Love and Lies in Laos

Arrival

I was awakened by a jolt in the rhythm of the carriage wheels hitting the rail joints. A man’s strident voice was announcing something in Thai. A thin strip of light came sneaking through the gap between the curtain and the window frame. I pulled back the screen separating my upper berth from the rest of the carriage.

A conductor was walking the aisle, waking the passengers, his back stiff in his neatly pressed beige uniform, the shiny black visor hiding his eyes giving him a somewhat sinister appearance. I was finally reaching my destination, Nong Khai in Thailand’s north-eastern Issan province, the end of the railway line—and the gateway to Laos.

Below me, my fellow passengers were pouring tea out of orange and pink aluminium flasks and eating sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, leaning protectively against their bulging red-white-and-blue shopping bags. Their weather-beaten peasant faces moved jerkily as they talked to each other, exposing sparkling dark eyes. A middle-aged man wearing a faded black Kubota baseball cap said something in a mock complaining tone, frowning and gesticulating, and aroused universal laughter.

As soon as I’d stepped out of the carriage half a dozen tuk-tuk drivers came charging towards me, yelling at the top of their voices: “Very cheap, sir! You come here!” My eyes darted from one peering face to another: a middle-aged man with limp greasy hair and decayed teeth, a surly-looking youth in a white singlet, his arms covered with home-made dark green tattoos. I asked a plump boy with a flat, round, open face how much it cost to get to the Lao border. His fare was so cheap I didn’t bother to bargain.

We hurtled across the dusty streets of Nong Khai, past hardware stores, outdoor noodle restaurants, service stations—all semi-deserted at this time of day, their advertising signs gaudy in the already harsh light.

“You get Lao visa already?” the tuk-tuk driver asked, turning his head back to look into my eyes.

“No,” I replied. My Lonely Planet guide said you could get it at the border crossing.

“You get visa here,” said the driver. He pulled over in front of a long low concrete block building, home to a few shops, a couple of them shuttered down. The iron rods that protruded from the roof to build a second storey had turned brown with rust. One shop sign read “Airline Ticket, Car Rent, Local Tour, Lao Visa”.

At the entrance a long-earlobed, effeminate, golden Buddha statue was staring impassively at me while the dark pink incense sticks in front of it were curling slowly into grey ash. A sweet smell permeated the air. Two girls with long black lacquered hair were sitting at their desks and talking to each other, giggling. They turned their heads towards me and smiled, their parted scarlet lips exposing dazzling teeth. I moved my eyes from one girl to another, struggling to maintain eye contact.

The visa cost twenty-two dollars and would be ready in twenty minutes, said the girl on the right, her fluttering eyelashes quickening my pulse. From one of her desk drawers she pulled out in unhurried practised movements a couple of forms and a rubber stamp. I was surprised to see that the Government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic had outsourced the issuing of visas; but this was the year 2000 and it seemed that even the Lao regime had to move with the times.

As I was racing through the forms the girl on the left spread an array of fragrant curries and condiments on her desk top. She and the tuk-tuk driver were deftly rolling little lumps of sticky rice with their finger tips and dipping them in the dishes. “Would you like some?” the girl asked, having caught my curious glance. When I dipped a small sticky rice ball in one of the curries both girls burst into joyful laughter.

A lanky Japanese backpacker with a prominent Adam’s apple and metal-rimmed glasses walked past the shop. The tuk-tuk driver gulped his mouthful with some difficulty and leapt from his chair: “Hello, sir! You get visa here! Sir!” The Japanese tourist kept on walking, his face fixed forward.

I handed my filled-out forms to the girl on the right, who stapled my photos, folded the forms in two and attached them to my passport with an elastic band. “OK, let’s go!” she said in a business-like tone.

