Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  Chandara waits for some moments; then he speaks to Vora a in Khmer, gesturing at a bamboo chair next to Jim’s. The small man hesitates, as though wondering whether he should have the temerity to sit down; but Chandara speaks to him again, his voice quiet and soothing, and Vora obeys, hunched forward respectfully on the edge of the chair. His brows are raised again: this time in a sort of pleading apprehension.

  Jim sits beside him. “It’s good to see you, Vora,” he says. “I’m very glad you made it. And your wife and family are safe too?”

  For some moments, Vora looks at him without answering, the many wrinkles in his forehead increasing. Then he says: “Bopha is with me, and our little daughter. But my sons are dead, Mr. Jim. Both dead.”

  Jim grimaces, staring at him. There’s silence for a moment. Then he reaches out and takes Vora’s hand. “Vora, I’m so very sorry. Oh Jesus, your sons.”

  “Better I did not educate them,” Vora says. “Not send them to school.”

  His voice is toneless, and he looks down at the floor while Jim holds his hand. Then he goes on talking. His English has been picked up from the correspondents he’s worked for: it’s rudimentary, and he mostly uses the present tense, but all the things he says are clear.

  “The Khmer Rouge find that my sons are educated,” he says. “They kill all educated people. So they take my sons away with their hands tied. Afterwards we are told they are beaten with hoes and killed.”

  None of us speaks. Vora goes on looking at the floor; then he looks up at us as though asking for something, his expression bewildered.

  “It’s the same story,” Chandara says. “We hear it so many times.” I find he’s looking at me, his eyes glittering with anger. “But still many of your Western intellectuals and journalists won’t believe it, Ray. It doesn’t suit them to believe—so they say the stories are false. But we have refugees arriving every week who tell us these things. The Khmer Rouge are killing anyone who is educated; a little bit of education is enough. When they drove the people out onto the roads, they killed any who had books with them. They are killing not just thousands of people but tens of thousands. They make mountains of bodies. They are like the Nazis. The towns are emptied; the temples destroyed; the monks slaughtered. This is true barbarism, which wants to smash everything that is civilized.”

  Vora is listening to Chandara quietly, with a sort of awe, as though the loss of his sons is at last being given meaning. A soldier brings him coffee and he sips it respectfully, while Chandara goes on addressing Jim and me. The colonel’s voice is low, but tight with anger; when he lights another of Jim’s Winstons, I see his fingers tremble.

  “Communism has been taken to its limits over there,” he said. “Envy has become a religion: they call it angka. I have learned much about angka, talking to our refugees. It is a new Dark Age. No books for the people to read; no medicine to heal them when they fall ill; no law to protect them; no family life; no religion to comfort them; no music but the music of propaganda, played over loudspeakers. Oh yes, they have loudspeakers, just as they have AK-47s: They want to get rid of Western technology, but the leaders make exceptions for what is important to them.”

  He draws deeply on his cigarette, and I sense that he’s talking partly to postpone the moment when Vora must tell us what he knows.

  “Many of the soldiers are peasants as young as twelve,” he says. “Children with automatic weapons. Anything they envy or don’t understand must be evil: must be killed and destroyed. When executing, the Khmer Rouge don’t waste bullets: they use hoes, and other simple methods. My own brother and his family must have died in this way. They failed to leave in time, and we hear nothing of them.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I can see Jim Feng’s boot tapping again. He takes out a Winston and passes it to Vora, who smiles and bends gratefully to the flame of Jim’s lighter. Sitting now with his artificial leg crossed over the other, gripping it in his left hand, Jim is showing tension in every line of his body. He clicks the lighter shut, and his voice when he speaks is strained and dry. “Vora—Colonel Chandara says you have news of Mike.”

  For a moment Vora is silent. He sits looking at the valuable American cigarette in his hand as though he hopes the question may drift away, like the smoke. Then he looks at Chandara.

  Chandara nods, wiping sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. He says nothing.

