Highways to a War (68 page)

Jim draws breath between his teeth with an impatient hiss, his expression scornful. “They’re superstitious people, these Thais,” he says to us. “This is just bullshit. They didn’t hear Mike’s ghost, because Mike isn’t dead.”

He swings around and walks quickly to the door, his limp more pronounced than usual. Harvey and I look at each other, listening to his uneven steps going off down the stairs. I start to follow, but Harvey takes my arm and shakes his head.

“Let him go,” he says. “We know where he’ll be.”

When we come out of the house and cross the little bridge, we walk along the path above the
klong
that leads back to the Newsroom. It’s still daylight, but twilight’s gathering. Swarms of small birds are twittering in the huge tropical trees on the canal: trees for which I still have no names. The hum of invisible traffic from the big main avenues is deepening in volume.

The Newsroom isn’t very full at this time, and Jim is seated at our usual table, a beer in front of him, his artificial leg stretched stiffly into the aisle. The moment he sees us, he smiles. It’s a curious smile, expressive of tender contemplation. As we sit down, he signals for one of the waiters and orders two more beers. When they come, he pours for us from the bottles, and then raises his glass. “Cheers,” he says. We drink, but none of us speaks.

Harvey and I are on one side of the table, Jim on the other. I watch through the white iron grille as the first colored lanterns come on in the stalls under their awnings across the road. We’ve talked away so many afternoons here, Harvey and Jim and I, living mentally over the border in those countries that are now locked off. Passions fermented in Europe more than a century ago created such a long agony there: passions of the mind. Now the war’s over, and all that’s left is a flavor of empty longing: a flavor I suspect that Harvey and Jim will taste for the rest of their lives. I turn back from the window to find Jim looking at Harvey, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

He still smiles, wearing an expression that perhaps signifies the recollection of something touching, and he plays with the Zippo lighter that’s a relic of youth and Vietnam, turning it over in his fingers. When he speaks, his voice is reminiscent; he seems to pick up a broken conversation.

“You took risks only when you had to, didn’t you, Harvey? You were never crazy. Snow and Dmitri and I took them because we wanted to: that was what we were hooked on.”

Harvey smiles back. “You always denied that until now, James.”

Jim takes the cigarette from his mouth and looks at it; then he clears his throat. “It belonged to the time when we were young,” he says. “And we went on doing it too long. Yet since I lost my leg, I’ve been eating at myself because I couldn’t go back to it.” He releases a breath of laughter like a sigh. “That means I’m a bloody idiot, of course. Ying tells me so all the time. She also tells me I’m lucky; lucky I lost my leg and didn’t die. Maybe she’s right. I often think so when little Meiping comes running to me, holding up her hands.”

He finally lights the cigarette, narrowing his eyes, his face becoming empty. When he speaks again, his voice is dry, as though he’s discussing business. “Of course the rest of you are right, Harvey—Mike’s gone. When I first told Ying that he was missing, she cried out. ‘Oh no, not him, not him!’ She knew straightaway that he was lost; she knew he wouldn’t come back. I have never wanted to believe it—partly because I loved him, partly because I can’t bear to know that he died in the way he did.”

He breaks off and sits back. He removes a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip with his index finger and studies it, not looking up when he speaks again.

“So I will stop telling myself and others that Mike is still alive,” he says. “Even though in a part of my heart, I’m still not sure that he’s dead.”

“Maybe you never will be sure,” Harvey says. “Neither will any of us. But that’s all right, brother.”

 

 

Harvey and Jim have gone home now. But I sit on in the Newsroom, reluctant to leave. Tomorrow will be my last day in Bangkok.

I go on looking through the grille: past the Chinese owner’s Mercedes, past the new Japanese motorbikes and cars that are turning and whirring on the square. Over by the canal, as darkness creeps in, black-haired figures by the row of little stalls are busying themselves among earthenware jars and baskets: cheap goods from another age. I imagine that they and their stalls will soon disappear, like a mirage: they don’t really fit with the new Bangkok.

I reach into the airways bag beside me, and pull out one of the photographs that Jim took down from the board in Langford’s house, in that room that was like a waiting room.

Mike walks away from the helicopter behind Colonel Chandara, his hair fluttering in the draft from the chopper blades. He looks different here: different from the way he appears in any other picture. He’s haggard, and for the first time seems less youthful: an appearance that’s emphasized by the shirt he’s wearing, which appears almost black. Perhaps the unit’s been through some difficult action; or perhaps he’s simply showing the strain of the past year. But certainly he looks older: another, interior face has emerged through the skin, and a trick of the draft gives the thick, lifted hair a nineteenth-century appearance, which his sideburns accentuate. The long, hollow white cheeks and far, washed-out eyes are a mid-Victorian gentleman’s: an image from the birth of photography. And suddenly I see his great-great-grandfather, whose portrait now hangs on my study wall at home. It’s Robert Devereux’s face.

In a region of Dis beyond the Thai border, a row of crosses rises from the paddy field’s red earth, in the motionless and terrible heat. I see flames reach up for him, like the heat’s choking essence. But then there are other upright poles about him; and now he’s somewhere else.

Orderly wires stretch away, and hidden voices murmur among bright leaves. Walled and roofed by green, by a green like light itself, he hangs in a blessed coolness: the underwater cool of the hop glades.

Home.

In every corner of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety—the very best in publishing today.

For complete information about books available from Penguin—including Puffins, Penguin Classics, and Arkana—and how to order them, write to us at the appropriate address below. Please note that for copyright reasons the selection of books vanes from country to country.

 

 

In the United Kingdom:
Please write to
Dept JC,
Penguin
Books
Ltd,
FREEPOST,
West
Drayton, Middlesex
UB7 OBR.

 

If you have any difficulty in obtaining a title, please send your order with the correct money, plus ten percent for postage and packaging, to
P.O. Box No. 11, West Drayton, Middlesex
UB7 OBR

 

In the United States:
Please write to
Consumer Sales, Penguin USA, P.O. Box 999, Depf. 17109, Bergenfield, NewJersey
07621-0120 VISA and MasterCard holders call 1-800-253-6476 to order all Penguin titles

 

In Canada:
Please write to
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2

 

In Australia:
Please write to
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, P.O.Box 257, Ringwood,
Victoria 3134

 

In New Zealand:
Please write to
Penguin Books
(NZ)
Ltd, Private Bag 102902, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 10

 

In India:
Please write to
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,
706
Eros Apartments,
56
Nehru Place, New Delhi
110 019

 

In the Netherlands:
Please write to
Penguin Books Netherlands bv, Postbus
3507,
NL- 1001 AH Amsterdam

 

In Germany:
Please write to
Penguin Books Deutschland GmbH, Metzlerstrasse 26, 60594 Frankfurt am Main

 

In Spain:
Please write to
Penguin Books S.A., Bravo Murillo
19,
1°
B,
28015 Madrid

 

In Italy:
Please write to
Penguin Italia s.r.l., Via Felice Casati 20, I-20124 Milano

 

In France:
Please write to
Penguin France S. A., 17 rue Lejeune, F-31000 Toulouse

 

In Japan:
Please write to
Penguin Books Japan, Ishikiribashi Building, 2-5-4, Suido, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112

 

In Greece:
Please write to
Penguin Hellas Ltd, Dimocritou 3, GR- 106 71 Athens

 

In SouthAfrica:
Please write to
Longman Penguin Southern Africa (Pty) Ltd, Private Bag X08, Bertsham 2013