Authors: Tom Knox
An hour had passed since the firebombing. His phone was nearly juiced out. He’d called Ty, then the Embassy – which was shut. Now he had just enough battery left for a conversation with Chemda. And he didn’t have time for niceties. Just the brutal facts. The firebombing. Sen’s bizarre offer.
She heard his story in shocked silence; she stammered her sympathies about his apartment. But he interrupted her with a question.
‘Why did you tell me your grandfather was away?’
‘He was! He was away. But he came back early. The maid told him you were there . . . Jake, please . . .’
Her voice faded behind the noise of a tuk-tuk.
Jake was standing in the shuttered doorway of a pharmacy, near the great river. Sidling further into the hot and tropical shadows, away from the street noise, he pressed the phone closer to his ear, waiting for her explanation.
She spoke, again.
‘Maybe it
was
stupid, asking you to come to the house. I am sorry. I was nervous, scared. But believe me, please
believe
me, I am perhaps almost as disoriented as you. Can you understand that, Jake? Hn? My own mother is trying to frighten me with two dead babies,
kun krak
, the worst kind of magic; and now my grandfather, my beloved grandfather, the man I most respect in the world, he has tried to marry me off, like a chattel, like some concubine for Sihanouk.’
Another tuk-tuk passed, its two stroke engine rasping, in an ugly and primitive way.
‘Jake, I need to know. If you don’t trust me . . . I understand. But then you must leave me alone. I will manage.’
What to do? He pondered her words. But even as he steeled himself he could feel the lush emotions melting his resolve; he was wary of her, yet he also felt a powerful sense of mutuality: they
were
in this together. She knew his darker secrets; she was closer to him than Tyrone now. And besides, he also craved her friendship. Her warmth. That proud and royal smile. He couldn’t deny it.
‘Meet me.’
She whispered her reply: ‘Where?’
‘You tell me Chem. Somewhere discreet.’
Her silence spoke of her thoughts; then she answered.
A temple. Near the central market. One hour.
He agreed and closed the call.
Jake stepped out of the shadows. The city stared at him, blankly. A moto hooted, seeking business. Sensing his ex posure he slipped down a sideroad, then doubled back down an old alley, paved with rotting banana leaves. The alley led to the rear of his block. The fires must have been doused, there was no smoke. He could see hoses, and a couple of firemen at the corner, in wet and yellow overalls, smoking cigarettes.
A back door gave onto his stairwell. He walked to the grey metal lockers: he was lucky, the fire hadn’t made it to the ground floor. Jake twisted his little key and swiftly grabbed his stuff: his spare passport, some money, a few cards, a digital camera. He kept it all here so he could jump on a plane with a few minutes’ warning: imagining himself as the dashing foreign correspondent. He had never imagined this stash would be so useful:
after an attempt on his life.
Cards and passport zipped in his small rucksack, he hurried to the temple. It took twelve anxious minutes. Chemda was waiting in the courtyard. Her face was beautiful and it was dark and her skirt was very blue. He felt a sudden and unwarranted need to kiss her. Maybe this was the surge of life-force, so close to death.
‘Jake, we have to hide.’
‘Where?’
Chemda reached out and touched his hand. Like a nervous bride in church, meekly seeking reassurance from her groom.
‘I know a place, my grandfather owns a block of apartments. One of them is empty, it’s just come up for sale. Jake, I have a key –
and he doesn’t know.
’
He shook off her hand, gazed around.
A young novice monk in his orange-saffron robes was sitting on the steps, vaguely looking their way, lazily swatting flies from his face. His expression was sleepy; it was so hot. The smell of incense, and rotting fruit, spiced the air.
Chemda had chosen this place because it was supposedly discreet, but the ambience was unnerving: blue smoke and hot sun and intense dark shade from the overhanging eaves of the temple. And a languid, skinhead monk, observing them.
Still shaken by the attempt on his life, Jake didn’t know if he could trust his own feelings. He swallowed the bitter dryness of anxiety.
