Songs from the Violet Cafe (25 page)

But it was nearly the end of the day before she found Kiem, on the road that led to the killing fields of Cheung Ek. Her
krama,
the scarf that served as headgear, was wet with sweat, her clothes matted with red clay and dust. She was almost ready to give up, because if dark fell, she would be as good as dead, and just moving in the direction of the killing fields made her skin crawl. She had been there once, a place of total desolation. Recently exhumed skulls, some still wearing their blindfolds, and torn clothes poked through the earth. She had been surrounded by total silence. No birds sang near there. People didn’t speak in that monstrous place. As she neared Cheung
Ek, she found herself increasingly afraid. Now that she had been in the East all these years, she sensed some Buddhist force at work in her. It was said that the spirits of those who were not buried in the place that they came from would wander alone and restless, seeking help. But she had nothing to give them.

She was riding on the back of a motor-bike, saddle-sore and exhausted when the driver came across Kiem.

He was asleep in a hammock, beneath a thatched roof, fanned by a young wife who was close to giving birth. Suddenly, Jessie didn’t want Kiem to go on this expedition.

Not that she could explain this to him, because once he saw her he became excited. Yes, he did want to come north with her. He wouldn’t be put off This way he would take care of his wife and babies. They negotiated a price, Jessie starting low, in the hope of putting him off. His face fell, and she offered him what the job was worth.

Back at the FCC, there was a change of plan. Reports had been coming in of guerrilla activity and such heavy retaliatory fire by the Vietnamese that the road to Battambang was virtually impassable. The Red Cross group’s second target was a group of amputees in the Kompong Chhnang area, and now they had switched to that as a first option. If the road was good the jeeps could get through in perhaps half a day, but much of it had been sucked away in the last monsoons, so that it could take days, skirting the washouts. During the day, in Jessie’s absence, the group had been exploring the possibility of taking a boat along the river, but it was crawling with pirates, and the banks were full of snipers. Annette Gerhardt had decided to take her convoy by road to Kompong Chhnang.

‘Is Kiem up to it?’ she asked Jessie when she appeared, showered and changed, and settled opposite her.

‘He’ll go where I want him to.’

‘Is there a but?’ asked Annette, noting her hesitation.

‘He has a wife and children, and another one due soon. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t take him.’

‘C’est
la
guerre.
Oh, I know what you mean. What would our mothers say if they could see where we were?’ Annette had shed her
elegant clothes in favour of fatigues. She looked exhausted, as if she too had been out in the heat during the day.

‘I don’t know,’ Jessie said. She had downed two bourbons in quick succession. ‘My mother died when I was eighteen.’

‘That’s hard. Mine is still alive, an old woman, but strong in her mind and spirit, and her body not in such bad shape either. I’m lucky. What happened to your mother?’

‘Cancer. I wasn’t with her when she died. I should have been but I couldn’t bear to tear myself away from a boy I was in love with at the time. A young Chinese man.’ Jessie felt the drink, the heat, and the unexpected sight of Lou Messenger, risen from the dead, making her loquacious. She tried to remind herself that she was a self-contained woman who didn’t need to tell garrulous stories to strangers. But why she should think of herself as different? This woman and she were going to face life and death together, and then, if they survived, they would go their separate ways. There had been a telephone message from Bangkok to say that Paul Greaves couldn’t get a flight into Phnom Penh and he’d have to keep going to Sydney. ‘You remind me of someone,’ Jessie said. ‘A strong woman I knew around about that time when my mother and so many people died.’

‘So many people? This sounds like a complicated story.’

‘Yes, that’s true. I was with a group of people, the Chinese boy was among them. Well, he had one Chinese parent — after today, I’m confused. I knew his father too, or I thought I did, and it turns out neither of them was Chinese.’

‘This is the one you were in love with?’

‘Oh yes, very much in love. I thought John would marry me. I was such a plain girl and he was beautiful. I can’t tell you … he had a heat about him. But, I don’t know.’ She had stopped to read the specials. The fish was always fresh. Today it was baked with tomatoes, olives, capers and anchovies, and a touch of French basil. Violet would have approved. Where did they get all this stuff from, while outside, beyond in the dark, there lay nothing but misery and starvation? She found herself settling for Peking duck, wrapped in Mandarin pancakes. A gesture to the past.

