Songs from the Violet Cafe

by Fiona Kidman

  In the morning, he rowed back while it was still early. From the outside, the house seemed very still. Lou opened the door carefully, not wanting to disturb his father, an early riser who liked to work from the moment he was out of bed. Walking down the passage, he heard small cries from the main bedroom, looked in and saw the tangle of blonde hair, white and brown flesh on the bed. ‘Whoo,’ his father hollered. ‘Whoo-up.’ And the woman, her feet knotted firmly together behind his back, laughed. ‘Keep going, oh yes,’ she cried.

  This was his stepmother, who saw him off when he went away on his second and last tour of duty. Raewyn, wearing a big hat and flat heels to diminish her height, stood between his father and his own new wife, Freda. When he came back, his father had died, and Raewyn had all his money. She had sold the house by the lake.

  Later, Lou went to live in the town with his wife and their baby. Sometimes, people asked him if the child was his little sister. He stayed looking much the same as he had in his teens until he entered his thirties, when a hollow developed in his left cheek, and a small pouch of flesh gathered beneath his chin. His daughter was not a bad little kid, he supposed. She tried hard. That was the best and the worst he could say about her.

  The sorrows of childhood. He’d had them, and so had Evelyn. A wave of anguish overtook him. In the past, when he thought of limbs entwined, the way he had seen his father and Raewyn, he’d thought of the pleasures of voyeurism. Now he could see only the tangle of bodies that lay somewhere in the lake.

  He wished suddenly that he could speak to Violet Trench, who had never talked to him about grief, and yet he understood that she had experienced it. Perhaps she could help him sort out this whole mess; he would not be entirely misunderstood by her.

  The first time he entered Violet Trench’s café, she had looked up at him, startled.

  ‘Do we know each other?’ she said. His wife, who by then earned her living at the radio station, had told him about the new venture by the lake. He was as surprised to see Violet as she was to see him, but not as disconcerted. Immediately, he thought what a fool she was to have acknowledged him, because he might not have recognised her, nearly twenty years after that day by the lake. Then again he’d always had a good memory, and hers were not eyes to forget.

  ‘Almost certainly,’ he had said, smiling and holding her eye. So that he had a power over her. He knew that she would have given a lot to have turned the moment back and held her tongue, but it was too late.

  Strange the way things began, because that power that he wielded over Violet Trench was the beginning of all of this trouble. She would have kept him in check as she did everyone else, were it not for what he knew.

  ‘I have not committed a crime,’ he said to himself, or did he say it aloud? For a moment he thought that he could go back and face them all.

  But he couldn’t.

  It was a crime. Worse, his father would have said, a sin, a mortal sin, although the perfect gentleman was no better than the rest. All the same he would have passed judgement, and he would have been right.

  Lou studied the leaves beneath the trees. He could walk into them as far as he go, and he would be gone without trace. He would lie down in them somewhere and his life would forsake him. Someone, sooner or later, would come across his car; it would be locked and he would be gone. They would shake their heads. The pigs got him, they would say, the wild pigs. It might even be true.

  There was a strange persistent smell in the air, like garlic. He was so light-headed he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but it seemed to him that he should set forth as unencumbered as possible. He took off his shoes and socks and placed them in a row, rolling the socks out flat into their original shapes before setting them beside the shoes. Then he pulled off his shirt, and laid it down flat too, with the arms stretched wide. Barefoot and bare-chested, he set off into the trees. Soon he was swallowed up by the filmy ferns. Far overhead in the linked branches of the beech trees, he saw the receding sky.

