Bible of the Dead

Chapter 23

Closing the call with Tyrone, Jake resisted the desire to panic. But then he began to panic. So he got going instead, he closed his bag, ran downstairs, and joined Chemda and Sonisoy in the back of the tuk-tuk. The soft morning air smelled of fish sauce and garbage and sweet jasmine and two stroke engines. And danger.

Chemda looked his way:

‘You OK?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither,’ she said, and she squeezed his hand.

Chemda’s uncle snapped some Khmer at the driver. The tuk-tuk swivelled onto the road and they began the journey to the great temples of Angkor, the Bayon, Angkor Tom, Ankor Wat, Banteay Srei, the East Mebom.

Jake gazed ahead, trying to remember. He had visited Angkor in his first year in Cambodia. Like any tourist he’d wandered the miles of tumbledown sandstone shrines and palaces, the gopuras and lingams and terraces of garudas slowly being swallowed by the orchids and lianas and strangler figs of the jungle: he had walked around gawping.

It was, as he recalled, a truly stupendous place, even Jake’s Godless soul had been stirred by the majestic mystery of it all, this city of monuments, a thousand years old, where once a million people lived and worshipped; a city that was left to the poisonous millipedes and the jumping spiders – and the busloads of Japanese tourists queueing for sunset photos by the bodhis of Phnom Bakheng.

This was a very different journey. Fretful, disquieting, dangerous. The air was cool with the promise of heat as the tuk-tuk puttered north on the long straight road to Angkor. Monkeys played by the road between the fallen green husks of coconuts; stall holders cycled their iceboxes of cold drinks to work; villagers in blue-chequered kramas washed naked toddlers under pumps of gushing water. Chemda said to Sonisoy:

‘Uncle, could you tell Jake, what we discussed last night?’

Sonisoy’s nod was terse.

‘About a year ago we found a Frenchman, Marcel Barnier, wandering around the temple. Looking specifically in Preah Kahn, where we were researching. We asked him to talk with us.’

‘Us?’

‘Our consortium. Samsara. We have an office in Siem and we are restoring the temples, with EU and Chinese help. Angkor is a world heritage centre.’

They were passing a vast new concrete hotel, as yet un finished. A vendor was selling coils of dried snake in the car park, and buckets of boiled eggs. The vendor gazed at their tuk-tuk, unsmiling, unfrowning, just blank.’This man was quite old. Sixty-five, maybe seventy.’

‘What was he doing there?’

‘Apparently, in 1976, a team of scientists and thinkers, all of them left wing radicals, was invited from Paris to Cambodia. Their mission was to help the Chinese and the Khmer Rouge, to create a perfect communist, a soldier for communism.’

‘With brain surgery?’

Sonisoy shrugged, his tee shirt was old and clean, with a discreet little picture of a young Elvis Presley on the breast pocket. He glanced along the road ahead, which was almost empty. Jake also scanned ahead: for police, soldiers, danger. Nothing. The road was ominously deserted. Sonisoy continued:

‘Barnier did not know that aspect of the story, but after hearing from you and Chemda, I think yes, that must have been one technique used by the Khmer Rouge. Experiments on the brain.’

‘How did Barnier know nothing about the surgery, if he was part of this same team?’

‘Barnier’s speciality was hybridization, between species. Men and monkeys. That was another avenue explored by the communists. It started in the 1920s in Russia. However…’ Sonisoy looked over Jake’s shoulder, a car was approaching fast behind. His face tautened. Jake spun around.

‘Relax,’ said Sonisoy. ‘Park rangers. We are just approaching the gates. Relax.’

But Jake could not relax, not after what Tyrone had said. Indeed he had an urgent need to express himself, explain his fears, he needed to share and dilute his paranoia. Leaning forward, he informed Chemda and Sonisoy what he had been told by Tyrone. The manhunt. The tension in Phnom Penh. The price on his head.

When he had finished, Chemda was pale and her expression tremulous. Even Sonisoy’s monastic serenity was ruffled.

‘OK,’ Sonisoy said. ‘This is not good. But I know a way to get you to Anlong Veng, it’s through Angkor anyway. And we are safe in Angkor behind the fences. For a short while. We must be quick. Here.’

He gestured. They were approaching a large wall. The entire fifty square miles of Angkorian remains were surrounded by guards and fences and walls and toll booths. Making sure all those touristic dollars and euros and yuan poured into the coffers of Phnom Penh.

Sonisoy alighted from the tuk-tuk, flashed the gatekeepers a badge, and gestured at Chemda and Jake. Jake shrank from the inquisitive stares of the gatekeepers. If these officials had seen a Phnom Penh paper this morning then he could be spotted, recognized. But maybe it was too early for the news to have made it here?

