Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

by Colin Cotterill

  “I could really use a spicy number two,” he said.

  Very Green Tourism

  How word got around so fast, nobody knew. But even before the first cock crowed, before the first hornbill cooed, the visitors started to arrive. Some suggested the actual Crazy Rajid had seen Dr. Siri emerge from the river and had sounded the alarm. Others cited dreams, or instinct, or just an urge to stop by Daeng’s noodle shop to see how things were going. They were all shocked but nobody was disappointed with what they found. The loss of weight didn’t hurt the doctor’s looks any, they agreed. The women said he was even more irresistible. Gaunt was in this year and the scars on his shaved head gave him a rugged demeanor. His timing and coordination might have been off just a tad. He took a moment to consider before answering questions, if he understood them at all. Perhaps he stuttered here and there and gave more inappropriate responses than he used to. He’d only had four hours of sleep before they started arriving.

  In fact, he found all the excitement bewildering. Faces jumped in and out of his vision like camera flashes. Some he recalled but most were faded photographs in a forgotten album. Civilai was in focus and clear, as were Dtui and Geung. But when Judge Haeng turned up at nine, Siri was respectful and didn’t make any sarcastic comments, which perhaps frightened everybody most. They all agreed that Dr. Siri must have walked through the furnaces of Satan. They were glad to have him back even if he was … a bit odd. Odd was better than dead. But when they pushed him on what had happened there in hell, Madame Daeng was always around to deflect the questions.

  “He’ll tell you when he’s ready,” she said.

  But before ten, to the vocal displeasure of a shop full of people, Daeng decided that the circus was over. The doctor needed his rest. When the last hanger-on was shoved into the street and the shutters were closed, she took Siri by the arm and led him up to the bedroom.

  “I could tell them,” he said.

  “You aren’t telling anyone anything until I hear it first,” she told him. “I don’t care if the president himself arrives by helicopter. I’m not letting him in. Come! To bed with you.”

  Siri laughed.

  “I don’t think …, “ he said.

  “Oh, wipe that conceited smirk off your face, Siri Paiboun. Look at you, scrawny bruised old man that you are. You think I’d be interested in anything but watching you sleep?”

  “I’ve had … I mean I’ve slept enough.”

  “Four hours? That was barely long enough to get those puffy eyes closed. You’ve barely the energy to speak. You have a month to catch up with. And I want you rested so you can keep something down. I won’t have a man throwing up my noodles in my own shop.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “But I want, I mean … I want to talk about it.”

  “And you will, my hero. As soon as I’m ready to hear.”

  “I’m not treated.”

  “What?”

  “No, tired, I mean. I’m not tired.”

  “Good. Then lie down here beside me and hold my hand.”

  He had barely tucked his fingers between those of his wife when sleep poured over him like liquid cement. He slept through the rest of that day and into the night. He missed the dog-howl chorus at ten and the midnight transformer explosion somewhere across the river. It was 4:00 am when he finally stretched and groaned and rolled onto his side to see Daeng beside him. The night was bright but the light came from an open room along the hallway. His wife was smiling.

  “I dreamed the world was an awful place,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” she told him. “How are you feeling?”

  “I don’t know. Heavy,” he said.

  “Do you want to eat?”

  “No, Daeng. I want to talk.”

  And so he began. His speech was still slow but sleep had reorganized his mind. He left out a lot of details, facts he was sure she’d be able to insert herself, but even the abridged version frightened both of them. By the time he reached the night of his escape his whole body was shaking like an old water pump. Daeng had her arm over him to anchor him down.

  “The heavy monk had become the enemy already,” Siri said, staring his story into Daeng’s eyes. “One minute he was running the show, the next he was chained to corpses and soon to become one of them. Everyone was aware that they could be next. I don’t know how long the smiley man had been nursing his bottle of Johnnie Black on the back porch. He’d just put in a solid eight hours of torturing his colleagues. A man has to have doubts about job security when that happens. There’s nothing like Johnnie Walker for showing a man how fleeting his stay on the earth might be.

