by Knox, Tom
He shook his head, revolted and disgusted, watching the watermen on the river speeding past in their long-tailed boats, churning the chocolate-milk water.
“They are miscarried fetuses. Mummified?”
“Yes. But sometimes they can be worse than that. I suspect the kratha in our rooms are even more evil.”
“Worse? How could they be any worse?”
“The babies in our rooms … ah, I don’t know for sure, but my guess is they aren’t just miscarried fetuses.” She gazed away at the river, torpid and decaying; “I think the ones in our rooms were the worst of all. Even worse than the ghost children. You saw the maid’s reaction. Pure horror.”
“So? What are they?”
“What we saw, hanging from the door, was probably kun krak. Smoke babies. They are babies that have been…” She blinked, twice, and then again. “Ripped out of a woman’s living womb, then doused in some kind of sacred oil, then smoked over a fire. Some call them kuk krun. Well-done babies.”
She paused. Jake gazed between the papayas and the jackfruit, trying not to dwell on this truly appalling information. Murdered babies of a murdered woman; fetuses anointed and smoked.
“Sweet fucking Jesus.” His voice was choked.
Chemda’s eyes were moist and shy. “The fact that someone put them in … my room, our rooms, means someone wants us out. It is a direct and devilish threat, Jake. Designed to unnerve. And I am unnerved. The smoke babies. It scares me. Ah.”
He regained himself. Angrily.
“But Chemda. You’re a Californian, right? You went to UCLA. You know it’s all bollocks. This is just, just voodoo. Juju dolls, dead chickens, zombies. It means nothing—”
“I can’t help it. I believe it, Jake. Somewhere inside I do fear it, horribly; it’s part of my root culture. Maybe more than that; maybe it’s genetic. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t help it. Ah. Can’t help it.”
This was the closest she had come to breaking. So far, Chemda had been relatively unfazed by the bloody death of Doctor Samnang; she had been determined, and decisive, when they were fleeing the police at Site 9; she had arranged their escape from the Secret City with a valiant coolness bordering on sangfroid; but a brief if chilling encounter with black magic—that had thrown her.
But if Jake was honest with himself, it had also thrown him. Like someone were taunting him with his worst fears and guilt. The little dead child, eyes rolled and white.
Trying to void his mind of this revenant image, he looked around—Agnès Marconnet was standing, once more, at the edge of the riverside lawn, anxiously gazing their way. The hotel owner had been in a state of anguished nerves ever since the ghastly discovery, apologizing and speculating. Who had put these hideous things in the room. Mais pourquoi…. C’est pas croyable…. Mes propres employés? Je suis vraiment désolé….
But as he stared, Jake also became aware, through the screen of trees at the edge of the garden, of a police car, parked on the road that concluded at the Gauguin. A police car? When did that arrive? A few minutes ago? What was the policeman doing inside? Talking on his radio? To whom?
“OK. Fuck this. Superstition or not, Chemda, we need to go, now. Look!”
He tilted his head, significantly. Chemda squinted at the police car.
“How long has he been there?”
“Who knows. Maybe someone called them, about the … talismans. C’mon, we need to go.”
“But where? The roads, they are so long, and so bad. It will take two or three days. We cannot fly out.”
“Just grab the bags.”
Their luggage was still stacked at the rear of the hotel, in a pile, on a cart. A melancholy brace of tiny rucksacks, dirty and ragged. They had been left there as if their stay was expected to be brief. Jake turned at a noise. The policeman was stepping out of the car. The door of his Toyota closed. A two-way radio crackled.
The cop was walking to the hotel door. He was knocking at the door; he was talking to someone there.
They stood in the garden, screened by the trees—but paralyzed. There was no way out of the hotel now. Indeed, a second police car was sliding down the narrow road, lights flashing, pointlessly, in the tropical sunlight.
Agnès emerged. Her voice was tremulous. She stammered, for a minute, in French, gazing at Chemda.
Chemda explained.
“She says someone called the police, about the … kratha. She doesn’t know who. A maid, maybe. She says her husband is holding the police at the door, but they will force their way in if necessary—”
“So we’re screwed.”
