Authors: Tom Knox
‘They came here to examine the jars.’
‘Yes!’ Tou said. ‘Last year. See. Here. Look. Yeng say this is what they find. And this is what I tell Mister Samnang. He sad then, scared.’
He was pointing inside one of the nearest jars. The large, two metre high, very crudely carved vessels were made of some prickly stone, rough to the touch; Jake leaned over and stared into the foetid darkness of the jar indicated by Tou. His eyes adjusted.
Several human skulls stared back at him, sitting forlornly on the stone floor. Next to them lay a small pyre of burned bones, ribs or femurs, pelvic bones maybe: with the appearance of old, charred wood.
The skulls had holes in them. Like the skulls at Cheung Ek, smashed by the cudgels of the Khmer Rouge. But the holes here were at the front, smaller. And of course the skulls were much much older. Jake was no scientist, but he could tell these skulls were ancient – by the mouldering. Yet they were also preserved somehow. By lids, maybe? Some of the jars had until recently possessed lids – he had read that. The lids may only have been wrenched away, in the last few decades: by the Khmer Rouge, or by this mysterious American. Exposing the archaic remains within.
It was intriguing. But even so, these were just old bones and skulls. Why would the rediscovery of these bones provoke such emotion in Samnang,
and how did it cause his murder?
Chemda was obviously working the same mystery. She was peering into the jars, talking quickly with Tou, in English and French. Maybe Khmer. Jake couldn’t quite follow.
‘Many people have speculated,’ she said, coming over to Jake, a little breathless. ‘Speculated that the jars were urns, funeral urns, for a civilization we do not understand, but this is nothing amazing. I don’t see why the communists got so excited by this. Or Samnang. It merely proves an existing theory – Tou – Tou –’ She swivelled on the young man. He was smiling, shyly. Anxiously. In the silent countryside with the solitary waterbuffalo still gazing their way.
‘Tou, ask Yeng what the Khmer Rouge found, why they were so drawn to this site – more than others?’
Tou shrugged. ‘I already know: I ask him that. He heard the American talking, he know some English.’
‘So?’
‘Thousand year ago. Many people here, Khmer people, black Khmer. They have . . . much war, many killing, many war. And then . . . then they . . . suicide themselves, kill themself. And they put each other in the jar. Like tombs, hide themselves. Kill each other and burn the bone.’
Jake intervened.
‘How did they establish this? The Khmer Rouge? The American?’
Tou pouted his ignorance, then turned, and asked in Khmer a question of the Hmong man – who was now glancing anxiously at the horizon. The old man shrugged and muttered. Tou interpreted.
‘We not know. But he know the people in the jar were Khmer. And the hole in the head . . . the skulls. They were . . . in the story I think. There is the Khmer curse . . . The Black Khmer?’
Yeng interrupted, unprompted, gesturing, and very agitated. A frown of real fear on his face.
Jake turned.
Noises
.
The silent countryside was silent no more. The trees bent, the sun glared, the noises grew. The waterbuffalo was straining on his tether. Loud car noises were coming towards them. Jake strained to see: then he saw. Rolling over a hill, maybe five kilometres away. Big white 4 by 4s. Like the ones that had arrived in the hotel, dirty but new.
The police. Surely the police.
Tou said:
‘Now we run.’
The cold winds moaned and wailed right outside Annika’s cottage. The sound was distressing, like anguished mothers were wandering along the derelict lanes of Vayssieres, battering on the ancient doors, searching for their murdered children. Here in the very middle of the Cham des Bondons.
This was Julia’s first visit to the Cham since she had been dismissed by Ghislaine last week. She was glad to be with Annika again, with her friend. Yet she was also, as always, unsettled by the surroundings. She couldn’t understand why Annika lived
quite
so close to the stones. The Cham was wonderfully atmospheric, but why choose to live in the only habitable cottage, in an otherwise abandoned village?
It was just a little
too
eerie.
Annika was crossing the low ceilinged living room, bearing a tray, with a pot of tea.
‘A habit I collected in China. Green tea. Cha!’
Julia’s friend was originally from Antwerp: she was a demure, wise and graciously elegant sixty-two-year-old Belgian. So her mother tongue was Flemish – but her English was nearly as good as her French. Annika was also an archaeologist, although semi-retired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.
