Ah, the immediacy of modern communications! I think I would have preferred the age of sail, when letters took months to travel from one continent to another and one might easily have died of cholera or heatstroke before knowing how one’s heart has been treated by the special correspondent on the other side of the world. But this is the twenty-first century, after all, and when in Babylon, one must do as the Babylonians do. A couple of clicks brings up our standard advertisement for the Old Man’s Club. I add the single line
Hello from Nong Jitpleecheep and your loving son Sonchai,
before zinging it off to Superman alias my biological father. I guess it’s the kind of early-morning message every middle-aged man with those kinds of skeletons in the cupboard least wants to receive. We’ll never hear from him, right?
I call my mother and tell her about Kimberley’s e-mail, keeping to myself for the moment the fact that I’ve just taken the irrevocable step of sending him a message.
A long silence. Whispering: “She really got those details from the FBI?”
“Yes.”
“It’s been thirty-three years, Sonchai. I don’t know if I can handle this.” A muffled sound that could have been anything—surely not an uncontrolled sob? But she does hang up immediately, which is not like her at all.
Now I’m alone with him again. Hero and substance abuser, successful lawyer, lousy husband, absentee father (at least in my case). Lost soul?
My cell phone is ringing again. “Would you mind telling me what you intend to do?”
I confess that I’ve sent Superman her cyberversion of “Hello Sailor!” with our family name attached. A gasp. “Have you lost your magic tortoise? Sonchai, you could have at least discussed it with me. Don’t you have any respect?”
“He’s my father.”
She hangs up again. I shrug. When I call Bangkok Airways, they tell me there are nine flights per day to Hat Yai, only two a week to Songai Kolok. I book the next flight to Hat Yai.
12
FYI:
Roughly translated, the full name of our capital means: “Great city of angels, the repository of divine gems, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of reincarnated spirits.”
Phonetically it goes like this: “Krung Thep mahanakhon bowon rattanakosin mahintara ayuthaya mahadilok popnopparat ratcha-thani burirom-udomratchaniwet mahasathan-amonpiman-avatansathri-
sakkathatityavisnukamprasit.”
There’s no Bangkok in it.
TWO
The South
13
O
n the flight to the deep South I sit next to two young sex tourists who are chuckling over a familiar chestnut:
“So I paid her bar fine and took her back to my room for an all-night, and when I went to use the bathroom in the morning,
canyabelieveit,
she’s actually been squatting on the seat—there are foot marks all over it.”
This particular story always annoys me. I think it does illustrate the cultural gap though, not because the girls are used to squatting, but because Westerners find it so important and shocking. I guess the toilet is right at the center of the
farang
mind, just as Buddha is with us, no? I’m afraid I could not resist an intervention.
“Recent research shows that people who squat rarely if ever suffer from cancer of the colon,” I tell the young fellow next to me (headscarf, nose stud, three-quarter walking shorts, and T-shirt).
A quizzical look. “That right?”
“Yes, soon you’ll all be squatting over there too. It’ll take a while to catch on, there’ll be squat-ins, everyone will have to go to classes, there’ll be how-to best-sellers with illustrations, talk-show hosts will demonstrate how it’s done, missionaries will be dispatched to other countries.”
“Huh?”
Isn’t universal education a wonderful thing? I turn away to stare out the window at weightless white puffs, still irritated, until I remember the venerable Monsieur Truffaut, who hired my mother for a few months in Paris when I was young. There was a squatters’ toilet even in his
cinquième arrondissement
apartment. My mother always respected him—and the French—for that. Actually, my mother and I both prefer to squat. Neither of us has ever suffered any kind of bowel disorder in our lives, by the way,
farang.
In Hat Yai I catch a cab to the railway station.
Train: I think we must have bought our rolling stock from the British in the heyday of empire; I imagine an Edwardian in worsted wool somewhere in the English Midlands calculating that if he left out the upholstery, he could fit in one more native per seat. After half an hour the slats have imprinted themselves on my bum, which I am sure must resemble a wicket.