The driver, the girl and I got on the flimsy tuk-tuk, which was raising little puffs of dust as it sped along the almost empty road. Soon we reached the checkpoint—a modest concrete cube at the Friendship Bridge spanning the Mekong River. A mangy yellow dog was lying motionless in the dirt, its eyes half-closed, not bothering to shake off the flies that were gathered on its side. There were two counter windows at the front of the building. One was shut; the Japanese backpacker was standing in front of the other, his shoulders stooped, his eyes darting from the form he was filling out to his open passport. I looked with bewilderment from him to the girl holding my documents. “You wait one minute here,” she told me, her voice sounding a bit too loud, almost jarring. Her eyes were invisible behind the mirror-like lenses of her designer sunglasses. She sashayed to the back of the building and handed my documents to a Lao official in military uniform who greeted her like an old friend. I looked at the sign: a visa cost twelve dollars here—ten dollars less than what I’d been charged.

It was not an extortionate price to pay for sampling the local cuisine with a couple of attractive, friendly locals—and yet I was crestfallen, unable to believe that I had let myself fall for such a rudimentary ruse.

I had always been a hopeless liar; I had a friend who used to have two girlfriends—one in Sydney and one in Newcastle. With voyeuristic absorption, I would follow his tales of the elaborate stories he had to concoct, convinced that I would never be able to replicate such feats of deception. Looking at the tuk-tuk driver’s open, good-natured face, I recalled the moment I entered the travel agency and saw the two wholesome, beautiful girls with their affable smiles and blissful laughter. My annoyance and humiliation were mixed with fascination by the con artist’s craft—the perfect control over facial expression, physical posture and tone of voice that I knew I would never be able to achieve.

I retrieved my stamped passport, thanked my two companions curtly and paid the tuk-tuk driver without a tip. A faint shadow flickered over his face—or was it just my imagination?

 

Vientiane

A small fleet of battered taxis was waiting at the Lao side of the bridge, their drivers leaning against them, smoking listlessly, holding their cigarettes between their thumbs and index fingers: ancient Peugeots and only slightly newer Soviet-made Ladas, relics of two bygone ages in the oddly tumultuous modern history of this small landlocked country. When we reached the outskirts of Vientiane, the Lao capital, perhaps half an hour later, the driver turned back and, exposing bad teeth, asked where I wanted to be dropped off. I opened my guidebook. A circle at the middle of the map appeared to be the city centre. According to the book it was known as “Fountain Circle” and was surrounded by French colonial buildings.

A few minutes later I found myself standing alone, my backpack lying on the dusty cracked bitumen at my feet, in front of a miserable little roundabout, its patchy lawn yellowing, the small plain fountain in its middle bone-dry, surrounded by a few nondescript, run-down two-storey buildings. The place was almost deserted. A lone scooter chugged past me, ridden by two young women without helmets. They were both dressed in a sarong and a blouse, their long hair tied back in a ponytail, and they were wearing no makeup.

“Why are you going to Laos? There’s nothing to see there!”

We were at a dinner party at the Randwick flat of one of Cathy’s friends from work, still going through our first glasses of chardonnay. The speaker was an overweight doctor in his mid-thirties whose black-framed rectangular glasses looked at odds with his pink, plump, baby-like face. We had just been introduced to him that evening, and he had already confided in his slight Dutch or German accent that he had found India “disgusting” and Thailand “much better than India, but still very dirty”. As he was making his pronouncement about Laos I could sense by my side the subtle change in Cathy’s posture. Without looking at her I could picture her placid blue eyes imploring me to control my emotions.

“I just want to spend some time somewhere peaceful and quiet,” I replied with all the calm I could muster. Glancing sideways I noted Cathy’s tacit approval. Yet now in Vientiane, looking around me at this wretched, misnamed city centre, I had to concede that the abrasive Dutch doctor may have had a point.

I had met Cathy three years earlier, my first long-term relationship after years that stretched like an ocean of loneliness, sprinkled with an archipelago of abortive liaisons. Our relationship did not start with mad infatuation on my part, but months had passed, then a year, and before I knew it I realised I was happy. In another sign of emerging from my extended adolescence I was establishing what could be referred to as a career. I had set up an internet design business, creating websites for friends who ran small businesses, but gradually, through word of mouth, securing a couple of larger corporate clients. Cathy’s father had been very supportive in referring clients to me from his accountancy practice.

