She was returning from the market, walking to the end of the street where the motorcycle taxis wait, when she heard crying. Deep, heart-broken sobbing, coming from somewhere nearby.
Curious, she turned into a side street. She was going in the right direction, though now, strangely, the crying sounded further away. The street had a dog-leg turn in it, and as she passed the angle, she heard it again, this time coming from somewhere to her right.
Across the street there was an alley or sub-soi, with washing lines full of clothes strung across it at third floor level, from window to window, shading the street. The clothes seemed to muffle the crying voice, but Apsara went forward, through stripes of sunlight and shadow. At her feet she saw the silhouetted flutter of children’s clothes, and looking down at them she heard the sobbing again — and the well of deep, inconsolable grief in those wretched, choking cries.
At the end of the soi was an iron gate, and through the bars she saw a courtyard, quite large, with a stone urn in the middle of it from which water swelled from a fountain shaped like a pho leaf. Beyond the courtyard there was a tree-shaded garden and the facade of a house of spare, clean lines and golden proportions, with shady, trellised balconies and a beautiful Thai roof.
For some reason, it struck her as the most beautiful house she had ever seen. Her dream house, in fact.
Before she could take in the fine ratios of that house or absorb all its detail, her eye was caught by a movement in the ground floor window — a movement of hands, skilfully arranging flowers in an elegant vase, but she couldn’t see the face of the woman, which was in shadow, or hidden by reflections.
Intrigued, Apsara quietly pushed open the gate, gently leaned her bag of vegetables against the wall, and entered the garden, treading softly. At the side of the house a door stood open. Apsara slipped off her shoes and entered.
Inside, she was again struck by the balance of modern and traditional styles. In some parts the floors were of teak, and in others, softly shining white tiles. The rooms were high, white and airy, like rooms in an art gallery. Again she thought, How beautiful! Exactly as I would design it, if I had the money to build such a house, such a beautiful house.
The crying was softer now, as if the worst had passed. She followed the sound into the next room. A woman stood with her back to her at a table of dark wood, bending over the flowers and watering them with her tears. Elegantly dressed, with glints of gold at her wrists and her long black hair gleaming in the light of the window, she was not a maid, but the lady of the house.
She turned, lifting her sad eyes to meet Apsara’s curious gaze, her cheeks glistening wet, and her hands still full of flowers. Standing in the cool, bright room, Apsara realised, with a shock of recognition, who it was.
She was looking at herself.
∆
She grew up in Isan, North-East Thailand, a rough village childhood she came through with a fighting and ambitious spirit. She got herself into university in Bangkok to study art and graphic design, and once she’d graduated she found a job working on lay-out at a newspaper, and was fulfilled and happy. The money was decent; she would always remember the pleasure of being able to afford three thousand baht shoes, which was lot of money in those days. And she was happy to be free from her family, especially her mother, who’d told her, when she was struggling to meet her tuition fees, to become a prostitute. Never! And she would never go back to the village.
She told no one her family nickname. In the village she was ‘Daeng’, an ugly syllable she’d never liked. It meant ‘Red’, which was a lucky colour, but she hated the sound. When she heard them call her — Daeng! Daeng! — she thought her name as ugly as they told her she was. And that was why they had must have chosen it, for the ugliness of the sound. Her real name, she thought, was beautiful — why did no one ever use it? They punished her for everything, and even her nickname was punishment. But for what? For what? So she vowed that when she grew up she would get away from the village, and never tell anyone her nickname. And she’d done it. In Bangkok, she was Apsara, she was herself.
It was a shame she couldn’t sustain that self-possession. Thais — Thai women in particular — tend to be subject to the lure of the foreign, because it is synonymous with the lure of money and sophisticated lifestyles, and many Thai women marry Western men.
In Apsara’s case there it was slightly different — a variation on the theme. Her parents had told her she was ugly, and on an unconscious level she still believed it; at the same time, she knew she was no different from other Thai girls. And so she must marry a foreign man, who would give her children more beautiful than her.
After two or three years working in Bangkok, she decided to go and stay with some relatives in the UK to improve her English. In Chester she met Terry Feldman, seventeen years her senior, a successful computer engineer. They married and moved to Clwyd, North Wales, where prosperity and the birth of a child masked an already abusive relationship. It first it was mental cruelty, rather than physical. If he was angry with her while they were out, which was often, he would refuse to let her ride in the car, forcing her to walk home, sometimes mile after mile. Far from home and devoted to her little son, she had little choice but to endure it.
