The Coroner's Lunch Read online

  Suddenly refreshed, and mysteriously elated, he pulled back his mosquito net and got up. He saw the midge that had been trapped inside with him and feasted gloriously on his finger’s blood. It flew to the window and out to boast of its coup.

  Siri put on the kettle, drew the ill-fitting curtain, and carried his small transistor radio to the coffee table. It was a sin, but one he delighted in.

  Lao radio broadcasts boomed from public address speakers all over the city from five A.M. on. Some lucky citizens had the honor of being blasted from their beds by statistics of the People’s National Rice Harvest coming directly through their window. Others’ houses vibrated to reminders that salt borders would keep slugs off their vegetables.

  But Siri was in a blissful black hole, far enough from the PA’s for their messages to be no more than a distant hum. He listened instead to his beloved transistor. By keeping the volume down, he could tune into world news on the Thai military channel. The world had receded somewhat on Lao radio recently.

  Naturally, Thai radio and television were banned in the People’s Democratic Republic. You wouldn’t be arrested for listening, but your District Security Council member would knock loudly on your door and shout for all the neighbors to hear, “Comrade, don’t you realize that listening to decadent foreign propaganda will only distort your mind? Aren’t we all content here with what we have? Why do we need to give satisfaction to the capitalist pigs by listening to their pollution?”

  Your name would be added to a list of grade-four subversives and, theoretically, your co-workers would cease to have complete trust in you. But as far as Siri was concerned, the edict only succeeded in depriving the Lao people of some jolly entertainment.

  The Thais were devastated that evil communists had moved in next door, in Laos. Their paranoid military could never be accused of subtlety. Siri loved to listen to their broadcasts. He honestly believed that if the politburo allowed free access to Thai radio, people would decide for themselves which regime they’d prefer to live under.

  He’d listened to “expert” commentaries on the Reds’ inborn taste for wife-sharing, an infirmity that caused such confusion in their society that “incest was inevitable.” How communism had led to a dramatic increase in two-headed births he was uncertain, but Thai radio had the figures to prove it.

  Saturday morning was his favorite because they assumed the Lao would be gathered by their radios on the weekend, desperate for propaganda. But today Siri was distracted. He didn’t even get around to turning on the radio. He brought his thick brown Vietnamese coffee to the table, sat in his favorite chair, and inhaled the delicious aroma. It smelled a lot better than it tasted.

  He was about to take a sip when the light from the window reflected from something in front of him on the surface of the tin coffeetable. It was a circle of water, the kind you get from a damp glass. This was nothing incredible, except that he hadn’t put anything on the table that morning. His cup was dry and it hadn’t left his hand. And in Vientiane’s climate, this moisture could not have been left over from the previous evening.

  He drank some coffee and looked at the ring of water calmly, waiting for an answer to come to his mind. He looked up at the chair where the morning shadows had played tricks on him, then back at the table. If he wanted to be perverse, he could remark that the ring was in the spot where the longboat man’s whisky bottle had sat. He turned to the shelf on the wall behind him and ripped a sheet of paper from the roll there.

  But when he turned back to the table there was no ring of water.

  His second strange awakening that weekend wasn’t so occult. Miss Vong from the Department of Education had a habit of not knocking on the door until after she’d walked through it. She’d often caught Siri putting things on or taking things off, but she always looked at him as if it was his fault. If he’d done the same at her apartment, he’d be facing a court summons for certain.

  But on this Sunday morning, he was still fast asleep when she arrived, so he knew it had to be early. The scent of temple incense had already filled the room, but the roosters were still dreaming of magical flights over mountains and lakes.

  “Come on, sleepy. Time to get up.”

  As she had no children of her own, this annoying woman had taken to mothering everybody. She went to the single curtain and yanked it open. The light didn’t stream in, it oozed. It was an early hour indeed. She stood by the window with her hands on her hips. “We have an irrigation canal to dig.”

  His mind groaned. What had happened to weekends, to free time, to days off? His Saturday mornings at work invariably became days, and here they were, stealing his Sunday too. He pried open one eye.

  Miss Vong was dressed in corduroy working trousers and a sensible long-sleeved shirt buttoned at neck and wrist. She wore her thinning hair in pigtails and reminded Siri of the Chinese peasant eternalized in Mao posters. Chinese propaganda skimped on facial features, as nature had done with Miss Vong. She was somewhere between thirty and sixty, with the build of an underfed teenaged boy.

  “What torture is this? Leave me alone.”

  “I will not. You deliberately missed the community painting of the youth center last month. I’m certainly not going to let you miss out on the chance to dig the overflow canal.”

  Community service in the city of Vientiane wasn’t a punishment; it was a reward for being a good citizen. It was the authorities’ gift to the people. They didn’t want a single man, woman, or child to miss out on the heart-swelling pride that comes from resurfacing a road or dredging a stream. The government knew the people would gladly give up their only day off for such a treat.

  “I’ve got a cold,” he said, pulling the sheet over his head. He heard the tinkle of water filling a kettle and the pop of the gas range. He felt the tickle and heard the rustle of his mosquito net being tethered to the hook on the wall. He heard the swish of a straw brush across his floor.

