The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot

by Colin Cotterill

  And to the amusement of a grinning boatman, Siri gave Daeng the type of kiss that nobody along the banks of the river would ever forget.

  The fat woman at the loom still had a cheroot dangling between her lips.

  “He’s at the school,” she shouted.

  “Isn’t it the weekend?” Daeng asked, not certain herself after all the goings-on.

  “He likes to be there just as much when the kids aren’t there as when they are,” she said. “It’s peaceful up on the hill.”

  Siri and Daeng followed the track. In Thakhek it was a muggy, hot day as the clouds gathered for another assault, but at the end of the tunnel there was a coolness. There was no breeze, just a drop in temperature of several degrees. Daeng breathed in the climate. They walked up to the schoolhouse. Satsai was at his desk mending what looked like a cordless metal cutter contraption. There was as much oil on the teacher’s shirt as on the machine.

  “Knock knock,” said Siri.

  Satsai looked up and smiled. If he was surprised to see Siri and Daeng he didn’t show it.

  “I don’t suppose either of you have engineering degrees?” he said.

  “Afraid we were born in an age before technology,” said Siri.

  He and Daeng sat at the miniature desk. Satsai brushed all the motor parts into a heap and wiped his hands on a rag.

  “I had a feeling you’d be back,” he said.

  “Instinct?” said Daeng.

  “Common sense,” said Satsai. “You came all the way to Thakhek to solve your mystery. You aren’t the types to give up. When I told you about the helicopter attack I could see a light behind your eyes. Even if that invasion wasn’t connected to your Japanese pilot story, I could see I’d fueled your imaginations. You are adventurers.”

  “Ah, but you know it is connected to our pilot story,” said Siri.

  “I do?”

  “Yes,” said Daeng. “We know for certain that Hiro was here in your village. We assume he came here during his leave time. You weren’t absolutely honest in having us believe you’d never heard of him. Your village is the connection we were looking for. We don’t know if his presence caused the helicopter raid but my husband is most unforgiving towards coincidences.”

  “Hate ’em,” said Siri.

  Satsai looked up at the tight thatch of the roof. Like all the other structures, it had been assembled with care and love. He sighed.

  “It’s because you were sent the diary that I feel I should tell you what you want to know,” he said. “The account you gave me yesterday about Hiro working in Thakhek with a group of misfits wasn’t true. He wasn’t there.”

  “You mean he wasn’t there under that name?” said Siri.

  “No, I mean physically he was never a part of any occupational force based in Thakhek. He’d been decommissioned a long time before.”

  “Damn,” said Siri. “I think it’s story time.”

  “It’s a long story,” said Satsai. “I think you’ll want to sit somewhere more comfortable.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Major Depression

  “It was late 1940,” Satsai began. “I was a field medic with the French forces up on the Chinese border. They’d recruited me mostly for my languages. Apart from French and Lao I knew Vietnamese and a few hill tribe dialects. The average Lao and Vietnamese foot soldiers were uneducated. They could barely communicate in their own national languages. Imagine a French captain trying to get through to a brigade of farmers. Making me a medic was not based on any skills I’d exhibited in medicine. They had no budget for translators even though they badly needed linguists in the field. They also needed able-bodied men to carry litters and patch up wounds and hand out malaria tablets. In me they had both.

  “The Japanese had arrived some two months earlier. They’d taken advantage of France’s distractions in Europe and lied their way into the French-controlled region in order to stop the trains heading through to China loaded with weapons and supplies. The friction along the border was substantial and the French fortresses were on constant alert for an inevitable Japanese offensive. When I arrived, the two armies were truly strange bedfellows. There was no official conflict between the Japanese and those they called the ‘white devils’—most of whom were actually Vietnamese—so the French had no choice but to allow the invaders to use their services and help themselves to supplies.

