the greens of the tropical garden. Two uniformed guards in white caps had stood guard at the front barrier to keep out riff-raff. Siri and Boua hadn’t been allowed inside. After speaking to them rudely in Khmer, the prim bouncers had asked in French;

  “Are you guests?”

  “Mais, oui,” Siri had lied.

  “Show me your receipt.”

  “It’s in our suite. My personal French secretary has it in her purse.”

  The guards had eyed their peasant clothes, their sandals and their cloth shoulder bags and laughed at them. They’d laughed right in their faces and pointed to the street. Phnom Penh had been a city back then in which natives were not welcome. The Khmer made up ninety-three per cent of the population but the Chinese had all the money and the Europeans handled the culture. The Khmers cooked and cleaned and begged and threw scum out of luxury hotels. Such was their lot.

  The floodlights were gone now, the grounds overgrown. Only one or two lights glowing from rooms here and there gave any suggestion of the size of what the guide told them was no longer Hotel Le Phnom, but House Number Two. They pulled up in front of the large entrance but nobody came running down the steps to open the door for them. The driver switched off the engine but the guide was still running.

  “…that worklessness no longer exists in Democratic Kampuchea. All our citizens work with vigour to the hours of the sun. There is no longer salaried employment and our Khmer brothers and sisters voted unanimously that we should do away with money. We use a system of…”

  “You don’t have money?” Civilai asked.

  “We are a…”

  “So we can’t give him a tip,” Siri lamented, climbing out of the car. “Too bad because he’s been so helpful and informative.”

  The guide continued to drone on in the background.

  “Then we’ll show our gratitude in some other way,” Civilai decided. “We’ll tell his president what a good guide he is.”

  The guide stopped.

  “We don’t have a president,” he said.

  “No? What do you have?”

  “We have Brother Number One.”

  “Is that so?” Siri asked. “And does Brother Number One live in House Number Two?”

  “No. He lives in House Number Three.”

  “I might have known. Then it is Brother Number One whom we shall inform of your diligence.”

  “It is my pleasure to serve Angkar,” the boy said.

  “I bet it is.”

  The car pulled away and there was faint but undeniable pride on the face of the guide as he peered from the rear window. But it quickly became clear they shouldn’t have dispatched their interpreter so soon. From that moment on they could communicate with nobody. The hotel staff, or at least the figures standing in strategic positions around the reception area, were dressed exactly as their guide. The women had short hair and stern faces. The men glared accusingly. There was not a pretty or handsome one amongst them. Nobody smiled. Nobody was animated. It was like a visit to a slowly melting waxworks.

  Siri and Civilai pointed to their names on the hotel guest ledger and a serious man with a limp led them up to the second floor. He unlocked two doors and left the keys in the locks and the guests in the hallway.

  “Is this weird enough for you yet?” Siri asked.

  “I suppose room service is out of the question,” said Civilai, looking up and down the deserted corridor.

  “There’s still half a ton of Chinese inside you. You can’t be hungry?”

  “I was thinking of a nightcap.”

  “Perhaps they’ve left us a little something in the rooms. Sandwiches and a bottle of Beaujolais perhaps?”

  “Now, why do I doubt that?”

  In their rooms they found beds, chairs, cupboards, unlabeled bottles of water and slightly grimy glasses.

  “What time is it?” Civilai asked.

  “The only working clock in reception said it was eight o’clock in Mexico City.”

  “Well, assuming that’s eight a.m. then it’s only about nine a.m. here. Fancy a stroll around town before bed?”

  “I can’t imagine what else to do.”

  They emptied their bladders in their respective bathrooms and regrouped in the hallway. As they walked along the light green carpet they heard a loud squeaking, grating sound
coming from the floor below. It was unmistakably the sound of Godzilla chewing on a Volkswagen Camper. They walked down a dimly lit stairwell to a reception area whose lights, all but one above the desk, had been extinguished. The staff had fled but for one of the male cadres. He was now shirtless and tending to some business behind the counter. The entrance to the hotel had been blocked by a huge metal roller-grill. Phnom Penh beyond was apparently out of bounds. They were trapped.