  “That’s why I’m fixing you a nutritious cup of tea with a twist of—”

  “I hate tea.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He laughed. “I thought after seventy-two years, I might know what I hate and what I don’t.”

  “You need to build up your strength for the digging.”

  “What happened to all the prison inmates? They used to do all this. Dig ditches, unplug sewers.”

  “Dr. Siri, I’m surprised at you. Sometimes I wonder if you really did fight for the revolution. There’s no longer any excuse for the uneducated and ignorant to be doing all our dirty work. We’re all perfectly capable of lifting a hoe and swinging an ax.”

  “…and dissecting a cancerous liver,” he mumbled under the cover.

  “All our ill-advised criminal types are undergoing re-education at the islands. You know that. Now. Are you getting up, or do I have to drag you out of there?”

  He decided to punish her for her unsolicited familiarity.

  “No. I’ll get up. But I have to warn you, I’m naked and I have a morning erection. It’s nothing sexual, you’ll understand. It’s a result of pressure on the….”

  There was a slight click and the battering of loose boards on the veranda. He peeled down the sheet and looked triumphantly around the empty room.

  When he went downstairs, he found two trucks loaded with drowsy silent neighbors, obviously overcome with delight. Area 29C was providing the labor for irrigation canal section 189. It would take the better part of the day, but a sticky rice, salt fish, and tamnin ivy lunch would be provided absolutely free.

  He shook off Saloop’s lethargic charge and climbed onto the rear truck. He’d spotted Miss Vong on the front one, lecturing the young couple from the room opposite his. He nodded and joked with his neighbors as the convoy set off. They nodded and joked back. But none of these good moods could be described as sincere.

  Despite having joined the Communist Party for entirely inappropriate reasons, Siri had been a paid-up member for forty-seven years. If the truth were to be told,
he was a heathen of a communist. He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

  After clawing his way through a French education system dense and overgrown with restrictions against the poor, he had finally proved that a country boy could make something of himself. He found a rare, benevolent French sponsor, who sent him to Paris. There he became a competent but not brilliant medical student. France wasn’t renowned for making life easier for those poor souls born outside its borders. It was every homme for himself.

  But Siri was used to struggling. In his first two years at Ancienne, without distractions, he was in the top thirty percent of his class. His tutors agreed he had great promise, “for an Asian.” But like many a good man before him, he soon discovered that all the potential in the world was no match for a nice pair of breasts. He found himself in third-year pathology concentrating not on the huge blackboard crammed with its neat diagrams, but on the slow-breathing sweater of Boua. She was a red-faced Lao nursing student who sat by the window whatever the weather. He could generally tell from the sweater just how cold it was outside. In the summer, it became a slow-breathing blouse with more buttons undone than was absolutely necessary. He barely scraped through pathology and plummeted into the bottom twenty-percent bracket overall.

  By the fourth year, he and Boua were engaged and sharing a room so small, the bed had been sawn short so the door could open. She was a healthy, well-curved girl from Laos’s ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang. Her family was blue-blooded Royalist from generations back. But while her parents knelt and bowed at the feet of the passing king and tossed orchid petals before him, she was in her room plotting his demise.

  She had learned of the French Communist Party from her first lover, a skinny young tutor from Lyons. At the first opportunity, she set off for her Mecca. Whereas Siri had come to Paris to become a doctor, Boua was studying nursing as a pretext: she was actually in Paris to become the best communist she could be, in order to return to elevate the downtrodden masses in her homeland.

  She made it clear to Siri that if he wanted her hand, he had to embrace the red flag also. He did want her hand, and the rest of her, and considered four evenings a week, the odd Sunday, and five francs a month, cheap at half the price. At first, the thought of attending meetings that espoused the fall of the great capitalist empire made him uneasy. He was quite fond of the music of capitalism and fully expected to dance to it as soon as the chance presented itself. He’d been poor all his life, a state he was hoping to recover from as a doctor. But guilt at having such thoughts eventually overtook him.

  So it was that communism and Boua conspired to damage his hopes and dreams. By embracing his fiancée and her red flag, he was slowly tearing himself from the grasp of medicine. In order to pass his fifth year, he had to take several make-up exams. By the time he reached his practicum, he had two black stars on the front of his personal file. They indicated that the student therein had to be an exceptional intern if he didn’t want to be loaded on an early Airopostale flight and forfeit his sponsor’s fees.

  Fortunately, Siri was a natural doctor. The patients adored him, and the staff at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital thought so highly of him that the administration asked him to consider staying on in France and working there full-time. But his heart was with Boua, and when she returned to further The Cause in her homeland, he was at her side.

  On Monday, Siri walked down to the Mekhong River and stood for a while. The rains had held on stubbornly that year, but he was sure they were now gone for another five months. It was a brisk November morning and the sun hadn’t yet found the strength to dry the grasses on the bank. He let the cool dew soak his feet and wondered how long the Party’s shiny vinyl shoes would survive the next rains.

