The Lost Goddess

33

Twenty-four hours later and Jake still hadn’t heard anything. Her phone was, of course, switched off. He’d waited for hours in the hotel just hoping, but it was hopeless.

In desperation, feeling his sense of himself begin to dissolve, he had even tried calling Chemda’s mother and grandfather, risking everything — but all he got was the Sovirom maids, who answered his questions with impenetrable Khmer. He was lost; he was unmanned and enfeebled; he understood no one; and now he was sitting in a street-side bar in central Bangkok with Julia and Barnier.

Marcel Barnier’s breath smelled of whiskey. He always smelled of whiskey. He had apparently been drinking on the sois of Sukhumvit, nonstop, since the incident in Baccara, as he was too damn “motherfucking scared” to go home to the flat in case “the witch” came to kill him.

It was accepted by all that the witch, the killer, was not Chemda. Julia had been tearful and profound enough in her apologies on that score. But that didn’t answer any of the other questions. The questions that burned through Jake. Where was Chemda? Who’d taken her? The Laotians? Her family? The Khmer Rouge loyalists? Would they come for Jake? And if they did find Jake, would they bother with a kidnapping? Maybe they would just kill him, as they had so nearly done in Anlong Veng.

He remembered the smells and the senses of that moment: involuntarily praying in the dust by Pol Pot’s grave; staring at the incense sticks planted in the old noodle jar; smelling the rotting trash. Waiting to die, like a tethered goat. He knew that could happen again at any moment — but he couldn’t flee for his life.

Because of Chemda. He couldn’t leave Chemda to her fate. Not now, not ever. He had lost two women in his life. This third he would find again. He had to, or his life was smoke and ashes.

Jake turned and looked at his drinking companions. Julia — miserable and guilt-ridden and earnest. And Barnier, drunk and frightened and smirking. But at least they seemed relatively calm. Jake was far from calm. He was nervy. Jumpy. Twitching. He wanted to do something. Anything.

“Tell us? Why have you asked us here, Marcel?”

The Frenchman languorously swallowed another shot of Mekong whiskey.

“I want to know what you have discovered, I want to compare notes. Apparently Julia has a theory.”

“A theory?”

“What happened in Cambodia thirty years ago. Julia says she has worked out why. The theoretical basis.”

Jake switched his anxious gaze to the pale American woman.

“Yes,” she said, very quietly, as if speaking to herself. “Well… I believe I might have pieced together the intellectual idea that underpinned what happened in Cambodia in 1976.”

“So! Now is the time to tell!” Barnier grinned, quite vulgarly, maybe a little desperately. “Ideas, theories, discoveries, whatever. Confess! It might help us, and it might even help Chemda. No? Allez, les braves!”

Barnier lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke through his nose. Jake stared, in nervous depression, at the ecstatic neon glow of the nearest sushi bar, and then he shrugged at his own bleakness. He looked at his cell phone. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing piled on nothing.

They had nothing better to do, nothing else they could do. Why not discuss, why not do this?

He motioned at Julia.

“Go on?”

In five very dense minutes, she outlined her theory: but she did it in precise and deeply confusing scientific language. The words were long and slippery; Jake found them hard to follow. His thoughts persistently drifted to Chemda. Barnier had no such problems, he kept saying, “Yes, yes,” grinning self-consciously and exhaling cigarette smoke in clouds of triumphant approbation, like he was winning a game of poker. By bluffing.

“It’s a stunning thesis,” said Barnier when Julia had concluded. “It is surely right! This is surely what Ghislaine’s essay must also have affirmed. C’est magnifique! You are a true scientist, and a sleuth!”

Julia looked half anguished, half pleased. Jake was entirely confused.

“Can you guys explain it a bit slower, in more simple terms. Remember, I’m just a bloody photographer. A snapper.”

Julia offered a sympathetic smile. “Of course. Sorry. First you have to know a little bit about the evolution of the human mind.”

“OK.”

Patiently, and more slowly, she explained behavioral modernity: the accepted idea that men and women made a Great Leap Forward in their cognition and cultural development around forty thousand years ago. Jake nodded.

“So, cave art, music, religion and stuff, proper burials, and tool making, they all… this is the first time we see them?”

“Correct,” said Barnier. “Abstract mentation! Teamwork in hunting. Even humor is born. We see many, many signs that the human mind, the human spirit, quite suddenly changed during the Ice Ages.”

“Why did it change?”

Barnier puffed smoke at a passing tuk-tuk and answered: “Genetic mutation. Or change in the neural structures. Or both! No one is sure.”

“So… In which case. Go over it again? The entire thesis?”

Julia nodded, shyly, and answered: “It’s actually quite simple but, like I say, very relevant. In essence I believe that the birth of the art evidenced in the cave paintings shows the birth of guilt, and this guilt is the key to the modern human condition.”

“And…?”

“Around 40,000 B. C. it also seems that we, as a species, became truly aware of… of death. Hence the complex ritualization of burials. And a corollary of this is that we humans must surely have become aware that we were killing our fellow creatures, condemning them to death — and so we began to feel guilty over this slaughter. Guilt for… who we are.”

Jake looked again at his cell phone. Nothing. He glanced at the rumbling Bangkok traffic. The pink-and-yellow Toyotas reflected the streetlights, casting a subtle glow on Julia’s animated face.