When I asked Cathy to marry me it seemed the obvious next step. We decided to have our wedding the following year, once she had got her master’s degree out of the way. Meanwhile she wanted to devote the summer holidays to completing her thesis. With enough frequent-flyer points to book a return flight to Bangkok, where could I go? Burma did not allow overland entry, Vietnam didn’t share a border with Thailand and I had already visited Cambodia. How about Laos? In A Dragon Apparent, his classic account of travel in French Indo-China, Norman Lewis was underwhelmed: Laos was too quiet, too backward, lacking the excitement and ebullience of Vietnam. Yet he did add somewhat cryptically that the French colonial officers viewed Laos as paradise on earth, and once settled there found it hard to leave.

I started walking, sweating, the straps of my backpack cutting into my shoulder blades. The silent street was lined with cheaply built one- and two-storey houses; the unsparing light was exposing their cracks and peeling paint. The clear blue sky, boundless and featureless, filled me with dread: my two weeks here in paradise stretched ahead like a prison sentence in solitary confinement.

I left my backpack at the first hotel I bumped into—a disintegrating Soviet-looking concrete block. After a hurried cold shower (there was no hot water) I ventured outside again and almost immediately came across the office of a domestic airline.

The clerk was another young woman in a sarong and a blouse, her long hair framing her serene, delicate face. There was a softness in her eyes which gave her the innocent, diffident air of a village maiden from a pre-industrial age. She told me there was a flight the following morning to Luang Prabang—the ancient royal capital and the country’s main tourist attraction. I bought a ticket, thinking that if my first impressions of Vientiane were totally wrong I could explore its hidden attractions on my way back.

As I entered Vientiane’s central market I was overwhelmed by the smell of open sewers, fish paste and incense. A middle-aged lady was hosing down the concrete floor, and I had to dodge the snaking rivulets as I made my way down the aisle. I ordered noodle soup at a little stall. It was bland, just about tasteless, and had in it a slice of something white that looked like processed meat. I ate only a few mouthfuls of noodles before rising from my chair to try my luck elsewhere. As soon as I had moved away an old toothless man in rags rushed to the table and started eating my discarded soup, slurping noisily, his body twisted into an awkward furtive crouch. For a moment I froze where I was standing, my heartbeat reverberating in my ears—mesmerised, unable to believe my eyes.

A whiff of early evening breeze soothed my perspiring face as I found myself strolling along the banks of the Mekong. The dishwater-coloured river was broad here, and I could discern no movement as its current—fed by the melting snows of Tibet—made its way towards the South China Sea. The muddy riverbank was lined with little restaurants on wooden decks just above the water. Two excited children were chasing a yellow puppy in front of one of the restaurants; at another four teenage girls were standing by the counter, all in Lao dress, and when they saw me walk past they looked at me in unison and smiled shyly. I kept on walking until I reached the end of the strip and then entered the last restaurant—they all looked the same anyway.

The awkward, spotty-faced schoolboy at the counter could not speak English. I somehow managed to order stir-fried noodles and a beer. The only other customers were a group of four Lao men in their mid-twenties, their banter getting rowdier as they piled empty Beerlao bottles on their table. One of them staggered towards me, his bare feet thumping the floorboards, and with a jerky movement of his tattoo-covered arm invited me to join them. One of his friends poured me a beer, spilling some on the table. I drank about a third of it. They spoke to each other animatedly and then one of them, putting his arm around my shoulder, goaded me with gestures to down it with one gulp.

I went to the front counter to pay my bill. The spotty boy was gone. A young woman was talking on the phone, her back towards me. She was dressed in tight white jeans and a baby-blue top, her short sleeves exposing golden brown skin. Her shiny shoulder-length bob was bouncing, coming alive whenever she tilted her head.

She put down the receiver and turned towards me. My heartbeat went racing. Her luscious beauty was beyond anything my imagination could have conjured up.

As she handed me the bill she said: “Those boys are no good.” Despite her soft voice and her lilting sing-song accent there was a finality in her tone, dismissive of the men and their prospects.

“They were just mucking around,” I said.

“No. You have to be careful. A Belgian friend of mine was robbed not far from here.”

