Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  He lay on his side in the middle of the road, the stick with its white handkerchief beside him. He was curled up like a child preparing to sleep, his mouth open and working a little, in the way it used to do when something had just provoked him into one of his speeches, his eyes staring towards me. They seemed to ask me about something that bewildered him; and they will never stop looking at me. I have always privately found blue eyes very strange; I can’t help it. In that moment, Dmitri’s were not their usual color: they were stronger, more brilliant, like blue flame. I looked past him to the trees, and saw there the two peasants from the farmhouse, the tall one and the stocky one. The tall one had the AK.

  He fired again: fast single shots. The bullets whined above our heads: but it was a good deep ditch, and with our heads down, he had no way of hitting us. Then I was conscious that Mike had stood up.

  It was suicidal, what he did, and not typical: I had never known him to expose himself to fire in such a way before. Crouching, he ran fast into the center of the road, took Dmitri under the arms, and began to drag him back to the ditch. But this time, amazingly, there was no fire. If there had been, I believe he would have had very little chance. He pulled Dmitri fast into the ditch with us, and lowered him flat.

  Why hadn’t the Khmer Rouge fired?

  Lenin, I thought: that bastard Lenin made contact with them. He ordered Dmitri hit; it was only Dmitri he wanted, not Mike and me. A crazy idea, I know: but at the time I believed it. How else was I to explain why the one with the AK hadn’t fired at Mike?

  There was no more fire after that; but this didn’t surprise me. To hit us, he would have had to come across the road; but then he would have shown himself to the Government troops. Maybe he’s gone, I thought, and Mike and I crouched above Dmitri, keeping our heads below the level of the ditch.

  He was alive, looking up at us both, his face even paler than it had been on the Trail. Mike held his hand, panting, staring into his face and saying nothing. At first, we couldn’t see a wound.

  Where are you hit? I asked.

  Dmitri’s eyes dropped, like those of someone who looks for spilled food on his front, and I saw that there was a patch of blood below his chest, in the center of the dark blue shirt—hardly noticeable on the dark fabric, and such a small amount that I allowed myself to hope. But when I drew the shirt up to his chest, the red hole in his skin confronted me like a small ugly mouth. A bullet had entered just below the breastbone, in the solar plexus. I had learned enough about wounds over the years to know what this meant. Most of the bleeding would be internal, and if the bullet had pierced the aorta, he could not have long to live; perhaps ten minutes.

  Leave me, Dmitri said. Get out of here, both of you.

  His voice was faint, but distinct; he looked up at us calmly.

  No way, Mike said. He continued to grip Dmitri’s hand. You’ll be OK, Count. Hang in there. The Government troops are coming.

  I peered through the grass and saw that this was true: two APCs had begun to rumble down the highway towards us. There was still no fire from the Khmer Rouge, who had pretty surely gone.

  Dmitri suddenly belched, and looked up at us with an expression of embarrassment: he seemed to be asking us not to judge him for his dying body’s lapse. A spasm of pain crossed his face, and his eyes widened, as though in disbelief.

  Don’t try and talk, Mike said. We’ll get you back. They’re coming. Just hang on, mate. Hang on.

  Don’t let go my hand, Dmitri said. He was looking up at Mike, and his eyes had changed. Then he looked away, and said something in Russian, very low and weak. Then he said: Mon Dieu, and made the sign of the cross Russian Orthodox style, using his right hand and touching his left shoulder last. Mike still held his other hand. Dmitri’s lips moved again, and I brought my face close to his in order to hear. But no words came, and his eyes looked at me through a film.

  Mike looked at me quickly across his head, and I nodded. Yes, he was gone.

  Mike frowned at me, his face bewildered, as though he’d just learned something he’d never imagined before. He sat up, his head above the level of the ditch, and took Dmitri’s head on his knees, looking down at him. He pushed some hair off the forehead. The eyes were still open: still the blue of flame, but all the strong life of the flame gone.

  Better stay down, I said, but Mike took no notice. I heard the sound of a motor, and saw the APC pull up almost beside us, above the bank. Two Cambodian soldiers in helmets, carrying M-16s, stood looking down at us.

