Two hours later, Siri was back at the orchard. His hosts were early sleepers, unused to company. In his sack he had two bottles of earthy rice whiskey, the remains of the river fish, and a container of sticky rice. This would be a fitting last meal for a man who loved his vocation.
The moon had lit his path from, and back to, the orchard, like a lighthouse beacon guiding a foreign ship. He walked the aisles of fruit trees, breathing in their sweet nighttime scents. A blind man could have identified each tree.
The gardener had abandoned his futile task and was sitting between Siri and a blazing fire. A good pile of lopped branches was at his side, and the smoke carried the scent of the trees they came from. The man was stockier than he’d appeared earlier, and he hunched forward slightly as he stared at the flames.
Siri announced his arrival. “Good health, friend.”
“Welcome back.”
Siri put his aid package on the ground in front of the old man and the bottles clinked together as he pulled them from the sack.
“This should soften the pain of saying goodbye to your friends here, eh?”
He chuckled and turned to the old man. It was his intention to shake his hand to re-launch their friendship. But as he moved out of the line of the fire, the flames lit up the hooded eyes of the gardener. Siri froze. His own face must have reflected his shocked disbelief at what he was seeing.
The firelight shone directly onto the man’s wide round features. The mouth spread slowly into a broad smile of neat teeth. It wasn’t a face Siri had seen in the flesh, but it was one he knew only too well. It was a face he’d seen on 8mm film in the caves of Houaphan, accompanied by the jeers and laughter of the cadres. It was a face he’d carried to the market, folded in his shoulder bag. It was a face on propaganda posters they’d used in hate sessions at endless political seminars.
The man spoke through his smile. “I hope this doesn’t disqualify me from having a drink.”
“It isn’t Dom Perignon.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
The king, into his second year of unemployment, leaned forward to shake the hand Siri had misplaced somewhere between them. “My name’s—”
“Yeah. I know. Bugger me. This is one for the books. I’m Siri, Siri Paiboun. Am I supposed to…I don’t know…curtsy or something?”
“I doubt that would do either of us any good. For heaven’s sake, sit down and open a bottle.”
Siri did as he was decreed, but he couldn’t help laughing at the weirdness of the moment. He poured the whiskey into two half-coconut shells and handed one to the old man.
“What exactly are you doing here?” Siri asked.
“Bidding, as you rightly say, farewell to my trees. This is the place I’ll miss most. Good health.”
He gestured the coconut shell toward his guest, then took a swig. Siri was already aware of just how awful the homemade brew was, but the king showed no reaction to it.
“Good health.” Siri drank and winced. “Yecch. I reckon we could piss this out as weed killer by the end of the night.”
They both laughed.
“What brings you here, Comrade Siri?”
“Some mysterious emergency. I’m the national coroner, for want of a better one. They asked me to identify a couple of crispy fliers. The local Party head expected me to tell him their names and addresses. In return, he wasn’t prepared to tell me a damn thing.”
“I think you’ll find they’re both Lao royalists.”
“What do you know?”
“There was an attempt, the day before yesterday, to take my family and me out of the country. One of the helicopters was shot down. I imagine that’s where your fliers are from. I’m sure your LPLA people would like to confirm that they had connections to the old Royal Lao Government. The helicopter crashed in the grounds of That Luang temple. You should go and take a look there.”
“Is that why you’re leaving?”
“They want me somewhere less accessible from Thailand.”
“You seem to be taking it all remarkably calmly.”
“I’m resigned to it. It’s been coming for some time.”
“Since the abdication?”
“Long before that, I’m afraid. Our royal line has lost its kwun.”
Even born-again-agnostic Siri was shocked to hear such a statement. Lao tradition had it that all living beings were in possession of a kwun: something between a soul and a spirit. Humans were said to have thirty-two kwun. In times of bad fortune, some of the kwun may flee, and shamans are called in to invite them to return. Only in serious illness or death does the kwun desert its host completely.
Siri looked at the man’s wrists, heavy with loops of unspun white thread. When begging the kwun to return, it was usual to circle the wrists of the unlucky one with strings and knot them. Somebody close to the king had been doing some serious negotiating with the spirit world.
