Bible of the Dead

Chapter 15

Jake called Chemda as soon as they got back from Skuon. It was dark. He sat at his empty desk in his sparse apartment that looked over the Tonle Sap river, and murmured the truth.

‘I’m sorry, Chemda.’

‘She said it was my mother?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

Chemda was silent; as silent as the Tonle Sap itself. Jake stared through the window at the reflection of a jaundiced moon in the sleepy waters.

‘But it doesn’t make any sense. My own mother paid for the kun krak? I… so… she was trying to frighten us? How does it relate to Doctor Samnang? Ah. I don’t understand.’

Jake was bereft of an answer. He muttered some consoling words, meaningless sympathies. But Chemda was in no mood for sympathy; her next reaction was much more articulate, and brisk:

‘Please come and see me tomorrow, at my house. I need support. I am going to confront her.’

‘What?’

‘This is too weird. So. Jake – I can’t live with this, knowing this, ah, I need to understand what is going on -’

‘But what can I do?’

‘Be my friend. Please, I need a friend. Just a friend. This is going to be hard.’

The words were alluring, even as the idea was discomfiting.

Chemda sighed and explained further, she told him her grandfather was away, as ever, on business, she had no one else to turn to, and she wanted Jake’s support, his physical presence.

She said it twice: his physical presence. A man. By her side.

‘Please. Will you come?’

The last words were murmured: sultry, dark, whispered.

He got the sense she was almost hypnotizing him, leading him somewhere. He thought of the apsaras of Angkor Wat, the bare breasted dancing girls of King Jayavarman. Dancing their endless nubile dances, wreathed in smiling inscrutability, twirling and alluring, teasing and divine. And always, in the end, unreachable.

Yet he was reaching.

‘OK Chem. I’ll be there.’

‘Thankyou. Jake. Ah. This means a lot. Thankyou.’

With a sense of great apprehension, and also the insistent stirrings of desire, he shut down the phone, and turned from the windowed view of the dark and aged river. He tried to distract himself with research on his shining laptop.

He scoured the Net, seeking information about the Plain of Jars, the burned bones. He researched the strange holes, the wounds in the crania. Jake looked at trepanations, he winced at medical images of opened braincases, he scowled at dissected human heads floating disembodied on the screen; he disturbed himself with stories of neurosurgery gone wrong: early lobotomy patients turned into drooling zombies, like Chemda’s grandmother.

This wasn’t helping. He turned off the computer and retreated to alcohol, hoping to lull his agitated soul to sleep with some Aussie wine. But his night was long and disturbed.

For some reason, he woke at three a.m, and he was sweating, heavily. Was he ill? He rubbed the sheet over his perspiring forehead. Drenched. Then he heard low voices outside his building. Why? Stepping to the window, he surveyed the humid night time streetscape. No one was there. Just the moon shadows of palms rustling in the breeze, and ranks of parked mopeds. A rowing boat was drifting down the Tonle Sap, with no one on board.

He went back to bed. Fought his way to a fretful sleep.

Early the next morning, he walked out onto a sunlit, empty, Sunday-ish Sisovath Boulevard and caught a tuk-tuk south along the corniche, deeply apprehensive.

The house of the Tek and Sovirom dynasties was auspiciously situated near the Imperial Gardens and the Embassies, very much the superior end of town. Where the Mekong braided with its sister rivers, the Brassac and the Tonle Sap, in a languorous troilism of the waters.

Whitewashed walls surrounded the Sovirom compound, he pressed the bell, said hello to a tiny camera, and the black electric gates swung smoothly ajar. He crossed a sunlit lawn of vivid green grass, and approached the impressive front door.

Behind it was a barefoot young maid, sweet, uniformed, humbly performing a wai, and also glancing anxiously at the ceiling. He soon realized the cause for her agitation. The house was filled with shouting.

Two women. It had to be Chemda and her mother. He could hear Chemda’s normally soft voice raised in real anger. Then an older woman snapping back. What were they saying? Even if Jake had understood Khmer he probably wouldn’t have understood the angry torrents of words.

The maid blushed, said nothing, looked left and right in confusion. Then she escorted Jake down a wide parquetfloored hallway to a large white sitting room. This house was so big. The maid departed, and he was alone – alone with the voices screaming upstairs.

He didn’t know what to do? Intervene? Surely not: this was a domestic, this was family, this could get nasty. But could he not intervene? What if it got nastier? Bewildered and uncertain, Jake sat down on a modernist leather chair and gazed around the enormous room.

It was sunny and bright, and decorated with antiquities. A Garuda stood in a corner, a winged and beaked Hindu deity carved in red sandstone – like a mute and flayed opera singer. Next to the Garuda was the enormous stone head of a Naga, a Hindu snake demon, snarling at a large black Samsung TV. Behind the antiquities was a huge wall of window, then a garden of grey sand, small trees, and soft grey rocks.

