by Fiona Kidman
‘If you’re sure.’
‘Let’s get some sleep,’ Jessie said, folding her napkin. ‘We’re going to need all the rest we can get.’
That night she dreamed of the strange boy who had enchanted her in the town, and the way she had held him in her heart for so many years, cherishing his memory. And now he was alive. She woke to the sound of machine-gun fire in the distance, and lay wide-eyed, remembering the reality. On the night of the accident she must have been worn out by desire for his pale body which, except for that one naked glimpse, had remained inaccessible beneath its clothes. The pressure of him against her, the shape of his thin chest and his penis which swelled and died away, had absorbed her so completely, that she had lost the will to think for herself, overwhelmed by the need to stay near to him, night after night. Doing what was asked of her by Violet Trench.
After the deaths and disappearances, and her own flight from her past, Jessie stopped desiring John, as if her body had been brought to its senses. The week she went back to Wellington, she had lain down at the back of the bait shed with Antonio, the Italian boy she’d been to school with, and let him fuck her — got it over with, as it were, so that she could go on with her life, doing what other people did.
She had followed him to the shed reeking of fish, and when he’d said his usual hellos, and grinned at her, she had reached out and touched his throat with the tips of her fingers and stroked it, as if seduction came naturally, now that she’d seen so much of it in action. He had looked curiously at her arms when she took off her cardigan for them to lie on. ‘Who gave you the bruises?’ he asked. John’s fingerprints were as blue as irises on her skin.
‘They’re nothing,’ she said, giving herself up to the pain of the first time.
Afterwards, he said to her, like a shy girl, ‘Jessie, I shouldn’t have. I’m engaged now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, though she wasn’t because for the moment she felt languorous and full of sweetness, as if all the preparation she’d done with John had paid off at last. ‘What must you think of me?’ she went on, as she pulled her stockings on one after the other, and snapped on her suspenders.
‘You were my reading coach,’ he said with wonder and despair.
‘I guess we’re quits,’ Jessie said.
On the way back up the hill she cried for what she hoped would be the first and last time, leaning against a lamp post leading up to Brighton Street, and sobbing until she thought she was going to be sick. The sea behind her was ravishing, honey-gold light spread across the waves, the black mound of the island perched in the bay, reminding her of that other place. John was gone now and her mother had abandoned her too. There was nobody to go home to. She thought it would go on like this, pleasure and goodbyes and what sense she could make of the spaces in between.
Another dawn. An unfurling of the light over the Tonlé Sap. The heavy white scent of frangipani, rice paddies dotted with ibises, bougainvillaea rioting in wild profusion over the remains of a shelled wat. Now they were in country. The trip had taken longer than any of them expected because the countryside festered with landmines and even the marked roads were dangerous. Jessie was spending her second night sleeping in a hammock, clear of snakes and scorpions. She felt gritty and gummy-eyed, dust clogging her nostrils and pores. The evening before, they had run a gauntlet of casual sniper fire that had missed its target, as if the guerrillas were half-hearted about their prey. A patrolling Vietnamese platoon, bristling with AK-47s, had taken them under their wing and formed an advance guard that had succeeded in keeping the mission safe up until now. They spent the first night in a small village close to an open plain that afforded their guards a view of marauding Khmer Rouge. None of them slept well.
They were not going directly to Kompong Chhnang, where Annette was taking medical supplies to the town, but first of all to a place a little to the south, where, they had been told, there was an encampment of wounded women and children. Looking at the spot on the map, Jessie couldn’t see what features of the landscape would be likely to draw together a group of the injured. Kiem studied the map with her, and gave a surprised little snort of pain.
‘You know where we’re going?’ she asked him.
‘The aeroplanes,’ he said. ‘They make a landing place.’
‘There aren’t any planes coming in here.’
‘He may be right,’ Annette said, joining them. ‘I’ve heard another story of this airstrip.’
