by Reif Larsen
“How do they expect to make her cool with hot bark soup and matches against her skin?” she signed.
The shaman produced a coin from his pocket, said some words in his language, and began dragging it across Leila’s forehead, between her breasts, down her arms.
“She is hot,” Tien said. “She has the hot wind inside her. We must release the wind.”
Eugenia could not take it anymore.
“Stop this at once!” she said aloud. She seized the shaman’s hand and pushed him away. The coin fell to the ground, rolling beneath the bed. He stared at her with a look of curious amusement and then carefully bowed and left the room.
“Mother,” Jean-Baptiste said, stooping down to retrieve the fallen coin, “this is their way. They have been doing this forever.”
“It isn’t our way,” she signed. “I won’t let my daughter be scraped to death by some witch doctor.”
“The coin’s French,” he said, holding it up to the light.
“I don’t care what it is. This cannot go on any longer.”
“Please,” he said. “Please. We need all the assistance we can find right now. Let them do what can be done.”
After this, Tien came every day with the shaman’s soup. Under Eugenia’s disapproving eye, he rubbed the coin against Leila’s forehead and the space between her shoulder blades. Yet Tien was painstakingly tender with his ministrations: he would speak to each part of her body and carefully roll her over, as if turning over a very delicate manuscript. Her body emaciated and weak, Leila could no longer eat the soup, but he served it to her anyway, in careful little spoonfuls. The soup dribbled down her chin, coming to rest in the hollow of her neck before he wiped it away with a small cloth he kept in his back pocket, all the while singing lullabies to her in Khmer.
“Send him away,” Eugenia signed angrily. “We all know his coin does nothing. I’m fine managing her myself.”
“He cares for her,” Jean-Baptiste signed to his mother. “He brings her hope. He brings me hope. And maybe this is enough.”
“I don’t trust him. I’ve never trusted that one,” she signed. “There are things you don’t know.” She stopped, glancing over to Leila’s bed.
“You think me a fool,” he said. “I am not a fool.”
The next day, a monk dressed in saffron and umber robes arrived from upstream. He was standing at the bow of a small boat, carrying a gnarled stick in his hands. Thin as a rail, he looked nearly a hundred years old, but his gaze was steady and clear. Tien greeted the monk at the dock and led him by the arm to the main house. They talked quietly, as if they had known each other for a long time.
“It is a great honor,” Tien said to Jean-Baptiste. “He has come a long way.”
“Why is he here?” asked Jean-Baptiste.
The monk settled in by Leila’s bedside with his eyes closed, sitting very still. Eugenia watched him wearily, several times shooting an exasperated glance in Jean-Baptiste’s direction. And then the monk took Leila’s thin, yellowing hand. He looked up at Eugenia and smiled.
“She is at peace,” he said. “She is ready for the wheel to turn.”
The following morning, as the sun rose over the vast rows of rubber trees, the wheel turned. At the exact moment of her death, she was alone, and when the living returned to her bedside shortly thereafter, they found the faintest smile on her lips, as if she had known this would happen all along.
4
Though local custom dictated that the body be put on display for seven days before being cremated, Jean-Baptiste made arrangements to have Leila buried immediately, next to the de Broglie men on the hilltop by the observatory. A large crowd had gathered for the ceremony. The plantation workers were there, but so were the schoolchildren, and more came from the forest, streaming in from every direction. The monk mingled among them, chattering softly, clearly displeased with the break from tradition.
“He says her soul will not be able to escape if we put her in the ground,” Tien said to Jean-Baptiste.
“What do you think, Tien?”
He put his hands together and bowed. “Madame has her own beliefs.”
“And she’s my wife. Tell him that. She’s my wife, Tien. Tell him we’re not like you. Tell him we don’t believe in reincarnation. Tell him we only believe in what we can see.”