The argument upstairs was getting worse.

Steeling himself, he stood up: he had to take action, step between these women. But as he walked to the door he was met by the door swinging open.

A man entered. A small Asian man, with a yellowish complexion, attired in a beige linen suit. Jake instantly recognized this man from the newspaper and TV as Sen, Sovirom Sen, the businessman, the banker, the friend of prime ministers, confidant of Sihanouk.

The patriarch.

Jake felt intense relief. Now someone else could intervene and solve the argument upstairs.

Grandfather Sen smiled, and put a finger to his lips. Then he gestured at the ceiling, and spoke.

‘I always think cherchez le femme is a rather absurd expression, don’t you? Women are not exactly hard to find. They are so audible.’

Jake didn’t know what to say; Sen was shaking his hand, warmly. Sincerely.

‘Please. I am Chemda’s grandfather. And of course you are Jake Thurby. My granddaughter discourses on you, nightly.’ A delicate pause, Sen smiled opaquely. ‘Ah. Shall we step into the garden? Women are like the weather. Their moods are tropical depressions. We must simply wait for the rains to pass.’

Outside, and with the glass door shut behind them, the noise of Chemda and her mother was almost completely muffled. Sen led the way along a path to a kind of summer house, with wooden benches and silk crimson cushions, that looked out over the sands and posed rocks and the small, pale-green trees.

‘Please, Mister Thurby. Be seated.’

Jake sat down on the wooden bench. Sovirom smiled, and regarded the exquisitely raked grey sand. Jake noticed the man was wearing beautiful shoes, of fine grained leather. Probably bespoke: handmade in London or Paris.

A pause.

Sovirom Sen leaned an inch towards Jake, and said:

‘This garden is… one of my greatest passions.’

Jake wasn’t sure how to reply. He attempted a sensible remark. ‘It’s beautiful. Japanese, right?’

‘Of course. It is closely modelled on the famous withered gardens in the Zen temples of Kyoto. You have seen them I imagine?’

‘No, I’ve never been to Japan.’

‘But you must, you must go! I visit Japan regularly, for my business. I adore the great Zen temples of Kyoto. Ryoanji. The Silver Pavilion. Nanzenji. Hence my garden here.’ He raised a modest hand. ‘The essence of the Zen garden is abstraction. The more you take away – the more you have. And that is the true genius of Japanese culture, they see the beauty in nullity. Abstraction is perfection. The haiku is but a few parched syllables. Japanese cuisine is rawness and purity. And Japanese Zen Buddhism – that is the greatest of religions. Why? Because there is no god, no afterlife, no superstition, there is nothing.’

Fittingly, this speech was concluded by silence. But Jake had to break it, he had to say something.

‘Mister Sovirom, I want to thank you for saving us, in Laos. The airplane, the soldiers.’

The patriarch smiled, distantly.

‘It is nothing.’

‘But I also have questions.’

‘Yes yes. Of course. I am aware what has happened. In Ponsavanh. In Luang. You must be confused. Please accept my profound apologies for this.’

‘OK…’

‘Happily, I can explain everything. If you will permit.’

‘Please?’

The grandfather spoke quietly. But with firmness.

‘My daughter, Madame Tek, is a shrewd and educated woman – like her daughter in turn. But, Jacob, they profoundly disagree. Madame Tek believes that Chemda’s determination to dig up Cambodia’s tragic past is, shall we say, unideal. She thinks the bones of the killing fields should be left to moulder. Why open the coffins, why break the tombs? Why dance around with our skulls, like Mexicans after too much tequila?’

‘I… don’t know.’

‘Well, there is one answer. My wilful granddaughter would say, with her American education, that we cannot “move on” as a country until we have confronted the past. And it is not an argument without merit. Perhaps we should stare at the head of the naga, the snake, Kali. I myself have truly difficult memories of the Khmer Rouge regime, maybe I have not dealt with these memories.’

Jake felt a need to be bold.

‘You mean your wife? We know something terrible happened to her.’

The elegant old man continued.

‘Yes indeed. We don’t know precisely what happened to her. We do know they did some experiment, on her body and her mind. Perhaps akin to brain washing.’

‘Your wife volunteered for this, uh… experiment. That’s what we heard.’

Grandfather Sen looked at the concentric circles of sand.

‘This is apparently the case. And it is quite plausible. You see, my wife believed in that absurd regime, she was a true cadre. She supported the Khmer Rouge.’

‘Why?’

‘You must understand, at the time many people believed in the new regime. Because they wanted to believe. The Americans were bombing us. The country was in uproar. The king was on all sides at once. The Vietnamese were abusing us. The fascist, Lon Nol, was in power. Brutal and gangsterly, a son of a bitch, as they say. The Americans’ very own son of a bitch.’