‘He was in love with someone else?’

‘I suppose so, though I didn’t see it at the time. This woman I’m telling you about was called Violet, and it seems that she was his mother, though I didn’t know that either. I’ve only found out today, and it’s been something of a shock. Anyway, a group of us girls worked in her café. Violet was very self-centred, she named it after herself, and she liked to be in control. She thought she knew what was best for all of us. She wanted me to marry John, but all her plans backfired when several people who worked for her went out on a lake and drowned. The place fell apart after that. I wasn’t with them, because I was on my way back to my mother, but I was too late, you see. She had already died. I’d waited too long.’

‘So you lost your mother and your lover on the one night?’ Annette said. ‘That’s a very tragic story.’

‘I did lose my lover, if you could call him that, although he didn’t drown. I found out years later.’

‘The mother didn’t tell you?’

‘I think she decided that it had all been a mistake. But then, perhaps she felt herself surrounded by mistakes.’

‘I don’t think I’m like this woman you’re talking about,’ Annette remarked. ‘I like to be sure I’m not making mistakes. I have other people’s lives in my hands.’

‘Well, I hope you’re right. So did Violet, but she let go at the crucial moment. I left my country hurriedly, after all these disasters. I don’t know where all the people went after that night. As it happens, I met one of them today. He runs a bar down by the markets, one of those seedy little shacks with bad food on the side, and a sack of
can
sa
behind the counter, and God knows what else out the back. His name’s Lou Messenger.’

‘Messenger? I’ve heard of him.’

‘Well, I’ve been out here a long time, and I hadn’t.’

‘He goes by different names. He’s a bad man. Have nothing to do with him. He traffics in children.’

‘There are often two sides to a story,’ Jessie said evenly.

‘Not with men like that.’ Annette was stabbing the air with her
lean brown fingers, making her point. ‘I tell you, if you’re a friend of his, I don’t want you near this mission.’

‘Look, I ran across him in the markets. I hadn’t seen him for nearly twenty years. He told me he never wanted to see me again.’

‘If you’re sure.’

‘Let’s get some sleep,’ Jessie said, folding her napkin. ‘We’re going to need all the rest we can get.’

That night she dreamed of the strange boy who had enchanted her in the town, and the way she had held him in her heart for so many years, cherishing his memory. And now he was alive. She woke to the sound of machine-gun fire in the distance, and lay wide-eyed, remembering the reality. On the night of the accident she must have been worn out by desire for his pale body which, except for that one naked glimpse, had remained inaccessible beneath its clothes. The pressure of him against her, the shape of his thin chest and his penis which swelled and died away, had absorbed her so completely, that she had lost the will to think for herself, overwhelmed by the need to stay near to him, night after night. Doing what was asked of her by Violet Trench.

After the deaths and disappearances, and her own flight from her past, Jessie stopped desiring John, as if her body had been brought to its senses. The week she went back to Wellington, she had lain down at the back of the bait shed with Antonio, the Italian boy she’d been to school with, and let him fuck her — got it over with, as it were, so that she could go on with her life, doing what other people did.

She had followed him to the shed reeking of fish, and when he’d said his usual hellos, and grinned at her, she had reached out and touched his throat with the tips of her fingers and stroked it, as if seduction came naturally, now that she’d seen so much of it in action. He had looked curiously at her arms when she took off her cardigan for them to lie on. ‘Who gave you the bruises?’ he asked. John’s fingerprints were as blue as irises on her skin.

‘They’re nothing,’ she said, giving herself up to the pain of the first time.

Afterwards, he said to her, like a shy girl, ‘Jessie, I shouldn’t have. I’m engaged now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, though she wasn’t because for the moment she felt languorous and full of sweetness, as if all the preparation she’d done with John had paid off at last. ‘What must you think of me?’ she went on, as she pulled her stockings on one after the other, and snapped on her suspenders.

‘You were my
reading
coach,’ he said with wonder and despair.

‘I guess we’re quits,’ Jessie said.

On the way back up the hill she cried for what she hoped would be the first and last time, leaning against a lamp post leading up to Brighton Street, and sobbing until she thought she was going to be sick. The sea behind her was ravishing, honey-gold light spread across the waves, the black mound of the island perched in the bay, reminding her of that other place. John was gone now and her mother had abandoned her too. There was nobody to go home to. She thought it would go on like this, pleasure and goodbyes and what sense she could make of the spaces in between.

