Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

It was here that Nurse Dtui and Madame Daeng sat on either side of the deceased military officer, finishing their tea. Despite appearances, there was nothing perverse in this irreverent act. It had been necessitated by the peculiar events of that morning. Mr. Geung had a form of Down syndrome that made him very efficient at repetitive tasks and very thorough in those duties he’d been taught. Anything out of the ordinary, however, caused him to become flustered. He didn’t trust strange people or equipment that disturbed the norm in his domain. The auditors had been such an intrusion and he continued to mutter his displeasure to himself. But there had been one other annoyance that week. The morgue’s perfectly good French refrigeration unit had been replaced with a Soviet behemoth twice its size. Neither the hospital engineer who installed it nor Mr. Geung, who was responsible for turning it off and on, had any idea how it worked. Dtui could read Russian but none of the dials seemed to perform the functions they promised. So Mr. Geung had been particularly distraught to discover that after only two hours in the unit the army captain was deep frozen.

Madame Daeng, the coroner’s fiancйe, had arrived just then to discover Dtui comforting a teary Geung, and a large ice pole of a corpse on the tray. It was made all the worse by the fact that an unknown surgeon would be coming to conduct the autopsy that afternoon in the company of Mr. Suk, the hospital director. The body had to be thawed out somehow before their arrival. They agreed that wrapping him in blankets would only have the effect of preserving the frozen state. It was a comparatively cool early December day and there was no heater. Madame Daeng, always calm in a crisis, suggested they wheel the soldier into the sunlight that filtered through the louvered window and sit close to the body so their own body heat might warm him up. The only other heat producer they could find was the Romanian water-boiling element. They plugged it in, placed the water pot at the end of the stainless-steel dolly, and watched it bubble.

As there was water on the boil and margarine peanut biscuits in the tin, why not, they thought, have a cup of tea or two? For modesty’s sake, and to catch the crumbs, a white cloth was draped over the captain’s nether regions. And there they sat, discussing the latest items to have disappeared from the shops.

“How’s he doing?” Daeng asked.

Dtui poked the skin with her spoon. “Another hour and he should be ready.”

“And who’s performing the autopsy? I thought Siri was the only one in the country qualified.”

“Well”-Dtui leaned back in her chair-”technically, Dr. Siri isn’t all that qualified either. I mean, he’s good, but he doesn’t have any formal training as a coroner. Our politburo didn’t seem to think that fact was terribly important; surgeon-coroner, same difference. Luckily for them, Siri’s a bit of a genius in a number of ways.” As Dtui wasn’t sure how much Daeng knew about the doctor’s spirit connections, she kept her praise vague.

“So, today…?”

“Is some young hotshot surgeon who just got back from East Germany. He went over there as a medic six years ago. Amazing what they can achieve in the Eastern Bloc. Must be some type of fast track. But the new boy isn’t qualified to perform autopsies either. If our friend here hadn’t been a soldier they’d probably have kept him on ice till Siri got back. But the military are really curious to find out what killed their officer. The boys who brought him in said he hasn’t even been identified yet. They’re waiting for his unit to report him missing. The hospital director asked Hotshot if he could do an autopsy in a hurry and the fellow evidently said, ‘How hard can it be?’ Well, we’ll see.”

“It would have been a lot harder if we hadn’t thawed him out. I think it must be working. I’m starting to get a whiff.”

“Me too.”

“It looks like we generate more body heat than we thought.”

It was true. Both women had good reason to glow. Big, beautiful Dtui could thank her first sexual experience for the baby taking shape inside her. Fortunately, Phosy the policeman had done the right thing. Auntie Bpoo the fortune-teller had said the child would be a girl. Their daughter was barely three months along and Dtui had already given her a name and started to crochet pink sun hats for her. She would be fat and jolly and intelligent like her mother… and she’d be a doctor… and she’d get married before she got pregnant and not at a registry the week after the test came back positive. In that respect she wouldn’t be like her mother at all.

Madame Daeng glowed because, at sixty-six years of age, she’d been proposed to by a man she’d secretly loved for much of her life. When she had been reunited with Siri in the south just a few months earlier, those same old girlish feelings had still gurgled around inside her. She and Siri were both widowed now-both battered by cruel circumstances in a country that had only ever known war. But the two old warriors were gloriously open to new love. She’d unashamedly followed him back to Vientiane and kept her fingers crossed. Siri had proposed to her in a most un-Lao fashion: with flowers. To her joy he’d acquired that peculiar habit during his years in France. She’d refused him, of course. What respectable woman would accept a man’s first offer? And, luckily, he’d asked again, over coffee, not a flower in sight, and this time she’d accepted. They would marry immediately upon his return from the north.

“Do you suppose we can leave our little soldier now?” she asked Dtui.

“Absolutely! Let’s go open your restaurant. If he thaws out any more he’ll insist on coming with us.”

Mr. Geung agreed to watch the body and the two glowing ladies climbed onto their respective bicycles and rode out of the Mahosot Hospital grounds. They tinkled their bells as they turned left on Mahosot Road even though there was very little chance of being hit by anything but other bicycles. Vientiane was a cyclist’s paradise. Unless they had friends in the Party, very few citizens could afford to fill up their motorcycle tanks with petrol. Cars had become front yard ornaments. The sound of a passing engine prompted little children to run to the street’s edge and wave. Siri might have been right. Laos was shrinking back into a preindustrial age.

Dtui and Daeng rode past peeling signs that pointed to services and establishments that had ceased to exist, past long-since vacated spirit houses and leaning telegraph poles that seemed to be held up by the wires strung between them. The few tarred roads were frayed at the edges like nibbled licorice and the sidewalks were clogged with unkempt patches of grass. They pedaled along the Mekhong past Chantabouli Temple to the little noodle shop Daeng had acquired on her arrival in the city. It wasn’t a particularly bright period to be setting up a new business. But she’d brought with her a reputation as a cordon bleu noodleist. The word had spread and even though it was only eleven thirty, hungry customers were already gathered in front of her shuttered store. When she arrived they cheered and made bawdy comments. Humor was one of the few glues that held people together in hard times.

“Been visiting with your gynecological nurse, have you, Madame Daeng?” one asked. “I suppose you’ll be making an announcement sometime soon.”

“If I were to make that particular announcement you could expect to see the world press gathered out here,” she said. “Now, move aside and stop your insolence.”

Dtui and the customers helped her open up and move some of the tables out to the street side. They wheeled the portable kitchen to the front of the shop and Daeng lit the twigs and charcoal to get the water boiling. She’d prepared all the ingredients before heading off to the morgue; now she only needed to parboil the noodles. While they were waiting, she poured everyone a cup of cold jasmine tea. At last, Dtui and Daeng stood side by side at the stand dishing out feu noodles in deep bowls. When the better part of the crowd was fed, Daeng leaned toward her friend.

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