The fish and vegetables they served were fresh and, they had to admit, delicious. But the lunch table conversation was torturous. Every topic was a slow drip of water onto the forehead. Whenever light and jovial threatened, the Khmer would step in to redirect the mood in the direction of sombre and dull. There were no servants. The Lao diplomatic staff delivered the meals and collected the dishes without speaking.
It was during the distribution of the pumpkin custard slices that one young diplomat dropped a spoon on Siri's lap. It was a minor inconvenience as there had been nothing on the spoon at the time. Siri reminded him that, as far as he knew, they didn't teach the dishing up of pudding at the foreign diplomats' school, but the young man made a terrible fuss. He bowed and threw his hands together in apology and berated himself. And, as he leaned over to right whatever wrong he thought he'd done, he dropped a folded napkin into the doctor's lap and engaged his eyes briefly.
Siri finished his dessert, asked where the bathroom was, and excused himself. There was no lock on the bathroom door so Siri leaned against it and unfolded the white cloth serviette. In laundry pen were written the words:
Siri. Find an excuse not to go on the a.m. trip. Stay here. Urgent. Kavinh.
Siri pulled the chain, climbed onto the porcelain toilet and dropped the napkin into the overhead cistern. He waited a few minutes before returning to the table. His rendition of a man suffering from diarrhoea and stomach cramps was spectacular. He'd obviously seen his fair share of victims. The noises he somehow produced from his bowel region were frightening enough to make everyone in the room fear they might forfeit their own lunches. Siri was led to a camp bed in a back room, covered in a blanket, and left to groan. Knowing his friend's solid constitution, only Civilai saw anything suspicious about the attack and he kept his doubts to himself.
"I'm not really feeling too well myself," Civilai announced. "I'm wondering whether something in the lunch was off."
"I assure you — " the short-haired minder began.
"But, at least one of us should make the effort," Civilai decided. "I'll carry our flag to your collective, comrades. Let's hope my colleague is well enough to attend the reception this evening. I'd hate for this to turn into a diplomatic matter."
He told them he wouldn't push the issue with the Chinese as long as the doctor was given care and rest for the afternoon. The guide seemed almost relieved to leave Siri there. And so it was that Civilai and Comrade Chenda boarded the bus to District Seventeen and Siri did not.
Phnom Penh, under whatever tyrant or warlord, had always observed the colonial French custom of sleeping after a good meal. Those two hours during the hottest part of the day belied the claim that Kampuchea did not know worklessness. Comrade Ta Khev, the sun-blistered cadre attached to the Lao embassy, was no exception. As soon as the man began his customary afternoon nap, and the bestial sounds of his snoring could be heard behind the door of his room, the embassy came alive. One diplomat was posted in front of the cadre's room. Ambassador Kavinh was kneeling on the floor at Siri's cot, hugging him like a newly deceased relative. It was a desperate and unexpected gesture.
"Siri, Siri, my old friend," he whispered.
"Kavinh? I thought you'd forgotten me."
"My past is the only thing I can think fondly of," he replied. It was a curious comment but Siri instinctively understood it.
"Come, we don't have much time," Kavinh said, climbing slowly to his feet. "And there's a lot to do."
Siri was led through the house to the larder. In the corner stood a stack of wooden crates. Those on the top contained cans of meat and fish. The lower boxes were apparently empty. Two of the junior diplomats quickly slid the stack to one side and revealed a large metal ring on a hinge embedded in the wooden floorboards. They prised the ring upwards and pulled. A heavy trapdoor lifted slowly and without sound and Siri found himself staring down into a black pit. The embassy staff looked at him and gestured that he should go down. Siri, it had to be said, had a problem with black pits. Some of his worst living nightmares had taken place in such places. He baulked.
"Really, Siri," said Kavinh. "We don't have much time before the bastard wakes up."
"Oh well."
A metal ladder led down into the darkness. Siri took a deep breath and began to descend. The ambassador followed close behind. Siri arrived at a concrete floor He stood aside and Kavinh stepped down. The trapdoor closed and Siri could hear the rearrangement of the crates overhead. The darkness was total and overwhelming.
"Bien," said the ambassador.
There came a tinkle of glass, the strike of a match, and Siri saw a disembodied hand suspended in mid-air. It carried the flame to a wick and a dirty yellow light from an oil lamp bathed the cellar. Twenty eyes looked out of the ochre shadow.
"Good afternoon," said Siri.
There was a long moment of hesitation before four men and six women stepped up to him, smiling, taking his hand, squeezing his fingers. None of them spoke.
"This is the real briefing," Kavinh whispered. "It will have to be quick. But this is the information you need to take back to Vientiane when you leave."
"Who are these people?" Siri asked.
"They're Khmer. All of them. Some we found. Others found us. This room is ventilated and sound doesn't carry. But we have to be careful. If they're found we'll all be killed."
"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 over-regulate Laos into a societal straitjacket? 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 grey. 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 the seventeenth, 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 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 apologised 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 recognised.
"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 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 land 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 re-education 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 was 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 amongst the prisoners of diplomacy with their huge concrete flower pots 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 two metres high but another metre of breeze blocks had been crudely cemented on top of that. That in turn was garnished with ugly broken glass. The breeze-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 rockery leaned against the display with ledges of pansies and other effeminate border plants. From top to bottom ran a sculptured waterfall which no longer spouted.
Siri climbed to the top of the pile, crushing plants underfoot, and looked into the neighbour's property. At one time it had been a mechanic's yard or the car park 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 a metre and a half tall. Why the neighbour 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 sixty centimetres, between the two. That, Siri was certain, was the way out. He leaned casually onto the top of the wall, glanced back towards 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 have noticed. 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 levelled, apparently by a bomb. Rubble and shattered glass and broken lives were strewn fifty metres 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 pretence, 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 amongst 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 coloured pots, dead vines climbing a three-storey building, losing their grip, hanging over the street suspended in free fall.
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave dp-7 Page 20
