LITMIR.BIZ

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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 old man hobbled across the square with Moreau's sack of rice flour slung over his 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,

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