All around Guesthouse Number One, their voices could be heard: mothers calling their children in from the open fields, old women crying for the old men they’d left behind, toddlers giggling-too innocent to realize they’d been dead for many years. How could Siri sleep with such an accompaniment? Then, as if things weren’t already bad enough, at about midnight the awful disco music started up. It destroyed any hope of sleep. He wondered what type of people would start dancing in the middle of the night and how anyone could enjoy such an ugly Western din. Or perhaps this was one of the Party’s torture techniques to punish the officials from Vientiane. He could think of few things more cruel.
The Red-Tag Bag Room
Geung Watajak had been born in October 1952 in a village on the outskirts of Vientiane called Thangon consisting of a temple and a tiny collection of wooden huts that blew down in the wet-season monsoons. Its only reason for appearing on maps at all was its ferry, which labored back and forth across the Nam Ngum River, sending people to and from the great reservoir. Few travelers stopped in Thangon for any other reason, but a village had grown up there nevertheless. Despite its proximity to the capital and the constant stream of passing gentry, it was very much a hick town.
Beliefs were simple there. According to the locals, there were only two categories of mental infirmity: slow as a tree growing and fruity as a bad batch of plum cider. Thangon had itself one of each. Auntie Soun had briefly been the shaman for the region before she completely forgot how to release the evil spirits back to the forest. They became bottled up inside her like soda gas until one day she flipped her lid. She became renowned for wild solo rantings and spontaneous acts of flashing.
Geung, on the other hand, had been a very quiet baby, one of seven children. He displayed the physical characteristics of Down Syndrome so just one look at his face and everyone knew there was no point in sending the boy to school. It’s true he was a slow learner but that might have been because nobody ever tried to teach him anything. Only his mother called him by his name. His father, brothers, and sisters all called him Moron. It wasn’t said in a nasty way, and Geung reached eighteen years of age still thinking it was his mother who’d got it wrong.
As the Watajaks were a farming family, their routines were repetitive and uncomplicated and that suited the happy boy. Hard work built up his slowly developing muscles, and being around his family all day gave him a feeling of loyalty and belonging. But that security came to a sudden end on the day his father took him and two of his siblings to Vientiane to find them work. They were big enough and cost too much to feed. It was time for them to give a little something back to the lazy man who had gone to all the trouble of siring them. Their mother had no say in the matter.
The sister got work in a bamboo-and-corrugated-tin nightclub out on Hanoi Road by the market. The sad fact was she’d earn most of her salary with her feet in the air, but a fourteen-year-old farm girl with no schooling had to think herself lucky to have any kind of paying work. Geung’s younger brother got a job at the bus terminal touting for passengers, collecting tickets, and hanging out of the door of the speeding bus announcing where it was headed at the top of his voice.
But his father knew that finding work for Geung was going to be the biggest challenge of all. Who in their right mind would want to take on a moron? But not only was the old man a layabout, he also possessed the nerve of the devil. He took his eighteen-year-old son to Mahosot Hospital, where he offered the boy’s services free of charge in exchange for food scraps and a floor to sleep on. Hospitals, after all, were supposed to look after sick people. He reminded the hospital employment section of this fact, and the clerk on duty made the fatal mistake of displaying a moment’s hesitation before saying no. So when she left the office at the end of the day, she saw young Geung sitting alone on the wooden bench out front. He had a newspaper-wrapped parcel on his lap.
“Where’s your dad?”
“Home,” he answered in a matter-of-fact way.
“Well, you can’t stay here. You know that, don’t you?”
He smiled, showing a line of teeth that looked as if they’d all been borrowed from different people’s mouths. When she arrived for work the next morning, Mr. Geung was sitting in the same position, and the next day, and the next. Each day he smiled, displaying his unmatching teeth, and wished her good health, and his newspaper parcel got smaller and smaller till all his dried fish was eaten. So it was that Geung Watajak became an unpaid member of the staff at Vientiane’s newest hospital.
As it turned out, there was a job that normal people were unable to do for any period of time. It was in the clearing room behind the hospital laundry. It had driven off four applicants in two months. It was the place where red-tagged bags arrived from the wards and operating theatres. The tag denoted soiled items. This generally meant blood and excrement but there were often other little surprises wrapped hurriedly in the sheets and blankets. Over the five years he worked there, Geung could likely have put together several complete human beings from all the spare parts.
His task was to rinse through the red-tag linens and surgeons’ rubber aprons, and take out the bits and pieces before sending the laundry off to be boiled in industrial washers. He was given a small room to sleep in and coupons to use in the staff canteen. He never complained about his gruesome work or his lack of income. This was his destiny. Every now and then, his father would make a very brief appearance on a “salary collection run.” Although Geung had no money to give him to take back to the farm, the old man would bring a little fruit and a baton of sticky rice in bamboo along with interesting news of people who only barely registered in Geung’s memory. The young man never asked to return home.
