area, and I had never succeeded in getting there. By now many of the old statues had been stolen and sold to Bangkok antique dealers, but I wanted to go there nonetheless. Was my future not symbolically flowing down the Mekong towards me? I wanted to go and meet it.
In the main cave a group of Laotians were kneeling before a stone Buddha, enquiring about their future. I did the same. The process is simple. Slowly, with hands joined, you shake a boxful of little bamboo sticks until one of them falls to the ground. Each stick bears a number corresponding to a slip of paper with a message. Mine was eleven, and the message was:
Shoot your arrow at the giant Ku Pan. You will certainly kill him. Soon you will have no more enemies and your name will be known in every corner of the earth. Your people need you and you must continue to help them. If you go in for business you will lose every penny. You will have no illnesses. Travel is a very good thing for you.
I did not think much of this, but later, when I pulled the little scrap of paper out of my pocket during the Christmas dinner at the French embassy in Vientiane, it was like the spark that ignites a great blaze. Soon, around that very formal table served by silent waiters in livery, the talk was all about fortune-tellers, prophecies and magic. Everyone had a story, an experience to tell. Perhaps because we were dining by candlelight, in a great white house surrounded by bougainvillaea and orchids, nestling in a mysterious garden populated with old statues of explorers – or perhaps because Europe and its logic seemed further away than ever – it was as if my slip of paper had opened a Pandora’s box and this were an hour of unwonted confessions.
‘A fortune-teller really changed my life,’ said a beautiful, elegant woman of around forty, recently arrived from Paris, who sat opposite me. While still at university she had become pregnant by a fellow student, who had died immediately afterwards in a skiing accident. A common friend had stayed by her side, and a great love had developed between them. But one day this friend’s mother had been to a fortune-teller who had said, ‘Your son is about to become the father of a child which is not his, and he must absolutely not do it. It would ruin his life.’ When the mother told her son this he was so shocked that he called off the wedding. ‘And that,’ said a gentleman sitting to the right of the ambassador’s wife, ‘is how I became the father of that child.’
This sounded to me like a typical case: the mother had somehow got the fortune-teller to say what she herself could not say to her son, and thus, through the authority of the occult, obtained the result she wanted. But the other diners were rather impressed, and the woman herself was totally convinced of the fortune-teller’s powers. As for my fortune-teller in Hong Kong, everyone agreed that I must heed his warning and refrain from flying.
At dawn I left, by air, for the Plain of Jars, a strange valley amid the mountains of northern Laos, which is scattered with huge, mysterious stone vessels, some over seven feet high, all beautifully carved. But by whom? To hold what? Anthropologists say they were funerary urns of an ancient population of Chinese origin, now extinct, but the Laotians prefer to believe their legends. ‘They are amphoras for wine,’ they say. ‘The giants made them. At the top of the mountain there is an enormous stone table where, from time to time, the giants meet for their banquets.’ But no one had ever managed to reach it.
I spent three days in the region. The ripe opium poppies were beginning to shed their red, purple and white petals, and women were cutting open the bulbs to collect the precious sticky black juice in old bowls. The Muong, the mountain people, were celebrating their New Year. Young people were at their most popular sport: playing ball as a way of finding a mate. In each village rows of girls in traditional dress stand for hours on end opposite rows of boys and throw cloth balls back and forth while chanting an old ditty: ‘If you love me, throw better. If you want me, improve your looks.’
I was accompanied by a very special guide, Claude Vincent, a cultivated Frenchman of about fifty who had lived in Laos since he was a boy. He had married a Laotian woman, and remained in the country even after the Pathet Lao seized power in 1975. In the years of the war we had often met, but had never known each other well; for him I was one of the many journalist-vultures who descended on Laos, attracted by its dead. Now it was different, and Claude wanted to make me understand his love for a land to whose ancient, beautiful soul he is fervently attached.
I realized this when, tired after an afternoon exploring the Plain of Jars, we retired for the night to an inn without electricity or water. We talked about the Communists: wherever they went, in China as in Cambodia, the first thing they did was to abolish the popular traditions. They fought against superstition, eliminated fortune-tellers and banned the old ceremonies. I asked Claude how the Pathet Lao had behaved. In reply he told me about something that had happened to him a few years before.
It was a Sunday in 1985 in Vientiane, and Claude and his family planned to have a picnic on the bank of the Mekong. One of his nieces was very excited about the trip, but she went down with a high fever and they decided to leave her at home. She was terribly upset and insisted that she must, absolutely must go to the river. Not to take her was out of the question.
They found a place on the bank, the adults eating and the children playing by the water. Only when it was time to go did they realize that the little girl was no longer there. They searched for her everywhere, but she had vanished. In desperation they consulted a famous clairvoyante, who went into a trance and told them: ‘Next Friday, at 3.45 in the afternoon, go to the bend in the river. There, in front of the pagoda, you’ll find her. She will have blue marks on her body: one under her arm and one on her chest.’ The family went, and at the appointed hour the child’s body floated to the surface, bearing the blue marks described by the woman.
Claude told me that the clairvoyante had made contact with the Spirit of the River and asked it to yield up the child’s body in return for the sacrifice of seven chickens and a pig. The family’s problem was how to give the Spirit the promised reward. These were the hardest years of the Communist regime. There were informers in every neighbourhood, and Claude was afraid of getting into trouble if he organized the ceremony. He went to ask the advice of a high party official. The response surprised him. ‘You absolutely must make the sacrifice. You promised it to the Spirit of the River and you can’t break your word,’ he said, and reminded Claude that during the war every time the Pathet Lao crossed a river, the last man in the patrol had to turn back and call to a non-existent comrade. The Spirit of the River habitually carries off the last of a line, and in that way the guerrillas hoped to deceive it. ‘Today that practice has become a military order for all patrols crossing watercourses,’ said Claude in conclusion.* The idea that in Laos even the Marxist-Leninists had remained above all Laotians, and in their own way outside time, was enormously pleasing.
The next day we travelled north by jeep. The area around the Plain of Jars was one of those most devastated by the American war. The old capital, Xianghuang, literally no longer exists: it was obliterated by carpet bombing from B-52S. The new settlement, Phongsovane, is so far only a sprawl of wooden shacks.
To escape the bombs, the people of the region lived for years in the caves. Now they are rebuilding the villages with whatever materials the war left behind. The shells of cluster bombs – giant eggs that burst in the air and released dozens of murderous little booby-traps – are used as fencing or animal feeding troughs; artillery shells serve as water containers.
‘How old are you?’ I asked a woman in the market at Phongsovane. She looked at me, perplexed. ‘When were you born?’ I persisted. ‘Before the war,’ she replied. Which of the many wars was unclear. In human memory Laos has always been at war.
Thirty miles from Phongsovane is a fork in the road: one road stretches eastward towards Vietnam and the port of Vinh, the other continues north towards the old guerrilla capital Sam Neua and the Chinese frontier. Alongside the latter, about six miles from the fork, is the cave