Two men wandered through the ornate wooden gate and nodded at the monk, then made a ponderous bow, a
samphae
, at a gilded and gaudy shrine. The men were clean-cut, prosper ous, thirty-ish. Businessmen? In a temple? Jake watched them leave again, his eyes followed them suspiciously, ensuring sure they were really gone.
Chemda came close, and repeated herself; still meek, but also insistent:
‘Jake, the people I most trust in the world, my family, have left me bewildered, scared, worse. Literally the only person I still trust in Phnom Penh is
you.
Ah.
Only you.
Most of my friends are in America, my mother is compromised, the people at the UN do not understand, they are not Khmer.’
She was barely blinking. ‘But you are different. You come from outside and yet you became my friend, you are unsul-lied. I
trust you.
But if that is not reciprocated, which I understand, ah, then maybe we should never meet again.’
Her words were lyrical, overwrought, but evidently heart-felt. She was standing close to him to meet his gaze, standing so close her perfume was discernible. Her face was flushed with urgency; she was looking up at him, feminine and defiant and proud all at once.
Jake believed her, yet he still didn’t quite believe she was telling him everything. Was there something else? Was she dancing around him, dazzling him? The
apsara
of Jayavarman?
Yet he wanted her: that slenderness. More than he wanted to leave the country, more than he wanted to save himself, he wanted to kiss her. Jake thought of her sleeping that day on the pirogue, sailing from Luang; the way her delicate head rested on a folded sarong, with the smear of grey rivermud on her bare legs; he saw the red petals of flame trees falling on the muddy Mekong.
He was being seduced, even if she didn’t mean to do it, she was seducing him. Yet this was not right: his life was at stake, he had to stay lucid.
‘Who tried to kill me?’
She shrugged, almost tersely.
‘It is obviously the Khmer Rouge loyalists. In government. Revenge on my family, on all of us.
Kumnun
.’
‘Not the Laotians?’
‘Hn. Would they be this direct and uncaring of the con sequences? No, this is local and powerful people. Ah. Very powerful.’ She looked left and right; a Buddha statue squatted in the corner, grinning the perpetual smirk of
nibbana
. ‘This degree of violence, it sometimes happens in Phnom Penh, gangsters maybe. But this is also aimed at you, a foreigner, therefore it must surely be political: that means we must have uncovered something in Laos, something very serious.’
She reached out a soft hand once again and took his fingers in hers, interlacing them, like the waters of the Mekong and the Brassac. Her voice was soft and clear.
‘You must be very frightened. You could so easily have been killed. If you want to fly back to England no one could blame you – I wouldn’t blame you – you mustn’t stay here for me, my insanity is mine. I will deal with it.’
Again he shook off her hand, but this time with a certain reluctance. Instead he grasped her by both wrists and spoke to her upturned face. His masculinity was affronted by her words. Frightened?
‘I’m not running away, Chemda. I’m not. I came to Cambodia to
do something.
If I let them scare me off I have done nothing, proved nothing. Where am I going to go, anyhow? Back to England, for what? Somewhere else? Another war-torn country? What’s the difference? This is my job, my home – I want to stay – I’m not
frightened.
But –’
He dropped her wrists, still stymied. What could he say? What
should
he say?
Dumb with frustration, Jake walked a few paces, further into the shade. He was staring through an open door at a side temple. Statues sat on a dais at the end, statues of deities, gods, demons, whatever. It was all so alien, exotic, confusing.
Jake didn’t truly understand Buddhism, Hinduism – or how they mixed or differed. He had tried, and tried hard, but some essence always seemed to elude him. Even here, even now, he was befuddled: he’d thought this was a Buddhist temple, Indochinese, but this shrine seemed more purely Indian. The statues were garishly painted, like plaster gnomes, they had red lips, yellow teeth, turquoise eyes; a blue woman with many arms and yellow swords danced her frozen dance of death, with her necklace of severed heads. Was that Kali?
Someone had made offerings to the shrine, tiny poignant offerings had been placed on the steps: a ripe nectarine, two broken cigarettes, some sticky rice on a plastic plate; the ball of rice seethed with black flies.