What awaited them, further across the shimmering, humid plain, was a rolling aerodrome. It lay abandoned, except for a couple of guards in a makeshift sentry box inside a barbed-wire compound. Huddled in a makeshift shelter in scrub, at the far end of the runway, were four sick and wounded men. There was no sign of the women and children Annette had expected. Kiem spoke to the men. They said there had been more of them. They had come to see if an aeroplane would take them away, but they were fired on, and anyway, they now knew that planes didn’t come here, in spite of the runway. Some had been able to escape; others had crawled away, because they believed nobody would come to help them, or someone would come and kill them. One of the wounded men knew more than the others. The airstrip had been built for Chinese to bring in military equipment to the Khmer Rouge. Now it was nothing, going nowhere.
Kiem had begun to weep as he listened to the men speak. ‘They say that if all those who died building this strip had been lain side by side they would have stretched the length of the runway.’
‘But that runway is at least three kilometres,’ Jessie said. She was snapping pictures as they talked.
Kiem nodded. ‘Put one man, and one man and one man, all the way up, still not all the people who died.’
‘Perhaps three hundred thousand,’ Donald said, hazarding a guess. He had had little to say for himself throughout the entire journey, and spent his evenings before nightfall searching out clean weed to smoke in the dark.
Kiem shook his head as if the numbers were meaningless. ‘Many people.’
Donald shrugged. ‘How many million lives did it take to build the temples at Angkor?’
‘But this is not a temple,’ Annette exclaimed, surveying the ugly rolling strip of tarmac.
‘We have to get away from here,’ Jessie said to Annette. ‘If the Khmer Rouge get wind that we’re here we’re likely to be fired on.’
The doctor nodded, grim-faced. Donald began bundling the men into the front jeep. One of them was protesting.
‘He thinks his wife might come back to him if he waits here.’
‘He’ll be too dead to see her,’ Annette said.
‘I think he’s waiting for her spirit to visit him,’ said Jessie.
‘Poor man. Tell him it is better that he comes with us,’ Annette instructed Kiem.
The man did come with them, Jessie holding water to his pale lips as the jeep lurched back the way it had come. His krama, which he wore as a loincloth, gaped open to show his reed-like limbs — what was left of them. He was so emaciated that she was afraid she might break him, as she sought to prop him up against the jeeps interior. She had taken pictures of the airstrip, which she believed would be news on the outside. Clearly, the Vietnamese would know about it, but largely she believed it was a hidden thing, and the thousands of missing people a secret yet to be revealed. Through Kiem, she continued to ask questions, but the men could tell her little more.
‘You have a story?’ Annette said.
‘Perhaps. But I need more eye-witness accounts.’
Next it was Kompong Chhnang itself, a town by the river, where they were greeted by scores of thin and wasted citizens who tried to climb on the jeeps as they rolled through. This was Annette’s territory now. Jessie retreated to the riverbank to think. The Red Cross team would camp here for the night, while they set up a base and collected the injured. Annette and Donald would stay for a week to treat as many sick and wounded as they could, before returning to Phnom Penh for further supplies, and a second attempt at reaching Battambang to the
north. One of the jeeps, driven by Kiem, was heading back that night, and Jessie was expected to go back on it. Yet she needed more than pictures of an empty airstrip and the hearsay testimony of the four men.
Kiem had brought her food: a dish of deep-fried sparrows, another of steamed lotus stems, and some rice. Jessie crunched the crisp delicate bird bones and remembered how her mother used to feed sparrows on the back lawn at Island Bay. She had never had much stomach for sparrows.
Through Kiem, she tried to ask more questions of the people in Kompong Chhnang, but nobody would answer her. ‘It’s too close,’ he said. ‘They are afraid of what will happen if they tell. All their houses might get burned down tonight.’
‘But you knew about it. Somebody told you.’
‘I heard word from my uncle and his friends who have gone back to Siem Reap, since Pol Pot has gone into hiding. I do not want to say more.’
‘Where in Siem Reap? Near the temples? Angkor Wat?’
‘No, on the city on the lake.’
Jessie had heard of it, a huge collection of houses built on stilts over the water, like a floating city, only it was known as the Vietnamese Fishing Village. ‘I could take a letter to your uncle.’