When I mentioned to her that I was flying to Luang Prabang the following morning she said she was going there on the same day with a couple of friends. Filled with the trancelike confidence of a poet possessed by inspiration from the gods, I said with perfect poise:

“Maybe we could have dinner together one night.”

“Sure,” she said. “We’ll be staying at the Orient Hotel.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She looked into my eyes for a brief moment. My heart skipped a beat.

“Noi,” she said.

The next morning I had just finished checking in at Vientiane airport when I heard a voice call my name.

Noi was there, beaming. I felt the adrenaline rushing. She introduced me to her friends, who were standing awkwardly behind her.

Marc was a Belgian in his late twenties who lived in Vientiane. He was lanky, his shoulders stooped somewhat, giving the impression that he was unwilling to occupy all the space allotted to his body. Enclosed within the metal frame of his glasses his brown eyes had a softness which reminded me of my grandfather, and his handshake was firm without being overwhelming. As we disengaged our hands there was a flash of something raw in his eyes.

Marc’s girlfriend Lily was a Lao woman in her thirties. Her hair was tied back and her face was covered with old acne scars. She smiled at me, baring even, white teeth.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

Her lips froze, turning into a grimace, then she giggled nervously, lowering her eyes.

“Lily doesn’t speak English very well,” explained Noi, “but now she has to focus on learning French.”

It was time to board the aircraft—a Chinese-made Y7 with two propeller engines, which could carry around forty passengers. The cabin looked odd: there were no reading lights or air-conditioning ducts, and looking above me I could only see the arching contour of the fuselage. The ride, at low altitude, was bumpy. The uneven screech of the flimsy-looking propeller engines was unsettling for someone used to the steady, powerful whirr of jet engines. Noi and her friends were seated at the other end of the aircraft. I discovered in the Laos guidebook that the Y7 was based on the Soviet-made Antonov-24, whose production had been discontinued back in the 1970s. The spare fit-out of the passenger cabin extended to the cockpit, which lacked modern navigation instruments. During take-off and landing the pilots had to rely on sight alone, and if there was limited visibility they would have no way of landing safely. They would either circle the airport, waiting for the weather to clear, or try to find an alternative landing spot. Every now and then a plane would run out of fuel during those manoeuvres and end up having to attempt an emergency landing, which in Laos’s rugged terrain invariably ended in disaster.

My seat was not far from the left engine. The sound was disconcertingly irregular. We hit some turbulence. Every bump, every change in the chugging of the engines seemed to portend disaster. Through the window I could see only densely forested rugged mountains. My fingers gripped the armrests, turning white at the joints. On landing in Luang Prabang, relieved, a pang in my chest reminded me that my mission was only half done: I would also have to make it back in one piece.

 

Luang Prabang

At Luang Prabang airport a small Daewoo van was waiting for Noi and her friends. I walked towards them gingerly, my eyes trained on Noi.

“Have you booked a hotel?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, you can stay with us then.”

The Orient Hotel was a small colonial building that might have been the residence of some low-ranking French official. It had been renovated, but the paint was peeling off, the eaves were blighted by mildew and it was sinking into a genteel decline. We checked into three bedrooms.

Not long after, we were climbing up steep, lichen-covered grey stone steps towards the golden-roofed pagoda at the top of the hill. The air was balmy, pierced by the shrill drone of cicadas. When we reached a particularly steep step I offered Noi my hand. It was the first time our bodies connected. I could feel something swelling within me: the mysterious bodily chemistry of love.

Noi was twenty-eight, although she looked much younger. She had completed a degree in Economics at Vientiane University.

“Which economists did you study?” I asked.

“Karl Marx, and also a Russian one—I can’t remember his name.”

She was managing the restaurant. Although she kept referring to it as “my restaurant”, it was owned by her parents, who had a number of business interests.

We sat down on a weathered stone bench in the narrow, overshadowed courtyard of a temple halfway up the hill. Little boys in saffron robes, their heads shaven, were sitting on the entrance steps, open textbooks on their laps, jostling each other boisterously. Noi was applying sunblock lotion on her arms and face. She looked like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian girls getting ready for a fashion magazine shoot.

