Bible of the Dead

by Tom Knox

  The police. Surely the police.

  Tou said:

  ‘Now we run.’

  Chapter 7

  The cold winds moaned and wailed right outside Annika’s cottage. The sound was distressing, like anguished mothers were wandering along the derelict lanes of Vayssieres, battering on the ancient doors, searching for their murdered children. Here in the very middle of the Cham des Bondons.

  This was Julia’s first visit to the Cham since she had been dismissed by Ghislaine last week. She was glad to be with Annika again, with her friend. Yet she was also, as always, unsettled by the surroundings. She couldn’t understand why Annika lived quite so close to the stones. The Cham was wonderfully atmospheric, but why choose to live in the only habitable cottage, in an otherwise abandoned village?

  It was just a little too eerie.

  Annika was crossing the low ceilinged living room, bearing a tray, with a pot of tea.

  ‘A habit I collected in China. Green tea. Cha!’

  Julia’s friend was originally from Antwerp: she was a demure, wise and graciously elegant sixty-two-year-old Belgian. So her mother tongue was Flemish – but her English was nearly as good as her French. Annika was also an archaeologist, although semi-retired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.

  While her hostess decorously tipped the porcelain teapot, Julia stared around. Annika’s taste in décor consistently fascinated her: the drawings, the paintings, the elegant sketches, the wistful etchings of winter scenes, of skaters and frozen lakes. Maybe from Belgium, or Holland.

  Annika stood, and returned to the kitchen, to fetch some cake.

  Taking advantage of the moment, Julia looked further along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breugel-ish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet, and the ‘sorcerer’ of the Trois Freres. And there, on the far wall of the sitting room, a picture of the Hands of Gargas, from the Gargas cave in the mid Pyrenees: stencils of hands made on cave walls, by men, women and children: in the early Stone Age.

  Sitting here in this weather-beaten cottage, aged thirty-three, Julia could still vividly recall the day she first saw the Hands of Gargas. In a way those hands were the reason she was here.

  In her mind she relived the scene.

  She was fifteen when it happened. As a special treat, as part of a long holiday in France, her mother and father had taken her to see the great ancient caves of the Dordogne and the Lot. Lascaux and Cougnac, Rouffignac and Pech Merle. With their famous and glowing cave-paintings.

  There, confronted by these stunningly ancient tableaux – some painted 20,000 years ago, even 30,000 years ago – Julia had almost cried, ravished by their primeval yet timeless loveliness.

  But that was only the beginning. After the Dordogne they had driven south, to the Pyrenees, to go and look at Gargas. And the Hands. And where Cougnac and Pech Merle had delighted, the Hands of Gargas had troubled her, and truly moved her.

  They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a stone age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia, and placed their hands against the rockface, and blown the paint through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave – or so it was supposed by the experts – so the tiny infant hand could be stencilled alongside the adults’.

  Why?

  And why were so many of the hands disfigured? Julia had wondered this then even as she wondered it now. Why the disfigurement? Fingers were severed or bent in most of the Hands of Gargas. No one knew the reason. Since the discovery of the cave in the nineteenth century, many theor ies had been provided for these ‘mutilated’ hands – a hunting code, a disease, frostbite, a ritual and tribalistic disfigurement – yet none of them really fitted.

  A great conundrum.

  And so it was the Hands that had decided Julia’s fate. Standing in Gargas feeling giddy and awkward and flustered and adolescently attracted to the young French student who was their guide, Julia had resolved – there and then – to make these precious subterranean cloisters her world. At that moment she had resolved to study prehistory; and then to become an archaeologist.

  To solve the puzzles.

  At first her parents had been pleased by her impetuous decision: their precious daughter had a charming vocation! But when the teenage ideal evolved into twenty-something reality, things had changed. After her degree in Toronto she’d left for Europe, to do her PhD in London; and then the guilt really kicked in, the guilt of an only child leaving her family, and pursuing a career instead of giving them grandchildren. As if to compound her sense of error, her subsequent career had begun to disappoint, it had all tailed off into a mediocre teaching job at a mediocre London college.

