“Who was the character referred to near the beginning of the note?” Siri asked. “The PP?”
“It would appear that Phetsarat Ponpaseth was involved in the coup.”
“Damn. And he’s a minister.”
“He was until this afternoon. We can assume he was slated to be the head of the revolutionary government. I’m sorry to say the security forces were too slow to pick him up. He and one or two of the generals on the list have disappeared.”
“They probably fled as soon as they heard that the Ubon operation center had been compromised,” Civilai said.
“So it would seem,” Katay continued. “But despite that little setback, my Vietnamese counterpart assures me that as far as Hanoi and Vientiane are concerned, the coup threat has been nullified.”
There was a spontaneous cheer in the little room, followed by much hugging and backslapping. It was an easy atmosphere to be caught up in but Siri continued to feel like an observer who’d stumbled upon someone else’s victory parade. He didn’t begrudge them their celebration. A win was a win. But he was sorry Daeng wasn’t there with them. She was the one who’d made the Ubon connection. This was her victory also. He’d sent a trishaw driver to find her but she wasn’t in her shanty. He thought back to that last night when they’d celebrated together in Savanaketh in 1945, the night they’d drunk to their country’s independence. He recalled how he’d felt then and wondered why he didn’t have any of those emotions now. Perhaps it was age.
He would have appreciated some time alone with Civilai. There were one or two things still worrying him that he knew his friend could explain, but through the evening and into the night the old brothers found themselves apart. Circumstances didn’t give them a chance to chat. First it was the unflagging conversation, then the trail of visitors from the town hall, and the military bringing ongoing reports and not leaving. Then it was the whisky. With Lao rice whisky there were clear signals that it was time to stop: stomachs evacuating, eyes blurring, bottoms flatulating. But those heathen Scottish tribes had created a brew that seduced a man and forced him to consume beyond the point of logic. He would find himself floating above the clouds on the back of a giant eagle, euphorically stupid. He would be so assured of himself that even when the eagle vanished—poof—and he was tumbling down toward the bleak rugged mountains of the highlands, he would still swear he was in control. He might even attempt a somersault or two as he dropped, and then splat.
Siri awoke from his own personal splat in a damp patch of grass above the ferry port. He had no idea how he had arrived there. Before him, the Se Don, which often gave the impression it was something special as far as rivers were concerned, converged with the magnificent Mekhong like a worm running into a giant cobra. The scene was too vast for Siri’s limited consciousness to take in. His brain felt like it had shriveled to the size of a walnut. When he moved his head he could hear it rattle inside his skull. His ear throbbed, his eyes smarted, and his neck was as stiff as a tree stump. His body was a treasure trove of aches and agonies. The morphine and the adrenaline had long since worn off and he was left with no doubt that he’d engaged in a wrestling match with a younger man. Hoisting himself onto one elbow was a major feat.
With the sky still obscured by grumbling clouds, it was difficult to pinpoint the hour. Something in his inner clock told him it was a quarter past dawn, but there was a thin line between instinct and downright guesses. Down in the river, up to her waist in the rust brown water, a woman bathed. She wore a thin cotton cloth tied above her breasts. The bathing sarong is sewn into a tube and, from experience, Siri knew she would be naked inside it. To Siri’s mind, there was nothing more beautiful, nothing in the world as erotic, as a woman bathing in a river.
She untied the loose knot and pulled the cloth forward. She took the soap from its floating dish, reached inside her sarong, and scrubbed. Then she retied the knot and reached up inside from the hem and took great pains to soap even the most inaccessible nooks and crannies. She gave a little spin-drier shimmy, collected her soap dish, and waded to the bank with the cloth sticking to her lean body like a tattoo. Siri was invigorated. It was a sight to turn a boy into a man. It was so stimulating he could momentarily forget the river bacteria and algae that dedicated their short lives to seeking out warm fertile flesh to infest. He could certainly forgive her for polluting a waterway that provided drinking water to thousands of families downstream, and the thought of what might have entered the water upstream wasn’t even worth considering. All of that fell into the realm of meaningless trivia when compared to the pleasure to be had from watching a woman bathe in a river.
The sight reminded him why he’d come to this spot in the early hours of the morning. Even before the party had begun to wind down, it had become imperative to see Daeng and tell her the news. In his inebriated state he’d been unable to find her small house along the confusing backstreets so he’d gone to her noodle stand. Not surprisingly, at 3 a.m. it was all disassembled and tied onto her cart, which in turn was padlocked to a six-inch pipe. He’d climbed the bluff to consider his next move and there fatigue and pain had overcome him.
But now the ferry was operating and a lot of hungry people would be passing up and down the ramp. He knew his old friend would be at work, and nothing soothed a hangover like a bowl of noodles. If Daeng’s noodle stall had been equipped with rafters it would have been jammed to them. The little plastic stools were all occupied, some by two patrons each balancing on one cheek. Others sat eating on the concrete ramp with their feet dangling over the edge. A long queue of people stood in front of the cart watching Daeng work the noodle baskets—ever in control—always with time to smile and joke with her clients. Siri stood to one side and admired her skill.