  “The first I heard of Major Hiro was from the Vietnamese medics in my unit. They said a Japanese officer had gone berserk. He’d spent the day with his battalion as usual, filing reports, recording the movement of equipment. At exactly five p.m. he took off all his clothes, climbed to the top of an old unoccupied French machine gun tower, and started yelling at the top of his voice. They’d dragged him down and taken him to a medical ward in a small French hospital. It was there that I met him: a crazy man. He was sedated but still shouting in a language nobody could follow. I’m not an adherent of the spirit world but to me it sounded as if he was possessed. He spat and snarled and drooled and had to be tied to the bunk to protect the other patients. He was unnerving everyone so eventually they had to put a gag on him. His commander wanted to send him back to Japan but he was in no condition to travel.

  “They assigned me to him. I was supposed to feed him. For two days he just spat everything out. He needed calming down so I started to talk to him. I didn’t have much Japanese at the time so I spoke in Lao. I knew he didn’t understand but it didn’t seem to matter. After a few days he’d let me feed him. He seemed to relax with me. I felt good about it. It was like . . . like I was taming a wild beast. Three weeks passed and still they were haggling about when to ship him home. And then this general arrived. His name was Shosen Umiji and he’d been Hiro’s commanding officer in China. He had a very simplistic approach to mental health. He came to see Hiro just that one time, looked down his nose at him and spat on the pillow. He turned to his aid and said something I vaguely understood. I was sitting at the back of the room and I memorized the comment. The French had a Japanese translator and I asked him later what had been said. The translator told me, ‘Major Hiro will have to die on the battlefield.’

  “The general had decided to avoid embarrassment for the family and the nation by having Hiro put down. I was astounded at how lightly he’d made the decision. I wasn’t a friend of Hiro. He was a disaster; a cocktail of hateful sounds and looks. There was a devil in his eyes even when he was relaxed. But with me by his side he remained calm. In a way he had selected me. Something told me I should help him.”

  “So you sprang him from the hospital,” said Daeng.

  She and Siri were so engrossed in the story it took a while for them to notice the refreshments on the desk beside theirs. Someone had walked up from the village with three cut coconuts with straws and spoons to cut out the meat. The coconut water was surprisingly chill. Nobody had asked for or ordered anything. It was just one more nicety in a nice place: the type of village that used to exist everywhere.

  “I suppose I sprang us both,” said Satsai. “I hated being there. Life education can only go so far before it becomes torment. I hated the French and the Japanese and I missed my home. There was death all around me. So one day I put my ID card in the pocket of a corpse that had no head and I took his papers. I stole a horse and cart, put Hiro on the back, and headed south. Even after I’d untied him he came with me with no drama whatsoever. He’d stopped his ranting and his anger subsided. He wasn’t less insane, just a different type of crazy. He dribbled and stared ahead at something only he could see. I dressed us both in peasants' clothes and we were largely ignored at roadblocks where they assumed our brains were as empty as the cart. The only possession we had was a small knapsack that was supposed to contain Hiro’s personal belongings, although I never opened it. I’d blocked it inside the wooden seat along with his uniform and helmet and I forgot all about it until much later.

 
; “We stopped for a week here and there on our way to the Lao border, living off the land. One day he turned up at the campfire with his diary in his hand. He’d taken it from under the seat. I didn’t even realize he knew where his kit was. He showed it to me. I couldn’t understand anything but it was beautifully written. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do. He’d point to this or that and I realized he wanted me to tell him the Lao words. So that’s when I started to teach him Lao. We began with the basics: name, where he came from, age, et cetera. I’d write it in sand or mud and he’d copy it into his diary. It was incredible how fast he picked it up. I guess all those nights in the hospital with me speaking to him in Lao language had stuck somehow. He ate it up. He was like an alien coming to earth with only a brief time to understand everything. I would give him a phrase and do my best to explain the meaning and he’d nod and write. On the journey we picked up a notebook and pencil for me and we’d communicate through Lao writing. I suppose you could say we became pen friends. But from that night we fled the hospital till he left us, I never heard him say a word.”