While her hostess decorously tipped the porcelain teapot, Julia stared around. Annika’s taste in décor consistently fascinated her: the drawings, the paintings, the elegant sketches, the wistful etchings of winter scenes, of skaters and frozen lakes. Maybe from Belgium, or Holland.
Annika stood, and returned to the kitchen, to fetch some cake.
Taking advantage of the moment, Julia looked further along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breugel-ish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet, and the ‘sorcerer’ of the Trois Freres. And there, on the far wall of the sitting room, a picture of the Hands of Gargas, from the Gargas cave in the mid Pyrenees: stencils of hands made on cave walls, by men, women and children: in the early Stone Age.
Sitting here in this weather-beaten cottage, aged thirty-three, Julia could still vividly recall the day she first saw the Hands of Gargas. In a way those hands were the reason she
was
here.
In her mind she relived the scene.
She was fifteen when it happened. As a special treat, as part of a long holiday in France, her mother and father had taken her to see the great ancient caves of the Dordogne and the Lot. Lascaux and Cougnac, Rouffignac and Pech Merle. With their famous and glowing cave-paintings.
There, confronted by these stunningly ancient tableaux – some painted 20,000 years ago, even 30,000 years ago – Julia had almost cried, ravished by their primeval yet timeless loveliness.
But that was only the beginning. After the Dordogne they had driven south, to the Pyrenees, to go and look at Gargas. And the Hands. And where Cougnac and Pech Merle had delighted, the Hands of Gargas had troubled her, and
truly
moved her.
They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a stone age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia, and placed their hands against the rockface, and blown the paint through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave – or so it was supposed by the experts – so the tiny infant hand could be stencilled alongside the adults’.
Why?
And why were so many of the hands disfigured? Julia had wondered this then even as she wondered it now. Why the disfigurement? Fingers were severed or bent in most of the Hands of Gargas. No one knew the reason. Since the discovery of the cave in the nineteenth century, many theor ies had been provided for these ‘mutilated’ hands – a hunting code, a disease, frostbite, a ritual and tribalistic disfigurement – yet none of them really fitted.
A great conundrum.
And so it was the Hands that had decided Julia’s fate. Standing in Gargas feeling giddy and awkward and flustered and adolescently attracted to the young French student who was their guide, Julia had resolved – there and then – to make these precious subterranean cloisters her world. At that moment she had resolved to study prehistory; and then to become an archaeologist.
To solve the puzzles.
At first her parents had been pleased by her impetuous decision: their precious daughter had a charming vocation! But when the teenage ideal evolved into twenty-something reality, things had changed. After her degree in Toronto she’d left for Europe, to do her PhD in London; and then the guilt really kicked in, the guilt of an only child leaving her family, and pursuing a career instead of giving them grandchildren. As if to compound her sense of error, her subsequent career had begun to disappoint, it had all tailed off into a mediocre teaching job at a mediocre London college.
Soon after that, and much as she loved her parents, the weekly transatlantic phone calls from her mother and father had become an unspoken ordeal, a silent yet insidious reproach: No I am not coming home, Yes I am still ‘just teaching’, No I haven’t got a fiancé, No there is no prospect of grandchildren. Goodbye Dad, goodbye Mum.
Goodbye.
Julia sighed and shook her head.
Annika set a plate of sweet cakes on the table – and spoke.
‘You must understand Ghislaine, he is a disappointed man. A very disappointed man, but determined too.’
Julia knew that Annika and Ghislaine went way back. They were the same age. They had been friends, apparently, for decades. Annika had worked under the ludicrous Ghislaine since the 1970s, across France, now in Lozère.
She leaned forward.
‘Annika, do you mind if I ask a personal question?’
The older woman shrugged, in a neutral way, and pulled her grey cashmere cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders. ‘Not at all. You have told me all of your life! Why not ask me about mine.’
‘Were you and Ghislaine . . . were you . . .’
‘Lovers. Yes.’
‘In Paris?’
‘1969. We shared political ideals. We were at the Sorbonne together. We learned Maoism together! We even went to China together in the early seventies. Hence, Julia, the tea.’ The late middle aged lady pursed her slightly over-lipsticked lips, to take a hot sip, then she set down the handle-less porcelain cup.