‘He won’t talk to anyone.’
‘Will you come with me, up the river?’
‘Up the river, no.’
‘Then find me a boat that will take me. Please, Kiem. Ten dollars. Many thousands of riels. Look after your wife.’
He gave her a long considered look. ‘I think they will kill you. I think, Madame Sandle, that you are very brave and very mad.’
Jessie did nearly die on the boat upriver, when pirates boarded the flat-bottomed wooden craft. The river flows into Tonlé Sap Lake, a vast inland tract of water, so wide that land is not visible for mile after mile, where sky and lake meet. There were six men on board when the boat set off, as well as Jessie. It was night when the pirates came on board. Much later, she would attribute her survival to her acceptance of death, drained of the fear that might have encouraged her to fight back, rather than any particular cleverness. Instead, she lay still among stored sacks of rice and vegetables until morning. When she emerged at dawn, and the screams and shouting had died away, two of the six men were left. She supposed they must have been Pol Pot sympathisers or they would have been dead too. Nothing was said as they travelled on together up to the city on the lake.
As far as the eye could see, reed-thatched houses stretched across the lake, decorated with pots of bright marigolds, so that the surface of the water seemed to be trembling with orange fire. This might have been the fishing capital of the world, the water dense with carp that the villagers were allowed, once more, to catch for themselves. Baskets of the fish were carried away on the backs of bicycles. This is what Jessie ate in her days by the lake — fish, freshly-cooked in pots over live coals, the smoke swirling round her face. At night she slept in a hammock in an abandoned house, listening to the water lapping around the poles that surrounded it. She slept in fitful catnaps, her camera tied to her waist. She thought about going inland to see the temples and check if the damage inflicted was as bad as rumour had it, but the journey on her own seemed too improbable, too likely to end in failure, or captivity. She reminded herself, like a mantra, a story is no good to anyone unless the reporter can deliver it. But finding Kiem’s uncle was proving a next-to-impossible task. She had searched for him in a longboat with the people next door, who grudgingly agreed to take her with them. Nobody wanted to acknowledge her presence. On the third night she thought she felt a fever coming on, and sat up in the moonlight. The still air held a static crackle of menace. In the dark, she made out a man crawling on his belly towards her.
‘Cannot find,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘Uncle is dead. You bring us bad trouble.’
A volley of shells erupted in the sky, raining fire. One landed and set a house on the lake alight.
The East. Gone troppo. On her own in a grass hut without a mosquito net, a Caucasian woman among a million Asians who didn’t need her there, in an immense bright terrifying landscape. Of course the guerrilla fighters knew she was there, and would punish those who continued to harbour her. Or demand a ransom for her, back in Phnom Penh. And, if they didn’t get it, or simply tired of having her around, they would lie her face down, her arms tied behind her back and slice her head off with the end of a hoe, a favoured method for killing foreigners. She had broken all the rules. If she disappeared, there would be an outcry in the world media, but it would be brief. Journalists often went missing. She could not think of one person who might care enough to pay her ransom, although several might feel obliged to make a gesture.
In a few hours there would be a ferry of sorts. If she was quick and careful, she could board and make her way south. Before it got light, Jessie crawled over a plank across the scum and sewage that the lake city spewed into the water, guided by the runner who had found her. She huddled again among sacks of strong-smelling fish and stacked bamboo poles until the ferry began to move. At first the lake felt empty, and very cold, in spite of great heat during the day. Scores of feet began to pass overhead, until the ferry filled. Soon the upper and lower decks were crammed with three times as many people as it could safely hold. The ferry, powered by an asthmatic diesel engine, shuddered and roared, causing the vessel to lurch from side to side. When they had been underway an hour or more, Jessie, fearing she might suffocate, crawled out of the hold into the light. In the stern, the coldest part of the boat, a group of women sat huddled in sarongs and krama. When she appeared, they looked at her curiously, uncomfortable and afraid. One of them, different from the rest, moved aside to let her sit down.
