Anarchy and the Old Dogs

The Devil ’s Vagina

Siri sloshed barefoot through the muddy streets, his old leather sandals in his hands. Twice he’d skidded and landed on his backside, laughing like a fool. The rain fell in a mist so fine and warm it was like walking into a long sneeze. It wasn’t a tropical storm by any stretch of the imagination and it wouldn’t help the farmers to any great extent, but it certainly felt good to be rained on again. Everything seemed to be going splendidly.

The misty downpour had begun as he sat drinking Lao cocktails (half rice whisky and the other half rice whisky) with Daeng at her humble wooden lean-to. They saw the rain as an omen, a sign that things were going to get better for their country. They’d sat on the front porch that night and talked about the missing years when Siri had fled to Vietnam with Boua. The last time he and Daeng had seen each other was in the sports stadium in Savanaketh on October 12, 1945. It was a date that neither of them was likely to forget, probably the happiest day the Lao had ever known.

The Japanese occupation forces had demonstrated that an Asian nation could match the once invincible West. This created a belief in the Lao that they could and should be running their own affairs. The French oppressor, preoccupied with events in Europe, had let its control of the colonies slip, and on that day in Savanaketh stadium, the governor had stood on the halfway line in the center of the football field and shouted into a wobbly microphone. On that day, Laos had been proclaimed an independent nation with its own national assembly. The cheers could be heard in Paris. There was an impromptu parade and an orchestra of khen pipes, gongs, and drums. Householders put up decorations and waved the new Lao flag. The celebrations went on far into the following day.

In fact, the celebrations had lasted almost as long as the independence. Following their rout by the Japanese, the French troops had regrouped, were rearmed by the Americans, and set about reclaiming their colony. The Free Lao movement, the Lao Issara, had suffered horrific reprisals for its audacity. There were massacres and witch hunts and Siri and Boua became fugitives. They escaped from Champasak and fought with a number of scattered Free Lao resistance groups before finding their way to Vietnam and a completely different type of insurgency.

Daeng had stayed in the south of Laos, and continued to sell her noodles by day. At night she coordinated covert Lao Issara operations to disrupt the French occupation. She was the agent they code-named Fleur-de-Lis, and, to the day the invaders scurried back to France with their tails between their legs, her identity had never been discovered. Siri considered her more of a national hero than a lot of the speech givers and hand shakers in Vientiane, and he told her so.

How drunk they became, these two old revolutionaries talking about their victories and defeats, recalling the names of their old allies. And, at the point when they could barely feel their faces, just as Siri was about to begin the long stagger back to his hotel, Daeng had surprised him once more with her resourcefulness.

“Oh, by the way,” she said. Siri had climbed to his feet using the front beam of the porch. Daeng had used Siri to pull herself up. She liked the way rice whisky dealt with arthritis. “I forgot the most important thing.”

“What could be more important than reviving the Free Lao?” Siri asked.

“I think I might have found your vagina.”

They were both at a giggly stage and it took a while for them to calm their respective convulsions.

“Of course, if you aren’t going to take it seriously…”

“No,” he slurred. “I’m all right. Tell me.”

“Well, I’d doubted it could be the name of a person or a place so I went for some natural phenomenon. I thought perhaps it was some rock formation or a gully. You know what these country folk are like. The people I asked were wise elders, sons and daughters of the land. They knew all the local myths and legends. And, to my amazement, one old fellow knew right off what I was talking about. Your Devil’s Vagina isn’t a rock formation at all. It’s a tree.”

Siri sat down again, felling Daeng at the same time.

“You don’t say.”

“Well, yes I do,” she said. As they were back on the straw matting and the bottles were still there, she filled his glass for the umpteenth time and told him the legend.

“It’s all about a Khmer princess. It seems she’d been promised to a king who was a drinking buddy of her daddy’s while she was still in the womb. I’m sure worse deals have been made in bars but I can’t think of any right off. The girl grew up to be a real looker and the date of her betrothal arrived. Naturally, as you can testify, the ravages of many years of drinking had left her fiancй saggy and bewrinkled, not to mention extremely old, and the princess was beside herself with grief.”

“There were two of her?”

“What? Look, pay attention or I won’t tell you the punch line. There was just the one princess, and the night before the wedding she climbed out a palace window and ran off to the jungle. She knew there was only one way to protect her maidenhead, so deep in the forest she ripped off her-”

“Oh, don’t!”

“Yes, and threw it high into a nearby tree. In this way she was able to return to the palace asexual and totally unmarriageable. As if things weren’t bad enough, she was banished from the kingdom and forced to fend for herself. Being vaginaless-and thus no longer possessing the soul of a woman-she soon became a devil, and died of old age in a hostel for homeless devils. Actually, I just made that last part up, but good story, eh?”

