by Knox, Tom
The road was, inconceivably, deteriorating: it was now little more than a linear stripe of mud, just coincidentally the width of a car. The jeep banged and jumped and rocked. Yeng hawked and laughed and talked in Hmong.
“I’ve seen the evidence. The pyramids of skulls,” said Jake. “At Cheung Ek.” He hesitated. Should he pry further? “Horrible. But … but all this must have happened before you were born?”
“Yes,” said Chemda calmly. “I only heard of it. My father never got over the genocide. He lost so many relatives. As, perhaps, you understand?”
“I understand.”
Jake knew what it was like for your family to disappear. To dissolve.
Chemda continued: “So my father died in California, years later. That was not suicide, strictly speaking. A broken heart, maybe. Many others in my family were killed by the Khmer Rouge. My surviving cousins and uncles won’t even talk about it. My mother is the same. It shattered us as a family. Ah. The only true survivor was my grandfather.”
She gazed his way, her eyes candid and searching, seeking maybe for some reassurance that he could be trusted with these truths.
He said, “Go on.”
“He is a powerful man, my grandfather. Sovirom Sen.”
“Sovirom Sen?” Jake had heard of him. A businessman. In Phnom Penh. Fiercely anti-Communist. Rich. Powerful. Connected. “He’s your grandfather?”
“He is my grandfather. He is the man the police spoke to in Ponsavan.”
“You said it was the UN.”
Chemda shook her head. “They tried the UN first, of course, but it was my grandfather who really pulled their stupid strings. Got us released. I didn’t want to say it out loud, at the police station, not so bluntly as that.”
It all made sense. Jake sat back. It made a lot of sense. That’s why Chemda felt able to take these risks. She had a powerful man in her family. That counted for a lot in Southeast Asia, a patriarchal culture. That was almost everything. Face and money and masculine power. Sovirom Sen. First name Sen, family name Sovirom, a regal name, a rich Cambodian name. Most Cambodian family names were short, perfunctory, monosyllabic; the rolling polysyllables of Sovirom meant money and class.
“He’s involved in import and export, right?”
Chemda shrugged. “Business with China. His family is … or we were … upper class. It sounds absurd but that is the case. We were friends of Prince Sihanouk. Nearly all the bourgeoisie and the upper classes were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge, as soon as they got the chance. But Grandfather didn’t die. He survived. I have always admired him for that, loved him.”
“So it was his idea you came here. To find out what happened to his wife?”
“No,” said Chemda. “It was my idea. But he was proud of me.”
Jake fell silent. The track was now so rough, so barely there, so narrow and unused, trees and bushes were reaching in through the windows, clawing. They all shut the windows; conversation was stifled by the crackle of the undergrowth, the squelch of the tires, the jerk of the car slapping from rut to rut, then up onto the rattling craquelure of sunbaked mud. He was still trying to solve the somber puzzle of Samnang’s murder: he didn’t believe Tou did it, not for a moment. The boy was incapable, he had no motive; but then, what? Who? Why?
“Here.”
They had emerged from the woodland onto another flat meadow. And there were the large stone jars, in direct view.
The jeep parked. Yeng climbed out, smiling proudly: pointing. Jake looked at the fields and the shining rice paddies stretching to hills; a water buffalo, tethered to a wild magnolia, stared back at them, pugnaciously bored.
“Is it safe?”
Tou nodded, leading the way. “No bomb here. Yeng say no bomb.” The young Hmong man was almost running. “The Khmer Rouge take most of the remain in other place, but here you can still see some. In here. And here. And here. Soon this will be gone. They want to destroy this. But they wait because Yeng say people come here, last year. Still looking. American.”
Jake stepped closer. “Sorry?”
“He say…” Tou turned to the Hmong man, whose dark face was lined with a smile. Tou repeated the question, and again Yeng gave his answer; then Tou interpreted: “Yeng say he was driver for them. Many days. He know the area, the bomb. So they hire him. Last year. American. Fishhook. Fishwork? Don’t know.”
