I just ran out of smokes last night. Where'd you find these?"
"These and other foreign goods are available at the shop over there," he replied, jutting his chin in that direction. "I live with my wife and child in a house over on the hillside just beyond the village." He pointed toward a densely wooded hill that faced Dragon Mountain from the far side of the village. "You must come to our house for dinner one night and tell me news of the outside world. I have been here already five years now." He gazed blankly across the village, his head bobbing rhythmically.
After a long silence, he stood up and stretched his limbs. "Well, I must go to work now," he said, and handed me the pack of cigarettes. "Please accept these; I have more at home. Where do you stay in the village?" I told him I was Kiang's guest, and he looked impressed. "Kiang is a good man. You are lucky. He has a big house and three beautiful daughters. You should be quite happy there. I will see you again soon, monsieur. Au revoir."
I sat there in a funk for the rest of the day, smoking Moreau's cigarettes and daydreaming. What else could I do? Soon the sun was sinking over the trees, and men began trickling back to the village from the hills and fields. Smoke from cooking fires curled up through thatched roofs, giving the impression that the whole village was aflame. The smell of fresh food and spices cooking reminded me how hungry I felt, so I left my roost under the bodhi tree and strolled back to Kiang's house.
He was already home and puffing on a cheroot when I returned, and he welcomed me with a cup of hot tea. Soon his wife and daughters had dinner ready, and we all gathered around the table to eat.
Except for festival days—when they slaughtered a pig or dog—dinners there were usually the same. We each got a heaping bowlful of boiled rice, millet, or barley. In the middle of the table were three iron pots, each with a different curry in it. Two were always some combination of vegetables, while the third was usually chicken, fish, wild game, or eggs, depending on what was available that day.
They used no chopsticks or any other eating utensils. Instead, each person ladled some curry onto his rice, then used the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand to mash the grain and curry into little bite-size balls, which were then popped into the mouth. The left hand is never used for eating, because its function is to take care of business at the other end of the line, using water instead of toilet paper. The Shan always wash their hands and mouths thoroughly both before and after eating—an excellent habit.
After dinner, Kiang and I chatted for a while over cheroots, but I was in no mood for socializing that evening. Despite the unfailing kindness of Kiang's family, I felt like an alien who'd landed on an unknown planet. No one protested when I stood up early to say good night, bowing my head with hands folded at the heart, in the traditional manner.
I got undressed and lay down on the cot, using my sarong for a sheet. I thought of reading myself to sleep, but there was nothing to read, so I just stared at the bouncing shadows cast against the walls by the flickering oil lamp.
I was dozing on the edge of sleep, eyes closed and mind adrift, when I heard someone swish quietly into my room. Startled, I bolted up in bed and focused my eyes on the intruder. Standing there next to me with a broad ivory smile, naked to the waist, was the daughter I'd selected that morning as the winner of Kiang's little beauty contest.
Surprised and embarrassed, I moved to cover my thighs with my sarong, but she snatched it from my hands and flung it aside. Then she yanked a knot on her hip and her own sarong fell in a heap around her feet. Purring softly, she twined her arms around my neck and pressed her body gently down on top of mine.
VI
It was an old tribal custom, and I must say that it really made me feel at home there. Moreau later told me that it was a traditional form of hospitality practiced since ancient times by the Shan mountain tribes, though not by the Burmans down on the plains. If a tribesman had as his houseguest a man of superior social rank to his own, it was customary for the host to provide his esteemed guest not only with the best food and drink at his disposal, but also to offer him one of his wives or daughters to sleep with at night. This was regarded as a great honor to the host's entire lineage. But if a woman of the household were caught sleeping with a man of inferior status to her own family, she would be driven out of the house and banished from the village, if not killed by her brothers on the spot. Since Ching Wei bestowed superior social status on all of his so-called "foreign guests," this happy custom applied naturally to me.
Besides that, any family who provided a wife to one of Ching Wei's guests and thereby helped induce him to settle down stood to gain considerable fringe benefits, such as access to goods from the store and free opium.
Her name was Suraya, and she was only seventeen. No need to dwell on the details of our first night together, except to say that she came to me so sweetly, so full of warmth and feeling, and with such an open heart, that it felt as though we'd been lovers forever. She showed no sense of shame or sacrifice about sex and approached me with unabashed curiosity. As the Chinese would say, she was "ripe as a melon, ready to split." When we appeared at breakfast together late next morning, no one even raised an eyebrow.
I bumped into Moreau later that day sitting under the same bodhi tree, smoking and reading a rumpled newspaper. He congratulated me on my good fortune with Suraya, informing me that she was one of the most desirable girls in Poong. I bummed a smoke and asked him why he was not at work.
"Sunday is my holiday. My wife sent me down here to have some rice ground to flour." He jutted his chin at a dilapidated shack just off the village square. "The old man there does it for me on his grinding stone—three kilos of flour for one packet of cigarettes. Not bad." He smiled for the first time, showing teeth that looked like rusty nails.
"Where the hell'd you get that newspaper, Moreau? Got a subscription?" He was reading the French paper Le Monde.
"Oh, this also comes from the shop. They bring it sometimes from Bangkok with other foreign publications," he shrugged, "and sometimes not. It is two months old already, but here all news is fresh."
"So tell me, Moreau, how'd you end up here?"
"Like you, I was invited." He'd been a teacher at a small primary school for the French community in Bangkok, but his real interest and lifelong hobby had always been orchids. "That is why I moved to Thailand. There I could spend all my holidays and spare time up-country, studying and collecting rare orchids. There are species growing in Thailand that are found nowhere else on earth. It was a good life."
Then one year, he won several major prizes at an international orchid show held in Bangkok, and his name and picture got plastered all over the press. Ching Wei, himself an avid orchid collector, had attended the exhibit during one of his clandestine business trips to Bangkok, and he'd been deeply impressed by Moreau's work. So impressed, in fact, that the moment he got back to Dragon Mountain, he dispatched a team of goons to stake out Moreau's place for an abduction. He was easy to nab: no family, no servants, no pets—just him and his orchids.
"Without damaging a single specimen," he recalled laconically, "they brought me and my entire collection back to this place. For more than one year I lived in the village as an unwilling prisoner, and I refused to cooperate with Ching Wei. But time and boredom—as well as opium—dissolved my resistance, and soon I came to miss my orchids even more than my freedom. So I went to him and agreed to serve as his orchid man. By then he had a substantial collection, including my own, but it required much work. I married the daughter of my host, and Ching Wei built that house up on the hill for us. Now I have no wish to return to the outside world. I'm quite happy here in my own little world with my family and my flowers."
An