This woman was dressed in European clothes, of a kind. Well-creased slacks, a high-necked sweater and a checked coat and, on her head, a peaked cap. Sportin’ Life, Jessie thought, a female version. She must have spent time with Americans. In her lap, Sportin’ Life held a plump sleeping girl, perhaps two or three years old, her spread-eagled limbs appearing almost lifeless. An unnatural sleep, perhaps. Jessie looked more closely at the child. Although the woman was Khmer, the girl was not. The perfect slanted seams of her closed eyelids suggested Chinese Cambodian, and a strand of fairer hair made Jessie wonder if there had been a Caucasian parent — an American soldier, perhaps, or a French planter. A pink bow held the girl’s hair in a topknot on her head. Someone had painted her fingernails and toenails bright red. Jessie gestured to the woman, offering to let the child lie across her knees. Looking down at the small face, and feeling her warm body against her own, she thought that the girl had been drugged.
‘She’s so pretty,’ she remarked, not knowing whether she could make herself understood.
The woman in the peaked cap nodded in agreement, and pinched the girl’s flesh. ‘One hundred dollar,’ she said.
‘Oh my God,’ Jessie said, to no one in particular.
‘You have her. One hundred dollars. Very good price.’
‘No,’ said Jessie. ‘No, I don’t want to buy her. I’ll take her picture.’
‘No picture,’ the woman said. A man appeared on the ladder leading from the upper deck. He waved his finger with an angry gesture at Jessie. The other women had pulled away, so that they were not connected with Sportin’ Life, or the child. They knew what was going on here, and were powerless to stop it. The woman in the peaked cap must be a regular traveller on the ferry, stupefying the children she was taking to the markets and disposing of them in Phnom Penh. The man above threw a blanket over the woman and child, covering them from Jessie’s view.
In her left sock, which she hadn’t taken off for a week now, since she left Phnom Penh the week before, Jessie still had one hundred and fifty American dollars.
As the ferry pulled into the city, Jessie said to Sportin’ Life: ‘I will take the child. She’ll be my child now.’
This was the girl whom Jessie would call Bopha, which means flower. She would be known to the nuns in Phnom Penh as Jessie’s daught
er.
BOPHA
In the beginning, the convent was built of thatch and mud. The floor was hard earth from which fine red dust emanated in small ceaseless eddies. The nuns swept it down before prayer. There were four sisters at the Home of Holy Rescue — Sisters Perpetua, Veronica, Therese and Mary Luke. They had come, they said, because God had called them to feed the destitute. They combed Phnom Penh’s dusty streets, wearing their wimples and crosses, looking for the hungry, and found plenty. This was a favourite joke among them. Jessie could see how often they made it, passing it around in conversation like an incantation that made them laugh. Sister Veronica was the cook. When she discovered Jessie had once been a chef, she threw her arms around her and said that God had brought her to them. I’ve never been good at bread, she said, perhaps you could do bread for us. Jessie had never made bread, but she did then, in the weeks that she stayed at the convent. It was good bread, sweet-smelling loaves that sprang back at the touch. Her new family, as she had come to call the sisters, were delighted. You can stay with us a long time and get to know the little girl, they said. Sister Perpetua was the administrator, the person who ordered supplies and kept the records; Sister Therese took care of housekeeping, which included emptying the latrine buckets, something she did as if God’s grace smiled on her every day; Sister Mary Luke ran the nursery, because they found not only hungry people but also abandoned children in the streets. There was just one, at first, a little boy whose mother appeared to have died giving birth to him; her body lay beside him in a pile of rubbish near the markets. And then someone brought another baby who they said they’d found too, although they never did hear the real story, and suddenly Sister Mary Luke, who had found it hardest to adjust to the heat, and cried very easily, had discovered the meaning in her life that God had been just waiting for her to find. When there were six children, the sisters decided to call themselves an orphanage and sent home for funds to build an outpost mission dedicated to the care of lost children. This was where Jessie brought Bopha, the girl she had bought for a hundred dollars.