“They came here to examine the jars.”
“Yes!” Tou said. “Last year. See. Here. Look. Yeng say this is what they find. And this is what I tell Mr. Samnang. He sad then, scared.”
He was pointing inside one of the nearest jars. The large, two-yard-high, very crudely carved vessels were made of some prickly stone, rough to the touch; Jake leaned over and stared into the fetid darkness of the jar indicated by Tou. His eyes adjusted.
Several human skulls stared back at him, sitting forlornly on the stone floor. Next to them lay a small pyre of burned bones, ribs or femurs, pelvic bones, maybe, with the appearance of old, charred wood.
The skulls had holes in them. Like the skulls at Cheung Ek, smashed by the cudgels of the Khmer Rouge. But the holes here were at the front, smaller. And of course the skulls were much, much older. Jake was no scientist, but he could tell these skulls were ancient—by the moldering. Yet they were also preserved somehow. By lids, maybe? Some of the jars had until recently possessed lids—he had read that. The lids may only have been wrenched away in the last few decades: by the Khmer Rouge, or by this mysterious American. Exposing the archaic remains within.
It was intriguing. But even so, these were just old bones and skulls. Why would the rediscovery of these bones provoke such emotion in Samnang, and how did it cause his murder?
Chemda was obviously working the same mystery. She was peering into the jars, talking quickly with Tou in English and French. Maybe Khmer. Jake couldn’t quite follow.
“Many people have speculated,” she said, coming over to Jake a little breathless. “Speculated that the jars were urns, funeral urns, for a civilization we do not understand, but this is nothing amazing. I don’t see why the Communists got so excited by this. Or Samnang. It merely proves an existing theory. Tou—Tou—” She swiveled on the young man. He was smiling shyly. Anxiously. In the silent countryside with the solitary water buffalo still gazing their way.
“Tou, ask Yeng what the Khmer Rouge found, why they were so drawn to this site—more than others?”
Tou shrugged. “I already know: I ask him that. He hear the American talking, he know some English.”
“So?”
“Thousand year ago. Many people here, Khmer people, Black Khmer. They have … much war, many killing, many war. And then … then they … suicide themselves, kill themself. And they put each other in the jar. Like tombs, hide themselves. Kill each other and burn the bone.”
Jake intervened. “How did they establish this? The Khmer Rouge? The American?”
Tou pouted his ignorance, then turned and asked in Khmer a question of the Hmong man—who was now glancing anxiously at the horizon. The old man shrugged and muttered. Tou interpreted.
“We not know. But he know the people in the jar were Khmer. And the hole in the head … the skulls. They were … in the story, I think. There is the Khmer curse…. The Black Khmer?”
Yeng interrupted, unprompted, gesturing and very agitated. There was a frown of genuine fear on his face. Jake turned.
Noises.
The silent countryside was silent no more. The trees bent, the sun glared, the noises grew. The water buffalo was straining at his tether. Loud car noises were coming toward them. Jake strained to see: then he saw. Rolling over a hill, maybe five kilometers away. Big white four by fours. Like the ones that had arrived at the hotel before dawn: dirty but new.
The police. Surely the police.
Tou said: “Now we run.”
7
The cold winds moaned and howled right outside Annika’s cottage. The sound was distressing, like anguished mothers were wandering along the derelict lan
es of Vayssières, crying at the ancient doors, searching for their murdered children. Here in the very middle of the Cham des Bondons.
This was Julia’s first visit to the Cham since she had been dismissed by Ghislaine last week. She was glad to be with Annika again, with her friend. Yet she was also, as always, unsettled by the surroundings. She couldn’t understand why Annika lived quite so close to the stones. The Cham was wonderfully atmospheric, but why choose to live in the only habitable cottage in an otherwise abandoned village?
It was just a little too eerie.
Annika was crossing the low-ceilinged living room, bearing a tray with a pot of tea.
“A habit I collected in China. Green tea. Cha!”
