Thirty-Three Teeth

The Daughter That Lived

Teacher Chanmee arrived at the morgue early in the afternoon. She was there on the bed of a pickup truck when Dtui got back from lunch.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“This is for you, Mrs.”

The hospital driver was keen to get a signature on his chit and offload the body.

“If you called me ‘Miss,’ I might think about it.”

Mr. Geung arrived just as she was signing. He wheeled out the morgue trolley and took the new guest to the examination room. As he was preparing to slot her into the freezer, Dtui came up behind him and looked at the body.

“See that, Mr. Geung? Those marks are almost identical to the ones on Auntie See.”

He continued to prepare the teacher for storage.

“Let … let’s w … wait for the Comrade Doctor.”

“Wouldn’t you trust me to cut her up, pal?”

“Dr. Siri is a … a doctor.”

“And what am I?”

“A girl.”

“What about when I come back from four years’ study in the Soviet Union with a coroner’s certificate? Will I still be just a girl then?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Then you … you … you’ll be an old girl.”

He kept his face straight for as long as was humanly possible, then snorted his laugh. She picked up the bone cleaver and chased him around the dissection table.

Dtui was the unbreakable one. She was the survivor of a litter of children who all left life before puberty. Had they lived, she would now have five brothers and five sisters. But they hadn’t been as lucky or as hardy or wily as she proved to be. She went beyond the point that had taken most of her siblings: the crossroads where childbirth and death meet. Without the assistance of immunization, her body had fought off all the usual childhood diseases, and the curse of accidents had passed over her roof to give grief to the next household.

Her mother, Manoluk, had invested eleven lives of love into her surviving daughter. When her soldier husband was lost in one more meaningless battle, she brought her to Vientiane. Here she cooked and cleaned and washed for strangers and pushed Dtui through school. It wasn’t until her daughter stood on the platform receiving her nursing diploma from the wife of the viceroy that she allowed herself to relax.

Cirrhosis took her almost immediately. It was as if the bacteria itself had waited for Dtui to graduate. Years of bad diet and poor living conditions took their toll on her tired body, and by her daughter’s third paycheck, Manoluk was already too weak to work.

The morgue position paid only a dollar a month more than the wards, but for Dtui every dollar counted. She didn’t particularly like the idea at first. She’d entered nursing to keep people alive, not put them in jars. But the morgue dollar and another from overtime paperwork helped pay for the drugs that kept her ma alive.

The previous coroner had been a kind man, a pencil-thin bachelor trained in France. He helped Dtui out whenever he could, but he was helping many others on his modest salary and she didn’t like to ask for more. He had escaped across the river with all the others, not knowing what punishment his sophisticated family name might bring down upon him.

The Pathet Lao takeover could have been a disaster for Manoluk, had Dtui missed any paychecks. Nobody was sure whether they’d keep their jobs in the new regime, or be paid, or be sent for re-education. Dtui and Geung went to the morgue every day as usual and mopped and dusted and whacked cockroaches, waiting for some news of their fate. But in the beginning it turned out that the new system worked in their favor. The government made a demonstrative point of helping the disadvantaged. Although money became scarcer and virtually disappeared after two drastic devaluations, Dtui was able to stock up on rice and canned supplies.

That’s how things still were. Manoluk had her better and worse days. Mostly she just lay and read. Like the mysterious monk had predicted, ma was having a better year. Her cirrhosis wasn’t getting any worse, but she still needed medical attention that wasn’t available in Laos. If Dtui got the posting to the Soviet Bloc, she could live dirt-cheap and send the living allowance back. It was double her salary. Girls she knew were doing just that.

She could dream of finding a wealthy man to marry and end all their suffering, but although the Lord had blessed her with intelligence and kindness, He hadn’t made her slender or pretty enough, so their future was in her hands.

