And there was something that had been worrying her about the autopsy. She took her sturdy Soviet flashlight downstairs and, after ten minutes of shouting over the phone, she walked out the back way and headed for the president’s house. There had been no reason to lock the door of the meeting room. The body still lay in segments on the plastic tablecloth. The story of the Cuban orderlies had stuck in her mind. There was no way the body in front of her could have belonged to the amorous basketball player, but what about his goat-faced friend? What if he hadn’t gone home? What if the smaller man had somehow been left behind and found himself in trouble?
As no logical alternatives occurred to her, she began to run the flashlight beam across the torso. She was used to Siri’s ongoing discussions with his subjects during autopsies, so she began her inspection with, “Excuse me, Mr. Odon, I was wondering whether perhaps you had a little more to tell us than you have so far.” She’d noticed something at the initial inspection, three marks-almost parallel lines-beneath the left armpit. At the time, she’d merely noted them as interesting. The contraction of the skin had left many such grooves, but there had been something strangely regimented about these three. Their oddity had lingered in her mind and she wanted to satisfy her curiosity.
She shone the beam onto the right side of the chest. It was more deteriorated there, harder to recognize, but after pushing at the leathery hide with her fingers, she had no doubt. Three furrows in an identical position to those on the left-symmetrical. Nothing biological could explain such marks. The body had been scarred in some type of ritual. It certainly did have more to tell.
Siri had arrived at the point where he was prepared to wake up the guesthouse supervisor and complain about the damned noise. Three nights he’d been there, and every night the foreign devil music had blasted out at midnight. Surely the youth of Vieng Xai had better ways to spend their time. Surely the senior cadres of the region ought to clamp down on such bourgeois Western decadence. He couldn’t work it out. Perhaps Huaphan had too few people left who really cared.
As sleep was hard to come by, he went over the points raised at his meeting with Comrade Lit. They’d drawn up a list. One: check the date of departure of Isandro and Odon. Two: locate the Vietnamese colonel who’d made the complaint to Santiago. Three: get information about any other projects in the region in which dark-skinned foreigners were involved. Siri broadened the search to include Vietnamese mountain tribesmen even though he was quite sure the dead man was not Asian.
Somewhere between numbers seven and eight on the list, order finally gave way to sleep. The crow and the sparrow returned for a dream sequel, still on their wire above the valley, still preening one another. But slowly, one by one, other sparrows came to rest alongside them. One settled beside the first and attempted to flirt with her. She rejected its advances and returned to her crow. This caused a terrible kafuffle in the sparrow community, and they flapped and fluttered and squawked and it seemed an assault on the crow was inevitable. But, before they could attack, the crow enfolded the sparrow in his broad black wing and the two of them dropped. There was no attempt to fly away. They merely dropped like stones into the valley below and deep into the soft mud of the fields.
Siri was awakened, not by the weak morning light through his window, but by the whimpering of a child. He thought of the girl he had seen in an earlier dream but the bunk opposite was empty. This child was more real, and seemed to be closer, so close he even raised his netting and peered under his bed. He went to the door and looked out into the empty corridor. But there was no doubt the sound came from inside his room. He touched the talisman at his neck. It could sense tricks from the malevolent spirits. They’d fooled him before. Their black magic had almost killed him on two occasions. But the white stone hung still and cool. This was no black magic. It was a sincere cry for help from some other troubled soul. But, with no clues and no way of responding, Siri could only lie back on his mattress and listen to the feeble cries. The sound gradually climbed to a higher pitch and became more hollow, and at some point it blended with the sound of the bamboo klooee that played its solitary morning tune.
The Cave of the Dead
Mr. Geung woke in panic just as he had the previous two mornings. But whereas on those other occasions he’d found himself surrounded by soldiers, today he was wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin like pork in a Chinese spring roll. He struggled to get loose, kicked and punched and pushed, but could find no way to free himself. His mind was blank. All the details of where he was and why he was there were gone. And so, although it didn’t help a bit, he started to cry.
“And what, tell me, do you think you’re doing in me firewood cover?” It was the voice of an old woman, that much he could tell. But he couldn’t see her through the opening at the top of his spring roll.
“I… I don’t know,” he said, and continued to cry. He felt a tug on his cocoon and was sent rolling across the ground and then flung loose from the tarpaulin onto the dry earth. An elderly woman and two giggling children were looking down at him.
“Grandma, he’s a retard,” the smallest girl said.
“So he is,” the old lady agreed. “What do you want here, retard?”
“I d… don’t know,” Geung answered truthfully.
“Then I should call the police and have you arrested,” she said.
“Yes, I th… I think so.”
“Or maybe I should get my gun and chase you away.”
Geung thought about that option. “Y… yes, that would be f… fine, too.”
The old woman laughed. Her betel nut-stained mouth reminded him of a number of disasters he’d seen in the morgue. “Eeh. You really are crazy. How am I supposed to threaten you if you agree with all I say, boy? Where do you hail from?”
“Thangon.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Sorry. I have t… t… to go to Vientiane.” He clambered to his sore feet, smiled at the children, and started walking.
