by Paul Theroux
The church, Holy Rosary, near the river, had a pencil-point steeple and arches, the whole of it faced in cream-colored stucco. Osier, no longer keeping his pictorial diary, could not break his habit of drawing such buildings in his head, and it relaxed him to see that this one would have been easy to put on the page. The church was a study in straight lines. Flowers filled the altar, which was draped in white linen, its marble supports picked out in gold. The faces on the stained-glass windows had an Asian cast.
He felt it was blasphemous to resent having to attend, yet he wanted it to be over with, so that he could see Song and resume what he now saw as his real life.
Osier knelt and prayed for things to go right for him. He asked God to understand. Yet God knew he had come under protest. Osier would not have been surprised to see the lovely domed ceiling crack to pieces and fall on his head—or something worse—for his hypocrisy.
The priest, a Thai, or perhaps an Indian, murmured the prayers, soothing Osier with their familiarity. But at one point, turning to face the mostly farang congregation, he hesitated in his delivery. At the same time there came a moment of traffic roar. The front door of the church had been opened and shut.
Glancing back, Osier saw Song making her way up the center aisle. When their eyes met, Song pressed her hands together in veneration, as though in a temple, and took a seat in the pew just across the aisle from him.
Osier’s heart raced. He struggled to breathe. Even in her best dress, a silk shawl over her hair, and wearing high heels, Song looked out of place—the dress a bit too red, the shawl revealing her lustrous hair, the high heels noticeably too high.
“Let us pray,” the priest said.
The congregation knelt. Song followed their example, her eyes cast down. Osier was burning with shame and indecision. His hands had gone clammy. What if she stood up and screamed at him?
Utterly at peace, without a clue, Missy DeFranza, kneeling between Osier and Fred, said her prayers. Osier pretended to pray, and as he did, he lifted his head and saw that Song was staring at him. Her gaze was unreadable. Osier tried to convey his helplessness to her in a meaningful shrug, but she was unmoved. And when she sat, she seemed like a bright-feathered and flamboyant bird, conspicuous in scarlet, with silken plumage, too beautiful to be praying.
The priest mounted the pulpit and gave a sermon, full of pauses, its theme the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee. And when, after that, the priest led the prayers, Osier could hear Song in a clacking voice declaiming a prayer in Thai, and it sounded like blasphemy. Osier, terrified, tried to anticipate what Song’s next move might be and how he might counter it. If she lunged at him, should he wrap her in his arms and drag her from the church? If she began shouting, denouncing him, ought he to hurry away?
But he saw, almost with disbelief, that Song was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks. And the priest at that moment was leading a benediction.
Had Fred seen any of this? Osier thought of making a run for it, just ducking out. But when the priest announced a hymn, and the people stood, holding hymnals, Osier looked across the aisle and saw that Song was no longer there.
This was worse. He endured the service to the end, then filed out with the others, squinting as the sun blinded him, and shielding himself, preparing to be accosted. But she had gone.
“Lunch,” Fred said.
“Not for me,” Osier said. He was choked with nausea.
“There’s a great noodle place right near here on the river.”
“I’ll buy,” Missy said. “I’m on expenses.”
“I could use a drink,” Osier said, and followed them, looking around for Song.
In the restaurant, digging at his noodles, Fred said, “Know where you find some awesome Christians? Korea.” Because he said Kree-ah, Osier felt it was untrue. “That Mass did me a power of good.” And, as though boasting, unashamed, he added, “I’ve done some terrible things in my life. Wicked things.”
“It’s all good,” Missy said.
“No,” Fred said. “It’s mortal sin, pure and simple.” He was looking at a ladyboy who was sitting with an older farang. “She’s not a woman, sentimental and afraid. She’s a man.”
Osier said, “What’s your point?”
“She’ll do what a man does,” Fred said.
