The Lost Goddess

11

Rising from the bed, Jake slowly approached the door. Hanging from the hook was a terrible thing.

What was it? A tiny dead monkey? A dried fruit bat? What the fuck was this? A brown leathery mammalian corpse just hanging here? Surely it couldn’t be worse, surely it couldn’t be what he most of all feared?

His revulsion mixed with his furious curiosity. He walked closer. And then his stomach surged with the bile of confirmed disgust.

This was no monkey. This was unmistakably not animal.

It was a human embryo.

A human fetus, somehow dried or mummified, was hanging by its own umbilical cord from the coat hook on the door.

The fetus stared at him. Its blank open eyes were milky white.

He heard a scream.

He stared.

The scream didn’t register; it was like a distant car alarm, not really meant for him. He was so transfixed by the sight of those eyes, dead eyes rolled back, like his sister. No, don’t think this way. But he couldn’t help it. Slowly he pulled on his jeans and a shirt, and all the time he kept staring at the baby, the dead fetus, the possessed, horrifyingly white eyes, like his sister’s, lying in the road; until he realized it was Chemda. Screaming.

Chemda!

He kicked open his door and the scream was still loud in his ears — her room was next to his. Shunting through her door, he found her, sitting on her bed, panting and gasping, her face wrought with fear. She was pointing at something, wordless and terrorized.

He didn’t have to guess. Hanging by its umbilical cord, from the rafters of the timbered room, was another fetus.

“Chemda. Come on—”

She was naked, wrapped in sheets. She didn’t move.

“Chemda. Please. Now!”

He walked over to her, took her damp hand; her gaze yearned beyond him, through him, at some fearful horizon. Then a lucidity reappeared; she nodded, dumbly, and he turned away as she hurriedly put on a dress. Before they could open the door a maid was in the room; the maid also screamed. And her scream was unbearable, existential: like she sensed her own approaching death. The maid’s rubber-gloved hand was weakly pointing at the limply hanging fetus; her mop had fallen to the floor. Then she screamed again. A wild klaxon. Shrieking and shuddering.

Jake didn’t know what to do: rescue Chemda, or calm the near-hysterical maid. He grabbed Chemda’s hand once more, and they fled into the garden.

He was agitated for an hour; it took Chemda two hours to calm down. Madame Marconnet brought tea and a blanket and the maid hovered nearby, distraught, her small, dusty hands trembling and shaking as she smoothed down her dirty apron, over and over. Sitting next to Jake, Chemda stared fearfully at the river and the boats and the algae nets and the singing fishermen, and for a hundred minutes she said nothing. And then, finally, she spoke.

“Talismans.” The voice from the back of her throat. “They are talismans.”

“What?”

“In Khmer—koh krohen… or kun krak.”

Once more she fell silent.

They were alone again in the secluded riverside garden of the Gauguin. Madame Marconnet had withdrawn, the maids had finally gone back to work — to clean the rooms, to take away those horrible things.

The garden, he now noticed, was beautiful. In front of them the milk-chocolate waters of the Mekong communed with the dark-chocolate waters of the Nam Khan. But all Jake could think about was those cold and dead and horrible milky eyes. Above them the leaves of the tamarinds tinkled and whispered, yet Chemda was still shivering with fright.

He needed to know.

“Talismans. What kind of talismans? How?”

She looked his way; she was visibly struggling to master her emotions. “It will all sound insane. But you must know the Khmers are very superstitious. Ah. For instance, you see the little spirit houses everywhere in Cambodia, to trap evil ghosts, the neak ta? Right? And gangsters with sacred tattoos, to ward off bullets: Phnom Penh is full of them.”

Jake nodded. He had seen these tiny, sinister shrines. And yes, the tattooed gangsters were everywhere, draped with blessed amulets.

“I’ve seen all that. But why here, us, why those things?”

“The belief in spirits goes deep in my culture, Jake.” She shuddered again. “Very deep. Even the Khmer Rouge, for all their atheism, were the same: animist and superstitious. And it’s not just Khmers who believe in the power of Khmer voodoo.”

