Bible of the Dead Page 2

  It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song river. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.

  The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.

  Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the digiscreen. No it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?

  Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own wilfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.

  He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure – to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy, and he’d realized he needed a job and so he’d remembered his childhood yen for art, and he’d squeezed into photography: begging for work in studios, laboriously teaching himself the craft, crawling back to a real kind of life.

  And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism – just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.

  But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.

  A young suntanned barefoot ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt, and clicked his camera, once again.

  The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behaviour. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.

  Every cool and river-misty morning dozens of minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tyre inner-tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the riverflow, and then these western teens and twentysomethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beershacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.

  By the time the innertubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.

  Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously third world experience – when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twentysomething who came here. Laos was remote but not that remote: thousands had this ‘unique experience’ every week of every month.

  But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed-up he’d have jumped in a tyre himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Han Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher Lager and crystal meth.

  But he wasn’t a kid any more. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough faffing around; and anyway, these days, when he took drugs, especially something mindwarping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms – it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.

  The light was nearly all gone.

  The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hilltribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.

  Ty was there. Tyrone J Gallagher. The American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.

  ‘Alright Jake?’ Ty smiled. ‘Got all your shots?’

  ‘Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Ty. ‘Sunset over the karst?’

  Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.

  Tyrone was leaning forward.

  ‘Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Chemda is here.’

  A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers – tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.

  The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.

  It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.

  His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.

  ‘Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?’

  ‘Well it’s Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.’

  Jake said nothing; Ty said:

  ‘So you remember her. Cute, right?’

  Jake shrugged.

  ‘Well, I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Yeah . . . rrrright.’

  ‘No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.’

  They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:

  ‘She’s at the hospital.’

  The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.

  ‘She’s OK?’

  ‘Yeah yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s with some Cambodian professors.’

  ‘Here in Laos?’ Jake was mystified. ‘I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.’

  ‘She was, sure.’ Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.

  Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professor
s, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.

  ‘Why the Plain of Jars?’ asked Jake.

  Tyrone finished his beer and explained.

  ‘Apparently during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there – seems the communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You know what the Plain of Jars is right?’

  Jake faltered a reply:

  ‘Big . . . old . . . stone . . . jars. Sitting in . . .’ He paused. ‘A plain?’

  They laughed. Tyrone continued:

  ‘Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Ponsavanh. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.’

  ‘But what’ve they got to do with . . .’

  ‘The Khmer Rouge? The KR?’ Ty smiled affably. ‘Ain’t got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the 70s, coercing these historians maybe – and Chemda is trying to find out why –’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The whole thing back in the 70s obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.’

  ‘But why the hospital? Why’s she here?’

  A tuk-tuk clattered past, two stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. ‘Kharb jai, dankeschon, kharb jai.’ Tyrone smiled at Jake:

  ‘The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal – all that fine American ordnance –’

  ‘That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.’

  Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted:

  ‘Didn’t the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam war, than on the whole of Germany – in the entire Second World War?’

  ‘Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined.’ Ty sighed, personably. ‘Anyhow, where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is, was all the way here to Vang. A long day’s drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pick-up –’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘She’s heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. She’s a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty.’ Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. ‘Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.’

  ‘Heading back to the Plain of Jars?’

  ‘Tomorrow, yeah. S’what she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if I’d like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didn’t care how intriguing it all is, I’m doing this coffee table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff – and anyhow I’d rather have drunken sex with a senior Ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.’

  Tyrone paused, and gazed at Jake’s pensive expression. He groaned.

  ‘Oh god. Colour me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, don’t you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!’

  Chapter 3

  ‘So what happened here, in the Plain of Jars?’

  Chemda stared across the cabin of the pick-up, at Jake. Her eyes were deep dark brown, like whisky aged in sherry casks; she had a slight nervousness about her, mixed with fierce determination. Intelligence and anxiety. She was maybe twenty-eight years old. He had only met her once or twice before: on the fringes of conversations, serious conversations, dark discussions about Cambodian corruption and peasant evictions and journalistic powerplays, on the roof terrace of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh, the terrace that gazed over the noisy tuk-tuk filled boulevards, and the wide and lazy Tonle Sap river.

  ‘You are a journalist? You do understand Cambodian politics?’

  Jake felt the pinch of sarcasm in her words.

  ‘Well, yes, I do. But . . .’

  ‘The Cambodian government is under intense pressure to . . .’ She sought the words. ‘Atone. To put the Khmer Rouge leadership on trial, to seek the truth of what happened in the 1970s. When so many died. As you know?’

  ‘Of course. Though – the genocide, I’m never sure how many died. I mean, I hear different opinions.’

  ‘A quarter of the population.’ Chemda’s firm but quiet voice, lilting, almost tender, made her revelation all the more sobering. ‘The Khmer Rouge killed, through starvation or extermination, a quarter of my people. Two million dead.’

