Pierre Lazarie.
WE’D barely been served our co¤ee the next morning, monkeys in the canopy still shrieking their sunrise hymn, when crewmen swarmed over the ship, lashing barrels down, clamping portholes shut and nailing tarpaulins over the hatches. I felt a clap on my shoulder and there was Malraux, unshaven and holloweyed yet on tiptoe with excitement. We pressed against the rail as the deck passengers were herded beneath a canopy in the stern.
—If they’re sitting on the roof and we tilt even a little, whoop, that’s the last of them, said Malraux. Please go to your cabins.
—Are the cataracts that dangerous? I asked.
He sucked voraciously on his sugarcane.
—For an hour today, you’ll feel alive. Every moment is a trial.
—No margin for error, said Henri. Our work is like that.
—We’ve been up the rapids at Preatapang, I said. Is this so much worse?
He wiped his moustache with the back of his hand before climbing a ladder.
—Keep an eye peeled for her bleached bones, Henri said. This may be as far as she came.
My stomach clenched at the thought, though my father could already have calculated, to the hundredth decimal, the unlikelihood that she was still living.
—I once made the mistake of describing these rapids to my Moï, said Charton, and they made me promise to lock myself in and crawl under the bed.
Inside our cabin it was difficult to relax—the frenzied stoking of the engines had started every piece of the ship shuddering like a franc coin on a tramline. From beneath his bed Henri pulled the wooden crate, reinforced with copper screws by Nguyen himself. In an entire week my colleague had consumed only a sixteen-bottle case, though our evening at the Continental had seen the end of five.
—Your economy has been remarkable.
—Yes, put that in your report, you wretch.
He pulled a pry-bar from his valise. Through our porthole I could glimpse only dark trees passing, yet one sound was everincreasing and I thought of putting my head out to see if an aeroplane was flying over. Henri looked up from the crate.
—Are those the rapids now?
Suddenly the cabin tilted, our trunks slid out from the wall and foaming brown water burst in from under the door, soaking Henri to mid-thigh where he knelt. I lifted my feet above the inundation. A chorus of alarm sounded from the stern. A moment later we tilted just as sharply in the opposite direction, the water rushed out, the trunks resumed their original positions and Henri, extricating a single bottle, climbed to his feet.
—In the name of the Vice-Regency we shall see what this is about!
We opened our door onto a whirlpool as large as a house yawning just below the rail, a teak log thrashing in its jaws like a matchstick in a drain. Spray lashed us and our ears roared. I seized the rail—for I had no wish to await the inevitable in that rat-trap of a cabin!—and Henri looped his arm through mine while he struggled with the opener around his neck. I shook him o¤, abetted by reprehensible language which neither of us could hear.
The stairs to the wheelhouse stood adjacent and we crept up like delinquent schoolboys. With Henri gripping my elbow I slid the door open, staggered backwards a step then pitched headlong into the cabin as the General Subrégis heaved sideways. We found a chart table which was bolted to the floor and clung to it gratefully. Captain Malraux grinned over his shoulder.
—The pleasure’s all mine!
He wore only trousers and the kerchief around his neck, and every cord in his back stood out as he gripped the creaking wheel. At his barked command a crewcutted Cambodian pushed the brass handle forward for more steam. I pitied those stokers, whose boiler room must have been bucking like a colt.
—Current holds the screws back and the rudder can’t respond! yelled Malraux.
I nodded sagely in response. Through the window we watched Duc leap and contort like Nijinsky himself as he rushed from one side of his deck to the other. Beyond him lay a panorama of cataracts so alarming that my gums suddenly tingled—these rapids were a mill for breaking ships into splinters. Malraux barked at the Cambodian and I guessed that the requested pressure had not been forthcoming. Duc pressed his face to the window, a baleful cigarette crushed against his chin. Henri pro¤ered his half-empty bottle of Paternina Gran Reserva.
—No to worry! shouted Malraux. The starboard screw’s lost pressure so the port… screw’s… having its way with us!
The boat rattled like a car in a mine shaft as we sailed on a perfect diagonal toward a thrashing whirlpool. I saw the achingly calm water just beyond it as the Cambodian turned a crank above his head.
—Hold on! shouted Malraux.
I wrapped my arms around the table leg. We tilted to the right and the empty wine bottle rolled past to thud against the wall. The bolts securing the leg groaned like invalids. How far could we lean before capsizing?
The Cambodian shouted again but, remarkably, with less alarm.
—Pressure’s back! called Malraux.
