by Knox, Tom
Chemda sat down at the rickety market café table and glanced at Jake as he gazed across the market aisle at the heaped up piles of brown rats.
“Field rats,” she said. Her voice was thick with exhaustion. “They are famous here. I mean, as far as rats go, these are top-notch. You can’t get a better rat in Laos.”
“I’m sure,” said Jake, smiling at her brave if tired attempt at humor. But the blood in the muzzles of the slaughtered rats reminded him of the blood on the floor, the blood of the dead Cambodian still in the tread of his boots. Ghastly. How close had he been to a real beating?
“What just happened, Chemda? Did Tou kill him? I don’t get it.”
She stared down at the grain of her elegantly narrow indigo jeans, now dusty and smudged. She shook her head and hid her eyes with a poetic gesture, like the cultured shyness of an Angkor princess.
At last she dropped her hand and spoke.
“Can we sit in the sun?”
They shifted down the pewlike benches of the café into the light; the sun, Jake noticed, was actually strong, sharpened by upland cold—but strong. Healing. Warming. They both turned their tired faces to the heat and said nothing for a second, absorbing.
Then she said, “It can’t be Tou. It just can’t. He was, ah, part of the team.”
“But he’s run away.”
Chemda shrugged. She had taken off her gray and tailored leather jacket, and he noticed the slenderness of her topaz-brown shoulders.
“He’s scared. He is Hmong.”
“OK…”
“And he has contacts with other Hmong, of course, which is why we employed him. The Hmong have been helping us. Because this is Hmong country: they know the plain better than anyone. They farm the rice paddies, they slash and burn the forests. They also know which areas are, ah, too risky, too saturated with unexploded ordnance. Of course that is—that was—pretty important for our work.”
“He rang you last night—trying to get through. But why…” Jake was trying to puzzle it out. Something was incongruent. A shard of memory like a piece of grit in a shoe.
Chemda interrupted his thoughts: “They really don’t want us here, Jake. As I said. And a murder case gives them a great excuse to make things extremely uncomfortable. It took the UN ages to get permission for this investigation in the first place. Now they have the whip hand. You noticed they didn’t take our passports? It’s because they want us to quit, to go. To give up and fly home. That was his hint about Laos—you heard it? ‘This is not Cambodia.’ Ahh.” Her sigh was brief. And unsentimental. And somehow undefeated.
Jake sat back. Their coffee had arrived, two chipped little cups of thick blackness, plus a tin of condensed sweetened milk already pierced and bubbling. Jake dribbled the viscous milk into his coffee; Chemda wanted hers black.
They drank quietly.
A man across the market was holding a chunk of honeycomb. It looked like a thick slice of intensely rotted wood. The man was digging into each cell of the hive slice with a finger, and retrieving a wriggling blob of whiteness. A larva. The man popped the white living larva into his mouth, munching and smiling, chasing it with slugs of Dr Pepper from a can. Then he winkled out another and ate it.
Something slotted into Jake’s mind. He looked at Chemda and said, “You think they did it. Don’t you? The cops.”
Her eyes met his halfway.
“Yes.” She frowned. “I do. Because of the way he died.”
“Why? It was a brutal death. But how does that prove it was the cops?”
“You never read the stories of what the Khmer Rouge did in Tuol Sleng?”
“The torture garden, S-21,” he said. “Yes, I know the history of Tuol Sleng: horrific. But maybe I missed … some details?”
She gazed across the café seats. The market was closing up; dried rats lollipopped on wooden sticks were being piled in cardboard boxes. Then she spoke:
“I have read two accounts of some experiments there. Accounts verified by the guy who ran the camp.”
“Comrade Duch.”
“Yes. Comrade Duch. Apparently, in Tuol Sleng they used to tie prisoners to iron beds, and they would attach pumps to them, and then drain every … drop of blood from their bodies. They wanted the blood for Khmer Rouge soldiers, but they turned it into, ah, a form of torture, a sadistic game.”
Jake was sweating; the sun was now directly overhead, the hard plateau sun. A sadistic game? He thought of the cop searching in the drawer as Chemda elaborated.