Julia’s friend was originally from Antwerp: she was a demure, wise, and graciously elegant sixty-two-year-old Belgian. So her mother tongue was Flemish, but her English was nearly as good as her French. Annika was also an archaeologist, although semiretired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.
Annika was graciously pouring the tea. Julia sat back and stared around the little cottage. She found her Belgian friend’s taste in decor consistently intriguing: the drawing, the paintings, the elegant sketches, the wistful etchings of winter scenes, of skaters and frozen lakes. Maybe from Belgium, or Holland.
Annika stood and returned to the kitchen to fetch some cake.
Taking advantage of the moment, Julia looked farther along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breughelish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet and the “sorcerer” of the Trois Frères. And there, on the far wall of the sitting room, a picture of the Hands of Gargas, from the Gargas cave in the mid-Pyrenees: stencils of hands made on cave walls by men, women, and children in the early Stone Age.
Sitting here in this weather-beaten cottage, aged thirty-three, Julia could still vividly recall the day she first saw the Hands of Gargas. In a way those hands were the reason she was here.
She was only fifteen when it had happened. As a special treat, as part of a long, unique holiday in France, her mother and father had taken her to see the great ancient caves of the Dordogne and the Lot, Lascaux and Cougnac, Rouffignac and Pech Merle, with their famous and glowing cave paintings.
There, confronted by these stunningly ancient tableaux—some painted twenty thousand, even thirty thousand years ago—Julia had almost cried, ravished by their primeval yet timeless loveliness.
But that was only the beginning. After the Dordogne they had driven south, to the Pyrenees, to go and look at Gargas. And the Hands. And where Cougnac and Pech Merle had delighted, the Hands of Gargas had troubled her, and truly moved her.
They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a Stone Age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia and placed their hands against the rock face and blown the pigment through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave—or so it was supposed by the experts—so the tiny infant hand could be stenciled alongside the adults’.
Why?
And why were so many of the hands disfigured? Julia had wondered about this then, even as she wondered about it now. Why the disfigurement? Fingers were severed or bent in most of the Hands of Gargas. No one knew the reason. Since the discovery of the cave in the nineteenth century, many theories had been provided for these “mutilated” hands—a hunting code, a disease, frostbite, a ritual and tribalistic disfigurement—yet none of them really fitted.
The mystery was everlasting. Painfully unanswered.
It was, therefore, the Hands that had decided Julia’s fate. Standing in Gargas feeling giddy and awkward and flustered and adolescently attracted to the young French student who was their guide, Julia had resolved—there and then—to make these precious subterranean cloisters her world. At that moment she had resolved to study prehistory; and then to become an archaeologist.
To solve the puzzles.
At first her parents had been pleased by her impetuous decision: their precious daughter had a charming vocation! But when the mid-teen ideal evolved into late-teen reality, those familial attitudes had changed. First she’d shocked Mom and Dad with her decision to leave not just Michigan but the country: she wanted to study at McGill in Montreal. This was partly, as she had patiently explained to them, because McGill had a great archaeology department. Also, living in Quebec, she could learn to speak French, by immersion, by actually living with French-speakers: something she really desired.
But there had been other reasons for her decision that she had not explained. Barely hidden inside her was a simple yearning to go somewhere different, somewhere real, somewhere with history and culture and a European flavor—just somewhere with flavor—to get away from the stifling, boring flatness of the Midwest, the boring snowy no man’s land on the border, the bored kids doing boring meth in the boring mall next to Meijer’s. And there was one further memory of Michigan she couldn’t bring herself to address: yet it, too, chased her away.
And so she had done it: she’d moved to Montreal and a freezing apartment in a handsome city where fat Americans spoke French and ate fries with curd.
The memories faded, just for a moment. Julia stared up at the Hands of Gargas. Apologetic, tragic, mutilated. Full of remorse. And then again her mind flicked back, through the mental photos: to that day she left Montreal—for London.