“You really believe that?”
“There’s no doubt.”
“When did it happen?” He refilled the coconut shells.
“When I came along.”
“Now, you’re just being hard on yourself.”
“It’s a fact. Indisputable. In my father’s time, he and my uncle, Phetsarath, were in harmony with the spirits. This orchard was theirs. Are you sensitive to necromancy, Dr. Siri?”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Then you can probably feel the spirits of the trees here and the hold they have over this region. I’m told it’s very strong. I cannot feel it myself. The whole of Luang Prabang is evidently bristling with the ghosts of previous kings and queens and their offspring. There’s been a magical connection between the Royal Capital and the occult since the days of my great ancestor, King Fa Ngum. It was he who brought the first spirits to this place. He had thirty-three teeth, you know?”
“He what?”
“Thirty-three teeth. It’s almost unheard of. The Lord Buddha also had thirty-three, and although he never mentioned it, the dental records showed that my uncle had thirty-three teeth as well. It’s a sign, an indication that you’ve been born as a bridge to the spirit world.”
“And you believe all this?” Siri asked as he began to use his tongue to count the teeth in his own mouth.
“There’s been too much evidence to doubt it.” Siri noticed for the first time that a cricket had come to rest on the old king’s shoulder. “Do you recall that your Viet Minh friends tried to invade Luang Prabang in the early fifties?”
“Yes.” Siri lost count of his teeth.
“What reason did they give for their failure?”
“Hmm, let me think. Something about the place being heavily fortified and manned with well-armed French militia.”
“Ha. So I thought. The French didn’t get here in time. All we had was a handful of old retainers with rusty hunting rifles. A crochet society could have invaded us. The advisers told my father we were doomed and that he should flee.
“But he stayed. That night, he gathered the shamans, and they called on the spirits to protect the capital. The following day, the Viet Minh were advancing upon us. They were so cocksure, they were already divvying up the spoils as they marched. But suddenly they began to fall.”
“In what way?”
“Just drop. A number were taken by some mysterious palsy. They lost all their strength. Their eyes rolled in their sockets and they couldn’t speak. More and more fell to this mysterious disease, until the commanders called a halt to the advance. They had to drag the stricken men back on bamboo travoises.
“Their medics couldn’t fathom what ailment had struck them down or how to treat them. But the next day, they awoke, right as rain. So they came at us again. And the same thing happened.”
“I admit, I didn’t hear that version. I would have remembered it if I had.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Over the last six months, I’ve started to believe almost everything.”
“In my uncle’s case, I saw it for myself. We would spend a day with him in Luang Prabang, then someone would arrive from Vientiane and tell you he’d spent the same day with him there. He could be at two or three places at once. On one occasion, I saw him rise from the ground. He just levitated.”
“Ah, so this isn’t the first time you’ve tried my sister-in-law’s homemade rice whiskey?”
They both laughed.
“But, Dr. Siri, I don’t have any of these gifts. When I was born, the shamans predicted that the kwun would leave the royal line along with me, that I wouldn’t live out my reign. When my father died, I knew I didn’t have the power to hold on to the magic that had helped us survive for so many centuries.”
Siri shook his head. “No. This is history, my friend. A revolution has nothing to do with appeasing the spirits. You’re a victim of politics, not destiny.”
“I agree that there are semantics involved. Even from the practical point of view, I have little leverage. My supporters have all fled. I have two confidants that I would trust with my life, but most of the entourage gave us lip service until they knew our fate. If my father were here, the kwun would show him the way to overcome your politics. It hasn’t shown me. I’m told it’s getting weaker day by day. When they move us from Luang Prabang, the connection will be severed. Our will cannot survive a move.”
“Ah. Don’t be so cheerful. They’ll just put you up in a camp for a few months, give you some Marxist propaganda to memorize, then bring you back a new improved born-again commie royal. They’ll hold you up as an example for the masses.”
“There will be no coming back.”