Geung’s uncomplicated honesty endeared him to the nurses and other medical staff. He became so popular that one of the doctors, Pongruk, decided it was time to rescue him from the red-tag bag room. Since Geung had first come to Mahosot, the Americans had rented Laos and most of the people in it. The colonizers’ money paid government salaries, bankrolled the military, and set up selected pockets of infrastructure in an attempt to hold off the advancing Reds. USAID funding had sent Dr. Pongruk to Bangkok and Washington to learn the trade of forensic medicine. Upon his return, he was to set up a new morgue on the hospital grounds.
Apart from Dr. Pongruk’s wage, there was one more half salary available that the Lao authorities envisaged would pay for the services of a part-time nurse. When the doctor told them he’d found someone very competent to work full-time for the small salary, they were delighted- until they found out whom the doctor had in mind. Like most other people, Dr. Pongruk had been appalled when he found out Geung had worked for all those years without pay. He understood that, due to his condition and lack of written qualifications, the hospital couldn’t hire Geung officially in any capacity. But slavery had died out in Laos by the end of the Lan Xang kingdom and he wanted to pay Geung back somehow.
The interim American administration agreed that this would certainly be the right thing to do, so the doctor set about training Mr. Geung as his morgue assistant. He showed infinite patience and put in many extra night hours to get Geung to a point where he was proficient at morgue duties. And the young man took to the job with great enthusiasm. He could take off the cap of a skull without grazing the brain and snip through ribs as if they were chalk with his long-handled cutters. He carried bodies and their errant parts around the lab like a caring member of the deceased’s family.
The doctor told his wife one night, “It’s a bit like using kee see sap to seal the planks of a boat. You have to be patient till the resin takes hold, but once it sets you couldn’t prize it apart with a mallet and chisel.” So when Dr. Pongruk and his wife floated across the Mekhong River one night to escape whatever the communists might have had in mind for academics, they left behind a morgue assistant with a knowledge of the procedures of autopsies second to no one in Laos. But there was no longer a coroner for him to work with. The morgue was shut. For six months,
Geung was returned to the red-tag bag room. He didn’t complain or see it as a demotion. It was his destiny.
Then one day, Dr. Siri had arrived, Nurse Dtui was pulled from the wards, and the morgue came alive again. They needed Geung’s expertise, and very soon the three became a team. It couldn’t, however, be called a team of forensic professionals. Siri had been a surgeon all his life but had never conducted an autopsy and didn’t particularly want to. He sought the retirement he thought he deserved and was very reluctant to commence this new career. They’d spent that first year learning and guessing. Even now, with no lab, no modern equipment, and no textbooks outlining up-to-date techniques, the Mahosot morgue was often a scene of rampant experimentation. If it hadn’t been for Siri’s gift-his ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead-there would likely have been some very serious mistakes made.
Their shared experience had brought the three colleagues very close together. To Geung, Dtui was a sister, and Siri a grandfather. Although he couldn’t explain his feeling, Geung loved them like no one else in his life. Even when he wasn’t sure what was going on, he suffered along with them. He enjoyed their victories and cried at their sorrows. He was as sensitive to their emotions as a barometer in an airship. They trusted him, and his honesty prevented him from making promises he wouldn’t be able to keep. That, in turn, increased the value of the ones he did make. Honoring promises took precedence over everything else in his simple mind. Before they’d left on this latest trip, comrade Dr. Siri had made him promise to look after the morgue until they came back.
His duties were simple when the doctor was away. The hospital could accept no more than two bodies at a time. Geung would be responsible for storing them, bunk-bed style, in the single freezer. There was unlikely to be a sudden intake of corpses requiring an autopsy. The dengue outbreak in the Vientiane basin was spreading fast but there were no mysteries as to how it did its deadly deed: fever, lethargy, bleeding, and death. The morgue only handled unexplained fatalities at the state hospitals and the odd murder referred by the police.
When they took on cases, Geung was indispensable. But he was not a mortician and could only perform his tasks in the presence of a doctor. All he was allowed to do while Siri and Dtui were away was dust, sweep, chase away cockroaches, and stand guard over the office. He took his role seriously; he’d even brought a blanket and pillow from his room and was ready to spend the night in the cutting room, an unlikely sentry.
He was the angel of peace. Anger and aggression had never been a part of his makeup, and he could feign neither. He was no scarier than a Chinese dumpling. So, when the two surly-looking men in uniform marched through the morgue entrance and called out his name, he greeted them with a smile that vanished when he saw their weapons.
“Wha… wha… what can I do for you, c… comrades?” he asked.
They pointed their pistols at him and pulled their triggers. After a split second of astonishment, Mr. Geung fell to the floor like a ripe jackfruit from a tree.
