Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

“I know.”

Civilai went back to the paperwork spread out across the bed and probably didn’t notice when Siri got up and left.

Before heading off to the wedding, the doctor stopped at Daeng’s noodle stall, requested 120 orders of thin-strand chicken noodles to go, and sat at a table by himself with a glass of rice whisky and a pout. When Daeng realized he was quite serious, she sent the ferry porters off for half a dozen chickens and extra noodles, and set about filling his order. As she worked, she fired questions at him, and although he answered them all, she could tell he was as flat as paint.

Finally, two large cardboard boxes filled with 120 plastic bags of noodles sat in a pony trap waiting for Siri, but Daeng wouldn’t let him leave.

“If I let you arrive at a wedding with that face,” she said, “they’ll be divorced by morning. What’s on your mind, old soldier?”

He looked up from his untouched drink. “Do you remember Somluk Boutavieng?”

“No. What unit was he in?”

“He was a footballer. He scored four goals for Laos against the Thai team in 1952. He was a magician in leather boots. He could trick his way through a six-man defense and break the net with his shot. He was just beautiful to watch. I saw him play in Savanaketh and then at the Olympic qualifier in Bangkok. He twisted his ankle and couldn’t play in the return game and we lost.”

“And you’re still depressed about it?”

Siri laughed. “No, not about the game, although it did take me a while to get over it. I was thinking about Somluk. I saw him again when we moved to Vientiane in ‘75. I recognized him straight-away. You know what he was doing? He was pedaling a samlor.”

“And?”

“And a man who’d been a legend, who’d inspired tens of thousands of young Lao men, had ended up scraping together a few kip a day just to stay alive. No dignity at all.”

“I have a feeling you’re about to make an appearance in this story.”

“I am… you are… all of us old fossils, paraded out on Patriots Day with our medals pinned to our tattered uniforms.” “Oh, I see.”

“You do? Then at least I’m not alone.”

“Oh, you’re alone, all right. I’m nowhere near feeling sorry for myself. I’ve got a story, too, and it’s much better than yours. There’s a girl who helps me here from time to time. She was ten when she first came. They didn’t let her stay in school because there was some rule about not repeating first grade more than three times. They agreed she was feebleminded and she ended up kicking around doing nothing for years. People ignored her. She was just a sweet girl with nothing to do. When she first came here I let her serve and I fed her and gave her some fresh clothes. She came back every day. I watched her work, saw how she put effort into getting the condiments lined up and cleaning the plastic tablecloths. And I got it into my head I could teach her to read.

“I’d never taught reading before, and she was painfully slow. She’d take a month to get to know a letter, then forget it. But we kept at it, no hurry: a letter and a letter and then another. We started sixteen years ago and last week she read her first book. It was a grade-two primer but it was a book with a cover and ten pages of text. She cried herself blurry eyed that night, couldn’t sleep, went through it ten more times. She finally read herself unconscious just as the sun was coming up.”

“That’s nice.”

“Oh, it’s much more than nice, Siri. It didn’t change the world. It isn’t going to get her a job reading the news over the propaganda airwaves. She’ll still serve noodles and wipe tables. But she’s different inside now. She has a new love in her life, and I gave it to her. Me. I did it all by myself, and I’m every bit as proud of that as I am of anything I did during the resistance. All right, here comes the philosophy. You can leave if you like but I suggest you stick it out. You don’t measure your own success against the size or volume of the effect you’re having. You gauge it from the difference you make to the subject you’re working on. Is leading an army that wins a war really that much more satisfying than teaching a four-year-old to ride a bicycle? At our age,” she said, “you go for the small things and you do them as well as you can.”

In the back of the pony trap, squashed beside his two large boxes, Siri still felt Daeng’s lip prints on his cheek and heard her whisper, “Go for the small things and do them well.” It would be his new mantra. Forget the planet, save the garden. He thought, too, about what she’d told him as he squeezed into the cart. She’d been hearing rumors. The Thai camps had always been breeding grounds for insurgents, launch points for forays onto Lao soil to cause disruption and spread propaganda. But over the last week, all that activity had stopped dead. All the indicators were that something big was about to happen. But Siri was just an old doctor going for small things, doing them well, saving the garden. Civilai could have his planet. There were more personal issues for Siri to think about, like the fact that Daeng had kissed him on the cheek.

He arrived at the village to find the place jumping like spiders on a hot rock. The dancing had begun long before the wedding. Women, old men, and dogs, all apparently drunk, were jigging back and forth in front of the main hut. There was a Buddhist-cum-animist ceremony going on inside. They’d sneaked the monks in by river and borrowed a shaman from another village. Such an event brought a lot of spirits out of the woodwork and Siri could feel their presence. Some dispossessed he could see sitting around in the shadows. He knew instantly which were the departed even though some of them seemed to be in better shape than the living.

Inside the hut, the villagers had tied their sacred threads around the heads and hands of the betrothed and were chanting along with the monks. Siri tried to slip in unnoticed to watch, but he was spotted and manhandled to a place of honor in front of the saffron-clad choir. One of the monks read from a sacred Pali text. The shaman unfurled some of the unspun cotton from a grandiose tower of banana leaves and flowers known as a krooay and tied together the spirits of the young lovers. Incense and mosquito-coil smoke intertwined in the warm air. From outside came the sound of music from traditional wooden instruments.

Siri smiled to himself. “Sorry, Comrades Marx and Lenin. This is what marriage is all about.”

Siri’s noodles joined the fish and vegetables and sticky rice on the communal table and were gone in under half an hour. Siri was plied with glass after glass of unidentifiable and dubious spirits. Like most guests, he was press-ganged into downing the entire contents of the glass in one go. This was the Lao way and he had no recourse. At one juncture along the winding path to inebriation it occurred to him he’d spent much of his time in the south drunk. Human beings mistakenly believed alcohol was a disguise that stopped real life from recognizing them. In fact, it was just a temporary hiding hole, and Siri knew he’d been fooling nobody.

It was almost ten o’clock when he looked around and realized he was at the river’s edge beside a beautiful local girl. She had eyes that would melt even the coldest of hearts and a smile that made Siri wish he, too, were ten years old.

“Do you come here often?” he slurred.

“Used to come here all the time,” she said.

“What stopped you?”

“Sing dying.”

If that didn’t sober him up in a hurry nothing would.

“You and Sing were friends?”

“Yeah.”

“You must miss him.”

“Yeah.”

She hugged her knees tightly to her chest. Her naked toes squeezed the mud. What is there to say to a ten-year-old who’s lost her best friend?