Bible of the Dead

Chapter 17

An hour had passed since the firebombing. His phone was nearly juiced out. He’d called Ty, then the Embassy – which was shut. Now he had just enough battery left for a conversation with Chemda. And he didn’t have time for niceties. Just the brutal facts. The firebombing. Sen’s bizarre offer.

She heard his story in shocked silence; she stammered her sympathies about his apartment. But he interrupted her with a question.

‘Why did you tell me your grandfather was away?’

‘He was! He was away. But he came back early. The maid told him you were there… Jake, please…’

Her voice faded behind the noise of a tuk-tuk.

Jake was standing in the shuttered doorway of a pharmacy, near the great river. Sidling further into the hot and tropical shadows, away from the street noise, he pressed the phone closer to his ear, waiting for her explanation.

She spoke, again.

‘Maybe it was stupid, asking you to come to the house. I am sorry. I was nervous, scared. But believe me, please believe me, I am perhaps almost as disoriented as you. Can you understand that, Jake? Hn? My own mother is trying to frighten me with two dead babies, kun krak, the worst kind of magic; and now my grandfather, my beloved grandfather, the man I most respect in the world, he has tried to marry me off, like a chattel, like some concubine for Sihanouk.’

Another tuk-tuk passed, its two stroke engine rasping, in an ugly and primitive way.

‘Jake, I need to know. If you don’t trust me… I understand. But then you must leave me alone. I will manage.’

What to do? He pondered her words. But even as he steeled himself he could feel the lush emotions melting his resolve; he was wary of her, yet he also felt a powerful sense of mutuality: they were in this together. She knew his darker secrets; she was closer to him than Tyrone now. And besides, he also craved her friendship. Her warmth. That proud and royal smile. He couldn’t deny it.

‘Meet me.’

She whispered her reply: ‘Where?’

‘You tell me Chem. Somewhere discreet.’

Her silence spoke of her thoughts; then she answered. A temple. Near the central market. One hour.

He agreed and closed the call.

Jake stepped out of the shadows. The city stared at him, blankly. A moto hooted, seeking business. Sensing his ex posure he slipped down a sideroad, then doubled back down an old alley, paved with rotting banana leaves. The alley led to the rear of his block. The fires must have been doused, there was no smoke. He could see hoses, and a couple of firemen at the corner, in wet and yellow overalls, smoking cigarettes.

A back door gave onto his stairwell. He walked to the grey metal lockers: he was lucky, the fire hadn’t made it to the ground floor. Jake twisted his little key and swiftly grabbed his stuff: his spare passport, some money, a few cards, a digital camera. He kept it all here so he could jump on a plane with a few minutes’ warning: imagining himself as the dashing foreign correspondent. He had never imagined this stash would be so useful: after an attempt on his life.

Cards and passport zipped in his small rucksack, he hurried to the temple. It took twelve anxious minutes. Chemda was waiting in the courtyard. Her face was beautiful and it was dark and her skirt was very blue. He felt a sudden and unwarranted need to kiss her. Maybe this was the surge of life-force, so close to death.

‘Jake, we have to hide.’

‘Where?’

Chemda reached out and touched his hand. Like a nervous bride in church, meekly seeking reassurance from her groom.

‘I know a place, my grandfather owns a block of apartments. One of them is empty, it’s just come up for sale. Jake, I have a key – and he doesn’t know.’

He shook off her hand, gazed around.

A young novice monk in his orange-saffron robes was sitting on the steps, vaguely looking their way, lazily swatting flies from his face. His expression was sleepy; it was so hot. The smell of incense, and rotting fruit, spiced the air.

Chemda had chosen this place because it was supposedly discreet, but the ambience was unnerving: blue smoke and hot sun and intense dark shade from the overhanging eaves of the temple. And a languid, skinhead monk, observing them.

Still shaken by the attempt on his life, Jake didn’t know if he could trust his own feelings. He swallowed the bitter dryness of anxiety.

Two men wandered through the ornate wooden gate and nodded at the monk, then made a ponderous bow, a samphae, at a gilded and gaudy shrine. The men were clean-cut, prosper ous, thirty-ish. Businessmen? In a temple? Jake watched them leave again, his eyes followed them suspiciously, ensuring sure they were really gone.