  “In all the time you were together?” said Daeng.

  “Not a single utterance,” said Satsai.

  “And you brought him here,” said Siri.

  “It was the only safe place I knew. My family liked him. They understood. The war had crushed him just as it had destroyed our country. The weight of it had been too much for him. It was a month in my village before he lost his multiple nervous tics. His hands stopped shaking. He no longer drooled. He used school notebooks to express himself. The village women taught him embroidery and cooking. He read the few Lao language books we had. His diary became his private world. I didn’t ask him what he was writing there. I hoped that one day he might show me.

  “Since our return, we hadn’t gone into Thakhek town. Before the war I would go often. As you can see, Sawan is geographically close but ideologically very far away. There was a lot of Japanese activity in the town. I thought it safer for him to stay here. If anyone came from civilization we had the caves to retreat to. But we weren’t bothered that much. Someone from the village would go in for supplies and he’d tell us what was going on. There was a large troop presence by then, new buildings going up, tent suburbs, roads being blasted through the mountains. Hiro would listen to all this news like a dog with its tail wagging and he’d run off to write his diary. But I knew he wanted to go there to see for himself. I was against it but he was determined. He would dress like a bum, dirty his skin, and resummon the facial expressions from the early days of our journey. He’d take the boat through the tunnel and wander around Thakhek ignored and avoided by everyone. He’d be gone for a day or two but always came back and he’d go straight to his diary.”

  “He let you read it?” Daeng asked.

  “Eventually he became proud to show it to me,” said the teacher. “And he was such a brilliant writer. I loved his fictional stories about Toshi, his alter ego. And I wanted to believe they were a gift to me.”

  “Did you send the diary to us?” Siri asked.

  “No. I really don’t know how it got to you and I don’t know who was asking for your help. I haven’t seen it since ’75.”

  “How often did Hiro leave the village?” Daeng asked.

  “For his clandestine trips into Thakhek, he’d go about once a month. But his missions took longer.”

  “His missions?” said Daeng.

  “Yes. He arrived at the school one day in his uniform with his helmet under his arm. It was the first time I’d ever seen him dressed up. He saluted and went down to the dock and he vanished. We were—or perhaps I should say I was—frantic. I didn’t know where he’d gone. I wanted to put his photograph up on trees and offer a reward for his return the way the French do for lost dogs. I suppose I hadn’t realized how functional he’d become, how independent. He’d learned French and Vietnamese.”

  “But he didn’t speak,” said Siri.

  “I believe he could understand both and had learned to read and write. He’d also taught himself carpentry, plumbing, agriculture. He improved our fishing system. We had always been poor but Hiro did all he could to improve our lot. It was only to be expected he’d leave one day. I was afraid that was the day.”

  “Did anything significant happen leading up to that day?” Siri asked.

  “We’d had an outbreak of diphtheria,” said the teacher. “As I’m sure you know, it’s a highly contagious condition. Some of our kids died. Many were sick. We’d take them into Thakhek but the little hospital was ill-equipped. What drugs they had were priced beyond our means.”

  “And that was when Hiro disappeared,” said Daeng. “You know, there was a page in the diary written on October second, 1943?”

  “I remember,” said Satsai. “I read it when he came back. He’d been gone eleven days. I don’t know how he got to Lang Son or what he did or how he got back. He wouldn’t tell me. But he had done something miraculous. A medical unit arrived in the village two days after his return. They treated all our children and left us medication. It was unbelievable.”

  “Teacher Satsai,” said Daeng.

  “Yes?”

  “From my memory, the diary entry written in October began with the words ‘Hello, my darling. I miss you and the children.’ Or something like that. We thought Hiro was writing it to his wife, but he wasn’t, was he?”

  Satsai looked at Daeng and gave his answer some thought.

  “No,” said Satsai. “He wasn’t married.”

