“Why do we make this if it is no good?” Tien asked.
“Sometimes when something is bad, it can be good,” he said. “You understand?”
Tien rolled his head slowly from one shoulder to the other, an ambiguous gesture of comprehension. “And when something is good, it can be bad,” he said.
Jean-Baptiste laughed. “Yes, Tien, that is probably more the truth of it.”
• • •
TOWARD THE END of the war, the Japanese, sensing their own demise, briefly turned over power in Cambodia and Vietnam to local governments. Cambodia became “Kampuchea” and roman lettering was abandoned for Khmer script. The arrangement lasted less than a year, however, before the French colons finally managed to reestablish control of the peninsula. Yet the damage was already done. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh, having tasted independence, and now backed by a steady stream of armaments from China and the Soviet Union, refused to fall back into imperialisme as usual, and so another war began. Grenades were thrown into movie theaters, roads attacked at night, garrisons shelled from the safety of the jungle. The slow noose began to tighten. All wars end badly, but with this war there could be no doubt of its outcome.
The bend in the river persisted. The news whispered up the Mekong was never good, but the remoteness of their location, a result of Henri’s reckless imagination, now insulated them from all conflicts. King Sihanouk was busy negotiating Cambodia’s independence from France and had largely managed to avoid becoming embroiled in the war between the Communist and colonial forces by using a shifting veil of neutrality that had left Phnom Penh’s French population in limbo. There had been whispers of insurgencies — one plantation upstream in Phumi Hang Savat was razed, its owners stabbed and disemboweled, their kidneys reportedly eaten raw by members of the guerrilla army Khmer Issarak.11 This story, told often and in graphic detail, did much to hasten the shuttering of homes along the river as families retreated to the relative safety of Saigon, where they would dream often of the land they had abandoned in the heart of the colony. Once considered too docile to pose any real problems to remote colonial rule, the Cambodians, now led by their young and crafty king, were embracing a new age of self-government. Abroad, potent seeds of malcontent were also being sown: a nascent Khmer Communist movement incubated in Paris, where a handful of Khmer students — including the soft-spoken Saloth Sar, who would later assume the nom de guerre Pol Pot — were beginning to debate how best to graft Marxism onto the slippery landscape of their homeland.
Yet even in this volatile climate of the early 1950s, as the Cold War giants began to take sides in Southeast Asia, as Sihanouk navigated a perilous transition to monarchical rule, as the floods came and went, when everything and nothing seemed possible, Jean-Baptiste did not budge. Occasionally they could hear the rumble of guns in the far distance, and once an Issarak rebel group moved through the plantation in the night and stole some chickens, but in general, the violence did not pierce the sheltered confines of their universe. It was as if that idle bend in the river provided them with an invisible, protective force field.
Still, Jean-Baptiste was not blind to the danger that lurked all around them, and at his mother’s prompting, he broke the silence of the severed telegraph by buying a wireless radio transceiver that he could use to contact Phnom Penh in an emergency, though if they were to be attacked, it was clear no radio would ever save them.
When Raouf the Algerian caretaker left to fight for his homeland in North Africa, Jean-Baptiste brought in Capitaine Claude Renoit to manage the business — or what remained of it. Capitaine Renoit was a war veteran with a bum leg. He meant well but lacked any sense of urgency when it came to the whole enterprise of rubber, and this suited Jean-Baptiste just fine. Operations became haphazard, shipments irregular. Tien and the men still bled the trees and loaded the stacks of latex onto barges, but it was all done out of tradition and not necessity. The center was no longer holding. Maybe the center had never held.
Eugenia, whose health had begun to decline but whose energy had not, spent her days painting the same Paphiopedilum appletonianum orchid plant. She had set up her easel and paints in the old telegraph room, and though Jean-Baptiste thought it ridiculous that she would squeeze herself into the smallest room in the house when they had so much space at their disposal, Eugenia claimed the tightness of the quarters gave her an urgency that she translated onto the canvas. She was prolific in her output: some days she would produce three or four paintings of the flower, all wildly different, all exactly the same. The paintings began accumulating in the warehouse, next to the racks of latex — shelves and shelves of the same blossom, repeated in every imaginable color, its two sagittal petals outstretched in greeting or malice, depending upon the canvas. When he gave a tour of the plantation to the rare visitor, Jean-Baptiste liked to joke to their guests that they were in the business of modern art making, merely amusing themselves now and then with some light rubber production. This was not far from the truth. More than one visitor left with a surreal orchid rendition tucked beneath his arm — whether out of guilt, appreciation, or morbid fascination, it was never clear.
• • •
“I’LL NEED A VAT of rubber,” Jean-Baptiste informed the Capitaine one day. “About seventy-five liters.”
“Seventy-five? That will take a couple of days. . weeks, maybe.”
“Is this not a rubber plantation? Are we not supposed to have rubber in bountiful supply?”
“Well, yes. .” Renoit seemed embarrassed. “We’ll see what we can scare up. May I ask what you will be using it for?”
“To make a rubber mold.”
“Of what?”
“Of myself,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I’m making a dummy. For medical purposes.”
The first rubber mannequins to emerge were white, grotesque beings with elephantine arms and strange leaks spilling from their hips. The clay that Jean-Baptiste was using for a cast could not hold the heated rubber; it seeped and bubbled and broke free from its confines. After this failure, he sent away for a bronzed mold of himself to be made in a navy foundry in Saigon. A month later, he received the molding, along with a note:
Très joli corps. Je l’épouserais volontiers. X
The bronze worked magnificently. He finally managed to find the right mixture of rubber and solution to give the mannequin a lifelike texture. When he made his first fully formed being, it was as if he had given birth. Jean-Baptiste painted the body white, then filled in the details of the face, taking care to get the coloring of the lips just right. For some reason, the lips suggested life more than any other aspect. Once the being had life, he went about giving it death: he painted on the telltale burns and lesions resulting from radiation poisoning. He wrote up a key for the mannequin, explaining each manner of wound, each degree of burn in relation to the amount of radiation exposure. He made four of them, each more convincing than the last, and then sent these radioactive dummies to four of the major French hospitals in the colonies.
“In the event you should have a case of acute radiation syndrome,” he wrote. “These models will instruct you on the symptoms of exposure. They are my gift to your institution.”
He did not have to wait long for a reply. The hospitals wrote back quickly, thanking him for his dummies, effusive about their usefulness. In fact, all four — plus the teaching hospital in Saigon — requested more mannequins, but would he mind not decorating them with any symptoms? The hospitals wanted them for more general purposes, and plain white dummies would suffice.