The weaver

Redson had the driver stop the car, waited for the red dust to settle, got out and walked back after the girl. He thought she had recognised him but if so she showed no interest. She was turning off the road between two houses and when he reached the corner she had disappeared.

He didn’t usually remember the girls he spent a night or an hour with. He wouldn’t have remembered this one either if he hadn’t seen her this second time. She had been nervous that night, trying to hide her fear as the girls did sometimes. He’d guessed she was new to it but being with her had been good. There was a special attractiveness in her inexperience and timidity and Redson had paid a bit more than they had agreed. She looked very different here walking near a dirt road in a peasant’s sarong and carrying two heavy cans of water hanging from a pole over her shoulder. But he was sure it was the same girl.

Redson looked around, up and down the track between a dozen wooden houses. They were ordinary houses, built on stilts so the tropical air would pass beneath them and keep them cool. Underneath was space for an ox cart and livestock, and one or two clay jars as tall as a man to store rain water. Local music played from a radio somewhere nearby. But there was no girl, and no-one else that he could see.

Redson walked along the track till it disappeared under a lake at the edge of the village. The girl was sitting at a loom under the last house. She did not look up as Redson walked over.

“I saw you from the car. Amazing, all this way from town. Thought I’d come and say hello.”

She pulled on a rope shooting the bobbin across the loom and started to line up the thread. Redson took out his hip flask and looked back at the lake. Some ducks were swimming about in the shallow water near a blue plank of wood that was partly submerged.

“Amazing luck! Only came this way because there’s some problem on the main road. Bridge down or something. Couldn’t believe it was you. This is your home?”

She nodded. Redson walked back to look over her shoulder at the cloth she was weaving. The colours were dyed into the thread on the bobbin and to make the pattern come out right she checked the alignment each time the bobbin passed. It was slow, precise work but the practiced rhythm of the girl’s movements made it seem natural and casual.

“I’ve been up to the irrigation project. Kendall’s the man there. They’re going to extend it.”

A man who Redson took to be the girl’s father came down the steps of the house with a tin tray and two glasses of water, smiling and saying something that Redson understood as a welcome. He poured what was left from his flask into the two glasses and the old man smiled guilelessly.

“Does your father have land?”

She still said nothing but paused in her work to glance beyond him. Redson turned too and stared at the water and ducks. He drank gratefully and looked from the smiling father to the sullen daughter.

Back in town Redson relished the air conditioning in his hotel and spent three days tramping between the bar and his tobacco-fogged room getting his report done. The truth was he had written most of it before he had seen the project. You could do that when you’d been in the business a while. He had written his ‘irrigation projects’ original for an assignment in Zaire and modified it in Syria, Pakistan and Turkey before coming to this job. Once you knew the ropes, adapting the draft to the statistics and adding some local colour wasn’t difficult. Nothing too contentious to upset the donors or let the locals lose face. He was good at it and his clients usually re-hired him for new missions.

On the third night he sat drumming his fingers on the bar and staring into his glass. The report was done and he would have a day free before the meeting with the project bankers. But something had bothered him since he had started writing, something didn’t fit. He had been through the figures and everything came out well enough. The bank’s money could be accounted for. The engineering work had kept more or less to the schedule and the farmers were growing more rice than they had ever done before the project started, he had no doubt about that. He’d seen enough irrigation projects to recognise a good one. From chatting to all the players he knew everyone wanted the next phase to go ahead. Why couldn’t he send the report off to the typist and be done with it?

Still uneasy, he wandered back to his room and shuffled the papers idly, checking his grammar and calculations. He looked again at the production levels that had been planned to be sure he had not made a stupid error. Kendall’s own report was nauseatingly complacent but Redson could not find any technical or factual mistakes in it. He glanced at the irrigation department’s glossy brochure with its predictably overblown self-congratulation and coloured pictures of officials and farmers smiling beside the project boundary sign. Then he looked again at the project map and felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck.

When he arrived at the village for the second time the girl was still sitting at the loom and as far as Redson could tell she was working at the same piece of cloth. It didn’t seem much bigger. She showed no more interest in him than at their last meeting.

He walked past her to the edge of the lake and could see the outline of old rice fields under the water. He kicked off his shoes and waded out to the blue plank. He couldn’t read the local writing but he recognised the Irrigation Department logo clearly enough under the slime.

Back under the house the father appeared again with the tin tray and glasses. He smiled at Redson though he must have wondered who this foreigner was.

“When was your land flooded?” Redson asked the girl.

“After they built the dam.” She replied, not looking up from her weaving.

“It’s been flooded ever since?”

“There was no problem in the first year. Then they brought tractors and trucks to make the land level so the irrigation would work better. They said we would get more rice. The bank lent us money for the levelling.”

Redson waited while she did something to the bobbin.

“The next year we planted the rice as usual but the water got deeper and deeper and drowned the seedlings. Last year was the same. This year we didn’t bother to plant anything.” She shrugged.

“How many other people are like you?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe twenty in our village.”

“How can they pay off their bank loans?”

She shrugged again but Redson already knew the answer and cursed himself for asking. They talked on into the afternoon when the sun was still fierce and before the farmers returned from their fields. Eventually they sent a child, barefoot but still in the khakhi pants of his school uniform, to find the headman, Onchai.

