by Morris West
‘And for the same reason. Tanaka’s as good as dead. Hoshino may last a little longer; but I’ve dealt with Captain Aditya before. He’s very ambitious. He’s on his way to being rich. This deal with Tanaka will just about get him there. After that, he’ll turn respectable and start eliminating anyone who can blackmail him. Hoshino is very high on his hit list.’
‘And how come you know so much about him?’
‘I’ve been freighting in and out of Bangkok for fifteen years.’ Once again, he gave that strange, spluttering laugh. ‘I told you I was a bastard, didn’t I? The first lesson you learn in trade and politics is that if you want to get you’ve got to give. Captain Aditya is one of my local charities. It entitles me to remind him of his duty from time to time.’
It was that odd, off-key conversation that made me cancel out the rest of the evening and cross to Siri’s house. All of a sudden I felt desperate, shamed and angered by the cold brutality of my world. I must have looked a wreck, because she made me strip off and shower and wrap myself in one of those sarongs of woven silk which the Thais call pakomas. They are cool and comfortable and, like an actor’s costume, they conduce to a shedding of one’s everyday banal identity.
The children, who were not children, but a beautiful young woman and a proud, handsome young man, greeted me first with careful respect and then with a sudden rush of affection that warmed my arid heart. We sat, family style, round the low teak table and nibbled small plates of food, spiced and bland, while Siri coaxed me through an account of my recent doings. She wanted me to be open. She wanted the children to hear. It was an important part of their education, and it was my duty as an elder in the house to impart it to them.
So I talked to them about the conference, the high hopes with which it had begun, the tragic collapse of its careful plans. I tried to explain the gerrymandered structure of the Soviet republics, with their transplanted ethnic groups; the ancient enmities, the entrenched privilege of the nomenklatura. The young man, bred to monarchy and an established Buddhist faith, was hard put to understand the scope and rancour of tribal rivalries in the rest of the world. He was, however, fascinated by the story of Leibig and his family, the old Baltic traders who had found a foothold in Japan so long ago and had held it ever since, as the Danes had held theirs in Thailand. My beautiful niece was more interested in the tragic tale of Miko, the fox-woman, run finally to earth and destroyed by stronger predators, and the unfinished drama of Marta Boysen, whom she characterised, with rare perception, as a half-built palace for which the plans have been mislaid.
When I told them about Kenji Tanaka, our long friendship and its abrupt end, they were suddenly caught in a flurry of family recollections: their grandfather, who had been active in the Free Thai movement and had been a friend of Jim Thompson; the half remembered, carefully suppressed tales they had heard about the infamies of the Burma railway, the experiences of their father, who had many times visited Japan and had never quite come to terms with it.
Vannikov fascinated them because they both remembered the big, dramatic occasion when Yuri Yevtushenko, in town for an Asian writers’ conference, had stood declaiming his verses, singing melancholy folk songs and trying to thread his tipsy way through an aria from Eugen Onegin. Vannikov was made in the same mould, big and lusty and full of ready passions. They loved passionate people. They did not mind melancholy ones either, so long as they were sad in a placid kind of way, like the countryside under the monsoon rain clouds.
Then came a moment when everything fell quiet and the young ones kissed me goodnight and melted into the shadows of the old house.
Siri said gently: ‘I’m so glad you came. You don’t know how important you are to the children.’
‘They and you are just as important to me … I felt like a fugitive tonight, panting for sanctuary.’
‘The night is not over yet. You are staying here. Everything is ready.’
She took my hand and led me across the footbridge that spanned the klong, to the small detached dwelling where my father had lived during his sojourn in Bangkok. Although I, too, occupied it sometimes, I had never regarded it as mine, always as my father’s. Everything in it was his: the books, the desk, the old Thai paintings, the small bronze Buddha perched on a wall bracket over the bed.
Siri peeled off her wrap and mine. Her body was smooth as old ivory, supple as silk. She made me lie down on the bed and sponged me with cool, perfumed water. She drew the mosquito net around the bed like a vast white tent, tucked it under the mattress, then turned out the light and slid into bed beside me. No words were spoken; none had ever been needed in this place. All argument ended, all dissension died, all doubts and fears and all the sadness of the world were left behind on the other side of the bridge. Here, there was only love; the giving of it, the taking of it, the high leap to ecstasy, the long, slow, languid glide into sleep.
This was the true gypsy’s resting place, marked by secret signs, redolent of the magic of other happy sojourns. Here, the yellow moon shone kindly; the spirits who lived in the tiny gilded house in the garden were all friendly; the Buddha who smiled from the shrine above the bed told the same age-old message to an unheeding world: ‘Nothing is permanent. Tomorrow the caravan moves on. The wheels turn. The flowers bloom and die. The good we do in bad times is a seed planted for others to harvest. Evil is a dark hole in creation, where good may once have flourished, where it may take root again one starlit night, when the wounded world murmurs in a healing sleep.’