Dragon apparent, p.26
Dragon Apparent, page 26
I was now more and more embarrassed by my speechlessness in such places as this. In the remote interior of Indo-China it is a good thing, for both one’s comfort and one’s safety, to speak a few words of one of the principal languages; Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian or even Chinese. But the first and last present great difficulties, owing to their tonal system. One must be willing to sing as well as speak. And Cambodian, although poverty-stricken in words expressing abstractions, is bewilderingly rich in other respects. There are, for instance, seventeen different verbs replacing the English verb to carry; according to whether one carries on the head, the back, the shoulders, the hip, in the arms, suspended from a cord, etc. There are also seven forms of address, reflecting, one supposes, the old Khmer social order, which take into account both the social and moral standing of the person one is addressing – and give grave offence if improperly used. This is not a simple matter like using the polite form in a Latin language. The differences are so great as almost to divide the language into seven separate dialects.
In the case of one’s food requirements, the remedy is to try to draw what one wants (my stylised sketch of a bird produced not a chicken’s wing, but two fried sparrows on a skewer), or point to what others are eating – invariably Chinese soup, from which the tentacles of small river octopi tend to trail. All this gives the greatest amusement to the customers, although, with the chiding finger of several thousand years’ civilisation behind them, the Indo-Chinese have far too much maiden-auntish control over themselves to laugh uproariously, as Africans might. In this case one of the heads of the family was fetched, who with dignified bows invited me into the kitchen, where in the antechamber to Dante’s hell I selected some brightly dyed mincemeat, which was delivered to me wrapped – in Hungarian style – in a cabbage leaf. Salt was always rare and precious in these places, and one was expected, in its place, to dowse one’s food in rancid sauces or to nibble between mouthfuls at salted fish. This café, however, supplied what was described in English, on the tin’s label, as Ve-Tsin Gourmet Powder, a yellow and pungent spice, which, if you used enough, produced a faint salinity.
Something like a state of emergency seemed to have been proclaimed in the neighbourhood, and several members of the National Guard were mooching round looking for somewhere to sleep. One of them slumped into a vacant chair at my table, and his rifle clattered to the ground. He groped for it, picked it up, leaned it against the table and stuck a flower down the barrel. It was an oldish weapon with a rusty bolt, but the butt had been most tastefully carved with a close, intricate design of leaves, through which a helmeted horseman charged with raised sword.
* * *
When it was time to set off again, the driver himself went round the village to look out each passenger, tracking down with difficulty some who, wanting to make the most of the excursion, had wandered off to see the local sights. We were leaving some of our fellow-passengers behind and collecting some new ones – Cambodian women who arrived carrying their belongings in beautifully woven baskets. Their good looks were subdued by the determined composure they adopted to cover all traces of excitement. The girls’ hair was done up in thick, glossy chignons, but the older women wore their hair in the close, ragged crop which happened, quite by chance, to correspond to the European fashion of that time.
Leaving the village, we thundered on through dead-flat country. On each side stretched a milky slough with deep pools, the colour of pale yolk, in which buffaloes squirmed like fat, grey maggots. The sky was iron-grey over this waste of tempera. For the first time I saw glossy ibises, in extraordinary partnership with eagles, paddling awkwardly in the shallows. The villages here were quite different, and for a short distance each house had a kind of totem pole with a carved, wooden cock raised in front of it. The country manners, too, were informal. At a hamlet stop an exquisite lady in black knickers descended the steps of her house, and, stationing herself with her back to us, before a large earthenware jar, began her morning toilet. Properly, the bonzes averted their eyes. Across the road the building of a new house had been started – a combined village enterprise which would take three or four days – and the solemn moment of the insertion of the central pillar, flying its red banner, was being fêted with flutes and drums.
And so we went on, the driver, it seemed, feeling his way with quiet perspicacity across the gentle, sunlit, dangerous landscape, stopping sometimes to make enquiries from a peasant, and then making perhaps a detour into the white waste to avoid some doubtful village. The bus took terrible punishment. We developed electrical troubles and without slackening speed the driver sent his mate out to repair them. With the bus leaping and lurching beneath him he crawled barefooted all over the front end, opening first one and then the other side of the bonnet, wielding his pliers to strip and join wires and insulating the joints with oblongs of tape he carried stuck to the skin of his legs. People who wanted rides were always trying to stop us. The driver took no notice of ordinary civilians, shouted polite excuses to bonzes, and stopped for soldiers.
In the early afternoon there was another pause. Once again there was a Chinese restaurant, and the family, until the invasion from the bus took place, could be seen taking their siesta on the tables in the background. It was a very enterprising concern; probably under new management. The food was served in splendid gold-edged bowls, splashed over with Chinese lettering, and stylised cocks and dragonflies had been painted on the spoons. But in spite of its amenities the restaurant did not object to patrons bringing their own food. While I was busy with my salted prawns one of the passengers, a frugal Cambodian, sat down at my side, ordered a glass of tea, and unwrapping a banana leaf produced a small bird, looking as if it might have been fried in bread-crumbs, which, holding by the beak, he devoured in two bites. When we had both finished our meal he got up, smiled and beckoned to me to go with him. We walked a short way down the street and he pointed to a house which consisted of a framework only supporting several intricately carved doors. There were no walls, and just as we arrived, the occupant, who had been reclining on a mat under a parasol, got up, opened one of the doors and came down the stepladder into the street. From his dress, which included a thick, black pullover and a topee, I judged him to be a man of importance. My companion grinned and said, pirate.
