by Tom Knox
The next morning was wet and dreich, the sky a true Parisian grisaille. Julia didn’t feel like doing anything or going anywhere. The puzzle wasn’t even half solved. And she felt desolate. Emptied. Unsatisfied. She sat down on the sofa and stared at nothing and didn’t even eat breakfast. Finally, she retreated to her laptop. Research. She had nothing else to do. She was a scientist. She could research.
But there was almost nothing to go on, just her own hunches and guesswork and wildly ambitious intuitions and she was frankly bored with them. How about hard facts?
The one fact she had was this essay title, and the name of the obscure magazine. The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. The magazine was long defunct, just as some of its editions had disappeared this earth – but maybe she could find more about the magazine itself.
An hour of furious keytapping gave her an answer. One of the editors of the journal was mentioned in another obscure journal mentioned in the footnotes of another French government website. The trail of connections was flimsy and attenuated, like gossamer; Julia had the strange idea she was grasping at a cobweb, a network of ephemerality that could disappear with a single, too-eager touch. But a network of connections, nonetheless.
The name of this editor was intriguing. He was called Sergei Yakulovich; and he was apparently a senior editor of The Journal of French Anthropogenesis when Ghislaine submitted his essay.
And who was Sergei Yakulovich? The name was Russian.
The same website which gave her a brief but piercingly relevant biography.
Sergei Yakulovich: a Soviet primatologist who for many years studied at the Lomonosov State University, specializing in the relationship of human brains to primate brains.
Julia’s eyes were alive with excitement.
There was more:
Since 1979 Sergei Yakulovich has been director of the Centre for Primate Research in Abkhazia, Georgia; controversially, the centre is still best known for its experiments into cross breeding between primates and homo sapiens.
The revelation was a physical sensation, a slap across the face. This guy was running a centre that still did research into crossbreeding. Between men and animals. The old editor of the magazine that published Ghislaine’s essay was still alive. Still out there. Still working. Still contactable. In Abkhazia, in the insurrectionist wilds on the periphery of the broken Soviet Union, by the Black Sea.
Julia’s troubled and excited mind flew across the world to this place, She tried to imagine it; she failed. She looked back at the screen. The website even gave an email, for Sergei Yakulovich.
In Abkhazia!
She knew she was going to contact him. As soon as possible. Because: Maybe he had a copy of the essay? Maybe he knew all the answers? And his career – primate and animal hybridization – fitted the features of the puzzle too well, it had to be relevant.
But she also had to be clever. She couldn’t just email and ask this Yakulovich guy straight out. Maybe if she did that, he would say nothing, pull down the shutters, thwart her one viable route through the maze. So maybe she could even go there. To Abkhazia? Why not? She just about had the money and she certainly had the time – and maybe she had the ambition. And she literally had nothing else to do; the idea of now going home to London, retreating to teaching and winter and the quotidian pointlessness of her failing career seemed ludicrous. Not after all this.
Alex wandered into the room. He was munching a croissant and carrying an unread copy of Le Monde.
‘Morning sweetheart?’
‘Morning,’ she said.
‘Hey. Are you OK?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, sure, yes.’
As she watched him sit and not really read the paper, she knew her answer: she was probably going to do all this alone. She’d had enough of men patronizing her. Her father. Her boss in London. Even Alex was embarrassed by her wild ideas; even Rouvier was very charmingly unpersuaded. All the men in her life from her dad to Ghislaine to Alex, they had all been somehow condescending. Now she would show them all: prove her theory. Earn and demand their respect.
‘Shall I make some more coffee?’ said Alex.
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Coffee would be good.’
Chapter 26
He didn’t dare look down. He didn’t want to look across, or behind him, or anywhere. He could feel the silt, or maybe something less acceptable, between his toes. A cold persistent breeze froze into him. Moonlight sheened the waveless water, silhouetting the black dead trees against the deadening silver.
The Butcher’s Lake. They were a third of the way across, already it was long past midnight.
‘Here.’
He reached a hand for Chemda, she had slipped in the rotting mud.
‘Thanks –’
Jake hauled her up onto a kind of island, with its one requisite black spar of dead tree. A large white nightbird, alarmed by their arrival, flapped away into the depths of sky, towards the silent tropical stars. The whiteness of the beating wings dwindled into dark.