  Kassat, I said, and raised my arms. They smiled and nodded.

  I stood up and climbed from the ditch, but Mike didn’t move. He sat in the ditch with Dmitri’s head on his lap, looking down into the Count’s white face, his own face almost as white, with no expression at all. He began to shake his head, and to mutter to himself: I could only just hear.

  Not you, Count, he said. Not you.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. Come on, Snow, I said.

  He looked up then, his eyes shining and sharp as though he was rejecting something: something he hated. Then he took the Saint Nicholas medal from around Dmitri’s neck, and dropped it in his shirt pocket.

  When we rode back to Phnom Penh from Svay Rieng in the Government helicopter, Mike still wouldn’t speak. Dmitri’s body was zipped into one of those plastic bags they used for the troops, and we sat on the floor beside him. I began to weep then, and the four Cambodian soldiers riding with us watched me across the cabin.

  But Mike remained dry-eyed all the way, staring out the open door of the Huey. He seemed to look for answers in the sky.

  FOUR

  DREAM PAVILION

  1.

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  When Mike Langford and Jim Feng were released by the North Vietnamese Army, the news got to the press corps a little ahead of the helicopter that was bringing them back to Phnom Penh. So did the news of Dmitri Volkov’s death. This was during siesta time, when many correspondents were in from the field, and a contingent of us went out to the airport.

  It would have been a celebration, if it hadn’t been for the fact that only the two of them had come back. But those correspondents who hadn’t known Dmitri well saw it as a good story, and the departure lounge at Pochentong was crowded with press. Langford and Feng came through the glass doors, accompanied by two Cambodian Army officers, and were mobbed by journalists brandishing bottles of cognac and whiskey as gifts, who began immediately to put questions to them.

  But neither of them smiled, and at first, neither responded. Both were noticeably thinner, and very drawn, and Jim Feng was limping from an infected foot. Halting, they looked at the faces around them in a manner that was sober yet dazed, as though wondering where they were, and why they were here. They gave the impression of being in a different dimension. The questioning voices died, and the lounge became almost silent.

  Then people began to murmur low-voiced regrets about Dmitri, and at the same time to put questions about his death. Jim answered briefly, but Mike not at all: he stared, his eyes empty. This worried me. I badly wanted to talk to both of them alone; but that was impossible, so I hung back. They were shortly commandeered by American and Cambodian officials who took them away for a medical check, and some sort of official questioning.

  At nightfall, after a bath and a long siesta in the Hotel Royal, they emerged for a press conference by the swimming pool. I was present at this too, and able to greet them; they seemed pleased to see me, but there was still little chance of a private conversation. I was thinking about the “box” that Dmitri had made me responsible for, which was still presumably up in his room. The responsibility was preying on my mind. That afternoon I’d telephoned the French embassy, and had discovered that they’d already contacted Volkov’s CBS bureau chief in Hong Kong, and had informed his mother and sister in Paris of his death. His body would be flown to Paris for burial. But no one had thought about his personal effects; and the weary male voice on the phone had hinted strongly that in the pres
ent state of things in Phnom Penh, they had more urgent matters to worry about. So then I felt free to carry out Dmitri’s wishes. But I wanted Mike and Jim to come with me to his room: I didn’t want to open the box alone.

  This too had to wait, since an emotional correspondents’ dinner lay ahead at the Jade Pagoda. There was no couscous that night, only liquor; and it turned into a sort of wake for the Count. Strangely—or perhaps not—the person most visibly affected was Trevor Griffiths.

  Very drunk, he stood up and called commandingly for silence, his eyes red-rimmed, black brows frowning, black beard thrusting. “Dmitri Volkov was a brother,” he said. “What else is there to say but that?” Then he recited “Do not go gentle into that good night,” bringing it out from his chest, using his best Welsh bass notes.

  For some reason, then and afterwards, I kept seeing Volkov at the battle in the Iron Triangle, when Langford took shrapnel in the head: saw Dmitri running out of the orange screen I’d thought at first was fire. For many nights following, when I lay on the edge of sleep, I’d see this image repeated: he’d come running towards me out of flame.