  Soon after that, and much as she loved her parents, the weekly transatlantic phone calls from her mother and father had become an unspoken ordeal, a silent yet insidious reproach: No I am not coming home, Yes I am still ‘just teaching’, No I haven’t got a fiancé, No there is no prospect of grandchildren. Goodbye Dad, goodbye Mum.

  Goodbye.

  Julia sighed and shook her head.

  Annika set a plate of sweet cakes on the table – and spoke.

  ‘You must understand Ghislaine, he is a disappointed man. A very disappointed man, but determined too.’

  Julia knew that Annika and Ghislaine went way back. They were the same age. They had been friends, apparently, for decades. Annika had worked under the ludicrous Ghislaine since the 1970s, across France, now in Lozère.

  She leaned forward.

  ‘Annika, do you mind if I ask a personal question?’

  The older woman shrugged, in a neutral way, and pulled her grey cashmere cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders. ‘Not at all. You have told me all of your life! Why not ask me about mine.’

  ‘Were you and Ghislaine . . . were you . . .’

  ‘Lovers. Yes.’

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘1969. We shared political ideals. We were at the Sorbonne together. We learned Maoism together! We even went to China together in the early seventies. Hence, Julia, the tea.’ The late middle aged lady pursed her slightly over-lipsticked lips, to take a hot sip, then she set down the handle-less porcelain cup.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Do not blame him, Julia, for the way he acts and is. He has . . . beliefs, even now. Beliefs which brought him here. And me. There was a time we shared ideals as well as kisses, and we were both interested in the caves, in prehistory. Archaeology.’ The two women simultaneously looked at the wall pictures, the Hands of Gargas. Open and closed, fingerless and mutilated.

  ‘Of course we are no longer together now. We do not share kisses.’ The smile was brief and unmirthful. ‘But we are still friends, after a fashion. A la mode. I will not betray him. He is a sad man, conflicted. And he has his family name.’

  Julia was frustrated, and bewildered.

  ‘Why won’t he take my find seriously?’

  ‘What makes you think he doesn’t take it seriously?’

  The way he just dismissed me! Sacked me!’

  Annika squinted at Julia, then she looked out of the window, where the wind was searching amongst the stones, lamenting its widowhood. ‘Perhaps he takes you very seriously. Therefore his reaction. He is conflicted, as I say.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’

  ‘I cannot explain. There are mysteries in Ghislaine’s past. But it is not for me to reveal, not for me to shine the lamp on the cavern wall. But do not think less of yourself. That is all.’

  Annika was always a little evasive; self consciously mysteri ous in her thoughts. But this was a seriously new level of annoying coyness. Even though she liked and admired Annika, Julia couldn’t help thinking: get over yourself.

  She tried again:r />
  ‘What did he mean by “the collection in Prunier”.’

  ‘You can Google this yourself.’

  ‘I did. And I found out. Prunier is a tiny village, twenty kilometres away. North Lozère.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘So I went there, Annika. And there’s nothing there. I expected a collection of some sort. A small museum of archaeology, more skulls and skeletons, that kind of thing. But all I discovered was a boulangerie and a church. And some old lady who scowled at me. There is nothing in Prunier.’

  Her Belgian friend smiled, distantly.

  ‘So you did not find. Do not worry. It probably will not help you anyway.’

  Julia sighed and sipped Chinese tea; Annika added:

  ‘Consider it possible: some things are meant to be hidden.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘The truth is hidden in the caves? But it has always been hidden there hasn’t it? And we still do not know quite what it is.’ The Flemish lady allowed herself another long, melancholy glance at a picture on the wall: at the beautiful twinned horses of Pech Merle, peculiar elegant horses cantering away from each other since the Ice Age. ‘I always think, even today: why did they paint so many animals and so few humans? Isn’t that strange, mmn, Julia? And when they do paint humans, they are so sad or forlorn, no? The poor boys of Addaura, the terrible hands of Gargas, the little stick man at Lascaux, with the slaughtered bison and his intestines, his chitterling, like so many andouillettes, pouring out of the stomach! There is some more green tea.’