  They walked to reception and discovered that the clerk was connecting a mosquito net. One end was tied to the switchboard, the other wound around the neck of a stone statue, a poor copy of one of the apsaras from Angkor Wat. He seemed annoyed to have been disturbed. After ten minutes of mimes and gestures; bottles, drinking, staggering drunkenness, then down the scale to eating, rice, peanuts, bananas, the cadre was positively livid.

  “My brother, Civilai,” Siri said at last, “if our friend has a weapon of any sort down there behind the counter, I feel he’s reached the point at which he’ll use it.”

  “Then, I’ll say goodnight.”

  “Goodnight and sweet dreams,” they wished the scowling receptionist.

  ∗

  There was no sweetness in Siri’s dream that night. That same disconcerting nightmare was waiting for him. But everything was so much more vivid. The streets through which he walked had acquired a scent, a rancid smell he knew well from his work. The song came at him from everywhere like a sensur-round soundtrack with strings and a harmonious backing group. But it was certainly the same eerily beautiful song.

  The boy-soldier who approached him with his pistol raised had a history now. He had a family, brothers and sisters, all hungry, others dead because there were no medicines to cure simple ills. He had been drafted into the military because his mother had no rice to feed him. Siri knew all this, not because he’d been told, but because, in the place where dreams are produced, this was a logical plot development. It made the character more dimensional. We now had reason to feel sorry for the antagonist, to side with him. It created an element of conflict in the conscience of the viewer, in this case, Siri. Something in him wanted the boy to pull the trigger. And, with so much unexpected support, that’s exactly what he did. Siri’s head was gone. Splattered like a kumquat on a busy highway. And the dream-Siri was filled with dread, not because he was headless – inconvenient though it was – but because he was afraid he might stumble into the singer and that would be the end of mankind. He knew there was nothing to pull him back. Finding the origin of the song would signal the end of all hope, worse than anything he’d ever experienced.

  The explosion of the gun had reduced the soundtrack to a single beautiful voice. Headless Siri was on his hands and knees. He reached a plot of earth where the sounds climbed up through the dirt and lingered there like invisible music plants. He began to dig down. Something beneath the ground was attempting to dig upwards. Siri was overwhelmed by the wonderful song. The refrain squeezed at his heart strings, squeezed blood out of them, squeezed until they snapped, one by one. His heart, stringless, broke away from his chest like an untethered blimp and was carried off by the music plants, rising, lost in the blood-red sky. As his seventies cultural attache, Dtui – self-confessed addict to Thai pop magazines – would say, it was all very Beatles.

  A breath fanned his hand and his fingers felt the outline of a mouth deep in the dirt. These were the lips that sang the love song. He raked away the debris with his fingers so the singer could breathe fresh ait He hurriedly brushed dirt from the nose, from the eyes. The voice was beginning to break. It slipped off key and fell, tumbling through octaves. It came to rest on a deep, bronchial B flat. Siri knew he had to save the tune. With increasing desperation he strove to free the singer from his tomb. He lifted the head and cradled it in his arms, willing the song not to die. And that was when his fingers knew. Beneath their touch the cheekbones rose, the eyebrows bristled. And as he swept back the thick hair, his thumb and forefinger traced the outline of a left ear, missing a lobe.

  15

  A MOSQUITO INSIDE THE NET

  “I really don’t know what he’s getting at,” Phosy said, not for the first time. Even though his desk was directly behind that of his superior, Sihot shook his head in response. Phosy held a note from Dr Siri. Daeng had dropped it off after Siri’s departure, a last-minute memo scribbled in Siri’s barely legible hand. Against his better judgement, Phosy had done what the doctor had suggested. He’d listened to Neung’s story. It had been very slick. It explained everything apart from why three victims, all known to the suspect, had been killed. Phosy was disappointed that the doctor could have fallen for it. Of course Neung had it all worked out. It was easy enough to do when the evidence has been handed to him on a plate. Even Phosy could have done that. He was furious that Siri could have been so naive, presenting the accused with the police department’s entire case.

  But Phosy had listened patiently and asked the appropriate questions at the end. “Who would want to frame you? Do you have any enemies? Has anybody threatened you?”

