Bible of the Dead

Chapter 20

Ponlok pressed the knife cruelly to Chemda’s pulsing neck. She was screaming and writhing but if she writhed any harder she would slash her own throat. The blood would geyser. Her legs were being slowly forced open.

Jake had a fraction of a second to decide.

He stepped back as if turning away, then he swivelled in an instant and ran two steps and flashed out a boot, as hard as he could manage. At school he’d learned to do the drop kick fast, very fast, invisibly fast. Before he got crushed in the rugby maul.

It worked. A sickeningly direct hit. The thudding sound of his steelcapped boot hitting Ponlok’s head was queasy, and cracking; but his kick did the task. The janitor went sprawling into the grit of the rancid laboratory. The knife spun silver in the sunlight, twirling into shadows.

Ponlok gave a low and ugly moan. The Khmer man was prone, bleeding, half conscious. Jake grabbed Chemda’s hands and helped her to her feet and she said:

‘Aw kohn, Quick!’

He didn’t need thankyous; he understood quick; hand in hand they skeltered down the alley, down the next alley, up the fire-escape past the jackfruit trees and into the apartment. Two minutes. Chemda bandaged his head with some torn up cotton tee shirt; he wiped himself down in the bathroom, then stuffed his few items in a bag. Chemda was in the living room, ringing someone on a phone, rattling questions in Khmer. Then she looked Jake’s way.

‘Now!’

As one, they sprinted down the stoop to the yard and then the boulevard; they were two pitiable fugitives with a couple of bags standing alongside the rumbling drag race of National Highway 6 – where anyone and everyone could drive by and see them – but then a black and white old Citroën taxi squealed to the kerbside and the driver grinned his six teeth and Chemda jumped in and said,

‘Siem Reap.’

The man lifted a hand to say whoah – Siem Reap?

Jake knew this was a long way – two hundred kilometres west, into the jungle, close to Angkor, way out west. A day’s drive. Yet the taxi driver’s sceptical eyes narrowed into shrewd acceptance – when he saw Chemda flourish a clutch of dollars from her bag: tens, twenties, hundreds.

‘Siem Reap, baat!’

The taxi dodged through the traffic, which was thinning anyway as they swiftly exited the brash peripheries of the city.

Sweating and trembling, Jake checked behind them. Nothing. Nothing but traffic. They passed Caltex stations, Happy Cellphone shops, grungy garages, then more Caltex stations, more Happy Cellphone outlets, more tyre shops; it was like the backdrop to a cheap cartoon repeating itself; then they passed an old French shop with depot de pharmacie on the side, then a Sukisoup outlet, a patch of wasteland, and then the skeletal bamboo scaffold of a half finished apartment block – and then at last the water buffalo and the paddies and the sugarpalms inclining their heads, like chancellors bowing to a despotic lord.

The royal sun.

They had made it out of the city. They were in rural Cambodia, the land of two seasons and two harvests and two million dead, the land of the killing fields.

‘The money is my mom’s,’ said Chemda. ‘I just took it.’

Jake shrugged, and didn’t reply. He wasn’t even sure if he cared, or if he was meant to reply. If he answered her that meant a dialogue and a dialogue meant conversation and a conversation meant they might have to talk about what just happened: Chemda had nearly been raped by an old man with a terrible scar. An old man who had been, what, altered? An old man who had endured the same terrors as Chemda’s grandmother, and who else?

It was too much. The grief in Chemda’s life was mounting like the pyramids of bashed-in skulls at Cheung Ek. And this was just Chemda’s family. There were a million more Khmer families in Cambodia, out there, each one with their little pyramid of skulls. No wonder there were so many neak ta: so many cages for the unquiet dead.

‘I was wondering if anyone else was… experimented on. So many of my cousins did not survive.’

Her eyes were staring ahead, lustrous, in profile. They were roaring through a little village, where women loosely turbaned by the elegant khmer scarves – the striped or chequerboard cotton krama – used as slings or turbans or babycarriers or lunchpacks or ponchos – looked up at the car. The women frowned under their kramas. Children played in the dust, quite naked.