  “When he saw the first prisoner fleeing across the backyard I assume it was instinct rather than conscientious duty that made him grab a bayonet and go after him. He was so drunk I’m surprised he made any contact at all. But I doubt the kill gave him any pleasure. I’m sure the hopelessness had eaten into him by that stage. When he saw me and Thursday and the woman, we were just more walls tumbling down around him. End of optimism. End of life. He had the gun in his hand even before he reached me. There’s an old saying, ‘Only a fool sits next to a man with a gun to his head.’ Well, I was that fool. He pulled me to him and I didn’t have the strength to push him away. I’m sure he had it in mind to do away with me as well as himself.”

  “You can take a break if you like,” Daeng told him. Siri’s sweat had soaked her clothes. She wiped his forehead with a cloth.

  “He pulled the trigger. I heard it click,” Siri went on. “Then all I remember was being in the middle of this ball of energy, like … like watching an explosion from the inside. I don’t know what deflected the bullet—his thick skull, a metal plate in his brain, or just his wayward aim. I don’t know. Whatever … it was kind to me. All I got was a face full of cranial matter and this.”

  He ran his finger along the scar that slashed across his forehead like a cancellation.

  “It’s very masculine.”

  “The noise had deafened me and I was in this blissful, pristine silence. Everything seemed so peaceful. I looked up and saw this figure leaning over me. I wondered whether it was one of the angels come to collect me but it was Thursday. He pulled me to my feet and cleaned off my face and half carried me into the darkness beyond the school. I’m sure there was a lot of wildness going on around us then—guards alerted by the gunshot, people searching, tentative shots into the shadows, I don’t know. But it was all such a dream that I felt I was floating off. And they were all around, the spirits of the dead. There were thousands of them lounging about in the deserted suburbs. Slouching in doorways. Crouching by the roadsides. They watched us pass like crowds along the route of a royal motorcade. It was all quite beautiful, I remember. Moving.”

  He seemed to be reliving the moment with a smile on his face.

  “How did you get out of the city?” Daeng asked.

  “Him. Thursday. He was one of theirs too. A Khmer Rouge. He spoke some Vietnamese. He’d been stabbed in the back in one of their purges. He’d been a colonel in the Region Eight command. He knew the city. Knew which parts were occupied, which were deserted. We stayed the first few nights in his relative’s house. There was nobody there. The whole suburb was uninhabited and untouched. It was bizarre. We stayed long enough for us all to recover from our respective injuries and illnesses. There was canned food. We boiled water. My hearing returned. The child somehow shook off a malarial fever.”

  “Who was she, the woman?”

  “She was nobody. No threat. No reason to be interrogated at all as far as I could see. Her husband had been a schoolteacher. Chinese descent. She had no more idea of what was going on in that place than anybody. Now, Thursday, he was our savior. His home town was Siem Reap. He had people there, family. It was perhaps a reflection of the oppressive cloud hanging over us that led him to question whether he could trust them. But we had no choice. That’s where we headed. It’s over one hundred twenty
five miles. It took us a week just to get to the outskirts of Udong. Foraging, stealing food, avoiding soldiers. We slept in the day and traveled at night. In our favor, there was chaos everywhere. Nobody knew who was in charge. None of the soldiers had orders. On the few occasions we were discovered, Thursday sprang into Khmer Rouge colonel mode and talked us through. It worked. Most of the young cadres in the villages were desperate for authority figures. There had been so many purges there weren’t enough chiefs for all the Indians.

  “Then, one day, we got lucky. Thursday marched us into a village and took over the place. When a supply truck passed through he talked us onto it. I think if he’d set his mind to it, he could have taken over the country all by himself. When we got to Siem Reap we met up with Thursday’s brother and father. They were commanding officers in charge of large units around Angkor Wat. Thursday told them I’d saved his life and that of the young woman and her child. They were nervous about having me there but they agreed they owed me a debt of gratitude. They had to find a way to smuggle me out of the country. And here, my darling Daeng, we arrive at one of the most peculiar elements in my whole story.”

