21
Fritz von Staffen was certainly different, I had to give him that. For a start he was not middle-aged; he was in his mid-thirties. Nor was he discernibly inadequate in any other way. He was tall, slim and handsome, from the south of Germany where people are as likely to have brown hair as blond. His was almost black and his skin pale. His only affectation, apart from being an elegant dresser, was to smoke English cigarettes from an amber cigarette holder, but this he did well.
It was my first experience of flying. Fourteen hours in the belly of a huge machine, then a nervous trip from the airport in a big white Mercedes taxi, my mother making appropriate sounds of wonder with the tall German’s arm around her while I gazed at wide empty streets as black as her hair.
We arrived at night, so the voyage of discovery began the next day, when we stepped out into the air. And what air! I had never experienced air in a city which smelled fresh, just as though you were in the country. Deciduous trees exploding in sprays of greens! I had never seen the pyramids on horse chestnuts before, apple blossom, chestnut blossom, the first roses. You had to wonder if this was really a city, or a gigantic park on which a few housing estates had encroached. Garten were everywhere. There was the Englischer Garten, the Finanzgarten, the Hofgarten, the Botanischer Garten—it seemed that Garten were to Munich what traffic was to Krung Thep. And attached to each of these Garten, sometimes bang in the middle, you invariably came across another kind of Garten, the Biergarten, and equally inevitably you came across one or more of Fritz’s many friends and acquaintances. They seemed like a small army at first, until they narrowed down to three couples who always seemed to be there drinking huge steins of beer, which I could hardly lift, and eating potato salad, chicken, ribs from paper plates while a Bavarian band in lederhosen played Strauss. Not that I could tell Strauss from Gershwin until Fritz explained music, as he explained many other things that a young boy needs to know.
Fritz’s friends passed our tests admirably, even Nong said so. Not the slightest Teutonic coldness toward the brown-skinned woman and her half-caste son, not a hint in the eyes that they had discussed between them (as they surely had) the likely nature of her profession. The women of the three couples were especially attentive and told my mother how delighted they were that dear Fritz had finally found a mate whom he and his friends could love. Nong told me that Germans were special people, not afflicted by the narrow-mindedness that caused so much racism in other Western countries. Germans were people of the world who could cut through cultural barriers and look into the hearts of those from the other side of the earth. If only Thais were more like that.
We had arrived in May and by July Fritz pronounced my English way in advance of that of any German boy. Nong’s English, too, had improved measurably, for Fritz had a clever way of teasing her: “Darling, I really love the way you pronounce your r’s, we used to have a comedian who did that—he was hilarious, earned a fortune on the stage and on TV.”
My mother put in the time and never made an r sound like an l again, except for satirical purposes, when she wanted to show her sophistication by making fun of the bar-girl accent (other improvements were no less dramatic, though even Fritz took some time to convince her that “boom-boom” was not standard English for sexual intercourse, but rather a device by which some gifted predecessor had first pierced the language barrier on this crucial point).
In June I caught a summer cold and Nong learned her first complete phrase in German: “Was ist los, bist Du erkaeltert?”
During the third week of July my mother took me for a walk in the Englischer Garten, sat down with me on a bench under a chestnut tree, held my hand tightly and burst into tears. She laughed as she cried. “Darling, I can’t believe how happy I am, I’m crying with relief that the nightmare is over—I don’t have to—you know—work at night anymore. I don’t have to go to Pat Pong ever again in my life if I don’t want to.” I too felt the sense of religious redemption: I would have her with me every night from now on, until we died.
The letdown was vertiginous. The first I knew of it was an explosion of Thai expletives from the bedroom next door, a “Calm down, darling, please, calm down” from Fritz, more Thai expletives, the sound of something being thrown, a “You little savage” from Fritz, the word Scheisser repeated over and over again by Nong, a flood of tears not of the joyful variety, an “Ouch, you f*cking bitch” from Fritz, and “I’ll make you pay for that, you vile little monkey,” the bedroom door opening and closing with a slam, Nong running downstairs, the garden door opening and slamming. Silence.
I figured a late-night dash to the airport was in the cards and prepared myself for fourteen hours with a furious mother, followed by Krung Thep in late July—not the sweetest prospect on earth. Obviously, Fritz kept a tall blond mistress somewhere and Nong had come across the evidence, probably after a diligent search of his pockets.
But the call to flee did not come that night, and Fritz really wasn’t fooling around.
In my hospital bed I reflect on my mother’s most defining moment with a pride that has grown with the years.
The next day she appeared alone in my bedroom, still boiling. She told me to pack my things, leaving out every single toy, game or book that Fritz had given me, while she did the same. Fritz insisted on driving us to the airport in his BMW. A telling line of dialogue broke the silence: Fritz: “I wasn’t going to put you in any danger, you know.” Nong: “So why don’t you bring the suitcases from Bangkok yourself, if it’s so safe?”
At the airport Nong ostentatiously opened our two suitcases and examined every item, even squeezing toothpaste and shaking cakes of soap and knocking on the cases to check for false bottoms. Fritz, with a sarcastic aside about her level of education and the Thai intellect in general, pointed out that no one exports illegal drugs from the West into Thailand. She ignored him with true Thai stubbornness, and when she was through checked herself and her son onto the flight to Bangkok without a single backward glance. Fritz was history.
