Dear Phosy,
The sports committee members have looked over your
application for a tryout with the volleyball team and we are
impressed with your experience. We are delighted to invite you
to our training session on Court Four, Area Sixteen, at ten
o'clock on August 24.
Yours sincerely,
Minmong Yotha, team captain
"You apply for the volleyball team?" Dtui whispered.
He shook his head. She raised her eyebrows and nodded. This was it. The walls had been breached.
At nine thirty, Phosy was walking alone through the camp, asking for directions to Area Sixteen. It was a decent walk across the sprawling base, and the rain had been falling constantly for an hour. It was a bad day for volleyball. What the nearest family assured him was Court Four turned out to be a rectangle of mud. No net, no lines, no players. He wasn't sure why he'd expected to find an actual volleyball practice going on. It just seemed like a fitting way to round out the subterfuge. He sat on a plank nailed to two stumps that probably served as the bleacher, his back to a bamboo fence. Twenty minutes later he was still there. The rain had soaked through his clothes and was working its way through his skin. A camp dog had joined him. Live dogs were always a good sign in a refugee camp, proof that there was enough to eat without getting desperate.
The dog looked up at the sound before Phosy heard it. Ten yards away, three lengths of bamboo fence tilted forward and a dark face peered through the gap at the bottom. The man looked at Phosy.
"You the carpenter?"
"That's me."
"Come on."
Phosy ran to the gap, got on his hands and knees, and crawled under the pivoted slats. The dog came out with him. On the outside of the fence three men stood looking down at him. One was Bunteuk, the area chief.
"Good morning," Phosy said, straightening up.
"Good morning, Comrade," Bunteuk replied.
Phosy laughed off the address. "No need for that here, brother." He held out his hand but Bunteuk didn't return the handshake.
"I imagine that would depend on how stupid you think we are, comrade spy. You've been recognized."
With his hand still held hopefully in front of him, Phosy was hit from behind. Through his life he'd been slugged with various blunt and not-so-blunt instruments, and, as he sank to his knees and inkblots filled in his vision, he was pretty sure he'd been felled this time by a block of wood-- about four by four--definitely teak.
Siri had arrived at the village in time to attend the official wedding ceremony of a neighbor's son. The soldier, Kumpai, had promised to come and pick him up at the hospital but he hadn't shown so Siri found his own way there in a trishaw. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, an utterly inconvenient hour for everyone involved, except for the government cadre who'd been assigned to officiate. As the regulations stipulated the need for chairs, the fishermen had been obliged to borrow two dozen from the Full Moon dance hall and ship them downriver on a garbage scow.
The official was young and puffy and had no more interest in the union of Gaew and Mon than he had in the average yearly rainfall of Finland. He opened the Party manual and read out seven ways the confused betrothed would be able to benefit society and the nation as a whole by becoming a married couple. He reminded them that Marx had described a socialist marriage as the uniting of two people, making them one, but with the output of three. Siri didn't recall that particular equation from his early readings of Marx, nor did he understand the mathematics of it, but for once he kept his mouth shut. The sweating official concluded: "The Democratic Republic of Laos is proud to announce your union certified."
They signed a document, he countersigned it, and handed them the carbon copy as evidence. He put the top copy in his briefcase, shook hands with the moderately happy couple, and left. The whole thing took sixteen minutes. Returning the chairs would take two hours.
Siri managed to waylay the young man before he could head off on his little motorcycle. He held out a note he'd conceived and written during the ceremony but the official didn't take it.
"Son," Siri said, "I believe you have a Vietnamese adviser at the town hall."
"What would that be to you?" the young man asked.
"I need you to give this note to him."
"Do I look like a postman?"
"No, you look like a very junior clerk who performs whatever tasks he's told to. Don't get clever with me. Governor Katay is a personal friend."
The cadre was suddenly more tentative about his attack.
"If you're his friend, why don't you give it to him yourself?"
"What do they feed you young fellows to make you all so suspicious of everyone? Listen, the governor and I had dinner together last evening. The Vietnamese adviser wanted some information and, as I speak Vietnamese, the governor asked me to write it down. See? It's written in Vietnamese. That's all. Put it to your ear. Nothing ticking in there. I'm sure the governor will be very grateful."
