And now they were heading for the mountains, the Annamese Cordillera, and it was damp, even chilly: not the tropics Jake was used to, not Luang or Vang Vieng, let alone Phnom Penh. Fog wreathed the vines and banana trees, wedding veils of fog, kilometers of dismal gauze.
Night was dimly falling, along with the saddening mists. The car rattled through another pothole. The wounded Cambodian man had been left at Vang Vieng Hospital, where Jake had tracked down Chemda.
When they had met, late last night, she had appeared pleased by his eagerness to tell the story, to come along. She said she wanted the world to hear what the Khmer Rouge had done: that was her job, as the press-officer-cum-lawyer for the UN Extraordinary Tribunal in Cambodia. And so far she had only got a couple of articles published, on minor Asian websites. Maybe Jake could do better; he had contacts. She was keen.
But now she seemed displeased by Jake’s relative ignorance of Cambodian politics. And Jake didn’t know what to do about this. He didn’t know how to act, because he sensed an unnerving disparity between them: he was older, yet she was the one doing the important work. Chemda was the one with the knowledge; the proper purpose; the real job. And her seriousness was visible, tangible, in the sharp young profile of her dark face, framed by the car window beyond.
Their silent Laotian driver swerved to avoid a water buffalo that was belligerently munching ferns by the side of the alleged road. Jake gripped at the frame of the rocking pickup. A soldier slept on top of a stationary car as they drove past.
Jake stared across the gear well. He wanted to befriend this slightly daunting woman, with her earnest loveliness, her irrelevant beauty. He was here to do a task; he desired to be a proper photojournalist, do a serious job like her. But for that he needed her friendship — and her candor. If only she would open up.
He asked about her background. Her replies were polite but terse. She was born in the chaos that came after the Khmer Rouge genocide, and her family had fled to California following the Vietnamese subjection of Cambodia in the 1980s. She was educated at UCLA, but she had returned to Cambodia, like many of her close relatives, to rebuild the country, to restart, reboot, rejoin. To reset an entire nation.
Jake wanted to ask if all her family had escaped — survived the Khmer Rouge killings.
But he dared not touch on this most difficult of subjects. He knew from sad experience that if you asked this of Cambodians you got, quite casually, the most harrowing of replies. “Oh no, my mother and father died, they killed my sister. Everyone died.” Even worse was the answer: “I don’t know what happened to them. I am alone.”
So Jake had stopped asking this question of most Cambodians after his first year in Phnom Penh: just looking around the city was information enough. There were hardly any old people. All the people who would have been old had been murdered.
Whether that included Chemda’s wider family, he didn’t know. It seemed she wasn’t going to tell him. He certainly wasn’t going to ask. Not yet. He got the sense of something — something bad. But every Cambodian had something bad and tragic in the past, something best not discussed.
The driver turned on the headlights: a small wild animal’s eyes reflected in the glare, then shot off the road. It was almost freezing now, a freezing twilight in the high hills. Jake buzzed the window shut to keep out the cold and the damp. Then he spoke:
“This is it, isn’t it? The Plain of Jars.”
They had topped out. The exhausted car rounded a final turn and stopped climbing — now they were very slightly descending onto a plateau. They had reached the plain, after sixteen grueling hours of solid, hard, bone-wrenching car travel.
It was an unnerving landscape. The villages scattered across the moonlit plateau seemed to be bereft of electricity. That much was obvious from the lack of lights. But it also seemed that many of these wooden tribal hamlets lacked heat and running water, because people were bathing themselves in gutters, or from parish pumps. And the villagers had also lit countless small fires outside their wooden shacks, presumably for heat and cooking. Didn’t they even have chimneys?
Whatever the answer, it made for a frightening vision: a medieval depiction of hell. The flat, darkling plateau was speckled with those thousands of tiny fires, flaring in the cold and mist. And everywhere, old women were crouched by the pumps, their ribbed and seminaked bodies garishly illuminated by the lurid scarlet flames.
“Fifty kilometers,” said Chemda, “to Phonsavan. That’s where we are based.”
As they neared the destination, Jake seized the moment; he needed more facts.
“Who is pressuring the Cambodian government? To do this, to reckon with the past?”
“The Cambodian people. The UN. Many Western governments.”
“Not all Western governments?”
“The Americans supported the Khmer Rouge in the late seventies, so they are more ambivalent.”
“OK.”
Her slight smile was pitying.
“Yes, a fine irony. The Americans thought the Khmer Rouge could be a buttress against Vietnamese communism. But now many Americans, of course, do want the past to be examined, ah, especially the Khmer diaspora.”
“People like you?”
“People like me. Cambodians like me are coming back. And we want the truth.”
The car slowed.
Ahead of them, Jake could see real streetlights. It was a town. With shops, or at least garages open to the road: selling colorful packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talk time, and lao-lao rice whiskey. Faces stared at Jake as they passed, faces blank yet inquiring, impassively curious, faintly Mongolian. Men wrapped in anoraks pointed and shook their heads; two of them scowled. There weren’t many Westerners up here on the chilly plain. This was not Vang Vieng, it was like another and very different world.
They sped on into the gray-black countryside once more.
“The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.”
Jake was glad to get to the center of the issue.
“So what did happen here?”
“We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot gave an order. That’s the famous Khmer Rouge leader—”
Jake bridled. “I have heard of Pol Pot, Chemda. He was a famous weather presenter, on morning TV?”
For the first time since he had met her this morning, she laughed, sincerely; her serious face was transformed, delicate white teeth revealed, eyes wide and smiling.
“OK. Sorry. OK. My professor at UCLA once said I was ‘a tad didactic.’ Am I being…” her brown eyes met his “… a tad didactic?”
“Well. Yes. A bit.”
A silence. The driver buzzed down a window and spat. The in rushing cold was piercing and stark. Jake shuddered, wishing he had brought a proper coat. All he had was a raincoat packed in his rucksack. No one had told him he would need to keep warm.
Conversation might keep him warm.
“So, Chemda.”
She was staring at the darkness: the bombed and lethal plain. She turned.
“Sorry. I was thinking. But let me finish the story. We know that in ’76 the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao, and the Maoist Chinese, they all sent a team here, to the, ah, Plain of Jars. A team of historians, academics, experts who knew something about the remains, the Neolithic ruins. Then they made people search the whole area, despite all the lethal UXO.”
“Unexploded ordnance.”
“Yes. Hundreds died. The KR didn’t give a damn… nor the Chinese. They were looking for something. We don’t know exactly what. In the scale of things”—her eyes sought Jake’s and found them—“in the scale of things it is a pretty minor atrocity. Just a few hundred killed, a thousand injured. What’s that compared with two million dead?” She shook her head. “But it’s a puzzle, and it was cold-blooded murder. And Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and Ta Mok the butcher, all the Khmer Rouge leadership, they were, ah, obsessed with this project, likewise the Chinese. They had no money but they spent lots on this, in the summer of ’76. Searching the plain. Searching for what?”