A fifth excerpt from The Season of Breath. In chapter 13, Michael is staying with Chu’s family, near Roi Et, in Isan. Bombay, a scooter delivery driver, has taken the day off to drive them to Huai Pung Yai Lake, where you eat lunch on floating huts.
BOMBAY HAD taken the day off. For a delivery driver, Chu pointed out to me, that’s a sacrifice on the scale of a day off at the Saint Louis pharmacy, and she looked very proud of him. He showed up late in the morning, in his red-and-gray delivery jacket, which he never takes off, even when he isn’t working, his fiancée behind him on the scooter, with a plastic bag full of swimsuits and towels, not one of which matched another.
“Today, lake!” he announced, the way you’d announce a victory.
Huai Pung Yai Lake isn’t far from the village. You get there on a red-dirt track, between fields and scrawny trees, and then all of a sudden the horizon opens up: a great sheet of calm, shining water, mirroring the sky. Along the shore stood a row of little floating huts, houseboats, as I immediately called them for lack of a better word. They’re platforms of bamboo and planks set on floats, with a tin or thatched roof, a mat on the floor and a low table in the middle. Each one is tied to the shore by a long cable.
You settle in, you order, and then a boy pulls on the cable and pushes the boat off. It glides slowly out onto the water, farther and farther, until the cable goes taut and the shore is nothing but a green line in the distance. Then you’re alone in the middle of the lake. There’s nothing but water all around, and the sky above.
I thought it was brilliant. A restaurant that delivers you to the middle of a lake, where nobody can leave before the meal is over, and where, if the waiter forgets about you, you’re in for life in the wild. I asked Bombay what would happen if the cable snapped. He gave it serious thought, then answered, very seriously too:
“Then we live here.”
It was the perfect answer.
That’s the spirit of this place, summed up in two expressions. “Mai pen rai”: never mind, it doesn’t matter. The cable snaps? Mai pen rai, we’ll live here. And “sanuk,” fun, which I’d already seen at work with the underwear saleswoman at MBK. For a sick man, I know no better philosophy. Mai pen rai for everything else. Sanuk for today.
The food arrived by little boat, dish after dish, which the boy passed to us over the side. I had never seen so many dishes on such a small table. Nothing but Isan food, nothing else. Som tam, of course, two kinds, one of them for me, with a single chili, which is a start. Pork larb, minced with herbs and pounded toasted rice, sour and fragrant. A whole fish grilled in a salt crust, with a stalk of lemongrass stuck in its mouth like a cigar. Grilled chicken. Grilled pork neck, sliced, fatty and melting, with a dark dried-chili sauce. An herb soup that smelled of the forest. And sticky rice in little woven baskets, again, always, everywhere.
I took a slice of pork neck, watched the fat glisten in the sun, and thought very hard about Karadoc, of Kaamelott. Fat is life. For once, I wasn’t going to argue with him.
We ate with our fingers, sitting cross-legged on the mat, the four of us, Chu, Bombay, his fiancée and me. The boat rocked gently. The wind passed underneath and lifted the edge of the tablecloth. Bombay showed me how to make a ball of sticky rice and dip it in the sauce, with the patience of a teacher for a pupil already doomed to repeat the year. His fiancée laughed at each of my failures, kindly, her hand in front of her mouth. Chu, for her part, watched me eat. I think she was counting the mouthfuls. Chu is always counting. It’s her job.
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This excerpt comes from chapter 13, “The Lake,” of The Season of Breath, the true story of a man from Liège who goes to live a season in Thailand with an illness no one can see. The book is available in English.
