The Lost Goddess

28

“Let’s go.”

The climb began. It was sharp and prickly, but it was dry, and better than their ghastly course across the Butcher’s reservoir. Roots ripped his hands. Chemda held on to Jake’s arms. Rittisak was a sherpa of nimbleness, choosing rocks as footholds, helping them up, adeptly pointing at branches they could use to ascend. Jake wondered why Rittisak was so assiduous in his assistance: the villagers here were much friendlier than in so many other places. Maybe they just hated authority, like Chemda had said, and a couple of outlaws, like he and Chemda, appealed to their rebel spirit.

Ten strenuous and sweaty minutes later they were on top of the cliff, near a concrete shack. The moon shone on more dead trees, burned trees; maybe slashed and burned by the swidden farmers. There was a definite sense of dawn in the air, a virginal stirring, as birds timidly chirruped.

Jake said, “We need to rest a few hours, Chemda. Tell Rittisak?”

The two Khmers spoke Khmer. Jake saw Rittisak shrug, uncomfortably, then accede. OK. Sleep here. Jake lay down at once — right inside the fetid concrete shack. His rucksack was a pillow. Chemda lay beside him and sleep came at once, like a kidnapper, hooding him brutally. Darkness.

He didn’t care. He slept and he dreamed as he knew he would dream: he dreamed of bodies and faces drowned underwater; he dreamed of his mother like a mermaid, his sister, too, the lost women underwater, sighing and singing, sirenic, disinterred, waving their pale limbs, beckoning.

He woke to blazing patches of sun on the ground, shaped by the small concrete windows. Eight a. m., maybe. Jake suppressed his shivers of simultaneous heat and cold. And then the juddering memory of the lake returned, and his anxieties spiraled. He felt feverish. Could this get any worse? What was happening to him? He felt an overwhelming urge to see the picture of his sister one more time. But where was it?

He recalled: buttoned in his breast pocket, where he’d secreted it during the long truck journey from Siem Reap. Fumbling for his pocket, he reached for the photo. But the pocket was unbuttoned. It had come undone. The photo was gone. Slipped away, or washed away, no doubt, when they were wading the lake. Only shreds of moist paper remained. She had dissolved in the water. His family had finally dissolved.

It was difficult to fight the emotions, the keening loss. Yet he tried. But even as he fought the grief, the chilly possibility slit open his thoughts. The possibility he had been ignoring for days — yet not quite avoiding. And this final slice of grief tipped him into speculation. Abject, degraded speculation.

Was he cursed? Had he been cursed by the spider witch?

This was, of course, ridiculous. He was a rationalist, a materialist, the most convinced of atheists. He wasn’t scared of death, of ghosts, of vampires or God or gravestones or hell. He despised and rejected the absurd and clattering parade of human religion and superstition.

And yet, despite his anger, he couldn’t wipe away the sensation, the creeping and ridiculous idea. That ghastly witch, the nouveau crone in her sequined turquoise jumper, with the black spider excrement in her chewing black mouth — maybe she really had done it: cursed him, cast a terrible spell. Bad luck, evil luck, was pursuing him like a feral dog. And now he had lost the photo. Lost his sister all over again.

The sun shone brightly through the little window.

Chemda was awake. She was standing and dressed, and listening to Rittisak. He was talking quickly in Khmer — and his utterance made her blanch, visibly.

“Pol Pot’s house,” she said, and her face was trembling. “My God, we are in Pol Pot’s old house. Where he spent his last years. Sometimes tourists come here. Ah. God… Of all the places. We have to go.”

She was obviously shaken. They needed to leave at once. Jake doused his face with bottled water, slung on his socks and boots, then he and Chemda helped each other with the rucksacks and shared a brief, silent kiss, and they walked into the jungle.

There was still a deathliness to the area. This was not the vibrant, overly fecund jungle of Angkor Wat. Patches of burned or dead vegetation dotted the forest. Birds sang: apologetically, and uncertainly. Or maybe Jake was imagining it. He hoped he was imagining it, just as he wanted to believe he had imagined the skulls and skeletons in the water, the jaunty flotsam of genocide.

Two hours and five kilometers of jungle pathway found them in the outskirts of a village. Rittisak looked more relaxed in the sunlight. His job was close to completion. He pointed one way and talked and then pointed another way.

Chemda turned: “He says the main road is just there, so we must be careful, but the Chong Sa crossing is also very close, we just have to hack through this last field… take the path, along a ravine, get across the frontier.”

They slipped down the ravine, but the route was confusing, it forked several times. At one point it led them to a clutch of houses, the busy road to Thailand taking them horribly close to danger; but another turning seemed to head for the wilds, toward that unguarded and very wooded border a few kilometers east.

They walked away from the houses, sweating, silent, and scared. Burned trees lined the narrow lane. And then the path widened to a clearing.

Everyone halted.

In the center of the scruffy clearing was a small linear hump of soft mud, surrounded by a wire fence. A low and rusty iron roof protected the mud from the rains and the sun.

Rittisak was pointing.

“Pol Pot grave! Where they burn body. Dump him!”

