can stick these things together? Why expect?’ she demanded.
‘But in me,’ persisted Stephen, ‘the gaps are so great. I am hardly made of the same human stuff. The same human matter. There is no consistency in me. No glue. No paste. I have no cohesion. I make no sense. I am a vacuum. I am fragments. I am morsels.’
She shook her head, worldly-wise.
‘Is not unusual,’ she said. ‘Is normal. Is naturally or common matter.’
‘The people I like I don’t approve,’ he persisted. ‘The people I approve I do not like. The women I like I cannot love. The woman I love I cannot like. The life I seek I could not endure. I seek a land where the water flows uphill. I seek simplicity.’
‘Is no simplicity. Is only way onwards. Is no way back to village. No way back to childhood. Is finished, all finished. All over world, village is finished. English village, Thai village, African village. Is burned, is chopped, is washed away. Is no way backwards. Water find level. Is no way back.’
‘But it is heart-rending, heart-rending,’ said Stephen Cox, crushing out his little cigarette in an enamel ashtray. ‘All this waste. All this wasted possibility. All this suffering. All these dreams. All this cruelty. All these dead.’
‘No, is not so. Is better now. Is better life expectancy, more electrics, more saloon cars, more soap, more rice, more nice clothings and suitings, more ice-cream, more maple syrup, more Coca-Cola, more cocktails, more Ovaltine, more champagne, more cassette players, more faxes, more aeroplanes, more Rolex watches, more perfumes, more satellites, more TV, more microwave, more word processor, more shower fitments, more motorbicycles, more ice boxes, more chips, more tampons, more tweezers, more fridges, more air conditionings, more cabinets, more musical, more confections, more bracelets, more prawns, more fruit varieties, more choice, more liberty, more democracy.’
‘You believe that?’
She nodded, seriously. ‘It never roll back now. Is finished. Socialism finished, simplicity finished, poverty finished, USSR and China and Vietnam all finished. Liberty, is all. Growth, is all. Dollars, is all.’ She smiled, encouraging. ‘Is good. Is better. Equality and fraternity is poverty and sickness. Is men working like beast, like buffalo. Is men killing one another like beast, like worse beast. Is no good, Stephen. Is finished. Is new world now. Is failed and finished.’
‘So you offer me nothing but desolation and loss. You offer me nothing but heartbreak.’
‘I offer you riches, I offer you choice, I offer you freedom. You can take, if only you choose. Forget old ideas. Choose.’
‘No,’ he repeated, forlornly. ‘You offer me desolation and loss. You offer me stones.’
*
Konstantin Vassiliou tries to enlist the help of his new friend Stephen Cox with an idea for a book. He will do the pictures, Stephen can write the text. Konstantin already has interest from a publisher, and with Stephen’s name the thing will be a piece of cake. Konstantin would be honoured. Please help. It will be a book about peaceful life, about the village. An anti-war book. Bitter Rice. The book that Robert Capa never made.
Stephen demurs. He thinks Konstantin is being naïve, but does not like to say so. He can hardly plead over-occupation as an excuse, as he has already lingered in the soft beds of the East for seven times seven nights with nothing to show for his sojourn but scribbles and sketches. But he does not like the idea of a picture book. He does not want to write the text for a book of glossy photographs of tragic people, even if the photographs are taken by his charming new friend. He has already turned down many offers to write texts and introductions to non-books. When he won the Booker, such requests had flooded in, and he had agreed, feebly, to write a foreword to an architectural guide to Paris Métro stations. This he had much regretted.
He regrets too that Konstantin has suggested something as banal as a book. Surely he should be above such things? He needs Konstantin to be the spiritual hero, not the cobbler-together of objects to put on Miss Porntip’s glass-topped coffee table.
He protests that he is not good at that kind of thing. He is an old-fashioned book person. Konstantin, the man with the camera, is the man of the future, the coming man. Why does he not write his own text?
Konstantin shrugs and smiles disarmingly and says he cannot write. He says to Stephen, I write like you draw. Stephen laughs. But does not give a firm assent. They will go along together to the border, he agrees, and they will see what happens. Jack Crane will give them a lift to Aranyaprathet in the ICRDP van.
Stephen continues to wish that Konstantin had not stooped to a commercial proposition, although he continues to be flattered by his attention. For some reason, he wishes Konstantin to remain beyond reproach and pure in heart. He tries to quell his doubts about photojournalism. Why, as a trade, should it be any worse than his own? Is he himself, hanging around on the edge of events, a parasite, a maggot on dying flesh, is he himself beyond reproach?
Sean Flynn and Tim Page, in the Vietnam war, experimented with a camera that could be attached to a soldier’s rifle so that when the gun was fired, it automatically recorded the death of its victim.
Sean Flynn vanished in Cambodia. He drove off, Easy Rider, on his Honda, and was never seen again. He left a legend, but no bones. Maybe he is still alive.
Konstantin insists that he is not a war photographer. I photograph survivors, he tells Stephen. I photograph life, not death. Stephen wonders if this is so. If it is possible.
Stephen, sitting in the Bangkok Press Club on the twentieth floor of a luxury hotel, sips a candiola juice, and sinks back into his deep armchair. He is evading the choice between Konstantin and Miss Porntip, between the light and the dark. He is reading a copy of Asia Today which informs him that most of Asia has leaped straight from illiteracy to the Visual Display Unit and has cut out the need for books. Stephen is a member of a threatened species. He is unnecessary. He reads that ‘Peasants in remote hill villages who have never mastered the art of reading and writing are quite at home with the electronic revolution. They have bypassed Gutenberg.’ He gazes at these words with incredulity. What fantasy world is this? Where do they find the electricity, in these remote hill villages? Do they all have their own generators? Are they not always in danger of storm or flood or guerrilla warfare or opium armies? Back home in the UK, in Good Time, Stephen has friends who have lost whole screenplays, whole novels, whole treatises on Wittgenstein into the unreachable limbo of their machinery. Are the hill peasants really that much smarter than his friends in Oxford and NW5?
Well, of course, judging by Miss Porntip, they may well be.
But what do they use their computers for, up there in the hills? Are they calculating the yield per acre of garlic versus cabbage, the profits of King Prawn versus Queen Porn, or are they rewriting the Tragedy of the Ravished Maiden?
It is the quiet hour, l’heure verte, when the spirit sinks. Other solitary figures slump in the gloom. Television screens flicker, and there is a hum of fax and telex. Stephen still writes with pen and ink, with pencil, with ball-point pen. The electronic revolution may or may not have reached Miss Porntip’s village, but it has certainly reached the Press Club of Bangkok.
The Khmer Rouge dispensed with the new technologies. They returned to people power, to bare hands.
Angkor had not been built, as the text books claim, by Suryavarman or Jayavarman or Indravarman or Hashavarman or any other Varman. It had been built by the bare hands of slave labour. By despised