This village was on a river bank and had a market selling a great deal of fish. There was a particular species which I saw here for the first time, but continually thereafter. What was remarkable about it was that it was always displayed for sale alive; in this case neatly lined up on banana leaves with others of its sort, price tickets balanced unsteadily on the flattish tops of each head between the eyes. Sometimes the fish, which I was told lived for about three hours after being taken out of the water, would start to move unsteadily away on ventral fins that were evolving into flippers. This happened particularly when they were chivvied by dogs. They would make a yard or so’s progress before being recovered and gently replaced by the Cambodian maiden in charge. When a sale was made the fish were tied up, using a length of thin bamboo, with a neat bow, and taken away suspended from the buyer’s finger. The only dead fish on offer were very large, and these, by way of placation, had their jaws forced wide apart and a propitiatory prawn thrust between them. It was a village of animal-lovers, and two great pink buffaloes – the lucky kind – had the run of it and had stopped at the market for a feed of choice vegetables, while the vendors looked on admiringly.
It was here that a rather ill-boding incident took place. Three soldiers had been travelling with us and now suddenly they came rushing up, breaking through the group of passengers who waited in the shade of the bus for the driver’s signal to take their seats. Scrambling into the bus they threw their possessions out of the window into the street, jumping after them – upsetting as they did so a pyramid of hens in bottle-shaped wicker baskets – and then dashed off up the road, trailing belts and bandoliers.
A clucking excitement now spread among the passengers, and some of them, following the soldiers’ example, tried to unload their packages. They were frustrated by the arrival of the driver, who, abandoning his normal phlegm, and waving his arms like a goose-herd, drove them back into the bus. When I tried to follow, the way was barred and the driver explained possibly in mandarin that some difficulty had arisen. His arguments were supported by helpful translations into Cambodian by the passengers, speaking with the exaggerated slowness and clarity which they felt sure would more than compensate for an actual ignorance of the language. The senior bonze joined in, respectfully removing his sunglasses before beginning a low-voiced exposition of the circumstance in some scholarly lingua franca – probably Pali. The man of the restaurant clambered down, and pushing his way to the front, said pirate again, but this time with a sadly apologetic smile. One of the market people called to interpret, asked ‘toi parler Français?’ But when I said yes, shook his head in confusion and, having exhausted his vocabulary, was allowed to escape.
Once again the man of the restaurant was back, determined to break this impasse, while the driver cranked the starting-handle furiously. Hearing the word pirate again I pointed up the street to where the master of the skeleton house, who I supposed had retired on the proceeds of Dacoity, having made a dignified re-ascent of his stepladder and passed through his front door, was stretched out on his mat. But the man shook his head. Raising both arms he laid his eye along the sights of an invisible gun, pointed in my direction, pressed a phantom trigger and produced with his tongue a sharp, conclusive click. Then placing a finger on each eyelid he drew them down over his eyes, sighed deeply and gave a final puff, as if in dismissal of something, perhaps a soul. The passengers, who had all crowded over to our side of the bus, were much impressed with this piece of theatre, and shook their heads sympathetically.
The driver had now started the engine and was making gestures of impatience, but my friend persevered. From further sign language, some of which was international – such as the laying of both hands, palms together, under the cheek, to represent sleep – it was conveyed that as there were bandits ahead it would be better for me to stay in this village and to spend the night there, because if they found me on the bus, they would shoot me. This did not seem a very good idea, because I felt that if the bandits heard that I was in the village, as they probably would, they would most likely come for me, and I should be alone. Whereas if I went on with the bus and the worst came to the worst, I might be to some extent protected by the natural human sympathy, the bond of neighbourliness, however slight, that begins after a while to exist between fellow-passengers who are thrown together on such journeys. I therefore succeeded in making it clear that I wanted to go with the bus.
As soon as my determination to continue with them had sunk in, the driver, aided by several of the passengers, began a reorganisation of the baggage at the back of the bus. This was piled up round a kind of priest’s hole, in the opening of which I crouched in the manner of a hermit-crab, refusing to withdraw myself entirely from sight unless an emergency arose.
There followed two stifling but uneventful hours, by the end of which I was half-anaesthetised by the fierce gases from the bales of dried fish. The bus then stopped again. We had come to a ferry and the driver beckoned to me to come out. It seemed that the danger point was past. But we were just on the point of embarking on the ferry barge when a young man came up. He was dressed in a new American GI uniform, and in spite of his air of easy authority, appeared to be weaponless. Going up to each of the passengers he made a collection. When my turn came, I smiled and shook my head. The young man repeated whatever it was that he had said, and I shook my head again. With an expression of slight embarrassment he then gave up and went off. ‘Pirate,’ said my friend of the restaurant again, nodding his head after him.
