The unproductive half of Saturday — unless you happened to be teaching an intensive course to silly nurses — and all of Sunday, were the days the Lao were given to rest their weary joints. To be certain the populace didn’t waste this opportunity, the Party had arranged joyful activities during which a comrade might get together with new friends and laugh and sing uplifting songs. Inevitably, the activities involved the use of garden tools or nails or large tubs of wet cement. The Party would provide a packed lunch of sticky rice and foodstuff fermented to the point of micro-organism meltdown. Nobody was forced to enjoy these adventure weekends. Yes, your neighbourhood chicken counter might take note of your name if you were found lounging in your home. Yes, there might be hold-ups with your rice ration at the co-op. Yes, your name might appear on the list of suspected insurgent sympathizers pinned to the village noticeboard. But, yes, a citizen was perfectly free to choose what he and his family did with his weekend. Madame Daeng had asked Dtui and Inspector Phosy to give up an entire Sunday to conduct a little investigation.
Dtui was only too pleased.
The man calling himself Herve Barnard sat in the closed noodle restaurant on Fahngoum that Madame Keopakam, now Madame Paiboun, aka Daeng, had made her home in Vientiane. The back door hung by its hinges and the bloody tyre iron lay on the table in front of him. He’d already ransacked the upstairs rooms. The bedroom. The messy library with its hundreds of French books. The desk in the small office. There was an album. Black and white photographs of youths at a camp. There was Daeng, the way she’d looked when he’d fallen in love with her. He stared at her. Emotions crashed into him like a multi-vehicle pile-up on an icy motorway. Before her he’d loved nobody. And since? How could he ever trust a woman after that? In five short months she had taken away all those parts of him that gave a person potential. She had been that moment. The fulcrum. The point when everything became unbalanced. As long as she continued to breathe the same air as him, create currents in the same atmosphere, his ever-shortening life would be intolerable. She needed to be gone so that he could die.
He could already smell the smoke. The album. The books. The desk. Soon the entire restaurant. Not spite, merely a tactic of war. Wherever they were they’d hear about this. They’d hurry back. They’d find the body. She would be distraught and vulnerable and distracted and he would kill her. It was the only way to find peace.
The Minister of Agriculture, ex-General Popkorn, and his wife arrived by helicopter at eleven a.m. The last celebrity to make an appearance in the province had been Ai Dum the country music singer and the crowd then had been marginally smaller. But, of course, back then, there hadn’t been cadres going door to door dragging comrades from their hammocks. Back then they hadn’t come ‘to make a good show for the province’. They’d come because they enjoyed a good dance and a sing-song. The crowd of several hundred this Saturday was subdued because they knew the minister would neither sing nor dance, and just as well, perhaps. As he walked through the aisle they’d created for him they seemed unimpressed. Another old man in a grey safari suit.
But what a wife. Madame Ho was every bit as colourful as the old royal regatta pennants. She dressed in Western style in a white and orange frock daringly short to show her lamb-hock calves, and yellow high heels that defied all the principles of foundation engineering. She was a buffalo teetering on half-centimetre points. She was plastered in make-up that from a far distance might have made her look gorgeous. But as she passed the half-heartedly cheering locals with their little Lao flags, they could all see that the cosmetics did not follow the contours of her features. Hers was a deleted and redrawn face whose pencil lines still showed through.
The ministerial arrival was recorded in photographs and they all knew that the caption — Local agronomists show their admiration for their minister — would appear in the next edition of Siang Pasason, which nobody ever read. They hurried ex-General Popkorn to the governor’s house. Governor Siri was in the dark as to the purpose of the visit and the status of all the players he’d been told to accommodate. The official line was that this was an event to pass on the Party’s hopes that the boat races might stimulate camaraderie amongst the proletariat and show the country folk that a little cooperation can achieve a great deal. And that this message would trickle down to cooperative farmers. He had no idea that the minister was in Sanyaburi to evoke a ghost.
After refreshments, the minister went to the river, made a long speech to the assembled boatmen and women, then cut a ribbon suspended between a tree and Miss Sanyaburi, 1978, in traditional dress. And thus the Pak Lai boat race festival was officially opened. The minister waved, shook the governor’s hand and told him he needed a private room to speak with his aides. This room had already been organized and tables had been arranged into a rectangle with all the chairs facing inward to an island of imitation flowers and a handwritten card welcoming Our Dear Friends from Vientiane. The governor was more than a little miffed to have been excluded from this gathering.
Attending the closed meeting were the minister and his wife, Madame Peung and her brother, Tang, Dr Siri the coroner and his wife, Daeng, and a retarded fellow whom the minister assumed to be some part of the ceremony. The minister sat at a ridiculous teak throne dragged in at great expense to make an impression. To his left sat Siri. The general remembered the old doctor from numerous battlefront campaigns. Like many of his ministerial colleagues he had great respect for the doctor’s skills behind the front line, patching up wounded comrades and saving lives. But, also like his colleagues, he found the old man’s reluctance to take orders a reflection of his anarchistic leanings. He was to be avoided socially. There had been a circular to that effect. The party line was that Dr Siri Paiboun had been ideologically tainted by too many years in France and the early onset of senility. It didn’t however stop them from using his various skills whenever their own were lacking. And, on this day, in this room, Siri was the minister’s only ally.