  Vora looks back at Jim and me, and the corrugations of his forehead seem to have multiplied. “The Others come marching into Phnom Penh,” he says, “down Monivong Boulevard. No one knows what they will do, what they will be like. Then they order everybody out—out of the city. We are sent too, my wife and sons and I-with all the others, onto the roads. We have seen many dead people beside the road, hands tied behind their backs. But because I pretend I am just a taxi driver, they do not kill me.” He looks at Jim. “I have had to leave Black Bessie,” he says.

  Jim nods, still sitting rigid, waiting.

  “At first we work outside Phnom Penh, digging canals,” Vora says. “It is very hard; we have only rice to eat, and my wife is ill. This is when they have taken away my sons. Many they take away and execute, every day. Then we are taken with others in a train to Sisophon, up here near Thai border. And from there we go into the country and must build huts, and work in the rice fields. We have been there a long time, until just now when we escape. One night we have run away with others, and come through the forest to the border.”

  “You’re not telling us about Mike,” Jim says.

  Vora’s look of pleading intensifies; the effect would be comical, in other circumstances. His small, wrinkled face is really made for humor: for jokes. In the days when he drove Black Bessie for Mike, there would have been a lot of joking.

  “There is a village near that place we are in,” he says. “This is where the Khmer Rouge bosses in our camp have said that Mr. Mike came. They say that a Westerner and some Khmer Serei soldiers from over the border are captured there. We only hear what they say—do not see anything. People say the Westerner is an American CIA spy. The next day we have been taken out to a field near the village, and we saw them—in the distance. The Khmer Rouge guards say this is what happens to Lon Nol officers and traitors, and American spies who are enemies of angka.” He leans and stubs out his cigarette; he looks from one to the other of us, seeming to ask to be spared from saying more.

  “You saw them?” Jim asks. His tone is almost angry. “What did you see? Tell us.”

  “There are six executed,” Vora says. “We saw them, out in that field. The Khmer Rouge have executed so many; I have seen it before. I have seen them do many bad things. This time—” He breaks off and looks at us with his pleading despair. Then he raises his arms and holds them out stiffly from the shoulders, at full length.

  While Jim and I stare, Chandara speaks again. “This time their method was crucifixion. They often do this. Perhaps it’s an influence of their French Catholic education.”

  A fresh wave of perspiration pours down my face; as I mop at it, faintness comes over me. From a distance, I hear Jim say: “And Mike was one of them? Is that what you’re saying, Vora?”

  “I saw a man like Mr. Mike,” Vora says, “tied on one cross. I can see his white skin and yellow hair. He is wearing a black shirt and trousers, like a Khmer. It’s far off, and they have fires under the crosses, so there is a lot of smoke. But I believe it was Mr. Mike.”

  “But you couldn’t see his face.” Jim Feng’s voice is strained and almost accusing. He leans close to Vora with his fists clenched on his knees. “You couldn’t see his face, so you don’t know it was Mike!”

  “Jim,” Chandara says. “Jim. Who else could it have been?”

  Vora has begun to cry. He cries in a way that Westerners seldom do: like a child, his mouth open, his eyes staring in a sort of sad amazement, the back of his right hand held against his cheek. When he speaks again, his voice is high and squeezed, and he’s looking at the floor.

  “I
know it must be Mr. Mike,” he says. Then he raises his face to look at us all again, blinking away his tears. “He has helped all my family,” he says. “He has helped many others. He has fought for Cambodia. I will always remember him. I think of him many times. As often as I think of my sons.”

  Jim asks no more questions. His face is yellow and ill-looking, and dewed with perspiration. Holding his leg, he turns half away from us, looking out through the door. Across the baking white spaces out there, the green and mauve hills of Cambodia can be seen, musing and peaceful.

  Chandara comes around the table, and places one hand on Vora’s shoulder. He speaks to him quietly in Khmer. Vora rubs his nose and sniffs. He has finished crying for Mike, and now sits with patient dignity, in his ragged clothes and rubber sandals, looking from one to the other of us, waiting for what will happen next.

