Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

e the moment when Keang herself realises who Langford is. She says, almost to herself, that
he is called Mean Samnag, the ‘Lucky One’, by the Cambodian troops, and starts recruiting
Langford to the Free Cambodian cause (HW, 269).
Then, having succeeded at transforming him into a fighter for her forces, she replaces
the Lakshmi with her own lucky charm, but it is ‘a small, furry toy cat with orange stripes,
made in Japan’ which mews when tipped. ‘Take it to Saigon, she said. A mascot. It will
protect you; I’ve told it to’ (HW, 422). Ly Keang has given Langford a meaningless kitsch
item in the place of an artefact which symbolises the power of Vishnu, and which he truly
believes brings him the luck he has always needed to survive his work. Ly Keang is making a
terrific blunder, but fate has determined that Cambodia must fall to the ‘Black ghosts’, and
Keang, as symbol of the divine feminine, must also play her role in the turn of fortune whereby
the Mother Goddess makes way for the Destroyer Goddess.
The apsarasas are sometimes supposed to produce the madness associated with love
(Dowson, 20). From the beginning of Keang’s attention to him, Langford feels ‘a hollowing in
the stomach’ (HW, 269), and this attraction only intensifies until her disappearance with the
fall of Cambodia makes Langford mad. Jim Feng says that ‘He looked sick, and hardly ate’
(HW, 411). Langford loses his usual self-control over the frustrations of his commitment to
find her when it is suggested that his relentless search for Ly Keang is useless. Feng reports
that ‘One dickhead correspondent in the Foxhole kept insisting that she must be lost, and Mike
punched him up—and that wasn’t like Mike’ (HW, 436). Langford is caught in the descending
cycle of time, during which, according to Jainist tradition, the very physical stature of men will
diminish progressively, and the earth ‘will be an unspeakable morass of violence, bestiality,
and grief’ (Zimmer, 1969, 227). As the relationship between Langford and Keang also
represents the unified male/female force of the universe until the Divine Mother finishes her
destructive work and recreates the universe anew, the essential monistic principle of the eternal
dharma will itself be asunder.
- 213 -