The Lost Goddess

25

The she-demons stared. Jake could hear the police now: young male Khmer voices clacking orders at one another. A far wall was dazzlingly overlit by sun, then a shadow fleetingly shot across it: the shadow of a man. One of their pursuers.

“This way,” whispered Sonisoy. He gestured, low, beckoning. They followed. The stone corridors narrowed. A strangler fig tree loomed in the middle of a tiny light well, growing out of the architrave, its enormous roots like muscles and tendons grappling the stonework into submission, arm-wrestling the temple into dust. A spider hung sacred and scarlet, poised on a sunlit web.

They ducked. Another corridor, more voices. The policemen were flooding into the ancient maze of Preah Kahn: it sounded like a dozen, at least, climbing through the gopuras, patrolling the naga balustrades, pointing flashlights and guns into thousand-year-old alcoves where blind white salamanders feasted on the pristine darkness and scuttled from the hideous light.

Sonisoy’s shaved head was brightened by another shaft of sun, slanting through the broken roof. He glanced all around. Thinking — and gesturing.

“Along here—”

It was pointless. Jake felt the utter futility dragging like leg irons as they scrambled over the fallen columns and pediments and the cracked and tumbled bas reliefs. They were going to get caught. Death always caught up.

The young cops were engulfing the place, he could hear them everywhere now, those dark, high, clamorous Khmer vowels, clashing, unpleasant, stern and yet juvenile. They could not escape.

Abruptly, Sonisoy stopped and raised a hand. He was pointing through a stone window, at an open space. Great kapok trees loomed beyond a wall, like watchtowers around a concentration camp.

“See. The lions of the stairway, there—”

His gesture led Jake’s eye to a stone lion.

Sonisoy explained: “There’s a small path at the right of the lions, the stone lions, you see it?”

“Yes.”

“That path leads to the fourth enclosure and then it goes under a wall — we dug a tunnel to extract rubble.”

Jake leaned forward, excited: “So we go, we use the tunnel!”

“Wait!” Sonisoy hissed, quiet and urgent. Another clamor of male voices passed right behind them, just a wall away.

“Jake, you go, you’re the one they want. Chemda and I can stay here, get captured, nothing will happen to us—”

Chemda’s intervention was fierce: “If Jake is going I am going.”

“But, Chemda.”

“No!” Her eyes burned in the darkness. “I want to find the truth about my father. And I want to be with Jake.”

Jake looked her way. Churned.

“Stubborn little Chemtik, always stubborn.” Sonisoy sighed and put a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Just look after my niece. Please. OK? I’m going to run that way”—he gestured backward—“making a lot of noise to distract them, so you two will have a few seconds as they all come after me. Make sure you use those seconds—” He clasped Jake’s shoulder tighter, and said, “Then, when you get to the outside, just run, run through the forest, it goes a long way, right to a baray, Srah Srang, no one goes there, just villagers, locals, no tourists, no police — you can grab a ride to Anlong Veng.”

The nearest policeman was coming around the corner: Jake could hear the chink of rubble as black boots slid against the clitter.

Sonisoy gazed up at the half-revealed sky, his eyes worshipful and concerned, misted with sadness. “So, now, we split up, in three seconds, two seconds… ready?”

“Ready.”

Sonisoy ran noisily, left, out into a courtyard, shouting behind him.

“Chemda! Jake! This way!”

Immediately a chorus of excited voices responded — they’d heard him. Sonisoy kept shouting, leading, decoying.

Jake grabbed Chemda’s hand and they ducked into the sun, past the lion, down the terrace, down the steps, and onto the path.

There. The path evolved into a short tunnel, under the wall. They slid down the mud and scrambled through darkness and emerged into peaceful light, shattered by a sound.

A terrible scream.

The awful scream was so loud and eerie it seemed to silence the rasp of the jungle; it was the near-inhuman scream of someone being viciously beaten, or worse. And now the cops were calling, barking orders, continuing the hunt.

“Sonisoy—” Chemda’s eyes shone with the shock. “What did they do to Sonisoy?”

The scream echoed again: a man’s bellow of pain.

Jake was paralyzed, momentarily. He saw the repetition in his life: he was leaving someone behind, a broken body covered in blood, barely breathing.

But a fierceness entered Jake’s thoughts.

“They’ll do the same to us.”

He wrenched at her hand — she resisted, for a shred of a moment; then she shuddered, nodded, and they ran fast together deep into the jungle, hard along the path, running straight into this forest of noise and heat. It was a humid maze of green. Birds and monkeys catcalled like derisive hecklers. Insects hissed all around, whirring and angry; huge black wasps hovered and dived at their sweating faces; the sunlight flickered crazily through the green canopy.

They ran until they could barely walk, until Jake keeled to the side, gasping, heaving. Chemda hugged his neck, her warm, panting breath feathery on his skin; the two of them were hanging on each other’s shoulders, exhausted.