After a few minutes she noticed him.
“Brother Siri, what are you doing over there?” All the diners looked up at the battered old man. “And what on earth have you been up to? No, don’t tell me. I hear you were walking the streets at three this morning looking for my bedroom.” An ironic cheer rose from the happy eaters. Siri blushed a deep crimson. She really did know everything, this woman.
By the time he’d hobbled to the cart he still hadn’t thought of a witty retort. He merely squeezed her arm affectionately and whispered in her ear that the coup had been thwarted. She obviously knew that, too.
“Yes, good news, isn’t it?” she said. She didn’t seem excited. This was the same “ho hum” that he’d felt himself the previous evening. Perhaps she’d already exhausted her ability to celebrate. Quite unashamedly, Daeng told the people in the queue that Siri was her one true love so would they mind if he cut in, just this once? Of course, nobody objected. Love conquers all. He ordered the special, which was the ordinary plus fifty percent more of everything. As she handed him the enormous steaming bowl she said, “You’re going back to Vientiane today.” It wasn’t a question.
“At five.”
“I need to talk to you before then. About two? I’ll be finished with the lunch crowd.”
“Should I come here?”
“No, I’ll come to the hotel. There’s something important you should know and I have something to show you.”
Siri took his breakfast and his spoon and his Vietnamese chopsticks to the embankment and sat like a child, kicking his legs over the edge and filling his face. It was a happy experience. He looked back over his shoulder and gave Daeng an enthusiastic two-thumb salute. He couldn’t remember having a better breakfast in his life, and he certainly had no dementia when it came to food. It cleared his head, settled his stomach, and started the rusty old cogs rotating in his brain. A peculiar thought, more like an accidental hypothesis, had been following him for the past twenty-four hours. It was so preposterous he’d tried to shake it off but it kept coming back. He had no choice but to satisfy his curiosity.
All That Is Solid
The Bureau de Poste opened at eight. He was the first customer. A little girl was manning the counter while her mother loaded
letters into the PO boxes. Siri ignored the woman and stood in front of the girl.
“Are you the manager?” he asked.
“No,” the girl said. “I’m five.”
The mother looked over and smiled. “She’s off from school today.”
Siri continued speaking with the girl. “I’d like to buy a stamp, please.” She was delighted.
“Yes, Grandpa. What color?”
“How much is a green one?”
“Two kip.”
“Oh, dear. I’ve only got half a kip.” He produced a one-kip note folded in half. Since the latest devaluation, the notes had become good-luck tokens for weddings and such, but you couldn’t buy a breath of air for one kip.
“Then you have to have a white one,” the girl said. She took the note and pretended to be looking for stamps in the drawer.
“And I certainly want one without gum on the back,” Siri added. The girl handed him a piece of paper she’d torn from a telegram. “Perfect. Thank you.”
The mother laughed and returned to her stool at the counter.
“I bet you have a whole houseful of grandchildren,” she said.
He didn’t let the hurt reach his face. “Not a one, I’m afraid.” He remembered Boua’s refrain, played over and over like a scratched record. “We have a nation to salvage, Siri. How selfish it would be for us to dedicate ourselves to our own children.”
He’d always wanted a family. She would have none of it. Perhaps that was his problem in life now. He had no children or grandchildren for whom to make his country a better place. He had nobody to pass his legacy on to.
“That’s sad,” the mother said. “What can I do for you? Apart from the white gumless stamp.”
Siri smiled and pulled the photograph from his shoulder bag.
After the post office, Siri stopped off briefly at Sing’s school to tell Mim about the picture her best friend had drawn for her, how Sing had been thinking about her even at the end. Then there was a visit to the town hall, a stop at the police station to sign the witness report, a detour to Pakse hospital for a morphine top-up, and a call to the city radio station. His last trishaw trip was out beyond the teachers college to a house that took almost an hour to locate. What he learned there emptied him of all hope. He recalled a quotation from the Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.” Until today he hadn’t really understood it. His mood on the journey back into town was dour and foreboding. The sky was like a mauve pudding, threatening to dump its filling onto the nervous townsfolk.
Siri arrived back at the hotel at one. Dtui and Phosy were sitting in the lobby. He took a deep breath and did his best to keep his misery to himself.
“Hello, children,” he said, but his disguise apparently didn’t work.
“You look glum, Doc,” Dtui told him.
“It’s gravity. You get to an age where everything on your face sags. The only way you can look truly happy is to stand on your head. Want to see?”
“Not now,” Phosy said. “We’ve just had lunch.”
“Or at least something on a plate impersonating lunch,” Dtui added.
“Very well,” said Siri, knowing there was no time to introduce the couple to Daeng’s noodle stall. “You seen Uncle Civilai?”
“He’s still in his room, I imagine,” Dtui said. “He wasn’t hungry. I get the feeling last night’s session took its toll. He hasn’t been down all day.”