A few years later they moved to New Zealand, where their daughter was born. Now Apsara had a beautiful house and a shiny new BMW to drive, but the marriage continued to deteriorate. She was a devoted mother. She lived for them, those beautiful, sweet, characterful children. But things only got worse with her husband, who had, over the years, acquired a growing taste for hitting and throttling his small Thai wife.
So the marriage had to end. There was a period in which they co-habited as parents rather than man and wife, trying to keep things going for the sake of the children, with Apsara allowing him to see other women and even dressing him for dates. But it didn’t make him happy, and she still wasn’t safe, so eventually she filed for divorce, and was granted custody of the children by the New Zealand courts.
Feldman cut her off, never paying a cent in child support, contesting everything and dragging his feet through the legal process. She fought him through the courts for four years, but was eventually forced to return to Thailand, penniless, with the children. She had no choice but to go back to the village, and the family who hated her for no reason and called her by that ugly name.
And then she made her greatest mistake, agreeing to meet with Feldman so that he could spend some time with the children. He paid for them to come to Singapore, and they met at the famous zoo, where she left the children with him for a few hours. And that was the last she saw of them. Her son was eight years old, her daughter, five. Apsara would never forget the seismic panic, the deep and bottomless inward collapse she felt as she hurried faster and faster around the zoo looking for them, and the final desperate realisation that they were gone.
The likelihood was that Feldman had crossed the border into Malaysia, so Apsara had an immediate stop placed on his and the children’s passports. And so began the interminable search. Over the next two years she exhausted all the official channels, such as they were, since there was no treaty between Thailand and Malaysia. About a year later she succeeded in tracking him down, and went to Malaysia on borrowed money. The three of them were living in a nice villa, with Feldman’s Chinese girlfriend playing the role of step-mother. Apsara found the children playing in the park, but they ran away when they saw her: they were afraid, their heads full of the lies their father had told them. Feldman would not speak to her or let her into the house. Without help from the police or money to pay a lawyer she could do nothing. She lay down across the doorway and stayed there all night. But she was compelled to return to Thailand empty-handed and alone.
Childless and almost destitute, she went back to Bangkok and found work as a maid. She worked cleaning apartments for foreigners for a year or so until eventually a kind New Zealand couple, a school teacher and his wife, got her a job as a teaching assistant at an international school in the Sukhumvit area, one of the glamorous business districts of Bangkok. She lived with them in their large apartment near the school, helped with their children, and continued the search, managing to find an Interpol officer to take an interest in the case. But he would not help her unless she slept with him first. Filled with contempt, she turned him down.
There were moments when she did not believe she’d ever get them back. She was helpless. A huge hole was ripped in her.
Encouraged by her new friends, she started attending a Christian Church, finding some comfort in the religion. But nothing could fill the hole. One evening before dusk, she went swimming in the rooftop pool of the condo, and dived down to the bottom, wanting to stay there and drown herself. She couldn’t, of course, but as she bobbed back up to the surface, gasping and gulping, something happened which seemed like a sign. As she got control of her breathing and lay back in the water, her eyes rested blankly on a condominium a few blocks away. As it grew dark, she saw lights come on; first, a vertical swathe down the centre of the tower, and then a horizontal one as an observation deck lit up, emblazoning the tower with the sign of the cross. God had sent her a message.
She would not give up. A month or two later, the vicar of the Church told her she must accept the loss of her children as the will of God and discontinue her search. She would never do that. She walked out of the church and never went back. This was the beginning of a gradual process of moving away from all that was foreign and returning spiritually to her own land and its Buddhist religion. Farangs ruled the world, but in the end she knew that her place, her embrace, must be the land of the Thais, for all its poverty and corruption and the baffling misery of her childhood.
The dream of the beautiful house came to her in the Buddhist year 2557, when she was already forty-two and her children had been gone for nearly ten years. In her dream she was a young woman in her twenties, happy and fulfilled in her new Bangkok life. The dream was like the lost echo of a warning she’d needed to hear, half a lifetime ago.
BOHEMIA 