He gazed at the long-tailed boats. The sun of an idea dazzled on the Mekong’s dark ripples.
“Chemda. Stop!”
She was three meters in front of him, hurrying along. She turned.
He snapped, “How about the river? Doesn’t it go to Thailand? Eventually?”
Her face darkened — and then it brightened, a fraction.
“It does… Ah, yes, yes, it does!”
“So we get a boat. Right away. Hire one. Anything!”
The two of them hurried onto the wooden jetty. A few more boatmen were gathered at the very end, in the shade of a palm-roofed shelter, playing dice, some bare-chested, some barefoot, some laughing. Chemda walked straight up and talked urgently with one of the men, in Khmer, or Lao, in some language — yet another language Jake did not understand. His sense of isolation intensified. He was so foreign here; indeed, he was beyond foreign, he was like a different species. Chemda seemed excited, as well as frightened: she turned and interpreted.
“This man, Pang”—she indicated the wiriest of the boatmen—“he knows Agnès. And he knows a place, a day upriver. He can take us past Pak Beng. It’s wilderness up there. After that we can just walk into Thailand. Then, at last, we are out of Laos. Then we fly to PP from Chiang Rai.”
Jake glanced at Pang. He was an old Laotian man dressed in faded denim shorts and a Manchester United shirt. He was the pilot of this small, narrow riverboat, a pirogue. He smiled. He seemed trustworthy. Jake wondered at his own fatuous speculations. What choice did they have, anyhow? The police might be searching the gardens this minute. Then they would hunt along the riverbank.
Bags were flung, and thumped. Chemda hurried down the wooden ladder and into the wobbling boat. Pang was silent. Everyone was quite silent. No one spoke about the smoke babies, the well-done babies, the ghost children, hanging from the rafters. White-eyed. Jake couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Who had hung them there? Who was doing all this, trying to frighten them away?
The mighty river beckoned, implacable and unanswering. Swiftly he climbed into the boat, following Chemda aboard. Pang was already at the engine. Then Pang yanked the outboard into life and they pushed out from the shore, against the slowly surging waters, constantly fleeing their own tail plume of muddy water.
The staggered white stupas and golden wats of Luang, framed by the banana-tree green of Mount Phousi, receded at last. Jake watched the city of incense disappear behind them. He was very glad to leave, yet he knew he wasn’t really escaping. How could you escape your own memories? New memories or old, they stayed with you, forever.
The Mekong was apathetically vast. Broad and slow and wide. For the first few miles they had the unsettling company of tourist boats drifting lazily downstream, full of Western and Chinese tourists in ungainly shorts waving at them like kids; Jake cursed them and wished them away. Sometimes speedboats accelerated past, rocking them with backwash, trailing gauzy isadoras of blue diesel exhaust and making Jake think they were going to be surrounded and arrested.
But within an hour they were virtually alone. And the loneliness was possibly worse than the traffic. They were scarily alone, deep in the jungled upper reaches of the Lao Mekong.
Bamboo reeds bent in the breeze, silent red petals fell on milky-brown water. River birds flew overhead. Wild lychees, black herons, silence.
Occasionally they passed a little tribal village, lost in the jungle, where naked, dirty children ran down to the shoreline brandishing small, crude carved wooden dolls, desperately shouting, almost hysterical.
“Souvenirs,” said Chemda. “Sometimes tourist boats get this far, and they buy crafts from the villages. Otherwise these people live on nothing. Fruit from the forest. Monkey meat. Ah. Desperate conditions.”
In another village an old tribeswoman was sitting on a log, her withered breasts quite bare: the woman looked and smiled, and Jake felt the electricity of shock. Her mouth was full of blood. She was smiling and her mouth was full of blood. Then he realized: she was chewing betel nuts. The woman smiled her lurid scarlet smile.
The boat slid from one empty shore to another, avoiding mud slopes and rapids, ducking under bamboo overhangs. Water snakes slid beneath the boat, sinister sine waves of yellow. At one point they turned a grandiose bend in the river and Jake saw a huge cave: in its dark recesses glittered a hundred or a thousand little smirking Buddhas, gold and silver statues sitting on rocks and sand. There were boats tethered here. Pilgrims?
“Sacred caves,” said Chemda.
The sun was wearyingly hot, an enemy, ogling them. Jake felt increasingly ill at ease, once again. Were they being followed? Every so often he looked back, but the torpid waters stretched to a horizon framed by banana trees and bending palms and nothing else.
Pang the boatman was silent as the river. He was old, yet tough and wiry: one of those East Asians who looked like he could never die. Smoked by age and sun. Kippered. He smiled sometimes, but said nothing.
Chemda had, it seemed, fully recovered her wits. She wanted to talk. She was trying to explain Khmer culture to Jake, its superstitions and legends.
“Some people believe there is a particular darkness in the Khmer.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s difficult to explain it concisely. But here is an example: kum.”
“OK.”
“Kum is the desire to take revenge, a typically Khmer desire to do down your enemy. Ah. To crush him, over many years.”
“Like a vendetta.”
“Yes, but also no. Vendetta is just eye for an eye, isn’t it, you kill mine and I kill yours; kum is even more deadly — but no, deadly isn’t right.” She stared at the riverbank, where an egret sat on a branch. “Kum is more… satanic. Kum means the desire to take, ah, disproportionate revenge.”
“How?”
“Brutally. If someone hurts you, he becomes an enemy, a soek, and you must take revenge, sangsoek. But the principle of kum means you must hurt him ten times over in return. If someone rapes your sister, you must kill his sister and his brother and kill his father and his mother. Kill everyone.”
Jake sensed the proximity of personal grief. He was quiet. Then she continued, her noble profile framed by the troubling green jungle and the painful blue sky:
“The legend is that the Khmers adopted Buddhism, the most peaceful of religions, because it put a restraint on kum. And that”—she leaned out of the boat and trailed delicate fingers in the water—“that is why communism was so particularly vicious in Cambodia.”
“Explain?”
“The Khmer Rouge took away the constraints of Buddhism. They burned down the temples, tortured and slaughtered the monks. They tried to murder God. And the result…” She shrugged, and winced. “Was the killing fields. The nihilistic brutality of the killing fields. Because if you take away the Khmers’ religion, we are just left with kum—plus tyranny.”
Chemda withdrew her hand from the river abruptly, as if she feared it might be bitten. “And then again, sometimes I think that maybe we are still a cursed people.” She gazed into the mirroring waters. “Ah. Lacking something, lacking humanity. Maybe we are still the Black Khmer. Steeped in blood.”
The boat was slowing. Jake turned: they were approaching a larger village, with a pier and stores and one or two fishing skiffs, a place where village children played in clothes, rather than shrieking and naked.