  A chastening silence ensued. Jake stared out of the pick-up window. They were way up in the misty hills now, in central Laos, they had been driving for fifteen hours on the worst roads he had ever encountered: he understood why Tyrone had refused to make the journey, he understood why they had been obliged to leave before dawn if they wanted to do the journey in one day.

  The route on the map showed the distance was just a few hundred klicks, and theoretically this was the main road in Laos, but when the road wasn’t rudely potholed it was badly waterlogged or simply blocked; dogs and goats and chickens and cattle wandered on and off the asphalt, children played an inch from thundering trucks. Several times they had been obliged to halt by broken-down trucks, or by muddy washouts where they had to lay big flat stones under the helplessly whirring tyres.

  And now they were heading for the mountains, the Cordillera, and it was damp, even chilly: not the tropics Jake was used to, not Luang or Vang Vieng, let alone Phnom Penh. Fog wreathed the vines and banana trees, wedding veils of fog, kilometres of dismal gauze.

  Night was dimly falling, along with the saddening mists. Fifteen hours they had been driving. The car rattled over another pothole. The wounded Cambodian man had been left at Vang Vieng Hospital, where Jake had tracked down Chemda.

  When they had first met, late last night, she had appeared pleased by his eagerness to tell the story, to come along, she said she wanted the world to hear what the Khmer Rouge had done: that was her job, as the press officer-cum-lawyer for the UN Extraordinary Tribunal in Cambodia. And so far she had only got a couple of articles published, in minor Asian websites. Maybe Jake could do better; he had contacts. She was keen.

  But now she seemed displeased: by Jake’s relative ignorance of Cambodian politics. And Jake didn’t know what to do about this.

  Their silent Laotian driver swerved to avoid a water buffalo, which was belligerently munching ferns by the side of the alleged road. Jake gripped the window frame of the rocking pick-up. A soldier slept on top of a stationary car, as they drove past.

  Jake stared across the gearwell. He wanted to befriend this slightly daunting woman. Chemda, with her beautiful seriousness, her earnest loveliness. He was here to do a task, he wanted to be a proper photojournalist, that’s why he had agreed to do this. But for that he needed her friendship – and her candour. If only she would open up.

  He asked about her background. Her replies were polite, but terse. She was born in the chaos that came after the Khmer Rouge genocide, and her family had fled to California following the Vietnamese subjection of Cambodia in the 1980s. She was educated at UCLA, but she had returned to Cambodia, like many of her close relatives, to rebuild the country, to restart, reboot, rejoin. To reset an entire nation.

  Jake wanted to ask if all her family had escaped – survived the Khmer Rouge killings.

  But he dared not touch on this most difficult of subjects. He knew from sad experience that if you asked this of Cambodians you got, quite casually, the most harrowing of replies. ‘Oh no, my mother and father died, they killed my sister. Everyone died.’ Even worse was the answer: ‘I don’t know what happened to them. I am alone.’

  So Jake had stopped asking this question of most Cambo
dians after his first year in Phnom Penh: just looking around the city was information enough. There were hardly any old people. All the old people had been murdered.

  Whether that included Chemda’s wider family he didn’t know. It seemed she wasn’t going to tell him. He certainly wasn’t going to ask. Not yet. He got the sense of something – something bad. But every Cambodian had something bad and tragic in the past, something best not discussed.

  The driver turned on the headlights: a small wild animal’s eyes reflected in the glare, then shot off the road. It was almost freezing now, a freezing twilight in the high hills of Laos. Jake buzzed the window shut, to keep out the cold and the damp. Then he spoke:

  ‘This is it, isn’t it. The Plain of Jars.’

  They had topped out. The exhausted car rounded a final turn and stopped climbing – now they were very slightly descending, onto a plateau. They had reached the plain, after sixteen gruelling hours of solid, hard, bone-wrenching car-travel.

  It was an unnerving landscape. The villages scattered across the moonlit plateau seemed to be bereft of electricity. That much was obvious from the lack of lights. But it also seemed that many of these wooden tribal hamlets lacked heating and running water: because people were bathing themselves in gutters, or from parish pumps. And the villagers had also lit countless small fires outside their wooden shacks, presumably for heat and cooking. Didn’t they even have chimneys?

  Whatever the answer, it made for a frightening vision: a medieval depiction of Hell. The flat, darkling plateau was speckled with those thousands of tiny fires, flaring in the cold and mist. And everywhere, old women were crouched by the pumps, their ribbed and semi-naked old bodies garishly illuminated by the lurid scarlet flames.

  ‘Fifty kilometres,’ said Chemda, ‘to Ponsavanh. That’s where we are based.’

  As they neared the destination, Jake seized the moment; he needed more facts.

  ‘Who is pressuring the Cambodian government? To do this, to reckon with the past?’