“No.” Chemda looked at Agnès—and Agnès nodded. “There’s one other way, a path, down here, by the river, it leads around the wat, we can evade the police…”
Despair filled Jake’s thoughts. The idea was feeble. The path would still lead them back into Luang Prabang; but Jake also realized they had no choice.
“OK. The rucksacks.”
They snatched their bags, Chemda whispered a goodbye to Agnès, and then the two of them fled through the tamarinds, slipping into the cooler shadows, running down the lawn. As the garden approached the river, the lawn sloped, more severely, until it became a very serious incline. They were half scrambling, half crawling, almost rappelling to freedom.
Freedom? Jake winced at the idea. This wasn’t an escape to freedom, this was fucking futile. The riverside path would get them away from the hotel, around the police, but it would lead them straight back to town, emerging onto a main street, dirty and conspicuous, where they would immediately be spotted and arrested.
The riverside path led on, past the pier where the fishermen darned their nets in the sunshine. Jake stared.
The river. The pier. The river.
He gazed at the long-tailed boats. The sun of an idea dazzled on the Mekong’s dark ripples.
“Chemda. Stop!”
She was three meters in front of him, hurrying along. She turned.
He snapped, “How about the river? Doesn’t it go to Thailand? Eventually?”
Her face darkened—and then it brightened, a fraction.
“It does … Ah, yes, yes, it does!”
“So we get a boat. Right away. Hire one. Anything!”
The two of them hurried onto the wooden jetty. A few more boatmen were gathered at the very end, in the shade of a palm-roofed shelter, playing dice, some bare-chested, some barefoot, some laughing. Chemda walked straight up and talked urgently with one of the men, in Khmer, or Lao, in some language—yet another language Jake did not understand. His sense of isolation intensified. He was so foreign here; indeed, he was beyond foreign, he was like a different species. Chemda seemed excited, as well as frightened: she turned and interpreted.
“This man, Pang”—she indicated the wiriest of the boatmen—“he knows Agnès. And he knows a place, a day upriver. He can take us past Pak Beng. It’s wilderness up there. After that we can just walk into Thailand. Then, at last, we are out of Laos. Then we fly to PP from Chiang Rai.”
Jake glanced at Pang. He was an old Laotian man dressed in faded denim shorts and a Manchester United shirt. He was the pilot of this small, narrow riverboat, a pirogue. He smiled. He seemed trustworthy. Jake wondered at his own fatuous speculations. What choice did they have, anyhow? The police might be searching the gardens this minute. Then they would hunt along the riverbank.
Bags were flung, and thumped. Chemda hurried down the wooden ladder and into the wobbling boat. Pang was silent. Everyone was quite silent. No one spoke about the smoke babies, the well-done babies, the ghost children, hanging from the rafters. White-eyed. Jake couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Who had hung them there? Who was doing all this, trying to frighten them away?
The mighty river beckoned, implacable and unanswering. Swiftly he climbed into the boat, following Chemda aboard. Pang was already at the engine. Then Pang yanked the outboard into life and they pushed out from the shore, against the slowly surging waters, constantly fleeing the
ir own tail plume of muddy water.
The staggered white stupas and golden wats of Luang, framed by the banana-tree green of Mount Phousi, receded at last. Jake watched the city of incense disappear behind them. He was very glad to leave, yet he knew he wasn’t really escaping. How could you escape your own memories? New memories or old, they stayed with you, forever.
The Mekong was apathetically vast. Broad and slow and wide. For the first few miles they had the unsettling company of tourist boats drifting lazily downstream, full of Western and Chinese tourists in ungainly shorts waving at them like kids; Jake cursed them and wished them away. Sometimes speedboats accelerated past, rocking them with backwash, trailing gauzy isadoras of blue diesel exhaust and making Jake think they were going to be surrounded and arrested.
But within an hour they were virtually alone. And the loneliness was possibly worse than the traffic. They were scarily alone, deep in the jungled upper reaches of the Lao Mekong.
Bamboo reeds bent in the breeze, silent red petals fell on milky-brown water. River birds flew overhead. Wild lychees, black herons, silence.