“They drained all the blood from these chained prisoners just to see what would happen. Over many hours they took out all the blood until not a drop was left; the prisoners would writhe and gasp, someone described them as sounding like rasping crickets at the end, gasping, stridulating, croaking like insects as they died.”
Chemda looked briefly away, gazing at two barefoot boys sucking on the bloodstained ice from the fish counters; then she turned her dark, serious eyes on him.
Jake spoke: “Grotesque. Truly grotesque. But why repeat that experiment on Samnang?”
“It’s a message. Someone is giving me—us—ah, a message. To scare us or warn us, or remind us of the horrors of Pol Pot. I don’t know. But Tou wouldn’t know any of this, and anyway, if he wanted to kill Samnang he wouldn’t do it so bizarrely. But it surely cannot be coincidence: no one dies like that, as horribly as that, for no good reason. They are trying to scare me away. Ah. Because they know what I do—investigate the Khmer Rouge and their barbarities. They want me to give up. But I’m not giving up.”
Her expression was dark.
Jake felt a need to move. “OK. Let’s go for a walk, Chemda. Somewhere with fewer rats.”
They stood and stepped from the market, paced through a busy side road into the main street. It was more crowded and hectic than ever. And it was obviously full of Hmong people now: many of the women were dressed in the most splendid finery.
For several moments Jake and Chemda observed, together and silent and alone. They stared at the passing people: the cavalcade of girls, twirling delicate silken umbrellas, escorted by proud young men in ill-fitting suits. She answered his question before he asked it.
“No, they don’t always dress like this. It’s the Hmong New Year. The most important three days, when people meet their future husbands.”
“So…”
“They are fiercely traditional. Animist … but wait—is that—over there?”
She was pointing, and trying not to point. Jake scanned the scene: the parasols and the pickups, the Chinese noodle trucks and the silver jangling coins on summery dresses.
A small figure was discreetly waving at them, down the road, half hidden between two large jeeps.
“It’s Tou,” she whispered.
Jake marveled. This was Tou? He was barely more than a boy. And this was the crucial figure? Their all-important guide? This was the chief suspect in the homicide of Samnang? It was indeed a ludicrous concept: this boy looked more street urchin than murdering villain.
Tou’s smile was broken; his shirt was grubby and worn; his face was young and brave and eager and frightened.
Glancing both ways, Tou slipped into the shadows, then seconds later he reappeared, directly behind them, speaking quick, anxious, and fairly articulate English.
“Come, please, quick, Chemda—come!!”
His nervous glance flickered over Jake.
“It’s OK,” said Chemda. “It’s OK. He’s a friend, he’s with me. What is it? Are you all right? I know the police are—”
“Chemda, I have seen what they look for.”
“What?”
Tou gave his anxious reply. “The Stripe Hmong! One of them come to me yesterday, old Hmong man. And he tell me—he tell me stories of the Khmer Rouge come here, in the seventies. And others. That’s what I tell Doctor Samnang last night. That’s what I try tell you on the phone. Then Samnang he get sad, crying, and I run away—”
“What? What stories?”
“Chemda. I show you. We must to be quick, but…” He lifted a finger, invoking their silence, and their discretion. “I show you.”
“What do you mean? Show me what?”
“I show you what the Khmer Rouge find. Many, many years ago. On the Plain of Jars.”
6
“Chemda, why are you taking this risk? Why not just give up? And go home?”
She didn’t answer. Jake wondered whether to try again. They were speeding south, jeeping into the heart of the plain, with Tou and the old Hmong man, Yeng. They were taking a terrible risk, disobeying the cops, quitting Ponsavan, going to see what Tou had discovered.
Yeng had swiftly agreed to help them, as he had already helped Tou: he apparently hated the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge, all the Communists; he was a wiry, determined old guy, maybe an ex fighter, Jake suspected—certainly he was toughly contemptuous of everyone and everything. Yet likable.
Jake had been told Yeng was Hmong Bai, Striped Hmong, one of the most rebellious and warlike of Hmong tribes. Jake could see his motivation.