They were going too fast. Jake didn’t care, he wanted to go fast. Faster than the police. Faster than light. Faster than life. He was hot and dehydrated. Again. And he couldn’t keep saying nothing:

‘Do you remember anyone in your family being aggressive? Demented? Like the janitor?’

‘Why?’

‘Because, Chemda -’ he hesitated, and his gaze failed to meet hers, ‘because, I reckon I have an idea why Ponlok did what he did. He wrote me this note. Just before he attacked you.’

‘What?’

‘He said What they did to me made me this way. He was trying to warn me before he did it -’

‘How long before?’

‘Moments. Just a moment.’

‘So he knew what he was going to do? Attack me?’ She exhaled. ‘And he tried to warn you and yet -’ Her face whitened with understanding. ‘He is aware of the problem but he just couldn’t help himself, an uncontrollable urge.’

‘Yes exactly.’

Her demeanour was strained, like she was forcing herself to use a matter-of-fact voice, even though her lips were trembling. ‘But how could this brain surgery, or whatever it was, how could that have such an effect?’

‘Well, I did a bit of research on primitive surgery when we got back from Chiang Rai, I read about holes in the head, like the trepanations we saw on the -’

‘Trepanations?’

‘It means drilled holes in the skull.’

‘OK. Hn. And?’

Jake stared through the grimy cab window. The forests out there were thicker now. Mahogany, rosewood, sugar-palm. The banyan of the Buddha. They were driving deep into the soul of the country, Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, the emotional heartland of the Khmer.

He gave his answer.

‘I’m obviously not any kind of expert, but it seems the frontal lobes of the brain are associated with self-control, commanding the baser emotions; so maybe if you cut out some of the frontal cortex, you excise the most evolved part of the brain, therefore, just possibly, it could make you amoral and criminal? Cruel. Predatory. Violent.’

‘A rapist.’

Jake was silent. Then he said: ‘Yes.’

Her hand reached for his across the torn vinyl of the taxi’s back seat. She said to him, with softness:

‘You lost your sister and I lost my grandmother… and God knows who else.’ Her kissing lips were a warming whisper on his cheek, momentary and elusive, then she sat back. ‘We are the same.’

Jake felt his heart melt like sorbet in the sun, yet he wondered if this was really true. Some of him resisted the equation. Were they the same? Were they definitely on the same side? Even as he was falling for her, some element inside him still didn’t trust her. He thought of the black toothed spider witch. Her muttering and curses, her kitsch pullover with the sequined turquoise heart. Kali, the Eater of Men.

Chemda said:

‘Could that be why they did it, the Khmer Rouge? These, ah, horrible experiments, to make some kind of behavioural change? Make people more violent and cruel? Like beasts?’

‘Maybe.’ Jake had already been thinking on these lines. ‘But why would anyone volunteer for this. Like your grandmother?’

Chemda exhaled.

‘That’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Why volunteer for that? It simply doesn’t make any sense. But we can ask my uncle, he might know.’

‘Your uncle?’

‘My father’s brother. Tek Sonisoy. He works in Siem Reap. He’s a scientist. Conservation. That’s where we’re going.’

‘But -’

She lifted a dark yet somehow pale hand, and put a finger vertical to his lips. She spoke:

‘He renounced my family years ago. The wealth and the power and the politics. Resents my grandfather, dislikes my mother, hates all that political stuff. He grew up in California with me, but then he went travelling, wholly rejected my family, ah, he backpacked. And then he fetched up in Cambodia. He was a real monk for a while, now he works discreetly at Angkor. We get on. He has helped me in the past, when I was researching the Plain of Jars. I trust him… implicitly. He can shelter us.’ She paused, and added, ‘I didn’t want to bother him before, with all this. He hates the… politics. But now we have no choice.’

‘But won’t your grandfather know where we are?’

‘He might guess, eventually. I wonder if my grandfather even knows that Sonisoy is in the country, he certainly won’t know his precise location in Siem. Why would he?’

