by Zolbrod, Zoe
Around us, some small wind makes the bamboo start singing. “Shh, listen,” I say. “You know what that is?” Maybe someone who never heard bamboo can think that one beautiful waterfall pours in the distance, or many special birds join in long and sad cry, or some ghosts walk above on the magic floor, singing. That sound makes the world seem big and small both. NokRobin looks at me like she’s confused. “Bamboo,” I tell her. She still looks confused, so I tell her again, “That sound: Bamboo.” Now that she knows the sound, I stay quiet so she can hear it.
“NokRobin,” I say, when the bamboo stands still again. “You love to travel, you love it in my country, so I think there is way for you to make money here. Sure.”
“What’s the way?” she asks me. She wants to know this. Then she says the answer her voice tells me she doesn’t want: “Oh, you mean teaching English?”
“Teach English? Maybe in Korea, Japan, that’s one way to make money, but in Thailand, money for that is small. No. I think for you there’s something different, something like the plan I’m making for myself.” I nod at her.
“What plan? Tell me.”
“I’m always thinking about this,” I say. I look at the river. It’s not too big now, not too small, because in the cool dry season everything is balanced.
“This woman I was with in Bangkok, she’s a buyer for designers back home. They pay all her travel expenses. She just has to go around Asia and buy stuff for them to look at. But that’s a dream job. Not something you can just pick up and do. I’ve met people who import, buy stuff here to sell back home. Is that something like you mean?”
“Let me think some more about this,” I say.
NokRobin looks at me. I smile at her, but I say nothing. “What?” she says to me again, but then we sit quiet, without talking. When I start walking, she follows me. I know that some man in my situation—one pretty girl, the feeling is sweet, and already there is possibility-he feels excited, heart is bumping. But for me, what I feel is some very smooth peace. I don’t think of Abu, I don’t think of Bangkok, of Star Hotel. I don’t think of anything. My mind is empty. When we walk on that path, the bamboo sings.
Chapter 4
It had taken the bus four hours to cover the sixty miles of pocked and mountainous road that twined from Chiang Mai to Pai. Shaken, dusty, Robin and Piv blinked as they stepped down into the sun-baked lot that served as a station, and they grinned at each other when they realized that no rushing touts were lying in wait. The bus rumbled off, leaving their ears ringing with quiet. Robin hoisted Piv’s rucksack onto her back. He carried hers, because it was heavier. They made their way to Riverside Lodge, which Robin had been told was the cool place to stay. It was run by a Scotswoman and her Flemish husband, and the bungalows on short stilts rented for the equivalent of three dollars a night. By the time Piv and Robin emerged from the one they let, the palmed hills to the west glowed russet, and a misty chill settled in with a familiarity that explained the mildewed smell of the quilts and futon they had found in their lodging. Some lodgers sat around a campfire, and Robin and Piv joined them for a while before leaving to eat at another word-of-mouth hot spot, The Black Canyon Café.
They walked up a slight rise toward the night market, where vendors prepared foods and others lingered to eat under low-watt bare bulbs. The air was smooth and cool as lake water, and Piv took Robin’s hand. In Chiang Mai, Robin had been always reaching for his as an extension of the intimacy they were sharing in bed, and her feelings had been hurt when he’d repeatedly shied. Finally, he had told her that Thai people didn’t approve of public displays of romantic affection, and Robin tried harder to control her constant itch to touch him. She interpreted his gesture now, still furtive, as a signal to her of some kind, and his dry palm and thin fingers felt special in hers.
The Black Canyon Café was a stablelike building, open-fronted and thatch-roofed, glowing red on the far edge of town. Thai-style, Piv and Robin took their shoes off and padded thick-stockinged to a low table nestled in rough wool carpets and lumpy pillows. They ate their rice soup and wheat noodles alone, cupping their hands around the red glass globe that held a candle, and when they were through, their waiter shyly asked them if they would like to join the only other people present, a handful laughing quietly at a large table where a Thai man stroked a guitar.
The waiter joined the table, too. He was one of the three owner-brothers sitting round, all of them young and smiling and handsome with thick straight hair in identical ponytails and skin creamier than Piv’s.
“Welcome,” said the brother without the guitar. With the confidence of an eldest son, he poured Mekong whiskey into two glasses and topped them with Coke. “Please. I’m sorry that we have no ice.” He introduced the others: a hang glider from France, a Swiss man who was in the country to study copper foundries, and a German woman, beaming celestially, who did relief work in the hill tribe villages to the north.
“That’s great!” Robin said to the woman, liking the sound of the assignment, the philanthropic mission made glamorous by the variegated embroidery and silver ornamentation connoted by the words hill tribe. “How long have you been doing that? Where do you stay?”
“I stay here, with Yhan.” The woman met the eyes of their waiter, whom she sat beside, and the two of them grinned. “I meet Yhan one year and a half ago when I visit my friend then working in Thailand, and we fall in love.” Their eyes melted together again. “I have to go back to Germany, but I try and try to return to here. Finally I find this agricultural project. I specialize in minimal impact agriculture at the university. It’s hard for me to explain in English, but this is perfect for me in all ways.”
