by Knox, Tom
The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would go by cab to Vientiane, the Laotian capital—and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.
That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.
It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then, there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker; in fact, it was dwindling. All those people with camera phones, all that easy to use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop, they made it all so simple: anyone could take a decent snap. Literally anyone. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Robert Capa.
Jake didn’t resent, morally or philosophically, this democratization of his “art form.” Photography had always been the most demotic of arts, if it was an art at all. Let everyone join in. Let everyone have a go. Good luck to them.
The pain of the process was merely personal: it just meant that his business was disappearing. And the only answer to this dilemma was either to become a war photographer, to become so brave or foolhardy he could and would take shots no civilian would ever dare—and he was increasingly tempted that way—or he could accept boring, commercial, uncreative but comfy assignments, such as coffee-table books on Southeast Asian beauty spots, where at least the air tickets were paid for, the hotels were decent, the toilets nonsquat, and he got to see the world, which, after all, had been one of the reasons he had become a snapper in the first place.
He drank the last of his Red Bull, flipped the empty can into a bag of garbage on the roadside, and got back to work.
Photography.
Wandering down the languid, sun-setting, wood-and-concrete main street of Vang Vieng, Jake paused, looked to his right, and quickly assessed—and took a quiverful of shots of the riverine landscape, framed by a teak-built house and a ramshackle beer shop.
It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song River. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.
The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.
Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the screen. No, it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work, and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?
Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own willfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.
He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure—to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy and he’d realized he needed a job, and so he’d remembered his childhood yen for art, and he’d squeezed into photography: begging for work in studios, laboriously teaching himself the craft, crawling back to a real kind of life.
And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism—just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.
But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.
A young suntanned, barefoot, ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt and clicked his camera once again.
The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behavior. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day, every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.
Every cool and river-misty morning minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tire inner tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the river flow, and then these Western teens and twenty-somethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beer shacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.
By the time the inner-tubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.
Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously Third World experience—when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twenty-something who came here. Laos was remote, but not that remote: thousands had this “unique experience” every week of every month.
But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed up he’d have jumped in a tire himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Nam Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher lager and crystal meth.
But he wasn’t a kid anymore. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough messing around; and anyway, latterly, when he took drugs, especially something mind-warping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms, it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.
The light was nearly all gone.
The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops, and the mopeds had their headlamps on; the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hill-tribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.
Ty was there. Tyrone McKenna, the American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red-haired, hard-bitten, sardonic forty-five-year-old New Yorker didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with camera phones. Ty was a proper journalist—a correspondent—and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.
“All right, Jake?” Ty smiled. “Got all your shots?”
“Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.”
“Let me guess,” said Ty. “Sunset over the karst?”
Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was excellent.
Tyrone was leaning forward.
“Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.”
“Yes?”
“Chemda is here.”
A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned and breezily ordered some more Lao beers—tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, tried to say thank you for his lavish tip, blushed, and then smiled.
The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, living in a hut in the hills, not even able to speak Lao. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London college boys with “Girls Are Gay” written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning mor
e money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.
It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.
His mind clicked back into gear; he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American-educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
“Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?”
“Well, it’s Tek Chemda, technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Family name first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized, so yep, Chemda Tek.”
Jake said nothing.
Ty said, “So you remember her. Cute, right?”
Jake shrugged.
“Well, I hadn’t noticed.”
“Yeah … rrrright.”
“No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom had completely escaped me. Mate.”
They chinked glasses and chuckled.
Tyrone said, “She’s at the hospital.”
The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.
“She’s OK?”
“Yeah, yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.”
“Why?”
“She’s with some Cambodian professors.”
“Here in Laos?” Jake was mystified. “I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.”
“She was, sure.” Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand and gazed out at the street. A hammer-and-sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the Communist red looked darkest gray.
Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the onetime and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.
“Why the Plain of Jars?” asked Jake.
Tyrone finished his beer and explained.
“Apparently, during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there—seems the Communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.”
“Sorry?”
“You know what the Plain of Jars is, right?”
Jake faltered a reply: “Big … old … stone … jars. Sitting in…” He paused. “A plain?”
They laughed.
Tyrone continued: “Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Phonsavan. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.”
“But what’ve they got to do with…”
“The KR? The Khmer Rouge?” Ty smiled affably. “Ain’t got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the seventies, coercing these historians, maybe—and Chemda is trying to find out why—”
“And?”
“The whole thing back in the seventies obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.”
“But why the hospital? Why’s she here?”
A tuk-tuk clattered past, two-stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. “Kharb jai, danke schön, kharb jai.”
Tyrone smiled at Jake. “The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal—all that fine American ordnance—”
“That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.”
Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted: “Didn’t the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam War, than on the whole of Germany—in the entire Second World War?”
“Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined.” Ty sighed, personably. “Anyhow. Where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which—given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is—was all the way here to Vang. A long day’s drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pickup—”
“And now?”
“She’s heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. She’s a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty.” Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. “Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.”
“Heading back to the Plain of Jars?”
“Tomorrow. Yeah. ’S what she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if I’d like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didn’t care how intriguing it all is, I’m doing this coffee-table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff—and anyhow, I’d rather have drunken sex with a senior ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.”
Tyrone paused and gazed at Jake’s pensive expression. He groaned.
“Oh God. Color me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, don’t you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!”
3
“So what happened here, in the Plain of Jars?”
Chemda stared at Jake across the cabin of the pickup. Her eyes were deep dark brown, like whiskey aged in sherry casks; she had a slight nervousness about her, mixed with fierce determination. Intelligence and anxiety. She was maybe twenty-eight years old. He had met her only once or twice before: on the fringes of passionate conversations, dark and heavy discussions about Cambodian corruption and peasant evictions and journalistic power plays, on the roof terrace of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Phnom Penh, the terrace that gazed over the noisy boulevards and the wide, lazy Tonle Sap river.
“You are a journalist? You do understand Cambodian politics?”
Jake felt the pinch of sarcasm in her words.
“Well, yes, I do. But…”
“The Cambodian government is under intense pressure to…” She sought the words. “Atone. To put the Khmer Rouge leadership on trial, to seek the truth of what happened in the 1970s. When so many died. As you know?”
“Of course. Though … the genocide, I’m never sure how many died. I mean, I hear different opinions.”
“A quarter of the population.” Chemda’s firm but quiet voice, lilting, almost tender, made her revelation all the more sobering. “The Khmer Rouge killed, through starvation or extermination, a quarter of my people. Two million dead.”
A chastening silence ensued. Jake stared out of the pickup window. They were way up in the misty hills now, in central Laos; they had been driving for fifteen hours on the worst roads he had ever encountered: he understood why Tyrone had refused to make the journey; he understood why they had been obliged to leave before dawn if they wanted to do it in one day.
The route on the map showed the distance was just a few hundred kilometers, and theoretically this was the main road in Laos, but when the road wasn’t rudely potholed it was badly waterlogged or simply blocked; dogs and goats and chickens and cattle wandered on and off the asphalt, children played an inch from thundering trucks. Several times they had been obliged to halt by broken-down trucks, or by muddy washouts where they had to lay big flat stones under the helplessly whirring wheels.
And now they were heading for the mountains, the Annamese Cordillera, and it was damp, even chilly: not the tropics Jake was used to, not Luang or Vang Vieng, let alone Phnom Penh. Fog wreathed the vines and banana trees, wedding veils of fog, kilometers of dismal gauze.
Night was dimly falling, along with the saddening mists. The car rattled through another pothole. The wounded Cambodian man had been left at Vang Vieng Hospital, where Ja
ke had tracked down Chemda.
When they had met, late last night, she had appeared pleased by his eagerness to tell the story, to come along. She said she wanted the world to hear what the Khmer Rouge had done: that was her job, as the press-officer-cum-lawyer for the UN Extraordinary Tribunal in Cambodia. And so far she had only got a couple of articles published, on minor Asian websites. Maybe Jake could do better; he had contacts. She was keen.
But now she seemed displeased by Jake’s relative ignorance of Cambodian politics. And Jake didn’t know what to do about this. He didn’t know how to act, because he sensed an unnerving disparity between them: he was older, yet she was the one doing the important work. Chemda was the one with the knowledge; the proper purpose; the real job. And her seriousness was visible, tangible, in the sharp young profile of her dark face, framed by the car window beyond.
Their silent Laotian driver swerved to avoid a water buffalo that was belligerently munching ferns by the side of the alleged road. Jake gripped at the frame of the rocking pickup. A soldier slept on top of a stationary car as they drove past.
Jake stared across the gear well. He wanted to befriend this slightly daunting woman, with her earnest loveliness, her irrelevant beauty. He was here to do a task; he desired to be a proper photojournalist, do a serious job like her. But for that he needed her friendship—and her candor. If only she would open up.
He asked about her background. Her replies were polite but terse. She was born in the chaos that came after the Khmer Rouge genocide, and her family had fled to California following the Vietnamese subjection of Cambodia in the 1980s. She was educated at UCLA, but she had returned to Cambodia, like many of her close relatives, to rebuild the country, to restart, reboot, rejoin. To reset an entire nation.
Jake wanted to ask if all her family had escaped—survived the Khmer Rouge killings.
But he dared not touch on this most difficult of subjects. He knew from sad experience that if you asked this of Cambodians you got, quite casually, the most harrowing of replies. “Oh no, my mother and father died, they killed my sister. Everyone died.” Even worse was the answer: “I don’t know what happened to them. I am alone.”