“For how long will you be staying in Laos?” she asked. Her dark eyes narrowed.

“Two weeks,” I said.

I was surprised how unperturbed she appeared to be about the prospects of becoming casually involved with a foreigner for such a brief period. It seemed that the social mores of the Westernised, well-off Vientiane elite were quite liberal.

“So how come you’re travelling alone?”

I knew I would have to make my confession at some stage, but surely not right now, so early in our acquaintance.

“I just enjoy travelling by myself,” I replied. “It gives me time to think things over.” I felt that by offering her this hint I had done my bit; it was now up to her whether she wanted to pursue it.

Early in our relationship, Cathy and I were in bed one Sunday morning. The spring sun coming through the cracks between the timber blinds drew long prisms on the wall which shifted with the breeze. We were naked, and Cathy’s head was on my shoulder, my fingers tracing the contour of the small of her back. I could feel the warmth of her body, and could not tell if I was feeling or hearing her heartbeat.

“If you ever go to bed with someone else, I don’t want to know about it,” she suddenly said, in a soft, unwavering voice. Back then our bodies still couldn’t get enough of each other, and it seemed an idea lacking any reality—just another manifestation of Cathy’s celebrated emotional intelligence; but right now, as I was recollecting her words, I took them to mean that she was offering me carte blanche, confident in the resilience of our bond.

I was on the verge of committing myself to a lifetime of monogamy, to a future of driving the kids to school, mowing the lawn and paying off the mortgage—couldn’t I experience the exhilaration of new love just one last time? Noi knew that whatever was going to happen between us was restricted from the outset by the time frame of my stay—and Cathy would never know.

Along one of the busier streets, crouching hawkers were selling sticky rice balls, grilled chickens’ feet on wooden skewers, pineapples and finger-sized grilled bananas. I bought some grilled bananas for us. The vendor was a round-faced middle-aged woman in a black tribal head covering, her tattooed forearms covered with heavy silver bangles. When Noi told her that I said the bananas were delicious she laughed with pleasure. “The people here seem to be so content,” I said to Noi.

“In the old days,” she said, “the farmers would ask the head monk how much rice they should plant. The monk would ask them how many people they had in their family and would then tell them how much land they should plant to feed them. The farmers would plant just that much—enough to feed everyone. The idea that they should hoard food or try to make money never crossed their mind.” She looked at me, her eyes pensive, almost daydreaming. The air was warm, pregnant with the sweetness of expectation.

We went to have a late lunch at a riverside restaurant. The afternoon light gave the river and the blue hills in the distance a strange luminosity, making them look like a Chinese paper backdrop painted in pastel colours and lit softly from behind. While Noi and Lily were consulting the menus and talking to the middle-aged waitress, making exaggerated gestures with their hands and laughing loudly, I started a conversation with Marc.

He had a degree in agronomy from the University of Leuven, and had come to Laos to work for a French NGO promoting the use of environmentally-sustainable farming methods. Due to the local farmers’ inherent conservatism his efforts had met with limited success. There were no shopping centres in the whole country, Marc told me, no supermarkets, no ATMs and no railways. The only way to connect to the internet was by dialling up a service provider in Thailand and incurring the cost of an international call. And yet as he was describing his hardship posting there was a spark in his eyes, and the tone of his voice was bemused rather than complaining.

After dinner Noi and I were sitting on a white wickerwork sofa in the hotel lounge, watching Thai TV via satellite. The faint coconut smell of her skin and the warmth of her thigh touching mine hastened my pulse. There was a commercial break: a drop-dead gorgeous Thai model was stepping out of a red convertible and walking towards the entrance of a waterfront mansion, her glittering hair bouncing as she was climbing up the steps. Noi was staring at the images, her eyes glistening, looking almost teary in the blue flickering light. Suddenly she said:

“Marc only gets $1500 a month. That’s not much, is it?”

“Maybe he doesn’t do it just for the money,” I replied.

Noi shrugged. “In Australia people earn a lot more than that, don’t they?”

“Yes, I guess most people do.”

She changed the topic again. “How come you’re not married?” She fixed her eyes on mine.