“The intriguing nature of this theory,” she continued, “a theory that, as I say, I am sure Ghislaine Quoinelles first brought to birth, is that it neatly explains many puzzling aspects to the great Paleolithic cave art of France and Spain, and this art is, in itself, the strongest evidence we have for the Great Leap Forward.”

“Puzzling aspects?”

Julia answered:

“The obsession with animals. All the great caves are just filled with drawings and engravings and even sculptures of animals, galloping animals, herding animals, animals charging, animals copulating. Animals being speared to death. Various people have tried to explain these obsessive animal paintings as part of some ritual, to aid the hunt, to magically enable better hunting, but then why show so many animals — like horses or lions — that were rarely if ever hunted? Alternatively, why not just show hunts? Others have claimed the artworks are mere doodles, but then why are these paintings often so beautiful, so inaccessible, so treasured, so carefully hidden at the very ends of caves?”

Barnier interrupted: “This theory might appeal to an artist like yourself, Jake. Julia believes that the cave artists were, in a sense, returning to the scene of the crime! They were working through their own sudden guilt at seeing these animals suffer. A psychological reaction to trauma.”

Jake’s nodding smile was faint. The word trauma reminded him of Chemda. He glanced at his useless phone, then forced himself to focus on the argument:

“Sure. Er. That’s interesting. Sure. But this theory seems a bit fragile?”

“There is more,” Julia continued. “My theory — Ghislaine’s theory—this theory also explains why we see animals that were never hunted, why we see animals presented so reverently, and the reason is envy. The newly modern humans wanted to return to the Edenic state they once enjoyed, the guiltless freedom still enjoyed by the animals they killed. So they painted these animals as a form of worship, envious worship. This also explains several puzzling images of men with animal masks, like the Sorcier of the Trois Frères, which show men wanting to be animals once again. Men were now feeling exiled from their fellow creatures — and they looked back with regret.”

Jake frowned.

“OK.”

“Another puzzling aspect of the cave art is why there are so few representations of humans. I remember my friend Annika mentioning this. That was one of my first clues. I have now worked out the relevance.” Julia sighed. “All we have in the caves, in terms of human representation, are a few crude sketches. Most of them seem to be obscene caricatures, insulting, like the heavy-breasted women of Pech Merle, or the grinning imbecile of La Pasiega, or the ludicrous faces of Rouffignac. Why are these paintings so few, and so crude?” Julia barely paused; her question was rhetorical. “Mankind is not known for his lack of vanity and self-interest. For thousands of years we have painted and drawn and sketched ourselves and each other, yet back in 30,000 or 10,000 B. C., when there were truly great and skillful artists working, artists who could conjure an auroch or a lion with a few lines, like a Stone Age Matisse or Raphael, these artists refused to depict the beauty of men and women. They either ignored their own kind or obscenely insulted them, as if they despised themselves, despised mankind.”

Barnier, intent, and no longer smoking, interrupted once again: “There’s lots of other evidence, in addition. I am correct?”

“Yes.” Julia nodded, firmly. “For instance, when the few images of men don’t show cartoons or abusive doodles, they show men being tortured and speared: in the caves of Cougnac, there are the so called hommes blessés, the wounded men, men being speared to death. Or the tortured boys of Addaura. What despair made them record all this? Why all the horrible and existential self-loathing?”

“So,” said Jake. “Why?”

She gazed his way. “Now we come to Gargas. The famous Hands of Gargas. These hands have been a total mystery for a century. Some say they show frostbite in the Ice Age. But why would you go to the trouble of stenciling nasty wounds? Others say the hands must have belonged to a tribe with some kind of genetic malformation, but there is no skeletal evidence for this, and again, why stencil such embarrassing disfigurements? The latest theory is that the fingers are not mutilated or severed, they were bent over before being stenciled, and the hands show a hunting code — one finger closed means antelope, two for auroch—similar codes are utilized by some tribes today.”

Barnier came back, like they were working as a tag team:

“A particularly ludicrous theory. You only have to go to Gargas to see that. The hands are profoundly affecting. Intense. Hands of men and women and children. It’s not a few men making signals.”

“So, what—” Jake stared at Barnier, and then at Julia. “What do you think about Gargas?”

Julia answered: “The strange mute stencils of the hands express guilt and they seek redemption. The stencils say these human hands have sinned. These hands have killed. Forgive us. We can speculate that the fingers were, at first, mutilated deliberately as a kind of atonement, in a shamanic ritual. There is good evidence for this: some tribes did the same in very recent times, like the Tui-Tonga, or the Tahitians — they cut off knuckles and digits — as a form of human self-sacrifice, when the tribe needed to atone for sin, to propitiate some deity, or to mourn a noble death.”

A pause. Jake listened intently.

Julia added: “But after these initial amputations, in Gargas, probably the fingers were just bent over for ritual stenciling and the severed fingers became symbolic. But still the cavemen came into the cave to ritually stencil the hands, the hands that killed the noble animals. To express contrition, to seek redemption. To mourn the deaths they caused.”

Jake drank some of his Singha beer.

“All right. I’m beginning to understand… I think. But the skulls, the skulls and the bones, how do they fit in?”

Hunching forward, Barnier interruped: “Think about it, Jake, think. Here we have, in Julia’s magnificent thesis, the unique tragedy of la condition humaine. Encapsulated. Uniquely, it seems, we as a species have a sense of shame and guilt for just being human, for the sin of simply being ourselves. And all of this…” He smiled. “And yet all of this can be prevented with a few slices of the knife.”