“Sorry?”

“Khmer voodoo, Khmer black magic, is feared right across Southeast Asia. The Lao hate it, the Thais fear it, the Malays, the Burmese, the Chinese all pay homage. The Thai prime minister is thought, by Thais, to use Khmer talismans, kratha.”

Down by the pier, fishermen were hauling in nets, a meager catch of little silvery fish. Pungent and flapping.

“So what exactly are these talismans in our room? You called them something. Just now.”

“Koh krohen. They could be koh krohen. Ah. Dead babies. Embalmed.”

He shook his head, revolted and disgusted, watching the watermen on the river speeding past in their long-tailed boats, churning the chocolate-milk water.

“They are miscarried fetuses. Mummified?”

“Yes. But sometimes they can be worse than that. I suspect the kratha in our rooms are even more evil.”

“Worse? How could they be any worse?”

“The babies in our rooms… ah, I don’t know for sure, but my guess is they aren’t just miscarried fetuses.” She gazed away at the river, torpid and decaying; “I think the ones in our rooms were the worst of all. Even worse than the ghost children. You saw the maid’s reaction. Pure horror.”

“So? What are they?”

“What we saw, hanging from the door, was probably kun krak. Smoke babies. They are babies that have been…” She blinked, twice, and then again. “Ripped out of a woman’s living womb, then doused in some kind of sacred oil, then smoked over a fire. Some call them kuk krun. Well-done babies.”

She paused. Jake gazed between the papayas and the jackfruit, trying not to dwell on this truly appalling information. Murdered babies of a murdered woman; fetuses anointed and smoked.

“Sweet fucking Jesus.” His voice was choked.

Chemda’s eyes were moist and shy. “The fact that someone put them in… my room, our rooms, means someone wants us out. It is a direct and devilish threat, Jake. Designed to unnerve. And I am unnerved. The smoke babies. It scares me. Ah.”

He regained himself. Angrily.

“But Chemda. You’re a Californian, right? You went to UCLA. You know it’s all bollocks. This is just, just voodoo. Juju dolls, dead chickens, zombies. It means nothing—”

“I can’t help it. I believe it, Jake. Somewhere inside I do fear it, horribly; it’s part of my root culture. Maybe more than that; maybe it’s genetic. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t help it. Ah. Can’t help it.”

This was the closest she had come to breaking. So far, Chemda had been relatively unfazed by the bloody death of Doctor Samnang; she had been determined, and decisive, when they were fleeing the police at Site 9; she had arranged their escape from the Secret City with a valiant coolness bordering on sangfroid; but a brief if chilling encounter with black magic—that had thrown her.

But if Jake was honest with himself, it had also thrown him. Like someone were taunting him with his worst fears and guilt. The little dead child, eyes rolled and white.

Trying to void his mind of this revenant image, he looked around — Agnès Marconnet was standing, once more, at the edge of the riverside lawn, anxiously gazing their way. The hotel owner had been in a state of anguished nerves ever since the ghastly discovery, apologizing and speculating. Who had put these hideous things in the room. Mais pourquoi…. C’est pas croyable…. Mes propres employés? Je suis vraiment désolé….

But as he stared, Jake also became aware, through the screen of trees at the edge of the garden, of a police car, parked on the road that concluded at the Gauguin. A police car? When did that arrive? A few minutes ago? What was the policeman doing inside? Talking on his radio? To whom?

“OK. Fuck this. Superstition or not, Chemda, we need to go, now. Look!”

He tilted his head, significantly. Chemda squinted at the police car.

“How long has he been there?”

“Who knows. Maybe someone called them, about the… talismans. C’mon, we need to go.”

“But where? The roads, they are so long, and so bad. It will take two or three days. We cannot fly out.”

“Just grab the bags.”

Their luggage was still stacked at the rear of the hotel, in a pile, on a cart. A melancholy brace of tiny rucksacks, dirty and ragged. They had been left there as if their stay was expected to be brief. Jake turned at a noise. The policeman was stepping out of the car. The door of his Toyota closed. A two-way radio crackled.