Jean-Baptiste read a passage from Corinthians and a short excerpt from one of Darwin’s notebooks. (Tofte-Jebsen does not identify which.) He gestured for the monk to say a prayer. The monk stepped forward and bowed, but did not speak. He began to make slow, lazy motions with his hands, like birds coming to roost.
“What’s he saying?” Jean-Baptiste signed to his mother.
“He doesn’t speak with his hands,” his mother signed. “I don’t understand.”
It was conveyed that the children would like to sing a song. They gathered shyly, the littlest ones in front. A nervous silence. And then they began. A lullaby: “Au clair de la lune.” The volume was all wrong, words were mispronounced, the thread was lost and verses repeated, but the effect was instant and unmistakable. It melted those assembled like a great wave. Jean-Baptiste wept openly. Next to him, Eugenia leaned into her son, trembling. After the children were finished, they heard a commotion behind them. The crowd parted and revealed Tien on the ground, inconsolable. Tears were streaming down his face. Two workers with scarves wrapped around their heads took him by the waist and led him away.
Jean-Baptiste drafted a letter to his wife’s family. It would be the second most difficult letter he ever wrote. He apologized for taking their daughter to a foreign land. He told them about the school that she had started. How much the children had loved her. About their song at her funeral. He told them she had not died alone. He said he would send them a small pension as long as he was able. He mentioned nothing of the radiation, of the machine in the basement that could see through their daughter into the worlds within, of the baby that had not come into the world. Inside the envelope he enclosed the small French coin the kru Khmer had used to treat her.
After only two days, a letter from Paris arrived on the mail boat. At first he thought Leila’s parents were already replying, that somehow the laws of space and time and steamship had collapsed, but then he realized the letter was not from them but from his friend Luc, the doctor. The letter began with a description of the chaos in the city, the sense of an imminent Nazi invasion.
I envy you to be so far away from this mess in your little jungle paradise, but then I hesitate to call it a paradise with this news of your wife’s illness. The list of symptoms you describe match those we have seen in our patients exposed to a high level of radiation. Radium used to be a commonly prescribed treatment, but as we have learned more of its effects, we now know how serious acute radiation poisoning can be. You are correct in asserting that the severity of the poisoning usually corresponds with the length and amount of exposure, and so I think this good news in your wife’s case. Her exposure was not prolonged, and if radiation is indeed the culprit, I see no reason why she won’t recover. Regardless, I would not be too hard on yourself. You did not know of its effects, just as many before you did not know.
We must all be in a mood of forgiveness these days as ordinary men have been pressed to make extraordinary decisions. Many of the physicists have already fled to London and the United States. Bohr’s still in Denmark—he refuses to leave despite the German occupation. There are rumors that the United States and Britain are already developing a powerful bomb built on the process of irradiating atoms. The Germans may build one too, and no one wants to be forced to work for them. I do not doubt if it will be built—it is only a question of when. Once it gets the bit between its teeth, there’s no stopping the horse.
What a mess we’ve created in this gentle world we used to call home.
Well, take care. God bless & best of luck. May we all make it out of this aliv
e.
Yours, faithfully,
Luc Jeunet
It would be the last letter he received from Paris for nearly six years. One month later, the Nazis were marching past the London plane trees on the Champs-Élysées.
Perhaps Jean-Baptiste should have left then, and given up on an enterprise he had never believed in. But he did not leave, and he did not give up, not as the war in Europe spread across the world and the Japanese lay claim to the peninsula. The news of the silent takeover came in rumors and hearsay from the perpetually cheery boatmen who plied the Mekong. It did not seem to matter to them who was in charge. The French colons were still running the day-to-day operations in the capital, but the Japanese were the new masters. “Sdech muoyothngai,” the locals called them. “King for a day.”
At La Seule Vérité, the world remained unchanged. Their little patch of earth remained. Day fell into night and back into day. The trees were cut and bled, the latex collected, pressed, dried into strips, and stored in the warehouse.
