escape.
Suddenly refreshed, and mysteriously elated, he pulled back his mosquito net and got up. He saw the midge that had been trapped inside with him and feasted gloriously on his finger’s blood. It flew to the window and out to boast of its coup.
Siri put the kettle on, drew the ill-fitting curtain, and carried his small transistor radio to the coffee table. It was a sin, but one he delighted in.
Lao radio broadcasts boomed from public address speakers all over the city from 5 am on. Some lucky citizens had the honour of being blasted from their beds by statistics of the People’s National Rice Harvest coming directly through their window. Others’ houses vibrated to reminders that salt borders would keep slugs off their vegetables.
But Siri was in a blissful black hole, far enough from the PAs for their messages to be no more than a distant hum. He listened instead to his beloved transistor. By keeping the volume down, he could tune into world news on the Thai military channel. The world had receded somewhat on Lao radio recently.
Naturally, Thai radio and television were banned in the People’s Democratic Republic. You wouldn’t be arrested for listening, but your District Security Council member would knock loudly on your door and shout for all the neighbours to hear: “
Your name would be added to a list of grade-four subversives and, theoretically, your co-workers would cease to have complete trust in you. But as far as Siri was concerned, the edict only succeeded in depriving the Lao people of some jolly entertainment.
The Thais were devastated that evil communists had moved in next door. Their paranoid military could never be accused of subtlety. Siri loved to listen to their broadcasts. He honestly believed that if the politburo allowed free access to Thai radio, people would decide for themselves which regime they’d prefer to live under.
He’d listened to ‘expert’ commentaries on the Reds’ inborn taste for wife-sharing, an infirmity that caused such confusion in their society that ‘incest was inevitable’. How communism had led to a dramatic increase in two- headed births he was uncertain, but Thai radio had the figures to prove it.
Saturday morning was his favourite because they assumed the Lao would be gathered by their radios on the weekend, desperate for propaganda. But today Siri was distracted. He didn’t even get around to turning on the radio. He brought his thick brown Vietnamese coffee to the table, sat in his favourite chair, and inhaled the delicious aroma. It smelled a lot better than it tasted.
He was about to take a sip when the light from the window reflected something on the surface of the tin coffee table. It was a circle of water, the kind you get from a damp glass. This was nothing incredible, except that he hadn’t put anything on the table that morning. His cup was dry and it hadn’t left his hand. And in Vientiane’s climate, this moisture could not have been left over from the previous evening.
He drank some coffee and looked at the ring of water calmly, waiting for an answer to come to mind. He looked up at the chair where the morning shadows had played tricks on him. If he wanted to be perverse, he could admit that the ring was in the spot where the longboat man’s whisky bottle had sat. He turned to the shelf on the wall behind him and ripped a sheet of paper from the roll there.
But when he turned back to the table there was no ring of water.
¦
His second strange awakening that weekend wasn’t so occult. Miss Vong from the Department of Education had a habit of not knocking on the door until she’d walked through it. She’d often caught Siri putting clothes on or taking them off, but she always looked at him as if it was his fault. If he’d done the same at her apartment, he’d be facing a court summons for certain.
But on this Sunday morning, he was still fast asleep when she arrived, so he knew it had to be early. The scent of temple incense had already filled the room, but the roosters were still dreaming of magical flights over mountains and lakes.
“Come on, sleepy. Time to get up.”
As she had no children of her own, this annoying woman had taken to mothering everybody. She went to the single curtain and yanked it open. The light didn’t stream in, it oozed. It was an early hour indeed. She stood by the window with her hands on her hips. “We have an irrigation canal to dig.”
His mind groaned. What had happened to weekends, to free time, to days off? His Saturday mornings at work invariably became days, and here they were, stealing his Sunday too. He pried open one eye.
Miss Vong was dressed in corduroy working trousers and a sensible long-sleeved shirt buttoned at neck and wrist. She wore her thinning hair in pigtails and reminded Siri of the Chinese peasant eternalised in Mao posters. Chinese propaganda skimped on facial features, as nature had done with Miss Vong. She was somewhere between thirty and sixty, with the build of an underfed teenaged boy.
“What torture is this? Leave me alone.”
“I will not. You deliberately missed the community painting of the youth centre last month. I’m certainly not going to let you miss out on the chance to dig the overflow canal.”
Community service in the city of Vientiane wasn’t a punishment; it was a reward for being a good citizen. It was the authorities’ gift to the people. They didn’t want a single man, woman, or child to miss out on the heart- swelling pride that comes from resurfacing a road or dredging a stream. The government knew the people would gladly give up their only day off for such a treat.
“I’ve got a cold,” he said, pulling the sheet over his head. He heard the tinkle of water filling a kettle and the pop of the gas. He felt the tickle and heard the rustle of his mosquito net being tethered to the hook on the wall. He heard the swish of a straw brush across his floor.
“That’s why I’m fixing you a nutritious cup of tea with a twist of – ”
“I hate tea.”
“No you don’t.”
He laughed. “I thought after seventy-two years, I might know what I hate and what I don’t.”
“You need to build up your strength for the digging.”
“What happened to all the prison inmates? They used to do all this. Dig ditches, unplug sewers.”
“Dr Siri, I’m surprised at you. Sometimes I wonder if you really did fight for the revolution. There’s no longer any excuse for the uneducated and ignorant to be doing all our dirty work. We’re all perfectly capable of lifting a hoe and swinging an axe.”
“…and dissecting a cancerous liver,” he mumbled under the cover.
“All our ill-advised criminal types are undergoing reeducation at the islands. You know that. Now. Are you getting up, or do I have to drag you out of there?”
He decided to punish her for her unsolicited familiarity.
“No. I’ll get up. But I have to warn you, I’m naked and I have a morning erection. It’s nothing sexual, you understand. It’s a result of pressure on the…”
There was a slight click and the battering of loose boards on the verandah. He peeled down the sheet and looked triumphantly around the empty room.
When he went downstairs, he found two trucks loaded with drowsy silent neighbours, obviously overcome with delight. Area 29C was providing the labour for Irrigation Canal Section 189. It would take the better part of the day, but a sticky rice, salt fish, and
He shook off Saloop’s lethargic charge and climbed onto the rear truck. He’d spotted Miss Vong on the front one, lecturing the young couple from the room opposite his. He nodded and joked with his neighbours as the convoy set off. They nodded and joked back. But none of these good moods could be described as sincere.
¦
Despite having joined the Communist Party for entirely inappropriate reasons, Siri had been a paid-up member for forty-seven years. If the truth were to be told, he was a heathen of a communist. He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practise communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.
After clawing his way through a French education system dense and overgrown with restrictions against the