  “The children were at your school and the darling . . .”

  Again, he appeared to be weighing his reply.

  “Was me,” said Satsai. “I’m sorry.”

  “What on earth for?” said Daeng.

  “I don’t want to tarnish your impression of Hiro.”

  “Then you obviously haven’t had enough time to understand my husband and me. Everything you tell us about Hiro makes us like him more.”

  “I suppose I’d loved him ever since our wonderful journey in the pony cart together,” said Satsai. The visitors’ reaction seemed to liberate him. His face became animated and he smiled as he spoke. “He was unique, inquisitive, intelligent. I was proud to be with him and I wanted him to feel the same about me. But our trip home had been innocent. I had no intention of taking advantage of a man with such a troubled mind. When I read his diary entry calling me his darling I thought it was just a joke, but still it filled me with joy. It hadn’t occurred to me he would know I was a homosexual. I thought I had disguised it so well.”

  “Your trips to Thakhek before the war?” said Siri.

  “The French were obliging and passionate in many ways,” said Satsai. “I wonder if Hiro could smell the desperation on me. I was so bent on keeping my evil identity a secret from my parents. Thakhek had been my outlet. There were cross-cultural gatherings at the old French colonial house at the foot of the hill for like-minded souls.”

  “That was a busy place,” said Siri. “Was Beer one of your cross-cultural liaisons?”

  Satsai looked at him with surprise.

  “Surgeon’s intuition,” said Siri. “Was his wound connected to his inclination?”

  A look on the teacher’s face suggested he’d given up a lot already, but that the honesty was doing him good.

  “Beer thought he might enlarge his experience of the world by serving the Japanese as he had the French,” said Satsai. “But he ran into the wrong officer at the wrong end of a bottle of shochu, a last-minute attack of shame while holding a samurai sword. Beer was lucky his head was still attached to his shoulders the next morning.”

  “But meanwhile, back at Hiro’s return from Lang Son,” said Siri.

  “I read his diary entry and we laughed and there was no pretense. It was as if we’d always been lovers. My black-and-white existence took on all the colors of the rainbow. Everyone in the village
knew what we had together and nobody criticized us. In fact they were happy for us. I wish I’d shared my secret sooner. Hiro was my constant companion. We shared everything from then on. I’ve never known such a love.”

  The teacher leaned back against his chair and breathed heavily. One more burden had been off-loaded.

  “And what did he bring back from Vietnam?” asked Daeng.

  “The treasure?” said Satsai. “He never did say. I assumed he’d returned with money and had used it all to pay for the medicine.”

  Siri and Daeng exchanged a glance. They’d heard Satsai’s first lie.

  “Do you have any photographs from those days?” Daeng asked.

  “There were a lot,” said the teacher. “We didn’t have a camera of our own but some of our graduates did well, traveled, and came home to visit relatives. They had cameras. They sent us copies but everything was destroyed in the raid.”

  “Every photograph?” said Siri.

  Satsai pondered for a while, weighing up his next move.

  “All but this,” he said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a cheap plastic wallet. It was clearly not stuffed with money. He reached into one of the compartments and pulled out a photograph folded in half. He opened it carefully, like a librarian unpacking the Dead Sea Scrolls. It had obviously seen many such openings. The only thing holding the two halves together was an age-browned strip of tape on the back. The picture was almost entirely sepia from years of back-pocket sweat. He laid it down on his desk and Siri and Daeng stepped up to examine it. It had been taken in the village square. The focus was surprisingly good. Some twelve children of various sizes stood at the foot of the village pillar and two handsome men stood on either side of it. One was Satsai, as adorable in his twenties as Daeng had imagined. The other, a little shorter, cropped hair, round-rimmed glasses, was Hiro. Both men were smiling, not the grins thrust forward for photographs, but actual happy smiles. Siri was overjoyed to put a face to the writer.

  “When was this taken?” he asked.