Arms Race (10 page)

Do you think they will succeed? I asked.

The Vietcong did, Maxime said. And the Khmer Rouge. Why not the Pathet Laos?

Why not? Louis cried. Because everyone is so
layyyy-zeee
! It will take them a thousand
years to reach the capital. We will drink ourselves to death first!

He swung to me, and I felt his gaze linger over the sores on my face.

Céline, he said, why did you not return to France while you had the chance?

Return to France? I said. I have just escaped.

Bravo! Louis said. He refilled my glass. Tell me why you escaped.

Because it is the end of the world.

Of course it is, he said. The question is still why?

I gave the barest shrug. Imperialism? Bourgeois conservatism? Sexism?

Oh-ho, Louis said. You are one of them. What of liberalism and feminism and socialism?
Are these not the ends of the world?

I wish they were, I said. But sixty-eight has taken a job and a mortgage.

Oh-ho, he repeated. You are disappointed in your revolution, and so you run away.

There is a real revolution here, I said. I raised my glass into the low burning sun.
If communism is the end of the world, let us witness it.

We shall drink to that. Luang! Come!

A face rose in the window of the shack: a moon at the sickle turn, sharp with fear.

Luang, the world is ending again, Louis cried. He snapped his fingers. Another bottle
of
laos-laos
. Quickly.

The man moved among us with a bottle of the thick clear spirit.

Thank you, I murmured to him. What is your name?

His name is Luang, Louis said. Those are his children.

Beside us in the road three barefoot children played at being soldiers. They pointed
their sticks; they fell and jerked in the dust.

Luang is Pathet Laos, Louis said. I know that, and he knows that I know.

Luang smiled, yet he seemed afraid.

He is a good man, Louis said. He sides with the communists because he believes life
will be better for his children. But nothing changes. This country has no history.

Out on the road the children scattered. A young soldier in ill-fitting fatigues passed
on a motorbike. He turned at the bridge and came back. He looked us over with curiosity
and disgust, and spoke in Laotian. A change came over Louis. He replied sharply to
the soldier and they both began to laugh.

There is a company of Pathet Laos guerrillas coming west, Louis said. They are looking
for a man they claim is helping the royalists. I told him I am the man they seek
but, like all Frenchmen, I am too lazy to flee. He thinks I am very funny.

Louis poured a shot of
laos-laos
for the soldier and they drank together. The soldier
remounted his motorbike and
continued across the bridge. We sat in silence. Louis
poured still more drinks, and I saw his hands were shaking.

Actually, I am not joking, he said. I am the man they seek. But how can I leave?
I am too
layyyy-zeee
! Perhaps I will go tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Maxime said. I have been waiting for that a long time.

How long? I asked.

Eighty years, he said, and there was perhaps a hint of amusement about his face.

It was monsoon season when I arrived. The sky roared. Water filled the valleys. It
lay in gleaming pools along the road and in the roadside ditches where I walked.
I travelled at night and slept by day among the wide green pandanus. I swam the river
at Muang Ngoi below the wooden bridge, stroking out into a flat grey dark. My fatigues
clung like small wet hands. I scrambled up the bank and regained the cart track.
I heard laughter ahead. A voice crying out in French.

But I am so
layyyy-zeee
!

There was a bar beside the track, and two bodies pressed together at an outside table.
Their limbs surfaced like pale islands in the pre-dawn dark. Bottles gleamed upon
the ground. I heard the river's restless murmur and the whispered laughter on their
breath.

Come here, said a woman's voice. Oh, you must. Darling.

A spill of curls. The svelte curve of her legs around a man's naked back.

I cannot.

You must.

I cannot. I am too
layyyy-zeee
!

You are too drunk!

I am sorry. I have tried, but it is impossible—to be too drunk.

They broke apart to the musical clatter of bottles.

Hello? the man called. Who's there?

The woman laughed. Surely it is my father. Come to fetch me home and cut off your
balls.

