The Jade Cat by Suzanne Brøgger

Author:Suzanne Brøgger [Suzanne Brøgger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2004-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE JADE CAT

IN NOVEMBER 1963 John Kennedy was shot and later on everyone remembered exactly what he or she had been doing at that moment. Li and Rejn were playing a late night game of bridge with Dr A. and his American wife. It was she who heard the news from a servant who crept into the room and told her. Li insisted they go to the embassy to seek shelter with Ambassador Ebbe Munck, perhaps out of old habit. At the back of her mind lay the memory of how Tobias had evacuated all the Danes from the Baltic. Would Munck evacuate all the Danes now from Thailand in the event of a world war? It was largely due to the ambassador that Li had found her feet in Thailand. Not that she cared much for embassy parties or Danes. On the contrary. But there was something special about Munck. He wasn’t any old ambassador, he was a personality. A one-time freedom fighter, polar explorer and journalist. And from the very first day when they reported their arrival at the embassy, he had kept an eye on Li, in that he knew who she was. She was a Løvin. And he never forgot that as a young man he was employed at Berlingske Tidende and Papa had promoted him over the heads of others with greater seniority. And it was Ebbe Munck who was sent down to Berlin after the outbreak of war to meet Katze and the girls at the station when they were returning from Riga to Denmark.

So at this moment when they might be faced with a new world war it was natural to report to the Danish embassy. On the other hand: was the Møller family still Danish?

*

Myren spent all her time at her Thai riding school, where she had stabled her own white horse, Bucephalus, known to Rejn as Phallus. Lacking in any real sense a mother and a father, Zeste was the person Myren felt closest to, but it was a painful dependence. Myren wanted Zeste to herself and flew into hysterical rages because Zeste had involved herself in a life that excluded her. Myren didn’t begrudge Zeste all the sophisticated and artificial French business, because Zeste was much too good for it, in Myren’s opinion. And Myren meditated revenge as she devoted herself to animals and children, who didn’t put on all those airs, for God’s sake. Meanwhile Zeste hung on Khun Nui’s every word in the temple, where she was being made into a Thai woman with French ambitions.

After In and Pim Pao had taken over the house and more or less the administration for the Møller family as far as emotions went, and Nanny had gone back to Ceylon, Orm and Birdie, who had changed his name to Kwanki Wanki (because he was such a funny little thing), slipped into a vacuum, from where they couldn’t be reached – from a European view. The boys went to a Thai school, didn’t speak a word of Danish and only a little pidgin English, like other Thais.

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