“I’ll go and bang on his door for half an hour.”
“I’m sure that’ll make him feel much better,” Dtui laughed. “Remind him we have to be at the airport at four thirty.”
“I will.”
Siri walked slowly up to the second floor and stopped in front of Civilai’s door to catch his breath. Pakse would be the death of him yet. He tried the handle. The door was unlocked. It creaked as he opened it and walked inside. Civilai was still sitting in the same chair, now facing the window. He was looking up at the bruised clouds that gave the room a shadowy evening feeling.
“Should I turn on the light?” Siri asked.
“The power’s off again,” Civilai said without turning. “We have a hydroelectric dam pumping out 150 megawatts of electricity and we still can’t keep the lights working. I imagine the man who pulls the lever is off at a seminar someplace.”
“The phone downstairs hardly works even when there is electricity,” Siri said. He sat in the other rattan chair and watched the same heavy clouds rapidly turn to charcoal. “That would have been annoying for you, considering all that contact you had to make with Vientiane.”
Civilai cast him a brief angry glance. “I’ve been waiting for this. Don’t play Inspector Maigret with me, Siri. Not with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Tell me your next comment wasn’t going to be something like, ‘At least you kept in shape running back and forth to the post office to call your people.’”
“It was going to be a little funnier, but, yes, something like that.”
“And then I say, ‘Right, I should have taken a room above the post office,’ and you jump to your feet and say, ‘Aha, got you.’ Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been everywhere that has long-distance phones, haven’t you? The radio station, the army?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“You already know.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“The only place that’s seen you is the Bureau de Poste and that was yesterday. You apparently made quite a few calls. The woman hadn’t seen you at all before that.”
“Which means?”
“It means a lot of things. It means you’ve been lying ever since we got here. You weren’t in touch with anybody at all. Yesterday you warned all your coup pals to get out of town. It means you’ve betrayed your country, betrayed me—betrayed us.”
“Betray is a relative term. In your case you could look at it as protection. Does that make it feel any better, little brother? What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. How’s that?”
Siri laughed. “Protection? How nice of you. You give yourself a vacation on the strength of my forging you a health certificate. You pretend you’re coordinating some huge undercover counterrevolution and all the time you’re—what?—hiding. You’re biding your time and making sure I didn’t stir up any trouble for your coup mongers. Who exactly do you believe you were protecting me from?”
“From your eternal worst enemy.”
Siri got to his feet and stood between Civilai and his cloud gazing.
“No, this is no time to be condescending. We both know you weren’t here for my benefit. Damn it, you even got to me. You made me feel ashamed that I was interfering with your ‘official’ work. All the time I’ve been interpreting your moods as the result of things I’d done wrong. Hell, I even apologized. But I had nothing at all to do with your being a pain in the arse. It was all your doing. What on earth were you thinking?”
He waited for a response but Civilai still hadn’t looked him directly in the eye. Siri raised his voice. “That wasn’t intended as a rhetorical question. I really do need to know what the hell you were thinking.” Civilai remained silent.
“Damn it. After all the years we’ve known each other, you think you can do something like this?”
At last, Civilai’s eyes connected with Siri’s. But they were wet, vacuous eyes like those of a fish staring from a bowl.
“Marvelous,” he said. “So you really do have all the pieces. I had a feeling you’d work it out sooner or later.”
“Yes, I have all the bloody pieces. I wouldn’t have even considered this discussion unless I was absolutely certain you’d lost your old fool mind. I sat at Daeng’s going over things. There were too many questions that didn’t seem to fold neatly into how this crisis was resolved. I won
dered how you could possibly have been in touch with Vientiane if the hotel phone didn’t operate long distance. I wondered why you didn’t consider contacting the Vietnamese. You’d said something about not wanting them to have more control over us than they already did. But of all the players in this, they were the ones with a vested interest in keeping the Thais out. It was a last resort but I calculated we’d reached that stage already.”
“So it was you who alerted them?”
“Too true, it was me.”
“You couldn’t stop your meddling, could you? Despite everything I said.”
“My meddling might just have saved a lot more unnecessary bloodshed.”
“My hero.”
“Then I went over the note again. There was still one part that didn’t make sense to me. Daeng suggested I go to see an old Frenchman who lives here. He spent much of his life as a linguist. He interpreted for the colonists, then married a Lao lass, and settled down. He gave me a brief lesson in transcription.”
“Spare me.”
“Not on your life. I have a lot of ammunition and nobody else to shoot. Suffer it! We Lao don’t get many opportunities to see our names in Roman script. The Frenchman told me that most Civilais who work for foreigners or study overseas would spell their name with an S. He believes only those who wanted to make a statement about being civilized or a servant of civilization would spell it as you do.”
“Far too deep, brother. The school administrators saddled me with it before they shipped me off to Paris. I couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“Whatever you say. But either way the Frenchman was confident that in certain circumstances—for example, if an American-educated Lao transcribed a Lao name into English—your initials might very well be SS.”
Anarchy and Old Dogs Page 19