The Nine-Month Course

Nine months of Muay Thai paid for. Two ticks in the book.

The attendance book lives on the shelf above the water cooler at our gym in Cherngtalay, between the first-aid box and a statue of a cat that a student from Lyon left behind in 2019. It's a school exercise book with a blue cover. Since August I fill it in every morning in pen, because the inspectors might ask to see it, and because pencil, I've been told, looks like you were planning to change something.

My name is Ann. I've been a kru here for nine years. Before that I fought, and before that I was a girl from Surat Thani who was quicker than her brothers.

Dieter's page is page 14. His course is nine months, morning class, six days a week. The visa says he's here for Muay Thai.

His page has two ticks.

He comes in on a Thursday at 7:10 for the third tick, wearing new gloves with the shop tag still on the strap. He tells me he's been "visualising". He tells me he has always had the fighter mentality, even in the insurance business in Bielefeld, where you also have to read your opponent. I tape his hands. He watches me do it and nods, like he's checking my work.

He trains for forty minutes, hard, which is about twenty minutes longer than his body has agreed to. Then he sits on the edge of the ring with a towel over his head and says, "This is the life, eh?"

I give him his third tick.

He doesn't come on Friday. Or the next week.

On the Wednesday, a man and a woman from the Sports Authority come in with a clipboard. They're polite. They look at the mats, the fire extinguisher, the certificate on the wall. Then the woman asks for the book. She turns the pages slowly, the way you'd read a menu in a language you only half speak, and she stops on page 14. Three ticks in three weeks, against a nine-month course. She doesn't say anything. She writes something down. Then she goes on to page 15, which belongs to a Polish nurse who has missed one morning since July, and she smiles at that one.

That afternoon Nam comes in.

I know Nam a little. Everyone in Cherngtalay knows somebody who knows Nam. She's the one who put the lease for their condo in her own name, which I heard about at the market before I heard Dieter mention the condo. She stands by the water cooler in her work clothes and asks me, in Thai, very politely, how many ticks a visa needs to be safe.

"There's no number," I tell her. "They look at the book. They look at the person."

"What did they write?"

"I don't know. They wrote something."

She nods. She looks at page 14 for a long time without touching it.

"He'll come every morning," she says. "Until March."

From the next morning, Dieter comes every morning.

He arrives at 6:55, which is early enough to be noticed. He tells the other students about discipline. He tells them about the warrior's routine, how the body follows the mind, how in Germany everybody is soft. He has started saying "kru" the way you say a word you've only recently learned you're allowed to use.

At the end of the second week he takes a photo of himself in the ring for the group chat at home and asks me to be in it. I am in it. I look like a woman who has been in a lot of these photos.

What Dieter doesn't see, because he's facing the ring, is the car park.

Every morning at 6:50 a scooter pulls up outside. Nam is driving. Dieter climbs off the back with his gym bag, and Nam waits with the engine running until he's through the door. Then she goes to work. At 8:15 she's back with an iced coffee for him and one for me. She puts mine on the shelf, next to the book.

His page now has twenty-one ticks. When the inspectors come back, I will show them exactly that, in pen.

The book has a column for the student's signature and a column for mine. There's no column for the person outside on the scooter at 6:50 with the engine running.

Some mornings I think there should be.

---

Question: Should a Muay Thai visa require you to actually train?

*Illustrations are AI-generated.*