Jean-Baptiste began to smoke. The opium was brought up the river from the Kampong Cham poppy fields by a toothless man who laughed at every utterance Jean-Baptiste made. Sensing his mother’s disapproval, he never smoked in the house, only in a remote hut on the outskirts of the property where he couldn’t hear the sound of the machines or the tap, only the birds and the rain and the beat of his own heart. Occasionally a worker would join him with a pipe, but most often it was just him and the trees and the dull sense that what had begun had already ended.
The monotony was broken one day when a military patrol boat hushed around the bend of the Mekong, the imperial flag of the red-spoked sun flapping damply at its stern. A Japanese naval officer wearing a peaked hat bowed formally to Jean-Baptiste as he mounted their dock and introduced himself in polite but halting French as Lieutenant Sakutaro Matsuo. Jean-Baptiste returned the bow and invited the lieutenant to take a brandy with him on the porch.
As they sat sipping the Darroze Bas-Armagnac from Château de La Brise, their bodies enveloped by the jungle heat, Jean-Baptiste studied his guest. Matsuo refused to take off his hat, even as sweat began to run down the arrowhead of his temples and along the thin eave of his jawline. The slim mustache balanced on his upper lip could not hide the rawness of his youth. Jean-Baptiste sensed a lingering, misplaced terror beneath the lieutenant’s pristine movements, beneath the tightness of that button-snap collar. It was the kind of terror men spent their entire lives trying to ignore.
Matsuo straightened, as if remembering his duties, and laid out the demands of the occupying forces: Jean-Baptiste must hand over his entire rubber supply to the Japanese army and continue to produce for them indefinitely or else face certain arrest.
“They will send you away to work on the Burmese Railway,” said Matsuo. “It is a long railway. It is never finished.”
“Excellent,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I love projects that have no end.”
The man’s pinkie had begun to quiver. Jean-Baptiste wanted to reach across the table and still this tremor.
He smiled, assuring the officer of their cooperation.
“We don’t want trouble,” he said. “I don’t care who flies the flag, just as long as we’re able to make our beautiful rubber. I live only to make that rubber. We’ll do what we can. Here, have some more Darroze. They say it opens the heart. God knows when we’ll get it again.”
“Thank you,” said Matsuo, though he looked as if he had had quite enough.
The lieutenant sweated into his uniform as Jean-Baptiste, with great flourish, signed all the requisite documents.
“I see the Japanese are as fastidious with their documentation as they are with their own mortality.”
“Pardon?”
“Tell me,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Do you think you’ll ever see Japan again?”
The young man look startled.
“I do not know what you mean,” he said.
“Japan, your home.”
“This is Japan.”
“Is it?” Jean-Baptiste laughed. “I hadn’t heard. Maybe you’ll do better here than we have done.”
“What have you done?”
“Too much,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Or perhaps not enough. Well, my dear Sakutaro, if this is your home already, then I insist you spend the night.”
“My orders—”
“To hell with your orders. You’re in the jungle, my friend. There are different rules here.”
The lieutenant seemed to be weighing his options. “My boatman—” he said.
“We’ll take care of him. He’ll get on with the workers. They like news that they don’t make up themselves.”
In the end, Matsuo reluctantly relented. After dinner was served, Eugenia excused herself, sensing that this dance did not include her. Jean-Baptiste and the lieutenant sat long into the night. Jean-Baptiste did most of the talking, recounting the story of his life, of other lives, of lives never lived, placating the young man with the last of the Darroze and, when this ran out, some half-turned merlot, and, when this was gone, an old bottle of Cordon Bleu that he found in his laboratory. When there was nothing left to say or drink, the two men, having come to an unspoken understanding, stumbled up to Jean-Baptiste’s room, where they shared a pipe of opium and spent the rest of the night together.
The next morning, Lieutenant Matsuo, eyes bloodshot and uniform askew, skipped the elaborate array of quail eggs and split pomelo for breakfast, hurriedly boarded his boat without further comment, and disappeared down the channels of the Mekong to wherever he had come from.10
The rubber they produced for the Japanese during the war years was weak and unstable: Jean-Baptiste had ordered his men to interrupt the coagulation process by pouring in a peroxide solution so that the latex would snap under any sort of duress.
