Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'She's a menace,' Squibb said.

He came to me at the consulate and sat, refusing to leave until I listened to the last of his stories. 'There's nothing I can do,' I said. 'She's an American — you can send her home.' 'I don't see any evidence of treachery here,' I said. 'She's sticking her nose in where she's not wanted! ' 'That's a matter for the Malaysians to decide.' 'They're as browned-off as I am,' Squibb said. He became solicitous about the Laruts; odd — he had always spoken of them as a nuisance, interrupting the smooth operation of his lumber mills with their poaching and thieving.

A day or two later, the District Commissioner dropped in. He was a dapper, soft-spoken Malay named Azhari, educated in London; he had a reputation as a sport, and his adventures with various women at the Club were well-known. There were 'Azhari stories'. He informed me politely that he was serving a deportation order on Doctor Smith.

'What for?'

'Interfering in the internal affairs of our country,' he said. I wondered if she had turned him down.

'You've been talking to Squibb,' I said. He smiled; he didn't deny it.

It was Azhari's assistant who cycled to the village with the deportation order; it was he who brought us the news of the marriage.

At the Club, people said to me, 'You Americans,' and this was the only time in my two years at the consulate there, that Ayer Hitam was ever mentioned in the world's press. It was so unusual, seeing the town in the paper, mentions of the Club, City Bar, the kedai where Doctor Smith had stayed, each one shabbily hallowed to a shrine by the coarse prose of journalists. They attempted a description of our heat, our trees, our roads, our way of life; struggling to make us unique they only succeeded in making us ridiculous (I was the 'youthful American Consul'). They spelled all our names wrong.

There were photographs of Doctor Smith and the chief. She wore a printed scarf across her breasts in a makeshift halter, her hair knotted, and around her neck a great wooden necklace. He had a headgear of parrot feathers, leather armlets on his biceps, and heavy earrings; he was a small man of perhaps fifty, with a worried furrowed face and tiny ears. In the photographs he looked cross-eyed, but that might have been his worry distorted in the strong light. She towered over him, triumphant, wistful. His arm was awkwardly crooked in hers. Around them were many blurred grinning faces of Larut well-wishers.

'We are very much in love,' she was reported to have said. 'We plan to have lots of children.' 'I know my duties as a Larut wife.'

It was not simple. The Laruts, idle and good-hearted, were polygamous. The chief had eight wives. Doctor Smith was the ninth.

This was the last we heard of her for several months.

Father Lefever from the mission came to see me one afternoon. He was circumspect; he asked permission to smoke and then set fire to a stinking cheroot. In the middle of casual remarks about the late monsoon he said, 'You must do something about that woman.'

'So what Squibb said about the dispensary is true.'

'I don't know what he said, but I think this woman could do a great deal of harm. The Laruts are a simple people — like children. They are not used to this attention.'

'I haven't heard anything lately, though Squibb said they're treating themselves with native medicine — they've stopped coming to your dispensary.'

The priest looked down. 'And to church.'

'That's their choice, one would guess.'

'No, it's her. I know it. Not the Laruts.'

'But she's a Larut,' I said.

Azhari was firmer. He came demanding information on her background, by which he meant her past. I guessed his motive to be resentment: a man he regarded as a savage had become his sexual competitor. But the whole affair was beginning to annoy me. I told him it was none of my business, her marriage had given her Malaysian citizenship, and as far as I was concerned she was no longer an American subject. I said, 'I don't see what all the fuss is about.'

'You don't know these chaps,' said Azhari. 'They are special people in this country. They don't pay taxes, they don't vote, they can go anywhere they wish. And since that woman came there's been a lot of loose talk.'

'Of what sort?'

'She's stirring them up,' he said. But he didn't elaborate. 'If you won't help me I'll go over your head to the ambassador.'

'Nothing would please me more.'

All this interest in the Laruts, who until then had only sold butterflies, and were famous because they did not use violence.

Late one night, there was a loud rapping at the front door. Ah Wing answered it and, seeing the visitors, said 'Sakais,' with undisguised contempt.

A boy and an old man, obviously the chief. They came in and sat on the floor, the old man quite close, the boy— who was about twelve or thirteen — some distance away. They must have walked all the way from the village; their legs were wet and they had bits of broken leaf in their hair. They had brought the smell of the jungle into the room. The chief looked troubled; he nodded to the boy.

The boy said, 'He wants you to take her away.'

'His wife?' The boy jerked his head forward. 'I can't do that. Only he can do that. Tell him he is her husband.'

This was translated. The old man winced, and the scars beside his eyes bunched to tiny florets. He said something quickly, a signalling grunt. They had rehearsed this.

'He has money,' the boy said. 'He will pay you.'

'Money doesn't matter,' I said. I felt sorry for the old man: what had happened? Bullying, I imagined, threats of violence from Doctor Smith; what pacifist tribe could contain an American academic, a woman with a camera? I said, 'There's a way. It's very simple — but he must be absolutely sure he never wants to see her again.'

'He is sure.' The boy didn't bother to translate. He knew his orders. He listened to what I said.

And it was so strange, the boy translating into the Larut language the process of divorce, the old man shaking his head, and the word for which there could not have been a Larut equivalent, recurring in the explanation as vuss… vuss. The old chief looked slightly shocked, and I was embarrassed; he was having this new glimpse of us, a revelation of a private cruelty of ours, a secret ritual that was available to him. At the end he wanted to give me money. I told him to save it for the lawyer.

The newspapers were interested; there was another influx of journalists from Singapore, but Doctor Smith left as soon as the chief engaged a lawyer, and this time she didn't pass through Ayer Hitam. The journalists caught up with her in Tokyo — or was it Los Angeles? I forget. The pity of it was that they took no notice of what followed, the Laruts' new village (and prosperity for the chief) in the remotest part of the state, the closing of the mission, and Squibb's timber operation which, it was said, made that little bush track into a road wide enough for huge timber trucks to collect the trees that were felled in and around the derelict village.

Everyone hated Shimura; but no one really knew him: Shimura was Japanese. He was not a member of the Club. About every two weeks he would stop one night in Ayer Hitam on his way to Singapore. He spent the day in Singapore and stopped again on the way back. Using us — which was how Evans put it — he was avoiding two nights at an expensive Singapore hotel. I say he wasn't in our Club; yet he had full use of the facilities, because he was a member of the Selangor Club in Kuala Lumpur and we had reciprocal privileges. Seeing his blue Toyota appear in the driveway, Evans always said, 'Here comes the freeloader.'

Squibb said, 'I say, there's a nip in the air.'

And Alec said, 'Shoot him down.'