Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Siri was suddenly shocked to find himself standing outside his mosquito net. He was shuddering, clad only in his undershorts: a slightly chewy smorgasbord for carnivorous insects. He had no idea why he’d left the sanctuary of the mesh or why he was standing there. Now light from a full moon oozed through the curtains, and he saw that in the vacant bed on the far side of his room, a child lay. She was about four years old and malnourished. When Siri walked over to her she looked up at him.

“When did you get here, darling?” he asked. “Why don’t you have a mosquito net?”

She smiled. When she spoke, her voice seemed older than her apparent age. “I don’t have much time, uncle.”

“What can I do?”

“Take notice of what you see,” she said.

There was a rumbling sound and the ceiling came crashing down on their heads. The floor beneath them gave way and they tumbled slowly downward like leaves falling from a tree. A cockerel joined them in their descent. It looked into Siri’s eyes and crowed hoarsely.

A pale light was seeping in through the nylon curtain. Above Siri’s head, the corpses of a dozen flying beetles lay bottoms up on the top of the netting. Although the spirits had been known to spring trick endings on him, this second awakening had a feel of reality about it. The falling chicken crowed again and was joined by a howling dog. From somewhere close, the sound of a klooee, a green bamboo flute, began. It was a simple tune, executed with technical accuracy but with little heart. As he listened, he squirmed around under the quilt to discover which of his bones and muscles would ache that day. He had no say in this. He often overexerted himself in his dreams and suffered for it the next morning. But today, even as he stood, everything seemed to work fine.

He walked over to the spare bed and looked at the unruffled quilt that covered it. For no logical reason he could think of, he pulled it back. There was nothing there. Of course. This was real life. What did he expect? He was in the process of putting it back when he squashed something beneath his bare foot. He heard the squelch and wondered whether he might have put the nonsticking lizard out of its misery, but it was just a berry. It had fallen from the dish of fruit on the table. It was a small red currant. He’d seen its kind before but couldn’t put a name to it. A few years earlier he would have thrown it out. But everything that happened these days seemed to have relevance to some other thing. There were no coincidences. “Take notice of what you see.” He wrapped the berry in a sheet of tissue from the roll on the table and put it into his bag.

Mr. Geung had heard of Luang Prabang and Dr. Siri’s adventures there from the doctor himself. It was a place, like Paris, like Mrs. Kit’s Broom and Brush Factory, like the moon. These were all only words to Geung. Visiting them was unthinkable and unnecessary. He had his own world and had no need to visit any other. So, when the convoy arrived in Luang Prabang province, he was neither impressed nor glad to be there. The journey had been a bone jarring ordeal for all of them, but especially for Geung.

Hopelessness sat heavily upon him. As he was unable to cope with all the new information he was being exposed to, he sat where he’d been put, on the wooden bench, and stared, bemused, at the passing scenery, a mountainous vista like nothing he’d ever seen in his limited life.

Whenever the truck stopped and the soldiers all climbed down to stretch their aching muscles, Geung followed them off into the forest to relieve himself. He’d become so docile and uncommunicative that the soldiers had begun to treat him more like a kit bag than a prisoner. He’d off-load himself from the truck and they’d stand him in a corner. They’d lead him to the mess tent or to the bunks. Wherever they put him, they knew that’s where he’d be if they needed him. There was so little thought invested in him that by the time they reached the barracks at Xieng Ngeun, he’d been totally forgotten.

The sergeant ran up the wooden steps and knocked on the frame of the open door to the officers’ rec room. He walked straight in and found his superior officer reading the Huksat Lao newsletter.

“Captain Ouan, sir?”

“What is it?”

“The retarded man.”

“What about him?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“We… we don’t actually know, sir. When the trucks arrived here, he wasn’t on any of them.”

The captain threw down his paper. “You were supposed to be keeping an eye on him.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. He was in the habit of climbing up onto any truck he felt like. We got used to him just being there somewhere.”

“Oh, you did, did you? When was the last time anyone saw him?”

“Just before Xieng Ngeun. We stopped to shoot rabbits.”

The captain sighed. “Well, he isn’t likely to go far, is he, Corporal? Take a jeep back and find him.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted but paused before leaving. “Actually, it’s ‘sergeant,’ sir.”

“Not anymore it’s not.”

The old Pathet Lao driver was at Siri’s disposal for as long as he was needed. The jeep pulled up in front of the new regional hospital in Xam Neua at 8:00 A.M. Four years earlier, this capital of Huaphan province had been a pile of rubble and splinters. Not a house had remained standing after a dozen years of blitz. The noncombatant Air America forward air controllers had guided in the bombers and choreographed the destruction, but it was mostly Lao and Hmong pilots with their fingers on the buttons. It was a symbolic gesture. The civilian inhabitants had fled long before the city was flattened.

But now a new city was taking shape with pretentious boulevards as wide as the Champs-Elysйes and grand plans for another communist show town. The hospital was a temporary field of whitewashed barracks while the staff all waited for a move to a more splendid home. The front office housed the administrators, and Siri and Dtui found Dr. Santiago buried behind a rockery of files and books. He was a skinny man around Siri’s age with a hairstyle modeled on that of Albert Einstein. He wore porthole spectacles with glass as thick as the bottoms of gin bottles. A cigarette burned in an ashtray beside him and he seemed to hover there in its smoke. Obviously, he was used to people walking in and out of his office because he didn’t look up from his work when the visitors arrived.

“Dr. Santiago?” Siri said when he spotted him through the canyons of paper.

“Da?” The old Cuban still pored over his lists. Siri wasn’t surprised to hear him speak Russian. After almost ten years as head of foreign medical aid in Huaphan, Santiago still refused pointedly to learn Lao or Vietnamese. He spoke Spanish, English, and Russian fluently and had reached an age when he considered himself sufficiently full of languages. He hadn’t asked to come to Laos, or to work with the Vietnamese, whom he disliked. He certainly wasn’t about to make an attempt to cross the cultural divide. He was the expert, and everyone had to make the effort to communicate with him. All in all, not unlike Siri, he was a stubborn but engaging old coot.

“Dosvidanya,” Siri said. It was his only Russian word and he wasn’t actually sure what it meant.

Santiago finally looked up and squinted through his glasses. It seemed to take him a few moments either to focus or to place his old friend in his memory. “Dr. Siri? Is that you?” he asked in English. He jumped up from his chair and ran around the desk to embrace a respected colleague. They smiled and laughed a lot as they hugged, but Dtui noticed they weren’t actually conversing. On the journey, Siri had told her that he’d worked with Santiago, on and off, for five years without the benefit of a common language. Siri spoke French and Vietnamese quite fluently but he, too, had reached his linguistic quota. When there was no English/Lao interpreter available, the two had merely observed one another’s surgical skills and socialized with the aid of diagrams and mime. It had been such a peculiarly pleasant relationship, Siri wondered whether a common language might have spoiled it in some way.