Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

by Colin Cotterill

  “It was obvious the guide knew something,” he continued. “And I pushed him as far as I could to get it out of him. But all he’d tell me was that there’d been an incident. He led me down to the reception. I thought I might get some information there. The Lao ambassador was in the room but the minders were shepherding the crowd. They were deciding who should stand where, who should talk to whom. I had my Lao-speaking guide all to myself and he’d obviously been told to stick to me. I was introduced to a couple of bigwig Khmer but I couldn’t tell you who they were. They were as focused on not answering questions as the guide was on not asking them. They paraded us all through to the dining room and sat me at a table with people I didn’t know, and, for the most part, couldn’t communicate with. I doubt they could even—”

  “Civilai!” said Mrs. Nong firmly.

  “Yes, sorry. I wanted a chance to talk with Ambassador Kavinh alone. I could see him at the diplomatic table on the far side of the room. He made eye contact often. But there followed an hour of interminable speeches. Once they were over and the food was to be served, all of us weak bladders made a run for the toilets. I saw Kavinh head that way and I followed. I thought my boy would insist on coming with me but he didn’t. The ambassador was in the bathroom. There was a crowd in there, including the ambassador’s minder. Kavinh greeted me and asked me how the afternoon went. He shook my hand. As he did so he palmed me a note. He was a very nervous man. Even jumpier than he’d been that morning. I got the feeling he feared for his life on a twenty-four-hour basis. He used the urinal and left. I queued for a stall. Once inside I read the note. I only had time to go through it once but the gist was this:

  “Your Comrade knows the truth about this place. He broke out of the embassy compound. They’re looking for him. If they find him, they’ll kill him. Only diplomatic channels can save him. Tell the Chinese as soon as you get out of the country. It’s your only hope.”

  “Oh, Siri, no,” Daeng said quietly.

  “I was in a panic. I destroyed the note and went back to the reception. There were Chinese everywhere but I hadn’t met one who could speak Lao or French or who would admit to speaking Vietnamese. I can’t speak a word of Chinese. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know who to trust. It’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been there. There was an oppressive charge in the air like science fiction. The Khmer Rouge weren’t … they weren’t human. You couldn’t talk to them. They were robots.

  “I endured the rest of the evening and they let me go to my room. There were mud footprints outside on the carpet. The lock of my door had been picked and left unlocked. I went inside with trepidation. I don’t have what you might call luggage but nothing appeared to have been disturbed. I went across to Siri’s room. That wasn’t locked either but there was no sign of forced entry. There were no muddy footprints inside. Siri’s bag had been upended onto the bed. He traveled light too but I remember he had a book with him.”

  “Camus,” said Daeng, her voice a cloud.

  “That’s right. It was gone. Plus a notebook he kept. I don’t know whether he’d taken his travel documents to the embassy with him but they weren’t there either. I was lost. I went down to reception to ask if anyone had seen my friend, but of course … So I went back my own room and wedged a chair against the doorknob. I was afraid, Daeng. I was afraid for Siri but I was afraid for myself too. I thought they’d be coming for me. If Siri was up to something they were sure to think I was involved. I didn’t consider hunting for him, beating on doors, insisting …”

  Civilai’s eyes had become as gray and damp as the evening clouds above them.

  “That’s what heroes do,” he went on. “But I crept to my bed with the light blazing and I lay there all night wide awake. I lay there quivering like a coward. I considered all the things they might do to me. I’d seen the look of fear in Ambassador Kavinh’s eyes. I had no weapon, only one last resort. They said they had no use for money but I didn’t believe them. And I had dollars. At least I thought I did. I hadn’t checked my secret stash. I took the bag into the bathroom and locked the door. I sat on the tile floor and couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. It was half an hour before I was calm enough to peel through the layers of cloth in the strap of my satchel. And that’s when I found the letter. It consisted of three single sheets. They had been folded and refolded into a two-inch-square and wedged into a little plastic coin bag. Somebody had put it into my secret dollar compartment but they hadn’t touched the money.”

  “Siri,” said Madame Nong.