‘Stack of lizard poop,’ he said, leaning towards Siri.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Spirits and digging up the dead. Best left where he fell, as far as I’m concerned, Siri. Rest in peace, isn’t that what they say? No need for all this.’
‘I was under the impression you’d signed all the travel documents for us to be here,’ said Siri.
‘Certainly I did. It was the only way I could shut her up.’
On the word ‘her’, he’d raised his chin in the direction of his colourful wife. Siri looked at the woman. He recalled that the Ministry of Culture had issued a list of culturally unacceptable fashion statements. On it were long hair for men, clipped hair for women, revealing shorts and skirts, uplifting brassieres and, as far as he could remember, make-up. The list had obviously passed Madame Ho going in the wrong direction. She was ablaze with cornfield yellow and fresh-bruise purple and Wattay blue. Siri was certain if anyone struck a match in front of her she’d go up like a rocket. She was loud, too, and spoke Lao with the same linguistic prowess as Yul Brynner speaking Thai.
‘I take it this wasn’t a love match,’ said Siri, not caring in the least how offensive the question might have sounded.
Popkorn glared at him, then smiled.
‘Her family had a fleet of cargo ships out of Hai Phong. We needed the concession. They needed someone to marry their daughter.’
Siri admired her hairy ankles and the quote, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends,’ sprang into his mind. Undefeated as a general. Massacred as a husband.
The minister leaned forward and addressed the group.
‘Can we get this damned thing over with?’ he said.
His wife glared at him. Madame Peung stood and smiled at the old soldier.
‘Comrade Popkorn,’ she said. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have imposed this journey upon you. I know you’re a busy man. But I needed to be here in person in order to cross-reference the location of your brother’s corpse. I know that you believe th
is is all a lot of nonsense. Three months ago I would have felt exactly the same. Then, suddenly, something remarkable happened. I woke up as a different person. I was, you might say, in another reality. And I suddenly had a gift.’
Siri looked at her. She did not emote. Nor did she prance. She spoke calmly and used simple Lao. She told her story the way a baguette seller might describe the day she’d won a minor prize in the Thai national lottery. There was excitement in her eyes but not boasting. Siri hung on her every word. He might even have been smiling. At least that was how Madame Daeng noticed it. All this and the main feature had not yet begun. Brother Tang sat to one side ripping up crude paper cartoons of money and clothes and gold bullion.
‘You’re all in doubt,’ said Madame Peung. ‘I would be too. But the spirits come to me with ease. It’s as if I can pluck them out of the air at will. Let me take this one, for example. Madame Ho.’
The minister’s wife let out a Pekinese whelp.
‘Since our session together when we discussed your sister she has visited me often,’ said Madame Peung. ‘But I am sorry to tell you her bones will never be reunited with those of your ancestors. She was afraid of the socialist takeover. She boarded a refugee boat headed for Australia. It was not seaworthy and it sank in the deep ocean. I am sorry. Nobody survived.’
The minister’s wife gasped then burst into tears.
‘Kiang,’ she sobbed. ‘Kiang. Why didn’t you stay? I could have found you a gullible husband in the military. You would have been safe.’
The minister’s eyes rolled to the ceiling and back. He rarely travelled with his wife and everyone could see why. Madame Peung left her seat, squeezed through a gap between the tables and knelt in front of the Vietnamese woman. She held her hand.
‘Kiang took something of yours to remember you by. Was there something you both treasured?’
‘Our cat, TinTin,’ said Madame Ho.
‘TinTin is there with her,’ said Madame Peung. ‘They both miss you.’
‘That’s lov … lov … lovely,’ said Mr Geung.
Madame Daeng’s eyes joined the general’s on the ceiling.
‘I really don’t want this to be a circus,’ said Madame Peung. ‘I’m usually alone with the victim’s relatives. But in order to find the minister’s brother I need a sympathetic audience. Let’s not forget I’m new to all this. I can feel the hostility in the room. It doesn’t help. So, excuse me for what I’m about to do.’
She turned and looked directly into Daeng’s eyes. It was all the doctor’s wife could do not to turn away.
‘The red-haired man is with us,’ said Madame Peung.
Just that and Daeng closed in on herself like a frond of sensitive grass. She didn’t want to hear any more.
‘He has been punished over and over for what he did to your sister. He holds no grudge against you. There is no threat from him. From others, yes. But not him.’
Daeng said nothing but the witch had reached an icy hand inside her chest and pulled out her deepest tumour. She could feel the cold space that remained there.
Like a chess master playing several games simultaneously, Madame Peung walked around the rectangle of tables to where Mr Geung sat. She reached out her hand and he looked at it unaware that he was expected to take hold of it.
‘Geung,’ she said, ‘your father is sorry. He will always be ashamed of the way he treated you.’
‘My father is … is … is …’ said Geung.
‘He’s gone, Geung,’ said Madame Peung. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, he’s not,’ said Geung.
