Anarchy and Old Dogs (Dr. Siri Paiboun) (6 page)

Siri wondered what the hell he was doing there. He was aware of people walking along the far side of Samsenthai, looking in his direction. He was conscious of the clerk in the Aeroflot office staring out from behind the counter. Hers was one of only three glass-fronted shops on the block, and Siri could see his own embarrassed reflection in the office window. A cloud that had been threatening rain was purplish now, like an eggplant, and so close you could jump up and give it a squeeze. It complemented Auntie Bpoo's dress, which was crimson crepe and stopped just above her rugby-player knees. Once again, Siri sat in front of her like a schoolboy before the headmistress, waiting for her to deign to speak with him. At last, she stopped meshing her playing cards together and looked him in the eye. A poem.

Time will blow

Woe betide--when every man

And woman can

Have access to a world

Of evil and of knowledge all unfurled

Within a case

Face to face in every home.

The transvestite's stare burned into Siri's face until he was forced to respond.

"Right," he said. "Thanks for that. I was just hoping to ask about your last--"

"Ten thousand
kip."

"Eh?"

"Ten thousand. Cash. I don't take bank drafts."

"I thought you did all this for free."

"I tell you your future for free. For interviews I charge."

"I'm not interviewing you."

"Then stop asking questions and give me a kiss."

"What?"

"Just kidding. I wanted to see the look on your face. Now, Dr. Siri. Dr. Siri Paiboun. The lesser beasts around you seem to have settled down. Am I right?"

Siri didn't need clarification. For over a month, birds and insects and small animals near him had acted weirdly. But as of last week, things seemed to be back to normal. The most recent incident he could recall was when he awoke one morning to find a large gecko on the pillow beside him. It was on its back and appeared to be snoring. That had been the last. For some reason he wasn't surprised that Auntie Bpoo would know this.

"Yes."

"Good. Just a little surge of energy. But don't ignore the animal kingdom completely. Pay special attention to water-borne creatures."

"Fish, in particular?"

"Ten thousand
kip."

"Sorry."

"You will suffer a loss of sensation."

"It's started already."

"This too will pass. Your body's going through certain changes."

"Damn, I thought all that was behind me decades ago."

The corner of Auntie Bpoo's mouth creased. It might have been a smile.

She continued. "You have to expect ascents and descents. These are marvelous times."

Quite unexpectedly, she raised the hem of her crepe dress and gave Siri a flash of her naked genitalia. Attached with pink plastic string to the usual goods were four or five additional baubles: one delicate silver globe, two ping-pong balls, and a seashell. At least that was all Siri was able to memorize in the time allotted him. He didn't recall seeing a penis but it might have been there somewhere among the flotsam. Auntie Bpoo lowered the dress and continued as if nothing had happened.

"One more thing, old fool. Do not forget this. At the back of every wicked man, there is a shadow. Is that shadow any less guilty than he?"

Siri sat on the familiar leather seat of his old motorcycle and marveled: seventy-three years of age and still clueless, still a victim of impulse and irrational instincts. Dependent suddenly on a man in a dress who spoke in riddles and left him feeling as small as a head louse. But this grotesque man-woman creature knew it all. She knew what Siri was tuned in to and what was going on inside him. The doctor had no choice but to listen to her words and attempt to make sense of them. The life Siri had been cornered into was a lonely one that even his closest allies couldn't begin to understand. No matter how queer his new acquaintance might have been, he was determined to make a friend of her.

It was a dream that was black from beginning to end, but it was a dream. It was like a visit to the cinema when the projector breaks down and you sit in the darkness waiting for the projectionist to fix it, and you sit and sit, but the film doesn't return. Siri could feel himself alone in the viewing room, waiting. He could smell the stale popcorn crushed into the carpet, see the faint margin of light around the emergency exit doors. But there was no film.

He awoke in his government-supplied bungalow, the sun not yet backlighting the Mickey Mice on his curtain. His dream line to the afterlife was out of order. For some reason he'd become bound to the earth. He suddenly felt vulnerable, and mortal.

Siri and Civilai sat on their log, staring out across the sand, mud, and low waterline that made up a Mekhong desperate for a rainy season. The rains had come late in China and hadn't yet started to fill the river downstream. Nobody could recall the water course running so low this late in the year. It was a depressingly dreary view. Even affluent Thailand on the far bank looked impoverished. The ceiling of cartoon cloud continued to hang just above their heads, and the wrapped baguettes sat on the log beside them. The old friends had been silent for three minutes. If the Guinness people had been around, it would have qualified as a world record.

"Shit," said Civilai.

"You're telling me," said Siri.

"What in tarnation do we do about this one?"

"I was rather hoping you'd have something in mind. It's not as if you haven't been involved in a rebellion before."

"True, little brother. But if you remember, we were on the side of the people doing the rebelling."

"Then it's easy. All we have to do is put ourselves in the shoes of the tyrants we ousted. What would we do if we were the Royal Lao government?"