Siri was blearily silent for a few moments. Finally, he looked up and said, “Women’s souls are in their vaginas?”

“Siri, it doesn’t matter where we keep our souls. The point is-are you going to remember all this tomorrow?” He nodded solemnly. “The point is, the Devil’s Vagina is the name of a tree, a real tree.”

“Where does it grow?”

“Mostly around Burirum near the Khmer border.”

“That’s Thailand.”

“A plus for geography. But the old fellow said it grows here and there all the way up to the Lao border. He said he’s never actually seen one in Laos.”

“No doubt the Department of Culture burned them all down for having a rude name, corrupting our youth. Why on earth would these conspirators sign their letters with the name of a Thai tree?”

“No idea. But there’s more.”

“Thank heaven.”

“The envelope.”

“I showed you the envelope?”

“It was on the table the first day you were here. I couldn’t help but notice one of the postmarks.”

“What about it?”

“It was old. They changed that puncher, or whatever it’s called, six or seven months ago. They use a round impression now, not a square one.”

“Six months old? How can that be?” Siri wasn’t exactly sober now but he was focused.

“That’s what I wondered. So I asked the old postmaster. He comes calling from time to time.”

“I bet he does.”

“He told me he’d seen that decommissioned postmark used before.” “Who by?”

“People in the refugee camps across the border. They want to get in touch with friends and family over here. But they can’t just write letters with a Thai stamp and mail it. You know all the letters from outside the country go through the national directorate. It might take six months for a letter to reach its destination and by then it’s snipped to confetti and unreadable. So they have a service.”

“What kind?”

“They write their letters in the camps, buy actual Lao stamps there, and get them canceled with these unused Lao impressions to suggest they were posted in Pakse. They bring the letters to the border, smuggle them across, and put them on the buses to Vientiane. That’s the easy part. A few dollars to the driver to take on one more sack.”

“Your postmaster seems to know a lot about all this.”

“Perhaps that explains why he’s unemployed.”

“Well, this is astounding.” Siri threw back his cocktail and poured two new ones. The final bottle was empty now. “This explains everything. The coup’s being plotted by the old Royalists in a camp on the Thai side, probably in Ubon. It’s the closest. They contact their agents around the country by letter. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all funded with Thai and American money. You solved the puzzle. You’re incredible, Daeng.”

He leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek and she pulled back. Even on the wrong side of sixty, etiquette is still etiquette. She stared at him with a disappointed look and started to hum the anthem of the Lao Issara.

“So,” she said, at the end of the first verse. “Conspirators? There’s a coup planned? Feel like telling me about it?”

At last, Siri dreamed that night. It wasn’t his usual vividly realistic production. Instead it was more pastel and slightly out of focus. But that might have been due to the fact that he was underwater. He was picking his way-on foot- along the bed of a fast-flowing river. He wondered why he was walking and assumed it had to be because he couldn’t swim. Even dreams had to be anchored in reality. He looked up and could see the harsh sun in a cloudless sky high above the surface of the water. On either side of him, two giant catfish floated patiently, like bodyguards.

At one point, they were overtaken by a mermaid. She looked back and smiled at Siri, who was so occupied with admiring her magnificent globular breasts that he almost failed to notice the child riding on her back. The boy’s arms were hooked around her slender neck. It was Sing, healthy and alive and happy as a ten-year-old on a fairground ride. He and his mermaid raced ahead and merged into the murky water. Other mermaids overtook Siri, each with a person on her back, each speeding ahead into the gloomy distance while Siri plodded along with his corpulent guard of honor.

When he awoke, the sheet beneath him was uncomfortably damp.

The breakfast area in the Pakse Hotel was an excellent place to meet people and talk about the day’s plans. It wasn’t, however, somewhere you’d want to have breakfast. The coffee was road tar, the noodles were warm shoelaces, and the menu went rapidly downhill from there. Civilai sat with a cup of weak Chinese tea, tapping his fingers on the table-top. He saw Siri descending the staircase like a man astounded by the invention of steps. Like Civilai, he was wearing dark glasses. The expression “the blind leading the blind” entered the politburo man’s mind. Siri headed unsteadily toward the front desk.

“Over here, cousin,” Civilai shouted.

Siri obviously hadn’t mastered his new eyeglasses because he engaged and temporarily waltzed with a concrete pillar before finding the table.

“Are you joining me in incognito today?” Civilai asked.

“It’s the daylight,” Siri said. “When I woke up I felt like I’d landed my spaceship on the surface of the sun. Couldn’t see a damned thing. It is particularly glary today, isn’t it?”

“Have a few drinks last night, did we?”

“Older brother, you know me, just a small aperitif before dinner.”

“Really? Then why did you wake up so late?”

“I’m a slow sleeper.”

“Come on. What time did you get in?”