Osier, not eating, sipping at a glass of lemonade, suddenly stood up and said he’d just remembered that he had something urgent to do. He hurried out and took a taxi to Song’s. His knocking roused the neighbor in the next apartment. She poked her head out and made Osier understand through hand gestures that Song had gone out.
He went to Siamese Nights, almost empty in the Sunday-afternoon somnolence, a trickle of music, a few girls at tables. He sat to calm himself, then left without drinking. He walked along the hectic sidewalk in the direction of his hotel, and at a wide intersection he saw he was lost. He stood among a row of parked motorcycles and called Joyce. She did not answer. This was not surprising. It was three o’clock in the morning in Owls Head. One of the motorcyclists agreed to take him to his hotel. And so the weekend ended in silence and humiliation.
Monday was no better—repeated calls, no answer. Tuesday—no answer. And this was the week of the quarterly audit. He had never been busier, and the numbers didn’t tally. On one of those nights in his hotel room, walking quickly to the door, he caught sight of a figure in the full-length mirror. He saw that it was not him in his green short-sleeved shirt but a beaky woman in a sari, hands upraised to plead, lipstick on her mouth, a slash wound on her cheek, a comb jammed into her hair, imploring him. He was startled at first, then sad, seeing this sister abandoned to ridicule. He called Song again and got no answer.
In the cafeteria, Fred and Larry sat together. Osier was sure they had been talking about him. To discourage their gossiping, he sat with them.
Larry said, “You look like you’ve had some bad news.”
Such bluntness always put Osier on the defensive. He began to protest.
“Just pulling your leg,” Larry said. But Osier was sure that Fred had said something.
That night, the Wednesday, Osier went to Siamese Nights. He saw Song sitting in a booth with an older man, Indian possibly, or Arab. Osier did not hesitate. He snatched Song’s arm and lifted her, and before the startled man could react, he dragged her out of the club and pushed her into a taxi.
“I love you,” he said.
She sulked at the words. She said, “You a bad man. You lie to me. You take you wife to church.”
“That wasn’t my wife. I love you.”
To prove it, he took her to his hotel. He had brought her there before for a drink—she even seemed to have an understanding with the doorman and the lobby staff, something in the oblique way they acknowledged her, familiarly, as an equal, not deferential. But this was a more conspicuous visit. He needed her to know that he was not ashamed.
In the bar, he ordered her a lemonade, and a beer for himself.
Song was looking over his shoulder. “That man.”
Fred, leaving the bar, his back turned, but unmistakably Fred.
“You friend,” she said.
“Not my friend.”
“You boss?”
For simplicity—how could he explain?—he said yes, and as he said it, she looked again in the direction of the door. Osier didn’t dare to look. He assumed that Fred was lingering, because Song was still watching, her head moving slightly.
“Maybe you boss see you.”
“I don’t care,” he said, but a catch in his throat made him think that he did care.
“I go home.”
“No. Come to my room.”
This he knew was reckless, but he was determined to show her that he was not like any other man she’d met, not like anyone else who’d said, “I love you,” and pawed her. He needed to be serious, even solemn, to reassure her. He had sworn as much to her mother.
He drew her to the bed and held her, both of them clothed, and said, “Tell
me about your mother’s farm.”
“In the village,” she said. “Grow rice, have chicken . . .”
And as she spoke, he could see it, greeny-gold in the sunshine, the graceful huts on stilts, in the thickness of banana trees, under the feathery umbrellas of palms. The rice fields, banked in big squares, filled with water, mirrored the blue sky. Her mother stood over the smoking cookstove under the house, stirring the noodles in the wok. The most durable sort of human happiness. Song mentioned the children playing, her brother on his bicycle, and Osier could tell that it meant everything to her.
“Go on,” he said when she hesitated.
He easily fitted himself into that landscape. And when he fell asleep in Song’s arms he dreamed of the village, and a detail she had not given him, a fierce dog barking at him.