  “He’s the only one it could have been,” Civilai agreed. “The only one who knew. I thought about the footprints and the picked lock and I imagined he’d found his way back into the hotel somehow and come to leave me the note. That’s what I wanted to believe. But the sheets were written in Khmer. The handwriting appeared to be from three or four different sources with signatures at the end of each segment. The last side was composed of musical notes on uneven, handwritten bars. What looked like lyrics were written below. It all meant nothing to me. I wanted to scream my frustration.”

  “Calm down, brother,” said Madame Daeng. Mrs. Nong had hold of her husband’s hand. It trembled as he recalled that awful night. “There really was nothing you could have done.”

  “There was so much I didn’t understand,” Civilai went on. “If he’d found his way back to the hotel, why hadn’t he come down to the reception? Surely with so many people around he would have been safer than wandering alone through Phnom Penh. I had far too much time to think. I refused to go on their ridiculous irrigation tour the next morning. I told the guide I’d been asked to pay my respects to the Chinese ambassador. Of course it was out of the question. So I stayed in my room until it was time to board the flight to Peking. Even before we took off I was hustling the Chinese on board. I found one woman, one of the official journalists. She spoke Vietnamese poorly. During the flight I did my best to convey to her everything I knew and everything I didn’t. She passed my story on to the Chinese delegation. Once we landed, at last I was able to agitate. I still carried a little clout in China from my politburo days. Some people remembered me. The Lao ambassador to Peking came to see me and together we went to the Central Committee, where I repeated my story in the presence of an official Lao-Chinese interpreter. The committee members seemed—not upset exactly, more frustrated. Like the parents of a naughty child.”

  “Would the Khmer listen to the Chinese anyway?” Daeng asked calmly.

  “They’re the only people the Khmer would listen to. All their funding, all their weapons, all their credibility … it all comes from China. The influence of the Chinese is enormous there.”

  “So enormous they could bring the dead back to life?” Daeng asked.

  “Now stop that,” said Mrs. Nong. “They aren’t going to harm a delegate from an allied country. The worst that can happen is they arrest Siri for stepping out of bounds and put him in prison. They want to be seen as strong. With Chinese intervention they’d have him out in no time. Right, Civilai?”

  Her husband’s face didn’t convey the confidence she’d hoped for.

  “What of the note?” Daeng asked. “The Khmer letter.”

  “We found a translator,” he told her. “There’s no shortage of Khmer Royalists holed up in Peking. The Chinese like to hold on to different factions from this or that country and offer them immunity. They collect them like elaborate chess pieces in case they come back into play somewhere along the line. They’ve got old Sihanouk sitting—.”

  “Civilai!” said Nong.

  “Yes, right. Right. The translation. I’m not sure, as it stands, if it could be called evidence and I don’t get the feeling the Chinese were particularly surprised by its content. But it made a lasting impression on the ambassador and me. It was written by officials at the old Royalist Ministry of Communication. They wrote of atrocities they’d witnessed and their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. I suppose it can be best summed up by the words
of one young man, the one who wrote the song. He said his name was Bo something or other. His note was dated April 21, 1975. He was a musician and a junior official at the ministry. He said that he and many of his colleagues were patriots and that they remained at their posts even after the invasion in the hope that they could offer their expertise to the liberation forces. At first, the revolutionaries were kind to them and welcomed them into the new brotherhood. Bo and his fellows explained their work and taught the newcomers the skills they needed to operate equipment.

  “On the second day of occupation the troops took the managers for what they called reorientation. They told their juniors it was necessary to teach them the ways of the new regime. Bo said he heard gunshots every day and night, not from a battle but from what sounded like firing squads or single shots. The young soldiers wouldn’t let them leave the ministry building to go home to their families. Bo said that the Khmer Rouge were not like them. They were country people who had never seen cars. Never had electricity. It was as if they saw Bo and his kind as the enemy and Bo began to realize his life would be a short one. That was when he began to collect the testimonies and signatures.