‘Therefore?’

‘The Khmer Rouge seemed like a salvation. They were unsullied, pure. Incorruptible. Of course we heard reports from those places in the country where they had already seized power, reports of killing. Horrible killing. But these reports came from the CIA. When they said the Khmer Rouge will kill your mother and your father and your sister and your daughter, we did not believe the stories. My wife certainly did not believe them.’ Sen gazed almost longingly at his garden. ‘And yet… in my heart, I believed the stories. I knew some of these Khmer Rouge leaders from Paris, at least by reputation. Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon. Brilliant scholars, and also the most passionate of ideologues. From the beginning, I suspected they were capable of… extraordinary acts.’

‘Why didn’t you do anything?’

‘Take my family out of Cambodia?’ Sen smiled a bitter smile. ‘I am Cambodian Chinese, but my wife, she was pure Khmer, dark Khmer, royal Khmer, daughter of a concubine in the court of King Monivong. She was not going to leave. Besides, as I say, she supported them, even as they turned people into manure, even as they fertilized the rice paddies with the ashes of the bourgeois.’

‘Then they took her to Laos.’

‘She was a scientist. The government said they needed her. I watched her go. And then I heard that she had let them perform their brain surgeries, their experimental interventions, she actively volunteered, or so we were told -’

‘When did you find all this out?’

Sen was silent, regarding his rocks and tiny trees. The grey sands of the Zen garden shifted in a slender breeze off the river, whispering like something sleeping, but restive.

The old man spoke:

‘In 1980. After the Vietnamese invasion. I was living like a peasant near Battambang. starving, like everyone. Starving but surviving. And finally she returned from Laos, from the Plain of Jars, and she was… a dribbling doll, a Port-au-Prince zombie.’ His steady gaze became an anguished frown. ‘But we struggled on. There was so much pain in those years, this was merely an addition. And miraculously she had survived the mercies of Pol Pot and Ta Mok, survived their religion of hatred and holocaust, their god of smoke and ash. Yet it soon became apparent that whatever they did to her in Laos was irreversible.’ Sen touched a single fingertip to his forehead, and closed his eyes.

‘My daughter and her husband had already escaped to America, where they had baby Chemda. The paradox was piquant, first America tried to kill us, then it saved us. Ah. America with her bipolar moods, so generous and so unhinged. What a strange country it is.’

‘And you?’

‘I remained here. I stayed silent. And I decided to send this emptied husk, this creature that was once my wife, back to Luang. I sent her to our good friends the Marconnets, to live out her remaining years beneath the shade of the papayas, in beautiful Luang Prabang, Xien Dong Xieng Thong, the city of the Golden Lord Buddha. You see, she always loved Luang: it was emotionally appropriate. And I told no one she had come back. We did not want her to be ridiculed, to be gawped at in Phnom Penh, as the monkey woman, the ghost of herself, one of the araks brai. My proud wife would not have wanted anyone to see her salivating. In a wheelchair. And we did not want anyone to know her shame: that she had volunteered herself for this terrible surgery, that she had selected herself to be turned into a living corpse, a smoke woman.’

The wind had dropped. Silence was sovereign. Sen murmured:

‘But now you have the story. In toto. There it is.’

Jake felt the old man’s pain, it was searing, and still visible; and yet Sen seemed strong, despite it. A true survivor.

He thought of his own guilt and grief: the aching sadness that never entirely quit, the insidious remorse for something he didn’t do: hold on to his sister, protect his mother from despair. If Sovirom Sen could survive his far greater tragedies, Jake could surely endure his own. He recalled the phrase from the Khmer Rouge tribunals, the one Ty quoted: The only exit is survival.

But had they exited? And how had they survived so far? How had they survived Laos?

‘But, Mister Sovirom -’

‘Sen. I am Sen.’

‘Sen. Can you also explain what happened to us in Laos? Chemda and me? The professors?’

The patriarch smiled Jake’s way, and answered.

‘We suspect that Khmer Rouge loyalists, still active at the heart of the Phnom Penh government, are keen to derail Chemda’s investigation. They tried to obstruct the tribunals, but they failed. Now they are trying to suppress Chemda’s work in the Plain. They must have threatened the academics, who maybe slew themselves; surely they are working with the Pathet Lao, their old comrades, the communists still in power in Vientiane.’

‘So everything that happened, in Luang…’

‘When we heard of the death of Doctor Samnang, Madame Tek and I immediately feared that Chemda’s life was in danger if she continued working in Laos – or here in Cambodia. However, Chemda is so stubborn, we knew that if she was pressed too hard to leave she would be even more determined to stay.’

It was true enough: Jake had already experienced Chemda’s obstinate passion. It was one of the reasons he admired her.

‘But dead babies? Jesus. Why do that?’

A withered tree rustled in the near-silent wind.

