Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

“No,” he slurred. “I’m all right. Tell me.”

“Well, I’d doubted it could be the name of a person or a place so I went for some natural phenomenon. I thought perhaps it was some rock formation or a gully. You know what these country folk are like. The people I asked were wise elders, sons and daughters of the land. They knew all the local myths and legends. And, to my amazement, one old fellow knew right off what I was talking about. Your Devil’s Vagina isn’t a rock formation at all. It’s a tree.”

Siri sat down again, felling Daeng at the same time.

“You don’t say.”

“Well, yes I do,” she said. As they were back on the straw matting and the bottles were still there, she filled his glass for the umpteenth time and told him the legend.

“It’s all about a Khmer princess. It seems she’d been promised to a king who was a drinking buddy of her daddy’s while she was still in the womb. I’m sure worse deals have been made in bars but I can’t think of any right off. The girl grew up to be a real looker and the date of her betrothal arrived. Naturally, as you can testify, the ravages of many years of drinking had left her fiancй saggy and bewrinkled, not to mention extremely old, and the princess was beside herself with grief.”

“There were two of her?”

“What? Look, pay attention or I won’t tell you the punch line. There was just the one princess, and the night before the wedding she climbed out a palace window and ran off to the jungle. She knew there was only one way to protect her maidenhead, so deep in the forest she ripped off her-”

“Oh, don’t!”

“Yes, and threw it high into a nearby tree. In this way she was able to return to the palace asexual and totally unmarriageable. As if things weren’t bad enough, she was banished from the kingdom and forced to fend for herself. Being vaginaless-and thus no longer possessing the soul of a woman-she soon became a devil, and died of old age in a hostel for homeless devils. Actually, I just made that last part up, but good story, eh?”

Siri was blearily silent for a few moments. Finally, he looked up and said, “Women’s souls are in their vaginas?”

“Siri, it doesn’t matter where we keep our souls. The point is-are you going to remember all this tomorrow?” He nodded solemnly. “The point is, the Devil’s Vagina is the name of a tree, a real tree.”

“Where does it grow?”

“Mostly around Burirum near the Khmer border.”

“That’s Thailand.”

“A plus for geography. But the old fellow said it grows here and there all the way up to the Lao border. He said he’s never actually seen one in Laos.”

“No doubt the Department of Culture burned them all down for having a rude name, corrupting our youth. Why on earth would these conspirators sign their letters with the name of a Thai tree?”

“No idea. But there’s more.”

“Thank heaven.”

“The envelope.”

“I showed you the envelope?”

“It was on the table the first day you were here. I couldn’t help but notice one of the postmarks.”

“What about it?”

“It was old. They changed that puncher, or whatever it’s called, six or seven months ago. They use a round impression now, not a square one.”

“Six months old? How can that be?” Siri wasn’t exactly sober now but he was focused.

“That’s what I wondered. So I asked the old postmaster. He comes calling from time to time.”

“I bet he does.”

“He told me he’d seen that decommissioned postmark used before.” “Who by?”

“People in the refugee camps across the border. They want to get in touch with friends and family over here. But they can’t just write letters with a Thai stamp and mail it. You know all the letters from outside the country go through the national directorate. It might take six months for a letter to reach its destination and by then it’s snipped to confetti and unreadable. So they have a service.”

“What kind?”

“They write their letters in the camps, buy actual Lao stamps there, and get them canceled with these unused Lao impressions to suggest they were posted in Pakse. They bring the letters to the border, smuggle them across, and put them on the buses to Vientiane. That’s the easy part. A few dollars to the driver to take on one more sack.”

“Your postmaster seems to know a lot about all this.”

“Perhaps that explains why he’s unemployed.”

“Well, this is astounding.” Siri threw back his cocktail and poured two new ones. The final bottle was empty now. “This explains everything. The coup’s being plotted by the old Royalists in a camp on the Thai side, probably in Ubon. It’s the closest. They contact their agents around the country by letter. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all funded with Thai and American money. You solved the puzzle. You’re incredible, Daeng.”

He leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek and she pulled back. Even on the wrong side of sixty, etiquette is still etiquette. She stared at him with a disappointed look and started to hum the anthem of the Lao Issara.

“So,” she said, at the end of the first verse. “Conspirators? There’s a coup planned? Feel like telling me about it?”

At last, Siri dreamed that night. It wasn’t his usual vividly realistic production. Instead it was more pastel and slightly out of focus. But that might have been due to the fact that he was underwater. He was picking his way-on foot- along the bed of a fast-flowing river. He wondered why he was walking and assumed it had to be because he couldn’t swim. Even dreams had to be anchored in reality. He looked up and could see the harsh sun in a cloudless sky high above the surface of the water. On either side of him, two giant catfish floated patiently, like bodyguards.

At one point, they were overtaken by a mermaid. She looked back and smiled at Siri, who was so occupied with admiring her magnificent globular breasts that he almost failed to notice the child riding on her back. The boy’s arms were hooked around her slender neck. It was Sing, healthy and alive and happy as a ten-year-old on a fairground ride. He and his mermaid raced ahead and merged into the murky water. Other mermaids overtook Siri, each with a person on her back, each speeding ahead into the gloomy distance while Siri plodded along with his corpulent guard of honor.

When he awoke, the sheet beneath him was uncomfortably damp.

The breakfast area in the Pakse Hotel was an excellent place to meet people and talk about the day’s plans. It wasn’t, however, somewhere you’d want to have breakfast. The coffee was road tar, the noodles were warm shoelaces, and the menu went rapidly downhill from there. Civilai sat with a cup of weak Chinese tea, tapping his fingers on the table-top. He saw Siri descending the staircase like a man astounded by the invention of steps. Like Civilai, he was wearing dark glasses. The expression “the blind leading the blind” entered the politburo man’s mind. Siri headed unsteadily toward the front desk.

“Over here, cousin,” Civilai shouted.

Siri obviously hadn’t mastered his new eyeglasses because he engaged and temporarily waltzed with a concrete pillar before finding the table.

“Are you joining me in incognito today?” Civilai asked.

“It’s the daylight,” Siri said. “When I woke up I felt like I’d landed my spaceship on the surface of the sun. Couldn’t see a damned thing. It is particularly glary today, isn’t it?”

“Have a few drinks last night, did we?”

“Older brother, you know me, just a small aperitif before dinner.”

“Really? Then why did you wake up so late?”

“I’m a slow sleeper.”

“Come on. What time did you get in?”