“You wouldn’t consider going?”
“To Moscow? Are you mad?” Siri turned and headed to the open door. He stopped just beyond the doorway. “Why do you ask?” he said.
“All the other candidates have withdrawn their applications.”
“Even Supasit, the optician?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t blame them. If I’d been given an application form, which I wasn’t, I’d have ripped it up immediately.”
The vice minister laughed. He stood and walked past Siri to sit on the concrete bench out front.
“Siri,” he said, “I’ll be perfectly honest. The minister wasn’t that fond of you but he’s no longer in a position to make decisions on the Moscow trip. They’ve thrown it all in my lap. There are some on the committee who believe you were responsible for posting the warning and I tend to agree with them.”
Siri strode off in a huff, but not terribly quickly.
“Wait!” called the vice minister.
“Why? So I can be further insulted?”
“Unlike them,” said the vice minister, “I don’t consider what you did to be such a terrible thing.”
Siri stopped and turned around. “You don’t?” he said.
“Siri, I respected you as a teacher. I admire your nationalism and the many acts you’ve selflessly performed for our country. In a way I believe I would respect you even more if you did indeed post the warning at Mahosot to eliminate the opposition. It tells me how committed you are to represent Laos. The committee said you were the absolute last choice; that they’d only consider you if there were no other candidates. Well, today I heard from the optician and he prefers not to travel. The Soviets will only accept a team medical officer who has been trained by a recognized institution overseas. That makes you the last surviving contender. I know I’ll be given a grilling by the committee but I’d sooner have the best candidate than the safest. So, what do you say?”
Siri gazed beyond the open air balcony to the dusty city, to the silver-grey threads of the Mekhong and Thailand sitting smugly on the far bank. He stretched his back, walked to the vice minister and shook his hand.
“Of course I’ll have to take my wife,” he said.
“It looks like we’re going to Moscow, old girl,” said Siri nonchalantly. He and Daeng were helping Mr. Geung clean up after the morning noodle rush.
“Oh, yes?” said Daeng.
“Well, don’t go turning cartwheels.”
“What?”
“I thought you’d be excited. I went to great lengths to make it possible.”
“I know you did. But it’s just so soon after our narrow escape from Bangkok.”
“That’s not really the problem, is it?”
Daeng sat on one of the stools and whipped the wipe cloth across the table as if she were swatting a fly. “No.”
“Then what?”
“It’s the way I look,” she said.
He sat opposite her.
“You look marvelous,” he said. “You always have.”
“Siri, the Games are in July. The Lao team and officials will be flying out in June. That’s just under two months away. I won’t even have head stubble by then. The older you get the slower the growth. I can pencil on eyebrows but not a head of hair. And then there’s the tail.”
“What about it?”
“Do you know how hard it is to find fashionable clothes that disguise a woman’s tail?”
“Daeng, you’re starting to sound like a politburo bride.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s Europe, Siri. Glamorous women. The opera. Tea shops and discussions on women’s equality. I don’t want to let you down.”
“Daeng, if you stood in front of an Antonov Twenty-two and were cut into slices by the propeller and there was nothing left of you but a toe, I would be just as proud to walk around Moscow with your toe and take it to the Bolshoi. I’d mingle at cocktail parties with your toe. Nothing about you could disappoint me.”
She whipped her wipe cloth again.
“And that was supposed to make me feel better, Dr. Siri?”
“Vanity deserves ridicule.”
She glared at him for as long as she was able but his boyish grin defeated her once more. She laughed and threw her damp cloth in his direction. He ducked. Although he had no tact to speak of, his reflexes had not deserted him.
•••
“I’m not angry,” said Inspector Phosy angrily.
“It’s a great opportunity,” said Nurse Dtui.
“I know it is,” said Phosy. “And if you were a young unmarried woman without a child there would be every advantage in pursuing it. But you have a family.”
“I have a daughter . . .”
“We.”
“We have a daughter and we live in a socialist system that provides excellent child care. Communism has crèches exactly so that the parents, father and mother, can go out to work.”
“Not to the extent that the child might forget who her mother is,” said Phosy.
They were in the compact dormitory room allocated to them by the police department. They shared a bathroom with eight other families in a dark, single-story building. They were kept awake night after night by the crying of babies. If nothing else, the police were fertile. The walls were thin so they were communicating at the loudest level of whisper possible.
“Don’t make this about Malee,” said Dtui. “She’s two. I’m not breastfeeding her. Being without a mother for a month isn’t going to traumatize her. If you don’t want her here with you—”
“Of course I want her here.”
“We have any number of friends who’d be glad to take her in while I’m gone.”
“I’m not going to farm our daughter out to strangers.”
“Good. Then you’ll get to know how it feels here. All those nights Malee and I spent in this grubby little dorm while her father is in some far-off province. No word of when he’ll come back or if he’s alive or dead. Perhaps you’ll understand what it’s like.”
“So this is revenge?”
“Don’t be silly. This is a career opportunity.”
“Being a mother isn’t enough of a career?”
