Thirst (16 page)

I returned the papers without comment and performed the intricate ritual of asking for shelter, and Krik went through the intricate ritual of agreeing to provide it. My military rank alone would have obliged his cooperation, as would have my social position and, of course, my gun, but this formal ceremony—whose florid excesses would have appalled Leslie had she understood what we were saying—provided a means of expressing dire need and mandatory hospitality without awkwardness, unmanly deference, or ambiguity. For me to rend my people’s language into English literally would be to indeed rend it; it would make the language appear ludicrous, its forms affectatious and its syntax convoluted, when in fact it is a mode of expression perfectly suited to its environment—this dense jungle, this poverty, and
this climate of extremes. That it has no natural way of saying “carburetor” or “nose job” does not dim its brilliance any more than the lack of a word that adequately describes the storm from which we had just escaped qualifies English’s.

Sana meekly went to another darkened corner of the room and prepared dinner, joined by her worried husband. Still wet, I approached the feeble fire. The old woman turned away and the kids gathered around their sick brother.

It was nearly incomprehensible to me that a family could live in such squalor. What was shocking was not so much that the place was suffocatingly small—I knew three graduate students who paid $900 a month to share a studio that size on East 70th Street—but that it was in such extravagant disrepair. The plasterboard walls were near collapse and the floor was slimy with some sort of mold. The only ventilation was through a makeshift fireplace whose chimney was constructed from a flimsy metal sluice. The monsoon dripped in, never, it seemed, from the same leak twice.

The hut was furnished at random. The backseat of an automobile served as the hag’s throne. An oil drum hung loosely over a water basin. The wall decorations consisted of a cheap tapestry and a three-color print of an octagonal animist symbol representing the “eight fields of life.” Serving as a hearth rug was a piece of thermal insulation. The oldest daughter set dishes on a wooden table whose base had once been encircled by high-tension cables. Our boots were dripping on a lurid green piece of material that may have been a swatch of Astroturf.

“Here I am,” Leslie suddenly announced, emerging from behind the screen.

We were startled. For a moment I did not recognize her and her Caucasian body in the peasant’s drab costume. And then it was as if she were naked, every arc in her torso accentuated in the wraparound in a way no native woman’s planar, boyish body ever could be. I could see her nipples erupting beneath the sackcloth. Intuitively, she had known how to fasten the garment, thereby heightening the parody.

My discomfort was extreme. In the eyes of these people, she was godless, parading her body about like some slut from Broadway or Pigale or our capital’s own Rue des Chrétiens. I sternly glanced at the peasant, but his eyes were already cast to the floor.

Leslie, her gross (actually an 8B) feet bare except for scarlet nail polish that shone with more power than the kerosene lamp that illuminated the room, hunkered next to the sick child and tickled his belly. “Hello, hello there you,” Leslie whispered.

The child, his eyes glassy, his breathing labored, offered no response.

Leslie looked at me and lifted a strand of her hair. Absently, she said, “This weather gives me the frizzies.”

I was born in a French hospital in the capital of my country, but at the age of two was taken to Paris, where my father was stationed on behalf of my nation’s newly independent government. Throughout my childhood and adolescence my parents would shuttle between the
First World, the Second and the Third, depending on the nature of the mission my father was performing for his people. With my brothers, however, I spent most of these years in Europe, enrolled in Swiss and British schools, visiting here only about once every three summers, but never forgetting that this was my home. At the time of my twenty-seventh birthday, when I was completing graduate school in New York, I computed that I had lived five years, ten months, and fifteen days among my countrymen.

My father was a small, intense fellow who favored atheism, dark suits, and cosmopolitan manners. Nevertheless, he was an uncompromising patriot and ensured, directly or through tutors, that at least once every day I was reminded of who I was and of whom my education was meant to serve. My mother, a former dancer in the national theater, required us to speak my nation’s language whenever we were in her presence. From the age of ten, I read every issue of my uncle’s newspaper, regardless of the length of time required for it to be air-freighted to me.