“Now, why do you have to talk like that?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s speak of more delightful things—to counteract the bitter agony of this paint thinner we’re drinking.”
“Thank God for that. I was starting to think you were actually enjoying the stuff.”
“May I ask how your revolution’s going?”
“Revolutions always go more smoothly around a campfire in the jungle than they do in real life.”
“You’ll forgive me if I say you don’t come across as a hardened socialist.”
“It’s a bit of an anticlimax.”
“I understand. I heard your prime minister’s inspirational speech on the radio. I think the expression he used was ‘no major achievements in the first year of office.’ I was sure he could have found one little thing to boast about.”
“I think the takeover took us all by surprise. It happened so suddenly.”
“Twenty years is hardly sudden,” remarked the king.
“Ah, but that’s just it. All the sitting around tends to make you stodgy and lethargic. You get to wonder whether your revolutionary dream will ever come true. Then—poof—there you are running a country. The PL was swept into power in Laos on the back of the angry North Vietnamese dragon.”
“You’ve always held on to its tail.”
“That’s true. But I believe we’re a more gentle version.”
“The hundred thousand people that fled across the river didn’t appear to think so.”
“They were running away from the unknown rather than the reality. We’re quite sweet, really.”
The king sipped at the whiskey and turned the natural grimace it produced into a wry smile. “So you haven’t been sending officials from the old regime to concentration camps?”
“I think the Party refers to them as re-education camps. They’re like holiday camps with barbed wire and hard labor. Look, I know what you’re saying. I share some of your concerns. I don’t like locking people up for their beliefs. But I also understand that—at least in these early days—there’s a need for stability. The LPRP can’t afford to have vocal dissent stirring up anti-government feeling. They’ve got enough problems without that.”
“But—”
“And you have to admit that your old government officials and military and police weren’t exactly angels of purity. The Security Council’s been uncovering evidence of unbelievable corruption all the way up the ladder.”
“I’m sure it won’t take your new officials long to master the fine art of graft. Greed is sadly inherent in the soul of man.”
“Again, I agree. But we do have a lot of good people. They really have the well-being of Laos at heart. You don’t spend half your adult life in caves if your intention is to make yourself wealthy. They may not be popular in the towns, but let’s not forget that eighty-five percent of the population works the land. With all due respect, the old regime pretty much let them get on with it. You bought their products at a fraction of market value and didn’t do a thing to help them through droughts and epidemics.”
“And your communist brothers and sisters will.”
“I think they’ll try.”
“Then let us thank the Lord Buddha for that.”
Even while his words were still floating there in the air, Siri wondered whether he really believed what he’d just said. So many of those jungle dreams seemed to evaporate when exposed to reality. Once the cadres moved into the cities, the shoes of the old regime began to fit them quite well. There was already a rumor that officials at the Agricultural Ministry were taking kickbacks and rerouting seed stocks.
When he was at the temple in Savanaketh, Siri had read a translation of Animal Farm as a French primer. He had thought it was a story about animals on a farm. It wasn’t until it was condemned by the Communist Party in Paris as capitalist propaganda that he read it again as a political statement. He was starting to recognize some of the beasts.
Time passed quickly, and the two old men discussed Orwell and Voltaire, Engels and Guizot and Vailland, Césaire, spiraling down to Simenon and Hergé, wisely veering away from politics as the liquor slowly took hold.
In one of their last moments of sober clarity, Siri and the king had the brilliant idea of mixing Wilaiwan’s lethal brew with the juice of some succulent fruits from the orchard. The result was an ideal aperitif to accompany the fish and the rice, and the perfect antidote to depression.
When the whiskey bottles were empty, the two men lay side by side on a mat of lush grass, exhausted from a final bout of laughter, invigorated by talk of literature and music, at peace and at one with the aromatic fruit. There, Siri watched the cricket on the king’s shoulder, licking its fingernails, and he slowly joined the old regent in sleep.
As the spirits resided in the trees, and the fruit grew on those trees and that fruit was now inside Siri, it was no surprise that his sleep should be filled with the light and color of a spectacular dream.