She came up behind him.
‘We can hide in this apartment. No one will know we’re there, my grandfather never goes there.’ He remained silent. She repeated. ‘Please Jake. This is it. I am going to go now. If you don’t want to come with me, I understand but . . . for me the time is now. Goodbye.’
Kali waved her many swords, in her blue eternal dance. He resolved.
‘We got out of Laos – we can get out of this.
Come on.’
She looked at him briefly, and he thought he saw a flash of shy delight in her eyes – but then her regal composure returned.
They ran to the entrance, and stepped over the wooden threshold. It was hot outside, lazily hot: Sunday in Phnom Penh, a few motos jeering, cyclos jangling. Jake felt seriously exposed. He was standing in the sun where anyone might see him; someone could shoot him, snatch him, anything.
A tuk-tuk.
‘Here.’
They grabbed it. Chemda said some quick words in Khmer. The driver nodded – indeed he almost saluted. The journey was swift; instructed by Chemda, the driver took backroutes and darkened shortcuts: they sped down long squalid alleys where dogs ran out to snap and bark, they rattled past a row of tenements entirely shattered and burned, still empty, forty years later,
still empty
. Then they briefly turned onto a boulevard with adverts for Delon cigarettes, and big Hyundai showrooms, and Jake shrank into himself, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible; at last they reached the quietness and greenery of the suburbs.
An old wooden house, some gardens, a shady road with frangipani trees? Jake vaguely recognized the district.
‘Down here.’
It was a modern block of flats. White, clean, quiet, and concealed at the end of a side road.
Chemda paid the driver. She looked at Jake as he stepped from the tuk-tuk. The little rucksack slung over his shoulder.
‘That’s all you have?’
‘It was in the stairwell of my flat, my second passport, coupla cards. Everything else is gone. Everything.’
‘Well I have money. Ah. We can buy some clothes and things tomorrow. We need to get inside.’
The apartment was on the first floor. Sterile but comfortable, antiseptic, air conditioned, sparely furnished, two bedrooms.
A pied a terre
. An investment opportunity, waiting for some Cambodian expatriate to show his confidence, at last, in the local property market.
Jake sat on the expensive leather sofa and stared at an almost abstract photo of light and shade on the wall. Another temple.
Chemda sat in the wooden chair opposite him. She kicked off her sandals. Her light cotton, pale blue skirt was notably short. She stared his way. He felt an acute discomfort at their sudden intimacy. And again a tinge, much more than a tinge, of desire. He averted his gaze.
The silence was piercing. The room was oddly hot, despite the air con; like the closeness on the Mekong delta, before the wet season.
She rose, and walked across, and she stood right next to him.
‘If anyone is going to give me away,
it will be me.
’
Chemda took his hand. She took his hand and she put his hand inside her skirt, up inside, between her legs, she put his hand between her soft warm thighs.
He stood up and kissed her. Her dark eyes fluttered, yielding, feline, vivacious; her tongue, her lips, her hands were taking him, pulling him into the bedroom, she was a dancing and barefoot apsara, and he wanted to be seduced. He wanted to vanquish. He wanted, he just
wanted.
Dark raw sugar. She reminded him of dark, sweet, fierce unprocessed sugar. There was a harshness to her lovemaking, she sought him with a sly animality. They kissed and stripped, she pulled him closer, closer and harder. He kissed her bare breasts, kissed her again, he saw red petals on muddy water, he sensed the darkness, the commingling of the rivers, the Mekong and the Tonle Sap. He sensed topaz, lemongrass, her urgent heartbeat, and
prahok.
They made love twice, and slept for several hours. Then they snuck out to buy food and clothes, ate a twilit dinner, and afterwards fell asleep, once again.