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Mr Geung surprised everyone by smiling at this news. But he had no more to say. He was a man with an elaborate network of lights and sounds that played inside him like a tightly wrapped pinball table, but few of them could be seen or heard from the outside.
Meanwhile, Madame Peung had arrived at the seat of Dr Siri. She knelt in front of him, smiled and took his hand. He doubted anything she had to say would cause him any great concern. He was wrong.
‘Would you like to hear from Boua?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, instinctively. His hand now grasping hers tightly.
‘I mean …’ he continued. ‘No. But thanks.’
There were any number of reasons why this would not be a particularly appropriate time to chat celestially with his dead wife. Not least of these was the presence of his current wife seated opposite.
‘I understand,’ said Madame Peung. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps some other time.’
She turned and, still on her knees, crawled before the minister.
‘The energy is right now, Comrade,’ she said. ‘We can find your brother.’
Inspired by the show he’d witnessed, Minister Popkorn had no hesitation. He pulled the black and white photograph from his top pocket. It showed a dashing Lao soldier, arm in arm with a younger and skinnier Popkorn. They were posed in front of the Hanoi opera house. Attached to the photo with a paper clip was a small plastic photo envelope. She looked at him quizzically.
‘My wife thought it might help,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘He spent-’
‘He spent some time as a monk,’ Madame Peung interrupted. ‘When he was first ordained they cut off his eyebrows. For some reason he kept them. He was a little strange like that. He said that if anything ever happened to him you should plant them and grow a new him.’
The minster was astounded.
‘It was … a joke,’ he said. ‘He liked to joke. He was a fun-loving young man.’
Siri, it had to be said, was a little perturbed that the general should hang on to his brother’s eyebrows, but he could see a real affection between the two men. He was more impressed with his witch with every revelation. Her melodic laugh. Her matter-of-fact telling of intimacies. The glint in her eye. She was, no doubt, the real thing. Her brother had already sensed that the time was right. He had lit incense sticks on either side of her chair and was tapping gently on a small, handheld drum. The smoke of burning spirit money rose from a large mortar behind him. Madame Peung returned to her seat. With everyone’s permission she began the ceremony to locate the body of Major Ly. She started with an explanation.
‘Places,’ she said. ‘All places are governed by the holy mothers of the pantheon. Before we contact them we need to pay homage to the wandering souls. They delight in the ashes of riches and finery. My brother is finding a rhythm that will ease me into a shallow trance, although I have to admit I don’t have trouble slipping away. I’m told that normally we need all the trappings and I should wear a red hood and all that, but I think that’s for the tourists. I merely wait for my spirit guide like a passenger on a train platform; when he gets here I’ll shudder a little as he enters my body and, from there on, he does all the work. If you could just be patient for a few moments. Thank you.’
Siri had been expecting a song and dance act. He’d attended enough exorcisms and seances — had even conducted one of his own, albeit like a drunk attempting to fly a jumbo jet. So he expected that at any minute the kaftaned assistant would drape the red hood over the medium’s head and beat the hell out of a tambourine until she fell into her trance. But Madame Peung merely put the brother’s photograph on the plastic-covered chair arm beside the minister, took hold of his wrist and found a pulse. She nodded to the beat and Tang the assistant beat in time to it on the drum.
Madame Peung smiled at Siri, sighed and lowered her eyes. The sounds in the room came from the drums and shouts and music speakers back down along the river bank. They all watched the medium. Tang was tapping the drum with two fingers but the sound seemed to vibrate around the room. Then, a hum, a deep melodic hum emerged from the back of his throat. It was unvoiced, monotone, hypnotic and seemed not to need an intake of breath in order to continue its seamless drone. Everyone in the room sank into its warmth. And then the witch shuddered. It was barely noticeable but everyone in the room, on edge, wi
tnessed it. She nodded slowly. Smiled now and then. Laughed silently once. Then, after, some five minutes, she sighed. Her brother ceased his dirge and began to collect together the props. He seemed to know it was all over.
‘Hmm,’ said Madame Peung, as if mulling over a minor plumbing problem. ‘I know now why his body wasn’t found.’
‘Why?’ asked the minister.
‘He was trapped on a boat. It was a large boat and he was inside the cabin when the vessel capsized. It flipped over and he was unable to get out. He drowned.’
‘Where?’ asked the minister.
‘Not far from here, as I already intimated. It’s about ten kilometres upriver. I am still visualizing the landscape.’
‘Why, after all these years, has nobody noticed a boat submerged in the river?’ asked Daeng.
‘That’s a good question, Madame Daeng,’ said Madame Peung. ‘I think it’s because, well, I don’t feel water around him. It’s more claustrophobic than that. Perhaps he’s in a cave? Or, no. In fact, I believe he and the boat might be encased in mud.’
‘That’s not unlikely,’ said the minister. ‘There are long, deep stretches around these parts. In places the river can reach a depth of sixty metres. In some spots you could sink a pirogue and the silt and mud just sucks you down. Over time I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a sunken boat vanished completely.’
‘Oh, my word. This is a major project,’ said Madame Ho. ‘Call in the engineers, husband.’
‘Now wait!’ said the minister. ‘I can’t requisition a unit of men just like that. What would I tell their commanders?’
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