Rittisak glanced back at his charges, as they squatted on the mudbank, regaining some energy. His dark face in the gloomy moonlight had a primitive quality.
‘It’s taken us two hours already,’ Jake said to the Khmer, who shrugged. ‘How much longer?’
‘No English, no English.’
He pointed to his wrist, where a watch might be, if he hadn’t taken it off. ‘I said . . .’
But he said nothing: he gave up. He turned to Chemda to translate. She was barefoot and smeared with mud to the knee, Jake was likewise muddied to the shoulder: he had already slipped over once as they tried to ford the expanse of water: nearly collapsing into deeper greyness, splashing noisily, making the nightbirds clack and disperse in agitation, making Rittisak frown and put an urgent finger to his elegant Khmer lips: shhhhh!
At Jake’s request, Chemda translated. Rittisak answered. She translated again.
‘Just another three hours, ah, more or less. He says the next bit is the worst . . . then it should get easier, shallower I think.’
They rose and slid down the mud of the islet shore, and Jake girded himself for his semi-submersion. The cold cringed into his ankles, with a sensation of sickliness, like a sudden gangrene. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, this definite feeling of viscosity to the water, this cold and unpalatable oiliness. Perhaps he was just spooked by those stories of bodies dumped here, drowned here, the Butcher’s Thousands, cached underwater, like Ta Mok had been some kind of human crocodile: storing food.
The tiredness washed over him as they followed Rittisak’s delicate path, picking the shallowest route through the deceptive waters, the chilling wide swamps. He gazed, half-dreaming, at these strange black and white nightbirds, raptors, vulturesque, posed on so many trees. Did they feed off the corpse: is that why they roosted here?
Chemda slipped again, he reached out and steadied her. He wondered if he loved her.
The trudge continued. It was a hypnotically repetitive process: wait for Rittisak to seek his path through the quagmire, then follow his footsteps exactly, then lean against a poisoned tree, then turn, and make sure Chemda is OK.
Then repeat.
They were halfway across now. When he leaned against the next dead tree Jake looked behind, and squinted in the moon-tarnished darkness; he could see Ta Mok’s house, back there, on the dry ground. What must the Butcher have felt? Sitting there in his concrete villa with the stupid paintings, looking at this Reservoir of Death that he had decreed? Where the black ospreys fed on the fish and the flesh, carrying the carrion of his victims to the distant kapoks on the Dangrek Escarpment?
A sliver of wind goosefleshed the water around him. Another bird streaked the bleak whiteness of the moon, then disappeared.
It was three or four a.m. But was it really three or four a.m.? How long to dawn? Was that the first skein of silvery blue on the far horizon? Maybe it was just some dismal Cambodian town staining the sky with its naked lights hung on stark concrete poles.
Rittisak was talking and pointing. Chemda came up close and held Jake’s muddy hand as she listened. She explained:
‘Says it’s, ah, the last kilometre, we go that way, then we can climb the hills – some of this is deep – we need to be careful. But we are nearly there.’
Nearly there, they had nearly made it. Jake’s spirits surged with hope as they waded the greasy cold water. Soon they would be climbing up the hills, then they could rest in the dry warm shelter of the forest, then it was an easy slip across the border, and then: safety! After all the terrors came Thailand. And trains and telephones and a talk with Tyrone. Jake yearned to be in Thailand, to be in a country that was not haunted by two million ghosts, a country that wasn’t one giant neak ta, one giant spirit house, with more spectres than citizens.
The waters oiled between his legs, making a silver and rainbowy coil in the moonshine. Jake stared down, absorbed.
A face was staring up at him.
He lurched, swayed. And reached out a hand for a branch of black wood.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’
He lied. He was sure he’d seen a face, a kind of face, a skull, a skull with flesh on, bobbing momentarily. Or had he? Jake had no time to sort the nightmares from reality. It was all a nightmare. Now he could hear a fat sudden noise behind him. A splashing angry noise, coming close. The trees were denser here, the moon was partly clouded, the light was so poor: was it someone pursuing them, or some animal?