Then Jake looked up.

Ahead of them, beyond the last of the trees, was a waste of water, another sheet-metal expanse of baray, like a vast lido of mercury in the hot afternoon sun.

And maybe a village?

Seizing the opportunity, Chemda walked out onto the docile shores of the reservoir, where wooden shacks and some naked swimming children revealed human life. Jake followed, his heart still hurting from the exertions. Chemda was barefoot. Her ankles were bleeding. She curved and slipped her flip-flops on, and dropped her rucksack to the ground. Jake looked at the little bag; he had a similar bag on his back. All their possessions. Two pitiful rucksacks.

He picked up his and followed her. He felt a bleak sense of affirmation as they approached the village, Chemda ahead of him. They were certainly in this together now. She was his and he was hers. Whatever happened.

The village was so sleepy it was like someone had mortared the place with narcotic gas. Women lay on their sides on wooden platforms, dirty and barefoot, snoozing, yawning, breast-feeding babies, their kramas on their shoulders. Men sat with their backs against the banyans in the shadows, sleeping. Only the children and the roosters were alert.

An old man wearing a white loincloth came forward. He scrutinized Jake and Chemda; he asked her several curt questions; she replied. He looked like Mahatma Gandhi. His teeth were haphazard but his eyes were kind, and shrewd. The man watched as Chemda took dollars from her rucksack. Then he spoke.

Chemda translated his words for Jake: “There’s a pickup leaving here in forty minutes, taking fruit to Thailand. Through Anlong Veng. We can hide in the back.”

They had to wait. Jake was glad to wait. His legs were still aching from the run through the jungle, his mind still roiled by the hideous scream in the temple. What did they do to Sonisoy?

The old man led them to a clearing and a kind of communal table for the village. More chickens and children scampered in the dust. Five boys were playing with a shuttlecock down by the waveless waters of the baray, kicking it in the air.

Taking a metal jug, the man poured water in plastic cups for them both. It was cold and delicious. Jake drank it hungrily.

“Aw kohn.”

The old man smiled. His eyes held a spark of charm and friendliness, maybe even empathy for these two scruffed, muddy, sweating young people emerging with frightened faces from the jungle. He stood and retreated to the shade of a shack, then came back with a bowl of boiled eggs. He proffered them. Jake realized he had not eaten anything in almost a day. He gladly took one.

As he cracked open the egg he instantly understood his error: Chemda was staring his way, her eyebrows subtly raised. But it was too late. He’d have to eat it now. The rich and pungent smell emanating from the warm boiled egg told him what he was holding.

Balat. It was boiled duck embryo, an egg that had been fertilized and then left to grow for a fortnight or more: meaning there was a crunchy half-formed duck embryo inside. Jake peeled away the soft delicate shards of white shell, trying not to grimace. Sure enough, there it was, inside — the slimy bolus of egg and duck fetus: little feathers, brains, beak, claws, squidgy and gray, almost ready to be born, almost ready to fly, mixed in with the dark yellow egg pulp.

He couldn’t say no. These villagers were saving their lives. He didn’t dare risk insulting them. Closing his eyes, Jake put the egg in his mouth bit by bit, bone by bone, sensing the slimy crunch of the bird’s rib cage and the jellylike squidge of its half-formed brains between his teeth, like chewing silt. Jake shuddered and felt a kind of guilt, the guilt of a carnivore, and yet he ate. Because he was hungry.

“We’re ready—”

It was Chemda. Jake swallowed the last of the balat. And stood. A Toyota Hilux, unexpectedly clean and new, was backing into the clearing. Villagers were loading it with baskets of fruit: apples, mangosteens, papayas, purplish dragonfruit, and enormous durians, with their excessive green prickles.

Jake and Chemda climbed in. They lay on the bottom of the pickup, between the racks of fruit. The fetid, sweet, bad-sewer smell of durian was quite persistent, but they were concealed between the crates.

The old man threw some kind of tarpaulin over the load, and over Jake and Chemda. He whispered to them as they lay there, cowering in the darkness.

Jake said thank you. Chemda said aw kohn.

The pickup started. They were on their way.

The journey was long and hot, and Jake spent it watching Chemda sleeping. She was lying right next to him, and her eyes closed almost as soon as the vehicle accelerated away. He sensed her exhaustion. That’s why she could sleep in this fetid, cramped space, in the heat and the reek of the durians, as they rattled over the endless potholes of National Highway 67.

Jake was only half-awake himself. His thoughts wandered. He daydreamed. The smell of the durians was like toilets at a hot summer festival when he was a teenager. Glastonbury. The pickup rattled through the gears. He thought of his sister running into the road as the car banged and juddered. Becky, Rebecca. Why was the guilt so persistent? None of it was his fault. His sister, his mother, and yet he felt guilt. It held him. Fuck the guilt.