  PART SIX

  JESSIE SANDLE

  1980

  PHNOM PENH

  The Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Phnom Penh is a worn and battered-looking building from the outside. It faces the confluence of the Mekong and Tonlé Sap Rivers, the second of which is fed from a vast lake to the north of Cambodia. Inside, a flight of stairs leads to the accommodation level, and above that is the FCC itself, its walls open to the sky, with bamboo curtains rolled up above them, ready to be dropped to the balcony floors if a heavy monsoon rain passes by. Quivering chandeliers are suspended from the ceiling; often the electricity fails, and there is simply darkness. Everywhere, the surfaces crawl with pale green lizards. The place fills up from breakfast time, and stays full all day, and into the night, with journalists smoking long French cigarettes, or coarse tobacco rolled in Rizla Reds. They drink Dirty Mothers and gin tonics or shoot B52s — a mixture of Baileys, Kahlua and Grand Marnier — or Kamikazes, vodka and triple sec with a beguiling hint of lime, almost harmless one might think until the third or fourth goes down. The journalists have laptops they can slip out of their satchels, but when Jessie Sandle started working out of the place she couldn’t hear herself think for the rattle of old Remingtons, as rapid and noisy as artillery fire.

  Jessie’s room, one of three on the second level, seemed more or less like home in 1980. The big white tiled room was furnished with a dark-slatted wooden bed and a dressing table. A ceiling fan made slow waves in the humid air, while an occasional burst of electricity through the generators allowed Jessie light and some spurts of tepid water. She had learnt to write by candle and torchlight. She considered herself fortunate to have a room. In the old days, before Pol Pot’s regime, journalists congregated in the old Hotel Le Royale, closer to the action in the city, with rooms for all. But now it was an empty shell, its swimming pool a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The trickle of journalists arriving from the West found beds where they could, and hung out here. In the middle of warfare, one didn’t think about other more permanent bases, though Jessie had an apartment off London’s Eccleston Square within walking distance of Victoria Station, for which she paid rent, but rarely saw. Not that Cambodia was officially at war any longer. Saloth Sar, also known as Pol Pot, had been airlifted from the capital in a helicopter, when the Vietnamese army toppled the Khmer Rouge. He had left in much the same manner as the departing American generals had left Saigon in ’75, and Lon Nol, the previous general, had made his escape the same year from Phnom Penh — the fashionable retreat for oppressors. All the same, bursts of gunfire erupted from across the river, as prowling guerrillas roamed the periphery of the city and stole along the riverbanks.

  By day, there was little to see but magnificent, empty boulevards lined with the ruined and beautiful houses left behind by the French colonists. In those few buildings, occupied by recently appointed government employees, buckets of water were hoisted through the empty lift shafts. Pigs and cows stayed indoors with their owners to keep them safe from thieves. It was more than a year since the Vietnamese tanks had entered the city, but there were few signs of freedom.

  ‘This is the city of the dead,’ Jessie wrote in her first dispatch since her return to the Cambodian capital. ‘It is not that people are absent from the streets. They are arriving, thousands by the day, to look for those who are missing. But what they find is the evidence of death.

  ‘The people who lived here, up until the morning of 17 April 1975, have largely disappeared. On that morning, five and a half years ago, roughly the time of the Cambodian New Year, columns of Communist revolutionary troops, known as the Khmer Rouge, walked into the capital. They wore black peasant clothes or simple khaki uniforms. They walked in total silence, greeting nobody, and they carried guns. Many of them were under fifteen years old. This was their moment in history, or non-history as it turned out, for this was to be Year One, the beginning of recorded time when they overturned the oppression of foreigners — the Americans who had bombed them in the past —
the colonial legacy of the French, and the “feudalism” of those who had worked for the bureaucracies which ran the country before. They believed the city belonged to them, and that the people who lived there must move out and do the same work as the people of the countryside. Two million people were siphoned out of the city, to toil in the rice fields, no matter how old, or young, or infirm they were. Those who looked like intellectuals of any kind, even those who simply wore glasses, were likely to be put to death, socially unredeemable and expendable. They were designated “new people”, because the revolutionaries believed they had exorcised their history. Money, the markets, formal education, books, Buddhism, private property and freedom of movement were abolished. The revolutionary regime called itself Democratic Kampuchea.