But why would Chemda suddenly be so audacious, so foolhardy? The cops in Ponsavan were truly menacing; rustic and clumsy, but menacing. If he and Chemda got caught doing this, with the prime suspect for the murder—Tou—they would, of course, be immediately deported, if not arrested and beaten and imprisoned. As Chemda herself had implied.
Yet Chemda’s dark and serene Khmer face was impassive; only the tiniest tic of nerves showed in the corners of her eyes. Nothing else.
Frustrated, Jake looked out the window, wary and nervy.
The old jeep was rumbling along lanes that were little better than cattle tracks. Wooden houses of Hmong villagers lined the way, large wooden rice barns standing beside the laurel trees and the elephant grass. Some of the barns had strange metal struts supporting their thatched or iron roofs, fat pillars of steel curving to a point.
With a jolt—a physical jolt as the ancient American jeep vaulted a crack in the sunbaked muddy track—Jake realized the pillars in the rice barns were bomb cases. The Hmong were using bomb cases to construct their barns: there was obviously so much unexploded ordnance around here, so many old bombs and shells and grenades providing so much metal, the swidden-farming Hmong were scavenging the stuff for buildings.
And now, as Jake looked closer he could see American hardware everywhere: rusty shell cases used as flower pots; meters of corrugated tank tracks utilized for fences; huge bombs sliced in half and employed as water troughs for oxen.
“Why don’t you tell me. Why are you taking this risk?”
It was Chemda, at last. She had spoken. Her brown eyes secured his gaze; her expression was demure, clever, and opaque.
“’Cause I want the story,” he said. “I want to get a decent story for once in my life.”
“You want it that badly?”
“That badly.”
“And that’s it? Just that?”
Jake paused. Obviously Chemda sensed there was more: and she was right. But he couldn’t tell her the truth. Could he?
Two little Hmong boys were chasing a rooster—the car slowed just enough not to kill them, then speeded up again. They were blithely unaware that death had come so close. Nearly snatched them away. Abducted them.
He thought of his sister. The guilt was a burn on his brain, an ugly scar, never properly healed. He thought of his mother, and his sister, and their deaths: and the absence of femininity in his life.
Living his life was like living in a jail, like being in the army. Everything was crudely masculine. It was all beers and jokes and danger and ambition and cynical laughter with Tyrone. So maybe he needed something different, something feminine, something gracious? The idea was absurdly premature, but something in him already craved the elegant, mesmeric, intelligent femininity of this strong, resourceful Khmer girl; to fill the hole in his life, the bomb crater of the past, the sense of emptiness.
Alternatively, maybe he just didn’t know what he wanted.
They were headed deeper into the rough. The pitted and shallow hills where the lethal golden “bombies” slept, unexploded, beneath the pine trees: like fallen Christmas baubles of death.
“All my life,” Jake said at last, “I’ve wanted danger and risk. The adventure. And yes, the story.”
“But why? What, ah, motivates that?”
Her gaze was shrewd, even knowing. Jake now felt an enormous urge to confess: just get it out, cough it, purge the pain. Puke up the poison like when he was a teenager, drinking too much, drinking the pain away, with the room spinning: best to go and throw up.
“My sister died when she was five. Run over.”
“God. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that. Everyone says that, it’s bollocks.”
“OK. OK. And?”
“My mum was more broken than any of us. She was Irish, Irish Catholic. Devout. Before it happened. You know. Then Rebecca was killed and she just fell apart. Mum lost her faith. Stopped going to church. Then she stopped going anywhere. She…” He found it hard to say; he said it. “She changed. When I was about nine years old, she abandoned us, me and my brother, and my dad. Overnight. She never even said goodbye. She just walked out one night.”
“Jake. Ah. God. That’s awful.”
“She died of cancer ten years later. We were only informed when the police came to tell us. They took us to the hospital. We never knew she was living alone, in a different city.”
Chemda’s face was framed by the placid green hills beyond.