  3.

  My last duty in Bangkok before flying home is to arrange for the sale of Langford’s house.

  I decide to inspect it. It’s only five minutes’ walk along the canal from the Newsroom, standing on a section of the klong that’s lined with giant, spreading trees. Harvey Drummond, Jim Feng and I walk there together at four in the afternoon, crossing the klong by a little wooden bridge.

  We arrive at a plain, two-story villa made of cement sheeting, with a gabled iron roof, set among banana and mango trees. A middle-aged Thai housekeeper and her husband live downstairs; Mike lived alone in the two rooms upstairs. The housekeeper lets us in and leads the way up there, opening the shutters of a window looking onto the klong, and turning on the overhead fan.

  We stand in the middle of the room, which is close from having been shut up; there’s a smell of dust and tobacco. It’s very hot and still, and a bird outside the window keeps repeating the same call. Harvey and Jim begin talking to the housekeeper, whose name I haven’t caught. Harvey speaks a little Thai; she speaks no English.

  While they talk, I walk about the room. It’s plain and featureless as a motel room, with a bamboo settee and chairs, a dining table, a desk and a sideboard of Thai teak. Langford evidently hadn’t begun to decorate the place in any way, nor to replace any of the art works he’d lost in Phnom Penh. There are no personal possessions in evidence; Jim Feng long ago removed them. A couple of scraps of paper lie on the desk: bills for film. The only individual touch here is a cork notice board on one wall, bare except for two photographs, which I go up and examine.

  One is a picture of a group of Cambodian peasants walking through the countryside: men and women in pajamas and sarongs and checked kramas, their faces stoical, the infants and bundles they carry showing them to be refugees. The other is a picture of Mike and Colonel Chandara. They’re walking away from a helicopter that’s just landed.

  “I took that shot,” Jim says. He’s come up to stand behind me. “It was the last picture taken of Mike in Cambodia. The other is one Mike took a long time ago. I have copies. You should keep them both.” He pulls out the drawing pins and hands me the prints. “I have his three cameras at home,” he says. “There wasn’t much else here, but I’ve itemized it for you. He lost everything he had in Phnom Penh.”

  “The cameras are yours,” I say. “He left them to you in his will.”

  Jim’s face sets. “I will keep them for when he returns,” he says.

  The housekeeper and Harvey are still in conversation in the middle of the room. She’s a short, solidly built woman in a purple-figured blouse and brown sarong; her face is round, reminding me of a tabby cat’s. Harvey has to bend from the waist to hear her: she seems to have been speaking for some time, her flat voice low and mournful, and I begin to get curious.

  “What does she say?” I ask Harvey. “Are there any problems about the house?”

  “No problems,” Harvey says. He straightens up, rubbing his bald head, his expression uneasy.

  The housekeeper is looking at Jim and me with an insistent, sad expression. She speaks briefly to Harvey again as she does so, obviously asking him to translate.

  Harvey hesitates. “She wants me to tell you this,” he says. “A couple of times lately, she’s heard Mike come in here. The last time was two nights ago.”

  Jim and I stare at her, and the woman speaks more rapidly, her voice rising, her face becoming stubborn and defiant.

  “She says on quite a few nights when she and her husband are in bed, they’ve heard Mike’s boots on the gravel outside,” Harvey says. His tone is neutral, but I sense his embarrassment as he meets Jim’s gaze. “They know it was Mike, she says, because he always wore those jungle boots. They were used to the sound they made; they also knew it was Mike’s walk. They heard him go up the stairs; then they heard him walking overhead, in this room. He walked up and down, she says, like somebody worrying about something. One night her husband came up to investigate, but there was no one here.”

  Jim draws breath between his teeth with an impatient hiss, his expression scornful. “They’re superstitious people, these Thais,” he says to us. “This is just bullshit. They didn’t hear Mike’s ghost, because Mike isn’t dead.”