Chemda came close, and repeated herself; still meek, but also insistent:

‘Jake, the people I most trust in the world, my family, have left me bewildered, scared, worse. Literally the only person I still trust in Phnom Penh is you. Ah. Only you. Most of my friends are in America, my mother is compromised, the people at the UN do not understand, they are not Khmer.’

She was barely blinking. ‘But you are different. You come from outside and yet you became my friend, you are unsul-lied. I trust you. But if that is not reciprocated, which I understand, ah, then maybe we should never meet again.’

Her words were lyrical, overwrought, but evidently heart-felt. She was standing close to him to meet his gaze, standing so close her perfume was discernible. Her face was flushed with urgency; she was looking up at him, feminine and defiant and proud all at once.

Jake believed her, yet he still didn’t quite believe she was telling him everything. Was there something else? Was she dancing around him, dazzling him? The apsara of Jayavarman?

Yet he wanted her: that slenderness. More than he wanted to leave the country, more than he wanted to save himself, he wanted to kiss her. Jake thought of her sleeping that day on the pirogue, sailing from Luang; the way her delicate head rested on a folded sarong, with the smear of grey rivermud on her bare legs; he saw the red petals of flame trees falling on the muddy Mekong.

He was being seduced, even if she didn’t mean to do it, she was seducing him. Yet this was not right: his life was at stake, he had to stay lucid.

‘Who tried to kill me?’

She shrugged, almost tersely.

‘It is obviously the Khmer Rouge loyalists. In government. Revenge on my family, on all of us. Kumnun.’

‘Not the Laotians?’

‘Hn. Would they be this direct and uncaring of the con sequences? No, this is local and powerful people. Ah. Very powerful.’ She looked left and right; a Buddha statue squatted in the corner, grinning the perpetual smirk of nibbana. ‘This degree of violence, it sometimes happens in Phnom Penh, gangsters maybe. But this is also aimed at you, a foreigner, therefore it must surely be political: that means we must have uncovered something in Laos, something very serious.’

She reached out a soft hand once again and took his fingers in hers, interlacing them, like the waters of the Mekong and the Brassac. Her voice was soft and clear.

‘You must be very frightened. You could so easily have been killed. If you want to fly back to England no one could blame you – I wouldn’t blame you – you mustn’t stay here for me, my insanity is mine. I will deal with it.’

Again he shook off her hand, but this time with a certain reluctance. Instead he grasped her by both wrists and spoke to her upturned face. His masculinity was affronted by her words. Frightened?

‘I’m not running away, Chemda. I’m not. I came to Cambodia to do something. If I let them scare me off I have done nothing, proved nothing. Where am I going to go, anyhow? Back to England, for what? Somewhere else? Another war-torn country? What’s the difference? This is my job, my home – I want to stay – I’m not frightened. But -’

He dropped her wrists, still stymied. What could he say? What should he say?

Dumb with frustration, Jake walked a few paces, further into the shade. He was staring through an open door at a side temple. Statues sat on a dais at the end, statues of deities, gods, demons, whatever. It was all so alien, exotic, confusing.

Jake didn’t truly understand Buddhism, Hinduism – or how they mixed or differed. He had tried, and tried hard, but some essence always seemed to elude him. Even here, even now, he was befuddled: he’d thought this was a Buddhist temple, Indochinese, but this shrine seemed more purely Indian. The statues were garishly painted, like plaster gnomes, they had red lips, yellow teeth, turquoise eyes; a blue woman with many arms and yellow swords danced her frozen dance of death, with her necklace of severed heads. Was that Kali?

Someone had made offerings to the shrine, tiny poignant offerings had been placed on the steps: a ripe nectarine, two broken cigarettes, some sticky rice on a plastic plate; the ball of rice seethed with black flies.

She came up behind him.

‘We can hide in this apartment. No one will know we’re there, my grandfather never goes there.’ He remained silent. She repeated. ‘Please Jake. This is it. I am going to go now. If you don’t want to come with me, I understand but… for me the time is now. Goodbye.’