When he woke the sun was diagonal at the windows and it was Monday morning and she was fellating him. He gazed down, as she sucked, at the veil of her dark hair flung over her head. Jake sighed, tightly gripping the cool cotton bedsheets. He felt himself concentrated into one tiny intense source of joy and disquiet, down there, she was sucking him, beautifully, frighteningly, carnivorously; she was voracious Kali, the eater of men, she was a disembodied face, hovering over him, submissive yet delicious, exquisitely devouring – yet this was wrong, something was wrong – there was a shadow on the window, that was it. He jerked upright –
Something was outside
. Chemda was naked, and kneeling, gazing down. She couldn’t see.
Jake could see. His blood thumped.
A man was standing there, at the window. Staring in.
Chemda gathered a sheet around herself, backing up the bed, calling out:
‘Jake, what is it?
What?’
The figure at the window shrank away as Jake walked across, and pressed his face to the glass.
He scanned. His eyes absorbed: a fire escape, metal walk-ways, stairs, the shadows of jackfruit trees. And
there –
a Khmer man, hiding in a corner, nervous yet staring out, a pleading expression on his face.
There was something deeply strange about him. He had a hat on, a red fleecy baseball cap. In this heat?
Jake wasn’t scared now: the man didn’t look frightening, just eerie and furtive. Flinging on some clothes and finding the back door of the flat took half a minute; Jake stepped out onto the shade and heat of the fire escape.
The Khmer man was still there, in grimy overalls, old shoes, that peculiar cap. As Jake approached, the man shrank further into the shadowed and dusty corner.
‘It’s OK,’ said Jake. ‘It’s OK.’
This was ludicrous, it was not OK. The man had been staring in at the window when they were having sex, a leering expression on his awkward face: he was a peeping Tom, he was deviant. But as Jake neared the trembling Khmer man, he began to feel pity, he couldn’t help it, this dishevelled figure was so weedy, so pitiable, like a street urchin unfed for a week.
Chemda had dressed and joined them on the hot shadowed walkway. The jackfruit trees kept the direct glare of the sun off the metal, but the ambient dry season heat smothered everyone, like a hot blanket, like an arbitrary punishment they all had to suffer.
She spoke in Khmer to the man. He mumbled incoherently: not even words. He pointed to his mouth and shook his head. She murmured,
‘I’ve no idea what he is . . . who he is. But maybe harmless.’
Again the man pointed to his mouth, and shook his head.
But Jake understood.
‘You can’t talk can you?
You’re mute
?’
The man nodded.
‘But,’ Jake continued, ‘you can understand English?’
He nodded again, this time vigorously. Then he reached in the pocket of his overalls and pulled out something. Jake flinched: but it was just a small notebook, and a stubby pencil. The man was writing in the pad. Awkwardly using his knee as support. The little scene exuded sadness.
A glance was swapped between Chemda and Jake. Her dark eyes were wide with mystification.
The man had finished his scribbling. He tore out the note and handed the paper over, Jake took it and read.
I am Ponlok the janitor. I am sorry I scared you.
The English was good. This was bizarre. He showed the note to Chemda and she asked:
‘How do you know such good English? Why can’t you talk?’
The man’s eyes moistened, for a second they seemed to fill with a memory of tears. Jake felt the pity again, the stifling, discomfiting pity.
Another note was rapidly scrawled.
Jake snatched it from the man’s hand.
I used to be a teacher. English teacher. At the lycee. Then the Khmer Rouge did there experiment on me.
‘What experiment?’ Jake said. ‘It left you speechless?’
The janitor, Ponlok, nodded – morosely. And then he slowly reached up to his cap, and pulled it off.
A hideous scar lurked beneath. But it wasn’t just a scar it was also a kind of concavity in the upper forehead. As if the skull had slightly caved in, as if a chunk of brain had been removed, then the skullbone had cratered – though the skin had grown over.
It was horrible, and it was pitiable. The damage was so bad the hair had refused to grow back, the livid pink scar was left naked in its strange hollow. No wonder the poor guy wore a cap.
The small Khmer man put the cap back on, and cast his eyes to the floor, like a child ashamed of bedwetting.
Jake swore, quietly. He was thinking of the skulls and the bones in the Plain of Jars. The skulls with holes in the same place. Jake remembered the old Cambodian prophecy:
only the deaf and the mute will survive.
