Slash and Burn (2 page)

Five Weeks Earlier

It was true, just five weeks before, things had been normal. Well, normal for Vientiane. But first there was the haunting, then the note, then the Americans. And somewhere between the three life had become complicated again. That was Laos in the late seventies though, wasn’t it? What can you say? The place had always been mysterious, always been a victim of its politics and its confused beliefs and its weather. While the north ex perienced a premature dry season, the southern provinces were being flooded by Typhoon Joe. Worst hit was Champasak, the show province where almost half the country’s farming cooperatives had been established. All of them had been rained into submission and, once again, the locals were convinced that Lady Kosob, the goddess of the rice harvests, was displeased with government policy. The collectives program was doomed. This came as a blow to the ministry of agriculture who’d nationalized all the old royalist estates in preparation for this great socialist plan.

If the weather wasn’t bad enough, the country’s close proximity to Kampuchea, once a cultural and commercial partnership, had become a liability. Refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge were flooding into Thailand and southern Laos. The Lao government had issued twenty official statements denying KR claims that they were allowing Vietnamese troops to cross Lao territory. They absolutely weren’t amassing at the border in preparation for an invasion, which, of course, they were. But as there were still no actual laws, the Politburo could logically argue that they weren’t breaking any. The forty-six-member Supreme Council had been working on a national constitution for eight years and had barely made it beyond the design of the front cover. This general disorder, plus the fact that money was harder to come by than a cold beer, resulted in an estimated 150 citizens crossing the river to Thailand every day—120 successfully. An editorial in
Pasason Lao
newssheet informed the 40 per cent of the country who could read and the 2 per cent of those who could be bothered, that the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos had never had it so good.

During the month of July in 1978, people did the morgue at Mahosot Hospital a great favor by not dying mysteriously. They merely passed away as people do and no questions were asked. No motives sought. It was almost as if they sensed that Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country’s only coroner, was reaching the end of his unasked-for tenure and they didn’t care to trouble him. The good doctor had been putting in his notice every month since the Party first manhandled him into the job three years earlier. His boss, Judge Haeng, little in so many ways, had ignored the requests. “A good communist,” the man had said, “does not let go of the plough halfway across the paddy and leave the buffalo to find its own direction. He eats with her, tends to her injuries, and sleeps with her until the job is done.” Siri had resisted the temptation to spread the word that the Party was advocating bestiality. He’d known his time would come. But when it did, he’d been only a heartbeat away from occupying his own slab. He’d met the departing spirits eyeball to eyeball, and they were waiting for him. After the horrific events of May that year, he was still deaf in one ear and could barely feel his right hand. His few hours of sleep were plagued with nightmares. Everyone agreed that after his runin with the Khmer Rouge, Dr. Siri had earned his retirement.

If he could stay out of trouble, Siri had under two months left on the job. Then, the leisurely life he’d dreamed of through decade after decade in the jungles of Vietnam and northern Laos would be his; coffee mornings overlooking the Mekhong, leisurely noodle lunches at his wife Daeng’s shop, long evenings of talking rice whiskey nonsense with ex-Politburo man Civilai, and nights stretched out against a triangular pillow in his illicit backroom library reading French literature and philosophy. Dallying through to the early morning with comrades Sartre and Hugo and Voltaire. Really. All he had to do was stay out of trouble. For anyone else this might not have been much to ask. But this was no simple man. This was Dr. Siri Paiboun: seventy-four years of age, forty-eight years an unconvincing member of the Communist Party, host to a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman spirit, culturally tainted beyond redemption by ten years in Paris. Emotionally numbed to the horrors of injury and death by years of battlefront surgery, Dr. Siri felt he had earned himself the right to be an ornery old geezer. And, no. Staying out of trouble for two months was no easy task for such a complicated man.