“She came back to me!” Yhan drew her closer to him.
“Oh, lucky!” said Piv. “They say they will come again, but most times, never.”
“A toast to true love!” the Frenchman said. Everyone clinked glasses.
The drink was lukewarm and syrupy, and the warmth of it spread through Robin. She saw domestic details she had missed before: toothbrushes in a jar near the sink, hand cream and flowered bath towels on shelves, bedrolls propped between the beams of the low slanting ceiling. She tried to imagine living here, rolling out blankets and snuggling in them to drive away the mountain chill, making love silently, in the darkest corners, so the other brothers wouldn’t hear, then, in the daytime, working for sustainable agriculture. She took Piv’s hand underneath the table.
The musician brother grew more definite in his strumming. He was playing a John Denver song, “Country Roads,” and Robin watched as everyone-hang glider, aid worker, copper man, brothers-began singing quietly and certainly, not stumbling on any words. She felt a hard stab of mocking nostalgia. She’d sung “Country Roads” in Girl Scouts; not even Lite FM radio still played it at home.
The Swiss man reached across the table during the second verse and nudged her. “But you must know this song, yes? This is your song.” She smiled at him indulgently, but then saw the German woman and Yhan leaning together, swaying, singing, their bright faces the wick of global goodwill, and she joined in the chorus.
Country roads
take me home
to the place
I belong
West Virginia ...
Robin’s voice grew hesitant at the verse, but the others knew the words, and the candles’ glow nestled in her chest. Maybe they were all experiencing a Buddhist transcendence here, in this simple place. She’d ask Piv to tell her more about what that might mean. At the next chorus, she made her voice strong. They all did.
... to the place
I belong
Pai, Thailand she sang out
mountain momma
Country roads
Take me home
At the end, they broke into applause for one another and raised their drinks in sticky salutes.
A hush fell when the guitar player started fingering the first fervent bars of “Hotel California,” but when he reached the verse only Yhan and his girlf
riend whisper-sang along.
“Do you get many tourists here?” Piv asked the older brother. “In all seasons, do they come?”
“Sure. So more and more tourist businesses come, too.” He shrugged. He said there were days and weeks with little business, but they had always lived in Pai; they liked its quiet life. A commercial group from Bangkok had begun construction on a resort, and rumor had it that their influence was going to get the road improved, get an airstrip put in, but who knew? “Maybe there is enough change already for the people of Pai. Fifteen years ago, it took two days to get to Chiang Mai. You had to go on foot. Our mother went there, walking, only twice each year. But if the airplane comes now,” he shrugged again. “Okay, maybe it’s good for business.”
Robin wondered whether she and Piv could do something here in this little town, start some mellow business. Not just selling hill tribe stuff—Pai’s couple of streets were lined with places already doing that, their owners sitting deep in lawn chairs or idly dusting. And not sustainable agriculture; that just wasn’t her thing-although maybe she could help out occasionally by organizing a hill tribe craft fair or recruiting volunteers or acting as a liaison between the villages and a connoisseur like Zella ...
By the time they traded tipsy good-byes with their hosts and left the Black Canyon, the chirping night was downright cold, and Robin huddled appreciatively next to Piv. She felt properly coupled with him now, alive to their long-term potential, and when they turned their bodies toward each other on the pallet of the soft-floored bungalow, she felt the fever-scratch esctacy he’d given her since the night they met deepen into something like nourishment.
That sense of union ebbed and flowed only slightly during the two more weeks that they spent in the North. When Robin realized, sitting on the bed in a Mae Hong Son guesthouse on their twenty-third evening together, that her visa was expiring in a week and that since she had already renewed once, she had to leave the country in order to renew again, she felt more shock than panic. She looked at Piv blank and wide-eyed, the tissuey receipts, dull metallic credit cards, and grime-edged passport from her gutted money belt scattered around her.
“I have enough cash to get us to Bangkok. But then what, Piv? I don’t want to leave Thailand, but I have to. At least for a while.”
Piv sat on the edge of the other bed in the room. It was their sleeping bed, laid with a black, red, and brown Burmese blanket that Robin had bought when they’d arrived. They called the bed that Robin sat on their business bed, because in lieu of a desk or a table, that’s where they counted their money and where Robin counted the days until her credit card payments were due. Piv had wanted to assign the beds separate purposes, because he didn’t like how Robin’s feet would end up any which way when she was lounging around smoothing bills or studying her purchases. He didn’t want to sleep where her toes had touched the pillow. But Robin wasn’t surprised when she saw Piv break his own rule and stand up on the sleeping bed. She watched with a sense of déjà vu, of fateful certainty, as he swept the Burmese blanket up with him, held an edge in each hand and spread his arms wide as wings. With one long step he bridged the distance between the beds. His second leg joined the first on the business side of the divide, the springs of the old mattress squeaking, the coins she had stacked sliding clinkily askew. Then he squatted down in front of her and put his arms around her, his rich, rough cloak encasing them both.
“I think we leave my country together,” Piv whispered.
A thrill went through Robin. “Yes,” she whispered back.
