Cambodian Book of the Dead

by Tom Vater

  Someone removed the net. Three young girls, their hair cut short, all of them dressed in black uniforms, looked down at him. Their oblique expressions, perfectly synchronised, made him feel like a victim.

  “Maier, were you born in Leipzig?”

  The voice was old and tired, yet sharp and focused at the same time. Full of cold, bureaucratic routine. The man spoke a peculiar German. Maier thought he could detect a faint Eastern European accent. Whoever was outside his field of vision, in the process of deciding what would happen to him, had conducted thousands of interviews like this.

  “Yes.” He found himself about to talk in spite of the paralysis of the rest of his body.

  “Maier, are you working for an intelligence service?”

  “No.”

  The girl nearest to him drove her fist into his face.

  Maier cursed.

  “Maier, did you study political sciences in Berlin and Leipzig between 1976 and 1982?”

  “Yes.”

  “You worked as a foreign correspondent in the GDR? You travelled abroad?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means you were trusted not to defect, trusted at the highest level?”

  “That’s true.”

  “I don’t see any reason why the relevant offices would have had so much trust in you.”

  Maier did not know what to say. The second girl hit him hard on his right thigh. The child was good at her job, with immovable face and trauma rings around her eyes. The pain was terrible, a good sign as far as Maier was concerned. A little more beating and he would be able to walk again. He didn’t say anything for a while.

  “I was a good journalist.”

  “Did you work in Cambodia at the time?”

  “No.”

  “You absconded to the West before the Wall came down?”

  “I had an offer from dpa to work as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and South Asia.”

  “Your ideological turn-about presented no problems for you?”

  “There was no ideological turn. I was a journalist in the GDR, then in the reunited Germany. And then I stopped.”

  “Yes, yes, Battambang, ’97. A bomb that killed a Cambodian colleague. A man called Hort, through whom you met your girlfriend Carissa Stevenson.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend. The man was my fixer, my employee. Ms Stevenson is an old colleague.”

  The third girl stepped up and hit him in the face. Maier’s brain had started to crank up properly and he could make a pretty good guess at the next questions. As well as at the attached trap. He saw no way out.

  “Carissa Stevenson is not your girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have no real interest in whether she is dead or alive?”

  “Of course I have an interest, professional as well as motivated by friendship. We have known each other since the UNTAC years. Hort introduced her to me, as you said.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me that you no longer work as a journalist? How can your interest be professional? Are you lying to me, Maier?”

  “No.”

  The first of the three girls had stepped very close to Maier, holding a long acupuncture needle. She gently lifted his right arm and pushed the needle through the palm of his hand.

  Maier passed out.

  “Maier, were you born in Leipzig?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maier, are you working for an intelligence service?”

  “No.”

  The second girl hit him in the face.

  “Are you Christian?”

  Maier tried to shake his head.

  “That’s a shame, Maier. I would always give a second chance to a German Christian. You have another ten days of interrogations ahead of you. Choose your answers carefully and the young ladies will keep the needles away from your testicles.”

  Slow, scuffled steps receded. Maier hadn’t seen his interrogator. The three girls continued to watch him, their faces twisted by nameless resentment. Maier tried to breathe slowly and evenly to get his heartbeat back under control. Borderline experiences in Cambodia. He coughed with exhaustion and closed his eyes. Perhaps it was better to be tortured with eyes closed. The detective knew he was on the verge of burn-out. Short and sharp panic attacks shot like black pinballs from one corner of his drug-addled brain to another. He heard a cockerel crow outside. He felt like screaming himself, but he was not that far yet. Or perhaps he’d already passed the screaming stage. He let himself slide downwards.

  Maier lay on the wide stone terrace of a temple ruin. He knew he was badly injured. Dense jungle reached to the horizon ahead. Dark green, light green and a thousand shades in between for which there were no words. Not a soul down there. He couldn’t move. He could only stare at the green hell beneath him, above him, all around him. He managed to lift his right hand. The breeze almost pulled it away. As he looked past his dismembered thumb he could see the blue evening sky.

  Maier noticed that the walls of the room he lay in were covered in bas-reliefs. A gigantic battle unfolded around him. He gazed at the scene for some time without understanding. Then he slowly remembered what the thousand year old carvings represented.

  Gods and demons pulled at opposite ends of a naga, a mythical snake, which had curled around the sacred Mount Mandhara. Through the labour of gods and demons, the ocean of cosmic milk which surrounded the sacred mountain grew more and more stormy and eventually gave up amrita, the nectar of immortality.

  Heavenly apsaras – sacred celestial nymphs with perfect breasts and swaying hips – floated above the scene and gazed down at him with serene expressions.

  This old Hindu myth could also be found on the walls of Angkor Wat. But Maier had never seen this version of the masterpiece he was now looking at, despite feeling rotten and depressed. There was nothing left to do but look.

  Carissa had gone ahead and rounded a curve in the forest road. He’d just heard her voice, then she’d been swallowed by the jungle. Unarmed and curious. Greedy for the new. Maier ran up the mountain as fast as he could. Animals that no white man had seen lived in the huge trees along the roadside. But Maier could not see animals. He didn’t want to see or hear them.