“I haven’t got around to it yet,” I found myself replying mechanically, without thinking, maintaining eye contact. I was amazed by her ready acceptance. Could duplicity be that simple, just a matter of brushing aside any inconvenient truths?

The next morning we were all sitting in a longboat going down the Mekong on our way to visit an ancient hillside cave housing a small Buddhist temple. The boat sped down the river past well-tended vegetable plots and thickly forested slopes. In the distance there were fantastically shaped hills, their curved contours resembling those of the mountains in old Chinese scroll paintings. I had assumed that the Chinese artists used to paint mountains that way due to some artistic convention; now I found out that those dreamlike views actually existed.

The narrow cave was dimly lit by flickering white candles, its ceiling and back swallowed by the darkness. An array of bronze Buddha statues, incense sticks and petals had accumulated haphazardly within it through countless acts of individual piety.

“You put some money in that bowl and light an incense stick,” Noi said.

I placed a note in the bowl.

“That’s not enough,” she said. There was a harshness in her tone that I hadn’t heard before.

I put another note in the bowl. When I reached my hand towards the incense sticks she snapped again, her tone even sharper.

“Not this one! That one!” I looked at her with surprise.

Noi spent our return trip at the back of the boat, talking to Lily.

Yet after dinner, when we had all retired to our rooms, I walked up to Noi’s room and knocked lightly on her door. There was no answer. I knocked again, a bit more forcefully this time.

“Yes?” I heard her say tensely.

“Can I come in?” I asked, and then a couple of seconds later added: “Just for a minute.”

“OK.” Her voice was mellower now.

I opened the door and walked in. Noi was lying in bed, tucked under her blanket. Only her head on the pillow was visible. She looked impossibly beautiful. I could see in her eyes an odd mixture of attraction and apprehension. I sat down at the side of her bed, my face diagonally above hers. Her hands moved under the blanket, drawing it slightly towards herself.

“Can I kiss you?” I asked, almost whispering.

She looked at me silently, her eyes evincing some fear.

“Just one kiss,” I said softly, “and then you can go to sleep.”

“I’m shy …” Her voice trailed off, yet her eyes assented.

Our lips met. I was so full of her, losing myself in the sweet taste of her mouth, the texture of her flawless skin, the warmth of her body, her intoxicating scent.

Noi, Marc and Lily had flown back to Vientiane while I stayed in Luang Prabang for one more day. The night before my return flight I had a nightmare. I was seated at the front of an old World War Two bomber when it broke into two halves, the back half spiralling down into the dark abyss. The pilot was Richard Nixon—or was he just a fellow passenger?—and he was reassuring me that the remaining part of the plane could still land safely. I woke up in a fright and for a moment lay motionless in bed, waiting for my heartbeat to settle.

In the afternoon the hotel porter offered to take me to the airport on his scooter for a small fee. “Why did you and your girlfriend sleep in different rooms?” he asked me on the way. I smiled to myself, chuffed that to the outside world our match already looked like a fait accompli.

Luang Prabang airport was a narrow runway flanked by a large metal shed. I was very early and check-in for my four o’clock flight had not yet started. I sat down and waited. A man in uniform was announcing something in Lao. He repeated his message in English. There was one available seat on the two-thirty flight. Was there any passenger who would like to take it?

What if I took the two-thirty flight and it ended up crashing, while my originally scheduled flight arrived safely? But then again, what if the opposite happened?

“I’ll take it,” I said to the officer. This way, at least, my ordeal would be over sooner.

I followed the brisk man to the gate. We had to walk across the tarmac, the way one walks across a carpark to board a bus. I couldn’t believe my luck: the aircraft was a French-made ATR-42, and it had air-conditioning ducts, reading lights and—one would assume—navigation equipment in the cockpit.

Vientiane

Despite arriving in Vientiane Airport an hour and a half early I didn’t have to wait long for Noi. Soon I was holding her in my arms, drowning myself in her, surrendering myself to the heady elation. On the drive to my hotel in her almost new Hyundai she turned her face towards me:

“You don’t have any children, do you?”

“No, of course not,” I said. A short awkward silence ensued, and I found myself asking: “What about you?”

