“Upon the rising of the sun,” he said mournfully, “they will kill you.”
His words filled me with hope.
Not, let me add, because I thought he was right and hoped for death as a respite from life in a cage. Uncomfortable as my bamboo home might be, the alternative he proposed seemed even less desirable. The cause for hope stemmed not from the information I had received but from the way the message had been couched. It was not what he said but how he said it.
Consider: not We will kill you but They will kill you. Thus implicitly disassociating himself from any personal involvement in the act, either active or passive. And his tone of voice accentuated this – they were going to kill me, and he was sad about it. It even seemed likely that he had violated orders by giving me this bit of news.
“They will kill you at sunrise,” he said again.
I had been sitting in the lotus posture, legs folded up so that each foot rested on top of the opposite knee. I unknotted my legs, stretched out, rolled over onto my stomach, and put my mouth to the aperture in the cage bottom. The cage tilted slightly, but I remained fairly well balanced, physically if not emotionally. And I was able to see my informant clearly in the twilight. He was in his late teens, short and slender, with neatly cropped glossy black hair, and the clean, doll-like features prevalent throughout that part of the world.
“There was talk of getting you a woman,” he went on mournfully. “Usually when a man is condemned to die, he is first given a woman. It is the custom. Formerly it was done only for men who had fathered no children of their own, so that they might have a final opportunity to perpetuate their seed. But then it was said that no man can ever be certain that he has sired children, and so it was decided that every condemned man should spend the night before his execution with a woman.”
Imminent death is supposed to have an aphrodisiacal effect. It certainly didn’t this time. I didn’t want a woman. I didn’t even want a good meal or a glass of whiskey. All I really wanted was to get the hell out of the cage.
“But,” he continued, “there will not be a woman for you. It was decided that you are a capitalist imperialist dog and a white devil, and that your seed must not be mingled with the love juices of our women. It is what they decided.”
They again. I started to say how good it was of him to tell me, but he was not interested in such pap. He had more important things on his mind, and I was in every sense a captive audience.
“I have never had a woman,” he said.
“Never?”
“Never in all my days. I have, however, spent many hours thinking about such a thing.”
“I can imagine.”
“I look at the women,” he said dreamily. “I watch them walking, you know, the shapes of their bodies, the legs, the tilt of their heads, the tinkling sounds of their voices. Like little brass bells. I think about them a great deal.” He fell momentarily silent, perhaps to think about them some more. His brown eyes were very large, and beads of sweat formed on his smooth forehead. “There are times,” he said suddenly, “when I can honestly think of nothing else.”
“And you have never had one.”
“Never.”
I felt like the Playboy Advisor. “Well, why don’t you, uh, go and get one?”
“How?”
“Well-”
“Women do not like me,” he said. “And when I am near one of them, I become nervous, my hands sweat, and my mouth goes dry, a dryness in the back of my mouth and in my throat, and words die in my mouth like fish flapping themselves to death upon the shore, and my knees turn to water, and my head spins…”
He certainly had a problem. Under less restricted circumstances I probably would have been a good deal more sympathetic. But I too had a problem, and mine had a temporal urgency his did not share. Another few hours of celibacy would not kill him, while a few more hours in my birdcage would resolve itself in hanging or decapitation or whatever sort of fun and games was on the morrow’s agenda.
“I suppose you have had women?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, uh, yes I have.” And so I had, and it was the possession of one such, Tuppence Ngawa by name, that had brought me to Thailand in the first place.
“Many women?”
“Not too many.”
“What are they like?”
“Better than ham.”
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind,” I said. It was a reference to an old joke about a priest and a rabbi, a joke that couldn’t make much sense to a Thai. Besides, it was a diversion; the main thing now was to find a way to escape, and the only hope was this unhappy virgin, and-
Of course.
“There is nothing on earth to match the embrace of a woman,” I said. “I am not without extensive experience in such matters and I can tell you that no other sensation is its equivalent. The soft, sweet texture of female flesh, of breasts and legs, of hungry lips and tender doe-like eyes, the taste of a woman, the subtle but pungent aroma of a woman…”
I went on in this vein for quite a while. It had the desired effect. The poor clown had a fairly short fuse to begin with, and this was sheer agony for him. “Stop,” he said at last. “Please stop.”
“It is unfair that you have never known such joy. If only I were free, I would do something about it.”
“You would?”
“Of course, my friend.”
“But what would you do?”
“I would help you find a woman.”
“You could do this?”
“With ease and with pleasure.”
He hesitated for a moment. “It is a trick,” he said suddenly. “It is a capitalist imperialist trick, a trick.”
And he went away.
I slapped a mosquito and said something obscene in Siamese. At sunrise they were going to kill me. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why, but it hardly mattered. I had to get away, and they were not going to let me get away, and my little virginal friend had decided that he did not trust me. I hadn’t slept in seventeen years and tomorrow I would go to sleep and I would never wake up. I could barely remember what sleep was like, but the way I remembered it, the best part of it was waking up refreshed, and that was a part I couldn’t look forward to. They were going to put me to sleep, and that would be the end of it.
“You would really get me a woman?”
He had returned. It was darker now, and his voice was more urgent now, and I could guess what he had been spending his time thinking about. Capitalist imperialist trick or no, I was his one chance, just as he was mine. Alliances have been forged upon less than that.
“I will.”
“I have decided to trust you, my friend.”
“Good.”
“I shall help you.”
“They will kill me at sunrise unless we do something about it.”
“We will escape.”
“Good.”
“Together.”
“Good.”
“I go now. When it is darker, when the camp sleeps, I shall return. I go now, my friend, my good friend.”
I celebrated by slapping another mosquito. They were fairly bad during the days and considerably worse at night, and night was coming. The mosquitoes had bothered me most the first day in the jungle, but by the time I was captured the ferocity of their attack had diminished to a great extent. By now they mostly let me alone. What with my diet and my dysentery and the raids of earlier mosquitoes, I must have been running out of blood.
I wondered if my little friend would ever come back and whether his help would make much difference one way or the other. The cage could only be opened by lowering it to the ground, which in turn could not be done without making a hell of a racket and waking the entire camp. Furthermore, sentries stayed awake the entire night, so that even if I escaped from the cage, I would probably be caught trying to sneak out of the camp. And if I wasn’t caught, I would have a whole jungle to walk through.