Occasionally they passed a little tribal village, lost in the jungle, where naked, dirty children ran down to the shoreline brandishing small, crude carved wooden dolls, desperately shouting, almost hysterical.
“Souvenirs,” said Chemda. “Sometimes tourist boats get this far, and they buy crafts from the villages. Otherwise these people live on nothing. Fruit from the forest. Monkey meat. Ah. Desperate conditions.”
In another village an old tribeswoman was sitting on a log, her withered breasts quite bare: the woman looked and smiled, and Jake felt the electricity of shock. Her mouth was full of blood. She was smiling and her mouth was full of blood. Then he realized: she was chewing betel nuts. The woman smiled her lurid scarlet smile.
The boat slid from one empty shore to another, avoiding mud slopes and rapids, ducking under bamboo overhangs. Water snakes slid beneath the boat, sinister sine waves of yellow. At one point they turned a grandiose bend in the river and Jake saw a huge cave: in its dark recesses glittered a hundred or a thousand little smirking Buddhas, gold and silver statues sitting on rocks and sand. There were boats tethered here. Pilgrims?
“Sacred caves,” said Chemda.
The sun was wearyingly hot, an enemy, ogling them. Jake felt increasingly ill at ease, once again. Were they being followed? Every so often he looked back, but the torpid waters stretched to a horizon framed by banana trees and bending palms and nothing else.
Pang the boatman was silent as the river. He was old, yet tough and wiry: one of those East Asians who looked like he could never die. Smoked by age and sun. Kippered. He smiled sometimes, but said nothing.
Chemda had, it seemed, fully recovered her wits. She wanted to talk. She was trying to explain Khmer culture to Jake, its superstitions and legends.
“Some people believe there is a particular darkness in the Khmer.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s difficult to explain it concisely. But here is an example: kum.”
“OK.”
“Kum is the desire to take revenge, a typically Khmer desire to do down your enemy. Ah. To crush him, over many years.”
“Like a vendetta.”
“Yes, but also no. Vendetta is just eye for an eye, isn’t it, you kill mine and I kill yours; kum is even more deadly—but no, deadly isn’t right.” She stared at the riverbank, where an egret sat on a branch. “Kum is more … satanic. Kum means the desire to take, ah, disproportionate revenge.”
“How?”
“Brutally. If someone hurts you, he becomes an enemy, a soek, and you must take revenge, sangsoek. But the principle of kum means you must hurt him ten times over in return. If someone rapes your sister, you must kill his sister and his brother and kill his father and his mother. Kill everyone.”
Jake sensed the proximity of personal grief. He was quiet. Then she continued, her noble profile framed by the troubling green jungle and the painful blue sky:
“The legend is that the Khmers adopted Buddhism, the most peaceful of religions, because it put a restraint on kum. And that”—she leaned out of the boat and trailed delicate fingers in the water—“that is why communism was so particularly vicious in Cambodia.”
“Explain?”
“The Khmer Rouge took away the constraints of Buddhism. They burned down the temples, tortured and slaughtered the monks. They tried to murder God. And the result…” She shrugged, and winced. “Was the killing fields. The nihilistic brutality of the killing fields. Because if you take away the Khmers’ religion, we are just left with kum—plus tyranny.”
Chemda withdrew her hand from the river abruptly, as if she feared it might be bitten. “And then again, sometimes I think that maybe we are still a cursed people.” She gazed into the mirroring waters. “Ah. Lacking something, lacking humanity. Maybe we are still the Black Khmer. Steeped in blood.”
The boat was slowing. Jake turned: they were approaching a larger village, with a pier and stores and one or two fishing skiffs, a place where village children played in clothes, rather than shrieking and naked.
“Pak Beng. We can stop for water, briefly, it is surely safe here. No one comes here. Then we have another few hours and we can get to Thailand. I hope.”
They tethered the boat. Jake stepped ashore and grabbed a warm cola from a man running a stall in the village. He had one eye and one arm and one leg, and a full set of grinning white teeth.
