Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

by Colin Cotterill

  “But why are they here?”

  “Siri, you’re going to learn a lot today that will stretch your belief. Things so horrific you won’t sleep well for a year. We haven’t had direct contact with Vientiane for eight months. We have no phone here. We can’t travel without our minders. Every document passes through censors at the foreign ministry. So I haven’t been able to alert our government as to what’s happening. When I learned there would be a May Day reception and that a Lao delegation was invited, I knew it would be our best chance. Perhaps our last. I was so happy when I saw your name on the list, Siri. You’re exactly the type of man I need to fight for us, for the Khmer.”

  The situation seemed somewhat ridiculous to Siri, far too melodramatic. A lot of film extras overacting. Anne Frank—like whispers in the attic. So the Khmer Rouge were paranoid. Weren’t their own Pathet Lao? Didn’t they also overregulate Laos into a societal straightjacket? But “we’ll all be killed”? Come on. Siri was tempted to smile and would have done so but for the serious expressions all around him. A girl, probably no older than twenty, brought over two stools. She gave one to Siri and sat on the other. Ambassador Kavinh and all the pale dwellers of the cellar sat on the ground with their legs crossed and their backs straight.

  The girl was paler than the others. Siri wondered how long she’d been here in this sunless place. She was pretty but her young face was drawn now and her eye sockets were hollow and gray. She began to speak in French.

  “My name is Bopha,” she said. “My father was the curator of the Khmer National Museum.” Her voice was like thin ice disturbed by the rippling of a pond. Her grammar was perfect. Her accent suggested she’d lived in France for some time. She spoke carefully, searching for exactly the right words.

  “I was his assistant,” she continued. “I studied museum sciences at the Sorbonne. On April 17, 1975, my father and I were given an hour’s notice to pack our belongings and join the exodus from Phnom Penh along with two and a half million other people. The Khmer Rouge told us we were all to go to the countryside to work. My father had been entrusted with the safety of our heritage, our national identity, our treasures. He refused to leave and asked to speak to a commanding officer. A young soldier spat at my father and cut off his head with a machete. I was standing beside him.”

  She spoke for exactly thirty minutes, this brilliant, fluent, destroyed young person. She told tales and recounted scenes so awful that if a listener considered for one moment that they might be true, he would never be able to trust another human being. He would be left with the impression that there was nothing in the world save hate and evil. Hundreds of thousands executed, abused, left to die by the roadside. The genocide of intellectuals. A one-sided war against pale skin, Chinese faces, soft hands, and spectacles. Two thousand years of Khmer history erased like a pencil sketch from the compendium of time. She spoke so bluntly of atrocities that she might have been a newsreader. At the end of her account she apologized for her poor French. As a sort of ironic afterthought, she mentioned that she’d been there in the cellar for four months. She said they had received no credible news of the world for four years and was wondering who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. She had been following the judging when …

  Siri couldn’t give her an answer to her question. Nor could he speak. His stomach was a sack of lead shot. She had crushed his heart with her story, this innocent girl. When he eventually found words, his voice wasn’t one he recognized.

  “How did you get back to Phnom Penh?” he asked.

  “I’d worked for two years carrying earth at the irrigation site,” she said. “Digging latrines. Pleasing cadres. But they had my autobiography. They knew who I was. Somebody decided they needed to be seen to preserve our birthright. Incredibly, they had locked our treasures away. They brought me back to supervise the museum. I had no heart for it. It wasn’t just the messages the Khmer Rouge had beaten into us, that rich is bad, poor is pure and good. I looked around me at all the opulence in the museum. The statues, the paintings, the gems. They had taken on a new meaning to me. They were the spoils of other warlords, other oppressive regimes who had stolen enough treasures to make their mark on history. They were symbols of tyranny. I hated it all.

  “I knew Ambassador Kavinh. He had supported some of my father’s projects. I ran away from the dormitory and came here. He has risked his own life to look after us. I am grateful to him and some days I think I am lucky to be alive. But mostly I regret that they didn’t bury me out there with my sisters. I know these years will live inside me until I am old. All of us here, by the Lord’s good grace, we all survived, but the killing fields will not leave our hearts. We are all charred by the flames of hell.”