‘So?’
‘Do not blame him, Julia, for the way he acts and is. He has . . . beliefs, even now. Beliefs which brought him here. And me. There was a time we shared ideals as well as kisses, and we were both interested in the caves, in prehistory. Archaeology.’ The two women simultaneously looked at the wall pictures, the Hands of Gargas. Open and closed, fingerless and mutilated.
‘Of course we are no longer together now. We do not share kisses.’ The smile was brief and unmirthful. ‘But we are still friends, after a fashion. A la mode. I will not betray him. He is a sad man,
conflicted
. And he has his family name.’
Julia was frustrated, and bewildered.
‘Why won’t he take my find seriously?’
‘What makes you think he doesn’t take it seriously?’
The way he just dismissed me! Sacked me!’
Annika squinted at Julia, then she looked out of the window, where the wind was searching amongst the stones, lamenting its widowhood. ‘Perhaps he takes you very seriously. Therefore his reaction. He is conflicted, as I say.’
‘But what does
that
mean?’
‘I cannot explain. There are mysteries in Ghislaine’s past. But it is not for me to reveal, not for me to shine the lamp on the cavern wall. But do not think less of yourself. That is all.’
Annika was always a little evasive; self consciously mysteri ous in her thoughts. But this was a seriously new level of annoying coyness. Even though she liked and admired Annika, Julia couldn’t help thinking:
get over yourself.
She tried again:
‘What did he mean by “the collection in Prunier”.’
‘You can Google this yourself.’
‘I did. And I found out. Prunier is a tiny village, twenty kilometres away. North Lozère.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘So I
went there
, Annika.
And there’s nothing there.
I expected a collection of some sort. A small museum of archaeology, more skulls and skeletons, that kind of thing. But all I discovered was a boulangerie and a church. And some old lady who scowled at me. There is
nothing in Prunier
.’
Her Belgian friend smiled, distantly.
‘So you did not find. Do not worry. It probably will not help you anyway.’
Julia sighed and sipped Chinese tea; Annika added:
‘Consider it possible: some things are meant to be hidden.’
‘What the hell does
that
mean?’
‘The truth is hidden in the caves? But it has always been hidden there hasn’t it? And we still do not know quite what it is.’ The Flemish lady allowed herself another long, melancholy glance at a picture on the wall: at the beautiful twinned horses of Pech Merle, peculiar elegant horses cantering away from each other since the Ice Age. ‘I always think, even today: why did they paint so many animals and so few humans? Isn’t that strange, mmn, Julia? And when they do paint humans, they are so sad or forlorn, no? The poor boys of Addaura, the terrible hands of Gargas, the little stick man at Lascaux, with the slaughtered bison and his intestines, his chitterling, like so many andouillettes, pouring out of the stomach! There is some more green tea.’
Julia flinched at the image: the spilled intestines of the wounded bison, at Lascaux, one of the more horrifying tableaux of Ice Age art. Troubling, like the hands of Gargas. Why was Annika talking this way? This was ambiguity upon ambiguity. Adding irritation to frustration.
What should she do? Julia had more questions. And she felt she deserved straight answers. After all, Annika had invited
her
over, after Julia had mentioned her find, the skulls, the argument. So Julia had driven over through the autumn wind and cold, and now the older lady was being difficult and shrugging and mysterious and Gallic, even though she was Flemish Belgian.
‘Annika. You asked me over.
Can’t you tell me
? We’re
friends
. Tell me what is all this about? Why is Ghislaine so obstructive? If you can’t tell me anything then I don’t see what –’
The telephone rang. Annika rose and crossed her little living room. Phone in hand, she stood under a wallposter of the Cougnac paintings. Julia tuned out from the overheard dialogue, not wishing to intrude. It looked like Annika was having a slightly painful conversation: whispering, white faced, nodding tersely.
‘Oui . . . oui . . . bien sur. Merci.’
The phone receiver carefully replaced, the older woman came back to the coffee table, wrapping her cardigan even tighter – as if the wind was blowing down from the werewolf-haunted steppes of the Margeride and directly through the room. Picking up her cup Annika drank some tea and cursed:
‘
Merde
. The tea is cold.’ Then she looked at Julia. ‘That was the police. Ghislaine has been murdered.’