If their daughter’s quitting Michigan had been troubling for her parents, her decision to quit North America entirely, to do her PhD in London, had been bitter. Then the remorse had really kicked in, the guilt of an only child entirely deserting her family and pursuing a career—instead of giving them grandchildren.
To compound Julia’s growing sense of error, her subsequent career had begun to disappoint, it had all trailed off into a mediocre teaching job at a mediocre London college. Soon after that, the weekly transatlantic phone calls from her beloved mother and father had become an unspoken ordeal, a silent yet insidious reproach: No, I am not coming home; Yes, I am still “just teaching”; No, I haven’t got a fiancé; No, there is no prospect of grandchildren. Goodbye, Dad, goodbye, Mom.
Goodbye.
Julia sighed and shook her head.
Annika set a plate of sweet cakes on the table; she was speaking.
“You must understand Ghislaine, he is a disappointed man. A very disappointed man, but determined, too.”
Julia knew that Annika and Ghislaine went way back. They were the same age. They had been friends, apparently, for decades. Annika had worked under the ludicrous Ghislaine since the 1970s, across France, now in Lozère.
She leaned forward.
“Annika, do you mind if I ask a personal question?”
The older woman shrugged in a neutral way and pulled her gray cashmere cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders. “Not at all. You have told me all of your life! Why not ask me about mine?”
“Were you and Ghislaine … were you…”
“Lovers. Yes.”
“In Paris?”
“In 1969. We shared political ideals. We were at the Sorbonne together. We learned Maoism together! We even went to China together in the early seventies. Hence, Julia, the tea.” Annika puckered her slightly overlipsticked lips to take a hot sip, then she set down the handleless porcelain cup.
“So?”
“Do not blame him, Julia, for the way he acts and is. He has … beliefs, even now. Beliefs that brought him here. And me. There was a time we shared ideals as well as kisses, and we were both interested in the caves, in prehistory. Archaeology.” The two women simultaneously looked at the wall pictures, the cascading lions of Chauvet.
“Of course, we are no longer together now. We do not share kisses.” The smile was brief and unmirthful. “But we are still friends, after a fashion.
À la mode. I will not betray him. He is a sad man, conflicted. And he has his family name.”
Julia was bewildered.
“Why won’t he take my find seriously?”
“What makes you think he doesn’t take it seriously?”
“The way he just dismissed me! Sacked me!”
Annika squinted at Julia, then she looked out the window, where the wind was searching among the stones, lamenting its widowhood. “He wouldn’t do that lightly.”
“Why?”
“Think, Julia. Think.” Her older eyes assessed the younger woman for a moment. Then she continued: “You do know he is attracted to you, yes?”
“Sorry?”
Her friend sighed, quite patiently. “He may seem older to you, but he is a lover of beauty.” Her smile was sad. “Youthful beauty…. I know him, Julia, I saw the way he reacted, when he first met you. And you were blithely unaware of this?” A shake of the head. “You are one of those women, if I might say so, Julia, that does not realize her own attractiveness to men. This is true, isn’t it? Mmm? Yet your blue eyes, the blond hair, the blond hair you always keep tied back—”
“No. Annika, really, it’s idiotic. No.” Julia was blushing fiercely. And yet a thought was also tugging at her: the way Ghislaine had approached down the cave, like an attacker, like a man intent on … No, she chided herself, this was absurd. Not all men are like that.
She sat forward, seeking answers.
“Annika, even if it’s true, what’s the relevance? What’s any of that got to do with my dismissal, for God’s sake?”
“What I’m trying to say is he … liked you.” She lifted a hand. “Please. It is true. But he is also professional. He sincerely admires you as an archaeologist, that’s why he hired you. And for all these reasons, he would not dismiss you summarily. No.”
The picture clouded. “But then, why do it?”
“Perhaps he takes your find very seriously. Too seriously. And remember, he is conflicted.”
Julia could only feel lost.
“There are many mysteries in Ghislaine’s past. But it is not for me to reveal, not for me to shine the lamp on the cavern wall. But do not think less of yourself. That is all.”