  Run, Count, I’d say, and it would seem to me that if he ran hard enough, he’d run back into life.

  Mike, Jim and I got back to the Royal at curfew time. Mike had agreed to come to Dmitri’s room, but Jim asked to be excused, pleading tiredness. He was suffering from exhaustion, in fact, and so was Langford.

  The manager made no trouble about letting us have the key. He’d held Volkov’s room, as he’d done Jim Feng‘s, in the hope of his return. The room was on the third floor at the front, and pretty much identical to mine: as large as a small restaurant, with the same expanse of red-tiled floor, a big double bed with a lumpy mattress, and a dark, groaning old French wardrobe whose doors would stick. The place was dark and stifling when we went in; we turned on the fans, and a bedside lamp. A white shirt and a pair of pale blue cotton trousers hung on a chair, dropped there carelessly; a pair of sandals was by the bed. The terrible mute voices of objects abandoned forever! They speak much more distinctly than anything else, at a death.

  Oh Christ, I said; but Mike said nothing.

  There was little else to show that the room was occupied. A small stack of books and papers on a desk; his big Auricon sound camera; a few film cans; a Nagra tape recorder. The shutter doors to the balcony above the drive stood closed; we opened them to let in air, and let in as well the grumbling voice of the war: artillery and rocket fire outside the city, sounding even closer than it had done a month earlier.

  I looked under the bed, where Volkov had said the box would be. It was there, near the foot, and I pulled it out: a small, varnished wooden trunk rather like an old ammunition box, with a black metal hasp secured by a padlock. I slit the envelope containing the key, while Mike watched me. As Dmitri had promised, there was a piece of paper inside with a name on it: Linda Holmstrom,and an address in Washington.

  I pushed back the lid of the trunk, and Mike and I sat down side by side on the bed next to it. When I began to sort through the contents he made no attempt to involve himself but simply sat watching me, with heavy eyelids. His exhaustion clearly made every movement an effort, and I began to feel guilty for keeping him from bed.

  My life is in the box, Volkov had said. Well, here was his life: these few things.

  His will was on top: not a formal legal document, just two typed and signed sheets, dated six months earlier, and witnessed in Hong Kong by his boss at CBS. Glancing at the first page, I saw that he’d left everything to Linda Holmstrom. This meant all his savings: an amount of some $50,000. He had few possessions of any value. Not much to show, I thought, for half a lifetime of risk.

  “Jesus,” Mike said slowly. “To her! But this lady quit on him: she divorced him. Why would he leave it to her?”

  The Count was one of those people who don’t love enough, or else too much, I said.

  He shot a questioning glance at me, but made no comment. I turned back to the trunk, and picked up four portrait photographs.

  The first, which was framed, was a black-and-white picture of a blond woman in her late thirties. She looked directly at the camera, smiling to put us at our ease; but her well-spaced gray eyes gazed through us into some distance of which we knew nothing, and had no right to know. This, I didn’t doubt, was his “Minnesota Swede”: a Scandinavian-American of essentially prosaic beauty, whose face showed intelligence without imagination. She wouldn’t get intense about things that weren’t supposed to matter, I thought: and certainly it was a face that would have frowned on Dmitri’s excesses.

  The other portraits were of people who were pretty clearly Volkov’s family. A rather vulnerable-looking man of middle age with a neatly trimmed blond beard, Dmitri’s mouth, and an expression of melancholy dedication: his father, I decided. A handsome, big-boned woman in a formal, sleeveless gown from the thirties: no doubt his mother when young. And finally, an unframed portrait in sepia of a man in a nineteenth-century suit with a decoration on the lapel, and a cravat. He was clean-shaven, but with long side-whiskers, and his expression was what the nineteenth century would have called “imperious.” This face, with its white-blue eyes, was startlingly like Dmitri‘s, except that the jaw was heavier. On the back was a legend in Cyrillic. I didn’t doubt that this was Count Alexis Volkov, and said so to Mike.