The tension was an insistent pop song from a tinny radio, repetitive, and stressing. The gatekeeper yawned, stared again at Jake – and then shrugged an uncaring smile. Sonisoy climbed back in, the driver gunned the little engine, and the tuk-tuk trundled on, with painful slowness.

‘So, let me finish.’ Sonisoy sighed, curtly. ‘This Frenchman, Barnier, explained that he had been invited to Phnom Penh but in the end was not closely involved in the process. He wasn’t in the loop. Other specialists and scientists, neurologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, were more favoured. Perhaps the communists decided brain surgery was a better route to their goal. Barnier went home to Lyon virtually as mystified as when he arrived.’

‘But why did he come to you?’

‘Guilt.’

Sonisoy turned and snapped an order at the driver, giving him directions. He turned back:

‘Barnier has a conscience. Since that trip to Cambodia and China so long ago, he has renounced his communism, he sees it as a terrible historical error, and he is ashamed of giving succour to the Khmer Rouge by supporting their regime from the west. A lot of Maoists and leftists in Europe and America tried to justify the Khmer Rouge. Some of them are still serious academics, writers and politicians. I’m not sure how many have apologized for what they helped to do to my country.’ Sonisoy stared, unblinking at Jake. The stare of accusation? Jake twisted, in discomfort: physical and mental. The heat was already rising. The tension had topped out hours ago. Days ago.

He thought back to that fateful evening in Vieng Vang. He was just a happy, sad, guilt-ridden, cheerful, boozy photo-journalist; now he was a man on the run. Hunted. A prey animal.

Sonisoy was still talking: ‘Barnier wanted to, I suppose, absolve himself. And he wanted to find out how and why he was used by the Khmer Rouge. So he came to Angkor.’

‘Why Angkor?’

‘What Barnier did discover during his trip was that the KR and the Chinese were also obsessed with history, with some historical foundation to their experiments. And they did many explorations of Angkor. And from what you guys have told me – of the Plain of Jars. Now I see how it all fits.’

‘Go on.’

‘Following Barnier’s visit I began my own excavations based on his scanty but tantalizing information. After all, I too am a Khmer, I want to know what happened to my people, why we did what we did. We were the insane country. We had a national psychosis. What happened and why? I want the past uncovered. I want to know.’ He leaned across the tuk-tuk. ‘And we have unearthed some materials at Angkor in recent weeks, which may fit these pieces together, especially with this new information from you. And so I am going to show you. And then -’ He looked for the first time in a while at Chemda, then back at Jake. ‘You go north. At once, as fast as possible, across the border at Chong Sa.’

Jake nodded.

‘We got it, we’re not lingering.’

Sonisoy was scribbling something on a page of notebook. He ripped it out and handed it over, explaining:

‘Barnier’s address and number, in Bangkok. He lives in Bangkok now. When you get there, you could look him up. He may know more than he told us. OK we go left here.’

They all looked ahead. A glimmering sheet of water barred the end of the road, tinted gold by the morning sun. The great serene moat around Angkor Wat temple. Jake remembered, Angkor was built around and on top of and because of water: vast artificial lakes, beautiful and serene barays.

Some of them were eight kilometres long. And huge moats, too, reservoirs, aquifers, conduits: all quenching the thirst of the greatest city built before the age of industrialization. Perhaps the greatest city ever built. And now the barays were glittering gold and bloody yellow in the hot rising sun.

They turned left, puttering around the water barrier. The first tourist buses were already parked under the banyans, by the Angkor Wat causeway. From a distance the hundreds of tourists slowly crossing the moat by the causeway looked, to Jake, like the spirits of the newly dead silently and obediently proceeding unto oblivion, crossing the Styx.

‘We’re going to the Bayon first.’

This temple, Jake knew, was beyond Angkor Wat. It was within the ancient city precincts proper: Angkor Thom.

Ahead of them a wide bridge crossed another moat; the balustrades consisted of two nagas, enormous long stone snakes snarling their fangs, forever devouring the warm tropical air; the snakes were ridden by stone demons, also snarling. And the gate itself was a mouth, a huge stone yawning mouth topped with the serene smiling face of Jayavarman, the king-god.

As they bundled under the gate, driving right under the godhead, kids ran out to sell their trinkets and DVDs and bottles of water: mister mister you buy, America good England good barang you buy; still others scampered down from the crumbling great walls, grinning and jeering at Jake, making their eyes round by squashing their faces and laughing.