  Comrade Ta Khev, the Khmer Rouge cadre, awoke from a blissful sleep. As usual, it took him a few seconds to recall where he was. Good bed. Nice room. This was the life. Enough of all that jungle living. He’d endured poverty all his life and it was shit. This was what they’d dreamed of back then. A cushy city job, good food, and power. The high life and whatever it takes to get there. He rose from his bed, put on his black shirt, and walked through the house to the little alcove that had once been the servants’ sewing room. A room exclusively for sewing. He laughed. Those French. They certainly knew how to spend it. If he had money he’d build himself a counting room. A room where he kept all his money and he’d sit there all day counting it. He’d drink classy French wine and he’d count his money. He rubbed his full belly and opened the door. The cot was there in the middle of the little room but it was empty.

  “Arrogant Lao,” he said to himself. “I knew you were going to be a problem as soon as I …”

  He heard a cistern flush across the hall and a tap run. He went out in time to catch the old doctor stagger out of the bathroom. He looked in a bad way. He used the wall to hold himself up and tottered across to the sewing room. Comrade Ta Khev stepped out of his way. He asked the old Lao how he was but Siri ignored him and stumbled to the cot. It croaked like a toad as he lay down on it. The cadre smiled and muttered in Khmer, “Good. Serves you right. Arrogant Lao.”

  Siri listened to the footsteps walking off along the hallway and rubbed his face with his palms. The girl’s voice still crackled in his mind. He didn’t want to believe her. He didn’t want to think he could be one of a species that had no respect for its own kind. He’d dedicated fifty-odd years to preserving life. It was precious. Every one he saved and every one he lost. They all had value. Yet, if she were to be believed, lives here were being squashed and trodden underfoot. There was no logic to it. No sense.

  Ambassador Kavinh had heard the Khmer Rouge leaders describe it as an experiment. An experiment in human engineering. But to Siri’s ears it was jealousy, pure and simple. The have-nots wiping out the haves. The country poor had swept across the country like a black-suited plague and exterminated the rich and the educated. Then they’d moved against the middle classes, the not-so-rich, and the semi-educated. And when there was nobody left to hate, the Khmer Rouge had begun to turn on itself. And here, what was left of the administration, hanging by a threadbare noose. A still-kicking corpse, living in fear and paranoia.

  Siri couldn’t allow himself to believe it. If it were true, what was there to stop the plague from spreading across the northern border? Why shouldn’t it take hold in the souls of his Lao brothers and sisters? Why shouldn’t his country become a laboratory for its own inhuman experiment? If collectivism was an ideal state, then why not slavery? Why not kill those infected with the capitalist disease and be left with pure Socialist Man toiling eight hours a day with no ambition and no dreams? If death proved a convenient way of culling the populace here, why should his own leaders not … ?

  He opened his eyes and spoke aloud. “What if it’s started already?”

  With so little news and such a poor communication system, how could he really be sure there was no systematic slaughter in his own country? What became of all those members of the old regime sent for
reeducation in the north? What became of the missing hill-tribe people attempting to escape to Thailand? Surely the Lao couldn’t … It was all too much to take in. He felt as if his head were a pot and he was attempting to fill it with all the water from a village reservoir in one journey. He began to drown in the small room. He needed air. He needed evidence of normality. Children playing in front of their homes. Old ladies smiling from windows. Pretty girls ignoring the bawdy comments of street-corner youths. He didn’t mind if they were the country poor brought to the city and crammed into rich people’s houses like fast-breeding rats. It wasn’t important. He just needed to feel humanity around him. For his own sanity he had to be sure that at some level, life went on in this country.

  The life he was looking for would not be found behind the barricades of the embassy ghetto. It wouldn’t be among the prisoners of diplomacy with their huge concrete flowerpots and their street cleaners and their ghost minders. He would have to break out of this wonderland and see what genesis of a future he could find in the dirt-poor suburbs.