  He walked reluctantly along the embankment and kicked up scents from the Crow Shit blossoms that grew there. On the far bank, Thailand stared rudely back at him, its boats floating close to its waterfront. The river that was once a channel between two countries had become a barrier.

  In front of Mahosot Hospital, he sat on a wobbly stool beside the road and ate stale foi noodles purchased from a cart. Nothing really tasted fresh any more. But with all the diseases he’d been exposed to over the years, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to his health. He could probably inject himself with salmonella and it would pass straight through him.

  With no other excuses to delay his arrival at work, he walked between the shoebox buildings toward his office. The hospital had been put together without style or grace by the French and was basically a village of concrete bunkers. He hesitated in front of his own building before stepping inside. The sign over the door said MORGUE in French. The mat beneath it, his own personal touch, said WELCOME in English.

  Only two of the rooms in the blockhouse had natural light. One of these was his office. He shared it with his staff of two, a staff that Judge Haeng rudely referred to as one and a half.

  “Good morning, Comrades.” He walked into the gray cement room and went over to his desk.

  Dtui looked up from her Thai fan magazine.

  “Good health, doctor.” She was a solid young nurse with a well-washed but rather craggy face and a happy mouth. Her first reaction to everything was to smile, and goodness knows, she didn’t have a lot to smile about.

  “I doubt whether the Department of Information and Culture would be happy to see you reading such bourgeois perversions.”

  She grinned at the doctor’s comment. “I’m just reminding myself how repulsive the capitalist system can be, Comrade.” She held up a badly registered three-color print of a television star wearing a miniskirt. “I mean, can you see me in something like that?”

  Siri smiled to himself and raised his eyebrows. A rocking man in the corner of the office attracted his attention. “Ah, good morning, Mr. Geung.”

  The rocking man smiled when he heard his name and looked up. “Good morning, Dr. Comrade. It’s…it’s going to be a hot one.” He nodded his agreement with his own comment.

  “Yes, Mr. Geung. I believe you’re correct. Do we have any customers today?”

  Geung laughed as he always did at Siri’s permanent joke. “No customers today, Dr. Comrade.”

  This was it. This was the team he’d inherited, the job he didn’t want, the life he didn’t expect to be leading. For almost a year, he’d been the country’s head and only coroner. He was the first to confess to his lack of qualifications and his absence of enthusiasm for the job.

  The first month of his on-the-job training had been ridiculous. The only Lao doctor with a background in performing autopsies had crossed the river, allegedly in a rubber inner tube, long before Siri’s arrival. So, apart from Mr. Geung, who had acquired a massive but well-concealed body of information as that doctor’s assistant, there was nobody to teach Siri how to do his new job.

  So, once he’d agreed to postpone his retirement, he set about learning his trade from a couple of slightly charred French textbooks. He brought an old music stand from the abandoned American school and used it to hold the books open while he cut and sliced away at his first cases. With one eye on the music stand, he performed like a concert coroner playing away on the innards of the corpses. “Turn,” he would say, and Dtui turned the page. He worked through the numbers as recommended by French pathologists of 1948.

  He’d performed a good deal of battlefield surgery over the years, but maintenance of the living was a very different science to the investigation of the departed. There were procedures that needed to be followed, observations that needed to be made. He hadn’t expected, at seventy-two, to be learning a new career. When he had arrived in Vientiane for the first time with the victorious Pathet Lao on November 23, 1975, ther
e had been something far more pleasurable on his mind.

  After the landmark party conference of December 5th, the mood had been higher than a rocket. The celebrations were awash in vat after vat of freshly made Lao rice spirits. Cheeks were bruised from manly kisses.

  The crown prince, somber from suit to countenance, had read aloud his father’s notice of abdication and, naturally, declined an invitation to join the festivities. The Pathet Lao, after decades of cave-based insurgency, had become the rulers of Laos. The kingdom was now a republic. It was a dream many of the old soldiers, in their heart of hearts, had believed would never come true.

  In the spirit of jungle fighters, they moved the trestle tables out of the banquet room and put down straw mats. There they sat in circles relishing their victory. Food and drink were replenished throughout the evening by pretty young cadres in thick lipstick and green uniforms.

  Siri figured he’d probably spent more of his life cross-legged on the ground than he had in chairs. He, too, was in a buoyant mood that day, if not for the same reasons as his comrades. He would have returned to his guest house and slept the sleep of the victors if it hadn’t been for Senior Comrade Kham.

  The tall, gaunt senior party member took advantage of a vacant spot in the circle beside Siri and sat himself down.

  “So, Comrade Siri, we’ve actually done it.”

  “So it would seem.” Siri was unused to rice whisky in such volume, and he wasn’t completely in control of his mouth or the tongue inside it. “But I have the feeling we’re here to celebrate the end of something rather than the beginning.”

  “Marx tells us that all beginnings are difficult.”

  “Nothing you or Marx have ever known could prepare you for the problems you’ve got coming. But, hell, Kham, you certainly shut the doubters up.” He raised his glass and chinked it against Kham’s, but quaffed alone. The comrade’s eyes were couched deep in their sockets, like snakes looking out at the world.