  ‘Today I witnessed a place of utter desolation, a former high school in the suburb of Tuol Sleng, which served as an interrogation centre during the revolution. The walls of the classrooms are lined row after row, thousand upon thousand, with passport-sized photographs of those men and women who were tortured before being put to death. They have been photographed moments before their execution, their terror etched on one dark wall after another. There are rooms still filled with instruments of torture, racks and whips, and handcuffs to hang people from the walls. Cells have been built into some rooms, just wide enough for a human being to stand, but not to sit or lie down. More than twenty thousand people died in Tuol Sleng, before being trucked out to Cheung Ek, the killing field, but nobody knows for sure how many there were. Mothers and fathers seek their children, children seek their parents, some simply come to learn what has happened. Outside, in the thick red dust of Phnom Penh’s streets, survivors huddle under palm shelters and children chase cockroaches for sport, although these are cooked on open fires when they are caught.

  ‘At night the dragonflies hover like helicopters in the navy blue light over the Mekong, and sentries watch the tall reeds by the water for signs of movement. Pol Pot may be gone, but the followers of the Khmer Rouge have not put down their arms. They are all around, and the fields are filled with their landmines, so that the unwary loses a leg as easily and casually as a packet of cigarettes might be mislaid.’

  Jessie had left New Zealand two weeks after her departure from the Violet Café. A hastily arranged passport, a cancellation berth on a ship going to London, and she was another of those people who stood on the bow while land receded and took on a dim shape and then there was nothing to see except the sea itself and flocks of gulls. While others on board held streamers stretched from the hands of tearful relatives on the shore, Jessie stood by herself and waved to nobody. Her half-sister Belinda, who now lived with Aunt Agnes, had begged to be allowed to go down to the harbour to see the ship leave, but her aunt had said in a brisk no-nonsense voice that there was school tomorrow, and Jessie was a grown-up and wouldn’t want children hanging around on her big day. She had repeated this to Jessie in a voice heavy with meaning, reminding her that she had made plenty of exits without any help from her family, and look at the trouble that had got her into. Aunt Agnes had not been impressed by the arrival of police at the door, looking for Jessie and asking questions about the disappearance of some man she was involved with up north. I wasn’t involved with him, Jessie said, not that way, Lou Messenger was just someone I knew.

  A right sordid mess by the sound of it, her aunt had replied, snorting. Not to mention all those people drowned. She’d read in the paper that they were still looking for some of the bodies. To think you were mixed up with a bunch like that. She didn’t exactly wrap her skirts around the children, but she might as well have, as if contact with Jessie might contaminate them with whatever filth she carried. Only part of Jessie cared, even noticed. All of it too late. The coffin lid was already closed over her mother’s face when she got back to Wellington and the undertaker said that no, he couldn’t take it off. In fact he was under strict instructions to do nothing of the kind.

  So that was it, a patch of raw earth where she’d watched the cheap pine coffin lowered into the ground, while Belinda and the other children sobbed, and her stepfather, Jock, stood as far away from her as possible, with a resigned look on his face as if he wasn’t part of the proceedings. Two of the girls she’d known at university turned up and said, why didn’t she come back to university, she was sure to be able to pick up some papers, even if she didn’t do law. I can’t stay here, Jessie said. You must see that. In the house at Brighton Street, all her mother’s belongings were cleared away, so that nothing, not even a trace of her powder or a hair clip, could be found. Collect your stuff, Jock told her, though he and his sister had had a good clean-out in her room; to them, there wasn’t much left that seemed worth keeping. The clothes her mother had gathered to send her stood in a suitcase in the hall.

  ‘You’re a selfish bitch,’ Jock said. ‘I thought you were trouble from the beginning. There’s some money owing to you from your father. Your mother was keeping it for you.’

  Three hundred pounds.