The first intimations of a narrative glimmered in Jake’s mind.
Chemda had taken over the interrogation.
‘Why did the Khmer Rouge do this to you?’
I do not know. They took away my memory with some of my brain. And my talking.
‘When did they do this?’
In 1976.
‘Did you volunteer to have this done to you?’
I do not remember. I hope not. I know some people did.
‘Do you know where this happened?’
Yes. Near here. Let me show you.
Chemda said nothing, her expression spoke of confusion.
Another note:
I know who you are. Chemda.
‘What?’
Your grandfather gave me this job. When he built the apartment. He took pity on me.
Amidst the strangeness, Jake could understand that bit of the story. He’d never felt such pity. To have your brain opened up, to be turned into this shrinking, deformed, helpless leftover man? Like an experimental rat, with pieces of your mind thrown in the trash.
Grotesque.
That is why I came here this morning. To tell you.
Chemda gazed at the man.
‘Tell me what?’
The next note took a long time to write. Jake stood in the heat, trickles of sweat down his back. This man knew who they were, even this wretched specimen of a man had identified them. It was hopeless: everywhere, everyone was watching. The fucking jackfruit trees were watching them. It seemed there was no shade in the entire country.
Everywhere
was exposed to the heat and the danger.
The sweat ran down his back like those tickling claws of the scorpion, the tickle of fear on his spine. He wanted to get back inside the flat.
At last the note was handed over.
I saw you coming into the apartment yesterday, I watched you. I know who you are, Chemda Tek. Because you are famous and on UN and because you are granddaughter of Sovirom Sen. Everyone knows who you are. But I know more. I knew your grandmother. I saw them bring her to Tuol Sleng and then to S37. They didn’t do anything to her in Lao. They did it here. They brought her back and experimented on her. I can show you. I do remember some things.
Chemda insisted:
‘I want to see this place. Now.’
‘Wait –’ Jake put a restraining hand on her soft bare shoulder. She was in a midnight blue singlet. Her skin was dark and lovely. He could still remember her naked, crouched over him, the man staring through the window.
‘Can we trust him?’
Chemda shook her head, frustratedly; Jake whispered in her ear:
‘I know he has information, Chem, and I know I feel sorry for him, but look at him! And he might go straight to your grandfather. And he was standing at the window.’
Ponlok was waiting, like a lowly servant, a man used to being ordered around, used to revulsion and disdain. The Khmer Rouge had turned him into a serf.
Chemda replied, her voice hushed.
‘He was just coming to see us! Hn? He wasn’t doing anything. And whatever happened to this poor man,’ she gestured at Ponlok, ‘happened to my grandmother. He may be able to help, to tell us. I want to know more. This is our chance. And besides he’s seen us now, we have to do something. We need to win him over, make sure he doesn’t go to my grandfather.’
Jake shrugged and resiled. Chemda’s willpower was formidable, and if she wanted to know about her grandmother’s fate, he could hardly argue.
‘If you
want
I’ll go alone with him,’ said Chemda. ‘You can stay here.’
‘Are you kidding?’
A minute later they were climbing down the fire escape, following the small, slightly limping Khmer man, in his fleecy cap.
A hundred metres and two alleyways brought them to a slightly busier street. A spirit house stood on the corner, with offerings of dark fish sauce in little egg cups.
Jake waited, and listened. Chemda was explaining to Ponlok: why the janitor should keep this very quiet, that no one should know she and Jake were here, not even her grandfather. Even as he tuned in, Jake felt sure this plan was not going to work; it was too much of a risk: they couldn’t trust Ponlok. As soon as this immediate and ghastly task was done, they would have to leave, flee Phnom Penh entirely. Run away into the countryside.
But where could they go?
Jake stared down the leafy suburban road, looking west, away from the sun: thinking of escape routes, places they could hide. He stared, and a brush of horror made him jerk, like an icy hand had been suddenly pressed to the back of his neck.
