by Knox, Tom
Alex wandered into the room. He was munching a croissant and carrying an unread copy of Le Monde.
“Morning, sweetheart?”
“Morning,” she said.
“Hey. Are you OK?”
She nodded. “Yes, sure, yes.”
As she watched him sit and not really read the paper, she knew her answer: she was probably going to do all this alone. She’d had enough of men patronizing her. Her father. Her boss in London. Even Alex was embarrassed by her wild ideas; even Rouvier was very charmingly unpersuaded. All the men in her life, from Dad to Ghislaine, they had scoffed, or condescended, or both—even when they meant well. Now she would show them all—and prove herself. Earn and demand their respect.
“Shall I make some more coffee?” Alex asked.
“Yep,” she said. “Coffee would be good.”
27
He didn’t dare look down. He didn’t want to look across, or behind him, or anywhere. He could feel the silt, or maybe something less acceptable, between his toes. A persistent cold breeze froze into him. Moonlight sheened the waveless water, silhouetting the black dead trees against the deadening silver.
The Butcher’s Lake. They were a third of the way across; already it was long past midnight.
“Here.”
He reached out a hand for Chemda. She had slipped in the rotting mud.
“Thanks.”
Jake hauled her up onto a kind of island, with its one requisite black spar of dead tree. A large white night bird, alarmed by their arrival, flapped away into the depths of sky, toward the silent tropical stars. The whiteness of the beating wings dwindled into dark.
Rittisak glanced back at his charges as they squatted on the mud bank, regaining some energy. His dark face was fathomless in the gloomy moonlight.
“It’s taken us two hours already,” Jake said to the Khmer, who shrugged. “How much longer?”
“No English, no English.”
Jake pointed to his wrist, where a watch might be if he hadn’t taken it off. “I said…”
But he said nothing: he gave up. He turned to Chemda to translate. She was barefoot and smeared with mud to the knee—but they were all barefoot and smeared with mud, indeed Jake was muddy to the shoulder. He had already slipped over once as they tried to ford the expanse of water, nearly collapsing into deeper grayness, splashing noisily, making the night birds clack and disperse in agitation, making Rittisak frown and whisper and put an urgent finger to his elegant Khmer lips: shhhhh!
At Jake’s request, Chemda translated. Rittisak answered. She translated again.
“Just another three hours, ah, more or less. He says the next bit is the worst … then it should get easier, shallower, I think.”
They rose and slid down the mud of the islet shore, and Jake girded himself for his near-submersion. The cold cringed into his ankles with a sensation of sickliness, like sudden gangrene. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, this definite feeling of viscosity to the water, this cold and unpalatable oiliness. Perhaps he was just spooked by those stories of bodies dumped here, drowned here, the Butcher’s thousands, cached underwater, like Ta Mok had been some kind of human crocodile, storing food.
The tiredness washed over him as they followed Rittisak’s delicate path, picking the shallowest route through the deceptive waters, the chilling wide swamps. He gazed, half-dreaming, at these strange black-and-white night birds, raptors, vulturesque, posed on so many trees. Did they feed off the corpses? Was that why they roosted here?
Chemda slipped again, and he reached out to steady her. He wondered if he loved her.
The trudge continued. It was a hypnotically repetitive process: wait for Rittisak to seek his path through the quagmire, then follow his footsteps exactly, then lean against a poisoned tree, then turn and make sure Chemda was OK.
Then repeat.
They were halfway across now. When he leaned against the next dead tree, Jake looked behind and squinted in the moon-tarnished darkness; he could see Ta Mok’s house, back there, on the dry ground. What must the Butcher have felt? Sitting there in his concrete villa with the stupid paintings, looking at this reservoir of death that he had decreed? Where the ospreys fed on the fish and the flesh, carrying the carrion of his victims to the distant kapoks on the Dangrek Escarpment? A sliver of wind goosefleshed the water around him. Another bird streaked the bleak whiteness of the moon, then disappeared.
It was three or four a. m. But was it really? How long to dawn? Was that the first skein of silvery blue on the far horizon? Maybe it was just some dismal Cambodian town staining the sky with its naked lights hung on stark concrete poles.