“Yes, I have two daughters, they are six and four.”

Two daughters? So I wasn’t the only person managing the dissemination of information according to some hidden personal agenda. Looking at Noi with her flawless skin and her slender, perfectly toned body, and remembering the carefree manner in which she had just spent several days out of town enjoying herself with her friends, the idea that she could possibly be the mother of two young children would have never occurred to me.

That evening we were going to have dinner at Noi’s restaurant with Marc and Lily. The first stars were appearing but the air was still warm, and unfamiliar insects were making a recurring rasping sound. I was surprised to see that numerous members of Noi’s extended family had gathered. Noi’s pretty little daughters were running around between the tables, doll-like in their round bobs. Noi introduced me to her parents, who looked younger than I had expected. I shook their hands.

“You should wai!” said Noi sharply, and showed me how to put my palms together and raise them in front of my face, bowing slightly. When I complied, confused about what was going on, her father lowered his eyes, fidgeting with his hands.

Later that night, Noi said, we would go with Marc and Lily to “Jazz Cafe”, a local bar with live music and a dance floor which sounded like the focal point of Vientiane nightlife. In her accent the name sounded like “Chess Cafe”. I visualised two Lao gentlemen with thin white beards in blue Mao suits sitting at a table, drinking weak green tea and playing chess, the tables around them deserted.

I was surprised to see that the place was actually called “Chess Cafe”. On the small stage a live band was playing seventies and eighties Top 50 covers—the musicians were Filipinos, Noi said—and a few Western men were sitting at small round tables, drinking beer, some of them accompanied by Lao girls in mini-skirts. A few more local girls were sitting at the bar, talking to each other listlessly. As we were making our way to our table Noi stopped to say hello to two middle-aged American men and then to three Lao girls.

“The girls here look so Westernised,” I remarked to Noi as we sat down at our table.

“They are all prostitutes,” she said.

The band started playing a slow number. The mirror ball was sprinkling everything with little stars of light—the floor, the dancers, the two of us. I was reliving the sweet innocence of high school discos, when I’d be holding in my arms an astonishingly beautiful girl—both of us untouched by loss or betrayal—and dancing slowly, in seesaw-like movements, hoping that the tune would never end.

When we entered the hotel later the receptionist and Noi greeted each other with surprise and exchanged a few sentences, laughing. In the lift I was surprised to see Noi’s forehead twisted into a frown. “That guy knows my sister,” she said. “I didn’t want him to see me here.”

Inside my room Noi and I were sitting on the bed, kissing. I touched the top button of her blouse with two fingers.

Noi moved away. “I don’t want to have sex,” she said, her eyes darkening.

“That’s fine,” I said. “We can just kiss and touch each other.”

“I don’t like sex,” said Noi. “It hurts.”

Noi had met her future husband when she was twenty. His mother, a domineering woman who was now married for the third time to a retired French-Canadian dentist, didn’t like Noi. Her big mistake, Noi said, was to marry him despite his mother’s opposition.

They were both virgins on their wedding night. Noi’s husband had no idea how to pleasure her; sex with him was brief and unsatisfying and penetration painful.

A few months after the wedding Noi’s husband went to work in Pakse, a provincial town where his family’s company was involved in a construction project. Prior to the wedding he had been infatuated with her, but now that he was away from home he started visiting prostitutes. He would come to Vientiane only rarely, and then ask Noi for money. After their divorce she was left to raise their two daughters without any assistance from her ex-husband and his family.

He was now married to a girl “with white skin … she looks like Chinese … beautiful!” I remembered Noi’s constant application of sunblock whenever we ventured outdoors.

I was making love with Noi: caressing slowly her silky skin, kissing with parted lips her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, her lips, her neck, tracing slowly with my tongue the contours of her previously untouched nipples, kissing her soft down. Noi was holding my hands in her hands, guiding me, until her body suddenly erupted. We still had not had full intercourse.

In the morning, when Noi came up again to my hotel room, I was still getting ready to go out. As I was sitting on the bed and putting on my shoes I noticed that they were covered with a thin film of dust.