She clenched her fists. “If you’d wanted a career mother for your child you should have married a farmer. There are thousands of pretty, slim, uneducated women who fantasize about churning out babies for a man in uniform.”
He turned on his chair and shuffled through the papers on the table.
“And perhaps she’d appreciate me,” he said.
“Then why did you choose me?”
“Because you were pregnant with my baby.”
Dtui smiled as only a wounded Lao woman can. She gently scooped her daughter from the mattress, put the child’s head on her shoulder and walked out of the room.
“That’s right,” said Phosy. “The silent treatment. Works every time.”
But Dtui was humming a nursery rhyme in her daughter’s ear and had no mind to listen to the words of a stupid husband.
Chapter Three
What Exactly Is an Olympic?
Laos was quickly becoming an experiment that failed. The country had just reached the end of its national three-year development plan conceived (but implemented at a snail’s pace) when the Pathet Lao took over in ’75. There was still nothing to show for it. In his State of the Nation address the prime minister admitted his own past policies had been “inappropriate, stupid and suicidal.” Yet another devaluation of the kip had seen prices soar. Vietnam was pumping in foreign aid to support basic services. To offset the four-hundred-percent rise in costs, the government gave its officials a seventeen-percent pay increase, which resulted in a new surge of escapees crossing the river. Things had to change. Those families who had been chastised by cadres for not joining coopera
tives were now being applauded for their resilience. The private farmers had out-produced the collectives. The government began to woo the small private sector with an eye to joint ventures and the repression of private traders was discouraged. As Civilai said, “Hold on to your hats. Here comes Das Kapitalism.”
As the Party was doing a poor job of plastering over the cracks, the central committee agreed something had to be done to divert the attention of the dissatisfied populace. And that distraction came in the form of the Olympic Games.
The Lao Olympic team was made up of shooters, boxers and runners, twenty in all. Siri and Civilai had already paid a visit to the boxing camp but had been denied access to the shooters, all of whom were members of the Lao People’s Army. On this day, the track and field athletes were behind the lycee at kilometer six for the first joint training session. The track team comprised four men and four women, most of whom were sprinters. But there was one race walker named Khamon who claimed to be able to walk twenty kilometers at speed.
This particularly fascinated Siri and Civilai, who had been unable to take the concept of race walking seriously. As most Olympic competitions had originated from combat, throwing heavy or sharp objects, jumping over fences, wading through ditches, fighting, shooting, boating, and, particularly, running fast all seemed perfectly suited to battle. But Siri argued that walking at speed was neither here nor there. If you were charging a bank of archers you’d want to get there as quickly as possible so as not to provide a target for a second volley. If, on the other hand, you had realized your inadequacies and were about to retreat, “Get the blazes out of there as fast as possible” should have been in every soldier’s survival manual. So where did race walking come in? It looked particularly silly and no race walking champion’s portrait ever graced the walls of teenaged girls’ bedrooms. So it fascinated Siri that a young Lao man like Khamon would bother to teach himself the art.
They cornered him at the first group training session and asked him straight out.
“Why?”
Like all the Lao athletes, he was polite and enthusiastic. He had a sort of international face that didn’t immediately mark him down as a Lao. He was tall, skinny as a Champa branch and had unusually large feet. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to walk.
“I was born into it,” said Khamon. “My father was a fanatical walker. He’d race walk every morning. If he’d stayed in France he’d probably have been a champion.”
“What do you mean, stayed in France?” said Civilai.
“My father was French.”
“Which explains your looks,” said Siri.
“Not really. I was a disappointment to my mother,” said Khamon. “She courted and wed a foreigner because she really wanted to harvest those European seeds. She had dreams of producing tall blond offspring but her dominant genes left me dark haired and pug nosed.”
“How did you get recruited for this?” Civilai asked.
“Trials,” he said. “They came to the provinces and invited runners to the schools to show what they could do. They timed everyone and whittled the list down to the fastest. Of course, nobody got close to the Olympic qualifying times but it was a lot of fun. I told them I’d like to apply for the walk. It wasn’t even on their list. They said I’d have to find someone to race against. Of course there wasn’t much of a queue. So I ended up walking alone, bare foot on clay. I imagined my dad was there beside me. Even after he left us I didn’t stop walking, just for the health benefits, really. I walked round and round the track at the trial and the Olympic people drank tea and played checkers and I finished and they looked at the clock and referred to the log book and I’d set an Indochina record.
“They assumed they’d made a mistake, miscounted the laps or something. So they asked me to do it again the next day. And I did. But this time they concentrated and they had other people counting the laps and I was a minute faster than the day before. They still didn’t believe it. They even took out a tape and measured the track to make sure it wasn’t too short.”
“And it wasn’t?” said Siri.
“It was ten meters too long. I’d never bothered to time myself before but according to the stopwatch my performance would have been good enough for a second place at the previous Southeast Asian Games. So, here I am.”
Like Khamon, the other contestants had won their places on the team as a result of time trials but none seemed to grasp the significance of the competition they were about to take part in. At the orientation session one of the runners, a muscular boy with a tiger tattoo on his shoulder, asked Civilai,
“Uncle, what exactly is an Olympic?”
