They walked away from the houses, sweating, silent, and scared. Burned trees lined the narrow lane. And then the path widened to a clearing.
Everyone halted.
In the center of the scruffy clearing was a small linear hump of soft mud, surrounded by a wire fence. A low and rusty iron roof protected the mud from the rains and the sun.
Rittisak was pointing.
“Pol Pot grave! Where they burn body. Dump him!”
Jake stared, dumbfounded. This was the grave of the dictator? Pol Pot’s grave? It was poignantly rudimentary. It could have been the lyrically humble grave of a great poet, a pauper’s grave for a neglected genius — and then, Jake thought, maybe it was just that: the Mozart of death was buried here, this was the grave of an eerie prodigy, an autistic savant, a grinning mediocrity who somehow killed, murdered, his own country.
Offerings had been placed next to the grave. Some incense sticks were burning, planted in a sand-filled jar of instant tom yum noodles. Red apples shriveled beside a pile of silver coins. And next to the grave was a wooden spirit house: someone had actually installed a wooden shrine to honor the dead shade of Pol Pot. Jake moved close and saw: inside the wooden house were two dolls, Mr. and Mrs. Pol Pot. Jake marveled.
Rittisak was speaking. Chemda interpreted:
“He says people come here to pray, to, ah, seek help from the spirit of Pol Pot. The shrine was erected by some Thai guy. He won the lottery after praying to Pol Pot’s ghost. Hey. Do you think I am allowed to piss on this grave? Ah, are women allowed to do that, or is it just a guy thing? Anyway, please — let’s move.”
He had never heard Chemda speak coarsely before; she barely ever swore. Chemda turned away from the grave in disgust.
But Jake lingered. He was impressed by the florid paradox of the scene: the grave of a lunatic and atheist dictator, the man who murdered monks and pulled down temples, the man who didn’t just hate God but tried to stamp God into the dust — the grave of this unbeliever had been turned into a shrine, a place of superstitious worship where peasants prayed to a Communist ghost, a Marxist deity; it was the most perfect irony, quite sumptuous. It had to be recorded.
Almost reflexively, Jake took out his camera from his rucksack and aimed the lens.
Rittisak was edgy and fidgeting. Chemda was anxiously gesturing:
“Come on, Jake, quick, we need to go!”
“Just a couple more shots, wait, just a few more.”
He knelt in the dust and grabbed some images, just a couple more. Raising his tiny camera to get a wider shot, he stepped back; then he looked at the digital image and realized he hadn’t properly framed the four soldiers who had just walked into the clearing with guns.
The four soldiers with guns, who were now aiming them at Jake and Chemda and Rittisak.
“Chemda,” he whispered.
Way too fucking late. How stupid was this? How stupid had he been? So quickly, so easily: they had been captured. The soldiers were smiling, and laughing, waving those guns. One was snapping orders, triumphant. Shouting in Jake’s face.
Jake reeled at his own idiocy. His rasping stupidity. It was his fault. If they hadn’t lingered for him to take the photos, the soldiers might not have overheard them, marched off the road, and found them at the stupid little grave.
Rittisak had a gun pointed to his head. Chemda likewise. Jake felt the numbness of defeat. He allowed himself to be handcuffed. Everyone was handcuffed. The soldiers were arguing. Smiling and laughing — yet arguing. The youngest soldier handcuffed them all in brisk and ruthless silence. The apparent captain shouted his order. The youngest soldier shrugged and shook his head.
Again the soldiers argued. The captain pointed, with a metal bar in his hand — he was giving it to the younger soldier and barking his harsh Khmer sentences as he did. A metal bar? In a lonely clearing? Chemda was covering her face with frightened hands.
The revelation came to Jake like the flush of a sudden and terrible sickness. The soldiers were deciding whether to kill them.
A bird sang melodiously somewhere. It was done. The soldier saluted. The arguing ended. Jake could hear a car on the road, and a radio, and a cockerel crowing the tropical morning. He could smell cooking, he could smell woodsmoke and forest and sunbaked garbage.
This is how it happens, he thought. Not with choirs or angels or poetry, but with the smell of garbage.
Chemda tried to speak; the soldiers ignored her. They pushed Rittisak to his knees, making him buckle and kowtow. They kicked Jake to his knees, too: a foot brutally stamped the back of his legs so he crumpled into a praying position, supplicant in the sunny dust, praying by Pol Pot’s grave.
The smell of garbage.
He twisted to see Chemda. She was being led to the side, like she was special. Jake knew, with a shudder of quiet despair, precisely how his death was going to happen. He’d been to the killing fields of Cheung Ek. This is how they did it. This is how the Khmer Rouge slaughtered their countless victims, with a primitive and simple efficiency. Make them kneel down, swing the iron bar, crush the skull from behind. Next, please. Why waste a bullet on death?
He could hear Chemda crying now, heavily. The soldiers murmured. The decision had been made, so they were just doing their job. Rittisak was staring at the sky. Jake stared at Pol Pot’s grave. The incense was still burning. A trail of ants led from the brushwood to the shriveled apples, to an empty bottle of chili sauce.
The soldier approached with a rusty iron bar, a car axle, maybe. He was going to swing the bar and bash out their brains. Jake closed his eyes, waiting to die. Chemda sobbed in the darkness of his mind. He could hear the man giving orders. Yes, that’s it, kill them now. The world devolved to a still, silent point in the singularity of his life: here at the end of his life, he thought of his sister, and laughter, and his mother, and sadness, and Chemda, and Mama Brand Instant Rice Noodles gently rotting in the sun.
29
Monkey lab, thought Julia, what’s that in Russian? Didn’t she write that down somewhere?
Grabbing her notebook, she turned to the middle-aged man with broken, taped-together wire-rimmed spectacles, standing in the desolate, carless parking lot of Sukhumi railway station.
“Obez… yanii pitomnik.”
The man nodded. “Da! Obez’yanii pitomnik.” His nylon shirt was greasy, his chin unshaven, his tie stained. His helpful smile was keen.
The man was pointing down the road. Julia followed his gesture with a reflux of dismay: the streets in front of the station were potholed and syphilitic, the sidewalks cracked and weed-sprouted. This town seemed to be like every other town on this polluted eastern shore of the Black Sea, decaying, smelly, depressed, half destroyed by recent wars of irredentism and secession. A post-Communist, ex Soviet statelet at its worst.
“Da!” The man pointed, once again: his hand firm and vigorous, his fingernails dirty. He seemed to be telling her to go straight, then right, then up a hill. “Obez’yanii pitomnik!”
“Spasibo,” said Julia, putting away her notebook, quickly walking on.
The weariness was lurking. She was very tired from the flight from Paris to Moscow, the flight from Moscow to Adler, and the train down the gray-drizzled waters of the Black Sea littoral. But Julia was nearing her goal, so a surge of adrenaline was masking that tiredness. She walked quickly into the town.