“Noi, could you please get me some toilet paper?” I asked her. I didn’t have a brush and shoe polish, but I thought I’d try at least to make them look a bit more presentable.

“I’ll do it for you,” she said. She knelt on the floor beneath me and started wiping one of my shoes.

“It’s all right, sweetie, let me do it,” I said.

Still kneeling below me, she raised her face: “You know, every new moon a Lao wife has to kneel down in front of her husband and wai three times.”

I looked at her with acute discomfort and disbelief. What was the purpose of this charade? How could she possibly think that this was what I wanted to hear? Not to mention that I had seen enough of her domineering side to know that this display was a complete sham.

The following afternoon I was alone in my room. I was lying in bed, reading a battered paperback copy of The Lady of the Camellias, waiting for Noi to come back. My limbs were loose and my body was sinking into the sheets, overcome by gravity. My eyes lingered on the word courtesan, reading it again and again, unable to proceed to the rest of the sentence. I put down the book. My heartbeat quickened.

I suddenly realised that the Westernised, well-off Vientiane elite with its liberal social mores—which I’d told myself Noi belonged to—didn’t exist. Unmarried women in this country were on one extreme virgin village maidens in sarongs and on the other prostitutes in mini-skirts—with very little in between.

Marc did not have a relationship with a young, attractive, educated girl, because the family would not have allowed it. In Lily’s case, her parents must have given up hope on her ever marrying a suitable Lao man and grudgingly agreed to look the other way while she was consorting with a foreigner out of wedlock.

Noi was trapped here in eternal limbo, unable to find a partner, and for her I was not a casual fling but a ticket out of her stifling existence, her only chance of escape. By coming with me to my hotel room she was taking a gamble, risking her reputation—and she might have to live with the repercussions for years to come. In her desperation, she threw in her charade about the promise of a show of obeisance every month, hoping it would help to win me over.

My heart sank. I took a deep breath. So Noi saw a future for us—but how did I see it? Ever since our first encounter I had been suspended in an eternal present, with no past and future, overwhelmed by Noi’s presence, succumbing to the adrenaline rush of desire. Could I now just let her go?

But what kind of life would she have in Australia with her useless degree and basic English? Run a restaurant, perhaps? Not a riverside tourist establishment where she would drop in whenever she felt like it, giving confident instructions to her compliant lowly-paid staff, but a suburban Thai takeaway where she would be condemned to endless hours of drudgery behind the counter.

Perhaps we could find a way to make it work. I could help her out at first, and once the restaurant was fully established we’d be able to afford more staff. We would fall asleep in each other’s arms every night, feeling the warmth of each other’s body, listening to our heartbeats.

But what about Cathy? How could I sever our bond and disassemble the life the two of us had built together, all for the sake of a holiday romance? Before long my infatuation with Noi would wane, like a child tiring of a new toy, and her fantasies about life in the First World would be crushed by bitter experience.

Now that the flimsy constructs I had created in order to indulge myself had collapsed, the patently obvious conclusion had finally dawned on me: one way or another, this liaison was bound to end in tears. I felt like a small animal that had made a misstep and found itself blinded by an oncoming vehicle’s headlights, frozen.

There was a knock on the door. I opened it, took Noi in my arms and started kissing her neck, feeling her body yielding to my embrace. Time stood still. Only the white noise of the air-conditioner broke the silence.

Noi pushed me away: “I want to ask you something.” The corners of her eyes were glistening despite the semi-darkness, almost light blue in colour.

“Yes,” I said, my face only a palm’s length away from hers.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

I had been meandering on the warm sand of ambiguity, only dipping my toes in the tepid, shallow water of evasion. It was now time to dive headlong into the ocean of deceit. I looked deep into her eyes, mesmerised again by her beauty, and said in a steady voice, its timbre not betraying the slightest hint of hesitation: “No, I don’t.”

Afterwards, sated, lying on my back languidly and listening to the sound of gushing water coming through the shower door, I understood how the Thai tuk-tuk driver could look me in the eye and smile good-naturedly while shamelessly deceiving me. When you want something desperately enough, the reality you need to fabricate in order to attain it becomes your truth.