Chemda was silent; as silent as the Tonle Sap itself. Jake stared through the window at the reflection of a jaundiced moon in the sleepy waters.
“But it doesn’t make any sense. My own mother paid for the kun krak? I… so… she was trying to frighten us? How does it relate to Doctor Samnang? Ah. I don’t understand.”
Jake was bereft of an answer. He muttered some consoling words, meaningless sympathies. But Chemda was in no mood for sympathy; her next reaction was much more articulate, and brisk:
“Please come and see me tomorrow, at my house. I need support. I am going to confront her.”
“What?”
“This is too weird. So. Jake — I can’t live with this, knowing this, ah, I need to understand what is going on—”
“But what can I do?”
“Be my friend. Please, I need a friend. Just a friend. This is going to be hard.”
The words were alluring even as the idea was discomfiting.
Chemda sighed and explained further. She told him her grandfather was away, as ever, on business, she had no one else to turn to, and she wanted Jake’s support, his physical presence.
She said it twice: his physical presence. A man. By her side.
“Please. Will you come?”
The last words were murmured: sultry, dark, whispered.
He got the sense she was almost hypnotizing him, leading him somewhere. He thought of her sleeping on the boat out of Luang. Her naked legs. He thought of the apsaras he had once seen at Angkor Wat, the bare-breasted dancing girls of King Jayavarman. Dancing their endless nubile dances, wreathed in smiling inscrutability, twirling and alluring, teasing and divine. And always, in the end, unreachable.
Yet he was reaching.
“OK, Chem. I’ll be there.”
“Thank you, Jake. Ah. This means a lot. Thank you.”
With a sense of great apprehension, and also the insistent stirrings of desire, he shut down the phone and turned from the view of the dark and aged river. He tried to distract himself with research on his shining laptop.
He scoured the net, seeking information about the Plain of Jars, the burned bones. He researched the strange holes, the wounds in the crania. Jake looked at trepanations, he winced at medical images of opened braincases, he gaped at dissected human heads floating disembodied on the screen; he disturbed himself with stories of neurosurgery gone wrong: early lobotomy patients turned into drooling zombies, like Chemda’s grandmother.
This wasn’t helping. He turned off the computer and retreated to alcohol, hoping to lull his agitated soul to sleep with some Aussie wine. But his night was long and disturbed.
For some reason, he woke at three a. m. and he was sweating, heavily. Was he ill? He rubbed the sheet over his perspiring forehead. Drenched. Then he heard low voices outside his building. Why? Stepping to the window, he surveyed the humid nighttime streetscape. No one was there. Just the moon shadows of palms rustling in the breeze, and ranks of parked mopeds. A rowing boat was drifting down the Tonle Sap, with no one on board.
He went back to bed. Fought his way to a fretful sleep.
Early the next morning, he walked out onto a sunlit, empty, Sunday-ish Sisovath Boulevard and caught a tuk-tuk south along the corniche, deeply apprehensive.
The house of the Tek and Sovirom dynasties was auspiciously situated near the Imperial Gardens and the embassies, very much the superior end of town, where the Mekong braided with its sister rivers, the Brassac and the Tonle Sap, in a languorous troilism of the waters.
Whitewashed walls surrounded the Sovirom compound. He pressed the bell, said hello to a tiny camera, and the black electric gates swung smoothly ajar. He crossed a sunlit lawn of vivid green grass, and approached the impressive front door.
Behind it was a barefoot young maid, sweet, uniformed, humbly performing a wai, and also glancing anxiously at the ceiling. He soon realized the cause for her agitation. The house was filled with shouting.
Two women. It had to be Chemda and her mother. He could hear Chemda’s normally soft voice raised in real anger. Then an older woman snapping back. What were they saying? Even if Jake had understood Khmer he probably wouldn’t have understood the angry torrents of words.
The maid blushed, said nothing, looked left and right in confusion. Then she escorted Jake down a wide parquet-floored hallway to a large white sitting room. This house was big. The maid departed, and he was alone — alone with the voices screaming upstairs.
He didn’t know what to do — intervene? Surely not: this was domestic, this was family, this could get nasty. But could he not intervene? What if it got nastier? Bewildered and uncertain, Jake sat down on a modernist leather chair and gazed around the enormous room.
It was sunny and bright, and decorated with antiquities. A Garuda stood in a corner, a winged and beaked Hindu demon carved in red sandstone — like a mute and flayed opera singer. Next to the Garuda was the enormous stone head of a Naga, a Hindu snake deity, snarling at a large black Samsung TV. Behind the antiquities was a huge wall of window, then a garden of gray sand, small trees, and soft gray rocks.
The argument upstairs was getting worse. Jake stared at the garuda. Its stone mouth shouted back at him, soundlessly, like it was trying to ventriloquize the screaming upstairs. The demon’s stone wings were batlike, enormous. A flying djinn, poised in heraldic cruelty.
The shouting upstairs was undimmed.
Steeling himself, he stood up: he had to take action, step between these women. But as he walked to the door he was met by the door swinging open.
A man entered. A small Asian man, with a yellowish complexion, attired in a beige linen suit. Jake instantly recognized this man from the newspaper and TV as Sen, Sovirom Sen, the businessman, the banker, the friend of prime ministers, confidant of Sihanouk.
The patriarch.
Jake felt intense relief. Now someone else could intervene and solve the argument upstairs.
Grandfather Sen smiled and put a finger to his lips. Then he gestured at the ceiling and spoke.
“I always think cherchez la femme is a rather absurd expression, don’t you? Women are not exactly hard to find. They are so audible.”
Jake didn’t know what to say; Sen was shaking his hand warmly. Sincerely.
“Please. I am Chemda’s grandfather. And of course you are Jake Thurby. My granddaughter discourses on you, nightly.” A delicate hesitation. A smile. “Ah. Shall we step into the garden? Women are like the weather. Their moods are tropical depressions. We must simply wait for the rains to pass.”
Outside, and with the glass door shut behind them, the noise of Chemda and her mother was almost completely muffled. Sen led the way along a path to a kind of summerhouse, with wooden benches and silk crimson cushions, that looked out over the sands and posed rocks and the small, pale-green trees.
“Please, Mr. Thurby. Be seated.”
Jake sat down on the wooden bench. Sen smiled and regarded the exquisitely raked gray sand. Jake noticed the man was wearing beautiful shoes of fine-grained leather. Probably bespoke: handmade in London or Paris.
A pause.
Sovirom Sen leaned an inch toward Jake, and said, “This garden is… one of my greatest passions.”
Jake wasn’t sure how to reply. He attempted a sensible remark. “It’s beautiful. Japanese, right?”
“Of course. It is closely modeled on the famous withered gardens in the Zen temples of Kyoto. You have seen them, I imagine?”
“No, I’ve never been to Japan.”
“But you must, you must go! I visit Japan regularly, for my business. I adore the great Zen temples of Kyoto. Ryoanji. The Silver Pavilion. Nanzenji. Hence my garden here.” He raised a modest hand. “The essence of the Zen garden is abstraction. The more you take away — the more you have. And that is the true genius of Japanese culture, they see the beauty in nullity. Abstraction is perfection. The haiku is but a few parched syllables. Japanese cuisine is rawness and purity. And Japanese Zen Buddhism — that is the greatest of religions. Why? Because there is no god, no afterlife, no superstition, there is nothing.”