The cop was walking to the hotel door. He was knocking at the door; he was talking to someone there.

They stood in the garden, screened by the trees — but paralyzed. There was no way out of the hotel now. Indeed, a second police car was sliding down the narrow road, lights flashing, pointlessly, in the tropical sunlight.

Agnès emerged. Her voice was tremulous. She stammered, for a minute, in French, gazing at Chemda.

Chemda explained.

“She says someone called the police, about the… kratha. She doesn’t know who. A maid, maybe. She says her husband is holding the police at the door, but they will force their way in if necessary—”

“So we’re screwed.”

“No.” Chemda looked at Agnès — and Agnès nodded. “There’s one other way, a path, down here, by the river, it leads around the wat, we can evade the police…”

Despair filled Jake’s thoughts. The idea was feeble. The path would still lead them back into Luang Prabang; but Jake also realized they had no choice.

“OK. The rucksacks.”

They snatched their bags, Chemda whispered a goodbye to Agnès, and then the two of them fled through the tamarinds, slipping into the cooler shadows, running down the lawn. As the garden approached the river, the lawn sloped, more severely, until it became a very serious incline. They were half scrambling, half crawling, almost rappelling to freedom.

Freedom? Jake winced at the idea. This wasn’t an escape to freedom, this was fucking futile. The riverside path would get them away from the hotel, around the police, but it would lead them straight back to town, emerging onto a main street, dirty and conspicuous, where they would immediately be spotted and arrested.

The riverside path led on, past the pier where the fishermen darned their nets in the sunshine. Jake stared.

The river. The pier. The river.

He gazed at the long-tailed boats. The sun of an idea dazzled on the Mekong’s dark ripples.

“Chemda. Stop!”

She was three meters in front of him, hurrying along. She turned.

He snapped, “How about the river? Doesn’t it go to Thailand? Eventually?”

Her face darkened — and then it brightened, a fraction.

“It does… Ah, yes, yes, it does!”

“So we get a boat. Right away. Hire one. Anything!”

The two of them hurried onto the wooden jetty. A few more boatmen were gathered at the very end, in the shade of a palm-roofed shelter, playing dice, some bare-chested, some barefoot, some laughing. Chemda walked straight up and talked urgently with one of the men, in Khmer, or Lao, in some language — yet another language Jake did not understand. His sense of isolation intensified. He was so foreign here; indeed, he was beyond foreign, he was like a different species. Chemda seemed excited, as well as frightened: she turned and interpreted.

“This man, Pang”—she indicated the wiriest of the boatmen—“he knows Agnès. And he knows a place, a day upriver. He can take us past Pak Beng. It’s wilderness up there. After that we can just walk into Thailand. Then, at last, we are out of Laos. Then we fly to PP from Chiang Rai.”

Jake glanced at Pang. He was an old Laotian man dressed in faded denim shorts and a Manchester United shirt. He was the pilot of this small, narrow riverboat, a pirogue. He smiled. He seemed trustworthy. Jake wondered at his own fatuous speculations. What choice did they have, anyhow? The police might be searching the gardens this minute. Then they would hunt along the riverbank.

Bags were flung, and thumped. Chemda hurried down the wooden ladder and into the wobbling boat. Pang was silent. Everyone was quite silent. No one spoke about the smoke babies, the well-done babies, the ghost children, hanging from the rafters. White-eyed. Jake couldn’t stop thinking about them.

Who had hung them there? Who was doing all this, trying to frighten them away?

The mighty river beckoned, implacable and unanswering. Swiftly he climbed into the boat, following Chemda aboard. Pang was already at the engine. Then Pang yanked the outboard into life and they pushed out from the shore, against the slowly surging waters, constantly fleeing their own tail plume of muddy water.

The staggered white stupas and golden wats of Luang, framed by the banana-tree green of Mount Phousi, receded at last. Jake watched the city of incense disappear behind them. He was very glad to leave, yet he knew he wasn’t really escaping. How could you escape your own memories? New memories or old, they stayed with you, forever.