A Restaurant with No Food
Siri’s early-morning thoughts were disturbed by the rousing refrain of Patriotic Work Song Number Seventeen, “We Shall Hoe for the Republic,” written by the president himself.
“Oh my lord. Now what?”
Bones cracked as the doctor eased himself to a sitting position, half in and half out of the mosquito netting. If he’d slept, he certainly had no recollection of it. Now that he was seventy-three years of age, time had acquired a value, and he’d just given away six hours of the stuff without getting anything in return. He got to his feet and staggered, dull as a stack of pillows, over to the window.
Through the gap in the green nylon curtains he could see the singing policemen, with their farming implements over their shoulders, climbing onto the back of an army truck. Although their warders stood well back and held their weapons down at their sides, they appeared no less threatening. Each movement was directed by the shriek of a whistle. The inmates stood with their eyes front, and the truck headed off along the dirt track. The song vanished into the mist along with its choir. All around, the crags melted into the fog like some gray Chinese watercolor. The sun wouldn’t break through for another two hours.
Siri showered under a cold spout in the communal bathroom. Stale water that smelt of carbolic and dirt squirted up from the loose tiles under his feet. He dressed and walked to breakfast, passing the solitary guard who nodded, half asleep, on a fold-up chair in front of the plywood partition.
“Good health,” Siri said, but got no response.
The dining room contained twelve wonky tables without cloths, several framed black-and-white photos of the heroes of the revolution, and Dtui.
“Morning, Doc.”
“Good morning. How long have you been down here?”
“About an hour. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither.” He sat opposite her in the silent room. “I feel we may be expected to sing for our breakfasts.”
“This is a creepy place, isn’t it?”
“You feel it as well?”
“Probably not the way you do. I don’t get ghosties creeping into my bed in the middle of the night. But this building makes me feel strange. Plus, I’ve never…” She scrunched up her nose.
“Never what?”
“Never, you know, slept by myself before.”
“Dtui, I feel this is another pog.”
“No. I’m dead serious. I’ve always been with Ma-or in the nurses’ dorm. Can’t say I feel very safe up here by myself.”
“You’re going to have to get used to it. I dread to imagine you in Moscow announcing that you’re unable to sleep alone, although you’d certainly be a popular import. You won’t have your ma or the nurses with you in the Eastern Bloc, you know.”
“If I get there.”
“I have no doubt.”
Siri looked over his shoulder to see whether there was any chance of service. He was a little embarrassed at raising Dtui’s hopes again. Of course there was doubt. She’d recently taken the exams for applicants to advanced schools in the communist countries in Europe. For several years she’d studied secretly, not wanting to give the hospital administrators the idea she was smarter than they thought she was. Initiative could be interpreted entirely the wrong way in times such as these. She’d taken politics, medicine, and Russian, and stood an excellent chance of beating out medical students who had suffered since their teachers floated away across the river. The only fear Siri had was that she’d be elbowed off the list by relatives of the faithful cadres.
She had to play the game. Siri taught her what to say to fool the interviewers. He was an expert. He’d been playing communist charades for most of his life. His faith in the system had long since evaporated as he’d watched a perfectly good doctrine destroyed by personalities. What should have been a tool was being used as a weapon and he felt little pride now in his forty-eight-year membership in the Party. Dtui needed these three free years in Moscow more than most. With all the student grant money and the possibility of part-time nursing work, it would be a rich harvest for an impoverished Lao. But most of the scholarships went to those with connections, and the only person Dtui knew with influence was Siri. Unfortunately for her, he had refused to be sucked down into the same corrupt bog that had claimed most of his comrades in recent years. He hadn’t called in favors from members of the politburo or used his position with the Department of Health. He had, however, insisted his way onto the board that vetted the scholarship applications. He was certain, if things were decided on merit, Dtui would be on her way to the Soviet Union in the new year. His presence on the committee increased the odds of fair play. But nothing could be taken for granted in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos.
Siri looked around the stark shadowy dining room but saw no signs of life. The seminar attendees were off blowing themselves up, and it appeared the staff wasn’t expecting other guests. The evening before, there had been nothing available in the kitchen. Now t
he empty stomachs of Dtui and her boss were grumbling back and forth across the breakfast table. It was probably these sounds that caught the ear of a large lady wearing an apron over camouflage fatigues who had appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Waiting for food,” Dtui told her.
The woman’s sandals flapped against the loosely tiled floor as she approached the unexpected guests. “Why aren’t you out with the others?”
“We aren’t on that tour,” Siri told her. “We’re on the three-day, two-night, padlocked-historical-temple package.”
She stared at him, her expression as empty as the National Bank.
“Sorry,” he conceded. “We’re here at the invitation of the Security Division. We’ll be staying for a few days.”
“Hm. Nobody told me.” She folded her arms as if challenging them to suggest otherwise.
“Sorry! That’s my fault.”
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