Onchai strode purposefully into the house compound, a small, wiry man with a sparse stubble on his chin and sharp, alert eyes. Redson and the girl sat with him on the balcony explaining what they wanted. At dusk they walked to the headman’s house and Onchai stood at the top of his steps and beat with a stick on a hollowed log in a rhythm that Redson supposed meant something. Onchai went into his bedroom and after a few minutes reappeared in a uniform shirt and without the stubble. They walked with him to the temple ground where other villagers were assembling.

The temple was a rambling, simple structure. A wooden platform thirty meters square was raised nearly two meters above the ground on wooden pillars. Electrical switches looked as if they were newly installed, and clean white cables were stapled on the walls and across the ceiling to some fans and tubular lights nailed crudely to the rafters. Redson saw on a dais in a corner a bigger-than-life-size sitting Buddha, bronze with a saffron sash. Faded pictures of monks lined the walls, and Redson imagined they were all dead.

Redson, the girl and Onchai squatted on a mat in front of the villagers. A few of the men wore jeans, most wore checked cotton pakama skirts bunched and knotted at the waistline and reaching to below their knees. Some were staring and smiling at Redson. Others sat pokerfaced and threatening. Most of the women hovered around the back of the crowd.

The headman introduced Redson briskly.

"We all know about the dam and the flooding. These people have come to find out about it. They tell me they can do something to help us. I hope they can. Let's hear what they have to say."

There was some polite clapping, then expectant silence with only the hum of the fans. The girl spoke, sounding aggressive, Redson thought.

"We know your land gets flooded now, after the dam," she said. "We want to do something about it. We want to find out how much you lost. We will make them pay, and stop the flooding."

A man standing at the side called out, "How much will they pay?"  There was murmuring and some laughter, then silence. An old, toothless farmer near the front lit up a cigarette rolled in newsprint and Redson became aware of the homely smell of village tobacco.

"We don't know how much they will pay. We need information first, to know how many people are affected, how much we have lost."

They went from one villager to another, asking questions. Thongchai, silver haired and diffident, never uttering more then two words at once. Pitt, overweight, fiddling incessantly with an empty pack of Marlboroughs. Thawichai, business-like, the smartest looking of them all with his Lacoste tee-shirt and New York Yankees baseball cap. The bright-eyed Khonkha who sat with his wife trying to control their hyperactive four-year-old son. Suwan, greasy haired and loud, played to the crowd with each answer and Redson doubted every word he said.

How much of their land was under water? How much rice did they did they get before? And now? How many times had the officials visited?

The girl asked the questions and translated, Redson made notes. When the farmers wittered about rats getting into the barns and buffaloes breaking their tethers she brought them back to the point. When they lost interest she sat with Onchai and made lists of families in her childish handwriting and checked boxes against the names. Redson accepted their home brew and laughed with them and stood up occasionally to show he could still walk a straight line. When the power failed they lit paraffin lamps and talked and worked on into the night. As fatigue set in and the farmers finally drifted home Onchai offered him a sleeping mat and mosquito net, and gestured him to a small house within the temple compound. He didn't know where the girl slept.

In the hotel bar the night before his final meeting he cursed himself again for going back to the village. Now he knew more than he wanted to know. Things had seemed simple enough in Kendall’s office. Happy farmers, happy irrigation officials, happy bankers trawling through their budgets to find a million or so to start the second phase and happy contractors with their pens poised over their new contracts. Redson knew that kind of nervous and fragile happiness and wanted to nurture it, because he knew too the bitterness that would well up in its place if things went wrong. If he made things go wrong. He saw the work that he himself would lose to colleagues who were more prepared to come to a shabby compromise with their figures. There had been no need to go back to the village. But even now only he and the girl knew there were more than a hundred of them. It wasn’t too late to stay quiet and let the aid machine follow its natural course.

But with each beer came the memory of the girl’s frightened eyes that night, and the sterile, clinical phrases that people seemed to like so much in his reports started one by one to fall apart.

When they came into the room the bankers, department officials and Kendall found four roughly typed pages on the table in front of them instead of the smoothly edited report that they expected, and that they had expected the day before. Redson watched their faces as their casual skimming through the numbered paragraphs turned to more careful reading and then to frowning, nervous glances at their colleagues and at the glaring Kendall. The meeting came to order.

“Mr Redson, your report has taken me by surprise, and I think everyone else too. According to Mr Kendall the farmers’ yields are double what they were.” This was the banker.

Redson spread the map on the table. A thick red line showed the extent of the project. He pointed to an area near the road at the top of the map.

“This is the project office and right around here the farmers have done well. Kendall is right, they get twice as much rice as they got before the project.”

He slid the map around and took a pencil to shade an area near the red line at the bottom end.

“Down here though the contractors dug too deep. They turned this whole area into a sump. The water drains down and sits, a meter or so deep. The farmers can’t plant anything any more.”

As he was leaving the hotel for the airport the girl was in the lobby where she had been when he arrived three weeks before, over dressed and heavily made up to identify her trade. She smiled brightly when someone passed who might be a customer, then let her gaze fall back to her shiny green shoes. Was she worse off here than carrying water on a pole along a dusty village road? His report had made no difference, of course. It was hard to convince them that a hundred farmers had lost their livelihood when Kendall could say they had all repaid their loan instalments on time. There would be no compensation, and no need even to defer the loans. Their precious second phase would go ahead and they would all meet their annual targets.

Redson looked across at the girl as she negotiated with an over-weight, loud tourist. The tourist walked away hitching up his trousers with a date for later or looking for something cheaper, Redson could not tell which. With a weaver’s patience her eyes searched the lobby for another chance.