The light was nearly all gone.
The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hilltribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.
Ty was there. Tyrone J Gallagher. The American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didnt have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.
Alright Jake? Ty smiled. Got all your shots?
Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.
Let me guess, said Ty. Sunset over the karst?
Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.
Tyrone was leaning forward.
Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.
Yes?
Chemda is here.
A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers tucking a few dollars into the kids hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.
Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.
Yes?
Chemda is here.
A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers tucking a few dollars into the kids hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.
The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.
It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.
His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. Hed met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.
Chemda Tek. Whats she doing here?
Well its Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But shes Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.
Jake said nothing; Ty said:
So you remember her. Cute, right?
Jake shrugged.
Well, I hadnt noticed.
Yeah rrrright.
No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.
They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:
Shes at the hospital.
The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.
Shes OK?
Yeah yeah, shes fine. But its an odd situation.
Why?
Shes with some Cambodian professors.
Here in Laos? Jake was mystified. I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.
She was, sure. Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.
Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. Hed met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.
Why the Plain of Jars? asked Jake.
Tyrone finished his beer and explained.
Apparently during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there seems the communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.
Sorry?
You know what the Plain of Jars is right?
Jake faltered a reply:
Big old stone jars. Sitting in He paused. A plain?
They laughed. Tyrone continued:
Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Ponsavanh. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.
But whatve they got to do with
The Khmer Rouge? The KR? Ty smiled affably. Aint got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the 70s, coercing these historians maybe and Chemda is trying to find out why -
And?
The whole thing back in the 70s obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.
But why the hospital? Whys she here?
A tuk-tuk clattered past, two stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. Kharb jai, dankeschon, kharb jai. Tyrone smiled at Jake:
The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal all that fine American ordnance -
That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.
Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted:
Didnt the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam war, than on the whole of Germany in the entire Second World War?
Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined. Ty sighed, personably. Anyhow, where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is, was all the way here to Vang. A long days drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pick-up -
And now?
Shes heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. Shes a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty. Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.
Heading back to the Plain of Jars?
Tomorrow, yeah. Swhat she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if Id like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didnt care how intriguing it all is, Im doing this coffee table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff and anyhow Id rather have drunken sex with a senior Ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.
Tyrone paused, and gazed at Jakes pensive expression. He groaned.
Oh god. Colour me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, dont you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!
Chapter 3
So what happened here, in the Plain of Jars?
Chemda stared across the cabin of the pick-up, at Jake. Her eyes were deep dark brown, like whisky aged in sherry casks; she had a slight nervousness about her, mixed with fierce determination. Intelligence and anxiety. She was maybe twenty-eight years old. He had only met her once or twice before: on the fringes of conversations, serious conversations, dark discussions about Cambodian corruption and peasant evictions and journalistic powerplays, on the roof terrace of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh, the terrace that gazed over the noisy tuk-tuk filled boulevards, and the wide and lazy Tonle Sap river.
You are a journalist? You do understand Cambodian politics?
Jake felt the pinch of sarcasm in her words.
Well, yes, I do. But
The Cambodian government is under intense pressure to She sought the words. Atone. To put the Khmer Rouge leadership on trial, to seek the truth of what happened in the 1970s. When so many died. As you know?
Of course. Though the genocide, Im never sure how many died. I mean, I hear different opinions.
A quarter of the population. Chemdas firm but quiet voice, lilting, almost tender, made her revelation all the more sobering. The Khmer Rouge killed, through starvation or extermination, a quarter of my people. Two million dead.
A chastening silence ensued. Jake stared out of the pick-up window. They were way up in the misty hills now, in central Laos, they had been driving for fifteen hours on the worst roads he had ever encountered: he understood why Tyrone had refused to make the journey, he understood why they had been obliged to leave before dawn if they wanted to do the journey in one day.
The route on the map showed the distance was just a few hundred klicks, and theoretically this was the main road in Laos, but when the road wasnt rudely potholed it was badly waterlogged or simply blocked; dogs and goats and chickens and cattle wandered on and off the asphalt, children played an inch from thundering trucks. Several times they had been obliged to halt by broken-down trucks, or by muddy washouts where they had to lay big flat stones under the helplessly whirring tyres.
And now they were heading for the mountains, the 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, kilometres of dismal gauze.
Night was dimly falling, along with the saddening mists. Fifteen hours they had been driving. The car rattled over another pothole. The wounded Cambodian man had been left at Vang Vieng Hospital, where Jake had tracked down Chemda.
When they had first 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, in minor Asian websites. Maybe Jake could do better; he had contacts. She was keen.