Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

It was a dream that was black from beginning to end, but it was a dream. It was like a visit to the cinema when the projector breaks down and you sit in the darkness waiting for the projectionist to fix it, and you sit and sit, but the film doesn’t return. Siri could feel himself alone in the viewing room, waiting. He could smell the stale popcorn crushed into the carpet, see the faint margin of light around the emergency exit doors. But there was no film.

He awoke in his government-supplied bungalow, the sun not yet backlighting the Mickey Mice on his curtain. His dream line to the afterlife was out of order. For some reason he’d become bound to the earth. He suddenly felt vulnerable, and mortal.

Siri and Civilai sat on their log, staring out across the sand, mud, and low waterline that made up a Mekhong desperate for a rainy season. The rains had come late in China and hadn’t yet started to fill the river downstream. Nobody could recall the water course running so low this late in the year. It was a depressingly dreary view. Even affluent Thailand on the far bank looked impoverished. The ceiling of cartoon cloud continued to hang just above their heads, and the wrapped baguettes sat on the log beside them. The old friends had been silent for three minutes. If the Guinness people had been around, it would have qualified as a world record.

“Shit,” said Civilai.

“You’re telling me,” said Siri.

“What in tarnation do we do about this one?”

“I was rather hoping you’d have something in mind. It’s not as if you haven’t been involved in a rebellion before.”

“True, little brother. But if you remember, we were on the side of the people doing the rebelling.”

“Then it’s easy. All we have to do is put ourselves in the shoes of the tyrants we ousted. What would we do if we were the Royal Lao government?”

“We’d convert all our assets into gold and swim across the river to Thailand.”

“Perhaps that wasn’t such a good example. What do you say we just pass on what we’ve found to the Security Division and let them sort it out?”

“Siri, you amaze me at times. We aren’t exactly talking KGB here. What type of training do you think those boys have had? They’re converted foot soldiers from the countryside. They’re chicken counters. Their job is to make sure people are disclosing their incomes and paying their taxes. What type of high-level counterinsurgency operation do you think they could mount?”

“Surely there’s a mechanism in place.”

“We’re an eighteen-month-old administration. We’re spread thin on the ground. We’re barely hanging on as it is. We need several more years to have an infrastructure up and running for something like this.”

“All right. So we just let it happen?”

“You know I didn’t say that.”

“How about at the top level? People we’ve known all the way through the campaign: military leaders, politburo people. Men with enough local support to put up some resistance. After all we’ve been through, I’m certainly not going down without a fight.”

“I’m shocked, Siri. I didn’t think you cared.”

“I spent thirty-odd years crawling through the jungle for this country. My wife died for it. How can I not care? Do you know what last Saturday was? It was Free Lao Day. I went to pay respects at the Epitaph to the Unknown Soldier. People gave their lives for this independence. How can I let some opportunistic glamour seeker leapfrog an administration that struggled for thirty years to get where it is and… and steal our country from under us? Jesus. What was the point of it all if we just hand it over before we’ve even had time to get it right?”

“OK. I get it.” Civilai put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “I’d been wondering whether there were any nationalist embers left burning in your grate. I was starting to think your cynicism had pissed them all out.”

“Me? Great, coming from a man who called the prime minister a toad.”

“That was an accident. I meant ‘slug.’ I just couldn’t think of the word on the spur of the moment.” Siri laughed and his bout of gravity came to an end. “We’re both ornery old warhorses,” Civilai continued, “but they need asses like us. If they refuse to put us out to pasture, they have to expect a kick every now and then.”

“So what do you say we put our asinine minds together and see if we can’t come up with something to avert this coup.”

Civilai slowly began to unwrap the baguettes. “I know people,” he said.

“Who?”

The first drop of rain landed on Siri’s knee. It was as thick and heavy as a cow pat.

“I don’t think I should tell you just yet.”

“Why on earth not?”

Civilai produced two perfect loaves-delights, works of art-but not even their splendor could cheer Siri’s mood. A second drop of rain smashed into the crispy leaves above their heads. Civilai handed a baguette to Siri, who just held on to it, still awaiting an answer to his question.

“Because,” Civilai said, “when conducting a countercoup, one has to consider what the status quo would be if the coup was successful. The leaders would round up whoever was instrumental in the attempt to oppose them. They’d be the first to be liquidated. The fewer middlemen the better.”

“I’m not a middleman. Let them liquidate me. Or, what? You think I’d crumble under interrogation and implicate all your ‘people’?”

Large jellyfish-sized globules of rain were falling in countable drops all around them.

“No,” Civilai said, biting into one end of his lunch. “All they’d have to do is offer you a decent supply of coffee and a carefree life and you’d squeal your guts out.”

“If the coup were successful I’d march up to the buggers and tell them what I damn well think of them.”

“That’s the diplomacy that got you where you are today. If you-” A huge blob of rain somehow avoided the tree and landed with a smack in Civilai’s face. Siri laughed and wiped his friend’s glasses clean with a tissue from the lunch bag. The seriousness of politics quickly gave way to the seriousness of eating. The bread was fresh and the stuffing delicious. These were two men who appreciated a good baguette. And they knew exactly the drink with which to complement it. Siri offered his flask of pennywort juice to Civilai. No cabernet sauvignon could have enhanced a sandwich more. They ate without speaking and watched the heavy drops of rain land in the river, never gaining enough momentum to be called a shower.

Despite their present predicament, this was when Siri was at his happiest, eating and drinking on the bank of the Mekhong beside his best friend. He turned to look at Civilai. When trying to describe him to others, Siri had worked his way through a long list of insects-ant, hornet, wasp- before finally arriving at the simile that suited him best. Civilai was undoubtedly like a grasshopper. His head was a large, skin-covered helmet of a thing, mostly posterior. At its front, on his pointy nose, sat a huge pair of black-framed glasses. His grasshopper body was all gangly bones and angular joints. As he ate, an enormous Adam’s apple traveled up and down his long neck like an elevator.

“If you don’t stop staring at me, I’ll slap you,” Civilai said without looking at Siri.

“I can’t help it. You’re such a glamour-puss.”

“You obviously spend too much time with the dead, Dr. Siri.”

Like Siri, Civilai had France to thank for his academic degree and to blame for his political leanings. Whereas Siri had found his way to Paris via a temple education and charity, Civilai had been groomed for excellence by his parents. His wealthy Lao-Chinese father had been selectively married into an even more affluent Vietnamese-Chinese family, and even before Civilai was born, there had been no doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Songsawat’s son would be educated at the Sorbonne. They had mapped out a Francophile education for the boy in Saigon and invested a small fortune in contributions to ensure that he wouldn’t be rejected. As it turned out, his grades alone would have secured him a scholarship. On the day he sailed on the Victor Hugo to Europe, the family expected their smart lad to return with first-class honors in law and commerce, and one day take over the running of their vast business interests in Laos.