"We'd convert all our assets into gold and swim across the river to Thailand."

"Perhaps that wasn't such a good example. What do you say we just pass on what we've found to the Security Division and let them sort it out?"

"Siri, you amaze me at times. We aren't exactly talking KGB here. What type of training do you think those boys have had? They're converted foot soldiers from the countryside. They're chicken counters. Their job is to make sure people are disclosing their incomes and paying their taxes. What type of high-level counterinsurgency operation do you think they could mount?"

"Surely there's a mechanism in place."

"We're an eighteen-month-old administration. We're spread thin on the ground. We're barely hanging on as it is. We need several more years to have an infrastructure up and running for something like this."

"All right. So we just let it happen?"

"You know I didn't say that."

"How about at the top level? People we've known all the way through the campaign: military leaders, politburo people. Men with enough local support to put up some resistance. After all we've been through, I'm certainly not going down without a fight."

"I'm shocked, Siri. I didn't think you cared."

"I spent thirty-odd years crawling through the jungle for this country. My wife died for it. How can I not care? Do you know what last Saturday was? It was Free Lao Day. I went to pay respects at the Epitaph to the Unknown Soldier. People gave their lives for this independence. How can I let some opportunistic glamour seeker leapfrog an administration that struggled for thirty years to get where it is and ... and steal our country from under us? Jesus. What was the point of it all if we just hand it over before we've even had time to get it right?"

"OK. I get it." Civilai put his arm around his friend's shoulder. "I'd been wondering whether there were any nationalist embers left burning in your grate. I was starting to think your cynicism had pissed them all out."

"Me? Great, coming from a man who called the prime minister a toad."

"That was an accident. I meant 'slug.' I just couldn't think of the word on the spur of the moment." Siri laughed and his bout of gravity came to an end. "We're both ornery old warhorses," Civilai continued, "but they need asses like us. If they refuse to put us out to pasture, they have to expect a kick every now and then."

"So what do you say we put our asinine minds together and see if we can't come up with something to avert this coup."

Civilai slowly began to unwrap the baguettes. "I know people," he said.

"Who?"

The first drop of rain landed on Siri's knee. It was as thick and heavy as a cow pat.

"I don't think I should tell you just yet."

"Why on earth not?"

Civilai produced two perfect loaves--delights, works of art--but not even their splendor could cheer Siri's mood. A second drop of rain smashed into the crispy leaves above their heads. Civilai handed a baguette to Siri, who just held on to it, still awaiting an answer to his question.

"Because," Civilai said, "when conducting a countercoup, one has to consider what the status quo would be if the coup was successful. The leaders would round up whoever was instrumental in the attempt to oppose them. They'd be the first to be liquidated. The fewer middlemen the better."

"I'm not a middleman. Let them liquidate me. Or, what? You think I'd crumble under interrogation and implicate all your 'people'?"

Large jellyfish-sized globules of rain were falling in countable drops all around them.

"No," Civilai said, biting into one end of his lunch. "All they'd have to do is offer you a decent supply of coffee and a carefree life and you'd squeal your guts out."

"If the coup were successful I'd march up to the buggers and tell them what I damn well think of them."

"That's the diplomacy that got you where you are today. If you--" A huge blob of rain somehow avoided the tree and landed with a smack in Civilai's face. Siri laughed and wiped his friend's glasses clean with a tissue from the lunch bag. The seriousness of politics quickly gave way to the seriousness of eating. The bread was fresh and the stuffing delicious. These were two men who appreciated a good baguette. And they knew exactly the drink with which to complement it. Siri offered his flask of pennywort juice to Civilai. No cabernet sauvignon could have enhanced a sandwich more. They ate without speaking and watched the heavy drops of rain land in the river, never gaining enough momentum to be called a shower.

Despite their present predicament, this was when Siri was at his happiest, eating and drinking on the bank of the Mekhong beside his best friend. He turned to look at Civilai. When trying to describe him to others, Siri had worked his way through a long list of insects--ant, hornet, wasp-- before finally arriving at the simile that suited him best. Civilai was undoubtedly like a grasshopper. His head was a large, skin-covered helmet of a thing, mostly posterior. At its front, on his pointy nose, sat a huge pair of black-framed glasses. His grasshopper body was all gangly bones and angular joints. As he ate, an enormous Adam's apple traveled up and down his long neck like an elevator.

"If you don't stop staring at me, I'll slap you," Civilai said without looking at Siri.

"I can't help it. You're such a glamour-puss."

"You obviously spend too much time with the dead, Dr. Siri."

Like Siri, Civilai had France to thank for his academic degree and to blame for his political leanings. Whereas Siri had found his way to Paris via a temple education and charity, Civilai had been groomed for excellence by his parents. His wealthy Lao-Chinese father had been selectively married into an even more affluent Vietnamese-Chinese family, and even before Civilai was born, there had been no doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Songsawat's son would be educated at the Sorbonne. They had mapped out a Francophile education for the boy in Saigon and invested a small fortune in contributions to ensure that he wouldn't be rejected. As it turned out, his grades alone would have secured him a scholarship. On the day he sailed on the
Victor Hugo
to Europe, the family expected their smart lad to return with first-class honors in law and commerce, and one day take over the running of their vast business interests in Laos.

