Where had that image come from? His childhood. The stained-glass window, the blue robes of the Virgin. It was a visual echo of himself, as a little boy, with his mother in a Catholic church, holding her hand, staring up: there’s Saint Veronica, Jacob, and there’s Saint Francis, and that’s the blue of Saint Lucy, Saint Lucy blue.
Jake took another photo to mediate the sadness away. The spire of smoke became a wistful line, and then it was gone. All was blue, the blue of the sky and the blue of the reflecting paddies and the blue of the horizon, anxiously smudged with faint cloud.
No one spoke for many minutes as they made a lonely ascent through tiny hamlets and empty woodland. The return to the tranquillity of deep rural Laos was a small welcome death. They passed villages where girls threw tennis balls at young men, all of the men in suits, the girls in splendid dresses. The jeep sped on, urgent and noisy in the quiet of the woods.
“A mating ritual,” said Chemda. “They sing to each other and throw tennis balls at New Year. That way they can find husbands… and wives…. This damn phone.”
Chemda was again frustratedly checking her cell phone. But she shook her head. Agitated. Frightened. Determined. No signal. She leaned over and asked: “Tou! Where are we going? How can we get out of Laos? We need to find a way out!”
The lad turned.
“Yes, yes, big danger. But Yeng say he have friends. We go. But we drive long time, long time. Road dirty.”
Jake guessed immediately who these friends must be: Hmong fighters, tribal renegades, hiding out in the rugged hills. They were surely beyond government jurisdiction: this was surely rebel territory. He had been in just enough lawless regions to recognize the sensation: that liminal frisson as you passed into a no man’s land, the interzone, where the laws of the city no longer applied.
That’s where they were now. There were no police here. No civilian laws. Just endless thick forest and orchids and fungi and wild camellias astir in the sunny breeze; and in the distance, thin strings of waterfall tasseling in the wind as they dropped from the misty peaks of the high cordillera.
The journey was lengthy and anxious. Every so often they passed clearings in the forest where Hmong children, carrying wicker baskets full of freshly chopped hardwood, stopped dead and pointed, evidently stunned, astounded by what they saw in the jeep.
One boy gazed Jake’s way, his mouth hanging wide open, goggling and laughing. The child’s mother came behind, pushing a long-handled wooden wheelbarrow. She also paused and stared at Jake; her expression was so shocked it was beyond alarm, it was pure incomprehension: like she was seeing an extraterrestrial.
Tou laughed unhappily. “They never see a white man before. You like a god. Or demon.”
A cloud of gray dust showed a vehicle approaching, coming the other way. It was an army truck. Troops in khaki were hanging on the back. The fear was congealing. No one spoke in the jeep. What troops were these? But the soldiers just gazed vacantly at them, half curious, half bored. Tired, maybe. The apathetic gaze of conscripts across the world.
Nothing further happened. The army truck disappeared. The onward trail ran its ragged way through the hills, sidling around mountains, climbing higher, giddily high. The first hints of mist and cloud appeared, bashful centaurs and unicorns that fled as they approached.
The light was dwindling; night had conquered. How long had they been driving? Chemda was half-asleep, her head bobbing against the window of the jeep. Jake yearned to stop, to get out, to take a pee, to stop. But could they risk it? Maybe the police were just a few kilometers back. Maybe they were closing.
But they had to stop — so they stopped. For a second. In the middle of the dark jungle. Now it was truly night, and it was cold up here, in the hills. Jake walked a few yards into the dank and clammy darkness of the chattering forest, full of night sounds. Frogs croaking. A concerto of insects. Nocturnal howlings in the distance. He thought of the wildcats and strange jungle dogs he’d seen in Ponsavan market.
He relieved himself. Trying not to make the mental association: all the blood, the blood in the muzzles of the dead jungle dogs, the blood on the floor of the hotel room, the man with a gaping throat, hung by his ankles to bleed out like a kosher lamb. Probably Samnang was killed by the police. But why? And why so cruelly? Was it really to frighten them? Surely murder was frightening enough.
Jake shuddered. Sometimes, despite his convinced and angry atheism, he could sense death approaching, like a black god, a god he didn’t believe in, yet who still hated him. Your mother and your sister are mine. You’re next.
The moon was lonely overhead. Fireflies twinkled blue and green like shy and tiny ice stars in the undergrowth.
He walked back to the car. Chemda talked, nervously, as they drove on. She was speaking of ancient history: speculating about the remains they had found in the jars. Jake marveled that he had forgotten about them. In the midst of it all he had mislaid that image: the skulls kept in the jars. The sad old bones. Reproachful. You left us behind.
No. He got a grip on himself.
No.
Chemda was talking about the prophecies of the ancient Khmer.
“If the people in the jars, the people who made the jars, if they were Khmer… maybe they really were Black Khmer.”
“And they are?”
“The ancient Khmer: a cursed people. There are stories in the Khmer tradition of the earliest Khmer being a kind of terrible breed — no, that’s the wrong word — of making a terrible mistake. Losing God. Losing faith. Becoming violent. What is the prophecy? Tou mentioned it.”
The jeep’s headlights were struggling against the dark and the mist of the mountain forest. Chemda remembered the words:
“A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travelers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.”
Tou and Yeng were silent. Jake nodded. He didn’t believe in prophecies, he didn’t believe in legends, he didn’t believe — he certainly didn’t believe in any kind of god, because what kind of brutal god would allow all the terrors of the world? The Khmer Rouge? The death of children? His sister? But the skulls in the jar: they were certainly real; he had seen them, and the holes carved in their foreheads.
Why?
Chemda’s words echoed his thoughts.
“It is highly suggestive. What happened on the Plain of Jars two thousand years ago? To the Black Khmer? Maybe they did something terrible — to their gods — to each other. That is the prophecy. That, then, is why they would be cursed. Ah. It could explain the legends.”
“It’s like a kind of Noah legend, of a flood. God wiping out the people as revenge.”
“Yes,” said Chemda. “And also no. And, ah, I still don’t know why this so upset Doctor Samnang.”
Jake turned from her and looked out the viewless window. Out there it was cold and dark and chilling, like a sickening. The jungle was shivering.
Where were they going to sleep? Were they ever going to sleep? Devil-black darkness had descended on them, broken by the feeble beams of the headlights. They were churning mud now, the truck swaying. The fireflies twinkled. Above them shone the moon, bemused and still. The jungle yawned and sucked. The mud sucked them farther in. And at last Jake fell asleep.