Perfect Light

By Martin Alexander
© April 2003
First published in Dimsum, Volume 7, Spring 2003

It was a long, lazy afternoon in Luang Prabang. The light was perfect. In the yellow sun and under the deepening blue of the sky, saffron monks shaded their faces under orange umbrellas and slapped in sandals along the river road. Far below, the Nam Khan slid smoothly brown between its steeply sloping banks. All the rows of vegetables marched neatly up to the brown thatch of huts and the thick green forest below the blue of open sky. Ten or twelve monks headed towards the steps of the temple, where boat-prow roofs shaded the gilded carved pillars, and the stencilled gold figures of slender dancers were bright in the afternoon light against the black-painted walls.

Somehow, she had left her camera behind that morning. She’d snapped and snapped relentlessly in the weeks since they’d left home, carrying her camera dutifully everywhere on a neat loop around her wrist; but now she felt that every time she’d squinted into the viewfinder her wide gaze had felt cramped and magnified, unreal. Her husband, of course, had the big bag with the lenses and his camera bodies and all the rolls of unexposed film. It was her job to look after the little bag with the passports, the money, tickets, and all their exposed film from the days before.

Sarah felt dizzy in the heat. When Steve trapped three boys against a wall she suddenly imagined the thoughts behind those six solemn eyes which stared anxiously at her husband’s squatting figure, its big black eye where his face should have been. They frowned in puzzlement as one hand left the camera and he snapped his fingers high in the air to attract their attention. “What does this man want?” they seemed to be thinking. “What is interesting about three boys interrupted in their play?” She imagined the absurdity of local people taking photographs of tourists.

Steve and Sarah had spent the day wandering the quiet temples and the tranquil lanes where old colonial houses rotted behind branches and blooms; where once-elegant gardens now enclosed a cooking fire or made space for a woman in a long silk skirt and white blouse to winnow rice in a wide, flat basket. Roosters scratched at gravel and water trickled in open gutters by the sides of the roads. Every couple of yards he’d stop to suck a scene into his lens, crouching, his white legs solidly, implacably placed.

She held vividly in her mind an old lady’s face, wrinkled and impassive, turned down, away from the couple, with a wrinkled, liver-spotted hand raised to shield the face against the lens. Then the hand had dropped and fierce eyes had gazed straight past the camera into Sarah’s eyes. Steve had pressed the shutter and as he’d walked away he’d looked at Sarah and grinned.

“Got her!” he’d said.

And now he settled his hips with the hefty bag swung into the small of his back and brought the camera up to his eye. The monks were framed perfectly; his finger pressed the shutter to its half-way point - and then one of the two monks raised his hand and grinned and stepped off the pavement and out of frame. They were coming towards him. He lowered the camera, wiped the thin hair off his forehead and the bag swung unevenly to one side.

A big white UN four-wheel-drive swept past and hooted as the monks stepped into the road. They paused and bowed their heads against the dust, and then crossed to where the tourists stood.

“Hello!” The head was bald and, close up, she could see the black pepper specks of hair on the monk’s shaven skull. “My name is Sithathat. Welcome. How are you? Where are you from?”

The monk looked from Steve to Sarah and back again. He smiled. She stood, a couple of paces behind her husband, her hands loose by her sides. All afternoon she’d been silent, following her husband along the lanes and through the temple yards, absorbing with her eyes the monks’ dormitories, up on stilts, under the shade of trees. Mustard, saffron, river-brown and yellow robes were hung on lines to dry. She found herself looking intently, trying to memorise the fragrance of the day, half-conscious of the need she’d have back home to draw some solace from this warm and tranquil afternoon, uncaptured on those rolls of film.

Steve had been more methodical. He’d caught ragged children, kicking shoes in a wide lane; a moped with a silk-clad passenger riding side-saddle, demure; a woman in her long embroidered skirt, squatting with splayed toes before a smoking earthenware stove; a line of monks in silent procession.

“Uhhh….” He looked helplessly behind him to Sarah, and she moved forward. The monk and the woman spoke: soft words, bright-eyed. Sithathat had learned his musical English in three months, he said; and he wanted to go to university to learn to speak the languages of the world. She didn’t remember anything else, just his lean intensity, a calm determination in the face of the unlikely that unsettled her.

Steve shifted. He looked uncomfortable. It was hot and his feet slid wetly in his shoes. The photograph was spoiled: somehow the smile and the closeness of that monk’s brown skin had made it impossible now to stick a camera in his face and capture him along with all the rest. Steve grew impatient; he took Sarah’s hand in his fist and walked.

“Come on, Sair, I want to catch the sunset on the Mekong on the other side. Nice meeting you.” He nodded at the monk, but his eyes were turned away.

On the riverbank at dusk, the pictures taken and the cameras stowed away, Steve relaxed, and they sat on precarious red plastic chairs as the bare bulbs in the trees took over from the last light of the day. They drank cold Beer Lao, she from a thick tumbler, he from the bottle. Below them, unseen, the wide, slow flow of the brown Mekong deepened into darkness.

“Got some good ones,” he said. “Can’t wait to get them developed. That’s the bit I like best, opening the envelope, right there in the photo shop back home, and seeing what I’ve caught. But I didn’t get those monks, and I couldn’t catch the temple right because of the wires – and that guy standing right in front with his camera, spoiling it.”