The boy took the sealed envelope with its unfamiliar writing on the front. Siri always seemed to have plenty of envelopes of various sizes and shapes in his shoulder bag these days. "Well ..."
"Tell him it's from senior Party member Dr. Siri."
"You're a doctor?" He looked around at the surroundings.
"I'm on a house call. Run along now. I'll phone the governor this evening and check whether your Vietnamese adviser got this, so don't let me down."
"No, sir."
Siri sat with Sing's mother and told her about the river dolphin as well as giving her an abridged version of his own spiritual connections. The woman put both her hands on his and thanked him. There is no greater gift to a bereaved mother than to know her child's soul is at peace. She told him he'd already done too much for them and wondered how she could ever repay him. There weren't enough fish in the Mekhong. Siri told her he wouldn't give up on his investigation and didn't expect anything in return.
"In that case," the mother said. "I hope you'll be kind enough to help us celebrate the neighbor's wedding ceremony tonight."
Siri was amazed. "You have another neighbor getting married?"
"Oh, no, Doctor. Same ones. But you don't call what we just sat through a ceremony, do you?"
"I'm not sure."
"We don't. That was just to keep the government happy. They like their little speeches and form fillings. Of course, we all know it doesn't mean the kids are really married. Signing a bit of paper doesn't bond you with another person. No, sir. The real thing's tonight. And we'd be honored if you could make it."
"In that case," Siri decided, "I'd be most happy to accept."
Siri's evening briefing was full of hope. Civilai presently had a core of three national department heads who had proven trustworthy enough to bring in to the ongoing counterrevolution. They were influential men who had agreed to launch discreet inquiries into recent unauthorized troop activities and unscheduled high-level meetings.
The initials PP, set out in the dentist's letter, appeared to be those of the ringleader. But with so few combinations of initial letters equivalent to so many Lao names, there was a seemingly endless list of potential suspects. They ran from ex-Royal Lao politicians and imprisoned dissidents through to Hmong fighters and ex- and current military leaders. There were one or two favorites, but the woman Civilai had working through the list estimated it could be another week before all the potential coup leaders were identified and she could begin eliminating the dead, dying, and departed for foreign shores. It was a huge job.
Siri sat back in a rattan chair, sipping a lime juice and listening to his friend. Civilai was confident and in control now. This was the role for which he was best qualified: the coordinator.
"You're good at all this, Comrade," Siri said.
"I know."
Civilai went back to the paperwork spread out across the bed and probably didn't notice when Siri got up and left.
Before heading off to the wedding, the doctor stopped at Daeng's noodle stall, requested 120 orders of thin-strand chicken noodles to go, and sat at a table by himself with a glass of rice whisky and a pout. When Daeng realized he was quite serious, she sent the ferry porters off for half a dozen chickens and extra noodles, and set about filling his order. As she worked, she fired questions at him, and although he answered them all, she could tell he was as flat as paint.
Finally, two large cardboard boxes filled with 120 plastic bags of noodles sat in a pony trap waiting for Siri, but Daeng wouldn't let him leave.
"If I let you arrive at a wedding with that face," she said, "they'll be divorced by morning. What's on your mind, old soldier?"
He looked up from his untouched drink. "Do you remember Somluk Boutavieng?"
"No. What unit was he in?"
"He was a footballer. He scored four goals for Laos against the Thai team in 1952. He was a magician in leather boots. He could trick his way through a six-man defense and break the net with his shot. He was just beautiful to watch. I saw him play in Savanaketh and then at the Olympic qualifier in Bangkok. He twisted his ankle and couldn't play in the return game and we lost."
"And you're still depressed about it?"
Siri laughed. "No, not about the game, although it did take me a while to get over it. I was thinking about Somluk. I saw him again when we moved to Vientiane in '75. I recognized him straight-away. You know what he was doing? He was pedaling a
samlor."
"And?"
"And a man who'd been a legend, who'd inspired tens of thousands of young Lao men, had ended up scraping together a few
kip
a day just to stay alive. No dignity at all."
"I have a feeling you're about to make an appearance in this story."
"I am ... you are ... all of us old fossils, paraded out on Patriots Day with our medals pinned to our tattered uniforms." "Oh, I see."