  He went through the back kitchen door and into the garden. He knew that the people in the cellar hadn’t walked in past the sentries at the main gate. There had to be another way in and out. The original white wall around the garden was over six feet high but another three feet of cinder block had been crudely cemented on top of that. That in turn was garnished with ugly broken glass. The cinder-block barrier crossed the side street beside the embassy and climbed another garden wall on the far side before snaking off into the distance like the Great Wall of China. Siri had no doubt it blocked in every yard and every building in the quarter. The embassy compound was East Berlin.

  Siri was certain that with a pick and ten minutes he could have a hole in that jerry-built wall big enough to climb through. But he’d have every minder in the street on his back before he could remove one brick. No, he had to believe that those who built the wall saw it as a symbolic representation of power. They wouldn’t have imagined anyone in the embassy with the gall to challenge them. He strolled around a muddy garden still lovingly cared for by the Lao. He inspected the original white wall. Where it formed the border to the adjoining yard it was overgrown with a hysterical wisteria. An ornamental rock garden leaned against the display with ledges of pansies and other effeminate border plants. From top to bottom ran a sculptured waterfall that no longer spouted.

  Siri climbed to the top of the pile, crushing plants underfoot, and looked into the neighbor’s property. At one time it had been a mechanic’s yard or the parking lot for some rich man’s automobile collection. It was one large oil-stained slab of concrete. But it had its own brick wall. It ran parallel to that of the embassy and was only five feet tall. Why the neighbor would need a wall of his own and why it wasn’t built flush with the embassy wall he had no idea. But there was a gap, no more than two feet wide, between the two. That, Siri was certain, was the way out. He leaned casually onto the top of the wall, glanced back toward the embassy, then, certain there was nobody standing behind him, he slipped over the wall into the gap.

  He felt rather foolish pinned between the two walls and had no idea what he’d do if his theory proved to be wrong. But he sidled to his left to where the Khmer Rouge wall towered above him. The intersecting angle was bricked also but it was apparent that the blocks were not cemented, merely piled one atop the other. From a distance, nobody would notice. Siri began to disassemble the temporary wall. Brick by brick the far side revealed itself to him. The contrast between the view ahead and the oasis behind was as drastic as that between heaven and hell. The entire block immediately at the back of the embassy compound had been leveled, apparently by a bomb. Rubble and shattered glass and broken lives were strewn for more than one hundred fifty feet in either direction. Beyond that, the surviving buildings stood bruised with soot and dejected like mourners around a grave.

  Siri stepped cautiously into this other world and carefully replaced the blocks behind him. It was a peculiar, Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass feeling. He had the overwhelming sense of being behind the set at a film lot. Backstage, there was no pretense, no need for flowers and new paint. He picked his way through the debris until he was on a dirt street. There were no body parts among the rubble. No flies in search of lunch. The only sounds were far off and there was no movement. No birds, no dogs, no life. The buildings on either side seemed to stoop forward with curiosity to watch him pass. Some doors were open, others were padlocked. Those windows with glass were shattered. Every building had its own unique display of dead plants: dead orchids in half-coconut shells hanging from an awning, dead crown of thorns in a row of colored pots, dead vines climbing a three-story building, losing their grip, hanging over the street suspended in free fall.

  Another street, open doors, and front yards with small cemeteries of dead consumer goods. A toaster oven. A television. A rice cooker. Like fish washed up on a riverbank, no life source. No point. Embarrassed cars stripped bare left with only their carcasses. A dove in a rattan cage, unfed, feathers on a white rib cage. Broken bone-china cups crunching underfoot. At each intersection a pyre of the questionably valuable. The sooty smile of a piano keyboard. A child’s high chair in charcoal. The black shadow of an antique French bureau, once priceless, now worthless.