Reaching down to his rucksack, he unzipped it and retrieved his wallet. Between two fingers he found the photo of Rebecca, lifted it and looked, close, in the gloom. Her undying smile, the guiltless, happy smile. Five years old, then snuffed out. The grief tugged at him like an undertow, like an immense tide he could not resist. Maybe he did not want to resist. Just let go. Just let it all go.

He buttoned the photo in his breast pocket. He wanted it close, close to him, he didn’t know why. Then he shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t; he drifted into turbulent semiconsciousness.

Voices outside came and went in a second as they slammed through hamlets and jungle, and slowed over rickety wooden bridges. Jake shifted and rubbed his eyes. It was dark in here, under the tarpaulin; just a flapping corner of light at the end of the pickup showed dust and road and paddy fields disappearing as they motored north.

He thought of his mother. Dying and smiling. How had she died? He didn’t want to think about it. He thought of the demon heads, the women in the frieze staring down at him as they hid at the dark center of Preah Kahn. He thought of Sonisoy, screaming. Everyone was dying now, it was day zero, year zero, they were clearing the city of his life; people were just falling in the gutter of Sisovath Boulevard. Soon they would blow up the bank.

A rattle turned his daydreams into lucidity. The tarpaulin was flung back. The driver was standing there.

“Anlong Veng.”

The driver motioned: climb out.

Tentatively, Jake rubbed his muscles as he walked away from the pickup. The sun was less hot now. They were in the main square of some tiny impoverished town where boys played volleyball in the middle of the dusty road.

Chemda was on maneuvers already: paying off the driver, and talking to another, younger man in a faded red Klang Beer T-shirt.

She turned and explained to Jake: “We can rest here.” She gestured down a shady lane that led to a kind of promontory. “This man is Rittisak, he will help us.”

“But—” Jake stared around. Some guys were drinking palm wine at a wooden shack a few meters away, looking curiously at the muddied Khmer princess and the scruffed up sweating white man. “Are we safe here?”

“We are safe here. This is Anlong Veng, the Thai border is on top of those hills there, the Dangrek Escarpment, Chong Sa crossing. This is the last place the Khmer Rouge ruled, until 1998.”

“OK.”

“The locals hated the Khmer Rouge so much they still hate everyone, the police, the customs — if we are outlaws that makes us their friends — we are safe here, well, for a few hours, but then”—she looked at Jake’s face—“then we move on. As you said. We have to get to Thailand.”

Their new friend, Rittisak, was beckoning, his hand turned down, flapping, requesting them to follow. The path led through a grove of shady trees, past a burned-out Soviet truck, to a large concrete house.

“In here,” said Chemda, following Rittisak through a door and up some steps.

The house was bizarre, empty and furnitureless and still hot from the day’s sun, and it was decorated with amateurish murals, of Angkor Wat in an idealized jungle setting; Disney-eyed deer were feeding at overly crystalline lakes, elephants bathed in the sapphire waters, watched by monkeys so cheerful they looked as though they were drugged.

But what made the house truly bizarre was the view. On three sides of the almost wall-less house stretched a plain of water shining red and yellow in the setting sun, with the faint spicy reek of decay breezing off the waters. Sticking out of the water, like burned arms and charred fingers, were thousands of dead tree stumps, sometimes entire dead trees, all black, stricken and ugly. The watery graveyard of trees extended many miles, sullen and tragic, to a sudden rise of hills beyond. It looked like a First World War battlefield, like the Somme or Ypres or Passchendaele — inexplicably flooded, and set beneath a decrepit tropical sun.

“What the fuck is that?”

Rittisak bade them sit down. They sat. Jake asked again: about the view, the peculiar lake.

Chemda explained, quietly, as the sun folded its cards behind the Dangrek Hills.

“This was Ta Mok’s house.”

“The Khmer Rouge leader?”

Chemda nodded, rubbing the mud from her hands on her skirt.

“Look at me. Filthy. Yes, Ta Mok, the Butcher — Pol Pot’s friend — the only man crueler than Pol Pot.”

“And that… fucking graveyard over there, the lake?”

“They call it the Butcher’s Lake. Because Ta Mok made it. In the last years of the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled this final corner of Cambodia, Ta Mok had the peasants dam a river and build this lake, an artificial lake, but it went wrong, it just killed the trees, killed everything.”

“Why?”

“They say he did it to bury all the corpses. Even to the very end, the Khmer Rouge were slaughtering people, they killed many thousands of peasants around here, and, ah, locals say that the remains are out there, concealed under the waters, poisoning the waters, forever.”

Chemda sat back. Her hands behind her, she was talking with Rittisak, and frowning. She explained: “Rittisak says that to get across the border we have to move tonight. In the dark.”

“Good idea.”

“But there’s only one route, only one way to avoid checkpoints.” She stared outward, at the watery desolation, and nodded. “Yes. We have to go that way. It’s the only way. It’s dangerous.”

“No.”

“Yes. We have to get across the lake.”