He didn’t know who panicked first. Chemda maybe, maybe even Rittisak. But they panicked, all three of them. From the obedient procession of the last four hours, suddenly they were all running, or trying to run, wading the waters of a childhood nightmare, unable to progress, yet still running, slipping, gasping.
‘I’m stuck!’
He reached behind and grasped her hand, and tugged; the ooze clutched at her, lecherously; but then the mud yielded – and she was free, and shuddering, and waving him on. The splashing behind them was louder. They struggled forward. But now, all around them, the water was roiled, like a saucepan coming to the boil.
With a scum floating on the surface.
Jake fought his urge to give up, to go back, to do anything but this. Chased by the splashing, they were wading through bodies, or at least floating bones. Shin bones. Human arms and femurs. The lake was brimming with dismembered cadavers, floating like sad and small grey logs, brought to the surface by the disturbance.
The victims of Ta Mok.
The smell was an abomination. No wonder the night birds roosted here: the shrikes and the ravens. Black ospreys. Fish vultures. Butcherbirds. Despair and denial mixed with Jake’s revulsion, and his fear, but they had to keep wading, escaping whatever pursued them.
And now the moon shone down – on a tiny ripple of hope. Jake squinted, and yearned. They were nearly there: the hapless attempt at a shoreline where the artificial lake met the artificial beach; Rittisak was already up on the shore, reaching out; Jake caught the hand and was assisted on to dry land; behind him, Chemda raced up, spitting and shiver ing. She squatted on the black soil and she swivelled.
The moon broke the clouds, once more, revealing their pursuer: just a water buffalo. Halted angrily in the water, amidst the floating bones. A grey image in the lighter greyness.
Rittisak clapped his hands, the buffalo snorted, contemptuously, then turned and waded away.
For a moment they sat panting, and trembling, and rubbing the mud from their hands and feet as best they could, using leaves and ferns. They all coughed the filthy water from their mouths. Still no one spoke. A religious silence ruled. Maybe, Jake thought, what they had witnessed was beyond conversation, simply too harrowing to discuss. Maybe no one would mention this ever again. Not to anyone, not to each other, not for as long as they breathed.
‘Climb,’ said Chemda. ‘We have to climb.’
Chapter 27
‘Let’s go.’
The climb began. It was sharp and prickly, but it was dry, and better than their ghastly course across the Butcher’s reservoir. Roots ripped his hands. Chemda held on to Jake’s arms, Rittisak was a sherpa of nimbleness, choosing rocks as footholds, helping them up, adeptly pointing at branches they could use to ascend. Jake wondered why Rittisak was so assiduous in his assistance: the villagers here were much friendlier than so many other places. Maybe they just hated authority, like Chemda said: and a couple of outlaws, like he and Chemda, appealed to their rebel spirit.
Ten strenuous and sweaty minutes later they were on top of the cliff, near a concrete shack. The moon shone on more dead trees, burned trees; maybe slashed and burned by the swidden farmers. There was a definite sense of dawn in the air, a virginal stirring, as birds timidly chirruped.
Jake said:
‘We need to rest a few hours. Chemda. Tell Rittisak?’
The two Khmers spoke Khmer. Jake saw Rittisak shrug, uncomfortably – then accede. OK. Sleep here. Jake dossed down at once – right inside the fetid concrete shack. His rucksack was a pillow and Chemda lay beside him and sleep came at once, like a Mafia kidnapper, hooding him brutally. Darkness.
He didn’t care. He slept and he dreamed as he knew he would dream: he dreamed of bodies and faces drowned underwater, he dreamed of his mother like a mermaid, his sister too, the lost women underwater, sighing and singing, sirenic, disinterred, waving their pale limbs, beckoning.
He woke to blazing patches of sun on the ground, shaped by the small concrete windows. Eight a.m. maybe. Jake suppressed his shivers of simultaneous heat and cold. And then the juddering memory of the lake returned, and his anxieties spiralled. He felt feverish. Could this get any worse? What was happening to him?
The chilly possibility slit open his thoughts even as he rubbed morning air into his exhausted face. The possibility he had been ignoring for days – yet not quite avoiding. Was he cursed? Had he been cursed by the spider witch?