‘My daughter and my granddaughter they are educated, but they are also very superstitious, like all Khmers, like so many Asians. Why is this? I often wonder. I have often struggled against it, the exorcisms, the divinations, the luminously risible tattoos.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever the case, Madame Tek believes in the power of Khmer magic, as does Chemda. So Madame Tek arranged to frighten her daughter with the most forbidding talismans in Khmer occultism. The kun krak. The smoke foetuses.’ He frowned, once more. ‘Madame Tek knew that Chemda would be unnerved by them, and her plan worked. To a point.’

‘Go on.’

‘You fled, and you escaped Laos, but of course you are still in very grave danger, Mister Thurby. As is my grand daughter.’

‘What should we do?’

‘Consider your options. Chemda is a beautiful young woman. She is krangam.’

The wind blew a wisp of sand. The rocks shone black in the sun.

‘Yyyes. I guess.’

‘The fusion of Chinese and royal Khmer genes is fortuitous. And also my granddaughter is very intelligent, and she is unmarried. She is a prize.’

Jake was silenced.

‘I also know, Jake, that she has developed a certain tendresse.’ Sen gestured, poetically. ‘But to enter the guha you must leave the country, take her to England, or take her to America, she has an American passport. You must leave the country because you are both in danger, and I can no longer protect you. The Lao government want revenge for their dead police officer. The descendants of the Khmer Rouge even now are working against me and my interests. Against Chemda and you.’

Sen continued:

‘You have my permission. She will marry you. We can do it today or soon. You must take her, only you can persuade her to leave, but before that happens, of course, for the sake of propriety, a wedding. At once.’

‘A wedding??’

Grandfather Sen patted him paternally on the knee and said:

‘This is the most bizarre of surprises, I know.’

‘What the hell – a wedding?’

Jake could barely grasp the idea. He was being offered Chemda: like a casual meal, or a rather trifling gift.

Sen smiled, regretfully.

‘I understand the shock. You probably need to think about it. I shall step inside, to see if these two typhoons have exhausted themselves. Wait here and I shall bring my daughter.’

The old man quit the garden. Jake stared blankly at the black rocks, the perfectly positioned tree, the tenderly raked circles of grey sand, all parched and delicate in the ruthless sun of the remorseless dry season.

He was stunned. This wasn’t good; this was horrible. These people were so desperate to get Chemda safely out of the country, and get her swiftly married, they were prepared to foist her on some man they hardly knew. Maybe fear was driving this. Maybe even the great Sovirom Sen was scared; maybe everyone was scared.

Jake was scared.

A further, darker thought occurred to him. Could Chemda be part of this? Was this some peculiar conspiracy to entangle him? But why had she asked him to come this morning? Had she lied about her grandfather being away on business?

The confusion was bewildering, even painful. He needed to get out, to think clearly. Get some advice, go home, drink too much coffee, call Tyrone.

He got up and walked to the door, he crossed the hallway. The house was quiet, the maid staring at him from behind a door. The mother-daughter argument had apparently been calmed by Sen, or blown itself out. But he had no desire to linger and enjoy the domestic harmony. Not in this pristine prison of a house.

Jake paced very quickly to the front door, and then virtually ran down the long curving drive to the boulevard. Jumping in a tuk-tuk, he sat back, trying to clarify his thoughts in the sweet warm polluted Phnom Penh breeze. His mind was churning.

It was Sunday, it took just a few minutes to reach his corner. He tapped the driver on the shoulder:

‘Here. No problem. I can walk from here.’

Handing over two dollars, Jake turned the corner. And saw.

A boy was climbing off a motorbike – and casually walking to the door of Jake’s apartment block, carrying a glass bottle. Something about this was odd. Jake felt an instinctive wariness: who was this? What was going on? He slowed his pace, observing. The boy was fiddling with the bottle in his hand. And a lighter. He was setting fire to a cloth stuck in the bottle; the boy stepped back and threw the flaming bomb through a first floor window. The glass crashed.

The petrol bomb exploded inside Jake’s flat.

Flames woofed, fire streaked from the windows. Jake stood there, gawping, quite stupefied.

It was all so casual, so fucking casual.

The street was still quiet, it was Sunday morning, a young woman was cycling past the end of the road. Couples were strolling along the riverfront. And someone had thrown a petrol bomb.

As Jake watched, the boy climbed back on his Suzuki, and sped away from the scene. The flames were already roaring, hoarse and hungry, licking up the walls. Someone, somewhere, was screaming. People were running from cafes, and pointing: fear on their faces.

Jake sank into the shadow of a frangipani tree. He realized, with a lucid terror, that he had just witnessed an attempt on his own life. No one knew he wasn’t in there, it was still quite early, it was Sunday, they probably presumed he was asleep, inside.

Someone had just tried to kill him.