The Mekong was apathetically vast. Broad and slow and wide. For the first few miles they had the unsettling company of tourist boats drifting lazily downstream, full of Western and Chinese tourists in ungainly shorts waving at them like kids; Jake cursed them and wished them away. Sometimes speedboats accelerated past, rocking them with backwash, trailing gauzy isadoras of blue diesel exhaust and making Jake think they were going to be surrounded and arrested.

But within an hour they were virtually alone. And the loneliness was possibly worse than the traffic. They were scarily alone, deep in the jungled upper reaches of the Lao Mekong.

Bamboo reeds bent in the breeze, silent red petals fell on milky-brown water. River birds flew overhead. Wild lychees, black herons, silence.

Occasionally they passed a little tribal village, lost in the jungle, where naked, dirty children ran down to the shoreline brandishing small, crude carved wooden dolls, desperately shouting, almost hysterical.

“Souvenirs,” said Chemda. “Sometimes tourist boats get this far, and they buy crafts from the villages. Otherwise these people live on nothing. Fruit from the forest. Monkey meat. Ah. Desperate conditions.”

In another village an old tribeswoman was sitting on a log, her withered breasts quite bare: the woman looked and smiled, and Jake felt the electricity of shock. Her mouth was full of blood. She was smiling and her mouth was full of blood. Then he realized: she was chewing betel nuts. The woman smiled her lurid scarlet smile.

The boat slid from one empty shore to another, avoiding mud slopes and rapids, ducking under bamboo overhangs. Water snakes slid beneath the boat, sinister sine waves of yellow. At one point they turned a grandiose bend in the river and Jake saw a huge cave: in its dark recesses glittered a hundred or a thousand little smirking Buddhas, gold and silver statues sitting on rocks and sand. There were boats tethered here. Pilgrims?

“Sacred caves,” said Chemda.

The sun was wearyingly hot, an enemy, ogling them. Jake felt increasingly ill at ease, once again. Were they being followed? Every so often he looked back, but the torpid waters stretched to a horizon framed by banana trees and bending palms and nothing else.

Pang the boatman was silent as the river. He was old, yet tough and wiry: one of those East Asians who looked like he could never die. Smoked by age and sun. Kippered. He smiled sometimes, but said nothing.

Chemda had, it seemed, fully recovered her wits. She wanted to talk. She was trying to explain Khmer culture to Jake, its superstitions and legends.

“Some people believe there is a particular darkness in the Khmer.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s difficult to explain it concisely. But here is an example: kum.”

“OK.”

“Kum is the desire to take revenge, a typically Khmer desire to do down your enemy. Ah. To crush him, over many years.”

“Like a vendetta.”

“Yes, but also no. Vendetta is just eye for an eye, isn’t it, you kill mine and I kill yours; kum is even more deadly — but no, deadly isn’t right.” She stared at the riverbank, where an egret sat on a branch. “Kum is more… satanic. Kum means the desire to take, ah, disproportionate revenge.”

“How?”

“Brutally. If someone hurts you, he becomes an enemy, a soek, and you must take revenge, sangsoek. But the principle of kum means you must hurt him ten times over in return. If someone rapes your sister, you must kill his sister and his brother and kill his father and his mother. Kill everyone.”

Jake sensed the proximity of personal grief. He was quiet. Then she continued, her noble profile framed by the troubling green jungle and the painful blue sky:

“The legend is that the Khmers adopted Buddhism, the most peaceful of religions, because it put a restraint on kum. And that”—she leaned out of the boat and trailed delicate fingers in the water—“that is why communism was so particularly vicious in Cambodia.”

“Explain?”

“The Khmer Rouge took away the constraints of Buddhism. They burned down the temples, tortured and slaughtered the monks. They tried to murder God. And the result…” She shrugged, and winced. “Was the killing fields. The nihilistic brutality of the killing fields. Because if you take away the Khmers’ religion, we are just left with kum—plus tyranny.”

