The Merit Birds Part 17

He was lying on his back, his arms stretched out by his sides, eyes fluttering. "What's wrong with him?" I asked Trahn. The guy was panicking, shaking his friend's shoulders.

"He not eat in a week. He's very weak. He never gets broth or rice. The big guy in our cell eats most."

A guard blew a whistle and came running over to us.

"Back to work," he barked. He started to push Trahn off his friend. We walked reluctantly back to our shovels. The collapsed man lay limp on the dirt. The guard kicked him in the leg and then turned to walk away, glancing over his shoulder at us every now and then. When he rounded the corner I crept back to Trahn.

"I'll be back," I whispered.

"You'll be in big trouble!" he said. "Interrogation room!"

I glanced all around to make sure no one was watching. Then I walked swiftly to the guards' staff room. None of them would be there yet. It was too early for their break. Looking over my shoulder, I turned to slowly open the door. It creaked noisily on its hinges. My fearful heart beat deafeningly inside my ribcage. I quickly scanned the room and saw a huge bottle of water sitting on a water tipper. I picked a metal cup off the counter and quickly tipped the huge bottle to fill the cup with water. I was too hasty and some water sloshed on the floor. I turned to walk as quickly as I could out of the room without spilling the water. Trahn looked at me with awe as I approached. I bent over his friend and trickled water through the thin parting of his lips. My hands were shaking and I spilled some on the man's chest. His eyes fluttered and he began to swallow.

"Now I'll get you food," I whispered in his ear.

"Thank you," Trahn whispered to me. "Your heart so kind. But you need to stop. You get us all in trouble."

I couldn't stop. I was eighteen and had never thought beyond what I wanted or how sorry I was for myself. Suddenly serving this weak man was giving me power. For once I felt purposeful. Destined. I suddenly realized how helping him would save me.

I took the empty cup with me so the guys wouldn't get in trouble if a guard came while I was gone. I skulked to the stinking room where the fish were cleaned. I saw a prisoner bent over the pile of fish corpses, gutting them with a knife. A bored-looking guard watched him inattentively from the corner. I was nauseous, but something urged me on. I didn't want the other prisoner to see me, otherwise he'd be implicated, too. I waited and watched until the guard left, likely to take a p.i.s.s. The prisoner gutted another fish and then stood to stretch. He turned his back to me as he twisted his body from side to side, trying to get the kinks out of his hunched back. It was my moment. I swallowed. I slunk into the room, grabbed two slippery catfish, and was gone.

I sped-walked back to the site where we were digging the pond. I had a fish tucked under each armpit. I surrept.i.tiously pa.s.sed them to Trahn, who was helping his weak friend sit up.

"Here. Feed these to him. I can get you more later," I whispered. I resolved to find a way to bring my share of the catfish to Trahn's cell.

"But, the guard, he -" Trahn was interrupted as the guard who had kicked his friend came running across the field to us.

"You!" He pointed at me. "I was here two minutes ago and you weren't. Where were you?"

I saw the grim expression on Trahn's face.

"Answer!" the guard barked.

"Getting food," I said. "He will die without it." I pointed to the prisoner sitting on the ground and looking around, dazed.

"He gets food," the guard spat.

"Not enough."

"I didn't want to do this, but you could have got me in big trouble. I've had to report you to my supervisor," the guard said. "Tomorrow you'll have a meeting with him. He said he'd take you to the interrogation room himself."

I heard Trahn's shovel drop.

Memory.

Seng.

The next morning Vong found the wrinkled piece of paper with Meh's address lying on the bedside table of their guesthouse room.

"What's this?" she asked.

For once he knew something that she didn't. For once he was in control. He had taken life into his own hands. He paused to savour the feeling for a moment. He considered not telling her. She read their mother's stout characters, scratched out in a weak pen that looked like it was almost out of ink.

"Seng?"

"She's alive, Vong." He met her eyes. "Meh."

Vong flopped down in the wooden guesthouse chair.

"What are you saying?"

"I found her." He found her. No one else. He started to laugh. He had done the very thing he had dreamed of his entire life. By himself.

"Our mom is alive, euaigh!" He reached down and hugged his sister. "She's here, in Bangkok." He laughed hysterically. He buried his face into his sister's shoulder and his wild laughter gradually changed into wild sobbing. They sat for a long time, Seng laughing and weeping, Vong with a confused look on her face.

"I can't wait anymore. We will go see her today," Seng said, when they finally calmed down.

"We will see our mother today?" Vong asked, eyes wide. "I don't believe this. You must have it all wrong. Is it the stress? Tell me everything."

"Let's go! I've been waiting to see her since I was five years old. I can't wait any longer," he said.

Outside the guesthouse, Seng reluctantly handed the flyer over to a tuk-tuk driver. He was afraid to let it go, his only link to his mom. The driver nodded and Seng immediately took the flyer and put it into the pocket over his heart.

The driver let them off in front of a grey, brick tenement. Faded skirts with patterns of elephants and men's white unders.h.i.+rts flapped from laundry lines strung across balconies that were overflowing with stuff - boisterous chickens in cages, bicycles, and tattered wicker baskets. Barefoot children in dirty, worn clothes chased each other outside. The smell of smouldering garbage fires was everywhere.

Vong and Seng stepped over a beggar sitting on the cement steps. It looked like she lived in the stairwell. A cardboard box had been laid out flat underneath the stairs. A child sat on it, absent-mindedly forming grains of rice into a picture. She wore no top and her light brown hair frizzed around her head. Vong pressed a few baht into the woman's lined, brown palm.

"Please, miss. Can you tell us where apartment number 8 is?" Vong's voice was shaky.

