Bible of the Dead

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 Lucy, 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.

One boy gazed Jake’s way, his mouth hanging wide open, goggling and laughing. The child’s mother came behind, pushing a long-handled wooden wheelbarrow.

She also paused and stared at Jake; her expression was so shocked it was beyond alarm, it was pure incomprehension: like she was seeing an extraterrestrial.

Tou laughed, unhappily.

‘They have never seen a white man before, ever. You are like a god. Or a demon.’

A cloud of grey dust showed a vehicle approaching: coming the other way. It was an army vehicle. Troops in khaki were hanging on the back of the truck. The fear was congealing. No one spoke in the jeep. What troops were these? But the soldiers just gazed vacantly at them, half curious, half bored. Tired maybe. The apathetic gaze of conscripts across the world.

Nothing further happened. The army truck disappeared. The trail ran its ragged way through the hills, sidling around mountains. Getting higher, giddily high. The first hints of mist and cloud appeared; bashful centaurs and unicorns of cloud that fled as they approached.

It was darkening fast, it was nearly night. How long had they been driving? Chemda was half asleep, her head bobbing against the glass of the jeep window. Jake yearned to stop, to get out, to take a pee, to stop. But could they risk it? Maybe the police were just a few kilometres back. Maybe they were closing.

But they had to stop – so they stopped. For a second. In the middle of the dark jungle. Now it was truly night: and it was cold up here, in the hills. Jake walked a few yards into the dank and clammy darkness of the chattering forest, full of night sounds. Frogs croaking. A concerto of insects. Nocturnal howlings in the distance. He thought of the wild cats and strange jungle dogs he’d seen in Ponsavanh market.

He relieved himself. Trying not to make the mental association: all the blood, the blood in the muzzles of the dead jungle dogs, the blood on the floor of the hotel room: the man with a gaping throat, hung by his ankles to bleed out like a hoisted bush pig. Probably Samnang was killed by the police. But why? And why so cruelly? Was it really to frighten them? Surely murder and death was frightening enough.

Jake shuddered. Sometimes, despite his convinced and angry atheism, he could sense death approaching, like a black god, a god he didn’t believe in who yet still hated him. I got your mother and your sister, now you.

The moon was lonely overhead. Fireflies twinkled blue and green like shy and tiny ice-stars in the undergrowth.

He walked back to the car and Chemda talked, nervously, as they drove on. She was talking of ancient history: speculating about the remains they had found in the jars. Jake marvelled that he had forgotten about them. In the midst of it all he had mislaid that image: the skulls kept in the jars. The sad old bones. Reproachful. You left us behind.

No. He got a grip on himself.

No.

Chemda was talking about the prophecies of the ancient Khmer.

‘If the people in the jars, the people who made the jars, if they were Khmer… maybe they really were Black Khmer.’

‘And they are?’

‘The ancient Khmer: a cursed people. There are stories in the Khmer tradition of the earliest Khmers being a kind of terrible breed – no that’s the wrong word – of making a terrible mistake. Losing God. Losing faith. Becoming violent. What is the prophecy – Tou mentioned it.’

The jeep’s headlights were struggling against the dark and the mist of the mountain forest. Chemda remembered the words:

‘A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; 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.’

Tou was silent, Yeng was silent. Jake nodded. He didn’t believe in prophecies, he didn’t believe in legends, he didn’t believe – he certainly didn’t believe in any kind of God, what kind of brutal God would allow all the terrors of the world? The Khmer Rouge? The death of children? His sister? But the skulls in the jar: they were certainly real; he had seen them, and the holes carved in their foreheads.

Why?

Chemda’s words echoed his thoughts.

‘It is highly suggestive. What happened on the Plain of Jars two thousand years ago? To the Black Khmer? Maybe they did something terrible – to their gods – to each other. That is the prophecy. That then is why they would be cursed. Ah. It could explain the legends.’

‘It’s like a kind of Noah legend, of a Flood. God wiping out the people as revenge.’

‘Yes,’ said Chemda. ‘And also no. And, ah, I still don’t know why this so upset Doctor Samnang.’

Jake turned from her and looked out of the viewless window. Out there it was cold and dark and chilling, like a sickening. The jungle was shivering. Feverish and clammy.

Where were they going to sleep? Were they ever going to sleep? Devil black darkness had descended on them, broken by the feeble beams of the headlights. They were churning mud now, deep gloopy mud. The fireflies twinkled. Above them shone the moon, bemused, like a disembodied head, like the pale round face of a grieving mother in a black Islamic headscarf. The jungle yawned and sucked. The mud sucked them further in. Further and further. And at last Jake fell asleep.

He dreamed of a man throwing a tennis ball. A tall dark man. A little girl picked it up. Her face was blemished with a vivid, portwine birthmark.

He woke with a startled pain. Tou was shaking him roughly awake.

How long had he been sparked out?

It was dawn. They were on the lip of a canyon: a long mist-churned valley stretched ahead, and led down to a flat expanse, with a kind of airstrip and a dilapidation of buildings: low cabins, concrete and steel – but tumbledown and old. And there were ruined roads, strangled with weeds, or so it looked from this distance.

Tou said:

‘The secret city.’

So they’d reached the American airfield, the old American base hidden in the mountains. The Secret City of the Raven War, where the secret American bombers took off, to drop their secret golden bomblets on the people in the plain.

He yawned, and felt a hit of nausea. Disorientation or altitude? He couldn’t tell. Rubbing the sleepy grit from his eyes, he got out of the car. Tou handed him a bottle of cold water.

Jake drank, thirstily, lustily. They had escaped – for the moment – but what now. And where was Yeng? And Chemda?

There. Down the road, in the clearing mist, between a clutch of Hmong dwellings, he could see Hmong men gathered: young men with guns and rifles and belts of ammo slung brigandishly over their backs. Hmong rebels. In the middle of them all was the slight, yet animated figure of Chemda, talking and gesturing.

That girl. She had grit and steel and guts and backbone and Jake felt, again, the stirrings of moral admiration not unmixed with plain desire. She was tough. A tough determined Khmer princess. Five foot two of royal Khmer energy. Her ancestors, Jake suspected, would have been proud.

Tou shook his head like something bad had happened.

‘What?’

‘Chemda ring her grandfather again. He say you go Luang. Then he save you.’ Tou pointed at the distant airfield. ‘The Stripe Hmong have plane, we can get you Luang, same same, no problem.’

‘OK, that’s good, isn’t it?’

Tou shook his head.

‘Chemda nearly cry. She not cry, but nearly. Sad.’

‘Why?’

‘People here know her face and they hear grandfather name. They tell her.’ Tou looked shyly at his own mudded broken trainers. Jake reminded himself to thank this boy, to thank this boy for saving their lives: but Tou was not for thanking, he was explaining everything: ‘Hmong lady she tell Chemda, she know her grandmother, royal Khmer lady, everyone know what happen to her. To grandmother. When the Khmer Rouge come to the Plain of Jars, in 19… 19…’

‘76.’

‘Yes. Then they do something to Chemda grandmother. They cut open her head. For…’ Tou searched for the word. ‘For an experimen? Medical experimen. In her head. Cut her head open like she was a goat, in market.’

Jake stared at Chemda down the road. What did it mean? Cutting open? Experiments?

A parakeet flashed overhead, cinnabar and yellow, screeching in fear of some unseen pursuer.