Welcome! the man called. Drink with us, Monsieur Casteaux. It will steady your hand
for the cut.

The man lit a lantern, and wild shadows swung about the trees. By the light he was
handsome and skeletal, without a shirt, his trousers agape. She was just as thin,
her cheekbones sharp. She pulled down her skirt but did not care to hide her breasts.

I stepped forward and their laughter dimmed. I was dripping wet, unshaven and exhausted.
The man said something in a language I did not know.

Room for another? I asked in French.

You are French? the man said.

Of course.

But you look—you look like you need a drink.

I must go, the woman said.

Stay, the man said. We are not finished.

I
am not finished, the woman said, her face lit by mirth and drink. And you cannot
finish me. I will see you later. I must get some sleep.

She hunted the shadows for her blouse. She buttoned it crookedly, then swayed off
towards the bridge. I watched her depart from the lantern's fragile sphere. The man
read my expression as concern.

Do not worry, he said. Mademoiselle Casteaux is unkillable. She will dance upon our
graves. I'm Rochefort. Call me Louis. Drink this.

He handed me a tumbler of something poisonous. At the first sip my empty stomach
screamed. I kept my face unmoved.

The natives make it, he said. It has the peculiar quality of making time stop. You
are…French Foreign Legion, are you not?

This time I could not keep the surprise from my face. I had torn the insignia from
my uniform but to no end. I was too exhausted to lie, or to run. I could only hope
that such a man would not report me.

I was, I said.

You
were
? But you cannot leave the Legion.

I believe you can.

I could see him thinking, very slowly. You have
deserted? All the way from—Indochine?
On
foot
?

I said nothing. He seemed delighted.

But you are perfectly mad! We must drink to this. And you must tell me why!

I threw back my head and drained my glass, and the horizon swung away beneath me.
I felt my nerves fill with the cold, billowing fire of mustard gas.

Why desert? I said. Because the world is to end.

Oh-ho! he cried. Now I know we shall be friends. How will it end?

You have heard the news from Europe?

No. We are blessed to receive no news whatsoever.

They say Herr Hitler will march on Paris. They say it will be much worse than last
time.

Oh, that, he said. Surely that is not serious.

I am afraid it is. I fought in the first war and survived. I will not survive a second.

Bravo. And they are conscripting again?

As we speak.

Louis began to laugh, long and hard, until he was close to retching. His sunken face
seemed fashioned wholly out of sweat.

Forgive me, he said at last. It is too perfect. I have been in Laos a long time.
I avoided the first war and now it seems I have managed to avoid a second. Come,
let us get you breakfast. Luang!

No one answered. There was a rough shack behind us,
swallowed by the jungle palms.
Louis rose and opened the door and entered the darkness. He emerged half dragging
a man, and I glimpsed a face chaotic with surprise and sleep. Louis pushed him down
against the wall.

Wake up, for god's sake, Louis said. The world is ending again. Get us two
laap
and
a pipe of poppy. And give me your shirt.

The man looked up at him uncertainly. Louis spoke sharply in Laotian. The man unbuttoned.

Here, Louis said to me. Put this on. And give him yours. It will be our little joke.

I began to suspect that the Frenchman was a fool. But I was not going to refuse a
shirt. To be caught in my own uniform was to be shot. I unbuttoned and handed my
shirt to the native.

Here, I murmured, trying to apologise with my eyes. What is your name?

His name is Luang, Louis said. Those are his children.

I had not noticed the two small figures curled beside the shack. They were awake,
dark eyes watching their father.

He agitates in secret for decolonisation, Louis said. I know that. He knows that.
And now he wears the uniform of those who would die for France!

Luang looked away. He seemed upset.

He is a good man, Louis said. He is only treasonous because he imagines life will
be better for his children
without us. But of course there will be no mutiny. There
is no history here. Nothing changes.

But I have come, I said.

Certainly, Louis said. And there was one before you, and there will be one after.

But you, I said. Who was here before you?

He smiled at that, his thin moist lips stretched across stained teeth. Before me?