They followed the young woman's directions to the top of the grimy stairs and made a left into a dim, grey hall. With quivering hands, Seng knocked on the door. No one answered. Outside children called out to each other. A coin fell out of his pocket and tingled loudly on the dirty linoleum floor.

"Are you sure it was her, Seng?" Vong asked.

This time they could hear shuffling behind the thin door. The unlatching of locks. The creaking of hinges. And suddenly there she was. For the first time Seng saw her without her dark sungla.s.ses.

Of course.

His mother.

Eyes exactly like his own stared back at him. The smell of frying spring rolls wafted out from behind her.

"Meh!" Seng fell at her feet. "Meh!" He began to weep. Vong wiped her eyes.

"Mother, it's us. Vong and Seng."

A ghost of a smile pa.s.sed over their mother's cracked lips.

A door creaking open across the hallway interrupted the moment.

"Mrs. Emkhan. Everything okay?" asked a toothless, young woman.

"Yes, yes. Just the man looking for rent again," their mother spoke.

Vong shot Seng a confused look.

"Okay, Missus." The woman turned to speak to Vong and Seng. "I always check up on her, you know. She doesn't remember stuff. Something wrong with her head."

Seng didn't believe the woman. After all, Meh had remembered him. The woman looked Seng and Vong up and down and seemed to decide they weren't a threat. She went back into her apartment, shutting the scratched, blue door behind her.

"May we come in, Meh?" Seng finally said.

"Yes, yes, of course, although I already paid my rent." Their mother stepped to the side so Vong and Seng could enter.

Was this act so the neighbours wouldn't know?

The small apartment was cluttered with papers, bags of rice, and pots and pans. There was stuff everywhere. A rice cooker in the bathroom. Crumpled newspapers on the floor. Weak sunlight snuck in through a small, smudged window. On an overflowing bookcase made from cinder blocks and planks of wood Vong spotted a book with a Lao t.i.tle.

"Vong!" Seng whispered and pointed at a tattered black-and-white photograph stuck to the wall with masking tape. It was of the three of them as children. Nok was squinting in the sun at the camera. Seng's throat caught.

"Meh." Seng went into the kitchen where their mom was using tongs to take spring rolls out of a pot of boiling oil. He wanted to hold her hands, hug her, but instead Meh put the food on a plate and placed it on the floor. The three sat around the plate and ate silently. There was too much to say.

"Not too many because I have to sell them today. And I already paid you rent, I said."

"Meh, you can stop the charade now. It's me," Seng tried again. Emkhan looked up at him with blank eyes. She began to wring her hands. "Remember - we found each other on Khaosan Road?"

She began to rock back and forth on her knees.

"Seng, what's going on?" Vong asked.

"I don't know. She remembered me. She gave me her address. Now it's as if she doesn't know us." He swallowed the lump in his throat.

"Meh, do you remember this? How you would wave to me every morning from our driveway? When I was five. I would get on my bike and you would stand there until we couldn't see each other anymore. Every morning you did that. Every single morning." His voice was beginning to sound frantic and cheery in a forced way.

"And do you remember how Nok, just a baby, would try to ma.s.sage your feet after dinner? Her hands were so small but she was trying to copy Vong. Do you remember that? Meh?" He chuckled awkwardly. Meh began to tear up a tissue she was holding in her hand.

Vong reached over to lay one hand on top of her mother's. Emkhan brushed it aside.

"What about when we would walk past the grounds of the king's palace and you would make up funny stories about how the dragon statues came to be sitting on the temple steps?" His volume was rising with intensity. "Do you remember, Meh?"

"I don't know why you came here. I paid you the rent. I pay every month on time. You should leave an old woman alone."

He slapped his palm against the insubstantial apartment wall.

The toothless woman from across the hall creaked Meh's door open.

"Mrs. Emhkan, what's going on?" she asked, a look of concern on her face.

"Is something wrong with her?" Vong asked.

"Yes, I told you. She doesn't remember a lot of the time. I think it's called Alzheimer's. Sometimes she remembers and her mind is clear as anything, but then it goes again. I look out for her. She used to help me when she was well. Watch my kids and stuff."

Seng hung his head and began to sob noisily. This was everything he had ever dreamed of. It had come to him like an unexpected gift only to be cruelly s.n.a.t.c.hed away before he could open it. Vong stood up and went to place a hand on his shoulder while their mother rocked back and forth.

"I know you're not here for the rent because we have the same landlord," the woman said. "So who are you?"

"Her children," Vong said. Seng couldn't speak.

"Oh!" the woman raised a hand to her mouth. "Finally."

"She told you about us?" Vong asked.

"Yes, yes. One day she kept calling me Nok. She showed me this." She walked over to the makes.h.i.+ft bookshelf and pulled out a book. Tucked inside was a yellowing envelope.

"Here, take it," the woman said. It had their address in Vientiane written on it. Meh had known where they lived?

"You're Nok?" the woman asked Vong.

"No, her older sister," Vong said, and looked to her feet.

Seng opened the envelope.

Death Penalty.

Cam.

"I hear you yell at Sai last week," Huang said to me one morning. His hot, putrid morning breath met my nose. "Huang tell you he no better."

"No, you're wrong," I said. "Sai's not like that."

"You give me Sai's fish, I give you blanket."

"Never."

"You know nothing about world." Huang shook his head.

I ignored him and turned to get dressed. I didn't have time for Huang. My mind was racing about the interrogation room. There were stories of mock executions that left prisoners so shaken they couldn't walk back to their cells. Beatings that broke prisoners' teeth. My body s.h.i.+vered with cold perspiration.