Rittisak was talking and pointing. Chemda came up close and held Jake’s muddy hand as she listened. She explained:
“Says it’s, ah, the last kilometer, we go that way, then we can climb the hills—some of this is deep—we need to be careful. But we are nearly there.”
Nearly there, they had nearly made it. Jake’s spirits surged with hope as they waded the greasy cold water. Soon they would be climbing up the hills, then they could rest in the dry, warm shelter of the forest, then it was an easy slip across the border, and then: safety! After all the terrors came Thailand. And trains and telephones and a talk with Tyrone. Jake yearned to be in Thailand, to be in a country that was not haunted by two million ghosts, a country that wasn’t one giant neak ta, one giant spirit house, with more specters than citizens.
The waters oiled between his legs, making a silver-and-rainbow coil in the moonshine. Jake stared down, absorbed.
A face was staring up at him.
He lurched, swayed. And reached out a hand for a branch of black wood.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine.”
He lied. He was sure he’d seen a face, a kind of face, a skull, a skull with flesh on it, bobbing momentarily. Or had he? Jake had no time to sort the nightmares from reality. It was all a nightmare. Now he could hear a fat sudden noise behind him. A splashing angry noise, coming close. The trees were denser here, the moon was partly clouded, the light was so poor: Was it someone pursuing them, or some animal?
He didn’t know who panicked first. Chemda maybe, maybe even Rittisak. But they panicked, all three of them. From the obedient procession of the last four hours, suddenly they were all running, or trying to run, wading the waters of a childhood nightmare, unable to progress, yet still running, slipping, gasping.
“I’m stuck!”
He reached behind and grasped her hand and tugged; the ooze clutched at her, lecherously; but then the mud yielded—and she was free, and shuddering, and waving him on. The splashing behind them was louder. They struggled forward. But now, all around them, the water was roiled, like a saucepan coming to the boil.
With a scum floating on the surface.
Jake fought his urge to give up, to go back, to do anything but this. Chased by the splashing, they were wading through bodies, or at least floating bones. Shin bones. Human arms and femurs. The lake was brimming with dismembered cadavers, floating like sad and small gray logs, brought to the surface by the disturbance.
The victims of Ta Mok.
The smell was an abomination. No wonder the night birds roosted here: the shrikes and the ravens. Ospreys. Fish vultures. Butcher-birds. Despair and denial mixed with Jake’s revulsion, and his fear, but they had to keep wading, escaping whatever pursued them.
And now the moon shone down—on a tiny ripple of hope. Jake squinted, and yearned. They were nearly there: the hapless attempt at a shoreline where the artificial lake met the artificial beach. Rittisak was already up on the shore, reaching out; Jake caught the hand and was assisted onto dry land; behind him, Chemda raced up, spitting and shivering. She squatted on the black soil and she swiveled.
The moon broke the clouds, once more, revealing their pursuer: just a water buffalo. Halted angrily in the water, amid the floating bones. A gray image in the lighter grayness.
Rittisak clapped his hands. The buffalo sn
orted contemptuously, then turned and waded away.
For a moment they sat panting, and trembling, and rubbing the mud from their hands and feet as best they could, using leaves and ferns. They all coughed the filthy water from their mouths. Still no one spoke. Chemda seemed on the verge of tears, but as ever she strangled them at birth. Manfully.
A religious silence ruled. Total silence, omerta. Maybe, Jake thought, what they had witnessed was beyond conversation, simply too harrowing to discuss. Maybe they would never mention this again. Not to anyone, not to each other, not for as long as they breathed.
“Climb,” said Chemda. “We have to climb.”
28
“Let’s go.”
The climb began. It was sharp and prickly, but it was dry, and better than their ghastly course across the Butcher’s reservoir. Roots ripped his hands. Chemda held on to Jake’s arms. Rittisak was a sherpa of nimbleness, choosing rocks as footholds, helping them up, adeptly pointing at branches they could use to ascend. Jake wondered why Rittisak was so assiduous in his assistance: the villagers here were much friendlier than in so many other places. Maybe they just hated authority, like Chemda had said, and a couple of outlaws, like he and Chemda, appealed to their rebel spirit.