  Where was she? His woman?

  Carissa lay on the road, sleeping peacefully.

  Maier took in every detail of the crime scene. An army of ants had constructed a highway across her naked belly. Her white hair obscured most of her face. He could not read her last scream.

  The bullet had entered the skull from behind and emerged below the lower jaw. Carissa would never say another word. Everything, almost everything was blown away. The ants began to consume her eyes. The tiny soldiers danced around her dark unreachable pupils like kohl.

  A girl with short frizzy hair washed him. She was older than his earlier tormentors, around twenty perhaps. She was different. She did not smile, but she did not look as numb as the black creatures with the needles. She kept her pale blue almond-shaped eyes low. Maier recognised that in another life she would be beautiful. But one couldn’t choose. Perhaps in the next life.

  “My name is Raksmei. Eat something, Maier.”

  Maier expected another beating when he didn’t answer. He did not want to eat. Not even a Vodka Orange would have helped right now. He could smell shit and old leather. He could hear something hovering, flapping its wings, outside, beyond his reach.

  Kaley sat next to him and held his injured hand.

  “My name is Raksmei. Eat something.”

  “I have not found your sister yet.”

  “That does not matter. You have done your best.”

  Had his best been all that good?

  “Have you come to Cambodia to arrest the German?”

  “No.”

  “The old man is sure you here because of him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He is very old. He comes and goes. For more than twenty years.”

  He felt himself drift in shallow water. The current was slow.
He could stretch out and drift away, like a message in a bottle. He was embedded in silence, as if submerged in cotton wool, or fresh snow. In the absence of peace of mind, this was pretty good. There was no fresh snow in Cambodia. The water was tropically warm. Something moved in front of him. A white spider, as big as a car, sat on the water’s surface. Long white legs bopped up and down, gnarled like ancient tree trunks.

  The spider turned towards Maier.

  “Maier, do you work for a security service?”

  “No.”

  “Are you Christian?”

  “No.”

  “What do you know about Project Kangaok Meas?”

  His legs began to get caught up in the net of the spider. He felt himself slowly sink. People could drown in just thirty centimetres of water. He needed answers.

  He was a detective, a journalist, an adventurer, a ladies’ man, a lone wolf. All just shells.

  Maier screamed into the room, “You smell like a Stasi spook. Why haven’t you cut my nose off yet? Why haven’t you bugged my cell? Why haven’t you asked me whether I work for the CIA? Or the KGB? Or the IRA, the PLO or al-Qaeda? I don’t need to look at you to identify you. You smell of old files and the sweat of the dead you have on your conscience.”

  Exhausted, Maier fell back onto his bunk.

  Kaley and Raksmei had disappeared.

  The spider sat in the corner of the room and laughed blood.

  “What, what, what?”

  “If I told you that I know something about the sun and the moon, I would be lying.”

  “The sun and the moon? You are working for the sun and the moon? Maier, we are not on the same team.”

  Grey spittle dropped from the lower jaw and spread across the stone floor like something indescribable, searching out Maier’s cold flesh.

  “The only thing I know is what I will do with you.”

  Maier started singing to himself. The smell was unbearable, like rotten, atrophied flesh. The three girls, dressed in black bikinis, floated into the room on a long black surfboard, made from old car tyres and wrapped in barbed wire. The scarred, bent back of the spider burst open and thousands of tiny black spiders wearing black rubber shoes flooded the cell. In seconds, floor, walls and ceiling were covered in cold, black energy.

  Then they began to crawl up his legs. Maier was caught. Maier was composed. This is what the end looked like, felt like.

  “Sometimes the same is different, but mostly it’s the same.”

  The Khmer Rouge had forbidden everything. Shopping, music, gossip, prayer, love and even laughing and crying had been punishable by death or worse. But in the moment of dying, prohibitions did not apply. Maier did not feel like praying, so he laughed. Insanity was the solution. That seemed perfectly reasonable. It was part of being human.

  Maier got up and pushed the three girls aside.

  What was his small suffering in comparison to the decades-long chaos Cambodia had experienced?

  He stepped to the window, and, without turning, without searching for the eye of his tormentor, without bothering with the small spiders that were eating the world, he let go and rose into the clear blue evening sky.

  BIG SISTER

  Dani Stricker could hardly believe it. She did not recognise a thing. The country looked utterly foreign to her.

  The new airport was different to what she had expected. What had she expected? The buildings were practically shining and the arrival hall was as neat and clean as the departure lounge in Frankfurt. Everything smelled new. The immigration officer wore a real uniform, hardly looked at her and, once she’d paid the twenty US dollars for a tourist visa, he stamped her German passport without pulling a face or asking for a bribe.

  Her arrival card read “Welcome to Cambodia”.

  Fear and pleasure, a strange euphoria shot through her. The war, which she carried in the back of her head like the memory of an absent child, was nowhere to be seen. Outside, the taxi drivers hustled around her and carried her bags to a waiting car. For a moment she felt like she knew all Khmer people. After all, they were her people. Then she flushed, acutely aware that she had been away for twenty years. And that almost all the people she had once known were dead. Only her sister, Kaley, remained alive. And that man.