Despite our wretched angle I climbed to my feet. The river broke heavily over the bow but that lovely stretch of water lay immediately before us, and an instant later the General Subrégis surged mightily onto the calm eddy. The boat righted itself— the worst was past us! I looked to see what gripped my wrist and saw it was Henri’s hand.
But then I saw that we were still under maximum steam, flying over that glassy water like a torpedo—Malraux shrieked an order and the Cambodian threw the handle into reverse. Boulders the size of churches rushed toward us. Malraux fell back as the wheel spun like a windmill. I dropped to one knee.
When the impact came I was thrown against the back wall.
Then the cold-sweated relief of opening one’s eyes, to be able to open them, if only to look through a row of broken windows at a tangle of greenish-black trees.
—Lazarie, whispered Henri. Are you cognizant?
Though our engines were silent, the roar of the rapids was as loud as ever. I heard distant shouting. I sat up and the side of my head throbbed. Henri crouched before me, wild eyes scrutinizing mine, his face still ashen. His lip was cut.
—Hm, he said.
Then he vomited over my boot, and his purple sick felt so hot against my leg I thought I’d been burnt and was instantly on my feet. I looked down at him, wiping his mouth with that handkerchief, and wanted to smash his mottled head. Mist drifted in through the smashed windows. The abandoned wheel creaked pitifully.
—Where’s Malraux? I demanded.
—Someone coming, said Henri.
The wheelhouse door shuddered, the knob rattled, then frame and door both fell inward with a crash. Duc peered in at us.
Monsieur le directeur? he said. Everything is broken.
I helped Henri to his feet, collected our topees from the —corner then followed Duc down the stairs, of which only three remained. The morning sun was hotter than should have been possible, and a cadre of flies swarmed over my defiled boot and up to my face and ears, serving to distract me, if only vaguely, from the view: the topmost half of the General Subrégis lay nearly recognizable upon a shelf of rock stretching between river and forest, but the lower half had been pulverized against the boulders below.
Duc led us to the riverbank. Wreckage lay piled on the rocks as though some careless giant had dropped a deck of cards and a box of toothpicks. The mate, feet bloodied as he scaled the rocks, overturned one heap of boards after another.
—Captain? he shouted.
Planks swirled in the whirlpool and at first I failed to associate them with the General Subrégis. Deck passengers wrung out their garments and coughed, having been thrown into the eddy—Malraux had been right, the stern was the safest place.
—Only some drowned, they told us.
It was with something near ecstasy that I lay my eyes on the sticky-eyed infant and its mother as she sat nursing the child in the shade. Had I been a little more confident I would’ve obeyed my impulse to wrap them in my arms. Instead I stood fast beside Henri LeDallic.
—Where’s that little Charton? he asked.
The natives laid the injured on the grass. They ripped clothes for bandages. One fellow sat at our feet with his hand pressed to his face and blood coursing down his arm. Those in better repair helped the mate bring down the new-found dead. After a quarter-hour we deduced that the crewmen in the holds, the stokers in the boiler room and the passengers in their cabins, including our Charton, had all been crushed to death or drowned. At any rate they would not be found without heavy equipment. Duc limped by, carrying the body of a loincloth’d old stoker whose head lolled like a rag doll’s. They lay him out on the bank.
—The starboard screw had lost pressure, said the mate. That’s an engineering error, that wasn’t the captain’s fault.
I have seen additional tragedies in Indo-China since the wreck of the General Subrégis, some bloodier, some more infuriating; none so infused with that dreamlike quality of normal existence being turned on its side by the fact that I was still alive. Not to say that the world was brighter, or smelled more sweetly—the sun beat down malevolently, for one thing—but it was as di¤erent as walking out of a dark matinee into the sunlight of two o’clock.
—How far to the nearest village? I asked.
—There is Kemmarat. Not far. Through these trees, then I think to the left.
—What should we bring back?
—Bearers, said Duc. Wagons. Water and food.
—How far a walk? asked Henri.
—I know the headman likes the French very much, you will not have any problems. A little whisky for the sick people.
He resumed climbing the rocks—an unlikely place to find the captain, I thought, but as Malraux was nowhere else I had nothing to suggest. The brush above us was wet with spray and I relished the idea of wiping the sick from my boot.
—Do you have your credentials, asked Henri, or were they locked in the trunk with mine?
With a start I thrust a hand into my pocket—yes, yes, the little oval frame was there, along with the odd scrap of paper. The ’08–’14 ledger was lost, of course.
—Yes, here, I said. Crumpled.
