He didn’t know who panicked first. Chemda maybe, maybe even Rittisak. But they panicked, all three of them. From the obedient procession of the last four hours, suddenly they were all running, or trying to run, wading the waters of a childhood nightmare, unable to progress, yet still running, slipping, gasping.
“I’m stuck!”
He reached behind and grasped her hand and tugged; the ooze clutched at her, lecherously; but then the mud yielded — and she was free, and shuddering, and waving him on. The splashing behind them was louder. They struggled forward. But now, all around them, the water was roiled, like a saucepan coming to the boil.
With a scum floating on the surface.
Jake fought his urge to give up, to go back, to do anything but this. Chased by the splashing, they were wading through bodies, or at least floating bones. Shin bones. Human arms and femurs. The lake was brimming with dismembered cadavers, floating like sad and small gray logs, brought to the surface by the disturbance.
The victims of Ta Mok.
The smell was an abomination. No wonder the night birds roosted here: the shrikes and the ravens. Ospreys. Fish vultures. Butcher-birds. Despair and denial mixed with Jake’s revulsion, and his fear, but they had to keep wading, escaping whatever pursued them.
And now the moon shone down — on a tiny ripple of hope. Jake squinted, and yearned. They were nearly there: the hapless attempt at a shoreline where the artificial lake met the artificial beach. Rittisak was already up on the shore, reaching out; Jake caught the hand and was assisted onto dry land; behind him, Chemda raced up, spitting and shivering. She squatted on the black soil and she swiveled.
The moon broke the clouds, once more, revealing their pursuer: just a water buffalo. Halted angrily in the water, amid the floating bones. A gray image in the lighter grayness.
Rittisak clapped his hands. The buffalo snorted contemptuously, then turned and waded away.
For a moment they sat panting, and trembling, and rubbing the mud from their hands and feet as best they could, using leaves and ferns. They all coughed the filthy water from their mouths. Still no one spoke. Chemda seemed on the verge of tears, but as ever she strangled them at birth. Manfully.
A religious silence ruled. Total silence, omerta. Maybe, Jake thought, what they had witnessed was beyond conversation, simply too harrowing to discuss. Maybe they would never mention this again. Not to anyone, not to each other, not for as long as they breathed.
“Climb,” said Chemda. “We have to climb.”
28
“Let’s go.”
The climb began. It was sharp and prickly, but it was dry, and better than their ghastly course across the Butcher’s reservoir. Roots ripped his hands. Chemda held on to Jake’s arms. Rittisak was a sherpa of nimbleness, choosing rocks as footholds, helping them up, adeptly pointing at branches they could use to ascend. Jake wondered why Rittisak was so assiduous in his assistance: the villagers here were much friendlier than in so many other places. Maybe they just hated authority, like Chemda had said, and a couple of outlaws, like he and Chemda, appealed to their rebel spirit.
Ten strenuous and sweaty minutes later they were on top of the cliff, near a concrete shack. The moon shone on more dead trees, burned trees; maybe slashed and burned by the swidden farmers. There was a definite sense of dawn in the air, a virginal stirring, as birds timidly chirruped.
Jake said, “We need to rest a few hours, Chemda. Tell Rittisak?”
The two Khmers spoke Khmer. Jake saw Rittisak shrug, uncomfortably, then accede. OK. Sleep here. Jake lay down at once — right inside the fetid concrete shack. His rucksack was a pillow. Chemda lay beside him and sleep came at once, like a kidnapper, hooding him brutally. Darkness.
He didn’t care. He slept and he dreamed as he knew he would dream: he dreamed of bodies and faces drowned underwater; he dreamed of his mother like a mermaid, his sister, too, the lost women underwater, sighing and singing, sirenic, disinterred, waving their pale limbs, beckoning.
He woke to blazing patches of sun on the ground, shaped by the small concrete windows. Eight a. m., maybe. Jake suppressed his shivers of simultaneous heat and cold. And then the juddering memory of the lake returned, and his anxieties spiraled. He felt feverish. Could this get any worse? What was happening to him? He felt an overwhelming urge to see the picture of his sister one more time. But where was it?
He recalled: buttoned in his breast pocket, where he’d secreted it during the long truck journey from Siem Reap. Fumbling for his pocket, he reached for the photo. But the pocket was unbuttoned. It had come undone. The photo was gone. Slipped away, or washed away, no doubt, when they were wading the lake. Only shreds of moist paper remained. She had dissolved in the water. His family had finally dissolved.
It was difficult to fight the emotions, the keening loss. Yet he tried. But even as he fought the grief, the chilly possibility slit open his thoughts. The possibility he had been ignoring for days — yet not quite avoiding. And this final slice of grief tipped him into speculation. Abject, degraded speculation.
Was he cursed? Had he been cursed by the spider witch?
This was, of course, ridiculous. He was a rationalist, a materialist, the most convinced of atheists. He wasn’t scared of death, of ghosts, of vampires or God or gravestones or hell. He despised and rejected the absurd and clattering parade of human religion and superstition.
And yet, despite his anger, he couldn’t wipe away the sensation, the creeping and ridiculous idea. That ghastly witch, the nouveau crone in her sequined turquoise jumper, with the black spider excrement in her chewing black mouth — maybe she really had done it: cursed him, cast a terrible spell. Bad luck, evil luck, was pursuing him like a feral dog. And now he had lost the photo. Lost his sister all over again.
The sun shone brightly through the little window.
Chemda was awake. She was standing and dressed, and listening to Rittisak. He was talking quickly in Khmer — and his utterance made her blanch, visibly.
“Pol Pot’s house,” she said, and her face was trembling. “My God, we are in Pol Pot’s old house. Where he spent his last years. Sometimes tourists come here. Ah. God… Of all the places. We have to go.”
She was obviously shaken. They needed to leave at once. Jake doused his face with bottled water, slung on his socks and boots, then he and Chemda helped each other with the rucksacks and shared a brief, silent kiss, and they walked into the jungle.
There was still a deathliness to the area. This was not the vibrant, overly fecund jungle of Angkor Wat. Patches of burned or dead vegetation dotted the forest. Birds sang: apologetically, and uncertainly. Or maybe Jake was imagining it. He hoped he was imagining it, just as he wanted to believe he had imagined the skulls and skeletons in the water, the jaunty flotsam of genocide.
Two hours and five kilometers of jungle pathway found them in the outskirts of a village. Rittisak looked more relaxed in the sunlight. His job was close to completion. He pointed one way and talked and then pointed another way.
Chemda turned: “He says the main road is just there, so we must be careful, but the Chong Sa crossing is also very close, we just have to hack through this last field… take the path, along a ravine, get across the frontier.”
They slipped down the ravine, but the route was confusing, it forked several times. At one point it led them to a clutch of houses, the busy road to Thailand taking them horribly close to danger; but another turning seemed to head for the wilds, toward that unguarded and very wooded border a few kilometers east.