I arrived in an alien season, neither summer nor autumn nor winter nor spring. The
sky was a tumescent weight. The afternoons swelled but did not burst, and I felt
my head would burst instead. I was glad, for there was not the meanest crevice left
for thought.

We stepped from the barges at a place the natives knew as Nong Khiaw. We made a gloomy
camp above that wide brown serpent where it twisted south. Someone had been here
before us: the ruin of a sad thatched hut, and a table on cleared ground. I sat at
this table and surveyed the land. High cliffs of limestone rose on three sides, and
the verdant jungle tumbled down. It was a fine vantage. How strange to kick a cross
in the dirt, and here would be a city!

All this I wrote in my dispatch. But my secret reason lay within the sombre darkness
of the place, in the heat hanging thick upon us like damnation. For surely here was
the end of the earth: the furthest one could get from
the Eiffel Tower, that stiletto
through the heart of the city I had loved. Paris seemed to me now some lost and insane
dream, and my lover's face but a face glimpsed once in a crowded station. They told
me white men cannot work in the tropics. They go mad in the heat. That is why they
sent me here, and that is why I came. It is a neat justice when the punishment pleases
both the guilty and the dead.

I ordered my possessions be unloaded from the boats. The coolies dragged them up,
a chain of ants carrying off the artefacts of some junked civilisation. They dropped
my velvet
chaise longue
, and as it cartwheeled and smashed apart upon the mud I laughed
like a horse. One simply
must
own a
chaise longue
in Paris. Here, one must simply
throw the bloated thing into a river.

By day's end I was drunk. I sat at that rough wooden table with my worldly goods,
obedient and useless, arranged beneath chandeliers of jungle fruit. It seemed the
walls of my house in
le seizième
had dissolved within the swarming dusk, and just
the furniture remained. I toasted the mahogany dining table. I toasted the high-backed
chairs. I toasted the profound emptiness of my feather bed.

Sir.

One of my soldiers stood before me; and behind him, a native with clinging child.
The native seemed distressed.

Sir, the soldier said. We can find no nails among the supplies.

This is most dismaying, I said. The stew will be bland.

The man did not laugh. His face was not unkind, but distaste made it ugly. He knew
why I had been sent here.

Sir, we have dispatched a boat, but it will be some weeks before a dwelling can be
built. We fear for your furniture.

Let the furniture rot, I said. I have brandy to last two hundred years. Who is this
man?

He would speak with you, sir. He says this is his house and table.

He lives here?

Sir. He was away when we arrived. He brings you a gift.

The native offered a clay flagon. I unstoppered it: sweet ghastly fumes, a mouthful
of fire. Men crawling through paddies. Black tongues and stones for eyes. Flames.

What is this? I asked.

Laos-laos
. A strong spirit.

And his name?

The soldier asked the man, and the man moved his mouth. To me it sounded like
Luang
,
meaning town or place in the native tongue. It was as good a name as any.

Tell Luang he may work for me. I shall want more of his medicine. And bring me my
pipe.

The soldiers lit the lamps and retired. The coolies sat off down beside the river,
living in another century, and it was just myself and this fellow Luang. He stood
in the doorway of the hut and watched me at his table. His mouth
was a dark line.
I dragged a leather armchair to the light.

Drink with me, I said.

Beneath the lamps, the man seemed older. Older and stranger, and yet I felt I could
know him. There were lines raked about his eyes and down his cheeks as on my own.
His black hair was drifting to a coarsened silver, and he perched uncertainly on
the chair. We drank together, heads back, throats exposed. He watched me all the
way down, like a bird with a snake.

Do you hate France? I asked.

He made no reply.

Of course you do not, I said. You cannot hate that which you do not know. You cannot
even speak of it. But I can. I have come in the name of France, and I would erase
France from the face of the earth. I would erase all countries and all nations. It
is not the scandal. Scandal is not the end of the world. It is everything else. Everything
that would make us scandalous.