There were men. There were handsome ones and there were ugly ones. Cruel and kind ones. But, to a man, they had something in common. They were always superior. I was never more than an aperitif. I wasn’t in their class. I was an ignorant brown-skinned girl they sought to rescue. And so, they were clumsy. They released secrets through the sluice gates of cheap wine. They boasted over the telephone. They left documents lying around. In the beginning I was clumsy too. I hadn’t yet learned how to love mine enemy in order to garrotte him in his sleep. I needed to become an actress to mask the disgust that rose in my throat whenever I witnessed the excesses of our gods. Everything could have collapsed in that first week back in the town. It was as if all the trains of fate collided in one day in Pakse and there was only one survivor.
I was told of an agency that recruited French-speaking menial staff for the gods. I was interviewed by an officious Vietnamese woman whose French was awful. I had to match her mistakes and dumb myself down in order to sound competent. It was established from the beginning that she would be receiving 50 per cent of my income as an agency fee. I agreed gladly and noted her address. She sent me to the home of a Vietnamese couple. The wife met me at the front door of their fine wooden home on the bank of the Mekhong. She announced her name and status as if reciting lines in a school play. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. She called me ‘big sister’ and showed me to the servants’ quarters. There was a fat Lao cook, female but balding, a Vietnamese male driver with an abundance of female hormones, and me.
I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to learn by being in the home of a high-ranking Vietnamese official. I had no guidance. We were hardly the French underground. This was all my idea and it was an idea that felt heavier with every passing day. I was to clean the house, keep the garden and serve food when there were guests. One of the first questions the bitch at the agency had asked was whether I could read. It was a question I got to hear often. I’d told her ‘no’. Thus I was allowed access to the master’s office. There were so many documents scattered here and there and my French was basic back then. I didn’t know where to start. I knew somewhere in the piles of papers there would be information I could pass on but I was so raw that all I could do was start at the top and work my way slowly down.
I was halfway through that very first pile on my very first day when my heart was wrenched out of its socket. A deep male voice from behind me said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
I retreated from the documents with my head bowed. Didn’t dare look at the man who had caught me out. I cowered in a corner. Took courage from the knife between the folds of my phasin skirt.
‘I asked you what in hell’s name you think you’re doing?’
‘Cleaning, sir,’ I said, glaring at his boots — boots that should by rights have been taken off at the front step.
‘That did not look like cleaning,’ he said. ‘That looked like reading.’
I had an act already by then. I spoke slowly as if I were backward, blew into my lips as if every word was an effort.
‘I … I wish, sir,’ I said. ‘I wish I could read. The characters look so beautiful on the paper. I wish I could turn them into words.’
I shook with fear as might have been expected. He shocked me by kneeling in front of me but I kept my eyes trained on the parquet flooring.
‘You’re the new girl,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What’s your name?’
I had so many.
‘Sik,’ I said.
His hand reached for my chin and yanked it up so he could see my face. Still I forced my eyes downward.
‘Girls as pretty as you don’t need an education,’ he said. His Lao was competent but he was undeniably Vietnamese. There was something familiar about his accent.
‘You can make your way in the world with these.’
He grabbed my tit with his free hand and squeezed hard. I let my hand gently slide beneath the fold of my skirt. That was when I first doubted my ability to be what was expected of me. My life was already sacrificed for the fight of our people, but how could I ever allow myself to succumb to this?
His hand gripped my chin tighter and his face came closer to mine. I could smell the garlic and wine of his lunch and the grease that encased his hair. For the first time, I looked at him. And I knew him. A flash-flood of awful memories whisked me away from that room. Rolled me over and over in the swirl. Back there somewhere in the room he pushed his lips on to mine and forced his tongue against my teeth. And I let him kiss me. I let him because my mind was elsewhere and it was the means to an end. I knew he wouldn’t hear another cockerel crow nor abuse another girl. Suddenly, I had the will.
I awoke next morning to the screams of the thin-haired cook. I ran to the yard with the flowery driver one pace behind me. We stood at the chicken coop crying and screaming intermittently. The driver’s horror seemed sincere as, I hoped, did mine. The French militia came and the administrator and the local Lao headman. And they carried away the body of the poor deputy requisitions director who had been so horribly mutilated — down there, as they say. They suspected the young wife who remained sitting impassive on the top step of the front porch the whole time. But for the French to arrest someone for a crime of passion, they had to sense some … passion. The little Madame showed none. Felt none. As neither the cook, the driver nor the chambermaid had a motive, everything was once again laid in the lap of the bastard insurgents who lurked in the night shadows.
That night I burned sixteen candles at the temple; one for each year of Gulap’s short life to let her know the last of her tormentors was off the streets. I lit one more as a general thank you to whichever god had put me in the house of the Vietnamese. I never did learn how he’d wangled his way into a government position but, I suppose, if a man like that can sell toilets, he can sell himself.
14
The sun was setting behind the buildings when the rubber dinghy floated into Pak Lai. With the Uphill Rowing Club continuing its journey to Luang Prabang transporting the Buddha images, Siri and his team had inflated the dinghy and made good time downriver. The current had apparently noticed its mistake and was flowing fast towards the south. They’d collected the body of Madame Peung and the two boatmen had taken over the rowing. Near the town, they’d passed the elephants heading upriver for their rendezvous with Tang and told the mahout he was out of luck. There would be no delivery to Thailand. Pak Lai was rocking with the euphoria of finals day. Music came from every direction and villagers were slowly stirring the air in front of them with fanned fingers as they danced in time to the beat from the invisible instruments. When the dinghy docked opposite the Lao navy cruiser, Governor Siri, drunk as a lord, was on the wonky jetty.