guesthouse and slept the sleep of the victors if it hadn’t been for Senior Comrade Kham.
The tall, gaunt senior party member took advantage of a vacant spot in the circle beside Siri and sat himself down.
“So, Comrade Siri, we’ve actually done it.”
“So it would seem.” Siri was unused to rice whisky in such volume, and he wasn’t completely in control of his mouth or the tongue inside it. “But I have the feeling we’re here to celebrate the end of something rather than the beginning.”
“Marx tells us that all beginnings are difficult.”
“Nothing you or Marx have ever known could prepare you for the problems you’ve got coming. But, hell, Kham, you certainly shut the doubters up.” He raised his glass and chinked it against Kham’s, but quaffed alone. The comrade’s eyes were couched deep in their sockets, like snakes looking out at the world.
“You say ‘you’ as if you don’t plan to be helping us with our problems.”
Siri laughed. “Comrade Kham, I’m almost as old as the century. I’m tired. I think I’ve earned my small garden and my slow coffee mornings, afternoons of reading for pleasure, and early nights with a sweet cognac to ease me into sleep.” Kham raised his glass to the prime minister who sat red-faced and blissfully happy in a far circle. They both drained their glasses and called for another.
“That’s odd. As I recall, you don’t have any family living. How exactly were you planning to support this decadent lifestyle?”
“I assumed that forty-six years of membership of the party would entitle me…”
“To a pension?” Kham laughed rudely.
“Why not?”
Siri always believed, always assumed, that if ever the struggle was won, he would retire. It had been his dream on damp nights in the forests of the north. It was his prayer over the body of every young boy or girl he’d failed to pull back from death. He’d believed for so long that it would happen, he took it for granted that everyone else knew it too.
“My old friend,” Kham continued, “I would have expected you to know better after forty-six years. Socialism means contributing for as long as you still have something to give. When you start to forget where your mouth is and dribble egg down your shirt, when you need to pack towels into your underpants to keep yourself dry,
“But look at you. You’re still in sparkling health. You have a sharp mind. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” How selfish it would be to deny your services to the country you’ve striven to free from tyranny.”
Siri looked across to the high circle. The president, a reformed member of the royal family, had a sweet, mascara’d soldier on either side of him and had begun to sing them a revolutionary Vietnamese song. He became the focus of attention and conversations hushed around the room. The song finished half way through the second verse when he forgot the words and the comrades erupted into cheers and applause. A small orchestra of bamboo and wood instruments started up on the stage and the conversations continued in a more dignified manner.
Siri hadn’t yet been able to shed his disappointment. He waited for Kham to finish a heated conversation to his right and engaged him with more force than the man was used to.
“I take it my situation has already been discussed by the Politburo.”
“It has. You’ve impressed us all with your quiet dedication over the years.”
‘Quiet’, Siri took to mean ‘passive’. Over the past ten years, he’d ceased to display the revolutionary passion expected of him and had been shunted off to Party Guesthouse Number Three, away from all the policymaking and decision-taking in Xam Neua. There he tended to damaged cadres returning from the battlefields and lost touch with the zealous comrades and their politics.
Kham eased his haunches against Siri’s and put his arm around him. The doctor was himself a very tactile character but this gesture, in this situation, he considered disrespectful.
“We have allotted you a role of great responsibility.”
The words left Kham as a reward but hit Siri like a splintery wooden club across the face. He needed responsibility like he needed another head.
“Why?”
“Because you are the best man we have for the job.”
“I’ve never been the best man for any job, ever.”
“Don’t be so modest. You’re an experienced surgeon. You have an inquisitive mind and you don’t take things at face value. We’ve decided to make you the Republic’s chief police coroner.” He looked into Siri’s green eyes for a hint of pride, but saw only bewilderment. He might as well have told him he was to be the Republic’s new balloon bender or unicyclist.
“I’ve never done an autopsy in my life.”
“Ah. It’s all the same. Putting them together: taking them apart.”
“It certainly is not.”
He didn’t say this with any aggression but Kham was still taken aback to be contradicted so brazenly. The senior party members had become used to a level of respect. Siri had a habit of telling them when they were wrong, which was another reason for his removal to the jungle.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start. Of course I can’t do it. It’s a huge job. What do you think I am?”
Even with the glow of whisky still shining from his snake eyes, Comrade Kham was disturbed by Siri’s lack of gratitude. He tightened his grip around the old man’s shoulders and barked into his ear.
“I think you are a cog in this great revisionist machine which now powers our beloved country. You are a cog just as I am a cog and the president is a cog. Each cog can help our machine run smoothly. But by the same token, one broken cog can jam and stop the works completely. At this important time in our creation, we need all our cogs meshing and coordinated. Don’t let us down. Don’t stop the machine, Siri.”
He gave one last painful squeeze, nodded, and went off to insert himself into another circle. Siri, in a daze, looked around him at the revisionist mechanics. Lubricated by the alcohol, the wheels had already become misshapen. At one point, two wheels had buckled together into a figure-of-eight. There were big important cogs and little insignificant ones, some of whom had gone off to the toilet and not returned. This left large gaps in their wheels. Others were huddled together in small sub-wheels ignoring the big machine altogether.
Siri, suddenly depressed, explained to his wheel that he had to go pee. He staggered in that direction, but walked past the toilet and through the town hall entrance. Guards on either side of the door raised their rifles in salute. He saluted back and yanked his black necktie off. He walked to one of the boy guards and hooked it over the shiny bayonet, where it swung back and forth.
With a grin and thanks, he waved away the drivers of the black secondhand Russian Zil limousines that were waiting to ferry the comrades to their temporary barracks. It was a chilly December morning and there were no stars in the sky, but the way back was a straight line. He walked unsteadily along a deserted Lan Xang Avenue. Ahead of him was the Presidential Palace and a future he didn’t much want.
? The Coroner’s Lunch ?
2
Comrade Kham’s Wife
Even when times were at their hardest in Vientiane, the old stone kiln near the mosque still fired up at three every morning to produce the best bread to be had in the country. Three bare-chested men stoked the wood fire and kneaded the dough into long fingers and laid them out in rows on rusting black metal trays. There was nothing hygienic about it. But there were those who argued it was the dust, soot, sweat and rust that made Auntie Lah’s baguettes the sweetest in Vientiane. Her three sons pulled the sizzling loaves from the kiln with their hands wrapped in old grey towels and put them directly onto her cart.
At six every morning, Auntie Lah wheeled her sweet-smelling bread to the corner by the black stupa. By seven-thirty she’d usually sold the lot and returned to the shop for a new batch. These she carted to the corner of Sethathirat and Nong Bon streets, where most of the government departments were. By this time, the baguette
