Colin Cotterill: Slash and Burn

“What could you have done?”

“Yes.”

‘Torn up the note.”

Five Weeks Earlier

It was true, just five weeks before, things had been normal. Well, normal for Vientiane. But first there was the haunting, then the note, then the Americans. And somewhere between the three life had become complicated again. That was Laos in the late seventies though, wasn’t it? What can you say? The place had always been mysterious, always been a victim of its politics and its confused beliefs and its weather. While the north ex perienced a premature dry season, the southern provinces were being flooded by Typhoon Joe. Worst hit was Champasak, the show province where almost half the country’s farming cooperatives had been established. All of them had been rained into submission and, once again, the locals were convinced that Lady Kosob, the goddess of the rice harvests, was displeased with government policy. The collectives program was doomed. This came as a blow to the ministry of agriculture who’d nationalized all the old royalist estates in preparation for this great socialist plan.

If the weather wasn’t bad enough, the country’s close proximity to Kampuchea, once a cultural and commercial partnership, had become a liability. Refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge were flooding into Thailand and southern Laos. The Lao government had issued twenty official statements denying KR claims that they were allowing Vietnamese troops to cross Lao territory. They absolutely weren’t amassing at the border in preparation for an invasion, which, of course, they were. But as there were still no actual laws, the Politburo could logically argue that they weren’t breaking any. The forty-six-member Supreme Council had been working on a national constitution for eight years and had barely made it beyond the design of the front cover. This general disorder, plus the fact that money was harder to come by than a cold beer, resulted in an estimated 150 citizens crossing the river to Thailand every day-120 successfully. An editorial in Pasason Lao newssheet informed the 40 per cent of the country who could read and the 2 per cent of those who could be bothered, that the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos had never had it so good.

During the month of July in 1978, people did the morgue at Mahosot Hospital a great favor by not dying mysteriously. They merely passed away as people do and no questions were asked. No motives sought. It was almost as if they sensed that Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country’s only coroner, was reaching the end of his unasked-for tenure and they didn’t care to trouble him. The good doctor had been putting in his notice every month since the Party first manhandled him into the job three years earlier. His boss, Judge Haeng, little in so many ways, had ignored the requests. “A good communist,” the man had said, “does not let go of the plough halfway across the paddy and leave the buffalo to find its own direction. He eats with her, tends to her injuries, and sleeps with her until the job is done.” Siri had resisted the temptation to spread the word that the Party was advocating bestiality. He’d known his time would come. But when it did, he’d been only a heartbeat away from occupying his own slab. He’d met the departing spirits eyeball to eyeball, and they were waiting for him. After the horrific events of May that year, he was still deaf in one ear and could barely feel his right hand. His few hours of sleep were plagued with nightmares. Everyone agreed that after his runin with the Khmer Rouge, Dr. Siri had earned his retirement.

If he could stay out of trouble, Siri had under two months left on the job. Then, the leisurely life he’d dreamed of through decade after decade in the jungles of Vietnam and northern Laos would be his; coffee mornings overlooking the Mekhong, leisurely noodle lunches at his wife Daeng’s shop, long evenings of talking rice whiskey nonsense with ex-Politburo man Civilai, and nights stretched out against a triangular pillow in his illicit backroom library reading French literature and philosophy. Dallying through to the early morning with comrades Sartre and Hugo and Voltaire. Really. All he had to do was stay out of trouble. For anyone else this might not have been much to ask. But this was no simple man. This was Dr. Siri Paiboun: seventy-four years of age, forty-eight years an unconvincing member of the Communist Party, host to a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman spirit, culturally tainted beyond redemption by ten years in Paris. Emotionally numbed to the horrors of injury and death by years of battlefront surgery, Dr. Siri felt he had earned himself the right to be an ornery old geezer. And, no. Staying out of trouble for two months was no easy task for such a complicated man.

He’d had just the one case since his retirement notice was accepted. Compared to some of his adventures, it was barely worth mentioning as a case at all. The children at Thong Pong middle school had become unhinged. A number of them had started to vibrate uncontrollably and speak in languages none of them knew. The local medical intern had seen nothing like it and requested assistance from the Ministry of Health. Stories in Vientiane spread like atomic bomb fallout and word very quickly found its way to the morgue where Dr. Siri and his staff had been sitting lifeless for several weeks. Almost immediately, Siri had set off to visit the school on his Triumph motorcycle with his faithful nurse Dtui and lab assistant Geung squashed together behind him. As religion and superstition had no place in the new regime, nobody voiced what everyone suspected: that the school was haunted. Both doctor and nurse feigned indifference when they arrived, even though both were keen to discover a supernatural source for the peculiar epidemic. Dtui was one of only a half-dozen people who knew of Siri’s dalliance with the beyond and she had no doubt in her mind that there was a malevolent ghost at play in the school.

According to the head teacher, every day after morning assembly, up to forty children would become zombie-like, ranting and drooling and shaking without control. At first she’d considered that this was merely a student prank to get out of studying Marxist-Leninist theory during the first period. A number of other ruses had been uncovered by the embedded political spies from the youth league. But this was too elaborate. Some of the children had even begun to utter obscenities in voices that, without question, did not belong to twelve- and thirteen-year-old children. To Siri it sounded very much like some mass shamanic hysteria. For some reason, the pliable minds of the children were being hijacked by wayward spirits. But there had to be some unseen intermediary to channel the demons.

“Tell me,” he said to the head teacher. “What normally happens during your morning assembly?”

“The usual ceremony, Doctor,” she replied. “The children line up in their grades, I make announcements, the flag is raised and the school band plays the new national anthem.”

The new socialist national anthem, coincidentally, had the same tune as the old royalist national anthem. Only the words were different. Although badly metered and slightly misleading, as far as Siri could ascertain there was nothing inherently evil hidden in the new lyrics. So he asked to look at the musical instruments.

The head teacher unlocked the music department footlocker and it was there that Siri found the culprit. He pulled out the exorcism tambourine with its tassels and bottle cap rattles and smiled at Nurse Dtui.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked the principal.

“A tambourine?” she guessed.

“A shamanic tambourine, Comrade, used in seances,” he said. “And fully loaded, I’d say. Any idea how it fell into your possession?”

“Someone from the regional education office brought it,” she recalled. “Said it had been confiscated from some royalist. Why?”