“They’ll never land their planes on tires made from this,” Jean-Baptiste said to Tien as they stood over the bubbling vats of latex. “But then, I suppose their planes were never designed to land, were they?”
“Why do we make this if it is no good?” Tien asked.
“Sometimes when something is bad, it can be good,” he said. “You understand?”
Tien rolled his head slowly from one shoulder to the other, an ambiguous gesture of comprehension. “And when something is good, it can be bad,” he said.
Jean-Baptiste laughed. “Yes, Tien, that is probably more the truth of it.”
• • •
TOWARD THE END of the war, the Japanese, sensing their own demise, briefly turned over power in Cambodia and Vietnam to local governments. Cambodia became “Kampuchea” and roman lettering was abandoned for Khmer script. The arrangement lasted less than a year, however, before the French colons finally managed to reestablish control of the peninsula. Yet the damage was already done. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh, having tasted independence, and now backed by a steady stream of armaments from China and the Soviet Union, refused to fall back into imperialisme as usual, and so another war began. Grenades were thrown into movie theaters, roads attacked at night, garrisons shelled from the safety of the jungle. The slow noose began to tighten. All wars end badly, but with this war there could be no doubt of its outcome.
The bend in the river persisted. The news whispered up the Mekong was never good, but the remoteness of their location, a result of Henri’s reckless imagination, now insulated them from all conflicts. King Sihanouk was busy negotiating Cambodia’s independence from France and had largely managed to avoid becoming embroiled in the war between the Communist and colonial forces by using a shifting veil of neutrality that had left Phnom Penh’s French population in limbo. There had been whispers of insurgencies—one plantation upstream in Phumi Hang Savat was razed, its owners stabbed and disemboweled, their kidneys reportedly eaten raw by members of the guerrilla army Khmer Issarak.11 This story, told often and in graphic detail, did much to hasten the
shuttering of homes along the river as families retreated to the relative safety of Saigon, where they would dream often of the land they had abandoned in the heart of the colony. Once considered too docile to pose any real problems to remote colonial rule, the Cambodians, now led by their young and crafty king, were embracing a new age of self-government. Abroad, potent seeds of malcontent were also being sown: a nascent Khmer Communist movement incubated in Paris, where a handful of Khmer students—including the soft-spoken Saloth Sar, who would later assume the nom de guerre Pol Pot—were beginning to debate how best to graft Marxism onto the slippery landscape of their homeland.
Yet even in this volatile climate of the early 1950s, as the Cold War giants began to take sides in Southeast Asia, as Sihanouk navigated a perilous transition to monarchical rule, as the floods came and went, when everything and nothing seemed possible, Jean-Baptiste did not budge. Occasionally they could hear the rumble of guns in the far distance, and once an Issarak rebel group moved through the plantation in the night and stole some chickens, but in general, the violence did not pierce the sheltered confines of their universe. It was as if that idle bend in the river provided them with an invisible, protective force field.
Still, Jean-Baptiste was not blind to the danger that lurked all around them, and at his mother’s prompting, he broke the silence of the severed telegraph by buying a wireless radio transceiver that he could use to contact Phnom Penh in an emergency, though if they were to be attacked, it was clear no radio would ever save them.
When Raouf the Algerian caretaker left to fight for his homeland in North Africa, Jean-Baptiste brought in Capitaine Claude Renoit to manage the business—or what remained of it. Capitaine Renoit was a war veteran with a bum leg. He meant well but lacked any sense of urgency when it came to the whole enterprise of rubber, and this suited Jean-Baptiste just fine. Operations became haphazard, shipments irregular. Tien and the men still bled the trees and loaded the stacks of latex onto barges, but it was all done out of tradition and not necessity. The center was no longer holding. Maybe the center had never held.