“I had to wake up the watchman to open the door. I almost came directly to your room.”

“I’m a married man.”

“You’ll see me in a completely different light when I tell you what I found out.”

“I doubt that, but I’m desperate enough to believe anything. Tell!”

Before Siri could begin, the cook came over and asked if they were ready for breakfast. To Civilai’s disappointment, Siri ordered them fried eggs, bread, and coffee.

“We’re going to need something solid inside us today,” Siri told him.

“Well, we’re in the wrong place for that. How did your visit to the fishing village turn out?”

“Oh, heck. How could I have forgotten that? It was amazing. The whole community was mourning for the boy. I’ve never seen anything like it: marvelous spirit, lovely people. Poor as river mud yet devoted to each other. Remember the way country life used to be? No, perhaps you don’t. Of course, I’d arrived there thinking the mother was overreacting. A drowned child is a drowned child. But once I saw the body I knew she was right. Something very abnormal had happened to that boy.”

“How so?”

“Well, first, yes, he had indications of a drowning: some froth in the bronchi, water in the lungs. Nothing conclusive really, as he’d been in the water for so long. It was the other inconsistencies that made it so odd. I don’t really know how to describe it. It was as if there were two parts to him. As if the maceration of the bottom half of his body had happened faster than that of the top half.”

“That doesn’t sound very logical, Siri.”

“I know. I immediately understood why the river people were unhinged by the sight. His arms and face were covered in mosquito bites but there were none on his legs. Then there were the splinters.”

“Wood splinters?”

“Yes. There were these enormous splinters, about ten of them, in his back and the backs of his legs. I can’t imagine how they got there.”

The cook appeared and plonked down two plates and a basket of gray bread in front of the guests. The eggs seemed to float like flat tropical fish in pools of grease.

“Coffee’s coming,” the cook said. To Civilai’s ears, it sounded like a threat. He pushed his plate away and turned to Siri.

“Tell me, didn’t this boy wash up in Muang Khong or somewhere?”

“Sri Pun Don.”

“All right. So what? A hundred miles from his home after I don’t know how many hours of being thrashed about by the river. Surely he would have brushed against submerged logs, tree trunks?”

“I thought of that,” said Siri, spooning the egg goop into his mouth as if it were food. “So had the family. But think about it. The flow of the Mekhong hasn’t yet built up any pace. Logs that have been submerged for months, years? They’re soft wood already. You need dry timber to get splinters. And if the damage was caused by the river, surely the splinters would be all over, not just on his back.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. Obviously, our priority here is the fact that our country may soon be plunged into anarchy. Nonetheless, I’ve promised the mother I’ll do a little rooting around. The community gave me half a dozen mud carp for my troubles.”

“I love mud carp.”

“Me, too. That’s why Daeng and I ate them all last night, sorry. As I say, we have bigger fish to fry, and, to that end, we’ve made a breakthrough.”

Civilai had managed to spear his fried egg with his fork and was holding it above the plate, watching the grease drip. “We have?”

Siri told him everything: the Devil’s Vagina tree, the refugee camp connection, the mail service. Yet even as he was telling it, he realized the story lacked the same certainty it had held the previous night. Civilai echoed his thoughts.

“Your friend Daeng did a good job. But don’t you think you might be a little too desperate to make a link between all these spare parts? Myths and legends and postal networks don’t necessarily spell out a camp-based insurgency, Siri.”

“I know, but we’ve been here almost a week. Do we have anything better? Has all your clandestine networking actually turned anything else up? Be honest now. I’ve seen how frustrated you’re getting. You haven’t achieved much, have you?”

“Not a lot.”

“Then this is better than nothing. What do we have to lose?”

Civilai gave up on his egg and let it splash back onto the dish.

“Nothing at all. Let’s go with it. I’ll get in touch with my contacts in Vientiane and see what they can dig up. I imagine we have people placed in all the camps keeping an eye on things.”

“Spies, you mean?”

“Observers. They’d know if there was a major plot being arranged. Lots of gossip in the camps. Don’t forget we have to be careful who we share this with. I think your friend Daeng should be the end of the grapevine.”

“Well…”

“What?”

“Daeng and Phosy.”

“How on earth could you get word to Phosy between last night and now? You’ve only just crawled out of bed for heaven’s sake.”

“I was excited. I wrote him a note. Daeng said she could have it on the 6 a.m. bus to Vientiane. She knows the conductor. She was going to get him to drop it off at the morgue when he arrived.”

“The morgue? So Dtui’s in the loop as well.”

“Come on, old brother, if we can’t trust them, who can we trust? They’ve been involved in this from the beginning.”

“It’s not their reliability I’m concerned about. It’s their safety. This is a nasty situation, and they have a not-unwarranted reputation for acting recklessly. Let’s just hope they don’t do anything silly.”