He realized
where they were
. The hulking grimy concrete building at the end of the road was unmistakeable. So that’s why he had recognized the area.
Tuol Sleng.
They were right by Tuol Sleng, the notorious Khmer Rouge prison.
At the end of the road Jake could see a bus, decanting tourists. People doing the Holocaust Tour. Jake had done it himself, when he’d first arrived in PP. He’d seen the iron beds where people were flayed with electric cables; he’d seen the bleak and foetid concrete cells where women and children were raped with truncheons, or tied down screaming as their living organs were removed, in live dissections.
Tuol Sleng. The hill of the poison tree. S21.
Seventeen thousand went through Tuol Sleng alone. And twelve survived.
Just twelve survivors, out of
seventeen thousand
.
Another note from Ponlok. The janitor handed it to Jake.
No. It is not in Tuol Sleng. It is secret place. S37. Come?
He was guiding them away from the torture garden. Jake felt a brief frisson of relief: they were ducking away from the busyness and tourist police of Tuol Sleng.
But where
were
they going? Ponlok was heading down an alley, slippy with rotting fruit, and soggy bags of discarded noodles, and clinking Royal Ginseng beer-bottles. The alley culminated in a dead end: a patch of earth and rubble, and a shattered building, a small concrete shack, just another one of Phnom Penh’s ruins.
It was surrounded by bamboo stands and high grasses, it was almost overrun by the riotous tropical fertility of the Cambodian lowland. Just another ruin. But not just another ruin.
This was S37.
It was roofless, the size of a large one-car garage. A sinister iron bedframe stood in the middle, rusting away.
Two metal cupboards sat next to it, the drawers flung open and empty. Only an ancient, grimy, very broken syringe, lying on the floor, showed that this place might once have had some medical significance.
Chemda spoke:
‘This is where they did the experiments?’
Yes.
The man was trembling again, glancing at Chemda, looking at her bare legs. Jake wished, suddenly, that she had worn jeans, not the short blue skirt.
Your grandmother was brought here. I know. Then they cut open her head and she was changed. Forever. Like me. Like many members of your family.
Chemda stared at the note.
‘Other people? My family? Who else?’
The note fell from Chemda’s hand to the floor. She was visibly and entirely shocked, her mouth trembling. Jake went to touch her, she waved him away.
Jake turned to ask the janitor another question.
‘How do you know?’
But Ponlok wasn’t listening, he was staring at Chemda’s legs. He moved closer to Chemda, then stopped. He trembled, he quivered, riven with some internal conflict. At last he scribbled a note, and handed it to Jake.
You must go
‘What?’
They make me like this
This note was stained with spittle. Ponlok was actually drooling. Laboriously the janitor wrote another note, with a quivering hand.
The scrawl was so shaky it took Jake a few seconds to decipher the words.
At last he made sense of the spidery writing.
I cant help it
Too late, Jake realized the danger. Ponlok was already between him and Chemda, and Ponlok was moving fast. The janitor lunged at the girl. He grabbed her bare legs. She screamed. The wiry old man pushed her over, and down, and shoved his hand inside her skirt.
Jake grabbed the Khmer man by the arms, pulling him off, tearing at his dirty collar, pulling out fistfuls of the old man’s hair; but then Jake felt a flash of metal, deeply cutting his forehead.
A knife. Ponlok had produced a huge knife from somewhere, he’d swivelled and slashed, slicing Jake hard across the face.
The pain was momentarily blinding. Jake staggered, and gasped. The blood was gushing from his forehead; frantic and angry he wiped it away, and stared through the crimson pain.
Ponlok was on top of Chemda, her panties were half-torn and they were dangling from an ankle. The janitor was unzipping himself, but the other hand was holding the knife, pressing it tight against Chemda’s throat, so tight it was whitening the dark skin of her neck. Chemda’s eyes blazed in terror, staring at Jake.
Help me
Jake stood, frozen with exquisite indecision. One slash of that brutal knife could kill Chemda.
But the janitor was going to rape her. In front of him. On the grimy concrete floor of S37.