  “It couldn’t get any odder, Siri.”

  “Trust me, it did. I learned that there are only two air routes into and out of Cambodia. One is a fortnightly flight from Peking. The other is from Bangkok to Siem Reap.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “All this while, all through the slaughter and the genocide, they’ve continued to run tourist flights to visit Angkor Wat. It’s absolutely true. Well-heeled Europeans and Americans pop up to the temple, take a few snaps, buy their souvenirs, eat ice cream, and none of them are any the wiser that the population around them is being decimated. ‘Honey, did you hear that? It sounded like a gun? ‘Don’t be silly, doll. Probably popcorn.’ It’s all part of the KR public relations campaign to make the outside world believe everything’s fine and dandy there. I tell you, Daeng, if I wrote this in a story nobody would believe it, but I saw it with my own eyes. I watched them stroll around the ruins and not twenty miles away there were graves with bodies four deep.”

  “And how did they get you out?”

  Siri sighed.

  “They shot a Japanese tourist.”

  “Siri!”

  “I’m not proud of it, and I was in no position to stop it. They didn’t tell me until it was done. Thursday’s brother was in charge of security around the temple. They found a Japanese tourist on one of the guided trips who looked vaguely like me. He was traveling alone. They separated him from his tour group and put a bullet through his head.”

  “How could they?”

  “Life has no value to these people. It was like slaughtering a chicken. They handed me his clothes and his passport, decorated me in dark glasses and a hat, and put me on the Thai Airways flight back to Bangkok. It was as simple as that.”

  Daeng wiped the tears from Siri’s eyes with her finger, then attended to her own.

  “They gave me the man’s wallet as well. He had Thai baht. Lots of them. In Bangkok I strolled through immigration. The officer stamped the passport without even bothering to look at me. I found a bus to Nong Kai then traveled out to Si Chiangmai. I sat for a day opposite your shop, Daeng. It seemed so far. It should have been the easy part but I didn’t know how to get across. I talked to fishermen. None of them was game to chance a trip over here. They’d all lost friends to Lao bullets. So I studied the current. I walked nearly two miles upstream and selected myself a log and dived in.”

  “You poor man. You’ve only had four swimming lessons.”

  “That’s true,” he laughed. “But I graduated from the leg-kicking class. I was trusting the log to do the rest. Even so, it’s a lot easier in a pool than at the mercy of her highness, the Mekhong, and this broken hand didn’t help. I almost didn’t make it. I was flying past your shop and I was still ten feet from the bank. I made the mistake of leaving my log and attempting to splash my way ashore. I was sure I’d performed all the regulation arm and leg movements but they didn’t appear to stop me sinking below the surface. I kicked like a mule, took in several ounces of water, and was washed up in front of the Lan Xang Hotel. I walked back here along the bank. I was a little confused by then. I couldn’t remember where I lived until I saw the beach umbrella.”

  “I thought you were Rajid.”

  “You’d be surprised how much we have in common.”

  My Mama Sold the Buffalo and

  Bought a Rocket Launcher

  The second coming of Siri was generally considered a miracle in Vientiane. He was met by smiles wherever he went. In fact, the doctor had returned to a more caring city. His Vientiane had a far greater appeal once it was compared to Phnom Penh. Yes, the regime had been infected with the same corruption as its predecessors. Yes, they incarcerated old Royalists and killed the odd dozen here and there with hard labor. Yes, they were driving the Hmong from their homes. Yes, they forced everyone to study Marx and Lenin and no, they didn’t have a crumbling clue how to run a country. But, odd as it seemed, deep down, they had respect for their fellow man. It showed itself in peculiar ways, but the Lao—even after being slapped about by this or that oppressor for a century—still held on to their humanity.