Scenery: Small black violin-shaped birds sing in unison on telephone wires, a silver-gray buffalo with long horns blunders across a field, naked kids play in a stream, the grass is the same green as a card table, in flooded fields the first frail shoots of this year’s second rice harvest; everything distorts with heat. You could say the landscape changes dramatically from Hat Yai on south, though not for any reason of geography. All of a sudden the women working the fields are wearing Islamic headscarves and long skirts. Many are in black from head to foot. It is not in the nature of our women to cover their faces or affect prudishness, but the statement is unambiguous: this is another country. The men, too, wear Islamic headgear, either the skullcaps that so resemble those of their Hebrew brothers, or flowerpot-shaped things that cling to the sides of their heads. It is early evening, just before sunset, and the cries of invisible muezzins calling the faithful to invisible country mosques haunt the gathering dusk. Fear settles on my shoulder for a long haul. Anything can happen down here.
It’s dark by the time the train reaches Songai Kolok, and my instinct is to check the town out first, before contacting Mustafa.
It looks as if every second building on the main street is a form of rentable accommodation. I toy with the idea of using one of the seedier ones for old times’ sake (I could produce an encyclopedia of the dives Mum and I stayed in overseas, when she was commuting between johns) but decide against. I will have a Muslim guide to massage, after all, so I choose what looks like the biggest and best. It’s called Gracious Palace in Thai, Malaysian, and English and manages to be big, expensive, dingy, overlit, and sleazy all at once. At reception they issue me with towels, soap, and three condoms. Well, you can’t say they’re not taking HIV seriously.
Half an hour later I have showered and changed my clothes (generic black shoes, black pants, white shirt as usual); I am strolling through the town and beginning to get the picture. What I like best is the police station. It’s a big, even majestic building encircled by a perimeter wall, on the outside of which there are maybe three hundred little bamboo huts leaning against it and a girl or two in each hut. The huts are not brothels, of course—they’re too small for that. They pretend to sell food and drink, and some of them even have small fridges with beer, but there’s no mistaking the point of the exercise.
The girls are not usually local Muslims; they tend to be Buddhists from all over Thailand, especially the poor North, who have decided to specialize in this niche market. It doesn’t pay nearly as well as the
farang
market in Bangkok, but it’s a lot more reliable. Every weekend and most weekdays great hordes of pious young Muslim men from Malaysia cross the border here and leave their piety on the other side. They come in expensive four-by-fours, on cheap Honda motorbikes, in buses or minibuses. Some even come by bicycle. Some come on foot. Right now, for example, the town is flooded with them. The girls have all learned Malay, and the ringgit is an accepted currency. Young men are standing or sitting in every one of the huts, purring while the girls charm them. In a way they can be more civilized than
farang.
They don’t come just to get laid—they want the full debauch, including alcohol and a huge cavernous disco with karaoke. The sex comes at the end of the evening, so long as they’re still sober enough.
With my professional eye I spy one beauty who owns an elegance you do not generally see outside of Krung Thep. She surveys me with a blink almost imperceptible to a nonprofessional, sees my Thai style of dressing, and discards me as a possibility. It says a lot that a woman like that is working here. It doesn’t say nearly as much as the police station, though. No one familiar with Asia can doubt that the cops charge the girls rent for the use of the perimeter wall against which to lean their huts.
As I walk, my orientation acquires ever greater accuracy. The flesh trade is everywhere, it is the economy of this town, there is really nothing else. I think of Mustafa: what an affront it must be to him; what torture to his pure soul to walk through this town day after day. In every hotel lobby, every café, restaurant, and street corner, there’s a huddle of women somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age. Usually they look past me, for they have trained themselves to specialize in Malays, but most seem amenable to persuasion, should I weaken. Not exactly a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism: I think any Al Qaeda evangelist would be laughed out of town. Muhammad himself couldn’t incite these local guys to a jihad: they’re in Islamic heaven already.
I try to think of the
farang
Mitch Turner hanging out here month after month. Well, it seems he bolted for Soi Cowboy at least once. I can see why. Prostitution aside, this is a small, claustrophobic town.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a young Muslim man pull out a cell phone and speak into it. Did I imagine that involuntary jerk of the chin in my direction? While he is talking, I pull out my own cell phone and call Mustafa: engaged. That would prove nothing to a properly trained cop, but to a third-worldy working on intuition, it’s pretty conclusive.
