poor, he had finally proved that a country boy could make something of himself. He found a rare, benevolent French sponsor, who sent him to Paris. There he became a competent but not brilliant medical student. France wasn’t renowned for making life easier for those poor souls born outside its borders. It was every
But Siri was used to struggling. In his first two years at Ancienne, without distractions, he was in the top 30 per cent of his class. His tutors agreed he had great promise, ‘for an Asian’. But like many a good man before him, he soon discovered that all the potential in the world was no match for a nice pair of breasts. He found himself in third-year pathology concentrating not on the huge blackboard crammed with its neat diagrams, but on the slow- breathing sweater of Boua. She was a red-faced Lao nursing student who sat by the window whatever the weather. He could generally tell from the sweater just how cold it was outside.
In the summer, it became a slow-breathing blouse with more buttons undone than was absolutely necessary. He barely scraped through pathology and plummeted into the bottom 20 per cent bracket overall.
By the fourth year, he and Boua were engaged and sharing a room so small, the bed had been sawn short so the door could open. She was a healthy, well-curved girl from Laos’ ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang. Her family was blue-blooded royalist from generations back. But while her parents knelt and bowed at the feet of the passing king and tossed orchid petals before him, she was in her room plotting his demise.
She had learned of the French Communist Party from her first lover, a skinny young tutor from Lyons. At the first opportunity, she set off for her Mecca. Whereas Siri had come to Paris to become a doctor, Boua was studying nursing as a pretext: she was actually in Paris to become the best communist she could be, in order to return to elevate the downtrodden masses in her homeland.
She made it clear to Siri that if he wanted her hand, he had to embrace the red flag also. He did want her hand, and the rest of her, and considered four evenings a week, the odd Sunday, and five francs a month, cheap at half the price. At first, the thought of attending meetings that espoused the fall of the great capitalist empire made him uneasy. He was quite fond of the music of capitalism and fully expected to dance to it as soon as the chance presented itself. He’d been poor all his life, a state he was hoping to recover from as a doctor. But guilt at having such thoughts eventually overtook him.
So it was that communism and Boua conspired to damage his hopes and dreams. By embracing his fiancee and her red flag, he was slowly tearing himself from the grasp of medicine. In order to pass his fifth year, he had to take several make-up exams. By the time he reached his practicum, he had two black stars on the front of his personal file. They indicated that the student therein had to be an exceptional intern if he didn’t want to be loaded on an early Airopostale flight and forfeit his sponsor’s fees.
Fortunately, Siri was a natural doctor. The patients adored him, and the staff at the Hotel Dieu Hospital thought so highly of him that the administration offered him the chance to stay on in France and work there full- time. But his heart was with Boua, and when she returned to further The Cause in her homeland, he was at her side.
¦
On Monday, Siri walked down to the Mekhong River and stood for a while. The rains had held on stubbornly that year, but he was sure they were now gone for another five months. It was a brisk November morning and the sun hadn’t yet found the strength to dry the grasses on the bank. He let the cool dew soak his feet and wondered how long the Party’s shiny vinyl shoes would survive the next rains.
He walked along the embankment and kicked up scents from the crow shit blossoms that grew there. On the far bank, Thailand stared rudely back at him, its boats floating close to its waterfront. The river that was once a channel between two countries had now become a barrier.
In front of Mahosot Hospital, he sat on a wobbly stool beside the road and ate stale
With no other excuses to delay his arrival at work, he walked between the shoebox buildings towards his office. The hospital had been put together without style or grace by the French and was basically a village of concrete bunkers. He hesitated in front of his own building before stepping inside. The sign over the door said morgue in French. The that beneath it, his own personal touch, said ‘Welcome’ in English.
Only two of the rooms in the blockhouse had natural light. One of these was his office. He shared it with his staff of two, a staff that Judge Haeng rudely referred to as one and a half.
“Good morning, Comrades.” He walked into the grey cement room and went over to his desk.
Dtui looked up from her Thai fan magazine.
“Good health, doctor.” She was a solid young nurse with a well-washed but rather craggy face and a happy mouth. Her first reaction to everything was to smile, and goodness knows, she didn’t have a lot to smile about.
“I doubt whether the Department of Information and Culture would be happy to see you reading such bourgeois perversions.”
She grinned at the doctor’s comment. “I’m just reminding myself how repulsive the capitalist system can be, Comrade.” She held up a badly registered three-colour print of a television star wearing a miniskirt. “I mean, can you see me in something like that?”
Siri smiled to himself and raised his eyebrows. A man rocking in the corner of the office attracted his attention. “Ah, good morning, Mr Geung.”
The man smiled when he heard his name and looked up. “Good morning, Dr Comrade. It’s…it’s going to be a hot one.” He nodded his agreement with his own comment.
“Yes, Mr Geung. I believe you’re correct. Do we have any customers today?”
Geung laughed as he always did at Siri’s permanent joke. “No customers today, Dr Comrade.”
This was it. This was the team he’d inherited, the job he didn’t want, the life he didn’t expect to be leading. For almost a year, he’d been the country’s head and only coroner. He was the first to confess to his lack of qualifications and enthusiasm for the job.
The first month of his on-the-job training had been ridiculous. The only Lao doctor with a background in performing autopsies had crossed the river, allegedly in a rubber inner tube, long before Siri’s arrival. So, apart from Mr Geung, who had acquired a massive but well-concealed body of information as that doctor’s assistant, there was nobody to teach Siri how to do his new job.
¦
Once he’d agreed to postpone his retirement, he set about learning his trade from a couple of slightly charred French textbooks. He brought an old music stand from the abandoned American school and used it to hold the books open while he cut and sliced away at his first cases. With one eye on the music stand, he performed like a concert coroner playing away on the innards of the corpses. “Turn,” he would say, and Dtui turned the page. He worked through the numbers as recommended by French pathologists of 1948.
He’d performed a good deal of battlefield surgery over the years, but maintenance of the living was a very different science from the investigation of the departed. There were procedures that needed to be followed, observations that needed to be made. He hadn’t expected, at seventy-two, to be learning a new career. When he had arrived in Vientiane for the first time with the victorious Pathet Lao on 23 November 1975, there had been something far more pleasurable on his mind.
After the landmark party conference of 5 December, the mood had been higher than a rocket. The celebrations were awash in vat after vat of freshly made Lao rice spirits. Cheeks were bruised from manly kisses.
The crown prince, sombre from suit to countenance, had read aloud his father’s notice of abdication and, naturally, declined an invitation to join the festivities. The Pathet Lao, after decades of cave-based insurgency, had become the rulers of Laos. The kingdom was now a republic. It was a dream many of the old soldiers, in their heart of hearts, had believed would never come true.
In the spirit of jungle fighters, they moved the trestle tables out of the banquet room and put down straw mats. There they sat in circles relishing their victory. Food and drink were replenished throughout the evening by pretty young cadres in thick lipstick and green uniforms.
Siri figured he’d probably spent more of his life cross-legged on the ground than he had in chairs. He, too, was in a buoyant mood that day, if not for the same reasons as his comrades. He would have returned to his