Many of the athletes had grown up in the countryside with no media, no news of the world beyond their villages. Some had done well in the temple school and been nominated by the local cadre to attend a high school in the town. But even there the picture they saw of the planet was filtered through a red socialist lens. Their government didn’t want them to be too curious for fear they’d be dissatisfied with what little was on offer. Then, suddenly, here was a passport, not only to head out into the world but also to represent a country they didn’t really know much about. Of course it was overwhelming. There were many questions.
The Ministry of Sport had insisted the first evening assembly be staged around a large table arranged with a yellow tablecloth, an elaborate centerpiece of imitation flowers, one warm bottle of orange Fanta and a plastic mug per person. It was set up on the basketball court in the gymnasium. The eight athletes had been seated along one side with nametags, and the administrators sat opposite. From left to right there was Comrade Civilai (General Manager—Head of Mission), Siri (Team Physician), Daeng (House Auntie) Nurse Dtui (medic and translator), Mr. Ivanov (Soviet athletics coach), and General Suvan, the senior and ever-senile Party member who was co-opted onto most of the diplomatic missions because he was non-confrontational and had a lot of medals. The politburo had insisted on one active Party member’s taking part—although there was nothing particularly active about the general. Behind them against the wall were two observers from the Ministry. General Suvan’s welcome speech of the evening lasted twenty-four minutes. He concluded with the line, “As I have described in great detail your purpose in Moscow I doubt you’ll have any questions but now would be the time to ask if you did.”
The most curious and vocal of the runners was Chom, the two-hundred-meter runner. He was around twenty-eight but looked much older. His skin was pockmarked from some childhood disease and his hair was as scruffy as a lark’s nest dipped in charcoal. Despite his looks he was Mr. Popularity and his most endearing quality was his honesty.
“If I understand this right, comrades,” he said, “we’re being sent to the USSR, where the best athletes in the world live, to join sportsmen and -women from the entire world—people who spent their lives training and getting fit. And they’ll be beside us on the track looking down at the little Lao runners in our cheap cotton shorts and plimsolls. And they’ll be at the finishing line before we even start running and the only thing the world will remember is what losers the Lao are. Am I right?”
Their own small world went quiet. It was a question that had come too early. Siri and Civilai hadn’t planned to get on to international perception until just before they left, if at all. But it was Madame Daeng who took up the point.
“Firstly,” she said, “cotton shorts would be quite healthy, allow the skin to breath, and I think the other athletes would be envious if we wore them. But, in fact you’ll all be kitted out in nylon in the official Lao colors and you’ll all look splendid if a little itchy. Tomorrow you’ll be getting your first taste of Soviet spikes. I tried on a pair last night before going to bed. Dr. Siri couldn’t catch me. Could you, dear?”
Siri shrugged and blushed. The comment was met with surprised but honest laughter from all but the ministry reps, who contributed an official scowl. Regardless, the ice was broken.
“But the way you look won’t have any bearing on how the other athletes see you,” she added.
“No,” said Civilai, “the world isn’t remotely interested in losers. Not one camera will be trained on you stumbling from the starting blocks and hobbling along your lanes. In fact, even the second- and third-placed athletes will be forgotten within seconds.”
“Then why are we going?” asked Chom.
Civilai looked at him and smiled. “Comrade Chom,” he said, “what do you do for a living?”
In fact he’d already been through the application forms and knew very well what Comrade Chom did.
“I’m a vermin eradication officer,” said Chom with some pride. “I’m employed by the Savanaketh municipal council.”
“And are you good at your job?” Civilai asked.
“I’m the best there is,” said Chom. “I come from four generations of rat catchers. Naturally we don’t limit ourselves to rodents. We are equally proficient in the eradication of snakes and cockroaches and termites.”
“Of course,” said Civilai. “And how do you rate your success internationally?”
“What?”
“I mean, how often do you turn on the radio to see how you compare with rat catchers in say . . . Canada?”
“I haven’t got a radio,” said Chom.
Civilai grimaced. “But if you did, would it matter whether you caught two fewer rats last year than your Canadian counterpart?”
Chom gave it some thought. “Can’t say I know anything about Canada,” he said.
“Then, suppose there was a rat catchers’ Olympics,” said Civilai. “You would be competing with vermin eradication officers from a hundred other countries. You’d be compared to, say, the Mexican rat catcher who every day encounters rats the size of small pigs. He uses a lasso to bring them under control. And to the Icelandic rat catcher whose vermin are no bigger than spiders. He catches them with large sheets of paper covered in glue. How could anyone judge a winner between them? How can you compare yourself to them? You all come from unique backgrounds. We’d just have to appreciate your individual skills, your humility, your humor, your professionalism. Nobody would think less of you because you’re different. They judge you as a human being, not as a champion. It’s not whether you win or lose that’s important, it’s how you play the game.” He looked at the observers from the ministry. “Marx said that.”
The Rat Catchers' Olympics Page 3