Throughout my youth, the nation to which my life was consecrated existed not as a few thousand square kilometers of geography, but as a segment of the temporal continuum. It would truly exist for me only when I reached my parents’ ages; it was a country of adulthood.

Sex, of course, was also a country of adulthood, and one I would even more frequently contemplate. Despite the occasional visit in my youth—usually in the company of a professional guide—I did not take up residence there until I met Leslie, then a student at Columbia
University’s School of Foreign Relations. She was bright and good-natured and destined to be in possession of a great many foreign relations. She was also guiltlessly materialistic and, well, a bit zaftig. She disliked curry and believed man has known no better breakfast than an Egg McMuffin, yet she never complained about life here; she’d try anything. As a Protestant and a feminist, she was philosophically opposed to leisure, and she had an office in our family compound where she prepared regional political analyses for the Rand Corporation and a “household hints” column for my uncle’s newspaper.

Her modest (by Western standards) public manners were belied by her private daring, and the first year that I knew her I was in a condition of lust-crazed shock. I had never known anyone like her, and even after we had begun living together in Manhattan I still hadn’t figured her out.

The first weekend we spent at her parents’ home was supposed to be a separate-rooms affair. Leslie, however, never even bothered to muss her bed. A keen student of Western mores, I had almost expected this, but such an unabashed disregard of parental regulations was nevertheless upsetting; indeed, it virtually unmanned me, nearly removing the entire point of her intrigue. The house, though fabulously assessed by the local authorities, was tiny, and I imagined her family could hear every squeal of the bed. Worse, one evening Leslie caught me in the downstairs bathroom, right down the hall from where her mother was preparing dinner, and demanded a quickie while perched on the edge of the marble sink. There was a mirror on the medicine cabinet
door, and also one the entire length of the opposite wall and another on the inside of the tub. Looking over her shoulder, I could see my face in the medicine cabinet, and beyond it my ass, and then these reflections shrinking down to the size of a few hundred angstroms, and throughout all this I could hear her mother dicing onions.

I ended up pushing her into the basin and nearly cracking her head on the medicine cabinet, and my knees buckled and I almost fell onto the cool, just-scrubbed, polygonally tiled floor. Leslie, however, said, “That was fun.”

“Fun?”

“Wasn’t it?” She grinned sweetly like a little kid and pulled up her jeans.

“That’s a pretty odd way of putting it.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Fun? You don’t have sex for fun.”

“You don’t?”

“When your mother’s right down the hall?”

“She doesn’t care. We’re consenting adults.”

“For crying out loud. If you can’t wait to have sex until your mother’s out of earshot, you’re not doing it for fun.”

“Why not?” she asked mildly. “She
is
out of earshot. And she said dinner wasn’t going to be ready till 6:30, so I figured we had time—”

“Scrabble is fun. TV is fun. You don’t have sex for the same reasons.”

“You can. There’s nothing on this early. Besides, all these mirrors are sort of kinky.”

Leslie’s family, much to my annoyance, never seemed to catch on to the fact that I was Asian. Her father, a terrifyingly secular Unitarian minister with hands the size of my head, insisted at first on calling me “Paul.” The one man-to-man talk we had—on my professional expectations—was conducted as we tossed an American football between us in his backyard. Twice as I attempted to explain the role of model formats in macroeconomics, the ball sailed through my hands and ended up in the shrubbery. And then, with a forced casualness, he asked me if I was a Marxist. This was at the dawn of the last decade in which such things existed. I began a complicated explanation of my country’s unique socio-economic situation, its history, its resources, and its difficult regional position, and kept at it until he lost interest.