Well, not quite. Fritz was not unknown in the Bangkok bar scene and the efficient bush telegraph passed its message to Nong a few years later: Fritz had chosen the wrong girl again, this time with disastrous consequences for him. She had informed the police in Bangkok, who had mounted a sting operation, and now he was in the dreaded Bang Kwan prison on the Chao Phraya River. I was for going to see him. Nong wouldn’t hear of the idea. I insisted. Fritz might be rotten to the core, but for a number of months he had been the best surrogate father a boy could wish for. We fought, I won. One fine morning we went down to the river and took the boat as far as the last jetty, from where we trekked in the heat to the prison.
Bang Kwan was even grimmer than I expected. A fortress with a watchtower and guards armed with machine guns, surrounded by double perimeter walls, the stench of raw sewage as we passed through the first gate, and the spiritual stench of violence, sadism and rotting souls as we passed into the inhabited part of the prison. Fritz’s head was shaved, he was very thin in a threadbare prison shirt and shorts. The prison blacksmith had welded iron rings around his ankles joined by a heavy chain, but he greeted my mother and me with the same Old World charm, thanked us for coming to see him, and said: “I would like to apologize for the way I behaved at the airport that last day in Munich.” Nong maintained a relentlessly hard face, gave brittle answers to his questions. The interview lasted less than ten minutes.
On the way home from the prison, my mother admitted it had been a good idea to make the visit. In her eyes the Buddha had avenged her by sending Fritz to jail and humiliating him in front of her. When I sneezed from the pollution she said: “Was ist los, bist Du erkaeltert?”
The phrase has come into my mind because she is repeating it now as she leans over me, smiling. I grab her hand like a hungry lover, but I’m almost too weak to talk.
She has filled out somewhat in retirement, her bust is fuller and her shoulders broader, she is fifty now, and has not lost her effortless talent for projecting sex.
Not that she tries to lose it. She is wearing a crimson dress which exposes her brown shoulders and some of her cleavage, black and crimson patent leather shoes with fairly high heels, a gold Buddha on a heavy gold chain around her neck, a black and crimson handbag which is an illegal copy of a Gucci, a heavy gold bracelet, gold teardrop earrings, wet-look red lipstick, heavy mascara and that perfume I remember from Paris, mostly because Nong’s personal cannot-do-without budget doubled after that trip.
There is not a trace of gray in her hair, which is curled in a plait asymmetrically on one side of her head, with the end left to flop, giving her the appearance of—an expensive tart. She sits in a chair next to my bed and lights a Marlboro Red. “D’you want a puff?” I shake my head. “Is it really bad, darling? I rushed here as soon as I could when the Colonel told me what had happened. What were you doing in that house all alone late at night anyway?” She shudders, then puts a hand on mine where it lies on the sheet. “You’re going to be all right, though, the surgeon told me—he’s really charming, isn’t he? The longest scar in Krung Thep, but basically superficial, that’s what he said.” She looks at me fondly, as if I fell off a ladder during some juvenile prank. “Is there anything I can get you? Anything you want?”
I gaze into her eyes. “Mother, I’ve been dreaming and hallucinating with all the drugs they gave me. I want you to tell me who my father was.”
I have asked this question exactly ten times, this being the tenth. I remember the other nine times as vividly as I will remember this. The question takes courage, and requires the emotional intensity of a special occasion—a near-fatal attack by a would-be assassin should do.
She pats my hand. “As soon as you’re out of here, let’s you and me spend a few days at my house in Phetchabun, no? We’ll get in some beer, I’ll invite some people, we’ll play hi-lo, I can get you some ganja if you want—I know how much Pichai’s death must be affecting you.”
“Mother—”
Another pat on the hand. “I’m building up the courage, darling. Really I am.”
I sigh and allow her an indulgent smile. At least she has come to the hospital and plans to stay the week in Bangkok so she can be near me. She smokes another cigarette, tells me about Pichai’s funeral, which went exactly as expected—the police had to be called to break up a fight between two yaa baa dealers—and leaves me to fall back to sleep. I awake a few minutes later to find the FBI trying to open a window to let out the cigarette smoke. “Please leave it,” I tell her, “I like the smell of Marlboro.”
“Do you and your mother normally speak to each other in German?”
“Now and then. When we feel like it.”
“Do Thais usually learn German?”
“My mother and I learned a little from one of my professors,” I reply with a smile.
I want you to tell me who my father was. I still wonder about him almost daily, although my obsession has bedded down to some subconscious layer. I still stare rudely at middle-aged white American men who seem to fit the bill, but I no longer suffer from the unhealthy fanaticism of my teens. In my thirteenth year I took over one corner of our hovel and forced my mother to witness my yearning, month by month, while I plastered the walls with old Vietnam War clippings. For one week I was certain he was one of those who fought with superhuman courage in the tunnels of Cu Chi. For more than six weeks he was an aviator, imprisoned and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton, until I discovered that those heroes were not released until after I was born. Where was he during the Tet Offensive? Was he one of those of troubled conscience in the photograph where disillusioned GIs are smoking ganja through the barrels of their rifles? I think I was sixteen when I finally realized that America had lost the war, despite my anonymous father’s best efforts. But by then confusion had already divided my mind. After all, despite his undoubted qualities he must have been one of those white men from far away whose mission it was to kill brown men racially indistinguishable from my mother, her father and her brothers (some years later I realized Vietnam was not a race war but a war of religion). And what about the atrocities? My only overseas trip without Nong consisted of a week in Vietnam, where I searched for him in Cu Chi, Da Nang, Hanoi and the Museum of American War Atrocities in Ho Chi Minh City. And all that time she watched in agony. Sometimes her lips would tremble as if she were about to speak his name, but she never did. What terrible secret was she keeping? Was he “special forces”—one of the torturers?