She was standing close to him to meet his gaze, standing so close her perfume was discernible. Her face was flushed with urgency; she was looking up at him, feminine and defiant and proud and bewildered all at once.
He was also bewildered. He half understood her, he half shared her feelings. Yet he still didn’t quite believe she was telling him everything. Was there something else?
Yet he also wanted her: that slenderness. More than he wanted to leave the country, more than he wanted to save himself, he wanted simply to kiss her. Now. He just did. Jake thought of her sleeping that day on the pirogue from Luang; the way her delicate head rested on a folded sarong, with the smear of gray river mud on her bare legs; he saw the red petals of flame trees falling on the muddy Mekong.
He knew he was being seduced; even if she didn’t mean to do it, she was seducing him. Yet this was not right: his life was at stake, he had to stay lucid.
“Who tried to kill me?”
Her frown was impassioned.
“It is obviously the Khmer Rouge loyalists. It must be. The government. Revenge on my family, on all of us. Kumnun. Ah.”
“Not the Laotians?”
“Ah, no. Would they be this direct and uncaring of the consequences? No, this is local and powerful people. Very, very powerful.” She looked left and right; a Buddha statue squatted in the corner, grinning the perpetual smirk of nibbana. “This… degree of violence, it sometimes happens in Phnom Penh; gangsters, maybe. But this is also aimed at you, a foreigner, therefore it must surely be politicaclass="underline" that means we must have uncovered something in Laos, something very serious. You know this.”
She reached out a soft hand once again and took his fingers in hers, interlacing them, like the waters of the Mekong and the Brassac. Her voice was soft and clear and sad.
“You must be frightened. Of course. You could easily have been killed. If you want to fly back to England no one could blame you — I wouldn’t blame you — no, you mustn’t stay here for me, my insanity is mine. I’ll deal with it. I will.”
Again he shook off her hand, but this time with a certain reluctance. Instead he grasped her by both wrists and spoke to her upturned face. His masculinity was affronted by her words. Frightened?
“Chem, I’m not running away — it’s just — I came to Cambodia to do something. If I let them scare me off I have done nothing, proved nothing. Where am I going to go, anyhow? Back to England, for what? Somewhere else? Another war-torn country? What’s the difference? This is my job, my home — I want to stay — I’m not frightened. But—”
He dropped her wrists, still stymied. What could he say?
Dumb with frustration, Jake walked a few paces, farther into the shade. He was staring through an open door at a side temple. Statues sat on a dais at the end, statues of deities, gods, demons, whatever. It was all so alien, exotic, confusing.
He gazed.
Jake didn’t truly understand Buddhism, Hinduism — or how they mixed or differed. He had tried, and tried hard, but some essence always seemed to elude him. Even here, even now, he was befuddled: he’d thought this was a Buddhist temple, Indochinese, but this shrine seemed more purely Indian. The statues were garishly painted, like plaster gnomes, with red lips, yellow teeth, turquoise eyes; a blue woman with many arms and yellow swords danced her frozen dance of death, with her necklace of severed heads. Was that Kali?
Someone had made offerings to the shrine; tiny, poignant offerings had been placed on the steps — a ripe nectarine, two broken cigarettes, some sticky rice on a plastic plate; the ball of rice seethed with black flies.
She came up behind him.
“We can hide in this apartment? No one will know we’re there. My grandfather never goes there.” He remained silent. She repeated. “Please, Jake. This is it. I’m going to go now. If you don’t want to come with me, I understand, but… I have no more time. Goodbye….”
Kali waved her many swords, in her blue eternal dance. He made his resolve.
“We got out of Laos — we can get out of this. Come on.”
She looked at him briefly, and he thought he saw a flash of shy delight in her eyes — but then her royal determination returned.
They ran to the entrance and stepped over the wooden threshold. It was hot outside, lazily hot: Sunday in Phnom Penh, a few motos jeering, cyclos jangling. Jake felt seriously exposed. He was standing in the sun where anyone might see him; someone could shoot him, snatch him, anything.
A tuk-tuk.
“Here.”
They grabbed it. Chemda said some quick words in Khmer. The driver nodded — indeed, he almost saluted. The journey was swift: instructed by Chemda, the driver took back routes and darkened shortcuts; they sped down long, squalid lanes where dogs ran out to snap and bark, they rattled past a row of tenements entirely shattered and burned, still empty, forty years later, still empty. Then they briefly turned onto a boulevard with adverts for Delon cigarettes, and big Hyundai showrooms, and Jake shrank into himself, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. At last they reached the quietness and greenery of the suburbs.
An old wooden house, some gardens, a shady road with frangipani trees. Jake vaguely recognized the district.
“Down here.”
It was a modern apartment block. White, clean, quiet, and concealed at the end of a side road.
Chemda paid the driver. She looked at Jake as he stepped from the tuk-tuk, the little rucksack slung over his shoulder.
“That’s all you have?”
“It was in the stairwell of my building, my second passport, coupla cards. Everything else is gone. Everything.”
“Well, I have money. Ah. We can buy some clothes and things tomorrow. We need to get inside.”
The apartment was on the first floor. Sterile but comfortable, antiseptic, air-conditioned, sparely furnished, two bedrooms. A pied-à-terre. An investment opportunity, waiting for some Cambodian expatriate to show his confidence, at last, in the local property market.
Jake sat on the expensive leather sofa and stared at an almost abstract photo of light and shade on the wall. Another temple.
Chemda sat in the wooden chair opposite him. She kicked off her sandals. Her light cotton, pale blue skirt was notably short. She stared his way. He felt an acute discomfort at their sudden intimacy. And again a tinge, much more than a tinge, of desire. He averted his gaze.
The silence was piercing. The room was oddly hot, despite the AC; like the closeness on the Mekong delta before the wet season.
She rose, and walked across, and stood right next to him.
“If anyone is going to give me away, it will be me.”
Chemda took his hand. She put it inside her skirt, up inside, between her legs, between her soft, warm thighs.
He stood up and kissed her. Her dark eyes fluttered, yielding, feline, vivacious; her tongue, her lips, her hands were taking him, pulling him into the bedroom. She was a dancing and barefoot apsara, and he wanted to be seduced. He wanted to vanquish. He wanted, he just wanted.
Dark raw sugar. She reminded him of dark, sweet, fierce unprocessed sugar. There was a harshness to her lovemaking; she sought him with a sly animality. They kissed and stripped, she pulled him closer, closer and harder. He kissed her bare breasts, kissed her again, saw red petals on muddy water, sensed the darkness, the commingling of the rivers, the Mekong and the Tonle Sap. He sensed topaz, lemongrass, her urgent heartbeat, and prahok.