Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

The shaman, already one or two paces closer to Nirvana than most, was quick to enter his trance. His wife lowered the hood over his head and Dtui wondered how he was going to see what he was doing. But he didn’t need his eyes. For the next few moments, all his movements would be guided by some nonbeing. Siri had seen mediums thrown across the room by the spirits that possessed them at this stage. He’d seen shamans hit themselves violently with their own fists or rise into the air. But there were no such histrionics for this gentleman. His visiting spirit seemed as lethargic as its host.

He rose to his feet as smoothly as smoke rising from a mosquito coil and walked once around the spectators. His feel seemed barely to touch the ground. He sighed and knelt by the body of Panoy, who still muttered in a stranger’s voice. She lay on a straw litter parallel to that of Mrs. Nuts. He leaned down at her head, cupped his hand around her ear, and began to whisper. Siri knew by this stage that the shaman would need no help. All was under control. After two or three minutes, the little girl’s body jerked slightly. Only one person in the audience saw what happened next. The spirit of Mrs. Nuts rose from the girl’s body, looked around the room, then crossed over to her own. She woke the spirit of the little girl, who slept in her place and watched as she stumbled sleepily back to her own body. Mrs. Nuts then curled up in her old carcass, oblivious of the smell. It was that simple. Like changing beds in the middle of the night.

Little Panoy’s eyes opened. She looked at the threads that lay across her body like spiders’ webs, then noticed the red-hooded shape beside her. She jerked away and, like any normal four-year-old, began to wail. Dtui rushed to comfort her, but none of this noise or movement had any effect on the shaman, who was by now in a deep sleep.

Later, Dtui and Siri and their guide took tea beneath a straw canopy. The sun was harsh but a breeze skimmed across the top of the knoll. Siri stared at the pretty girl who’d brought them the cups and was now sitting beneath the leaves of a banana tree. There was something about her that drew him to her.

Dtui’s voice pulled him from his reverie. “Of course, it was interesting. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But I have to say I was expecting something more-more violent. You know? Blood and screaming and people going crazy.”

“That does occasionally happen,” Siri told her. “This was the soporific version.”

“When will the shaman fellow wake up?”

“Judging from his normal relationship with consciousness, I’d say sometime around November.”

“So we should get going.”

“Hold on a while.”

“What for?”

“There’s something else here.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a connection. There’s always a connection. I feel we shouldn’t leave just yet.”

“You’re the boss. I’ll go see how Panoy’s doing.” Dtui clambered to her feet and walked over to the hut where the little girl was sleeping off her ordeal. Siri sipped his tea and smiled at the teenager. Her features were finer than those of the other women of the village and her skin darker.

“Little sister,” he called over to her. She smiled shyly. “Where are you from?”

“From Vietnam, uncle.”

“You’re montagnard, aren’t you?”

She seemed pleased that he’d not used the derogatory word moi. “My mother’s Hmong; my father’s montagnard. He came here with his family when the Vietminh started to…” She stopped herself.

“I’m Lao, not Vietnamese,” he told her.

“My father’s people had sided with the French colonists against the communists. When the war was lost, the Vietnamese made them suffer for it.”

“There can’t be many montagnards here in Huaphan.”

“There are a few.”

“Tell me about them.”

She appeared to be delighted that the old Lao doctor was showing an interest in her people. She sat beside Siri and told him about one young man who was portering for the military and about a family she knew who were working on the Vietnamese roads, and on she went. There was an amazing grapevine. In spite of her isolation here, she could reel off the details of dozens of the expatriates from the Central Highlands. At last she got to one that pricked Siri’s interest.

“Then there’s H’Loi,” she continued. “She’s married to a Lao. She used to be the maid of a big Vietnamese soldier who died. Then there’s…”

There it was: the connection. Siri interrupted her gossip. “Do you know what happened to the family H’Loi worked for?”

“The soldier’s family, you mean? No, uncle. All I know is she found herself stuck here without a job. But she got lucky and caught a local chap.”

“Do you have any idea where they live?”

“Of course.”

“Is it far?”

“About half an hour. Do you want to go there? I can show you.”

Siri sent Dtui back to the guesthouse with Panoy and the guide. She had been anxious to talk to him about another pressing issue, but she decided it could wait. He had a feeling it was something serious and promised he’d return as soon as he could. He set off across the rolling hills at the montagnard girl’s heels. Very few hikers in Huaphan strayed from well-trodden paths for good reason. In fact, even the well-trodden paths were known to explode from time to time.

At a village so simple it made the previous hamlet look like Manhattan, they met H’Loi. She was a plain, jolly girl in her thirties who lived with an extremely ugly Lao man much older than she was. The marriage had given her legal status. Necessity, for the victimized montagnards, was the mother of invention. The woman had already been fluent in French and Vietnamese as well as two local dialects. Since her marriage, she’d mastered Lao. In any other society she’d be a highly sought-after personal assistant or interpreter. In this village she made babies and cooked. She knew there was no point in arguing with her fate.

She sat in her simple house with Siri and was happy to discuss her time with the colonel and his family. She’d been recruited by the colonel’s wife when they were at their previous posting in Ban Methuot in Vietnam’s central highlands. It wasn’t as if she’d had any choice. She was lucky to have any kind of work at all. She’d made the thousand-mile journey to Huaphan with them for their next posting. Although the wife could be something of an ogre, the daughter, Hong Lan, was sweet and, in H’Loi’s charming phraseology, as smart as a bath full of judges. Apart from being maid, cook, and tutor, H’Loi had also been the girl’s companion. They became close.

When Hong Lan fell sick, H’Loi had gone to the hospital every day. Often she stayed overnight. Hong Lan said it was just a little stomach pain, but the doctor had confided once that it was more serious than that. She had to have two operations to make things right. The girl was in the Kilometer 8 Hospital for over a month, recovering. Then, one day, the mother turned up out of the blue and had her transferred to a military hospital just outside Xam Dtai. That had been too far for H’Loi to travel every day so she hadn’t seen Hong Lan until the girl returned home.

Hong Lan hadn’t been herself after that. She was still very weak, but everyone said the operation had been a success and it wouldn’t be long before she was well again. But H’Loi wasn’t so sure. All those positive words didn’t seem to change Hong Lan’s condition one little bit. They talked a lot in those days. Once, the girl confided that she’d fallen in love during her stay at Kilometer 8. That came as something of a shock to H’Loi because she’d never suspected anything of the sort.