  Siri walked slowly along the unpaved lanes, his hands clenched into fists. He stepped into unlocked apartments and found himself in interrupted lives. The subliminal message “Had to pop out for a minute—be back soon” was pinned somewhere in the air around them. They sat humble and faithful like stupid dogs waiting for their owners to return. A letter, half written, undisturbed on a desk. A plate of rotting fruit on a kitchen table. Toy cars parked in front of a Kellogg’s-box garage on the floor.

  He heard a noise.

  He was at a row of two-story Chinese shophouses and, illogically, he walked from one to the other trying to locate the sound. His instincts and the amulet at his neck told him to walk away. But the ghostly loneliness of his promenade so far had been unnerving. Noise was a welcome ally. Even if it was a stray cat or an orphan child or a cheetah escaped from the Phnom Penh zoo, it made no difference. He could use the company. He stood below a balcony and heard the unmistakable sound of drawers being opened. No animal he knew of had perfected the art of opening and closing drawers.

  He walked in through the shop front. They sold baskets there, finely woven bags and purses, stacks of place mats and coasters. All too delicate to be pilfered by an army. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed or destroyed. The till tray remained open, banknotes pinned inside it under wire clips. Siri walked up the staircase at the back of the shop noisily, he thought, in his leather sandals. He followed the sounds into a kind of study with cabinets and bookshelves against one wall and bank upon bank of chests of drawers. And on his knees rifling through them was a child of thirteen or fourteen. He had already amassed a small pile of booty on the floor beside him, mostly ballpoint pens and colored pencils. He was so engrossed in his search that he hadn’t heard Siri enter.

  The doctor smiled. He was about to turn and leave the child to his treasure hunt when he noticed the muscles on the boy’s neck tense. It was as if he sensed a presence. He turned his head and saw the old man standing there. He seemed to tremble. His eyes widened and he fumbled around him for something on the floor. He found what he was looking for on a shelf in front of him. His pistol was fat and clumsy in his hand, but holding it seemed to give him confidence. He was no longer afraid. His face hardened and it was then that Siri recognized him. He’d looked into those eyes every night for more than a week. This was the young assassin from his nightmare. The boy was real. So was the gun. He climbed to his feet with the weapon in front of him and snarled and spat out words Siri didn’t understand. The gun was the child’s courage, his image, his personality. Siri knew it had killed before. The boy swaggered up to the old man and leveled his personality at Siri’s forehead.

  It was a performance that had never failed. Siri was certain men
, women, and other children had quaked with fear at this same show of strength. Siri knew the boy would have no qualms about pulling the trigger. He smelled death on him like the scent of gunpowder on a shooter’s hand. Siri knew that if he spoke just one word of Lao it would be his epitaph. So he kept quiet. He smiled and raised his right hand and he slapped the little boy hard across the cheek. The blow snapped the boy’s head to one side and the gun suddenly looked more like a plaything in his hand. He stared at Siri in amazement and the doctor glared calmly back into those young eyes. What thoughts, what memories passed through the child’s head in those few seconds? Confidence was suddenly replaced with indecision, which rapidly became humiliation, and the boy began to cry. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he huffed back the sobs. At that moment, the little soldier was three years old again, helpless, and just a child.

  Siri turned away from the shaking gun barrel, shook his head, and walked back down to the street. He paused by the front shutter to catch his breath. He didn’t know why he wasn’t dead. Perhaps, being elderly and white haired, it was conceivable he was one of the mysterious brothers of the Red Khmer. The boy might have seen the old man in a motorcade or heard him talk at a training seminar. Everyone over sixty looked the same. But, more likely, it was because the doctor had shown no fear, and it was fear that satisfied the blood lust of the little killer. Without it, the kill meant nothing. There was no power-fed adrenaline. Nothing to disguise the fact that every day was a trauma for the child.

  A block away, Siri’s legs began to wobble and he caught hold of a tree trunk, hanging on to it for dear life until the shakes worked their way out of his body.

  “Not the way you’d planned to go, Siri,” he said. “Not in the script. A Douglas Fairbanks ending for you, old boy. A fitting hero’s exit. Not popped by a little lad with a grownup’s gun. No, sir.”