Children were everywhere, on the balustrades, hanging from trees, running in the road, scampering, laughing – children running and smiling in the street, like his sister. The sadness and grief stabbed at Jake, maliciously; he took out his camera and grabbed a few shots. He needed to mediate the sadness. That’s how and why he worked: he mediated the sadness, put a lens between himself and the world, a distance between the present and the past.

Snap.

The tuk-tuk accelerated under and beyond the gate. For a few minutes they drove in anxious silence, the sunshine flickering in the laurels and bamboo and enormous kapok trees, as dark sombre birds flapped away. Ahead of them was a palace of enormous stone heads.

The Bayon.

‘We get off here first.’ Sonisoy gestured at the tuk-tuk driver. ‘He will wait.’

The temple of the Bayon was just as Jake recalled it from his cursory touristic visit two years back. A series of large, square, ascending sandstone terraces, delicately inscribed with bas-reliefs of apsaras and garudas, and serene female deities, devatas and dvarapalas, and scenes of Khmer life from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, princesses on palanquins, cockfights and boarfights, and scrolling stone tapestries of Hindu myths, the ark of the sacred fire, the churning of the ocean of milk, the god of love murdered by Shiva.

Jake took more photos.

What marked Bayon out was the heads: every significant point in the temple terminated in pinnacles beautifully carved with megalithic human heads, serene and huge and enigmatic visages of the godking. Smiling.

They climbed the very narrow stone steps to the innermost enclosure of the temple, the prasat. It was hot now. Jake was panting in the impervious sun. It was like they were too close to the sun.

‘Jayavarman,’ said Sonisoy. ‘The heads of Jayavarman, here in the Bayon, represent the apogee of Angkorian culture, the apotheosis, when the king becomes a living god and society is perfected. Many people find these heads disturbing. I think it is the smiles. The size of the heads, and the eternal smiles.’

Jake agreed. He found them awesome but they unsettled him. Maybe it was the vast serene smile, slightly different in every sculpted face. He remembered a face, smiling sadly in the dark, a large face, enormous, smiling. Disembodied.

‘Now, this is crucial. Look,’ said Sonisoy. He pointed at the nearest enormous head.

Chemda said, ‘What?’

‘There.’

‘But I can’t see!’

Chemda kicked off her flipflops, and climbed a balustrade to get a better look. Jake gazed at her ankles. She had a delicate tattoo of a scorpion on her slender left ankle. Sonisoy pointed again.

‘There. You see the forehead of the godking. There is a diamond there, a rhombus. No? Carved distinctly in the forehead – like a hole in the head. It represents, of course, the third eye of Hindu mythology: the location of the soul, the place in the mind where God resides. Consider the bindi of an Indian woman, the mark between and above her eyes – the same thing. So. Remember this – it’s important – because the rest of the story is in Preah Kahn. We must be quick.’

Hastily, almost slipping, they made it down the treacherous and mossy steps to ground level. Sonisoy led the way out, past the Terrace of the Elephants, past the Terrace of the Leper King, with its dancing demons and manic garudas, skinned Wagnerian sopranos, singing mutely through their sandstone beaks at the uncaring forest.

The lane to the west gate of Angkor Thom was unpaved, virtually jungled over. Monkeys swung away as they approached, disappearing into the lianas and the cotton trees. The noise of insects was close to deafening. Jake had heard cicadas rasping before, but this was like a mass screaming, like the whole forest was shrieking in anger, or torment.

Sonisoy led them through another snarling huge gate, topped with another huge head of another god king, and then they were in even thicker jungle. Cobwebs laced the pathway, invisible but very tangible. Jake spat them from his mouth with disgust. Translucent Lynx spiders fled up his arm, until he flicked them off. Chemda fought the red ants that dropped in her hair. Lianas, sticky with some gross exudation, snagged at their arms and legs.

Sonisoy turned, a faint smile of pity on his face.

‘Few people make it this far into the jungle – to Preah Kahn, one of the oldest temples of Angkor. Originally a university. Here.’

The temple loomed, old and vast and very ruinous. More giant garudas guarded the walls, at every corner. Nagas lay waiting either side of the entrance; headless statues of gods stood as sentinels at the porch.

‘Through here, and here… left here, just down this way…’

It was a labyrinth of dozing sunlight, ancient darkness, fallen stone pillars and mutilated stone buddhas. Enclosures, gopuras, doorways, columned doorways, and then long broken corridors where bats nested in the upper corners.

‘It’s vast,’ Chemda said.

‘Twenty thousand people lived in Preah Kahn at its height,’ said Sonisoy. ‘And we don’t know what they studied.’

He had finally brought them to a kind of open cloister. The far wall backed onto the jungle.