Ten strenuous and sweaty minutes later they were on top of the cliff, near a concrete shack. The moon shone on more dead trees, burned trees; maybe slashed and burned by the swidden farmers. There was a definite sense of dawn in the air, a virginal stirring, as birds timidly chirruped.
Jake said, “We need to rest a few hours, Chemda. Tell Rittisak?”
The two Khmers spoke Khmer. Jake saw Rittisak shrug, uncomfortably, then accede. OK. Sleep here. Jake lay down at once—right inside the fetid concrete shack. His rucksack was a pillow. Chemda lay beside him and sleep came at once, like a kidnapper, hooding him brutally. Darkness.
He didn’t care. He slept and he dreamed as he knew he would dream: he dreamed of bodies and faces drowned underwater; he dreamed of his mother like a mermaid, his sister, too, the lost women underwater, sighing and singing, sirenic, disinterred, waving their pale limbs, beckoning.
He woke to blazing patches of sun on the ground, shaped by the small concrete windows. Eight a. m., maybe. Jake suppressed his shivers of simultaneous heat and cold. And then the juddering memory of the lake returned, and his anxieties spiraled. He felt feverish. Could this get any worse? What was happening to him? He felt an overwhelming urge to see the picture of his sister one more time. But where was it?
He recalled: buttoned in his breast pocket, where he’d secreted it during the long truck journey from Siem Reap. Fumbling for his pocket, he reached for the photo. But the pocket was unbuttoned. It had come undone. The photo was gone. Slipped away, or washed away, no doubt, when they were wading the lake. Only shreds of moist paper remained. She had dissolved in the water. His family had finally dissolved.
It was difficult to fight the emotions, the keening loss. Yet he tried. But even as he fought the grief, the chilly possibility slit open his thoughts. The possibility he had been ignoring for days—yet not quite avoiding. And this final slice of grief tipped him into speculation. Abject, degraded speculation.
Was he cursed? Had he been cursed by the spider witch?
This was, of course, ridiculous. He was a rationalist, a materialist, the most convinced of atheists. He wasn’t scared of death, of ghosts, of vampires or God or gravestones or hell. He despised and rejected the absurd and clattering parade of human religion and superstition.
And yet, despite his anger, he couldn’t wipe away the sensation, the creeping and ridiculous idea. That ghastly witch, the nouveau crone in her sequined turquoise jumper, with the black spider excrement in her chewing black mouth—maybe she really had done it: cursed him, cast a terrible spell. Bad luck, evil luck, was pursuing him like a feral dog. And now he had lost the photo. Lost his sister all over again.
The sun shone brightly through the little window.
Chemda was awake. She was standing and dressed, and listening to Rittisak. He was talking quickly in Khmer—and his utterance made her blanch, visibly.
“Pol Pot’s house,” she said, and her face was trembling. “My God, we are in Pol Pot’s old house. Where he spent his last years. Sometimes tourists come here. Ah. God … Of all the places. We have to go.”
She was obviously shaken. They needed to leave at once. Jake doused his face with bottled water, slung on his socks and boots, then he and Chemda helped each other with the rucksacks and shared a brief, silent kiss, and they walked into the jungle.
There was still a deathliness to the area. This was not the vibrant, overly fecund jungle of Angkor Wat. Patches of burned or dead vegetation dotted the forest. Birds sang: apologetically, and uncertainly. Or maybe Jake was imagining it. He hoped he was imagining it, just as he wanted to believe he had imagined the skulls and skeletons in the water, the jaunty flotsam of genocide.
Two hours and five kilometers of jungle pathway found them in the outskirts of a village. Rittisak looked more relaxed in the sunlight. His job was close to completion. He pointed one way and talked and then pointed another way.
Chemda turned: “He says the main road is just there, so we must be careful, but the Chong Sa crossing is also very close, we just have to hack through this last field … take the path, along a ravine, get across the frontier.”
They slipped down the ravine, but the route was confusing, it forked several times. At one point it led them to a clutch of houses, the busy road to Thailand taking them horribly close to danger; but another turning seemed to head for the wilds, toward that unguarded and very wooded border a few kilometers east.
They walked away from the houses, sweating, silent, and scared. Burned trees lined the narrow lane. And then the path widened to a clearing.
Everyone halted.