He woke in the darkness. He was still dressed. Song had gotten into the bed. She’d had a shower. Her dress was folded on a chair.
“I’m going to the States,” he said.
He could tell even in the darkness, by the way she breathed, that she disapproved. She held his arm as if restraining him, though he hadn’t moved.
“If I don’t go, they make trouble for me.”
Song became thoughtful, then said, “What trouble?”
“Telling stories about me,” he said, and because he was ashamed of speaking this way, he whispered, “They no like me.”
He could tell he had her full attention, as when he had said, “I have money,” and her lips had moved as though in prayer.
She said, “They make you go home?”
He didn’t answer, but his silence was like a statement, and Song’s eyes were on him.
“Who say?”
“My boss.” He had to keep it simple—language was always a problem. But when he uttered the formula, she held on tighter, and he felt the desperation in her fingers.
“Boss,” she said disgustedly.
He regretted the word, his lame excuse, but the truth—Joyce, his pension, his early retirement, all of it—was too complicated to explain. He longed for the time when no more explanations would be necessary.
“Don’t worry.”
“I coming back, honey.” She sang it, as a kind of jeer, and that stung him. Her English had improved and was lethal in its accuracy when she was mocking.
Song said nothing more. The air conditioner restarted, filling the room with clatter. Instead of breaking the spell, the noise made any more talk impossible, and the mutter, with the blast of cool air, roused them. They made love joyously, but with defiance, too. Afterward he thought, How many more years of work? One or two. How many of life? Twenty or more. He was not old—Song had shown him that he was just beginning. He wanted more of life, more of Song. He craved that simple golden world of greenery that she took for granted, that he’d once imagined to be unattainable.
Even in Bangkok she was an oddity, and together they were a greater oddity, but they were alike.
In the morning he called Song a taxi, and he rode the shuttle with Fred and Larry. He was aware of their scrutiny. Had Fred said anything?
Fred said, “We’re thinking of hitting a few clubs tonight. Want to join us?”
This from the churchgoer who had a special relationship with Jesus. All that Osier could think of was his plan to go back to the States, to announce his intentions. He had no words for what he felt, no name for the state he was in, no way of saying what it was that had happened in the night—none that made any sense to him. If this was love, it was something he had never known before. He sorrowed for Joyce, for himself—not for Song. He knew that when the period of grieving was over she would have everything she wanted.
“I can’t go,” he said. This was the same man who’d gotten him to go to church. But this was different.
“We figured,” Larry said.
Osier looked at them both and said, “I know what you’re thinking. But there’s nothing wrong with me.”
Where had that come from? He was sorry he’d blurted it out. That they had no reply was like a challenge to him.
He spent the day finishing the quarterly accounts and making arrangements for flights back to the States. He called Haines and asked for discretionary leave, a week. He called Joyce, saying that he would be coming. And that night he slept well, knowing that he’d made his decision.
His phone rang in the darkness. He guessed it was Joyce, perhaps fretting, a confusion in the time difference. But it was Song. She had never called at this hour, and whenever she called she was circumspect. But she sounded certain—odd for this predawn hour.
“Boy?”
He blinked at the name. “Yes?”
“No more trouble.”
“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Where are you?”
“No more trouble.”
Her self-assurance gave him hope. Even if she was not love, she was life, and she had allowed him to discover something about himself. He was someone else, not the man he had been. Away from home, in the hot night of this city, he had become transformed. It was a glimpse of difference he would never have found in the States. It made him wonder, and that wonderment was his strength. Hearing Song’s voice, he yearned for her.
“I want to see you.”
“I want see you,” she said.
“See you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Then he slept deeply, consoled by her confident voice.
Neither Fred nor Larry was in the lobby when the company shuttle drew up. The doorman said he hadn’t seen them. Normally they were waiting for Osier, holding cups of coffee from the urn in the lobby.
He called Fred’s cell phone number but got a recorded message. He tried Larry.