“Wasn’t that the damnedest thing?” he continued. “That monk speaking English! Bald as hell and grinning like a… like a banshee!” He grinned too, obviously pleased with the word. It was cool now, but he had sweat in little drops across his brow. He wiped his forehead with the palm of his hand and rubbed it on the top of his thigh. His legs were red now: he’d caught the sun. Over-exposed, thought Sarah, and she smiled and said nothing.

“You know,” said Steve, “I bet he was pulling for money. You didn’t give him your e-mail, did you? Those guys – a bit of education and they want the world.”

“No, Steve, of course not,” Sarah murmured. But she wished she had. She tucked her neat hair behind her ears and straightened her back. He raised his bottle, slick with condensation, to his lips, to drain the last of it.

“OK! Dinner!” He stood and stretched, and bent to lift the camera bag. Steve raised his arm and waved.

“Damn! These people are so slow! What’s the matter with them?” Sarah sat while he paced impatiently. Placidly, she watched the day’s last light fade. She thought of a photograph un-developing itself in a darkroom’s tray. The waiter finally came. Steve held his hand out for the bulging little bag she’d been holding in her lap. She normally kept it round her waist, at the front, under her shirt, but had taken it off to be more comfortable at the riverbank bar. If she rested her hands on it, it didn’t show: she wore loose clothes in this heat anyway.

Steve paid from the ridiculous wad of thousands and thousands of Lao kip, but waited – again interminably, it seemed - for the change.

“Damn! Can you believe how much that cost! Just pennies! But if you give them too big a tip, they’ll be spoiled.”

Sarah nodded. She looked at him and wondered where the man she’d loved had gone. And as suddenly as that thought had come, she pushed it back, and stood and followed him up the darkening road.

Steve stopped under a dim streetlamp and bent over the guidebook. Across the street someone sang sadly in a European tongue: the restaurant’s open windows were warm with yellow light and paper star-lanterns swayed in the evening breeze, lit with flickering candles. It was an old colonial building, not yet renovated: Sarah noticed the peeling shutters and the grubby walls, but the tables seemed clean and there were big red flowers – something tropical – in a bowl on each table.

“It says it’s good – ‘An authentic taste of traditional colonial cuisine; the best of old and new in Indochina.’ Ha! I’ll bet. Some slick French guy’s hobby to liven up the day job with the UN. Remember that white truck? All that money going into aid and they can’t even get the telephone wires out of my picture. Call this a World Heritage City? Damn! Still – it’s our last night, there’s plenty of money left and I want a good bottle of wine. Surely they can’t screw that up.”

They had a table on the pavement. There was no one else there apart from a group of six white people inside, all leaning over the table, talking quietly under the dim lamp that hung from the high ceiling. The music had stopped, and the low voices and huddled figures gave the place a melancholy air.

Steve called out but no one came. Finally, a woman walked over from the table inside to take their order.

“I want this,“ said Steve, pointing at the menu. “Your most expensive bottle.” The woman nodded, unimpressed. She was languid, European, and spoke English softly, with a touch of accent. There was no apology and Steve was furious, but he said nothing until she had gone.

“Jesus! No wonder this country’s a mess! You’d think they’d be desperate for our money, not so damned indifferent!”

But Sarah didn’t mind. She watched the palm fronds swaying dimly on the riverbank and thought she saw glitters of light where the river must be. She remembered the old lady, and the children and the monk, and the yellow afternoon light; and she felt that if she had a soul, it might be soothed by such a place as this.

The candles in the star lanterns burned low and then went out. No one re-lit them. Again, she didn’t mind.

Eventually the wine came and even Steve grudgingly acknowledged that it was excellent. He thought irritably that the young Lao waiter was incompetent in serving it but Sarah saw him merely as gentle and unhurried. She felt vaguely guilty for not sharing in her husband’s rage. Her dish arrived, but Steve’s was inexplicably delayed, and she finally began to eat. They’d finished the first bottle while they were waiting for the food, and had started the second when his food finally arrived.

“What you don’t seem to understand, Sarah, is that I’m paying for service and quality, and I’m not getting it. Jesus. It’s our last night, the flight’s first thing in the morning and we’re stuck here in this god-awful restaurant with a good bottle of wine and no food.”

“Oh come on,” said Sarah, a little weakly, but she didn’t say any more because Steve looked at her in that dangerous way and raised his chin and pressed his lips together.

Later, when she tried to remember those moments at the end of the evening, she could recall the delicate flavour of stuffed bamboo shoots in her mouth, and sudden unexpected darkness as though someone had put out her eyes. Then she’d felt panic rising. The darkness was complete. Voices were raised inside; then she heard Steve’s chair and felt his grip, hard on her wrist.

“Power cut! Come on!” he whispered hoarsely. She heard the heavy camera bag scrape on the floor and then she found herself on the asphalt of the street, being dragged off towards the hotel. Candles had appeared in windows and torches slashed narrow beams of bright light.

“No!” she said. “We can’t do this!” And then more quietly, “It’s wrong!”

“Don’t be stupid – they deserve it. A bunch of French assholes and some incompetent locals. Welcome to the real world.”

They were well down the street when the lights came on again. Sarah felt sick, shame like fire in her throat. Why hadn’t she stayed? She stumbled after Steve, her wrist still in his grip. Her other arm swayed wildly as she tried to keep her balance. Finally they stopped. Steve panted, but with satisfaction. Her hands trembled; she tucked her hair back behind her ears again but it flopped forward, over her eyes. Something shrank inside her.

“Oh God,” she thought. “The bag.” But he had turned, put his shoulders back, and was taking the steps to the hotel two at a time. She stood in the street, alone.

E-mail: Martin Alexander