"You do? Then at least I'm not alone."
"Oh, you're alone, all right. I'm nowhere near feeling sorry for myself. I've got a story, too, and it's much better than yours. There's a girl who helps me here from time to time. She was ten when she first came. They didn't let her stay in school because there was some rule about not repeating first grade more than three times. They agreed she was feebleminded and she ended up kicking around doing nothing for years. People ignored her. She was just a sweet girl with nothing to do. When she first came here I let her serve and I fed her and gave her some fresh clothes. She came back every day. I watched her work, saw how she put effort into getting the condiments lined up and cleaning the plastic tablecloths. And I got it into my head I could teach her to read.
"I'd never taught reading before, and she was painfully slow. She'd take a month to get to know a letter, then forget it. But we kept at it, no hurry: a letter and a letter and then another. We started sixteen years ago and last week she read her first book. It was a grade-two primer but it was a book with a cover and ten pages of text. She cried herself blurry eyed that night, couldn't sleep, went through it ten more times. She finally read herself unconscious just as the sun was coming up."
"That's nice."
"Oh, it's much more than nice, Siri. It didn't change the world. It isn't going to get her a job reading the news over the propaganda airwaves. She'll still serve noodles and wipe tables. But she's different inside now. She has a new love in her life, and I gave it to her. Me. I did it all by myself, and I'm every bit as proud of that as I am of anything I did during the resistance. All right, here comes the philosophy. You can leave if you like but I suggest you stick it out. You don't measure your own success against the size or volume of the effect you're having. You gauge it from the difference you make to the subject you're working on. Is leading an army that wins a war really that much more satisfying than teaching a four-year-old to ride a bicycle? At our age," she said, "you go for the small things and you do them as well as you can."
In the back of the pony trap, squashed beside his two large boxes, Siri still felt Daeng's lip prints on his cheek and heard her whisper, "Go for the small things and do them well." It would be his new mantra. Forget the planet, save the garden. He thought, too, about what she'd told him as he squeezed into the cart. She'd been hearing rumors. The Thai camps had always been breeding grounds for insurgents, launch points for forays onto Lao soil to cause disruption and spread propaganda. But over the last week, all that activity had stopped dead. All the indicators were that something big was about to happen. But Siri was just an old doctor going for small things, doing them well, saving the garden. Civilai could have his planet. There were more personal issues for Siri to think about, like the fact that Daeng had kissed him on the cheek.
He arrived at the village to find the place jumping like spiders on a hot rock. The dancing had begun long before the wedding. Women, old men, and dogs, all apparently drunk, were jigging back and forth in front of the main hut. There was a Buddhist-cum-animist ceremony going on inside. They'd sneaked the monks in by river and borrowed a shaman from another village. Such an event brought a lot of spirits out of the woodwork and Siri could feel their presence. Some dispossessed he could see sitting around in the shadows. He knew instantly which were the departed even though some of them seemed to be in better shape than the living.
Inside the hut, the villagers had tied their sacred threads around the heads and hands of the betrothed and were chanting along with the monks. Siri tried to slip in unnoticed to watch, but he was spotted and manhandled to a place of honor in front of the saffron-clad choir. One of the monks read from a sacred Pali text. The shaman unfurled some of the unspun cotton from a grandiose tower of banana leaves and flowers known as a krooay and tied together the spirits of the young lovers. Incense and mosquito-coil smoke intertwined in the warm air. From outside came the sound of music from traditional wooden instruments.
Siri smiled to himself. "Sorry, Comrades Marx and Lenin. This is what marriage is all about."
Siri's noodles joined the fish and vegetables and sticky rice on the communal table and were gone in under half an hour. Siri was plied with glass after glass of unidentifiable and dubious spirits. Like most guests, he was press-ganged into downing the entire contents of the glass in one go. This was the Lao way and he had no recourse. At one juncture along the winding path to inebriation it occurred to him he'd spent much of his time in the south drunk. Human beings mistakenly believed alcohol was a disguise that stopped real life from recognizing them. In fact, it was just a temporary hiding hole, and Siri knew he'd been fooling nobody.