“Wait. Wait there,” the old woman said. “You think you’re going to walk to Vientiane?”
“I p… promised.”
“Is that so? You hungry, boy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can’t walk to Vientiane if you’re hungry, seeing it’s so far. And as…”
“Yes. I remember.”
“What’s that?”
“The mo… mo… mosquitoes. I wrapped up so the mo… mosquitoes didn’t get me. D… d… dengue fever. Comrade Dtui s… said you have to wrap up against the mo… mo… mo… mo…”
“MOSQUITOES!” the two girls chorused.
“Yes.” He smiled at the girls and they giggled back.
“All right,” the old lady decided. “Come and eat and we’ll see if we can get some sense out of you before you set out on your big march. And I think I can find you some homemade paste here, should keep the mosquitoes from your blood. It’ll last for a week so long as you don’t wash.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said and put his hands together in a polite nop.
“Well, I don’t know where you’re from or what you’re about, but they taught you some nice manners.” They went into her solid wooden hut. This was the home of the caretaker of the pine plantation through which Geung had trekked during the first day of his escape. “First thing you do is sit yourself down and take off them vinyl shoes. You wear them all the way to Vientiane and you’ll be a cripple as well as a retard.”
“Thank you, m… m…”
“MA’AM!” the children yelled as if the circus were in town.
“Mother,” Geung said, and smiled again at the girls with his crazy-paving teeth.
Dtui’s first day at Kilometer 8 Hospital was chaotic. It wasn’t her fault. Chaos was the norm there. After only an hour she felt helpless. There was a staff of six, two of whom had no medical training whatsoever. The most senior medic had undergone six months of emergency field hospital training in Vietnam. Dtui, with a two-year nursing diploma, was their surgeon general. Each
of them simply stopped making decisions and deferred to her judgment. She immediately mistrusted her ability to make the necessary decisions. Never had she been in a situation that was so desperate.
By far the largest population in the fifty-bed hospital was made up of bombi victims. Of all the wicked tools of war, the bombi was one of the cruelest. A shell packed with baseball-sized bombis was dropped from a plane. In midair the shell opened and the bombis rained over the selected target. On contact, two hundred and fifty white-hot ball bearings exploded in all directions from each one, ripping through buildings and people with equal detachment. Some of the bombis were on a short-delay timer to catch the survivors who went to care for their loved ones. But some just lay dormant for days, weeks, months, or years, to spring their deadly surprise on the innocent and ill informed. The bombi had no sense of who its victim should be. A buffalo, a hoe, a child, a young mother planting rice, it mattered not. It took them all.
Every day at Kilometer 8 new victims arrived with truncated limbs bound to stem the flow of blood. They came on ox carts, on ponies, on litters dragged by their relatives. The hospital staff gave them generous doses of opium to repress any sensations, good or bad, and did their best to clean the wounds. Many had lost too much blood or were too shredded to keep alive. Those who survived did so mainly of their own volition. Every few days, Dr. Santiago would come by to amputate whatever was unsavable and perform whatever miracles it took to give people another chance at life.
There were no shifts at Kilometer 8. Staff slept during the rare moments of quiet, day or night. They cooked for those patients whose relatives weren’t camped in the wards. They kept them full of a painkiller they knew would leave them addicted, and they stretchered the deceased up the slope to the cave of the dead, a crematorium on the skirt of the mountain. At the end of her incredibly long first day, Dtui estimated she’d lost four kilograms. Singsai, the senior medic, told her if she stayed a month she’d be so skinny they’d be able to store her in the closet with the mops. She enjoyed that image.
It had been a comparatively good day. Only one lady had made the journey to the cave of the dead. Dtui had personally been able to save the life, perhaps temporarily, of a ten-year-old child, and at two in the morning the residents at Kilometer 8 were all stoned into a restful sleep. Dtui and Singsai sat in front of the long rectangular room that formed the main ward. They were too fatigued to sleep, so they gazed up at the stars that showed themselves so rarely in the northeastern sky that the medic saw their appearance now as an omen.
“Days like this make you realize how stupid you are,” Dtui said.
“You aren’t stupid at all, Nurse,” Singsai assured her. He was such a brown-skinned little man his words seemed to come out of the darkness from a floating set of teeth. He reminded Dtui of the mummy in the president’s house.
“Okay, perhaps not stupid exactly, but… lacking.”
“You’ve done a lot of good today.”
“But there’s so much more I didn’t know how to do. It’s so frustrating. It makes me appreciate your Dr. Santiago and my own boss that much more. They do this stuff day in, day out, year after year, saving lives as if it were as natural as breathing.”
“I hope to be a surgeon someday,” Singsai told her, looking at the sky as if that were the place such a hope might hang. He was in his fifties and unconnected so Dtui knew he had little chance.
She scrambled for a change of subject. “Do you ever have any cases here that aren’t emergencies?”
“One or two malarials,” he said. “We’ve a little boy with chronic diarrhea. They say that’s the biggest killer of kids in the whole of Southeast Asia. Most of them don’t make it, but we’re fighting for this chap. He’s been lucky. Oh, and then there’s Mrs. Duaning.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nobody knows. She’s been in a coma for two weeks. We found her out on the road.”