  ‘You’re nothing to me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s mutual,’ she said, her hand closing around the money. Enough to get away. She was becoming expert at that.

  Jessie wore a dusty khaki shirt and trousers, and ankle boots to protect her from snakebite. Her face was bare of make-up, her frizzy hair pulled back and wound behind her head, so that, from a distance, she could pass for a man. That Hepburn woman, some men remarked, but she didn’t see herself like that. What they did, out there in the East, wasn’t glamorous.

  At the end of each day a clean, ironed set of khakis would be waiting in her room, and changing into them was the extent of her preparation for dinner. When she had washed her face and hands, she felt cleaner and stronger, as if putting the grit and sorrow behind her for a few hours. This evening, she went out on to her balcony for a moment, trying to shelter in shadows. A huge moon was dangling in the sky, and she thought she saw an outline withdrawing near the shoreline of Sisowath Quay. So they were being watched, and closer than they had thought.

  There were new faces at the bar, but then there always were. The population shifted and moved from day to day. The FCC was full of people who told their life stories over a few drinks to others who would be gone in the morning. They would make promises of eternal friendship to those they never expected to see again. Or might not see alive. Not everyone who went out in the morning came back. There were deals going down all the time — people trading trips into the countryside, a ride in a chopper, a seat on a plane leaving the country the next day, or going up north. Some crazy fools were going up the river towards Siem Reap where there were strongholds of guerrillas at every bend, and boatloads of pirates who boarded any floating object or, in some cases, shot it up in the water before they even reached it. Jessie was in the habit of weighing up the consequences of each operation. A great story wasn’t worth following if she didn’t survive to put it across the wires. At all times, she carried money inside her boots so she could buy her way out of trouble. So far, she had got through, but some day she might not.

  A woman as tall as she was stood with her back to the crowd in the bar. She was dressed in a loose-flowing blouse made of pale aubergine silk, with sweeping sleeves and slits at the hips, and a sarong. Her dark hair was crisp and turning grey. The wife of visiting military, was Jessie’s first uncharitable thought. The woman turned slightly, her eyes scanning the room and settling on Jessie.

  Jessie was looking for a man called Paul Greaves, a publisher she’d met in London, who was interested in a book about the hunt for Pol Pot. He was supposed to be travelling out to Australia for a conference and said if he could get a visa he’d come through Phnom Penh and see how the story was coming along. They would sleep together too, which was what they did sometimes in London, when his wife took their children away to the country in the school holidays. Jessie, as often as not, had a war to go to, and that aroused her as much as sex. This frightened her, when she paused to think about it: the idea that her passio
n and her flights to violence were somehow inextricably linked. I hate bloody wars, she would say, if asked why she was always at the front. If nobody tells the truth, the world will never know. She thought Paul might not make it. You don’t have the guts, she’d said, teasing him over a dinner she’d cooked for him at her apartment.

  ‘I could if I tried,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so. You’ll get as far as Bangkok, and as you come into land you’ll smell the heat and dust and shit that rises up to meet you before the wheels touch, and you’ll think what an adventure, I’m brave to have got this far. And you’ll remind yourself that you are, after all, a father. You’d be right to do that. You don’t need to get mixed up in what I do.’

  ‘What is it about you and Asia? It’s as if you’re in love with it,’ he’d said, spooning an oyster into her mouth.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ Jessie said, as if she truly hadn’t considered the matter and didn’t know. ‘Just something that grows on you,’ she added, as if that was all there was to it. But it wasn’t, of course. She had set out for China, years ago, got stuck in Indochina and never left. Not really, even if she took breaks from it now and then. She could see her life going on, or not, because one day she thought she might die out there and that thought mattered less as time passed.

  Tonight she wished Paul was with her, just for a few hours, here at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. When she was away working, she didn’t often want to sleep with a man, but tonight, because of the slight possibility that he might appear, she felt a hungry ache, a desire to be touched, not by beggar’s hands.