Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

Colin Cotterill

Dr Siri Paiboun

Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

#7

2010

Three young Laotian women have died of fencing sword wounds. Each of them had studied abroad in an Eastern bloc country. Before he can complete his investigation, Dr. Siri is lured to Cambodia by an all-expenses-paid trip. Accused of spying for the Vietnamese, he is imprisoned, beaten, and threatened with death. The Khmer Rouge is relentless, and it is touch and go for the dauntless, seventy-four-year-old national – and only – coroner of Laos.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DR SIRI

I
celebrate the dawn of my seventy-fourth birthday handcuffed to a lead pipe. I’d had something more traditional in mind; a few drinks with my new wife, some gay
mo lum
music on the record player, shellfish plucked fresh from the Mekhong. But here I am in Hades and not a balloon in sight. My ex-room-mate, a grey-faced youth in his early twenties, is chained by the ankle to the far end of the same pipe. They dragged the boy in during the night and we struggled to communicate. We scratched for words to share. But, as soon as he understood that we were different animals in the same abattoir, tears of despair carved uneven grooves down his bloody cheeks. I could do nothing but sit back against the flaking plaster and watch the life drain from him. He didn’t live to greet the new day. When the sun finally sneered through the wire mesh of the window, it cast a shadow like a fisherman’s net across the body. The corpse lay trapped, expired from the effort of untangling itself from all this unnecessary misery. But his soul was free. I envied him that. I am Dr Siri Paiboun, the national and only coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, a medical man, a humanitarian, but I’m still unable to summon an appropriate emotion. I listened through the night to the sobs and screams of my unseen neighbours. I didn’t understand the words they cried but I knew people were being killed all around me. I scented their essence and saw their fleeing spirits. I am well aware that I will soon be joining them. Yet the overriding thought in my mind is that I didn’t have the foresight to say goodbye or thank you to the people I love. That sounds corny, I know, but what’s wrong with corny? It has its place
.

I wonder whether they might know instinctively. Really. I wonder whether they’ve been able to see through this crusty, annoyingly stubborn exterior to the warm and fluffy Siri that nestles barely visible inside me. If only I could squeeze the hand of Madame Daeng one final time, ruffle the newly permed hair of Mr. Geung, sniff the cheeks of Nurse Dtui and her milk-scented baby, and slap Inspector Phosy on the back. If only I could raise one last glass with my best friend, Civilai. But those opportunities will never come. The amulet that protected me from the malevolent spirits was ripped from my neck, stolen by one of the teenaged guards. I am exposed. Once the ghosts are aware their enemy is unprotected, they will circle me like hungry jungle dogs and close in for the kill
.

All things considered, at this almost final analysis, I am stuffed
.

∗

The woman read from the carbon copy in front of her. The sheet was of such proportions as to defy filing and of such poor quality that it was almost inevitable the words would be sucked back into the fibres like invisible ink returning whence it had emerged. The clerk had a pleasant voice, soothing like honey balm, and the two old men opposite stared at her luscious lips as she spoke.

“Of course, it isn’t finalised,” she smiled. “But it will certainly read something like this.” She coughed. “The People’s Democratic Republic of Laos would have it known that Dr Siri Paiboun, National Coroner, Hero of the revolution and lifetime member of the Communist Party, passed away on the second of May, 1978. Dr Siri had fought tirelessly and fearlessly for the revolution and was – ”

“Fearlessly first,” one of the men interrupted.

“I’m sorry?”

“It would be better to have ‘fearlessly’ before ‘tirelessly’, then nobody would be in doubt he’d not been tired out by the lack of fearing.”

“Absolutely,” the second man agreed.

“What? Hmm. I’m not sure I understand that,” the girl confessed and made a note on the pad beside her. “I’ll mention it to Comrade Sisavee. It is only the first draft but, to tell the truth, we called you in to check on the factual, rather than the syntactical elements of the eulogy. We have people to deal with all the technicalities in later versions. I’ll read on if I’m – ”

“And, ‘was struck down dead’ has a more heroic ring to it,” the second old man said. “That’s factual.”

“Struck down?”

“Rather than ‘passed away’,” he added. “‘Passed away’ makes it sound like bodily wind, a collection of stomach gases on their way out. Do you know what I mean? We’re talking about heroism here. Heroes don’t just ‘pass’ like flatulence in a strong breeze.”

“With or without scent,” added the second man most seriously.

The clerk glared from one old gentleman to the next, then back to the first.

“Are you playing with me?” she asked, sternly.

“Certainly not, sweet young lady,” said the skinnier of the two men. He was bald as a
boule
with a long camel-like throat sporting an Adam’s apple so large it might well have been Adam’s original. “This is a most serious affair.”

“No playing matter,” agreed the first.

Still uncertain of her ground, the young lady pressed on. “The nation will never forget the contribution Dr Siri made to the development of this great nation, nor can – ”

“That’s two nations,” said the bald man.

“Oh, do let her finish,” said the other. “Didn’t she tell you they have a department that handles syntax? Probably an entire ministry.”

“The Ministry of Getting Words Right?”

“Or it could be a branch of the Ministry of Making Things Up and Bamboozling People.”

The clerk was miffed. She slapped the paper onto the wooden table top and drummed her fingers on it noisily. She seemed to be wrestling down a darker inner person. Her voluptuous mouth had become mysteriously unattractive.

“I don’t think either of you appreciate what a great honour this is,” she said at last. Her eyes watered. “Anybody else would be proud. Dr Siri, I’m particularly disappointed that you would take all this so lightly. Given your record, it’s a wonder your name is on the list at all.”

Siri raised the thickets of coarse white hair he called eyebrows and scratched at his missing left earlobe.

