Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

“I thought he was a carpenter?”

“Oh, shit. My mouth.” Dtui really seemed to be crying now. “He’ll kill me, I swear he will.”

“Dtui!”

“I just wanted to get out of here, go to Australia. Find some peace.” The girl took Dtui’s hand and smiled for her to continue. Dtui spoke in a barely audible whisper interspersed with sobs. “Phosy was with the Central Command. He trained under General Ouan. He was one of the undercover agents on special duty around the central region.”

“Why didn’t he just tell everyone when he got here?”

“Are you kidding? He knows for certain there are over a hundred PL sympathizers spying here at this camp. How could he be certain who to trust? He’s waiting to catch sight of one of his old RIA mates, someone he knows. But most of his senior commanders and colleagues are overseas already. He’s getting desperate, but I have to give him credit, he’s a patient man, is my Phosy. He’ll wait months if he has to until he’s sure who to confide in.”

“What about you?”

“Me? Of course I’d prefer to be in my own country under a safe RLA government than off catching lunch with a boomerang. But until that can happen, I’d sooner be sitting it out in a suburb of Sydney than stuck here. But not Phosy, he’s driven. He can’t settle until he wipes out every one of the bastard Reds with his own hands.”

Dtui’s friend suddenly remembered the time and rushed off, but not before swearing on the soul of her grandmother that she wouldn’t divulge a word of what she’d just heard. As soon as she’d run off to shuck her peas, Dtui smiled to herself. She knew Granny was doomed to eternal damnation.

Siri sat, wheezing, on the balcony of the Pakse hospital. He was whiter than anything else in the town but he was headed for recovery. Dr. Somdy, his allocated physician, was evidently the region’s authority on near drownings. She told him she’d pumped so many fishermen back to life and earned so many fish in lieu of payment, she’d started to check the mirror every morning for gills.

She was an eight-shaped middle-aged lady with a Chinese face. She’d been hired initially by the French and had stuck with Pakse hospital through all the conflicts. She’d avoided communist reeducation only by being indispensable. At the end of her shift she sat drinking tea with Siri on the balcony. They watched two policemen corner a boy of about sixteen on the street below. One of the officers grabbed the youth by the arm while the other produced a pair of scissors and proceeded to give him a haircut. It wasn’t a particularly professional cut-he looked more scalped than groomed- but they didn’t charge him for it.

“Do they do makeup and give fashion advice as well?” Siri asked, straight-faced.

Somdy laughed. “Isn’t it this silly in Vientiane yet?”

“I haven’t seen them actually resort to hairdressing,” he said. “They’ve issued a number of edicts: no long hair on boys, no short hair on girls, no holding hands, no female trouser wearing, all that kind of thing. And I think they’re all still paranoid enough up north to do what they’re told. I can’t recall seeing the authorities do anything about miscreants, though. That was quite impressive.”

“You know television watching is illegal here, don’t you?”

“How can they stop it? Go door to door with big-eared dogs listening for Thai soap commercials?”

“They don’t need to, Doctor. At five every evening they bring down the antenna.”

“Bring it down?”

“Literally. Ten men with ropes lower the reception tower to the ground. In the morning they hoist it back up. It’s the only way they can be sure the locals aren’t feasting on Thai entertainment. Pakse’s a crucible for every silly rule the people in Vientiane come up with. I think it’s punishment for Champasak being a renegade province for so long. The effects are so concentrated because the administrators only actually control a twenty-mile circle around the city. They over-regulate everything in town as compensation because they can’t regulate anything at all outside.”

“You do realize you shouldn’t be talking like this to one of the elders of the Red Revolution?”

“Oh, Siri.” She smiled and put her hand on his arm. “You think it’s every bit as ridiculous as I do. I know you too well. You have no idea who I am, do you?”

He looked more closely at her broad, content face, but nothing registered.

“No.”

“I was one of your kids, Dr. Siri, at the camp. I did the basic medic training with you and your wife. I sat in your tent at night and swelled with pride listening to you tell us of the great things my countrymen had done. I was there on the parade ground punching my fist into the air, swearing allegiance to the Lao Issara and destruction to the French. You were my idol. I became a doctor because of you.”

She saw tears forming in the old man’s eyes. She squeezed his hand.

“Dr. Siri, I know deep in my heart that everything you’ve ever done and whatever you believe today is for our benefit: me, my husband, my children. You don’t see any more sense in these petty regulations than I do. This isn’t the system you fought for. I know you’d never compromise your ideals. You taught us to say what we believed without fear and fight for the right to do so. When they wheeled you in this morning, all that pride came flooding back to me. I felt like a disciple at the feet of Jesus.”

“Somdy,” said Siri with a smile on his face, wiping away the tears with his hand, “I don’t think Christian symbolism really applies in this situation, particularly as I failed to walk on water. Did you find God after I left?”

“I found lots of them, uncle. If you want to survive here, you believe in them all. A little bit of Catholic aid here, a little bit of Zen medical assistance there. After a while you learn how to convert to all of them to keep your patients alive. In a way that’s what you’re doing with politics. Am I right?”

“Nice to see some of my cynicism rubbed off on you, too. Just be careful. The big Reds in Vientiane don’t take kindly to religious zealots. But thank you. I can’t pretend this little chat hasn’t done me as much good as your medical care.”

When she left to sleep off her busy night, he sat alone on the balcony, fingering the newly plaited talisman around his neck. Phosy’s friend, Kumpai, the soldier, had gone to collect it from the hairdresser that morning. Siri couldn’t risk being exposed to the wiles of the malevolent ghosts for any longer than was necessary. They’d almost finished him last night, almost dispatched him and his resident shaman spirit to a watery grave. They were becoming more malignant, and Siri wondered how long it would be before he needed to upgrade his stone amulet to a more powerful model.

He watched the schoolchildren sliding in the street mud, turning their white shirts dark red like the naughty before and after kids in Thai Fab detergent commercials. He wondered how long it would be before they lost their happy innocence. Who would the role models in their lives be? And he thought about what Somdy had said: “I know you’d never compromise your ideals.”

He wondered what his ideals were exactly. He wondered if he could define his moral stand or his beliefs anymore, wondered how many times he had in fact compromised for selfish reasons since those idealistic days at the youth camp. One time sprang to mind: Tuyen Quang.

It was the conference of aligned Lao resistance groups in Vietnam. The day he’d sold out. The day they’d all sold out. It was supposed to have been a great event, the gathering of all the disparate Lao Issara units who’d fought to the last bullet in their resistance against the French invaders. Old warriors were reunited and cooling embers of rebellion were stoked once more. These were survivors-hunting rifles against howitzers and armored vehicles-and somehow they’d stayed alive. There were enough of them left for a rousing party on the eve of the conference. Good food, free-flowing drink, soft beds, and rekindled dreams of a free Lao homeland.