  Julia flinched at the image: the spilled intestines of the wounded bison, at Lascaux, one of the more horrifying tableaux of Ice Age art. Troubling, like the hands of Gargas. Why was Annika talking this way? This was ambiguity upon ambiguity. Adding irritation to frustration.

  What should she do? Julia had more questions. And she felt she deserved straight answers. After all, Annika had invited her over, after Julia had mentioned her find, the skulls, the argument. So Julia had driven over through the autumn wind and cold, and now the older lady was being difficult and shrugging and mysterious and Gallic, even though she was Flemish Belgian.

  ‘Annika. You asked me over. Can’t you tell me? We’re friends. Tell me what is all this about? Why is Ghislaine so obstructive? If you can’t tell me anything then I don’t see what –’

  The telephone rang. Annika rose and crossed her little living room. Phone in hand, she stood under a wallposter of the Cougnac paintings. Julia tuned out from the overheard dialogue, not wishing to intrude. It looked like Annika was having a slightly painful conversation: whispering, white faced, nodding tersely.

  ‘Oui . . . oui . . . bien sur. Merci.’

  The phone receiver carefully replaced, the older woman came back to the coffee table, wrapping her cardigan even tighter – as if the wind was blowing down from the werewolf-haunted steppes of the Margeride and directly through the room. Picking up her cup Annika drank some tea and cursed:

  ‘Merde. The tea is cold.’ Then she looked at Julia. ‘That was the police. Ghislaine has been murdered.’

  Chapter 8

  Gaining. The police were gaining.

  ‘Faster,’ said Chemda. Her hand gripped Jake’s momentarily, unconsciously maybe. ‘Faster. Quicker. Please.’ Then she spoke in French, and then Khmer. Urging on the driver.

  Jake doubted Yeng knew any of these languages. He spoke Hmong. But the meaning was plain.

  Faster. Quicker. Please.

  But no matter how fast they went, the noises behind them proved how swiftly they were losing. The roar of the big police Toyotas was drowning the growl of their own wheezing vehicle.

  ‘Faster!’ said Jake, helplessly. He saw images of the blood-drained Cambodian man in his mind: did the cops really do that? Why not? Who else? Perhaps it was that thin unsmiling Ponsavanh officer. Jake could easily envisage him: briskly slashing a neck, like severing the arteries of a suspended hog, watching the blood drain and belch. Nodding. Job done.

  The jeep accelerated into a desperate turn.

  They had no choice but to escape. Even if they surrendered to the Ponsavanh police and Chemda used her grandfather’s high profile, again, to save them – and there was no guarantee that this technique would work a second time, indeed Jake was sure it wouldn’t – that still meant surrendering Tou, who would certainly be beaten and imprisoned and convicted and possibly executed. And what would those clumsy and brutal police do to old man Yeng? The openly rebellious Hmong?

  But their vehicle was old, asthmatic and rusty; the police SUVs, however dirty, were fast and new.

  Yeng spun the wheel, racing them along the soft earthen banks of rice paddies, ducking the car under the slapping branches of oak, bamboo and glossy evergreens; the jeep slid and groaned in the mud – then sped on, grinding, desperate, and churning – but the cars were overtaking them. It was happening. They were being overtaken.

  Jake swore; Tou shouted; Yeng accelerated. Jake thought of the thin police officer, his repressed anger and hatred, maybe he would happily hoist them by their ankles, cut a throat –

  An explosion blossomed in gold.

  A huge and sudden explosion flayed the windscreen with mud and water and leaves; the jeep toppled left and further left, nearly flipping over; but then the driverside tyres found some purchase and surged forward and they crashed back onto level ground, and somehow they sped onwards.

  Unharmed?

  Smoke. There was smoke behind them. And wild flames of black and orange and billowing grey. Jake guessed at once: it must have been a bombie: an unexploded shell. The cars behind had surely hit some UXO. Jake stared, quite stunned, watching men falling out of one flaming vehicle, men on fire, screams. Muffled screams.

  Tou was whooping.