“To be fair, you’re not giving me much time,” he said. “How can I take life seriously when I’m forced to squeeze all those remaining pleasures into a mere twelve days? And look at this. You’re passing me away on my birthday, of all occasions. The happiest day of the year.”

“That’s odd, Doctor,” she said through clenched teeth. “I thought I had explained myself very clearly.”

“Tell him again,” said ex-politburo member Civilai. “He’s elderly.”

“As I said,” she began, slowly, “the actual date of your death will be filled in later.”

“In the event of it?” Siri said.

“Exactly.”

“So you aren’t actually expecting me to…”

“No!”

The transparent north-eastern skin of her neck revealed an atlas of purple roads heading north in the direction of her cheeks. The men admired her composure as she took a deep breath and continued.

“You will pass away naturally, or otherwise, as your destiny dictates. At that stage we will delete your date of birth and substitute it with your date of death. When that happens we will issue the announcement. Is that clear now?”

“And I will become a hero,” Siri smiled.

“It probably won’t be instantaneous…in your case.”

∗

The Department of Hero Creation, the DHC, was housed in a small annexe of the propaganda section of the Ministry of Information. Based loosely on a Vietnamese initiative already in place, the DHC was responsible for identifying role models, exaggerating their revolutionary qualities, and creating a fairy story around their lives. A week earlier, Dr Siri and Comrade Civilai had received their invitations to attend this preliminary meeting. They’d heard of the DHC, of course, and seen evidence of its devious work. Everyone over seventy who’d done the Party the great service of staying alive was under consideration. If selected, school textbooks would mention their bravery. Histories would be written detailing their supernatural ability to surmount the insurmountable and carry the red flag to victory. Siri and Civilai could hardly pass up a chance to scuttle such a nefarious scheme.

“What is my case?” Siri asked.

“What?”

“You said, ‘in your case’, suggesting I have some flaw.”

“Don’t hold back,” Civilai urged the clerk.

“It’s really not my place to – ”

“Go ahead,” Civilai prodded. “We won’t tell anyone.”

She seemed pleased to do so.

“We are aware of the Doctor’s…problems with authority,” the clerk said. She was now ignoring Siri and talking directly to Civilai. “But history has a short memory. It has a way of smudging over personality faults, no matter how serious they might be.”

“Voltaire said that history is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes,” Siri said.

“And why should I care what a wealthy seventeenth-century snob aristocrat has to say about anything?” she snapped. “Don’t you have thoughts of your own, Doctor?”

Siri smiled at Civilai who raised his eyebrows in return. The old friends were constantly on the lookout for fire, intelligence and passion within the system and, when found, it brought out their untapped paternal instincts. Wrong century, but most cadres wouldn’t have known Voltaire from a bag of beans. Their early evening visit to the Ministry of Information had not been a waste of time after all.

Following a politburo decree, the words Minister and Ministry had been liberated from the dungeon of anti-socialist political rhetoric and new ministries mushroomed. There was infighting within each ministry as departments and sections vied for its own ministerial status. Everyone wanted to be a minister. The secretarial pool at the new Ministry of Justice had put in an application to become the Ministry of Typing, and the head clerk, Manivone, put her name down to become the Minister of Changing Ink Ribbons. Dr Siri had helped her with the paperwork and it had taken several bottles of rice whisky to get it right. Of course, they hadn’t submitted the form. The system didn’t have a sense of humour.

There was nothing inherently funny about the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos in the nineteen seventies. The socialists had taken over the country three years earlier but the fun of having a whole country to play with had soon drained away. Euphoria had been replaced by paranoia and anyone who didn’t take the republic seriously was considered a threat. Dissidents were still being sent to ‘seminars’ in the north-east to join the ranks of officials from the old regime who were learning to grit their teeth and say ‘Yes, Comrade’. But Siri and Civilai, forty-year veterans of the struggle, were tolerated. They posed no threat to the status quo and their rants against the system could be dismissed – with sarcastic laughter – as senile gibberish. But there was nothing senile or gibberitic about these two old comrades. Their minds sparkled like a March night sky. Given a chance, they could out-strategise any man or woman on the central committee. To find a young crocodile with a good mind amongst that flock of flamingos was a rare delight to them.

“You’re quite right, of course.” Siri bowed his head to the clerk. “Forgive me. I’m prone, like many men my age, to presuppose that young people have no minds. I assume they’d all be impressed with my bourgeois philosophy. You are obviously a cut above the rest.”

“And you aren’t going to win me over with your flattery, either,” she replied.

“Nor with pink mimosa, nor sugared dates, no doubt,” Siri added. He thought he noticed a germ of a smile on her lips. “You really have to see the funny side of all this, you know?”

“And why is that?” she asked.

“You really want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m tempted to suggest you fabricate people’s experiences here. I noticed, for example, that your DHC has Comrade Bounmee Laoly charging into battle armed with only a machete at the age of sixty.”

“A lot of people are still very active at sixty.”

“I know that, but I also happen to know from personal experience he was already blind as a bat when he turned fifty. He couldn’t find a machete, let alone brandish one.”

She blushed, “I – ”

“All we ask,” Civilai took over, “is, should this great honour of herohood befall us – hopefully not posthumously – that we earn it from merit, not with the aid of major reconstructive surgery from Information.”

“We’d like people to remember and respect us for what we are,” Siri said.

“Warts and all,” Civilai added.

∗

Siri and Civilai sloshed and slithered hand-in-hand through the rain to the ministry car park. A cream Citroen with a missing tail light and a sturdy Triumph motorcycle were the only two vehicles. They were parked in muddy water like boats. Drowning grass poked here and there through the brown gravy.