He’d had just the one case since his retirement notice was accepted. Compared to some of his adventures, it was barely worth mentioning as a case at all. The children at Thong Pong middle school had become unhinged. A number of them had started to vibrate uncontrollably and speak in languages none of them knew. The local medical intern had seen nothing like it and requested assistance from the Ministry of Health. Stories in Vientiane spread like atomic bomb fallout and word very quickly found its way to the morgue where Dr. Siri and his staff had been sitting lifeless for several weeks. Almost immediately, Siri had set off to visit the school on his Triumph motorcycle with his faithful nurse Dtui and lab assistant Geung squashed together behind him. As religion and superstition had no place in the new regime, nobody voiced what everyone suspected: that the school was haunted. Both doctor and nurse feigned indifference when they arrived, even though both were keen to discover a supernatural source for the peculiar epidemic. Dtui was one of only a half-dozen people who knew of Siri’s dalliance with the beyond and she had no doubt in her mind that there was a malevolent ghost at play in the school.

According to the head teacher, every day after morning assembly, up to forty children would become zombie-like, ranting and drooling and shaking without control. At first she’d considered that this was merely a student prank to get out of studying Marxist-Leninist theory during the first period. A number of other ruses had been uncovered by the embedded political spies from the youth league. But this was too elaborate. Some of the children had even begun to utter obscenities in voices that, without question, did not belong to twelve-and thirteen-year-old children. To Siri it sounded very much like some mass shamanic hysteria. For some reason, the pliable minds of the children were being hijacked by wayward spirits. But there had to be some unseen intermediary to channel the demons.

“Tell me,” he said to the head teacher. “What normally happens during your morning assembly?”

“The usual ceremony, Doctor,” she replied. “The children line up in their grades, I make announcements, the flag is raised and the school band plays the new national anthem.”

The new socialist national anthem, coincidentally, had the same tune as the old royalist national anthem. Only the words were different. Although badly metered and slightly misleading, as far as Siri could ascertain there was nothing inherently evil hidden in the new lyrics. So he asked to look at the musical instruments.

The head teacher unlocked the music department footlocker and it was there that Siri found the culprit. He pulled out the exorcism tambourine with its tassels and bottle cap rattles and smiled at Nurse Dtui.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked the principal.

“A tambourine?” she guessed.

“A shamanic tambourine, Comrade, used in séances,” he said. “And fully loaded, I’d say. Any idea how it fell into your possession?”

“Someone from the regional education office brought it,” she recalled. “Said it had been confiscated from some royalist. Why?”

“I’d wager this is what’s been causing the hysteria,” he told her.

“But … but it’s just a musical instrument,” she protested.

Siri smiled at the Mao-shirted woman. She was a cadre from the northeast with a black and white upbringing and no tolerance for dimensions beyond the usual three. And so it was that in both Siri’s report and that of the head teacher, the problem had been attributed to tainted sweets sold by a rogue vendor outside the school gates. Yet, once the tambourine had been removed there was no repeat of the insanity.

The instrument now sat on Siri’s desk at the morgue and he flicked the little bells from time to time just for the hell of it. Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung would look up from their unimportant tasks and sigh. Siri would apologize then ring it again. His only other annoying habit had been pulled out from under him. Dtui had removed the clock from over their office door because the doctor had begun to count down the minutes to his retirement in reverse order.

“Only seventy thousand five hundred and forty-five minutes to go,” he’d sing. Dtui knew that the effects of this after a day or two would have driven them all into the same moronic stupor as the pupils at Thong Hong. So she’d come in early one day and had the hospital handyman take down the clock. She’d told Siri it was off being serviced. As she never lied, he didn’t question her.

At her desk, Nurse Dtui had her Thai fanzine open in front of her. To anyone walking unexpectedly into the office it would appear she was merely fantasizing her size fourteen frame into a size seven swimsuit as worn by the Bangkok television starlets on photo shoots. But hidden between the pages of her magazine were her Med. 1 Gynaecology notes in Russian. Despite a sudden unexpected pregnancy and the arrival of Malee, now five months old, Dtui had yet to give up her hopes of studying in the Soviet bloc. Unsolicited initiative was considered by the hospital administration to be a suspicious characteristic, a sign that you were not satisfied with your role in the new republic. So she studied surreptitiously. Even though she had no intention of abandoning her baby or her husband and running off to Moscow, she continued to prepare herself for that far-off day when she might take over the morgue. When times were hard, it always helped to have a dream. And times in Vientiane were certainly hard.

