I try to stand to run for the door, but slide on the slippery surface and collapse painfully back onto my knees. I twist to the right, in a gamble that Mr. Black will lunge to the left. Wrong, I feel the knife slice up the right side of my rib cage as I fling myself facedown onto the floor. Not the best defensive position. I manage a quick flip onto my back as Mr. Cleaver leaps on top of me, visor up. I raise my left foot and for a split second keep it there. An astonished groan peculiar to the male of our species as my honorable opponent’s testicles hit my heel and the visor slowly closes over his agony. A hardy fellow, I have to admit, as he rolls over and over to the open door, apparently having trouble standing, breathing and thinking. I hear him tick off the stairs on the way down to the ground on his backside and fancy I can hear that visor clopping as he goes.
My knees are all but paralyzed from the way I fell on the floor and my own blood is pooling with the old lady’s. I am skidding and flailing in a slippery pond when the motorbike starts up and roars away.
I crawl to the old lady, whose throat has been slashed back to the vertebra, then grope my way to my feet using the wall and feel my way to the master bedroom. As I switch on the light I feel her eyes on me. This time the ironic twist to her lips must be especially for me. The gold-stick-with-jade in her navel gives me pause as I pass by.
In the shower I watch my blood slipping away in pink solution and feel myself weakening.
Moment of truth: Who do I distrust least? Put another way, who is likely to be both punctual and equipped for a medical emergency? There is really no contest, the Colonel is probably carousing at one of his clubs and has certainly turned off his mobile. Nor is there any point in calling for an ambulance, since in Krung Thep there are none. I pick Rosen’s card out of my pocket and call him from the telephone in the bedroom. I speak in short sentences punctuated by convincing gasps of pain, and replace the receiver.
I lie on the bed while life slips away. It is not an unpleasant sensation, although one remains tormented by the question of what happens next.
21
Fritz von Staffen was certainly different, I had to give him that. For a start he was not middle-aged; he was in his mid-thirties. Nor was he discernibly inadequate in any other way. He was tall, slim and handsome, from the south of Germany where people are as likely to have brown hair as blond. His was almost black and his skin pale. His only affectation, apart from being an elegant dresser, was to smoke English cigarettes from an amber cigarette holder, but this he did well.
It was my first experience of flying. Fourteen hours in the belly of a huge machine, then a nervous trip from the airport in a big white Mercedes taxi, my mother making appropriate sounds of wonder with the tall German’s arm around her while I gazed at wide empty streets as black as her hair.
We arrived at night, so the voyage of discovery began the next day, when we stepped out into the air. And what air! I had never experienced air in a city which smelled fresh, just as though you were in the country. Deciduous trees exploding in sprays of greens! I had never seen the pyramids on horse chestnuts before, apple blossom, chestnut blossom, the first roses. You had to wonder if this was really a city, or a gigantic park on which a few housing estates had encroached. Garten were everywhere. There was the Englischer Garten, the Finanzgarten, the Hofgarten, the Botanischer Garten-it seemed that Garten were to Munich what traffic was to Krung Thep. And attached to each of these Garten, sometimes bang in the middle, you invariably came across another kind of Garten, the Biergarten, and equally inevitably you came across one or more of Fritz’s many friends and acquaintances. They seemed like a small army at first, until they narrowed down to three couples who always seemed to be there drinking huge steins of beer, which I could hardly lift, and eating potato salad, chicken, ribs from paper plates while a Bavarian band in lederhosen played Strauss. Not that I could tell Strauss from Gershwin until Fritz explained music, as he explained many other things that a young boy needs to know.
Fritz’s friends passed our tests admirably, even Nong said so. Not the slightest Teutonic coldness toward the brown-skinned woman and her half-caste son, not a hint in the eyes that they had discussed between them (as they surely had) the likely nature of her profession. The women of the three couples were especially attentive and told my mother how delighted they were that dear Fritz had finally found a mate whom he and his friends could love. Nong told me that Germans were special people, not afflicted by the narrow-mindedness that caused so much racism in other Western countries. Germans were people of the world who could cut through cultural barriers and look into the hearts of those from the other side of the earth. If only Thais were more like that.
We had arrived in May and by July Fritz pronounced my English way in advance of that of any German boy. Nong’s English, too, had improved measurably, for Fritz had a clever way of teasing her: “Darling, I really love the way you pronounce your r’s, we used to have a comedian who did that-he was hilarious, earned a fortune on the stage and on TV.”
My mother put in the time and never made an r sound like an l again, except for satirical purposes, when she wanted to show her sophistication by making fun of the bar-girl accent (other improvements were no less dramatic, though even Fritz took some time to convince her that “boom-boom” was not standard English for sexual intercourse, but rather a device by which some gifted predecessor had first pierced the language barrier on this crucial point).
In June I caught a summer cold and Nong learned her first complete phrase in German: “Was ist los, bist Du erkaeltert?”
During the third week of July my mother took me for a walk in the Englischer Garten, sat down with me on a bench under a chestnut tree, held my hand tightly and burst into tears. She laughed as she cried. “Darling, I can’t believe how happy I am, I’m crying with relief that the nightmare is over-I don’t have to-you know-work at night anymore. I don’t have to go to Pat Pong ever again in my life if I don’t want to.” I too felt the sense of religious redemption: I would have her with me every night from now on, until we died.
The letdown was vertiginous. The first I knew of it was an explosion of Thai expletives from the bedroom next door, a “Calm down, darling, please, calm down” from Fritz, more Thai expletives, the sound of something being thrown, a “You little savage” from Fritz, the word Scheisser repeated over and over again by Nong, a flood of tears not of the joyful variety, an “Ouch, you fucking bitch” from Fritz, and “I’ll make you pay for that, you vile little monkey,” the bedroom door opening and closing with a slam, Nong running downstairs, the garden door opening and slamming. Silence.
I figured a late-night dash to the airport was in the cards and prepared myself for fourteen hours with a furious mother, followed by Krung Thep in late July-not the sweetest prospect on earth. Obviously, Fritz kept a tall blond mistress somewhere and Nong had come across the evidence, probably after a diligent search of his pockets.
But the call to flee did not come that night, and Fritz really wasn’t fooling around.
In my hospital bed I reflect on my mother’s most defining moment with a pride that has grown with the years.