It was almost ten o'clock when he looked around and realized he was at the river's edge beside a beautiful local girl. She had eyes that would melt even the coldest of hearts and a smile that made Siri wish he, too, were ten years old.
"Do you come here often?" he slurred.
"Used to come here all the time," she said.
"What stopped you?"
"Sing dying."
If that didn't sober him up in a hurry nothing would.
"You and Sing were friends?"
"Yeah."
"You must miss him."
"Yeah."
She hugged her knees tightly to her chest. Her naked toes squeezed the mud. What is there to say to a ten-year-old who's lost her best friend?
"You know his spirit lives in a
pa kha
now?"
"They told me. That's why I come over. Can I ... talk to him?"
"Sing? Not with words."
"How then?"
"You can talk to him with your heart."
"I don't know how to do that, Grandpa."
"Of course you do. When you think about him, does your heart sometimes feel like it's being pumped up?"
"All the time."
"His spirit can feel that."
"It can?"
"And when you think about him, and when you say his name to yourself, all those times, his spirit's always listening. Sing knows."
She smiled briefly and looked at the shimmering lights across the river. Then she turned to Siri with the serious expression of an adult and said, "Do you think it happened because of all the naughty stuff he did?"
"No. Nobody Sing's age could ever be naughty enough to deserve what happened to him."
"He was a terror, though. He started acting bad after his dad ran off."
"In what way?"
"He used to sneak--you won't tell anyone, will you?" Siri shook his head. "He went into temples and scraped the gold leaf off the Buddhas. That's a sin, ain't it?"
"Well ... what's your name, love?"
"Mim."
"Well, Mim, there are those who'd say the temple shouldn't have gold in the first place. But it's true, you shouldn't steal from anybody."
"And he climbed like a monkey. He used to go up the town offices, the post office and the town hall and all them. He went on the weekends when they was all shut and he'd climb all over them till he found a shutter that wasn't locked properly and he'd pinch stuff." Her eyes welled with tears. "And ... and I told him. I said, 'Sing, if you don't mend your ways ...' "She sobbed and Siri sidled over to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She continued to force out the words. "I said, 'If you don't mend your ways, you'll get yourself killed.' I said that, Grandpa. It was me that put the curse on him."
She shook with tears and Siri pulled her to his chest.
"OK," he said. "I understand. And you think because you said those things, it's your fault he died." He felt her head nod. "Well, that's the silliest thing I've heard all year.
And I have to tell you I've heard some rubbish. Mim, nothing you said could make Sing die. It doesn't work like that. I can tell when spirits are angry, and Sing's spirit knows you had nothing to do with his going. You just said something sensible to make him stop being dishonest. That's what friends do. He understands that. Do you believe me?"
Her nod wasn't convincing. She looked up at Siri and he wiped the tears from her cheeks. "I knew, Grandpa," she said. "I knew he was off to get into more trouble the day he disappeared. I tried to talk him out of it."
"You saw him?"
"We always walked to school together. The days he bothered to go, anyway."
"What happened?"
"He just said, 'Stuff it, I'm not going.' And he turned and walked the other way. I think he'd lost a book or something and he was afraid of the class monitor making fun of him."
"Did he say where he was going?"
"Into town. We always went there at weekends and played around."
"Was there some place he especially liked?"
"The city offices."
"Hmm, right. But that day wasn't a weekend. All the offices would have been open. There were people in them. And if he'd just walked around in his uniform, someone would have stopped him and shipped him back to school, the police especially. Was there some secret place you liked to go? Somewhere you couldn't be seen?"
"Well ..." She shook her head. "No."
"Mim, it can't be a secret anymore."
"I know, but ..."
"Mim."
"Under the new bridge."
"What new bridge?"
"The one to the airport. It's not finished yet. They got all these big pipes and bricks and stuff under it. We got a camp there."
"Do you mind if I go and see it tomorrow?"
"Don't care. I'm not going there no more, not ... not by myself."
"I know. But don't you forget what I told you. Sing's spirit can tell when you're sad or when you blame yourself. You don't want to get his spirit depressed, do you?"
"No."
"Because you've never seen anything worse than a depressed spirit. I remember seeing one once. It got drunk and rode its bicycle into a tree."