  He swings around and walks quickly to the door, his limp more pronounced than usual. Harvey and I look at each other, listening to his uneven steps going off down the stairs. I start to follow, but Harvey takes my arm and shakes his head.

  “Let him go,” he says. “We know where he’ll be.”

  When we come out of the house and cross the little bridge, we walk along the path above the klong that leads back to the Newsroom. It’s still daylight, but twilight’s gathering. Swarms of small birds are twittering in the huge tropical trees on the canal: trees for which I still have no names. The hum of invisible traffic from the big main avenues is deepening in volume.

  The Newsroom isn’t very full at this time, and Jim is seated at our usual table, a beer in front of him, his artificial leg stretched stiffly into the aisle. The moment he sees us, he smiles. It’s a curious smile, expressive of tender contemplation. As we sit down, he signals for one of the waiters and orders two more beers. When they come, he pours for us from the bottles, and then raises his glass. “Cheers,” he says. We drink, but none of us speaks.

  Harvey and I are on one side of the table, Jim on the other. I watch through the white iron grille as the first colored lanterns come on in the stalls under their awnings across the road. We’ve talked away so many afternoons here, Harvey and Jim and I, living mentally over the border in those countries that are now locked off. Passions fermented in Europe more than a century ago created such a long agony there: passions of the mind. Now the war’s over, and all that’s left is a flavor of empty longing: a flavor I suspect that Harvey and Jim will taste for the rest of their lives. I turn back from the window to find Jim looking at Harvey, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  He still smiles, wearing an expression that perhaps signifies the recollection of something touching, and he plays with the Zippo lighter that’s a relic of youth and Vietnam, turning it over in his fingers. When he speaks, his voice is reminiscent; he seems to pick up a broken conversation.

  “You took risks only when you had to, didn’t you, Harvey? You were never crazy. Snow and Dmitri and I took them because we wanted to: that was what we were hooked on.”

  Harvey smiles back. “You always denied that until now, James.”

  Jim takes the cigarette from his mouth and looks at it; then he clears his throat. “It belonged to the time when we were young,” he says. “And we went on doing it too long. Yet since I lost my leg, I’ve been eating at myself because I couldn’t go back to it.” He releases a breath of laughter like a sigh. “That means I’m a bloody idiot, of course. Ying tells me so all the time. She also tells me I’m lucky; lucky I lost my leg and didn’t die. Maybe she’s right. I often think so when little Meiping comes running to me, holding up her hands.”

  He finally lights the cigarette, narrowing his eyes, his face becoming empty. When he speaks again, his voice is dry, as though he’s discussing business. “Of cou
rse the rest of you are right, Harvey—Mike’s gone. When I first told Ying that he was missing, she cried out. ‘Oh no, not him, not him!’ She knew straightaway that he was lost; she knew he wouldn’t come back. I have never wanted to believe it—partly because I loved him, partly because I can’t bear to know that he died in the way he did.”

  He breaks off and sits back. He removes a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip with his index finger and studies it, not looking up when he speaks again.

  “So I will stop telling myself and others that Mike is still alive,” he says. “Even though in a part of my heart, I’m still not sure that he’s dead.”

  “Maybe you never will be sure,” Harvey says. “Neither will any of us. But that’s all right, brother.”

  Harvey and Jim have gone home now. But I sit on in the Newsroom, reluctant to leave. Tomorrow will be my last day in Bangkok.

  I go on looking through the grille: past the Chinese owner’s Mercedes, past the new Japanese motorbikes and cars that are turning and whirring on the square. Over by the canal, as darkness creeps in, black-haired figures by the row of little stalls are busying themselves among earthenware jars and baskets: cheap goods from another age. I imagine that they and their stalls will soon disappear, like a mirage: they don’t really fit with the new Bangkok.

  I reach into the airways bag beside me, and pull out one of the photographs that Jim took down from the board in Langford’s house, in that room that was like a waiting room.