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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, I’m never sure how many died. I mean, I hear different opinions.’

‘A quarter of the population.’ Chemda’s 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 wasn’t 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.

But now she seemed displeased: by Jake’s relative ignorance of Cambodian politics. And Jake didn’t know what to do about this.

Their silent Laotian driver swerved to avoid a water buffalo, which was belligerently munching ferns by the side of the alleged road. Jake gripped the window frame of the rocking pick-up. A soldier slept on top of a stationary car, as they drove past.

Jake stared across the gearwell. He wanted to befriend this slightly daunting woman. Chemda, with her beautiful seriousness, her earnest loveliness. He was here to do a task, he wanted to be a proper photojournalist, that’s why he had agreed to do this. But for that he needed her friendship – and her candour. 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 old people 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 of Laos. 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 gruelling 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 heating 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 semi-naked old bodies garishly illuminated by the lurid scarlet flames.

‘Fifty kilometres,’ said Chemda, ‘to Ponsavanh. 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 70s, 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 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 garish packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talktime, and lao-lao rice whisky. 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 darkening countryside once more.

‘The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.’

Jake was glad to get to the centre of the issue.

‘So what did happen here?’

‘We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot made 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 inrushing 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 to 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?’

‘And these historians?’

‘Most of the academics were later purged by Pol Pot. Murdered at Cheung Ek. The killing fields, of course. But two survived. I tracked them down. We asked them to come with us, to show us where they searched, all this is part of the UN’s work . . . To, ah, dig up the truth. But these guys – they were very unwilling.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘They were ordered to help us, by the Cambodian government. They had no choice. But they don’t have to say anything, we can’t force the truth from their mouths. Can we? Now one is in hospital, and there is one left. Doctor Samnang. Not happy. Sometimes I wonder . . .’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if I am doing the right thing, in forcing these old men to rake over the past. But, it is my job.’ The steeliness had returned to her soft Khmer vowels; her English was only slightly accented. She turned to face him, square on: and she stared him out.

‘And then. There is a personal angle.’

‘OK.’

‘My grandmother died here.’

Jake said nothing. Chemda’s face was ghosting in the twilight.

‘I think she died up here in the Plain of Jars. She was one of the academics the Khmer Rouge brought with them.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I have a Khmer friend in Los Angeles. Her father was also sent here. And he claims he saw my grandmother, in the Plain, that she was one of the team. My grandmother was quite well known: my family is quite well known. So, my grandmother was an anthropologist, ah, we know she disappeared around that time, and we know there were rumours she came here. No one will tell me the truth because maybe no one knows the truth.’

Chemda’s words were like a litany, softly and reverently repetitive, a whispered prayer in the gloaming of a church.

‘That is one of the reasons I am doing this, Jake. By uncovering the truth about my family I can uncover the truth about Cambodia. It doesn’t make me popular, many people want to forget. But I don’t care.’

They drove in silence for fifteen minutes. The cabin was cold. Then Chemda’s cellphone chirruped, an incongruously jaunty song. Cantopop. She picked up the call, but the signal was bad.

‘Tou? Tou? Can you hear me?’ Rattling the phone, she cursed the reception, and explained. ‘Our guide, Tou. Trying to reach me. Cellphones are almost useless up here. Outside the towns.’

Jake was not surprised. A place without electricity was hardly likely to be superbly linked with telecommunications. Nonetheless the thought added to the growing sense of isolation.

An hour passed in even more subdued silence. And then:

‘Ponsavanh!’

The driver had spoken for the first time since the morning. They were entering, what was, for Laos, a largeish city. Straggling and busy and concrete, it was an ugly place, especially in the harsh glare of rudimentary streetlights. Jake saw an internet cafe, people in scarves locked on bright screens in a dingy room; a few closed tourist shops had Plain des Jarres scrawled in crude paint on their windows.

The pick-up swerved a sudden right, onto a very rough and rubbled track.

‘Here we go. The only hotel in the area. Home.’ Chemda smiled, with a hint of sarcasm. ‘My guide Tou is here. And the historian. The one who can, ah, still walk . . . It is good we are arriving at night; this is less conspicuous. The Pathet Lao do not want us here. Of course. They want us gone.’

‘You are intruders. Raking up the past.’

‘Yes. And also . . . there is tension. The Hmong.’

‘The hill tribesmen?’

‘They live in the uplands right across Southeast Asia, but here is the real Hmong heartland. And the jungles and mountains south of here. There are still Hmong rebels down there. Some say. Still fighting the Vietnam war.’

‘I heard a few stories.’

Now Jake could see lights of a distant building. Chemda continued:

‘The Hmong helped the Americans in the Vietnam war, when Laos was a secret battlezone. The North Vietnamese were using Laos as, ah, a route, to ferry arms to South Vietnam.’

‘The Ho Chi Minh trail.’

‘Yes! You know your history.’ Her eyes brightened, momentarily. ‘Yes. It came right through here, the Plain of Jars. So the Americans secretly infiltrated Laos, and secretly bombed the trail, and they recruited Hmong to help them, in the air war, because the Hmong hated the communists, the Pathet Lao, the people still in power now. The Lao regime.’ Her voice softened to a wondering tone. ‘The Americans actually had a whole secret city in the hills south of here, with airstrips, warehouses, barracks. And maverick pilots, specialist bombers, fighting a completely clandestine war. The Hmong helped, some actually became fliers . . . So there is still a lot of, ah, very bad feeling, and the Lao don’t want outsiders here, stirring things up.’

The car jerked to a stop outside a blank concrete building. The car park was almost empty: just a couple of dirty white minivans. Chemda got out and Jake joined her, yawning and stretching; the cold upland air was refreshing now, he inhaled deeply the sweet night scent of pollution and burning hardwood.

‘Come and meet the team. What’s left of it.’

The walk took a minute, along a walkway, to a door, where she knocked. Silence replied. She knocked again, there was no reply; Jake leaned against the door jamb, impatient with weariness. As he did he realized he was standing in something sticky.

The revelation was a slap of horror.

‘Jesus, Chemda, I think that’s blood!’

Chemda flinched and gazed down; then she stepped smartly aside, so the dim light of the walkway bulb could shine on the pooling fluid.

It was vivid and it was scarlet.

Immediately Jake pushed with a shoulder; the door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy: something was inside, blocking the way. He pushed again, and once more; Chemda assisted, resting a hand on a doorpanel. The door shunted open and they stepped into the bleak, harshly lit hotel room.

It was empty.

Where was the blood coming from? Jake followed the trail: the thickening flood of redness emanated from behind the door; the heavy door he had just swung open. Jake pulled the door, so they could see behind.

Chemda gasped.

Hanging from the back of the door, by ropes attached to a hook, was a dead man. A small, old Cambodian man, in cotton trousers, bare-chested. But he was hanging upside down, his ankles were roped to the hook, his body was dangling and inverted; his hands trailed on the ground and his head bobbed inches from the blood-smeared concrete floor.

The man’s throat had been cut: slashed violently open. Blood had obviously poured from his jugular onto the floor: as with the bleeding of halal butchery, he had been hung upside down so the blood would drain out. A smeared knife lay discarded nearby.

The old man’s hanging hair was just touching the blood. Like the tips of elegant painting brushes, dipped, quite delicately, in a puddle of crimson oil.