‘That place there,’ said Sonisoy, gesturing, ‘is unique in Angkor. The only building with round columns. Probably some kind of sacred library. As for what it contained…’

It was a roofless pavilion, elegant, empty, desolate. Big spider webs hung from the empty sandstone windowframes.

‘Books,’ said Chemda. ‘It would have contained, ah, books, parchments, wooden tablets, but they would all have been destroyed by time -’

‘Yes,’ Sonisoy gestured them to the side. ‘But stone can survive in great detail if it is buried. We have dug around this library in the past year, since our discussions with Monsieur Barnier, and we found these.’

He gestured over a heap of rubble. Beyond it was another pile of rubble, covered in dusty plastic.

Like a magician, Sonisoy swept the large sheet of plastic away. Jake stared. It was still a heap of nothing. They had come all this way to look at some ancient bricks.

‘Uncle, I don’t -’

‘Look harder. Use your eyes.’

Amidst the rubble stood two larger pieces of stone. Pediments, badly worn, with several carved panels; figures etched into the stone. Apsaras, garudas, the usual.

‘So what?’

Sonisoy sighed in the breathless heat.

‘These were special carvings kept in the special library in the intellectual heart of Angkor, the greatest city of its time, in the world. They must tell a story -’

‘You tell it to us,’ Chemda said, ‘and fast. Please.’

‘Of course.’ He turned to his niece. ‘We all know the prophecy, don’t we, every Khmer learns it: a darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers.’

Chemda finished the prophecy for him: ‘The land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.’

‘So,’ said Sonisoy, pointing to the pediment. ‘Here is the belly of the elephant. Here is the sea of blood.’

Jake knelt and squinted. He could barely see what Sonisoy was pointing out. Maybe that was an elephant, that could be an ocean, a ripple of water – or of blood. But now he was close he could definitely see one thing. One thing was perfectly plain.

‘My god, that’s a jar! From the Plain of Jars, in Laos! This is a carving of whatever happened to those people? In Laos?’

‘The Black Khmer. Exactly.’

Sonisoy was nodding; his bald head was sweating. He unwrapped his krama from his waist and dabbed his scalp, then he returned to the carvings: ‘When you told me of them last night, I thought of these carvings. Now it all makes sense. Here are people, Black Khmer, being drilled in the head, turning them into warriors. See, there, the drilling.’ He moved his hand. ‘And you see the metamorphosis here, and here. From cringing peasant to proud Khmer warrior, when the skull is drilled. These are probably Vietnamese prisoners, decapitated, after the wars, the triumphs of the Khmer.’

That was also clear: a row of heads on the ground. The panel was surely showing a great military victory, by Khmers, Black Khmers, in the Plain of Jars. Jake grabbed a couple of photos; poor photos, yet still evidence. Khmers with trepanations…

But evidence for what?

Sonisoy intoned:

‘But here, see, in the next panel we see the jars and the weeping women. And the blood and the destruction, the burning of bones, a mass suicide. You see, it is a story, it is the story -’

‘A story of what?’

‘Who knows. But -’

A noise interrupted, a buzz of static. It was a twoway radio attached to Sonisoy’s belt. Jake guessed you might just need such a thing, to stay in touch, in such a vast place as Angkor.

Sonisoy unbuckled the radio and talked. His face grew dark, then darker. Angry. He gabbled, and stared at Chemda.

Then he said:

‘That was the gatekeeper, a friend. Warning me. Someone has spotted you. National police, they are coming for us right now, surrounding the temple -’

Chemda grabbed Jake’s hand. She yelled at her uncle:

‘How do we get out?’

‘It’s too late, we need to hide – this way.’

They were about to be caught. The fear shrilled through Jake’s body, a klaxon in the night. Sonisoy guided them swiftly over fallen columns and rubble, and through a small empty window, which led to a dimly lit, elongated chamber, a virtual tomb of unaired heat.

The room was darkly concealed at the very heart of the temple, the bat-haunted core of Preah Kahn. The three of them pressed flat against the wall. Jake could feel the damp cold sweat of his own shirt. Chemda was next to him. her face a waxen and perspiring mask of unease, the heartbeat visible in her neckveins, pulsing, rapidly.

What next?

They were successfully hidden, for the moment. But they were also trapped inside the cardiac darkness of Preah Kahn. Sooner or later they would be found, in a minute, or five, or ten. Jake was prey, a targeted man. He would go to jail. He probably wouldn’t make it as far as jail. They would find a reason to execute him. This was Cambodia. People died with the merest blink.

Jake stared at the temple wall opposite. The chamber was decorated with a stone frieze. He realized it was a series of smiling, floating and completely disembodied female heads.