  He took the picture and studied it, his silence becoming oppressive. “Aristocrats,” he said at last. “What use are they now? I reckon this grandfather was the start of Dmitri’s problems.”

  I went on going through the box.

  A number of envelopes containing loose photographs. A jade Chinese statue, old and valuable from the look of it: possibly the Goddess of Fortune. Books, two of them Russian, and dating from the last century: the works of Pushkin, and a short work of Tol stoy’s whose Cyrillic title defeated me; Cossacks featured in the illustrations. Books in French: The Outsider, by Albert Camus; the poems of Baudelaire. Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, in English. Many more trinkets, of little obvious value to anyone else: the sad favorite objects of a lifetime. And finally, letters: only two sets of letters.

  There were two letters from Linda Holmstrom to Dmitri, dated two years before; and there were six from him to Linda, all of many pages, in unsealed envelopes, addressed but unposted. I looked at a few lines of one of them, and would not read any more. She’d have to read them, now.

  I closed Volkov’s trunk and found Mike still looking at me, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands loosely clasped between his knees. For the first and only time in all the years I’d known him I saw tears in his eyes, and it disconcerted me. He blinked, but his face remained frozen and without expression. He was looking more physically drained with every moment, it seemed to me, and I guessed that until now, he hadn’t had time to grieve; grief was only just beginning.

  He stood up, and walked out onto the little balcony between the shutter doors, blowing his nose as he went. After an interval I followed him, and we stood there in the night’s heavy warmth, looking down on the drive and the lamplit perspectives of Monivong Boulevard beyond, emptied by the curfew. It helped that we were both Australian; I knew how to judge his silence, and for how long to let it stretch.

  Finally he said abruptly: “Nothing ever happened between Ly Keang and me.”

  I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t think it had, I said. Why was he telling me this?

  “I had the idea it might have been bothering Dmitri,” he said.

  Well, you know better now, I said. There was only one woman in Dmitri’s mind, and she wouldn’t get out of it.

  He glanced at me with an expression that was unusual in him: a sort of defensiveness. “Have you got a cigarette, Harvey?”

  I shook my head; he’d forgotten I didn’t smoke.

  “Shit,” he said. “Why don’t you take it up?”

  He gave me the beginning of a grin, then turned away and leaned his forearms on the balustrade, hands locked, his long, blank fa
ce turned towards the darkness, out of which the boom of artillery could be heard at intervals. When he finally spoke, it was in the flat, jerky tones that affect the phlegmatic in the grip of emotion.

  “Dmitri was my brother,” he said. “And I reckon it’s my fault he’s dead, Harvey. I talked him into going to Kompong Cham.”

  No: come on, I said. Don’t start thinking that way, Snow. Dmitri chose to go, the way he’d done a hundred other times. You didn’t make him go.

  But he went on staring at the darkness, and made no answer.

  For once, I was glad of his taciturnity.

  His involvement with Ly Keang began very soon after this, as you probably know.

  My impression was that for Langford, she became Cambodia.

  You’ll probably find that fanciful and sentimental. All right, maybe so. But I have this notion, Ray, that we never love another human being so completely as when that human being is part of something else. Something which we’re in love with, or ready to be in love with, before we ever meet them. Something which becomes a part of our dreaming of that woman; that man. Do you see? A place; a piece of the past; a country; a half-remembered life that isn’t even ours, but for which we foolishly ache. I believe that’s how it was for Langford, with Ly Keang.

  And the Stringer was a patriot, just to cement it. A patriot in a way that’s gone out of style in the West: devoted to her country and her cause, and sworn, like some heroine out of melodrama, to avenge her father’s killing by those enemies who were finally poised to seize her land and its people—a people whose suffering wouldn’t end with the war, but instead would begin again, at a far more terrible level, in a frowning territory of waste ruled by the black-clad Others.

  Jim Feng’s right, in a way: it was as though Mike had never been in love before. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d only just grown into love, on the edge of middle age. It happens. Anyway, for the next two years, until the city fell, they were seldom separated. She moved in with him in that apartment near the Old Market: a very serious thing for a young Cambodian woman of her class to do. Now she would never marry a Cambodian; now her future was with Mike.