But there was one factor they'd failed to take into consideration. Civilai had a mind of his own, a considerable mind at that. At the lycee in Saigon he'd befriended another son of the mandarins by the name of Hok Nguyen Truk. They were both idealists, and their curiosity had led them to a startling discovery. The poor in their respective countries were being squeezed dry by wealthy landlords, by the same families who'd raised the two boys to believe it was normal to have a man to trim one's toenails. This revelation resulted in a hatred of the class to which they belonged and a hostility toward their fathers. They detested them for fawning on the French imperialists and for growing fatter from their dealings with the French while the poor starved.

So there they were, two angry youths in search of a sympathetic doctrine. They found it in the Paris of 1923. They arrived at a Sorbonne that was a safe haven for liberals and members of the lunatic fringe. Although their classes were comparatively conservative, the student body was replete with left-wingers and radicals. At a rally one weekend they met a Vietnamese who was making a living on the docks during the day and proselytizing Marxism-Leninism at night. He'd given his name as Nguyen Tat Than. He was a lean, hungry-eyed man in his early thirties who wore French suits elegantly and spoke with passion. His philosophies and hopes so closely matched their own that they soon shared his dream to take socialism to Indochina and free their downtrodden brothers and sisters from the repressive yoke of colonialism.

In this idealistic state, Civilai had chosen to ignore the absence in Laos of one of the fundamental components for a successful communist revolution. There was no rebellious Lao proletariat. There were no factories in which to organize unions, and hardly any working class. Eighty percent of the people grew rice on small plots of land. All their energy was invested in survival. The farmers were so resigned to their fate that a great deal of agitation would have been needed to convince them they were dissatisfied at all.

But by the time the two young men arrived back in Asia in 1929, the seeds of revolt had been sown in their fertile minds. Communism would save their repressed countrymen whether they liked it or not. In Siam they reunited with their guru Nguyen Tat Than, who by then was calling himself Quoc and posing as a Buddhist monk. The French had a death warrant out for him in Vietnam for his agitation in rural areas. Quoc was one of the many pseudonyms adopted for his survival by the remarkable man, but it was the name on an identity card belonging to a deceased Chinese merchant that would ultimately provide the sobriquet the world most associated with him: Ho Chi Minh.

Civilai and Hok traveled with Ho to Hong Kong, where, in 1930, they helped establish the Communist Party of Vietnam. As the only Lao in the group, Civilai took responsibility for organizing his own people to rise up against the French tyrants and reclaim their homeland. But therein lay one more potentially insurmountable problem. Laos only existed as a geographical entity because, to cut down on paperwork, a French administrator had inked a national border around some thirty diverse tribal groups and posted an announcement that this was now officially a country. Ethnic Lao constituted no more than sixty percent of this brand-new, custom-built colony.

This posed a quandary for Civilai and his cadres as they wandered from village to village stirring up national pride, building a national identity from the ground up. The villagers quite logically argued that they hadn't wanted to be Lao in the first place. Why should they fight for the right to be so? That was perhaps why the Vietnamese revolution had taken shape so efficiently and why Civilai had aged rapidly over the years.

The rain shower had exhausted itself even before the baguettes. They'd finished their lunch, these purveyors of frustrating politics, and sat still and silent on their log. Crumbs lay at their feet like wood shavings around a completed carving. Neither wanted to voice his feelings but Siri could tell what his friend was thinking. Avoiding a well-organized coup at this juncture in history could very well prove impossible. If that weren't the case, he knew Civilai would have headed straight off to his office to set wheels in motion. Instead he stared dully at the river.

"I'm off to Pakse this evening," Siri said.

"Why?"

"Some fool electrocuted himself in the bath."

"Hmm. Well worth traveling four hundred miles to see, I'd say."

"Two birds, one stone."

"The dentist's letter?"

"It was postmarked Pakse."

"You want to get your hands on the Devil's Vagina." "Who wouldn't?"

"You're interfering in something that could get you killed, you know?"

"I've dodged bullets, escaped exploding buildings. I've even eaten in the hospital canteen for over a year. If I can survive that, I can get through anything. I'm starting to believe I'm invincible."

"You're not."

"Then I'll go down kicking and screaming. One day, during this or the next junta reign, they'll remember me as a hero and put my face on a stamp. I'll meet Boua in Nirvana and have something to boast about. I might even make her proud of me, at last."

"Your wife was always proud of you, little brother."

"You think so?"

"I know she was." A glorious yellow caterpillar had lowered itself from the tree on a web rope and come to rest on Civilai's knee. Siri watched him gently run his finger along its back. "Of course, she always preferred me to you. But she was quite fond of you."