Colin Cotterill: Anarchy and the Old Dogs

Siri and Phosy had been to the morning market bus station in Vientiane and asked around about the blind man. People had to have noticed him. It hadn’t been long before they were directed to the Dong Bang-Ban Nathe service. The country bus had sat idling like a big duck in a nest of exhaust smog. They talked with the driver. It wasn’t he who’d brought the blind man into town the previous day, but this fellow had done so on two, perhaps three, other occasions. The most recent he could recall was about two weeks earlier. The driver remembered the old blind man waiting in the Dong Bang pavilion with a woman. She’d waved down the bus and handed the money to the driver. She never traveled with the blind man and didn’t meet him on his return. Once the bus reached the morning market, the blind man climbed down with everyone else and crossed the road to the Bureau de Poste. He’d be back on the bus in time for the return journey.

So this wasn’t the blind man’s first trip and the note was probably not the first he’d collected at the post office. Thus, with nothing better to do, Siri and Phosy had taken a ride to Dong Bang. All they needed was to find the blind man’s house and break the news to his family. But it was no longer just an exercise, a matter of filling in the details on the death certificate and closing their respective case files. They had a mystery on their hands. Who would send notes to a blind man, and why would they go to the trouble of writing them in invisible ink and in code? Neither Siri nor Phosy could resist such a conundrum.

They left the motorcycle behind the pavilion and walked to the nearest open-front shop. It was a noodle restaurant and wholesale compost outlet. Hoes and spades homemade from slices of war shrapnel were also for sale. The chef-cum-shopkeeper was sprawled on a hammock strung between the two beams holding up the roof of the store. When Siri coughed, she opened her eyes reluctantly and seemed disappointed to have customers.

“Yes, my loves?”

“We’re trying to find the home of a blind man we believe lives here,” Phosy said. “His name’s Bounthan.”

“No, dearie,” she said. “There’s only the one blind chap here and that’s Dr. Buagaew.”

Siri and Phosy looked at each other. Phosy said, “Doctor Buagaew? A physician?”

The woman scratched between her breasts. “No. In fact, he’s a dentist. We all just call him ‘Doctor.’’’

“But he’s blind,” Phosy exclaimed.

“He wasn’t always, love,” she replied, now scratching her big backside through the thick canvas hammock. “He was a damned good dentist till the cataracts got him. People used to come from all around these parts to have Dr. Buagaew fix their teeth. The worse his sight got, of course, the more mistakes he started to make, until he couldn’t do it no more.

People said they didn’t mind that he was blind; it was still better than going all the way to Vientiane. But he felt bad about pulling out the wrong teeth and that. Changed his character completely, it did. It was a bit like he turned reclusive. Stopped talking to everyone.”

“How did he make a living once he went blind?” Siri asked.

“No idea, love. Best ask him, eh? He lives across the way. It’s the only two-story place in the village. Can’t miss it.”

Siri and Phosy crossed the quiet main street and headed in the direction she’d indicated. Obviously, news of Dr. Buagaew’s demise hadn’t reached the village. This was the part of his job Dr. Siri hated: informing the next of kin. But, as it turned out, the white-haired, chopstick-thin wife of the blind dentist already knew she was a widow. When her husband hadn’t come back on the returning bus, or on the subsequent one, she’d become concerned. She’d headed into the city to look for him. She’d learned about the accident from the pen sellers in front of the post office. She told her visitors it was a very sad thing but there seemed to be little feeling in her words. The three of them were sitting on pieces of a tightly woven rattan lounge suite in a well-furnished living room. A large brass fan circled overhead. The doctor and his wife obviously hadn’t fallen on hard times since his retirement.

“We were wondering why you hadn’t come to claim the body,” Siri said.

“Nobody knew where he’d been taken,” she replied. Her voice was slight, almost inaudible beneath the whir of the fan. Her skin was dark and rutted like ripples on a night pond. She hadn’t offered her visitors a drink.

“But the morgue would have been the logical place to

look,” Siri continued. Normally, he wouldn’t have pursued the point with a bereaved wife but there was something about her demeanor that suggested she wasn’t particularly heartbroken.

“I suppose so,” she said. “I don’t really know about things like that.”

“About cremations and burial ceremonies, you mean?”

“About the rules of death in a socialist state. I assumed the government would take care of everything. I’m a bit of a novice when it comes to communism, I’m afraid. I just know the new system is very efficient. Well, yes, look. You two are here already.”

Neither man was of a mind to refute that observation, and neither wanted to point out the rarity of the service they were performing.

“Comrade,” Phosy said, “perhaps you could help us clear up a little mystery.”

“I’ll do my best, of course.”

He took the folded note from his shirt pocket and handed it to Dr. Buagaew’s wife. “We were wondering what this is. Your husband apparently collected it at the post office before he was killed.”

Siri observed that she didn’t flinch or change her expression when she took the paper from Phosy. He wondered whether she had any muscles at all in her face. She took a long time to read down the list, then she looked up at Phosy. To Siri’s surprise, she managed a smile of sorts.

“Why, it’s nothing at all,” she said.

“We were just curious,” Siri told her. “We made a sort of bet as to what it might be.”

She looked from one man to the other as if attempting to weigh their collective intelligence. Finally, she pointed her chin at a small antique table behind their seat. Siri had noticed it when they first entered. On it lay a fine wooden chessboard whose expensive jade pieces were poised mid-battle.

“Do you know what that is, gentlemen?” she asked. Siri was about to reply but she didn’t wait for a response. Her assessment had obviously classified the men as unworldly. “It’s an old-fashioned game called chess. It’s very complicated. My husband did try to teach it to me once but I have no head for such trivial complications. Dr. Buagaew loved the game but he didn’t have anyone to play with in this rustic place. So, for a number of years, he maintained a long distance chess-playing relationship with an old friend of his from school. He lives in the south. I believe there are players in other places, too, but I can’t give you the details. They play via the mail service.”

“So, these symbols…?”

“… are a record of their moves. Had Dr. Buagaew survived, he would have brought me this list and instructed me to read it to him as he sat at the table there.”

“You know the English alphabet?” Phosy asked.

“A little. My husband, on the other hand, was quite fluent in English.”

“And once you read out his friend’s code, Dr. Buagaew would understand and make the moves on this board?” Siri continued.

“And study the pieces with his fingers. It’s one of the few tactile games a blind man can enjoy. Once he had his own move worked out, he’d read the code to me and I’d write back to his friend.”

“You also wrote in invisible ink?” Phosy asked.