Another dawn. An unfurling of the light over the Tonlé Sap. The heavy white scent of frangipani, rice paddies dotted with ibises, bougainvillaea rioting in wild profusion over the remains of a shelled
wat.
Now they were in country. The trip had taken longer than any of them expected because the countryside festered with landmines and even the marked roads were dangerous. Jessie was spending her second night sleeping in a hammock, clear of snakes and scorpions. She felt gritty and gummy-eyed, dust clogging her nostrils and pores. The evening before, they had run a gauntlet of casual sniper fire that had missed its target, as if the guerrillas were half-hearted about their prey. A patrolling Vietnamese platoon, bristling with AK-47s, had taken them under their wing and formed an advance guard that had succeeded in keeping the mission safe up until now. They spent the first night in a small village close to an open plain that afforded their guards a view of marauding Khmer Rouge. None of them slept well.

They were not going directly to Kompong Chhnang, where Annette was taking medical supplies to the town, but first of all to a place a little to the south, where, they had been told, there was an
encampment of wounded women and children. Looking at the spot on the map, Jessie couldn’t see what features of the landscape would be likely to draw together a group of the injured. Kiem studied the map with her, and gave a surprised little snort of pain.

‘You know where we’re going?’ she asked him.

‘The aeroplanes,’ he said. ‘They make a landing place.’

‘There aren’t any planes coming in here.’

‘He may be right,’ Annette said, joining them. ‘I’ve heard another story of this airstrip.’

What awaited them, further across the shimmering, humid plain, was a rolling aerodrome. It lay abandoned, except for a couple of guards in a makeshift sentry box inside a barbed-wire compound. Huddled in a makeshift shelter in scrub, at the far end of the runway, were four sick and wounded men. There was no sign of the women and children Annette had expected. Kiem spoke to the men. They said there had been more of them. They had come to see if an aeroplane would take them away, but they were fired on, and anyway, they now knew that planes didn’t come here, in spite of the runway. Some had been able to escape; others had crawled away, because they believed nobody would come to help them, or someone would come and kill them. One of the wounded men knew more than the others. The airstrip had been built for Chinese to bring in military equipment to the Khmer Rouge. Now it was nothing, going nowhere.

Kiem had begun to weep as he listened to the men speak. ‘They say that if all those who died building this strip had been lain side by side they would have stretched the length of the runway.’

‘But that runway is at least three kilometres,’ Jessie said. She was snapping pictures as they talked.

Kiem nodded. ‘Put one man, and one man and one man, all the way up, still not all the people who died.’

‘Perhaps three hundred thousand,’ Donald said, hazarding a guess. He had had little to say for himself throughout the entire journey, and spent his evenings before nightfall searching out clean weed to smoke in the dark.

Kiem shook his head as if the numbers were meaningless. ‘Many people.’

Donald shrugged. ‘How many million lives did it take to build the temples at Angkor?’

‘But this is not a temple,’ Annette exclaimed, surveying the ugly rolling strip of tarmac.

‘We have to get away from here,’ Jessie said to Annette. ‘If the Khmer Rouge get wind that we’re here we’re likely to be fired on.’

The doctor nodded, grim-faced. Donald began bundling the men into the front jeep. One of them was protesting.

‘He thinks his wife might come back to him if he waits here.’

‘He’ll be too dead to see her,’ Annette said.

‘I think he’s waiting for her spirit to visit him,’ said Jessie.

‘Poor man. Tell him it is better that he comes with us,’ Annette instructed Kiem.

The man did come with them, Jessie holding water to his pale lips as the jeep lurched back the way it had come. His
krama,
which he wore as a loincloth, gaped open to show his reed-like limbs — what was left of them. He was so emaciated that she was afraid she might break him, as she sought to prop him up against the jeeps interior. She had taken pictures of the airstrip, which she believed would be news on the outside. Clearly, the Vietnamese would know about it, but largely she believed it was a hidden thing, and the thousands of missing people a secret yet to be revealed. Through Kiem, she continued to ask questions, but the men could tell her little more.