Jake sat back. He wasn’t entirely reassured.

‘Chemda, we can’t stay there for long. A few hours. We need to find a way to get to Thailand.’

‘OK, but we can work it out in Siem. Ah, please. I need to… rest. Hn. Just one night.’

The churning anxieties were hardly soothed. But Jake also saw no other obvious escape route. And Siem Reap was well on the way to Thailand. And Thailand would be safe. Rich, developed, comparatively sensible Thailand.

Crossing the frontier would be very tricky but they’d done it before in Laos, and once they were in Thailand he could draw breath – and then give vent to his despairing anguish at the trail of violence they had left behind. And he understood why Chemda needed to rest. The ghastly image of the cratered man, the severed man, groping inside her thighs, trying to rape her.

The cut on his head still hurt, under the haphazard bandage Chemda had applied at the apartment. It was just a flesh wound – but Jesus it stung. Jake winced and sweated and gazed at the sunlight, serrated by the palm fronds.

Two hours later, as the twilight finally relieved the countryside from the torment of the sun - like a good cop taking over from a bad cop – they arrived in Siem Reap.

Jake had been here, briefly, once before. A sweet little Indochinese town, not unlike Luang Prabang, full of hotels and spas and moonlit walks and klongs and nightmarkets, all dedicated to watering and sheltering the millions of tourists who flooded the sites further north: the clearings of Angkor Wat, where the great temples and palaces of Jayavarman and Suryvarman mouldered nobly in the rasping jungle.

But they were not here for sightseeing. They parked by the biggest nightmarket, already busy with stalls selling obese wooden buddhas and antique incense burners and pirated DVDs of Thai horror movies. Jake glanced at one image as they passed: it was a DVD called Demonic Beauty and the label showed the disembodied head of a woman with her spinal cord and lungs trailing from her severed head like a grisly bridal train of viscera. He turned away.

Sonisoy was waiting for them at a doorway. He looked like Chemda, in a male guise. Taller, handsome, older, with the shaved bald head of the monk he once was. He seemed intensely Khmer, he spoke flawless American-accented English.

Hands were shaken. Jake’s hands were shaking anyway. He smothered his nerves: he euthanized them. Sonisoy escorted them into a house just around the corner from the nightmarket, a house of wood and sweet smells of incense, and paper Chinese lanterns, and photos of the Temple of Ta Prohm on the wall.

He served them red Khmer tea as he listened to Chemda tell their story, in one gushing monologue. His face was sober and his head was shaved and his demeanour was monastic. He nodded.

Then he handed out some Khmer sweetmeats: Nom Krob Khnor, a translucent blob of gelatine with a yellow mung bean in the middle, like a sweetened little embyro in placenta. Jake wanted to be sick. He wanted to be at home in England. He could see the blank milky eyes of the smoke babies, the horrible pulsing scar of the janitor, he could see blood and death, the blank eyes of his sister and the disembodied smile of his mother and…

He snapped out of it. Turned the wheel of his mind. He had gone off road, for a moment, he had veered into the bush, where the minefields lurked, the UXO of the past.

The room was quiet. Chemda had finished her story. Sonisoy put down his cup of red tea and, with the nocturnal murmur of Siem Reap just audible beyond the shutters, he said:

‘Of course, I understand, I believe I have some more information that may piece it all together.’

‘What?’ said Chemda. ‘How?’

‘I think,’ Sonisoy sighed, ‘I believe, from what you told me, that I know who else was a victim of these experiments. Another member of the family. Close, Chemda. Very close.’

Chemda said nothing. She stared into the gloom, she stared at the scraped, shaven head of her uncle, now just a silhouette in the candled dark. She had a hand to her mouth; her eyes were shining in the candelight, moist with incipient tears.

‘My father? As well?’

‘Your father,’ he said. ‘My brother. Think about it, about the way he died.’

The room was morbid with silence. The plate of mung beans, wrapped in their translucent cocoons of jelly, glistened in the candlelight.