“It’s me,” Osier said when Larry answered. “Shuttle’s here.”
Larry sighed, a kind of whistling, and gasped a little, sounding like a weak child. “I’m at the hospital,” he said. “I’ll be all right. But I don’t know about Fred. He’s in tough shape.”
“What happened?”
“Couple of guys jumped us last night. They went after Fred. If I hadn’t intervened they would have killed him.”
“What, a robbery?”
“No robbery. Just”—Larry’s voice was weary, wounded— “mayhem. Screaming mayhem. The guys came at us with knives. They cut Fred real bad. You gotta call Haines. And Fred’s wife. Maybe the embassy, too.”
Osier stood in the courtyard of the hotel, the great hot city roaring around his head. The driver signaled from the van, querying with his hands, a gesture that asked, “Shall we go?”
Osier went up to his room but could not summon the nerve to break the news to Haines. To comfort himself, he called Song. “Big trouble,” he said, and he was going to say more but he didn’t trust his unsteady voice.
“No trouble,” Song said.
He had hardly started speaking when she cut him off with uncharacteristic efficiency. She knew everything—the bar, the injuries, even the name of the hospital where the men had been taken. And after this explanation, “I want see you.”
He had once thought, I can choose. People were happy who believed that. He was miserable, because he was no longer ignorant, because he knew he had no choice, and such misery seemed like a guarantee that life went on and on.
“Why did you do this?”
She hadn’t understood. She said, “Wiv my knife. Wiv my friend.”
He said, “I don’t know,” and the panic in his tremulous voice chastened him. Osier dropped his arm. He didn’t want to know how things would turn out. That was an unfair abbreviation, like knowing in advance the day of your death. He tried to be calm. He lifted the phone to his face and said it again.
“But I know,” Song said, with a steady voice of utter assurance, of insistence, taking possession of the whole matter. “Never mind. I love you.”
The manly fury in her voice was dark, even the word “love” was bloody and hellish. He was terrified by her certainty.
; “I want see you,” she said.
“No.” And when he said it, he heard Song snarl into the phone. The awful noise of objection was like the crackle of a harsh hot light, exposing everything he’d ever said and done, burning away his shadow. “I’ve got to make some calls.” She made the noise again. “Okay—later. Siamese Nights. Where are you now?”
“I downstairs. Waiting you.”
Nowadays the Dead Don’t Die
LOOKING FOR BIG game, I had walked all day with the spearman Enoch through the low prickle bush and the bulging head-high termite mounds in the sand hills, kicking through clusters of black pebble-like scat. I could see frantic bird prints, and the scoring, like finger grooves, of the light gravel by thrashing snakes, but saw no animal larger than the hares that had left that scat and the marks of their pads in the sand among the blowing grass. No tracks of lions or hyenas, not even dogs.
“I will tell you,” Enoch said, sounding ashamed, almost fearful. Then he explained.
We were asked, my brother and I, to take the elder, Noah, to the hospital at the boma, sixty-five miles away, in my brother’s vehicle. It was a road of potholes and detours, and halfway there, shaken by the ruts, his swollen belly paining him, Noah died. This was the beginning of everything, though we didn’t know it. At the time it was just a body to be disposed of.
Noah had no family. This was a problem. Among our people death is the occasion for a day of old specific rituals, first the washing of the body, smearing it with ocher, then wrapping it with herbs in a blanket, some chanting by the other elders, and finally carrying the body into the bush, where it is left to be eaten by animals, the lion, the leopard, the wild dogs, the hyenas. Dogs can be fierce in packs, but hyenas are the most thorough and will return to eat everything but the blanket.
We say, “The day the old woman disappears is the day the hyena shits gray hair.”
The family pays for the funeral, and this includes the cost of the blanket, the strings of beads, the twists of herbs, a clay pot of beer, and the red ocher–smearing. The total can be a cow, or a month’s wages for someone who works at the boma.