This was certainly ridiculous. He was a rationalist, a materialist, the most convinced of atheists. He wasn’t scared of death, of ghosts, of vampires or God or gravestones or Hell. He despised and rejected the absurd and clattering parade of human religion and superstition.
And yet despite his anger, he couldn’t wipe away the sensation, the creeping and ridiculous idea. That ghastly witch, the nouveau crone in her sequinned turquoise jumper, with the black spider excrement in her chewing black mouth, maybe she really had done it: cursed him, cast a terrible spell.
The sun shone brightly through the little window.
Chemda was awake. She was standing and dressed, and listening to Rittisak. He was talking quickly in Khmer – and his utterance made her blanch, visibly.
‘Pol Pot’s house,’ she said, and her face was trembling. ‘My God, we are in Pol Pot’s old house. Where he spent his last years. Sometimes tourists come here. Ah. God . . . Of all the places. We have to go.’
They needed to leave at once. Jake doused his face with bottled water, slung on his socks and boots, then he and Chemda rucksacked each other and shared a brief silent kiss, and they walked into the jungle.
There was still a deathliness to the area. This was not the vibrant overly fecund jungle of Angkor Wat. Patches of burned or dead vegetation dotted the forest. Birds sang, but half heartedly. Or maybe Jake was imagining it. He hoped he was imagining it, just as he wanted to believe he had imagined the skulls and skeletons in the water, the jaunty flotsam of genocide.
Two hours and five kilometres of jungle pathway found them in the outskirts of a village. Rittisak looked more relaxed in the sunlight. His job was close to completion. He pointed one way and talked and then pointed another way.
Chemda turned:
‘He says the main road is just there, so we must be careful, but the Chong Sa crossing is also very close, we just have to hack through this last field . . . take the path, along a ravine, get across the frontier.’
They slipped down the ravine, but the route was confusing, it forked several times
. At one point it led them to a clutch of houses, the busy road to Thailand, taking them horribly close to danger; but another turning seemed to head for the wilds, towards that unguarded and very wooded border a few kilometres east.
They walked away from the houses, sweating, silent, and scared. Burned trees lined the narrow lane. And then the path widened to a clearing.
Everyone halted.
In the centre of the scruffy clearing was a small linear hump of soft mud, surrounded by a wire fence. A low and rusty iron roof protected the mud from the rains and the sun.
Rittisak was pointing.
‘Pol Pot grave! Where they burn body. Dump him!’
Jake stared, dumbed. This was the grave of the dictator?
Pol Pot’s grave?
It was poignantly rudimentary.
It could have been the lyrically humble grave of a great poet, a pauper’s grave for a neglected genius – and then, Jake thought, maybe it was just that: the Mozart of death was buried here, this was the grave of an eerie prodigy, an autistic savant, a grinning mediocrity who somehow killed his own country.
Offerings had been placed next to the grave. Some incense sticks were burning, planted in a sand-filled jar of instant Tom Yum Noodles. Red apples shrivelled by a pile of silver coins. And next to the grave was a wooden spirit house: someone had actually installed a wooden shrine to honour the dead shade of Pol Pot. Jake moved close and saw: inside the wooden house were two dolls, Mr and Mrs Pol Pot. Jake marvelled.
Rittisak was speaking. Chemda interpreted:
‘He says people come here to pray, to, ah, seek help from the spirit of Pol Pot. The shrine was erected by some Thai guy. He won the lottery, after praying to Pol Pot’s ghost. Hey. Do you think I am allowed to piss on this grave? Ah, are women allowed to do that, or is it just a guy thing? Anyway, please – let’s move –’
He had never heard Chemda speak coarsely before, she barely ever swore. Chemda turned away from the grave in disgust.
But Jake lingered. He was impressed by the florid paradox of the scene, the tropical orchid of irony: the grave of a lunatic and atheist dictator, the man who murdered monks and pulled down temples, the man who didn’t just hate God but tried to stamp God into the dust – the grave of this unbeliever had been turned into a shrine, a place of superstitious worship where peasants prayed to a communist ghost, a Marxist deity; it was the most perfect irony, quite sumptuous. It had to be recorded.