Chemda withdrew her hand from the river abruptly, as if she feared it might be bitten. “And then again, sometimes I think that maybe we are still a cursed people.” She gazed into the mirroring waters. “Ah. Lacking something, lacking humanity. Maybe we are still the Black Khmer. Steeped in blood.”

The boat was slowing. Jake turned: they were approaching a larger village, with a pier and stores and one or two fishing skiffs, a place where village children played in clothes, rather than shrieking and naked.

“Pak Beng. We can stop for water, briefly, it is surely safe here. No one comes here. Then we have another few hours and we can get to Thailand. I hope.”

They tethered the boat. Jake stepped ashore and grabbed a warm cola from a man running a stall in the village. He had one eye and one arm and one leg, and a full set of grinning white teeth.

Jake returned to the boat. He didn’t feel refreshed, he felt utterly exhausted and still very hunted. The sun was so ferociously, predatingly hot; even the cooling river breeze did not help as they motored slowly upstream. The silence of the river and the memory of the smoke baby, hanging from the door, weighed on him, like oppressive humidity before a storm. He wanted to talk. He didn’t know what to say. Chemda spoke.

“Why do you feel guilt, about your family?”

It was one of her direct, even piercing questions.

He shied away from answering. “What do you mean by that?”

“When we were on the plain. You said…” She softened her voice, as if she knew her words might hurt him. “You said that you felt guilt, about surviving your family, or your mother and sister. Why?”

Again, something in Chemda seemed to invite the truth from him, and again he yearned to tell her everything; maybe because she had darkness in her past, too.

“When my sister was run over, I was… holding her hand. I was looking after her, but I was only seven, and she was five. Stupidly young. But I was still in charge, you know? And still I let go and, and, and she ran into the road.” He half-swallowed the rest of the story, eyes fixed on the walls of jungle imprisoning the river. “It was after that my mother fell apart, and then she walked out. Broken heart. I don’t know. But in my mind it was all my fault. If I hadn’t let go of Becky none of it would have happened. None of it. Kids blame themselves, don’t they? That’s what I did, and sometimes still do. When I’m not working. Or drinking. Or watching football. You know.”

The motor puttered as they curved another, tighter riverbend. Pang was staring rigidly ahead to where smooth rocks protruded from the brown-and-silver water.

“I have a photo. Of Rebecca. It’s the only thing I keep, the only bit of her left.”

Chemda said nothing. Instead she put her hand briefly on his, offering that tender electric shock. Then she sat back.

He reached for his rucksack, unzipped it, and took out his wallet. There. The photo. One of the first photos he had ever taken. Of his sister just before she died. He handed the little Polaroid to Chemda like he was trusting her with his most precious possession. A pathetic photo. By a seven-year-old. But it was precious: a photo taken by himself of his five-year-old sister, smiling her impish smile, wearing a hat three sizes too big. Laughing.

Chemda’s eyes moistened.

“She was… very pretty. I’m so sorry.”

Jake shrugged and took back the photo and put it away. Carefully zipping it up safe.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m being a bit morbid. Keeping it all this time. But it’s my only purchase on the past. You understand?”

“Of course,” said Chemda. “Of course….”

He watched her as she gazed at the rippled water. Her expression was maudlin and quiet.

“Tell me about yourself, Chemda.”

“Yes?”

“Well, twenty-eight. Unmarried. Boyfriend?”

She faintly smiled his way. “I am a virgin….” A pause. She added, with a more sincere smile: “In Cambodia.”

He laughed, somewhat uncertainly.

She said, “It sounds absurd to talk about all this, now.”

“Hey. What else can we talk about?”

“OK. OK. How to put it? I was not quite so chaste in LA. There were lots of boys. The wrong kind of boys.” Her eyes met his. “The insecurity was appealing. I was always drawn to boys who wandered away, adventurers, boys who couldn’t be tied down. Probably because I didn’t want to be tied down. Ah. You have to remember, Khmer culture is quite conservative, girls are expected to marry young. My parents have seriously started to worry about me. Especially now I am over twenty-five…. Ah well.”