Jake returned to the boat. He didn’t feel refreshed, he felt utterly exhausted and still very hunted. The sun was so ferociously, predatingly hot; even the cooling river breeze did not help as they motored slowly upstream. The silence of the river and the memory of the smoke baby, hanging from the door, weighed on him, like oppressive humidity before a storm. He wanted to talk. He didn’t know what to say. Chemda spoke.
“Why do you feel guilt, about your family?”
It was one of her direct, even piercing questions.
He shied away from answering. “What do you mean by that?”
“When we were on the plain. You said…” She softened her voice, as if she knew her words might hurt him. “You said that you felt guilt, about surviving your family, or your mother and sister. Why?”
Again, something in Chemda seemed to invite the truth from him, and again he yearned to tell her everything; maybe because she had darkness in her past, too.
“When my sister was run over, I was … holding her hand. I was looking after her, but I was only seven, and she was five. Stupidly young. But I was still in charge, you know? And still I let go and, and, and she ran into the road.” He half-swallowed the rest of the story, eyes fixed on the walls of jungle imprisoning the river. “It was after that my mother fell apart, and then she walked out. Broken heart. I don’t know. But in my mind it was all my fault. If I hadn’t let go of Becky none of it would have happened. None of it. Kids blame themselves, don’t they? That’s what I did, and sometimes still do. When I’m not working. Or drinking. Or watching football. You know.”
The motor puttered as they curved another, tighter riverbend. Pang was staring rigidly ahead to where smooth rocks protruded from the brown-and-silver water.
“I have a photo. Of Rebecca. It’s the only thing I keep, the only bit of her left.”
Chemda said nothing. Instead she put her hand briefly on his, offering that tender electric shock. Then she sat back.
He reached for his rucksack, unzipped it, and took out his wallet. There. The photo. One of the first photos he had ever taken. Of his sister just before she died. He handed the little Polaroid to Chemda like he was trusting her with his most precious possession. A pathetic photo. By a seven-year-old. But it was precious: a photo taken by himself of his five-year-old sister, smiling her impish smile, wearing a hat three sizes too big. Laughing.
Chemda’s eyes moistened.
“She was … very pretty. I’m so sorry.”
Jake shrugged and took back the
photo and put it away. Carefully zipping it up safe.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m being a bit morbid. Keeping it all this time. But it’s my only purchase on the past. You understand?”
“Of course,” said Chemda. “Of course….”
He watched her as she gazed at the rippled water. Her expression was maudlin and quiet.
“Tell me about yourself, Chemda.”
“Yes?”
“Well, twenty-eight. Unmarried. Boyfriend?”
She faintly smiled his way. “I am a virgin….” A pause. She added, with a more sincere smile: “In Cambodia.”
He laughed, somewhat uncertainly.
She said, “It sounds absurd to talk about all this, now.”
“Hey. What else can we talk about?”
“OK. OK. How to put it? I was not quite so chaste in LA. There were lots of boys. The wrong kind of boys.” Her eyes met his. “The insecurity was appealing. I was always drawn to boys who wandered away, adventurers, boys who couldn’t be tied down. Probably because I didn’t want to be tied down. Ah. You have to remember, Khmer culture is quite conservative, girls are expected to marry young. My parents have seriously started to worry about me. Especially now I am over twenty-five…. Ah well.”
The river birds were swooping again, silver and blue, maybe some kind of kingfisher. They talked some more, but then the silence fell, and with it the fear returned—and then the oppressive heat drove them to separate corners of the boat.
Jake gargled horribly warm water from the dirty water bottle, then dipped a T-shirt in the river and draped its wetness over his broiling face.
The motor chirred. Wearied by his own anxiety, and the sadistic heat, Jake lay back against the uncomfortable planks of the pirogue, and almost immediately felt the mermaids of sleep dragging him under. Soft female arms pulling him down. And down. Into the darkness of sleep, with the murmuring bones.
When he woke, his watch showed three hours had gone by. Now Chemda was asleep. The sun was filtered by the riverside palm fronds. Twilight. Pang was gazing at him.
Pang said, “We are soon there. You and Chemda very tired, I think.”