“In the end I just quit the UK. Just wanted to go anywhere else. Take risks. I didn’t care. Did lots of drugs, nearly killed myself.”
“So it was nihilistic. Your reaction?”
“Yep. Drink, coke, drunken rock climbing, you name it, I did it all. And then, eventually, photography. That was my solution. I wanted to do a job that entailed risk, you know? Because … when I was in danger I didn’t feel so sad, I just felt scared. And I had a job, an excuse, a purpose. It wasn’t just drugs. So I went to Africa, southern Russia, looking for action, seeking the work.”
“But you didn’t get the story?”
“Not anything amazing. There are a lot of guys—and girls—out there doing what I do. Lunatic photographers. Most of them are better than me. At least I can write a bit, so I can work on my own if I need to—but these guys are better photographers than me and—” He looked at her, he looked beyond her, at a flat blue lake surrounded by bushes with blue flowers and teak houses pillared by bombs. “And some of these guys are even more fucked than me. They will do anything. They don’t care. Really. They are broken. Damaged. Flawed. Junkies of one sort or another. Sometimes just basic junkies, heroin addicts. At least I managed to stop the drugs. I did a deal with Fate. I said, Just let me keep the booze, something to kill the guilt and grief—I’ll quit everything else. So that’s how I have survived my family. Now I stay cheerful. Sort of. When I’m not being threatened by cops.”
There. It was done. He’d said it. He had confessed. He felt a kind of lightness, his spirit unburdened; like he was on a better and smaller world, where the gravity was less punishing.
“And you?” he said. “Chemda? Why are you taking this risk?”
She was quiet again. Pensive. He didn’t know whether to insist, so he stared ahead at the track, at the widening landscape.
All around them stretched the plain. In the bright, harsh sun, the scenery had an astringent beauty: flat, whispering lakes, groves of silent bamboo, docile parades of brown cattle pursued by bored-looking boys with willow sticks and, in the distance, modest green hills.
Even from ten kilometers away, Jake could see the hills were marked by the smallpox of bomb craters, regular indentations of shaded circles. This region really had been bombed to fuck, as Tyrone put it, and now it was like a landscape that had survived death, a land in traction, floating on its memories of pain—but alive. Even the landscape was a survivor.
Chemda inhaled and said, “As you know
, my grandmother was killed by the Khmer Rouge, probably somewhere around here, in the Plain of Jars. Somehow she was killed. Maybe UXO.” Chemda hesitated, and then added: “But I don’t know, just don’t know. And that, Jake, is the real cancer in Cambodia’s past. Not knowing. Ah. I just know she is not here, no one is here, they all disappeared, got swallowed up. Dissolved. Maybe she wasn’t even blown up … maybe she just did her job and then they got back to Phnom Penh and Angkar, the Organization, the KR, they took her to Cheung Ek and smashed the back of her head with an iron bar. Because that’s how they killed, Jake, they didn’t even waste bullets—they just crushed heads with car axles and cudgels … two million heads. Babies or children they smashed to death against trees. Smashing babies against trees.”
Her voice was dry, faltering; for the first time it was breaking: her demure composure was gone. She shut her brown eyes and opened them and shook her head and she was quiet, and then she said: “How can you do that? How could anyone do that? They weren’t even doing it to the enemy. They were killing their own people. Smashing their own babies. So I want to know what happened to my grandmother and, ah, ah, all the rest of my family. Because: if I can find that out, maybe I can understand what happened to my country.” She stopped short, then spoke again: “The third jar site is over there. The red-and-white blocks are MAG warnings, Mines Advisory Group; warnings not to walk beyond the blocks. They mean the fields beyond are uncleared. One misstep and—bang.”
Jake stared. The pretty green meadow, just visible through the trees, was scattered with large stone jars. That was the only word for them—enormous jars—carved from old and coarse gray stone.
“Tou,” said Chemda, leaning forward and tapping the lad on the shoulder. “Where is this jar site the Khmer Rouge discovered? How far?”
“Not so far,” Tou said. “Jar Site Nine, is called. But very, very difficult road. Two hour. Maybe three? Only site left, not touch.”