  It was hotter and more humid than the Botanical House back in Mannheim. The air smelled sweet and heavy, saturated by the smells of blooming flowers and cheap talcum powder, the way Dani remembered from her childhood. The scene in front of her flickered from foreign to home, from alien to familiar, back and forth, rapidly.

  She looked around, perhaps expecting her hired assassin to emerge from the crowd to hand her the head of the man whose death she had wished for all these years. But of course she didn’t know the man and she couldn’t see anyone who might have fitted the bill.

  A family of Scandinavians, with five blonde children, tried to lift several heavy suitcases from their cab. The children screamed excitedly, the parents looked stressed. A tour group, Japanese, living up to the cliché, their necks bent forward, straining against several huge cameras, filed past her into the sun. A huge and pale barang in a loud Hawaiian shirt stood near the taxi rank and gesticulated into his telephone. The man had an impossibly red face and briefly looked distractedly in her direction. Who were these people? Who came here voluntarily? And why? Dani had bought a travel guide, but she was still surprised to see so many tourists. Her last impressions of her homeland, her overland escape, on foot, through a ruined and vicious country, were hard to connect with the reality of this new Cambodia.

  In early 1979, she had fled her commune, had walked along the heavily mined road leading west, had forced herself not to drink from ponds filled with the corpses, sometimes entire families, who’d been butchered or poisoned. Again and again she had lain hidden in the brush for hours to avoid patrolling Khmer Rouge units. Most of these soldiers had been undisciplined children with murder in their eyes. Again and again she’d thought about her sister whom she had left behind. Her life was worth nothing. Once she’d eaten a dog, a piece of dog that she had found, half cooked by the heat, on the broken tarmac. A man had appeared and tried to kill her with a stone until she gave up the carcass and ran. The man had had a leg missing. He had not been able to follow her. She had passed pagodas that had been turned into pigsties. In Sysophon, she had seen five shorn heads lined up on poles. The Buddha statues, those that hadn’t been smashed to pieces, had cried in their temples. On the way between the small town and the Thai border, she had not managed to eat again, despite the fact that she had a little old rice and dog in her pocket.

  The land she had walked across was silent. Throughout her entire month-long journey, she had not heard or seen a single motorised vehicle. Every now and then she had heard a young Khmer Rouge soldier laugh, despite the fact that Angkar had forbidden laughter. But she’d also heard the footsteps of ghosts preceding and following her, all the way to the border.

  Countless times, she had passed dead soldiers and civilians. The victims had been young and old, male and female, Buddhist and Muslim, Cambodians and Vietnamese. Cambodia had become a country where cannibalism had become commonplace. She’d noticed that the killers had often cut the livers from their victims and grilled and eaten the organs right next to the corpses. Intestines, swollen by fat black maggots, had burst from slit stomachs. Others had lain in the brush, tied together and beaten to death. Yet others, many more, had lain in open ditches, half buried and half left to the elements. The wild animals had long left this cursed land and migrated into Thailand or Laos. The Cambodians had rotted in their pits, untouched. Dani had walked on, even though she had hardly a will to live left. She had kept thinking about her little sister whom she had abandoned to the Khmer Rouge. What was the point of survival if everything one experienced was the suffering and death of others? There had been no future. The future had been forbidden by Angkar, along with everything else.

  She looked her driver in the eyes. He was about her age. He would not me
et her curious gaze and turned his head. A shock ran through Dani Stricker. No question, the horror was still here. People remembered in silence. It was embarrassing. It was still there, beneath the glittering surface of the new Cambodia. It did not fit in with this new life, but it served as a foundation for everything she was trying to absorb right now. For a moment she wished she had Harald with her, but he had died with her old life. She was alone.

  Dani took a deep breath and got into the old beaten-up Toyota. How many lives could a person experience in the few short years one lived consciously? She shook her head. That was truly a barang question. No wonder her home had become an alien place. She had become so German.

  As a young woman, she had once visited Phnom Penh. She remembered a sleepy, clean town with wide boulevards. Not much of that city had made the jump into the twenty-first century. All hell had come out to play on the airport road into town. Cambodia was waking up. After the dark years, the process looked a phenomenal challenge.

  The traffic was hair-raising. Hundreds of mopeds, many loaded with families or impossibly large piles of goods, drove on both sides of the road in all directions. No one wore a helmet. Mothers clutched two or three children, riding side-saddle behind their husbands. New temples, new apartment blocks and new businesses sprouted from every street corner. The taxi passed the university. The buildings looked overgrown and run down, but the young students, dressed in pressed white shirts and blue trousers or skirts, were streaming through the entrance gates into the road, laughing and kidding each other like students in other countries. Cambodia screamed new. Huge billboards promoting the country’s three political parties lined the roadside. Policemen stood in small clusters at busy crossings, machine guns casually slung across their shoulders, and dared each other to stop a vehicle and rob the driver for the coming weekend’s drinking money. Some things hadn’t changed.