  Siri had seen the dark side. He’d retrieved his amulet from a headless corpse in a high-school playground and he’d dug the body of a poet from the ground with his bare hands. He’d killed a man who probably didn’t want to be doing what he was doing and the life of an innocent Japanese had been taken purely for Siri’s own convenience. And now, he’d had enough of death. It was time to step away from the spirits. Dr. Siri had submitted his resignation along with his official report every month since the end of 1975. Every month it had been rejected or, more accurately, ignored. But when he strode into Judge Haeng’s office, slapped his resignation onto the desk, and said, “You have three months to find a new coroner or do without one,” nobody had any doubts that he was serious. Siri had earned his retirement. He had survived the killing fields. He was on life’s overtime and nobody had the nerve to begrudge him.

  Police work? That was a different matter. That was fun. That wasn’t messing with the dead. It was, in many respects, striving for the rights of the living. They couldn’t keep a good closet detective down. It was a Saturday evening and Siri and Inspector Phosy were seated on a mat at the back of the evening market. Four glasses stood at various angles on the uneven ground in front of them, two half full. Two Thumbs had obliged them by lowering their umbrella. There were stars in the sky at last and the drinkers wanted to see them. The first rule of cigarette and alcohol stall management was that the customer was always right until he or she ran out of money.

  “It looks like we’re still recognizing the Khmer Rouge,” Phosy said. He hadn’t known whether to broach the subject of Kampuchea but he had questions he wanted answered.

  “Their embassy’s still open but I’ve been smelling the odd scent of combustible chemicals from Daeng’s kitchen,” Siri smiled. “So don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning and there’s a mushroom cloud where their embassy used to be.”

  As often occurred in these encounters, Phosy was only half certain that was a joke so he ignored it.

  “It’s hard to believe all that horror is going on right next door,” he said. “But you’ve recovered from your ordeal remarkably. I thought you’d be a wreck for months after what you went through.”

  Siri smiled and looked around. He had recovered quite remarkably. Since that first morning back, he’d averaged twenty minutes’ sleep a night. And those tiny pecks of sleep were crammed so full of the most horrific nightmares he got more rest when he was awake. He hadn’t been able to keep food down so he was on a diet of rice porridge. Anybody passing his bathroom would swear some farm animal was being strangled inside. He still couldn’t write with his right hand and he was deaf in one ear. At the slightest unexpected sound he’d jump a foot in the air and his heart would thunder for five minutes befo
re it could be stilled. He would put his hand to his face and find tears on his cheeks and, at any time of the day or night, images of the dead Khmer were inside his head. Quite a remarkable recovery.

  “There used to be an expression,” he said. “‘There’s always someone worse off than you.’ But when you get to the Khmer, you’re at the end of the line, Phosy. It now reads, ‘There’s always someone worse off than you, unless you’re Cambodian.’ They call the system there Angkar. It’s a political machine that has everyone hypnotized. Mindless. I can’t believe there’s any place worse than Kampuchea, Phosy.”

  “How did … ? Ah, never mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How did you occupy your mind through all those hours of being locked up?”

  “It’s pretty much the same as enduring political seminars. You’ve been through it. Songs. I sang a lot of molum country songs to myself and made up a few dozen more in my mind.”

  “I’d like to hear them sometime.”

  “I doubt that. Unless the title ‘My Mama Sold the Buffalo and Bought a Rocket Launcher’ appeals to you. Then there were word games and mathematics puzzles. Not to mention solving real-life mysteries. I have to say there was a long period there when you squatted in my mind, Inspector Phosy.”

  “Me?”

  “I was very afraid of the outcome.”

  “Of the three-épée case?”

  “I was afraid you might miss the clues. I underestimated you and for that I apologize deeply.”

  “No need to apologize. You had every right to be afraid. My investigation concluded with half a dozen bullet holes in Comrade Neung. End of case. It wasn’t until I started to think like you that I saw things the way they really were.”

  “We can’t think the thoughts of others, Phosy.”

  “Maybe not. But we can open our minds and let other people’s thoughts in.”

  “I’m sure Comrade Neung will be eternally grateful you did. Tell me, at what point did you work it all out?”