Fittingly, this speech was concluded by silence. But Jake had to break it, he had to say something.
“Mr. Sovirom, I want to thank you for saving us, in Laos. The airplane, the soldiers.”
The patriarch smiled, distantly. “It is nothing.”
“But I also have questions.”
“Yes, yes. Of course. I am aware what has happened. In Ponsavan. In Luang. You must be confused. Please accept my profound apologies for this.”
“OK….”
“Happily, I can explain everything. If you will permit.”
“Please?”
The grandfather spoke quietly. But with firmness.
“My daughter, Madame Tek, is a shrewd and educated woman — like her daughter in turn. But, Jacob, they profoundly disagree. Madame Tek believes that Chemda’s determination to dig up Cambodia’s tragic past is, shall we say, not ideal. She thinks the bones of the killing fields should be left to molder. Why open the coffins, why break the tombs? Why dance around with our skulls, like Mexicans after too much tequila?”
“I… don’t know.”
“Well, there is one answer. My willful granddaughter would say, with her American education, that we cannot ‘move on’ as a country until we have confronted the past. And it is not an argument without merit. Perhaps we should stare at the head of the naga, the snake, Kali. I myself have truly difficult memories of the Khmer Rouge regime. Maybe I have not dealt with these memories.”
Jake felt a need to be bold.
“You mean your wife? We know something terrible happened to her.”
The elegant old man continued.
“Yes, indeed. We don’t know precisely what happened to her. Or why it happened. We do know they did some experiment, on her body and her mind. Perhaps akin to brainwashing.”
“Your wife volunteered for this, uh… experiment. That’s what we heard.”
Grandfather Sen looked at the concentric circles of sand.
“This is apparently the case. And it is quite plausible. You see, my wife believed in that absurd regime, she was a true cadre. She supported the Khmer Rouge.”
“Why?”
“You must understand, at the time many people believed in the new regime. Because they wanted to believe. The Americans were bombing us. The country was in uproar. The king was on all sides at once. The Vietnamese were abusing us. The fascist, Lon Nol, was in power. Brutal and gangsterly, a son of a bitch, as they say. The Americans’ very own son of a bitch.”
“Therefore?”
“The Khmer Rouge seemed like a salvation. They were unsullied, pure. Incorruptible. Of course, we heard reports from those places in the country where they had already seized power, reports of killing. Horrible killing. But these reports came from the CIA. When they said, ‘The Khmer Rouge will kill your mother and your father and your sister and your daughter,’ we did not believe the stories. My wife certainly did not believe them.” Sen gazed almost longingly at his garden. “And yet… in my heart, I believed the stories. I knew some of these Khmer Rouge leaders from Paris, at least by reputation. Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon. Brilliant scholars, every one — and also the most passionate of ideologues. From the beginning, I suspected they were capable of… extraordinary acts.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?”
“Take my family out of Cambodia?” Sen smiled a bitter smile. “I am Cambodian Chinese, but my wife, she was pure Khmer, dark Khmer, royal Khmer, daughter of a concubine in the court of King Monivong. She was not going to leave. Besides, as I say, she supported them, even as they burned the monks alive. Even as they manured the rice paddies with the ashes of the bourgeois.”
“Then they took her… to Laos.”
“She was a scientist. The government said they needed her. I watched her go. And then I heard that she had let them perform their strange brain surgeries, their experimental interventions, that she actively volunteered, or so we were told….”
“When did you find all this out?”
Sen was silent, regarding his rocks and tiny trees. The gray sands of the Zen garden shifted in a slender breeze off the river, whispering like something sleeping, but restive.
The old man spoke: “In 1980. After the Vietnamese invasion. I was living like a peasant near Battambang. Starving, like everyone. Starving but surviving. And finally she returned from Laos, from the Plain of Jars, and she was… a dribbling doll, a creole zombie.” His steady gaze became an anguished frown. “But we struggled on. There was so much pain in those years, this was merely an addition. And miraculously she had survived the mercies of Pol Pot and Ta Mok — survived their religion of holocaust and hatred, their god of smoke and ash. Yet it soon became apparent that whatever they did to her in Laos, and for whatever reason — it was irreversible.” Sen touched a single fingertip to his forehead, and closed his eyes.
“By that time, my daughter and her husband had already escaped to America, where they had baby Chemda. They were safe. The paradox is quite piquant: first America tried to kill us, then it saved us. Ah… America with her bipolar moods, so generous and so unhinged.”
“And you?”
“I remained here. I was proud. I am proud. I stayed silent. And I decided to send this emptied husk, this creature that was once my wife, back to Luang. I sent her to our good friends the Marconnets, to live out her remaining years beneath the shade of the papayas, in beautiful Luang Prabang, Xien Dong Xieng Thong, the city of the Golden Lord Buddha. You see, she always loved Luang: it was emotionally appropriate. And I told no one she had come back. We did not want her to be ridiculed, to be gawped at in Phnom Penh as the monkey woman, the smoke woman, one of the araks brai. My proud wife would not have wanted anyone to see her salivating. In a wheelchair. And we did not want anyone to know her shame: that she had volunteered herself for this terrible surgery, that she had selected herself to be turned into a living corpse.”
The wind had dropped. Silence was sovereign. Sen murmured, “But now you have the story. In toto. There it is.”
Jake felt the old man’s pain, it was searing, and still visible; and yet Sen seemed strong, despite it. A true survivor.
He thought of his own guilt and grief: the aching sadness that never entirely quit, the insidious remorse for something he didn’t do: hold on to his sister, protect his mother from despair. If Sovirom Sen could survive his far greater tragedies, Jake could surely endure his own. He recalled the phrase from the Khmer Rouge tribunals, the one Ty quoted: The only exit is survival.
But had they exited? And how had they survived so far? How had they survived Laos?
“But, Mr. Sovirom—”
“Sen. I am Sen.”
“Sen. Can you also explain what happened to us in Laos? Chemda and me? The professors?”
The patriarch smiled Jake’s way, and answered. “We suspect that Khmer Rouge loyalists, still active at the heart of the Phnom Penh government, are keen to derail Chemda’s investigation. They tried to obstruct the tribunals, but they failed. Now they are trying to suppress Chemda’s work on the Plain of Jars. They must have threatened the academics, who maybe slew themselves; surely they are working with the Pathet Lao, their old comrades, the Communists still in power in Vientiane.”