Kali waved her many swords, in her blue eternal dance. He resolved.

‘We got out of Laos – we can get out of this. Come on.’ She looked at him briefly, and he thought he saw a flash of shy delight in her eyes – but then her regal composure returned.

They ran to the entrance, and stepped over the wooden threshold. It was hot outside, lazily hot: Sunday in Phnom Penh, a few motos jeering, cyclos jangling. Jake felt seriously exposed. He was standing in the sun where anyone might see him; someone could shoot him, snatch him, anything.

A tuk-tuk.

‘Here.’

They grabbed it. Chemda said some quick words in Khmer. The driver nodded – indeed he almost saluted. The journey was swift; instructed by Chemda, the driver took backroutes and darkened shortcuts: they sped down long squalid alleys where dogs ran out to snap and bark, they rattled past a row of tenements entirely shattered and burned, still empty, forty years later, still empty. Then they briefly turned onto a boulevard with adverts for Delon cigarettes, and big Hyundai showrooms, and Jake shrank into himself, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible; at last they reached the quietness and greenery of the suburbs.

An old wooden house, some gardens, a shady road with frangipani trees? Jake vaguely recognized the district.

‘Down here.’

It was a modern block of flats. White, clean, quiet, and concealed at the end of a side road.

Chemda paid the driver. She looked at Jake as he stepped from the tuk-tuk. The little rucksack slung over his shoulder.

‘That’s all you have?’

‘It was in the stairwell of my flat, my second passport, coupla cards. Everything else is gone. Everything.’

‘Well I have money. Ah. We can buy some clothes and things tomorrow. We need to get inside.’

The apartment was on the first floor. Sterile but comfortable, antiseptic, air conditioned, sparely furnished, two bedrooms. A pied a terre. An investment opportunity, waiting for some Cambodian expatriate to show his confidence, at last, in the local property market.

Jake sat on the expensive leather sofa and stared at an almost abstract photo of light and shade on the wall. Another temple.

Chemda sat in the wooden chair opposite him. She kicked off her sandals. Her light cotton, pale blue skirt was notably short. She stared his way. He felt an acute discomfort at their sudden intimacy. And again a tinge, much more than a tinge, of desire. He averted his gaze.

The silence was piercing. The room was oddly hot, despite the air con; like the closeness on the Mekong delta, before the wet season.

She rose, and walked across, and she stood right next to him.

‘If anyone is going to give me away, it will be me.’

Chemda took his hand. She took his hand and she put his hand inside her skirt, up inside, between her legs, she put his hand between her soft warm thighs.

He stood up and kissed her. Her dark eyes fluttered, yielding, feline, vivacious; her tongue, her lips, her hands were taking him, pulling him into the bedroom, she was a dancing and barefoot apsara, and he wanted to be seduced. He wanted to vanquish. He wanted, he just wanted.

Dark raw sugar. She reminded him of dark, sweet, fierce unprocessed sugar. There was a harshness to her lovemaking, she sought him with a sly animality. They kissed and stripped, she pulled him closer, closer and harder. He kissed her bare breasts, kissed her again, he saw red petals on muddy water, he sensed the darkness, the commingling of the rivers, the Mekong and the Tonle Sap. He sensed topaz, lemongrass, her urgent heartbeat, and prahok.

They made love twice, and slept for several hours. Then they snuck out to buy food and clothes, ate a twilit dinner, and afterwards fell asleep, once again.

When he woke the sun was diagonal at the windows and it was Monday morning and she was fellating him. He gazed down, as she sucked, at the veil of her dark hair flung over her head. Jake sighed, tightly gripping the cool cotton bedsheets. He felt himself concentrated into one tiny intense source of joy and disquiet, down there, she was sucking him, beautifully, frighteningly, carnivorously; she was voracious Kali, the eater of men, she was a disembodied face, hovering over him, submissive yet delicious, exquisitely devouring – yet this was wrong, something was wrong – there was a shadow on the window, that was it. He jerked upright -

Something was outside. Chemda was naked, and kneeling, gazing down. She couldn’t see.

Jake could see. His blood thumped.

A man was standing there, at the window. Staring in.