The river birds were swooping again, silver and blue, maybe some kind of kingfisher. They talked some more, but then the silence fell, and with it the fear returned — and then the oppressive heat drove them to separate corners of the boat.

Jake gargled horribly warm water from the dirty water bottle, then dipped a T-shirt in the river and draped its wetness over his broiling face.

The motor chirred. Wearied by his own anxiety, and the sadistic heat, Jake lay back against the uncomfortable planks of the pirogue, and almost immediately felt the mermaids of sleep dragging him under. Soft female arms pulling him down. And down. Into the darkness of sleep, with the murmuring bones.

When he woke, his watch showed three hours had gone by. Now Chemda was asleep. The sun was filtered by the riverside palm fronds. Twilight. Pang was gazing at him.

Pang said, “We are soon there. You and Chemda very tired, I think.”

This was startling. It had not occurred to Jake that Pang spoke English. All this time he had presumed the man’s silence was due to his not understanding their conversation. Jake hadn’t even offered the boatman a proper word of hello.

“Please, Pang. I didn’t realize you spoke English… you know. I’m so sorry.”

“Not problem. I understand, much danger. Do not worry.” The old man nodded, distractedly. He was steering them carefully around floating logs and sudden rocks.

The river had become notably narrower, the current faster, the shorelines steeper, almost cliffs. Impenetrable jungle adorned the clifftops on either side. A younger Mekong.

“I take tourist up here, many years, for Madame Agnès. In the hotel. I know her family long time.” The boatman hesitated. “One time I know her family, too, they friend with Agnès.”

“Who did you know?”

“Her grandmother. Madame Sovirom. She live in Luang after the war.”

Jake paused, and pondered. Surely not. The grandmother was killed by the Khmer Rouge. But surely it had to be. The Hmong knew her, or knew of her; why not someone in Luang?

Pang revved the engine, steering for the opposite shore. Chemda was still fast asleep, her delicate head resting on a folded sarong, her bare dark legs smeared with mud.

The boatman’s Manchester United shirt was stained with salt and river and oil; the grime of honest hard work. He said, “I not like tell Chemda. Sad story. Maybe she not know?”

“What story?”

“I tell you. But secret. Everyone pretend they know nothing. Madame Agnès, everyone. The famous lady from Phnom Penh, royal lady. She lived at the Gauguin after the war, for a few year. She sit every day by the river, in the garden, and every man with a boat know who she was. She just sit looking at the river, every day for three year, maybe four. Some men call her bad name, Khmer name—vierunii—”

“It means?”

“Lao-lao. Whiskey. But also it mean… stupid woman, made bad by drink. Like she drunk.” He cocked his head and slacked his mouth, doing a caricature of someone palsied, or retarded. “She like this. Spitting.”

“She just sat there? Was she ill?”

Pang shrugged, his frown deep and troubled.

“Not ill. Own fault. She say, ‘Give me.’”

“What?”

“They cut her up, but they say she want this.” Pang sighed. “I do not know, maybe I say nothing.”

“But I want to know.”

A pause. They were just a few meters from the shore. Jake spotted a modest mud bank, and a rough track leading up the steep river cliff into the bush. He realized this must be Thailand, this shoreline: beyond the cliff was Thailand and roads and proper airports and 7 Elevens and safety—they were close to safety—but before he alighted he wanted more information, as much as possible.

“Pang, are you saying that Chemda’s grandmother volunteered to be experimented on?”

“Vol… an…?”

“Volunteer. It means, it means… Are you saying she asked them to do it to her? To cut her head open?”

“Yes. Yes! Doi! That is it. She ask them to do this, to cut her open, to make her brave like lion, like brave animal, but it go wrong and then she like… dead woman. Sitting there. For many year. Staring at the river. Sad story, so sad.” Pang nudged the boat onto the mud, darkly frowning, almost despairing. “I always ask. Always. Why? Why anyone want that? Why anyone ask to be cut open? To be cut into many pieces?”