As soon as the young man closes his phone, I call Mustafa again: it rings.
“Sonchai, where are you?”
“You know where I am.”
A pause. “I’ll come now.”
He arrives on foot within ten minutes. I’m seeing him in context now,
his
context, this serious young man of Islam. I want to observe his reaction to the prostitutes who are responsible for the town’s economy:
his
town,
his
economy. But he seems hardly to notice them. A mission of some kind has usurped his imagination. He looks grimly ahead, walking tall, straight-spined like his father. There is no denying the beauty of his surrender to Allah—no serious meditator could fail to approve—but the Buddha gave us the middle path; I see no golden mean in Mustafa’s. Without his father’s restraining hand, he could clear the town with a bomb and hardly notice. We do not
wai
each other; without the old man our recognition is neutral, like enemies who find a common purpose for a moment, before resuming an ancient feud.
“I have the key,” he says, not looking at me and fishing in his pockets.
“Not on the street, Mustafa,” I say. I guide him into a café, where I order a 7-Up and he drinks water. He is uncomfortable here, even though the café does not serve alcohol. I think he would be uncomfortable in any surrounding designed to induce congeniality. I see it in tantalizingly vague and elusive mental images from many centuries ago: even then he was impaled by that same single-mindedness that is a form of tunnel vision. Buddhism was too subtle for him then, as it is today. To the evolved mind of the Gautama Buddha, any desire was an obscene distortion, even the desire for God. Mustafa is one of those passionate souls who were made for Islam, the warrior religion.
“Relax,” I tell him. “Open your mind. I need information.”
“What information?” He is startled and defensive. For him, our meeting here was circumscribed with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He has no idea how Western this quaint shrinking of reality is.
“Well, how about the address?”
A blink: “I was going to show you, but you insisted on coming in here.”
“Good. In a minute you will show me where Mr. Mitch Turner lived. That is the future, Mustafa. Let’s stay in the present. Don’t you like it here?”
He looks around and shrugs. “It’s just a café.”
I cannot penetrate this iron skull. But I was his teacher once, and he loved me with the very same fierceness, the same passion, the same blindness. “Mustafa, let me tell you something: you are brilliant at what you do. It’s really not that easy, even in a small town like this, to have someone followed, to know where they are minute to minute. But your network has been on my tail since I arrived. I didn’t notice myself until I saw one of your people with his cell phone, and even then it was just a hunch on my part.”
“So? My father has to know what is going on at all times. I told you that in Krung Thep. It is his network, not mine. He says—” He breaks off, scared of saying too much.
“What? What does your father say?”
“He says there is nothing more threatening to the modern world than a moderate Muslim. The fanatics hate us because they think we are heretics and cowards, and the West hates us because we have a morality it lost a long time ago—many
farang
are converting to us, especially in America. I have to protect my father.”
“So you run the network that he put in place?”
“Yes.”
“So you probably know more about Mitch Turner than anyone on earth. At least, the Mitch Turner who lived here in Songai Kolok for however many months.”
“More than eight months.” He catches my eye and allows the faintest trace of a smirk. “Eight months and two weeks.”
“Your people followed him wherever he went, didn’t they?”
“My father told you, we were trying to keep him alive. The only way to do that was to keep an eye on him.”
“Did he know?”
A shake of the head. “He was very stupid.” He looks me in the eye. “No, that is not the word, but he was a typical
farang,
lost, confused, pulled in a thousand directions like a man consumed by demons. He lived in his head and saw very little of the outside world. I could have had ten men following him in a line, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Of course, being
farang
he thought he was the only one doing the spying. He deteriorated after the first month. A whore came to see him from Bangkok from time to time. He used drugs. He went through a bad patch, he thought he was undergoing a religious conversion. That’s when he went to see my father. But it was just his Western psychosis. Why do
farang
think that God loves crazies? Allah loves men of steel.”