shoulder. Moreau thanked him with a pack of cigarettes and transferred the load to his own shoulder with a grunt. "Come," he said. "If you are not engaged elsewhere, you shall be my guest for lunch this afternoon. We always eat well on Sundays. Perhaps you can tell me more recent news of the world than this old newspaper."
Moreau's house sat tucked in the shade of tropical fruit trees halfway up a hill on the northern outskirts of Poong. It was built entirely of timber and tile, not mud and wattle like the dwellings in the village. Orchids hung everywhere, many of them in full bloom, and the whole place smelled like perfume. A long veranda overlooked the garden, with a view of the village below, and in the distance Dragon Mountain hulked against the skyline. I could barely discern the curved eaves and green tiles of Ching Wei's palace through the foliage.
"Please make yourself at home," Moreau said, leading me to a chair of woven jute on the veranda. "I'll just tell my wife we have a guest for lunch."
He returned with two clay mugs brimming with a frothy white liquid. "Rice beer," he explained. "The arack the others make is too strong for my stomach, and I cannot afford the foreign liquors from the shop. But this is very good, easy to ferment at home, and no stronger than European beer. We make it once a week. À votre santé!" We clicked mugs and drank. It tasted a bit like yogurt or buttermilk and was slightly carbonated like beer.
While waiting for lunch, I filled Moreau in on the latest events in Saigon, Bangkok, and other places I'd been to recently. I think he wanted to hear the news more for entertainment than information, for he never once registered any intellectual interest in anything I reported, nor did he ask any questions. He seemed to view the outside world as an ongoing soap opera. He liked to keep up with the plot and fates of all the major characters, but if he missed a few episodes, or saw a repeat, he didn't mind.
Meanwhile, his wife set lunch out on a rattan table on the other end of the veranda and called us over to eat. Moreau introduced her as Lorna, and she greeted me with the traditional Buddhist bow. She had the distinctive Tibetan-Chinese features of pure Shan stock, without a trace of the Malay ancestry that prevails in the lowlands of Burma. She stood two heads shorter than Moreau, and had a strong, well-fleshed body. Her face was perfectly round and quite pretty, and she wore her hair in a single thick braid that hung down to the bottom of her back. They had a three-year-old daughter, whom I caught peeking at me through the window slats.
Lunch was excellent. Moreau's stomach could not handle curries, so his wife had prepared half a dozen different dishes of assorted vegetables and meats, some of them served hot and others cold, some lightly cooked and others marinated raw in marvelous dressings. All ingredients were finely shredded or chopped to make the food easier to digest. Instead of rice, she'd prepared a stack of very thin rice flour pancakes, like French crepes, which we used to wrap the various dishes into a kind of "Burmese burrito." We drank plenty of rice beer, and for dessert she served a big platter of fresh tropical fruits in bite-size pieces, all peeled and impaled on bamboo skewers, with a bowl of thick fresh coconut cream as a dip. After lunch, Moreau and I returned to our chairs on the veranda and smoked cigarettes while Lama cleared the table.
As the afternoon wore on and our stomachs settled, Moreau began to fidget, and his mind kept drifting from the conversation. Finally, he stood up and suggested we go inside for an "afternoon smoke."
"Thanks, but this one's still going," I said, hoisting my cigarette.
"Mais non, I mean a real smoke!" He flashed one of his rare smiles and beckoned me into a small room adjacent to the veranda. There was a polished hardwood platform elevated about one foot off the floor, and the walls were devoid of decor, except for a niche housing a small Buddhist shrine. Following his example, I kicked off my sandals at the door and sat down on the smooth planks. Latticed screens diffused the afternoon light that filtered in through the window slats, and a faint breeze carried the refreshing fragrance of frangipani into the room.
"Lie down here," Moreau instructed with a suddenly authoritative air. "No, on your side—facing the lamp, with your head on that pillow." The "pillow" was a rectangular block of wood about a foot long and six inches thick, with a smooth depression on one side where countless other heads had rested. The "lamp" was a small jar of coconut oil with a cotton wick stuffed through its cork stopper and a smudged glass chimney over it.
Moreau fiddled for a while with some utensils arrayed on a lacquered tray of paraphernalia that lay on a mat between us. Then he lit the lamp, carefully trimmed the wick, set the chimney in place over the flame, and lay his head down on a wooden block facing me.
"You have never smoked opium?" he asked with a tone of mild surprise. He reached for a bamboo tube resting on a rack beside him and lovingly stroked its smooth, well-season ed surface. It was an old Chinese opium pipe, the likes of which I'd often seen in antique shops in Shanghai right after the war. It consisted of a thick bamboo stem with an ornately cast silver saddle, an ivory mouthpiece on one end and a matching ivory plug on the other. Inserted firmly into the socket of the saddle was a clay bowl about the size and shape of a doorknob, with a small hole drilled into an aperture in the middle of its convex surface.
As he worked in the lamplight, Moreau transformed before my eyes. No longer the listless hunch I'd seen in the village, his face now glowed with enthusiasm, and his eyes sparkled with life. His hands fingered the pipe and accessories like a musician tuning his instruments.
"Now we are ready to begin," he sighed. He dipped the tip of a long, steel spindle into a tiny cup of thick, black syrup, then dangled the droplet over the chimney. It bubbled and spluttered, swelling and expanding like burning rubber. He dipped the gob into the liquid again and repeated the process several times, until it formed a sticky ball the size of a pea. With the tip of the spindle he kneaded the hot wad of opium on the smooth surface of the bowl until it gradually achieved the consistency of gum and its color turned slowly from dull black to chestnut brown and finally to a beautiful burnished gold. Then he rolled the golden pellet into a perfect cone, spun the cone swiftly in the hot spot over the lamp until it became soft as taffy, and inserted the cone quickly into the tiny hole in the bowl. Twisting the spindle a few times to release the cone from the shaft, he pulled the spindle out clean, leaving the wad of opium stuck around the hole like a little doughnut.
With the look of a man about the enter the gates of heaven, Moreau tilted the pipe over the lamp so that the wad of opium hung directly in the "sweet spot" over the chimney and started puffing mightily with a deep, rhythmic draw. As the wad of opium began to sizzle and vaporize, the sound reminded me of the gurgle made by sucking the last drops of a soft drink up through a straw. He kept puffing until the little wad shriveled up and disappeared completely into the hole, plumes of blue smoke trailing from his nostrils. It smelled strong and sweet, like licorice or burnt chocolate.
Then it was my turn. It took me a couple of tries before I got the hang of it, but finally I drew the pipe properly and got some smoke down my lungs. It tasted good and was not at all harsh on the throat. The key to smoking is to create just the right pressure in the tube and maintain a steady draw. The Chinese call it "Swallowing Clouds, Spewing Fog."
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