But not for some, it seemed. In the corner of the office, behind a desk and a chair he rarely used, Mr. Geung stood rocking gently back and forth in a blissful Down’s syndrome trance. His condition had one of two effects on onlookers. Some were appalled that a moron should be allowed to work at a hospital. Others, like his many fans around Mahosot, were envious of the apparent lack of complication in his life. Devoted to his work. Loyal to a fault. Friendly and honest. Mr. Geung seemed perfectly happy with a no-frills, budget lifestyle. But they all wondered what was going on in his head. How could a middle-aged man with such a terrible affliction seem so at peace? And recently his serenity had risen to a cloud way beyond that elusive number nine. Only Siri and Dtui knew the reason for the elevation. Although Mr. Geung himself was not letting on, his morgue mates could tell. It was romance. Birds did it. Bees did it. And, clearly, Mr. Geung did it too.

Others might have interpreted the marks on their friend’s neck as an allergic reaction to the washing powder in his shirt collar. But Siri and Dtui worked in the morgue. They knew teeth marks when they saw them. They didn’t exactly condone the practice. “One step away from vampirism,” Siri had called it. But neither begrudged Mr. Geung his first taste of romance, albeit in bitten form. Tukda’s arrival at the staff canteen had at first enraged Geung.

“She’s Down … Down’s syndrome,” he’d said, with the same condescending tone he’d heard all his life. “Sh … she shouldn’t be working here.”

But there was no mistaking the fact that Comrade Tukda was a pretty young lady and sweet natured. None of Mr. Geung’s protestations persuaded his coworkers that he didn’t find her attractive. And Geung and Tukda, through those mysterious corridors and hidden passageways of the syndrome, found each other. What they did and where and how and if, nobody knew. Only the washing powder allergy on Geung’s neck, and the sappy grins when they mentioned her name, gave anything away. He answered no questions on the subject. Denied all accusations. It was his … their secret. But there was no doubting the fact that Mr. Geung was a very happy man.

And this was how the members of the morgue team filled their days. Siri counting minutes. Dtui conjugating. Geung rocking. Then, all of a sudden, on one hot July morning, a note arrived. That such a flimsy slip of paper could have the effect it did would have been hard to imagine.

The morning crowd was silently engaged in the serious act of consuming Madame Daeng’s noodles. It was like watching a herd of buffalo—albeit seated—working their way through a garden of lush grass. Extra stools had been imported, dotted willy-nilly around the tables but still there wasn’t enough seating. Daeng and Siri encouraged diners to leave as soon as possible so others might enjoy their breakfasts, but Madame Daeng’s noodles were not to be rushed. They were the
cordon bleu
of soup noodles. If Michelin had been allowed into the country they would have been hard pressed to find enough stars with which to decorate her nameless noodle establishment. Yet, in spite of her popularity, Daeng never once considered raising her prices or reducing the size of the servings. She was a pro.

Siri stood beside her, gazing proudly at the lake of hunched shoulders and bobbing heads.

“Looks like I won’t have to worry about us starving to death when I retire,” he said.

Daeng looked up from the boiler, gently tossed a wire basket of pasta, then lowered it back into the bubbling water. She was a fine-looking woman with a mop of gray hair that always made her seem as if she’d been racing a fast-moving motorcycle, which often she had.

“And there I was wondering how we’d ever make do without your thirty-thousand
kip
a month contribution,” she smiled. “What is that on the international exchange market these days? One dollar fifty?”

“Two eighty. But let’s not forget all the other perks.”

“A dozen mosquito coils. Four kilos of weevil-infested rice. The occasional gardening implement. Socks. Six rolls of self-dissolving toilet paper. I don’t know how we’ll survive.”

“And the petrol allowance.”

“Two litres a month. You’ll have to start riding my bicycle.”

“I’ll have nowhere to go. I’ll just be hanging around under your feet like this—day in day out. You always said you wished we could spend more time together.”