  And all the answers had been negative. If Neung was about to go to all the trouble of inventing innocent relationships with the victims, surely he could have come up with a scapegoat to divert attention from himself. But, no. And, if it were possible, he made it worse for himself. Phosy had thought to ask whether the initial Z meant anything. And rather than deny it, Neung had the impudence to boast that they’d called him Zorro in Berlin. Something about his style, evidently. He’d been christened by his coach and the name had stuck with his students. Neung hadn’t even the common sense to withhold that juicy fact. So, Phosy had his watertight case and had no doubts in his own mind that he had the right man. No serious doubts. Of course, all criminal cases leave some gaps. But Siri’s note rankled him. It wasn’t a list of chores so much as unanswered questions. And of course he knew the questions. He had them on his own summary paper. He didn’t need Siri to remind him.

  Did Chanti suspect his wife was having an affair with Neung?

  Did he care?

  Why were the Vietnamese so reluctant to hand over the case to us?

  Did Kiang see her affair with Neung the same way he did?

  Did they fight?

  What was the timing of Neung and Jim’s respective arrival in⁄departure from Berlin?

  Who was taking painkillers and why? (Does Neung have an injury?)

  Does Neung still have the knife used to cut out the signature?

  Does his father think Neung is guilty?

  Do you?

  Certainly, a lot of it was merely the tying up of loose ends. As a good policeman he would have done that anyway…if they hadn’t been so understaffed. Just him and Sihot and so many reports to write. And what was the point? They had their man, didn’t they?

  It was the post script to the note that had most riled the inspector. Just who did this little doctor think he was? Not satisfied with playing detective and telling him how to do his job, he had to interfere in Phosy’s personal matters, too.

  Phosy, I’m sorry. I meant to tell you this earlier this evening but I was distracted by the visit to Neung. It would have been better face to face but I’ve lost my chance. It’s quite simple. If you aren’t having an affair, tell your wife, immediately. If you are, stop it.

  Phosy scratched out the entire postscript with his black biro, slashed at it till the paper tore. Still not satisfied, he took a pair of scissors from his pencil drawer and snipped off the bottom of the page. He scrunched it up and threw it into the wastepaper bin.

  “Interfering little bastard. None of your business,” he thought. “Who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do? You aren’t even a relative, certainly not my father. Too late now, Siri. Where were you forty years ago when I needed you?”

  ∗

  There weren’t any orphans in Laos, not government-sponsored or otherwise. And that was due to the fact that folks didn’t give children enough time to think they were unloved. If you lost
your parents, a relative would step in and fill their sandals as quickly as blood clotting on a wound, barely a scab. If you had the misfortune of losing your whole family, a neighbour would take you in, or someone in the next village. A local headman, perhaps. But, either way, you’d wake up next day with a new family and nobody would harp on your loss. They’d tell you what happened without drama and, no matter how poor, they wouldn’t complain about what a burden you were. At least, that’s the way it had been in Laos. That’s the way it had been for Phosy.

  He’d been studying at his primary school one day in the little northern village of Ban Maknow, Lemon Town. His mother and father just happened to be working in the wrong field at the wrong time and were mowed down in crossfire between this or that faction. Someone had come by the school and whispered in the teacher’s ear. As Phosy had no uncles or aunts, he went home that evening with his friend, Pow. Pow’s mother and father already had three other children living with them who had lost their parents in a civil war nobody really understood. It was such a clinical transition that it was several days before Phosy fully realised that he’d never see his parents again. He’d cried, of course. He missed them. But he was already safe and happy before loneliness had a chance to take hold.

  His new father was a carpenter. He carved temple doors and fine furniture and all seven of the children, five boys and two girls, learned to use woodworking tools at an early age. There was no secondary schooling in those parts so Phosy had hoped his new father would take him on as an apprentice as he had done with his eldest son. But when Phosy was ten, a young man had come to the village. He was educated and well-spoken. In the open-sided village meeting hut, he explained to all the parents how he had been plucked from a place very much like this when he was a boy. How he’d been given the opportunity to study in the liberated zones in the north-east. He’d graduated from high school there and gone on to further education in Vietnam. He told them that they’d recently opened a new school and that they could take eight hundred new students. All food and board would be taken care of.