"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 Euphoria had been replaced by paranoia and anyone who didn't take the republic seriously was considered a threat.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.
"Smart lady," Siri said.
"She certainly put us in our places."
"Nice lips."
"Exceptional."
"They did remain clenched when you mentioned your warts, though."
"They did."
Civilai opened the unlocked door of his old car and sat behind the steering wheel. Siri climbed into the passenger seat. They sat for a moment staring at the unpainted side wall of the building. As the concrete absorbed the endless rains, Siri fancied he saw the outline of New Zealand stained there, or it could have been a twisted balloon poodle. Following a disastrous year of drought, the farmers had smiled to see the early arrival of the 1978 rains. It was as if the gods had awoken late and, realising their negligence, had hastily attempted to make up for the previous year. The rain fell heavily and ceaselessly — three times the national average for April. The Lao New Year water festival celebrations — a time to call down the first rains of the year — were rained out. The earthen embankments of the new rice paddies were washed flat, the bougainvilleas had been rinsed colourless. The earth seemed to cry, "All right. Enough." But still it rained. It was nature's little joke. Like the Eskimos with their four million words for snow, the Lao vocabulary was expanding with new language to describe rain.
Today the water hung in the air like torn strips of grey paper.
"What is that?" Civilai asked.
"What's what?"
"That noise you're making."
"It's not a noise. It's a song. I have no idea where I heard it. I can't get it out of my head."
"Well try. It's annoying."
Siri swallowed his song.
"What do you think they've got on me?" he asked. "I mean, the DHC."
"Huh," Civilai laughed. "I knew it. You do want to be a national hero."
"I do not. I'm just…curious."
"About your warts?"
"Yes."
"Oh, where do I start? How about your abrasive personality?"
"Personalities change. And history has a way of smudging my character, don't forget."
"So I heard. All right…" Civilai beeped his horn for no apparent reason. "There's the spirit thing."
"How could they possibly know about that?"
"They probably don't know the specifics. Not that you actually chat with ghosties. I doubt they know that. But they must have heard the rumours. This is a small country. People like Judge Haeng must have accumulated a good deal of circumstantial evidence of your supernatural connections."
"But no proof. By its very nature he can't have accumulated evidence."
"No."
"Then they don't have anything."
"All right. Well, they probably don't like your Hmong campaign, either."
"It's hardly a campaign."
"You walked up and down in front of the Pasason News office with a placard saying 'WE NEED ANSWERS ON THE PLIGHT OF OUR HMONG BROTHERS'. People have been shot for less. You seem to have it in your mind that the government has a policy to intimidate minorities."
"It does."
"Well then. With that attitude I can see the central committee making little pencil crosses beside your name, can't you?"
"Things have to be sorted out before it's too late."