She sat in the dim glow of the desk lamp staring at the molds in front of her on the desk. She was wearing her Chinese overalls and a thin layer of red dust. Earlier, at the hospital garden allotment, she’d been assigned to rescue as many gaaw turnips as she could from the impenetrable crust of the back lots. Those that hadn’t been baked by the heat had become inedible fossils. She should have gone straight home to see how Manoluk was doing, but instead she’d become fascinated by this case. She’d made agar casts of the teethmarks on teacher Chanmee and was comparing them with the two other sets. Whatever had savaged the teacher had also bitten deep into the throat of Auntie See. There was no doubt about it.

Although the front morgue door was open, she heard a knock on the frame outside. She called out: “Who is it?”

“Civilai.”

“Come in, Comrade.”

Civilai walked through the dark vestibule and into the office.

“Hello, Dtui. Siri not here?”

“He’s not back yet.”

“Ah, those Luang Prabang girls.”

“He sent a message this afternoon that he’s trying to get a flight. There’s some problem with his paperwork.”

“You surprise me.”

“They say he can’t get a laissez passer out of Luang Prabang because he didn’t have one to get in. So, officially he shouldn’t be there.”

“Ridiculous. This was official business.”

“It was, but the doc didn’t come back when he was supposed to. He missed his helicopter ride. I think he upset the local governor as well.”

“He never gets too old to break the rules, does he? I’m convinced if he weren’t the national coroner, he’d be in prison.”

Dtui sucked air through her clenched teeth.

“What is it?”

“He might end up in prison anyway.”

Civilai shook his head and went to sit at the doctor’s desk. “What’s the old dog done now?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. But two uniformed policemen have been here twice looking for him. They say they have a warrant.”

“What for?”

“His arrest.” “What on earth do they think he’s done?”

“They wouldn’t tell me.”

“I’ll get Phosy to look into it. We can’t have our only forensic surgeon locked up. I’ll see what I can do about his travel pass, too.”

“Thanks, Comrade.”

He looked around at the office. “Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Teeth marks.”

“Aha.”

He carried his chair over to her desk and looked at the clear gray molds. He poked a finger into the side.

“This looks like …”

“It is.”

“Very ingenious. Did you think of it?”

“I was just about to, but Siri got there first. A second case came in today with identical marks to those on the old lady. We think it’s a bear.”

“In Vientiane?”

“One escaped from the garden of the Lan Xang.”

“Not that old dishrag? It hardly seemed alive. But I bet it had a chip on its shoulder. Now I see why Siri had me hunting for an animal expert.”

“Did you find one?”

“I certainly did. He apparently knows something about bears, too.”

“Good. I can’t wait for Siri to get back and sort this all out.”

Civilai looked at her through his thick glasses. “Well, don’t then.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t wait.”

“You mean I …?”

“Siri always says you’re five times smarter than he is, not that that’s so difficult. But you seem like a very able young lady. I’ll arrange the paperwork, and you can go talk to the fellow.” Dtui’s smile surpassed the glow from the lamp. “If you think you’re up to it.”

“You bet your red flag I am, Uncle.”

“Good. That’s settled then.”

“What do I need paperwork for?”

“You can’t just waltz up and start chatting to foreigners, you know.”

“He’s foreign?”

“Russian. Like the vodka.”

“Oh.”

The pervading atmosphere of socialist xenophobia in and around Vientiane had added to the culture of mistrust. Although there were very few actual spies, there were enough imagined ones to keep everyone on their toes. The Lao didn’t dare go up to a foreigner in the street, because they didn’t know who might be watching or what they might be thinking about the relationship.

The remaining foreign teachers or long-term residents found themselves with fewer and fewer friends the longer they stayed. Maids and gardeners and drivers had to report weekly to the Department of Foreign Affairs. They reported car registration numbers, overheard conversations, and names of suspicious visitors. It was frightening to imagine such power in the hands of a maid.

Although the politburo was keen to accept foreign aid from the Soviets and Vietnamese and to invite their experts to act as advisers, they didn’t actually want too much mixing with the common people. So it was that Dtui spent a sleepless night worrying about her date with the foreign devil on the following morn.

She’d never spoken to a white man before.