  Jake gazed in horror.

  ‘We have to stop.’ He grasped Tou’s shoulder. ‘We must stop, they could be hurt –’

  ‘No!’ Tou said. ‘Crazy! They kill us. They kill Samnang they kill you and Chemda we go –’

  Chemda looked Jake’s way:

  ‘We have to. He’s right –’

  ‘But – But Jesus –’

  ‘No. No no no! We escape!’ said Tou. ‘We escape now! See they are stopping!’

  It was true. All the police cars had been halted by the lead vehicle’s disaster. The cops were stuck in the smoke and the mud. They had all been saved by the American ordnance hiding under the softly unpetalling magnolia trees.

  ‘Escape. We escape.’

  We escape.

  Jake stared. Quite dumbed. Their old jeep rattled over the paddyfield bumps, screeching uphill and away. They were indeed going to escape – and maybe this was no accident, maybe this wasn’t just outrageous fortune. Jake had forgotten that Yeng the Driver knew what he was doing. Yeng knew the bush, the forest, the paddies. He was striped Hmong. Hmong Bai. Perhaps he knew all along where he was going, and where to lead their pursuers: into the bombs.

  Whatever the answer – luck or skill – the smoke and fire were a long way behind them now. The policemen, mobbing the wreck of their burned-out car, were visible but tiny. The jeep was already climbing into the mountains, quitting the Plain of Jars. And so their fate was boxed and mailed. They were really on the run. If Jake really wanted adventure and danger and risk: this was it.

  The Plain stretched into the blueness of the distance, as they ascended. The scenery was queerly serene, untroubled, as if this place had seen so much worse. And the serenity was paradoxically beautiful, too. Jake clutched his camera in his perspiring hands, and took a shot. The way the mosaic of rice paddies shone out so blue in the reflected sun: it was like the tesselated pieces of a stained glass window.

  Where had that image come from? His childhood. The stained glass window, the blue robes of the Virgin. It was a visual echo of himself, as a little boy, with his mother in a Catholic church: holding her hand, staring up: there’s Saint Veronica, Jacob, and there’s Saint Francis, and that’s the blue of Saint Lu
cy, Saint Lucy blue.

  Jake took another photo, to mediate the sadness away. The spire of smoke became a wistful line, and then it was gone. All was blue, the blue of the sky and the blue of the reflecting paddies and the blue of the horizon. Anxiously smudged with faint cloud.

  No one spoke for many minutes as they made a lonely ascent through tiny hamlets and empty woodland. The return to the tranquillity of deep rural Laos was a small welcome death. They passed villages where girls threw tennis balls at young men, all of the men in suits, the girls in splendid dresses. The jeep sped on, urgent and noisy in the quiet of the woods.

  ‘A mating ritual,’ said Chemda. ‘They sing to each other and throw tennis balls, at New Year. That way they can find husbands . . . and wives . . . This damn phone.’

  Chemda was again frustratedly checking her cellphone. But she shook her head. Agitated. Frightened. Determined. No signal. She leaned and asked Tou:

  ‘Tou! Where are we going? How can we get out of Laos – we need to find a way out!’

  The lad turned.

  ‘Yes yes big danger. But Yeng say he have friends. We go. But we drive long-time long-time. Road dirty.’

  Jake guessed immediately who these friends must be: Hmong fighters, tribal renegades, hiding out in the rugged hills. They were surely beyond government jurisdiction: this was surely rebel territory. He had been in just enough lawless regions to recognize the sensation: that liminal frisson as you passed into a no-man’s-land, the interzone, where the laws of the city do not apply.

  That’s where they were now. There were no police here. No civilian laws. Just endless thick forest and orchids and fungi and wild camellias astir in the sunny breeze; and in the distance, thin strings of waterfall tasseling in the wind as they dropped from the misty peaks of the high Cordillera.

  The journey was lengthy and anxious. Every so often they passed clearings in the forest where Hmong children, carrying wicker baskets full of freshly chopped hardwood, stopped dead and pointed, evidently stunned, astounded: wholly gobsmacked by what they saw in the jeep.