  “On the third day he watched them shoot his office mate in the forehead for no apparent reason. The guards left the corpse sitting there at his desk as a ‘reminder.’ Bo’s final words were that he loved his country and he believed that this was a temporary madness, but he felt sure he would never see his fiancée again. She lived in Battambang and he prayed that the insanity hadn’t yet spread that far. He wrote that his only regret was that he would never be able to watch the expression on her face as he sang her the song he had written for their wedding. ‘It’s a poor substitute,’ he wrote, ‘but I have written the tune and the melody on the rear of this note. If somebody finds this letter, I would like her to hear it. I would like her to know how much I love her. And I would like the world to know what craziness has descended on our beautiful city. These people are not Cambodian.”

  Civilai sighed and slouched back on his seat.

  “You think Siri found this note somewhere?” Daeng asked.

  “So it would seem. And thought it important enough to risk his life getting it out of the country.”

  “But Siri couldn’t read Khmer,” said Mrs. Nong, drying her tears with a tissue. “He wouldn’t have known how significant it was.”

  “He would,” Civilai and Daeng said at the same time.

  “It’s possible somebody gave it to him to pass on,” Daeng told her. “But my husband had instincts other men don’t possess.”

  Of course she’d meant to say “has.”

  The Therapeutic Effects Of Dying Horribly

  Time has lost its meaning. Misery has lost its edge. The sounds I hear no longer bear any human elements. They are ornaments. They are jingles. They are pleasant, almost enjoyable bursts of spontaneous birdsong. My clarity has become a giddy, drunken clarity. I see everything as a joke. A-funnything-happened-to-me-on-my-way-to-the-cemetery clarity. As Civilai liked to point out, my smart-arse thyroid is playing up again. Somewhere inside I’m aware this is a symptom, the result of endless light and lack of sleep and poor nutrition. But there’s really nothing I can do about it. I’m experiencing madness and it’s funny. Move over, Rajid.

  What good has all this conservation of energy done me? I mean, honestly. What can I do? When they nabbed me leaving Civilai’s room at the hotel, that was my chance. I had stashed my evidence and was on my way down to join the party when the black-suited monkeys were on me. I didn’t see them coming. But I was fit then, still burning calories from Peking. I could have done a James Bond. There were only two of them. Thugs, perhaps, but I could have felled them with well-placed karate chops. A sprint and dive headlong through the window at the end of the corridor. Parallel-bar routine through the branches of the strangler fig tree and head for the border. Blew that one. Very weak now. Perhaps they’ll do me the favor of killing me quickly. Perhaps they’ll tire of the toenail plucking and eye gouging and just put a bullet in me. That would be nice.

  And where have you lot gone to? One by one, you lost souls drifted away, off through the walls—east, west, north, or south. No direction. No leadership. See if I don’t desert you someday, you traitors. But, dear Ma, you’re still with me, my sweetheart. Too bad mothers have no choice. Even if they can’t see a hope in hell for their offspring they have to sit it out till the bitter end. Isn’t that right, my mother angel? Yes, chew your betels. Spit your blood. Perhaps we could chat about the old days when I come acr—

  A key in the lock. Why do they … ? Never mind. And there you are, the dungeon keeper. Thirty-six, thirty-seven? Either way, half my age but skinny. Skinny as the Chinese ideogram for tree … written in Biro. I could take you, you poorly written character. How dare they toss a twig into the lion’s den? No, Siri. Badly mangled metaphor. What would a lion care for a twig? I’ll work on that. But meanwhile you walk into my lair with your pail and your tin mug. It’s quiet beyond the door and black. Are you the night watchman? What are your orders, twiggy? Keep him alive till morning. We’ll kill him properly then. How hard can that be? Feed me and keep me away from sharp objects. But you don’t look that bright, do you?

  So I lie still and I stare. I stare into the hypnotic glare of the strip light. My tongue lolls from my mouth like that of a sleeping sloth. My breathing stops. I am clearly dead. Call me a liar. Yes, you dare speak to me. Your words sound like “Is a saucepan under a yellow?” in my language. You dare. You dare come near enough to look into my cloudy eyes. You dare lean close to my face to hold the back of your hand against my nose. And I have you. Snap. I grab hold of your head and I pull it into my stomach. No pain from my broken wrist, just a disorganized out-of-order feeling. I grip you with my arms and legs and I use what strength I have to hold you there. I am a vise. You writhe. You kick and punch. But you’re in no position to do me any damage because—you seem to forget—I am dead.

