Chris Korman
The arrival Then the heat hit him like an inescapable steamy landslide. Thick, heavy and sweltering. He had to gasp. 'Oh my! Oh my!' he exclaimed, choking, as it dawned on him that this would be his world from then on. The smell of hot humid air, as if he were stepping into a sauna bath, suffocated him. He could feel the film of moisture spreading over his back snake-like, soaking his shirt, enfolding his body. Feeling dizzy after eighteen hours in the cold air-conditioned atmosphere of the cabin he walked out of the plane into that shockingly new reality. That peculiar smell wouldn't leave thenceforth. In time he would get used to it. He had to steady himself. The first people he saw were soldiers, armed to the teeth and edgy in the gangway, swarming all over the airport in fact. It was just a few days after the assassination. The opposition leader back from his political exile shot point blank on the tarmac. Martial law, unrest, arrests and curfew. Not the best of times to come. But then he hadn't really had a choice. Or had he? Anyway there was no turning back now. The in-flight film: Apocalypse Now, didn't help to cheer him up. On the contrary, it added a little more dread to his first steps in this unknown country. South-East Asia. The land of Europe's darkest fantasies. He was coming here on a strange errand. Sent for by his estranged father, a man he hardly knew. He only had vague childhood memories, probably made up from washed out snapshots in the family album and the few stories his mother had told him and then had stopped telling him. An overzealous pock-marked customs officer was inspecting his suitcase, looking for what? He wondered. He was leafing through the documents it contained, the said family album, his family record book, birth certificates, a certified family tree reaching back to the eighteenth century- what on earth did André need all this for?- He hadn't told him anything. A terse letter, scribbled half-hearted sympathies for the loss of his
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