Now, just a bit further into the decade, I was spending my first full year back home. Although I held an important position in the Ministry of Economic Development, I was still obliged to perform some military service. Indeed, as a member of the elite, I had a duty toward the army, the guardian of the nation’s independence, that was lifelong. Even while in my office in the crumbling concrete skyscraper across the street from the national assembly, I was under the command of Major General Ti (a cousin by marriage). From the time I was eighteen I had spent three months of every year with my unit at the border, where our peasant soldiers stared with indifferent hostility across the frontier at our neighbor’s peasant soldiers, who stared back.

As an officer I was allowed the company of my
family, and Leslie had stayed with me the last two weeks of my recent tour. It was her idea. As the only white woman in camp, she gave the troops something to talk about, I’m sure, but I didn’t care, for what they said had no effect on my authority. More of a concern was what my fellow officers were thinking. My friends virtually cut me off. I was excused from our late-night drunks. I was quarantined from all sex-related jokes. Their wives, some of whom I had known since we were children, whose families had known mine for centuries, forgot the warmth they had once shown me and ended whatever casual flirtations we had cultivated. They had all known I had married a Westerner, of course, but it was not until she showed up in camp, making herself comfortable in the officer’s mess, walking around in jean cutoffs and those impossible curls, asking innocent questions in mangled Mamaroneck High School French, that my decision set me apart. Not one of the women offered my wife the slimmest chance of a friendship.

Leslie never noticed this ostracism. She was too busy “having the experience” (her oft-used, jarring expression; sometimes it made me wonder if I was an object of love or, like much else in this country, merely a detail in the composition of an “interesting” life). She rode on elephants and in tanks and was more curious about the technology of our relatively sophisticated communications facility than were most spies. She asked keen questions about routine maneuvers. As an enthusiastic though unskilled volunteer, she worked in the infirmary, where seriously ill and injured men were too self-conscious to moan in her presence.

I enjoyed her company, but having her watch me play soldier, and her delight in the harmless minutiae of military organization, made me feel like there was something basically dishonest in my life. My military duty meant more to me than she could understand.

Two years earlier, I had seen action in a border clash and had received commendations for bravery and leadership:

We were in the bush a few hours before dawn, undeniably lost in this leafy, wet, chaotic terrain that cannot hold the ink of a surveyor’s pen. There had been skirmishing earlier in the week. We were all tensed for a fight. My soldiers did not want to kill as much as they wanted to spend their ammunition; a few rounds of bullets at three piastres a shot would be the most expensive consumption their lives would ever allow. We could hear bats in the woods and something else, too. It was at this moment, before anything happened, that I was overcome by a feeling of . . . well, I’m not sure, but let’s call it destiny. After a lifetime of urban existence, I felt most powerful and most in control of myself here in this dank wilderness. I had my life and the lives of my men in my hands, but I was at peace. I could already smell blood, and the jungle had never before seemed so much like home. There was a click and a flash, and before I could even give the orders—not that I had any specific orders to give—my troops were on their bellies firing into the night and whooping like the Native Americans portrayed in Hollywood movies.

I myself got off a few shots, each departing from my rifle with a gentle kick. One seemed to kick twice, as if it
could transmit back to me the impact of its collision. My soldiers gleefully insisted that I had killed a man. When we returned to the area the next morning, we found several bodies. They had suffered a week’s worth of decomposition in this rancid climate. I could hardly believe they had ever known life. It was only my respect for army regulations that made me turn down my sergeant’s suggestion that I take home a foot as a trophy.

We were served dinner, a thin rice porridge, on chipped plastic dishes emblazoned with the Esso tiger. The company, which had first offered them as premiums to encourage the American consumption of its gasoline, had been stuck with them after the 1973 oil boycott. A sharp Kuwaiti businessman bought them at a trivial price and earned a handsome profit in a deal with Joseph the Syrian, the richest man in the capital, who in turn sold the dishes to provincial distributors, mostly Indians, who made a killing in the local bazaars. Highly ranked in our pantheon of animal gods, the tiger is a creature of profound meaning to our countrymen, despite his near extinction in our heavily hunted jungles (his hides are paid for with hard currency).