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 Cambodians 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?’
‘The Cambodian people. The UN. Many western governments.’
‘Not all western governments?’
‘The Americans supported the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s, so they are more ambivalent.’
‘OK.’
Her slight smile was pitying.
‘Yes, a fine irony. The Americans thought the Khmer Rouge could be a buttress against Vietnamese communism. But now many Americans do want the past to be examined, ah, especially the Khmer Diaspora.’
‘People like you?’
‘People like me. Cambodians like me are coming back. And we want the truth.’
The car slowed.
Ahead of them, Jake could see real streetlights. It was a town. With shops, or at least garages open to the road: selling garish packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talktime, and lao-lao rice whisky. Faces stared at Jake as they passed, faces blank yet inquiring, impassively curious, faintly Mongolian. Men wrapped in anoraks pointed and shook their heads, two of them scowled. There weren’t many westerners up here on the chilly plain, this was not Vang Vieng, it was like another and very different world.
They sped on into the darkening countryside once more.
‘The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.’
Jake was glad to get to the centre of the issue.
‘So what did happen here?’
‘We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot made an order. That’s the famous Khmer Rouge leader -’
Jake bridled.
‘I have heard of Pol Pot, Chemda. He was a famous weather presenter, on morning TV?’
For the first time since he had met her this morning, she laughed, sincerely; her serious face was transformed, delicate white teeth revealed, eyes wide and smiling.
‘OK. Sorry. OK. My professor at UCLA once said I was “a tad didactic”. Am I being…’ her brown eyes met his, ‘a tad didactic?’
‘Well. Yes. A bit.’
A silence. The driver buzzed down a window and spat. The inrushing cold was piercing and stark. Jake shuddered, wishing he had brought a proper coat. All he had was a raincoat packed in his rucksack. No one had told him he would need to keep warm.
Conversation might keep him warm.
‘So, Chemda.’
She was staring at the darkness: the bombed and lethal plain. She turned.
‘Sorry. I was thinking. But let me finish the story. We know that in ‘76 the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao, and the Maoist Chinese, they all sent a team here, to the, ah, Plain of Jars. A team of historians, academics, experts who knew something about the remains, the Neolithic ruins. Then they made people search the whole area, despite all the lethal UXO.’
‘Unexploded ordnance.’
‘Yes. Hundreds died. The KR didn’t give a damn… nor the Chinese. They were looking for something. We don’t know exactly what. In the scale of things,’ her eyes sought Jake’s and found them. ‘In the scale of things it is a pretty minor atrocity. Just a few hundred killed, a thousand injured. What’s that compared to two million dead?’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s a puzzle, and it was cold blooded murder. And Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and Ta Mok the Butcher, all the Khmer Rouge leadership, they were, ah, obsessed with this project, likewise the Chinese. They had no money but they spent lots on this, in the summer of ‘76. Searching the plain. Searching for what?’
‘And these historians?’
‘Most of the academics were later purged by Pol Pot. Murdered at Cheung Ek. The killing fields, of course. But two survived. I tracked them down. We asked them to come with us, to show us where they searched, all this is part of the UN’s work… To, ah, dig up the truth. But these guys – they were very unwilling.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘They were ordered to help us, by the Cambodian government. They had no choice. But they don’t have to say anything, we can’t force the truth from their mouths. Can we? Now one is in hospital, and there is one left. Doctor Samnang. Not happy. Sometimes I wonder…’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if I am doing the right thing, in forcing these old men to rake over the past. But, it is my job.’ The steeliness had returned to her soft Khmer vowels; her English was only slightly accented. She turned to face him, square on: and she stared him out.