“This is my plan that I have been thinking-for you, for myself. To be happy, to make money. We go to Indonesia for jewelry. You pick the good pieces, like your friend.”
“Yes.”
“Then we come back here. You have visa, we have jewelry, we sell that, make some profit. Sure. Then we find things here. Better things, more special. And then we can go somewhere else, always together, over the world, and sell them for more.”
As he spoke, the flower bloomed: This was it. This was what was supposed to be happening. Finally, her life. “Yes! Yes! What will we find? Where will we go?”
“Right now, silver. Then maybe some small thing carved from jade. Some ruby. We go to Hong Kong, Australia, Germany, North America.” He kissed her.
“Borneo, India, New York. With our beautiful things.” She kissed him back.
“It’s simple for you to leave my country to get more visa. Then, anywhere. New York City. Everywhere.”
They kissed again, falling together onto their sides, the money and documents crumbling beneath them, one bill sticking to their blanket as Piv rolled on top. His black waves of hair rushed down toward Robin, met her caramel strands on the bed, and she stretched her arm up luxuriously and ran her fingers through the mingling textures, hers thinner, his thicker, both cool in her hand.
They flew from Mae Hong Son to Chiang Mai—they were in a hurry, so the forty-dollar flight was no contest over the eight-hour bus trip-but more air travel was out of the question. Robin didn’t want to press her luck with the credit cards. At the Chiang Mai train station she smoothed out a five hundred baht bill and a one hundred and gave them to Piv, then asked if he needed any money for snacks. He went to get the tickets while she sat with their bags at her feet and the high yellow ceiling arching overhead. Piv had tied up his hair in a low bun, and she could see his T-shirt gently billow from the valley between his shoulder blades as he stood in line. The sight of him pleased her for the dozenth time that day. Air moved loosely through the station. She didn’t mind watching her money closely as long as she had some to watch. In fact, counting and budgeting made her feel capable and situated, and she went over the next few days’ expenses again in her mind. No problem.
There had been a problem back in New York, where she’d gone after college. It didn’t take long before previous months’ bills claimed whole paychecks with the current month’s already due—when change for laundry, let alone dry-cleaning, was so scarce that perspiring in an overheated building gave her cause to curse; when she contrived every action to wheedle or scam trial-sized packets of designer soap or train fare or an evening’s electricity on someone else’s utility bill. She’d been working as a gallery assistant for six dollars an hour then—a gig she’d been lucky to get and believed that she needed to keep, even as her nerves screeched like a field mouse’s from the pressures of supporting herself on low pay in the proximity of such gorgeous wealth. Most of her friends and her boyfriend from college had similarly low-paying, culturally cool gigs if they were working at all, but they also had allowances or trust funds and they often lived in the extra apartments their parents had lying around like extra pairs of slippers, and this difference isolated Robin from them even as she moved in their pack. She’d spent those two years unable to plan, only able to react, disappearing into the bathroom when it was her turn to buy the next round and growing more and more skittish as she waited in there.
But that being broke made her anxious was no surprise. The strange thing was how she felt after she’d given up that job and hit a stride selling Nissans at a New Jersey dealership owned by a friend’s father. She paid for that opportunity in the cool she’d been collecting, but there was cash now, lots of it. Money rushed in and poured out with the thunderous push-pull of the tide, and it unhinged her. There were back bills, expenses she’d been putting off, a car to get, the grungy shared walk-up to get out of, and a whole slew of deferred desires to attend to-and then another huge paycheck, unless it had been a slow month. Instead of stealing someone else’s trial sizes, now she could walk away from a department store makeup counter with three hundred dollars in product. She sent some face lotion back home, and the next time she called down there her mom had spoken in an awed, hurt whisper. “Sixtyfive dollars just for some night cream, honey?” And Robin had been ashamed of herself, and ashamed that she regularly spent five dollars on a loaf of bread, and ashamed, too, that when she did her stomach still clutched. She felt like s
he was caught in some white water rapid that moved downstream more violently as the numbers went up. She dated a man who made much more than she did, and he squired her around. He once spent six thousand dollars on a painting at a storefront gallery because she said it was good, but he didn’t care if it was; he couldn’t even see it, and she grew to loathe him. When she’d finally paid off her credit cards and caught up on her student loan, she didn’t even wait to save up more than a couple thousand dollars before she quit the dealership, got her vaccinations, and lit off for a trip around the world, hoping to start fresh.
And now maybe she had found it, she reminded herself: the something possible, the potential fresh. She turned away from the train’s window toward Piv, who had taken the aisle seat, and asked him what kind of car he would like, if he could have anything. They were pulling into a rural station, and women and kids ran alongside the slowing train, their knees bent under the weight of aluminum cooling boxes and buckets brimming with chicken satay. Piv smiled and shook his head.
“I don’t care about the car. Some Thai people want the new one, from Germany or Japan. It’s their dream. But where can one car take me?”
“Come on, just imagine,” she said. “What if you had to pick?”
“I pick you, and now you’re here. We’re going to fly. We don’t need the car.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, but she didn’t quite believe him. “You’re so sweet I want to give you a car. What should I give you?”