  It feels like a lifetime that I hold you to me. Two weak men in a macabre horizontal tango of death. I imagine the music. I think of fresh baguettes. And at some stage during these reveries, you have withdrawn from the dance. You are a Dutch wife in my grasp. But I hug on. I hug until every last memory is squeezed from you because I know one day you will seek the man who took your life. With luck you’ll understand I had to … I had to. But I lose consciousness and the bats and the moths come flocking.

  I come around sometime later. I feel like death but presumably I’m still alive. But not you, twiggy. You lie across me in a show of postmortem affection. You seem heavier without life as I push you off. I apologize to your mother. She probably had something better in mind for you. I search you and realize you have no pockets. What type of fashion would leave a man nowhere to put his handkerchief, his pen, his keys? I look around to see if you dropped them in our little tug of death. And then I see them. They are ten feet away, dangling in the lock of the open door. Where is a Plan B when I need one?

  It’s been ten minutes and nobody has come so perhaps there is nobody. I have been brooding over the dilemma of keys out of my reach. Even by extending my chains to their fullest and my joints to beyond their limit, I am still two yards from the door. It’s the funniest thing. I wipe sardonic tears of mirth from my eyes. Why do I never have a long pole with a hook on the end when I need one? I shall make a point of including one in my travel kit on my next journey.

  You have no belt, my jail keeper, but you have a standard-issue black-and-white checked scarf. It’s almost as poor quality as you. I rip it into strips and tie them together, all the while trying to recall the movie that taught me the skill of lassoing. It doesn’t come to me. I am amazed at how complicated it is to tie knots with one hand. I attach your tractor-tire sandal to the end of my rope and I toss. Half a dozen times I toss and my aim gets more wayward and my laughter becomes more manic. If anyone were outside the room they would have heard me by now.

  Then I catch me a key. The cloth snags on the bunch
and I have a victory of sorts. Except the key is at right angles to me and no end of tugging will remove it from the keyhole. So I work up a rhythm and swing the whole kit and caboodle: door, keys, sandal, left and right, left and right until I’m certain the lasso will slip its mooring. But the keys drop to the tiles with a mighty clang they could hear a third of a mile off.

  I sit and wait once more for the invasion of guards. And again it doesn’t happen. So I cast my line toward the floor-bound keys and I drag them to me. A bunch worthy of a Dumas dungeon. Door keys, cupboard keys, keys to some ancient vehicle, but nothing small enough to unlock me. Then I see it. A little black hex key. Annoyingly simple. I could have fashioned one myself out of my own shinbone after a year or so. If only I can keep my hand still enough to … and it clicks open. And the same key unfastens the chain at my ankle. I could probably open every door and safe and heart in the world with this cunning metal L.

  Twenty minutes have passed. I couldn’t stand. My knees had become welded lumps. I had to massage the life back into my legs. I had the option of crawling out on my hands and knees but that lacked … dignity. I wanted to make my escape attempt at least look like that of a biped rather than a tortoise. The feeling slowly came back to me and I staggered through the door and onto an open balcony. The night air was like a blast of freedom. Below was an overgrown stretch of grass that had perhaps hosted football matches in better times. It was illuminated by the odd electric bulb strung along a wall. But beyond that was a sea of black. My school was the only lighted building. I might have been at the end of the world.

  I am in the stairwell now, sitting on a step among other debris like myself. I feel like I have been dragged across broken masonry by a team of drunken asses. Indeed I have. My dance with the twig took more out of me than I have to spare. My journey thus far has taken me past three classrooms whose bright lights chiseled out the shape of the doors. From one I heard sobs. The others were silent. Then I passed the room with “Teachers’ Common Room” written in French in grand letters above the door. That was the room they’d taken me to. The business room. It was dark now. Torment is obviously a nine-to-five job. The torturers had hung up their claw hammers and headed off home to play with the kids. Stroke the dog. Kiss the wife.