I started uphill, picking my way over the slick branches but making headway over the rock, thinking again how little trouble it would have been to have dragged Charton up to the wheelhouse, though I reassured myself that for the sake of his Moï he’d have refused. I did not give the riverbank a parting glance—I wished the young mother to know we’d be gone only a moment.
—A corkscrew, said Henri. That’s what I have.
We met a great tangle of black thicket and I bent double to hurry through, spiderwebs breaking across my face, then we strode between stands of creaking bamboo, brown lizards scattering before us among the leaves. I felt sure that whisky would be the very thing for our wounded, or, better still, the headman might o¤er soothing opium. With my newly minted functionary’s mind I calculated the number of pipes we’d need to requisition.
—He told us go left, said Henri.
—Stay perpendicular to the river for now. The path will run parallel to it.
—You assume a logic within the Malay brain which may not be warranted.
—Good God, if you must call them—
—When my grandparents saw a photograph from the colonies they’d point and say ‘Malays,’ and I always felt that had great style.
Marks of bare toes lay in the dirt before us, and looking left and right I noted the undergrowth to be generally passable in either direction. French paths are more conspicuous as French pedestrians tend to wear shoes. I started to the left, grateful for the lack of scrub for the speed it allowed us, obviously, and because of an anecdote which had long lingered in the back of my mind and now flared like fireworks at the front. In Henri Baudesson’s book a tiger makes his lair behind a fallen tree blocking a path, and after making the necessary detour one unsuspecting Moï after another has his skull polished clean by the cat’s coarse tongue.
Next I realized that we hadn’t a grain of quinine between us though rural Indo-China is malarial in its entirety. Just then we came to a tree across the path and my heart came up into my throat.
—Duck around it! said Henri. What’s so mysterious?
The surrounding brush was not impassable or even thorny— indeed, the beginnings of a new path were already visible—yet I hesitated. Didn’t the air possess a distinctive funk?
—We’ll be another twenty-seven years and how old will your lady be then?
He darted past me, arms parting the branches with a sort of breaststroke. The white of his tunic disappeared, leaving me the noise of cracking boughs and his curses. But weren’t those more branches breaking on the other side of the log?
I dove after Henri. The roots of the fallen tree rose well above my head and I found him meandering through this labyrinth of snaking wood and cobwebs, the ideal hideout for every reptile imaginable.
—Will these people be the sort who insist we have a drink? he asked.
—Hi! Who’s that? a man’s voice called.
—Heavens, a countryman of ours! said Henri. We’ll have a heart-to-heart!
We rounded the great whorl of roots to find, breaststroking forward, my mirror image: a long-faced youngster in white. He put out his hand. He wore binoculars and had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
—Besançon, he said, of the Telegraphic Service! And here you are without a scrap of luggage—you must have porters stretched to the horizon!
We introduced ourselves somewhat shakily.
—Our steamer has crashed with great loss of life, I said. We’re going for help.
—Good God, you’re joking! Which boat?
—Now we’re looking for goddamn Kemmarat-town, said Henri. But Kemmarat’s gone up in smoke.
—But you’re headed for Amnach! Not to worry, though, I carry a little of everything—blankets and beds, and carts to haul them. Where can I find these people?
—Straight back this way, said Henri, and—
Just then a bullock cart burst from the brush, the creature’s hooves flattening the foliage while a black-turbaned driver flailed its hips. Besançon clicked his tongue and patted the beast’s great hump of a shoulder; the wagon was loaded with tent poles, rolls of canvas and spools of copper wire.
—Our line’s gone down somewhere in here, he said. Nothing’s getting through between Vientiane and Saigon, so our regional director got me out of bed!
Another cart crashed by, loaded with pots, pans and tin cans that rolled with every bounce of the wheels.
—Got wine or brandy? asked Henri.
—I’m a teetotaller, said Besançon. Where did you come onto this path, will I spot it?
—You’ll see, said Henri. We walk like a couple of clubfooted elephants.
—Nonsense, I said, we’ll lead you to the boat!
—No, you carry on to Amnach, said Besançon. You both look like death!
—Is that a Gitanes Maïs? asked Henri. Got any more?
—Take the packet, said Besançon. Amnach’s not far, then you might carry on to Ban Din—that’s your nearest telegraph.
Hope I get the thing mended!
We passed one cart full of ladders and cables, then five others. I gave up inspecting their contents. After a minute we trudged out of the trees into open country where cicadas buzzed with determination and a hawk circled far overhead.
—First find a drink, said Henri. Then Adélie Tremier.