* * *
Three days later I reached Saigon, just in time to claim my seat on the plane for Laos.
CHAPTER 17
Laos
LAOS FROM 10,000 FEET was a grey-green frothing seen through a heat-mist that was like a pane of dirty glass. As we came into Vientiane in the late afternoon the mist thickened and the pilot came down as if to look for landmarks. For the last half-hour bundles of rags kept whirling past the cabin. They were vultures – bad things to hit at two hundred miles an hour. We landed bumpily in a haze, as though bonfires had been lit round the field; and in this the sun wallowed – a diffused yellow disc. As the door of the cabin was opened, the heat rolled in.
In most journeyings there stands out the memory of days of discouragement; when the enthusiasm flags under the strain of petty physical discomforts. The introduction to Laos was spent in such a period. This was the earthly paradise that all the French had promised; the country that was one vast Tahiti, causing all the French who had been stationed there to affect ever after a vaguely dissolute manner. To be fair to Laos I was seeing it at the worst of all possible seasons – it was late March – when the air is burdened with the presage of storms and the landscape blighted with autumnal sadness. Heat lay like an interdict on the town of Vientiane, although the sun was wrapped until late morning in a sweltering mist. At certain hours, out of the stillness, a hot wind rose suddenly and skirmished in the streets, producing a brief, false animation, flapping huge leaves in the faces of passers-by, who were half disembodied by the swirling dust, above which they floated like genii. Sometimes the grey, swollen sky squeezed out a few drops of rain.
I was lodged in the government guest-house, a European villa – since it had two storeys – which at some time had gone native, with earthenware dragons crawling on its roof. Hornets had started cellular constructions in the window shutters and armies of cockroaches marched across the floors. Precious, expensive water was brought in large pots and left in the subdivision of the room where, using a gourd with a hole in its bottom, you could take a shower. The main advantage of having this open pot of water in the room was that it collected a gauzy layer of mosquitoes which were content to stay there in harmless concentration, unless disturbed. The Mekong could be seen from the window, a sallow strip of water across half a mile of whitened riverbed. Perhaps this drought had something to do with the town’s electrical generating system, because only occasionally – and never at night – would the filament of the electric light bulb consent to glow feebly. Whenever the hot wind sprang up, stirring the trees round the house, great dry leaves as big as dishes came tumbling down and fell with a crash in the layer already deposited on the earth. It was the death-rattle of the year, which in Laos expires in croaking senility, to be reborn with the raging storms which were about to break.
* * *
Vientiane is a religious centre, one of the two ancient capitals of Laos. It abounds with pagodas, many of them deserted and in ruins; and colossal Buddhas, with dusty half-obliterated smiles, sit in the tumbled brick work.
Since at this time, when the earth had dried up, there was no work to be done anywhere, it was the season of bouns; the Laotian festivals. Each pagoda holds one, as a means of collecting funds. They last for three days, and although an attempt is made not to hold two bouns at the same time, there are so many pagodas that duplication cannot always be helped; so that every night for several weeks the sky over one or more districts of Vientiane glows with the reflection of thousands of lights, while from a distance one catches the gusty, carnival sounds of Laotian rejoicings. Bouns start at about eleven, and go on all night.
The first night after my arrival I went to a boun, which I found by following a crowd. It was about two miles from the town’s centre and I passed several pagodas on the way, where carpenters were working by lamplight in preparation for a future festival.
An enclosure had been built round the pagoda in which every kind of light, from hurricane lamps to fluorescent tubes, had been concentrated in an anarchic glare. The pagoda had hired a generator for the occasion. There was no entrance fee, but young ladies with demurely lowered eyes waited just inside to accept donations, in return for which you received a candle, a posy of Japanese lilac and two joss-sticks in a bamboo container. Among the many attractions was a free theatre show, lasting for many hours, indistinguishable, except to an expert, from the theatre of Siam. Actors remained on the stage for what seemed interminable periods, occasionally advancing or retreating a few steps. Meanwhile their babies played happily round their feet, and quite frequently a stage-hand would walk across and interrupt a scene for a few seconds to pump up the pressure in the hurricane lamps.
On a nearby platform the lap ton was being danced. Once again it was the major attraction, but as it was still incorrect for Laotian girls to dance in public, religious enterprise had arranged for hostesses to be brought over from Siam, just across the river. The pagoda hired the girls for the three nights and lodged them in a nearby building. It cost a piastre to cavort round the stage for about fifteen minutes with one of them. They were dressed in hideous knee-length frocks, and some seemed to have permanent waves. The backward Laotian girls in their dowdy finery, their silk scarves, their skirts woven at the hem and waistband with silver and gold thread, and their abundant jewel-decked chignons, could only look on wistfully. As I arrived the organisers were having trouble with the microphone – indispensable adjunct to any social occasion in the new Far East. A young man chanted a soft, nasal melody which could only be heard within the boun enclosure itself. But suddenly the electricians were successful with their tinkerings and all Vientiane was flooded with a great, ogrish baying. The electricians hugged each other, and, enchanted by the din, the audience began to drift away from the theatre and make for the dancing floor.