Jake stared, dumbfounded. This was the grave of the dictator? Pol Pot’s grave? It was poignantly rudimentary. It could have been the lyrically humble grave of a great poet, a pauper’s grave for a neglected genius — and then, Jake thought, maybe it was just that: the Mozart of death was buried here, this was the grave of an eerie prodigy, an autistic savant, a grinning mediocrity who somehow killed, murdered, his own country.

Offerings had been placed next to the grave. Some incense sticks were burning, planted in a sand-filled jar of instant tom yum noodles. Red apples shriveled beside a pile of silver coins. And next to the grave was a wooden spirit house: someone had actually installed a wooden shrine to honor the dead shade of Pol Pot. Jake moved close and saw: inside the wooden house were two dolls, Mr. and Mrs. Pol Pot. Jake marveled.

Rittisak was speaking. Chemda interpreted:

“He says people come here to pray, to, ah, seek help from the spirit of Pol Pot. The shrine was erected by some Thai guy. He won the lottery after praying to Pol Pot’s ghost. Hey. Do you think I am allowed to piss on this grave? Ah, are women allowed to do that, or is it just a guy thing? Anyway, please — let’s move.”

He had never heard Chemda speak coarsely before; she barely ever swore. Chemda turned away from the grave in disgust.

But Jake lingered. He was impressed by the florid paradox of the scene: the grave of a lunatic and atheist dictator, the man who murdered monks and pulled down temples, the man who didn’t just hate God but tried to stamp God into the dust — the grave of this unbeliever had been turned into a shrine, a place of superstitious worship where peasants prayed to a Communist ghost, a Marxist deity; it was the most perfect irony, quite sumptuous. It had to be recorded.

Almost reflexively, Jake took out his camera from his rucksack and aimed the lens.

Rittisak was edgy and fidgeting. Chemda was anxiously gesturing:

“Come on, Jake, quick, we need to go!”

“Just a couple more shots, wait, just a few more.”

He knelt in the dust and grabbed some images, just a couple more. Raising his tiny camera to get a wider shot, he stepped back; then he looked at the digital image and realized he hadn’t properly framed the four soldiers who had just walked into the clearing with guns.

The four soldiers with guns, who were now aiming them at Jake and Chemda and Rittisak.

“Chemda,” he whispered.

Way too fucking late. How stupid was this? How stupid had he been? So quickly, so easily: they had been captured. The soldiers were smiling, and laughing, waving those guns. One was snapping orders, triumphant. Shouting in Jake’s face.

Jake reeled at his own idiocy. His rasping stupidity. It was his fault. If they hadn’t lingered for him to take the photos, the soldiers might not have overheard them, marched off the road, and found them at the stupid little grave.

Rittisak had a gun pointed to his head. Chemda likewise. Jake felt the numbness of defeat. He allowed himself to be handcuffed. Everyone was handcuffed. The soldiers were arguing. Smiling and laughing — yet arguing. The youngest soldier handcuffed them all in brisk and ruthless silence. The apparent captain shouted his order. The youngest soldier shrugged and shook his head.

Again the soldiers argued. The captain pointed, with a metal bar in his hand — he was giving it to the younger soldier and barking his harsh Khmer sentences as he did. A metal bar? In a lonely clearing? Chemda was covering her face with frightened hands.

The revelation came to Jake like the flush of a sudden and terrible sickness. The soldiers were deciding whether to kill them.

A bird sang melodiously somewhere. It was done. The soldier saluted. The arguing ended. Jake could hear a car on the road, and a radio, and a cockerel crowing the tropical morning. He could smell cooking, he could smell woodsmoke and forest and sunbaked garbage.

This is how it happens, he thought. Not with choirs or angels or poetry, but with the smell of garbage.

Chemda tried to speak; the soldiers ignored her. They pushed Rittisak to his knees, making him buckle and kowtow. They kicked Jake to his knees, too: a foot brutally stamped the back of his legs so he crumpled into a praying position, supplicant in the sunny dust, praying by Pol Pot’s grave.

The smell of garbage.

He twisted to see Chemda. She was being led to the side, like she was special. Jake knew, with a shudder of quiet despair, precisely how his death was going to happen. He’d been to the killing fields of Cheung Ek. This is how they did it. This is how the Khmer Rouge slaughtered their countless victims, with a primitive and simple efficiency. Make them kneel down, swing the iron bar, crush the skull from behind. Next, please. Why waste a bullet on death?

He could hear Chemda crying now, heavily. The soldiers murmured. The decision had been made, so they were just doing their job. Rittisak was staring at the sky. Jake stared at Pol Pot’s grave. The incense was still burning. A trail of ants led from the brushwood to the shriveled apples, to an empty bottle of chili sauce.

The soldier approached with a rusty iron bar, a car axle, maybe. He was going to swing the bar and bash out their brains. Jake closed his eyes, waiting to die. Chemda sobbed in the darkness of his mind. He could hear the man giving orders. Yes, that’s it, kill them now. The world devolved to a still, silent point in the singularity of his life: here at the end of his life, he thought of his sister, and laughter, and his mother, and sadness, and Chemda, and Mama Brand Instant Rice Noodles gently rotting in the sun.