“Nobody’s come to claim her?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know her name?”
“We don’t, but we can tell she’s Hmong. One of our Hmong interns christened her ‘Duaning.’ It means ‘nuts.’”
They went to visit Mrs. Nuts, who lay in a small block away from the others, where the non-life-threatening cases were billeted. She was on her back with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling and muttering.
“What’s she saying?” Dtui asked.
“She only started speaking the day before yesterday. She says the same thing, over and over.”
Dtui leaned over her and listened. The old lady’s voice seemed less gravelly than one would have expected from such a battered old crone. The words came from her mouth on a breath that smelt musty. “Have to feed Panoy,” she said. “Have to feed Panoy.”
“You don’t suppose Panoy’s her name?”
“This woman’s? No. It isn’t a very Hmong-sounding name.” He pulled up the single blanket to cover her and her feet were momentarily exposed. Both Dtui and Singsai looked at them in amazement. “What the…?”
The soles of the woman’s feet were caked in some maroon substance. “Has she been walking anywhere?” Dtui asked.
“No. As far as I know, she hasn’t moved. And this doesn’t look like clay.”
Dtui scratched at one sole with her fingernail. She knew exactly what she was seeing. “It’s congealed blood,” she said.
“Why would she have…? Are there any wounds?”
Dtui took a damp cloth from the basin beside the bed and carefully rubbed at one foot. “No.”
“Then how…?”
“It doesn’t look random, Singsai. Look at this other foot. It’s as if someone painted symbols onto her soles.”
“With blood? Whatever for?”
“That Hmong intern might have some idea.”
“Right. I don’t want to wake him now, but in the morning I’ll be very interested to see if he has an explanation.”
“Me, too,” Dtui said. “Me, too.”
Two more emergencies during the night meant that Dtui didn’t actually get to sleep until after seven. The breeze through the thin cotton curtains woke her at ten. Before heading for the main block, she stopped by to see Mrs. Nuts. She still lay staring at the ceiling but her tune had changed during the night.
“Panoy is weak now. Panoy is weak,” she said.
“Who is Panoy?” Dtui asked.
“Panoy is weak.”
Dtui pushed back the woman’s white hair from her face and put her palm on the woman’s cold brow. Her skin seemed dull, as if she were covered in dust. Her pulse was slow. She wondered whether Mrs. Nuts would make it through the day. Before she left the room, Dtui pulled up the blanket to look at her feet. The left sole, the one she’d wiped clean earlier that morning, was once again covered in dried blood.
Dr. Siri was downstairs in the guesthouse dining room reading a month-old copy of Pasason Lao. There was a picture of his old friend Civilai shaking hands with a Mongolian diplomat. Both were smiling, neither convincingly. He could tell exactly what Comrade Civilai, his only ally on the politburo, was thinking. It reminded him of an earlier time and two more idealistic people.
For years, Siri and his wife, Boua, had been members of the Lao Issara, the Free Lao resistance. But Boua was working her way toward a more disciplined independence from the French than just being a nuisance to the colonists. She was the devout communist of the pair, and it was she who led Siri to Hanoi and into the Nguyen Ai Quoc college. There he learned his Vietnamese and attended classes in communist ideology. He was baptized in red paint, held under until he breathed Lenin and defecated Marx. And with this new vital system he’d gone out into the Vietnamese countryside and convinced the farmers that nothing but communism could free them from the yoke of French colonization. He’d worked in field hospitals throughout the north of the country, and even after eighteen straight hours of bloody surgery, he’d still find time to engage the villagers in ideological debates.
It
was a period in his life he came to refer to as “the years they borrowed my mind.” It wasn’t until he met another enthusiastic cadre, a serious member of the Lao People’s Party and lifelong communist named Civilai, that Siri was able to put everything into perspective. Although he’d been trained to report comrades who strayed from the axiomatic straight and narrow, Civilai was so experienced and so obviously intelligent that Siri had no choice but to listen and reevaluate his own clouded beliefs. Civilai loved communism. There was no question of his loyalty to the Party. But he believed that communism should work without scaring the daylights out of people. For his opinions he was labeled an eccentric. He was too senior and too well respected by the masses to be kicked off the central committee, but he was kept backstage.
Siri had immediately warmed to Civilai’s middle path so he, too, had been ostracized by the top men of the Party. While Boua soldiered on in her attempts to educate a nation of proletariat, Siri hung up his red flag and became a full-time doctor. That was probably when his wife’s love for him began to dim. In Siri’s heart, the love light never went out. He loved her until her death, but he knew she’d already begun to consider her husband a disappointment. Through all that time, only his friendship with Civilai had kept him rational, and as the Party dumped more and more meaningless duties on Civilai, it was Siri who offered encouragement and hope to his friend.
The photograph before him showed one more symbolic handshake with one more foreign official. It was another snap for the diplomatic album. Civilai had told Siri he was becoming the Mickey Mouse of the new regime. He-
“Comrade?” Siri looked up to see the guard whose station was at the upstairs partition standing, drained of color, in the doorway. “You’re a doctor, right?”
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