In the center of the scruffy clearing was a small linear hump of soft mud, surrounded by a wire fence. A low and rusty iron roof protected the mud from the rains and the sun.
Rittisak was pointing.
“Pol Pot grave! Where they burn body. Dump him!”
Jake stared, dumbfounded. This was the grave of the dictator? Pol Pot’s grave? It was poignantly rudimentary. It could have been the lyrically humble grave of a great poet, a pauper’s grave for a neglected genius—and then, Jake thought, maybe it was just that: the Mozart of death was buried here, this was the grave of an eerie prodigy, an autistic savant, a grinning mediocrity who somehow killed, murdered, his own country.
Offerings had been placed next to the grave. Some incense sticks were burning, planted in a sand-filled jar of instant tom yum noodles. Red apples shriveled beside a pile of silver coins. And next to the grave was a wooden spirit house: someone had actually installed a wooden shrine to honor the dead shade of Pol Pot. Jake moved close and saw: inside the wooden house were two dolls, Mr. and Mrs. Pol Pot. Jake marveled.
Rittisak was speaking. Chemda interpreted:
“He says people come here to pray, to, ah, seek help from the spirit of Pol Pot. The shrine was erected by some Thai guy. He won the lottery after praying to Pol Pot’s ghost. Hey. Do you think I am allowed to piss on this grave? Ah, are women allowed to do that, or is it just a guy thing? Anyway, please—let’s move.”
He had never heard Chemda speak coarsely before; she barely ever swore. Chemda turned away from the grave in disgust.
But Jake lingered. He was impressed by the florid paradox of the scene: the grave of a lunatic and atheist dictator, the man who murdered monks and pulled down temples, the man who didn’t just hate God but tried to stamp God into the dust—the grave of this unbeliever had been turned into a shrine, a place of superstitious worship where peasants prayed to a Communist ghost, a Marxist deity; it was the most perfect irony, quite sumptuous. It had to be recorded.
Almost reflexively, Jake took out his camera from his rucksack and aimed the lens.
Rittisak was edgy and fidgeting. Chemda was anxiously gesturing:
&nb
sp; “Come on, Jake, quick, we need to go!”
“Just a couple more shots, wait, just a few more.”
He knelt in the dust and grabbed some images, just a couple more. Raising his tiny camera to get a wider shot, he stepped back; then he looked at the digital image and realized he hadn’t properly framed the four soldiers who had just walked into the clearing with guns.
The four soldiers with guns, who were now aiming them at Jake and Chemda and Rittisak.
“Chemda,” he whispered.
Way too fucking late. How stupid was this? How stupid had he been? So quickly, so easily: they had been captured. The soldiers were smiling, and laughing, waving those guns. One was snapping orders, triumphant. Shouting in Jake’s face.
Jake reeled at his own idiocy. His rasping stupidity. It was his fault. If they hadn’t lingered for him to take the photos, the soldiers might not have overheard them, marched off the road, and found them at the stupid little grave.
Rittisak had a gun pointed to his head. Chemda likewise. Jake felt the numbness of defeat. He allowed himself to be handcuffed. Everyone was handcuffed. The soldiers were arguing. Smiling and laughing—yet arguing. The youngest soldier handcuffed them all in brisk and ruthless silence. The apparent captain shouted his order. The youngest soldier shrugged and shook his head.
Again the soldiers argued. The captain pointed, with a metal bar in his hand—he was giving it to the younger soldier and barking his harsh Khmer sentences as he did. A metal bar? In a lonely clearing? Chemda was covering her face with frightened hands.
The revelation came to Jake like the flush of a sudden and terrible sickness. The soldiers were deciding whether to kill them.
A bird sang melodiously somewhere. It was done. The soldier saluted. The arguing ended. Jake could hear a car on the road, and a radio, and a cockerel crowing the tropical morning. He could smell cooking, he could smell woodsmoke and forest and sunbaked garbage.
This is how it happens, he thought. Not with choirs or angels or poetry, but with the smell of garbage.
Chemda tried to speak; the soldiers ignored her. They pushed Rittisak to his knees, making him buckle and kowtow. They kicked Jake to his knees, too: a foot brutally stamped the back of his legs so he crumpled into a praying position, supplicant in the sunny dust, praying by Pol Pot’s grave.
