Songs from the Violet Cafe (26 page)

‘You have a story?’ Annette said.

‘Perhaps. But I need more eye-witness accounts.’

Next it was Kompong Chhnang itself, a town by the river, where they were greeted by scores of thin and wasted citizens who tried to climb on the jeeps as they rolled through. This was Annette’s territory now. Jessie retreated to the riverbank to think. The Red Cross team would camp here for the night, while they set up a base and collected the injured. Annette and Donald would stay for a week to treat as many sick and wounded as they could, before returning to Phnom Penh for further supplies, and a second attempt at reaching
Battambang to the north. One of the jeeps, driven by Kiem, was heading back that night, and Jessie was expected to go back on it. Yet she needed more than pictures of an empty airstrip and the hearsay testimony of the four men.

Kiem had brought her food: a dish of deep-fried sparrows, another of steamed lotus stems, and some rice. Jessie crunched the crisp delicate bird bones and remembered how her mother used to feed sparrows on the back lawn at Island Bay. She had never had much stomach for sparrows.

Through Kiem, she tried to ask more questions of the people in Kompong Chhnang, but nobody would answer her. ‘It’s too close,’ he said. ‘They are afraid of what will happen if they tell. All their houses might get burned down tonight.’

‘But you knew about it. Somebody told you.’

‘I heard word from my uncle and his friends who have gone back to Siem Reap, since Pol Pot has gone into hiding. I do not want to say more.’

‘Where in Siem Reap? Near the temples? Angkor Wat?’

‘No, on the city on the lake.’

Jessie had heard of it, a huge collection of houses built on stilts over the water, like a floating city, only it was known as the Vietnamese Fishing Village. ‘I could take a letter to your uncle.’

‘He won’t talk to anyone.’

‘Will you come with me, up the river?’

‘Up the river, no.’

‘Then find me a boat that will take me. Please, Kiem. Ten dollars. Many thousands of riels. Look after your wife.’

He gave her a long considered look. ‘I think they will kill you. I think, Madame Sandle, that you are very brave and very mad.’

Jessie did nearly die on the boat upriver, when pirates boarded the flat-bottomed wooden craft. The river flows into Tonlé Sap Lake, a vast inland tract of water, so wide that land is not visible for mile after mile, where sky and lake meet. There were six men on board when the boat set off, as well as Jessie. It was night when the pirates came on
board. Much later, she would attribute her survival to her acceptance of death, drained of the fear that might have encouraged her to fight back, rather than any particular cleverness. Instead, she lay still among stored sacks of rice and vegetables until morning. When she emerged at dawn, and the screams and shouting had died away, two of the six men were left. She supposed they must have been Pol Pot sympathisers or they would have been dead too. Nothing was said as they travelled on together up to the city on the lake.

As far as the eye could see, reed-thatched houses stretched across the lake, decorated with pots of bright marigolds, so that the surface of the water seemed to be trembling with orange fire. This might have been the fishing capital of the world, the water dense with carp that the villagers were allowed, once more, to catch for themselves. Baskets of the fish were carried away on the backs of bicycles. This is what Jessie ate in her days by the lake — fish, freshly-cooked in pots over live coals, the smoke swirling round her face. At night she slept in a hammock in an abandoned house, listening to the water lapping around the poles that surrounded it. She slept in fitful catnaps, her camera tied to her waist. She thought about going inland to see the temples and check if the damage inflicted was as bad as rumour had it, but the journey on her own seemed too improbable, too likely to end in failure, or captivity. She reminded herself, like a mantra, a story is no good to anyone unless the reporter can deliver it. But finding Kiem’s uncle was proving a next-to-impossible task. She had searched for him in a longboat with the people next door, who grudgingly agreed to take her with them. Nobody wanted to acknowledge her presence. On the third night she thought she felt a fever coming on, and sat up in the moonlight. The still air held a static crackle of menace. In the dark, she made out a man crawling on his belly towards her.

‘Cannot find,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘Uncle is dead. You bring us bad trouble.’

A volley of shells erupted in the sky, raining fire. One landed and set a house on the lake alight.

The East. Gone troppo. On her own in a grass hut without a
mosquito net, a Caucasian woman among a million Asians who didn’t need her there, in an immense bright terrifying landscape. Of course the guerrilla fighters knew she was there, and would punish those who continued to harbour her. Or demand a ransom for her, back in Phnom Penh. And, if they didn’t get it, or simply tired of having her around, they would lie her face down, her arms tied behind her back and slice her head off with the end of a hoe, a favoured method for killing foreigners. She had broken all the rules. If she disappeared, there would be an outcry in the world media, but it would be brief. Journalists often went missing. She could not think of one person who might care enough to pay her ransom, although several might feel obliged to make a gesture.

In a few hours there would be a ferry of sorts. If she was quick and careful, she could board and make her way south. Before it got light, Jessie crawled over a plank across the scum and sewage that the lake city spewed into the water, guided by the runner who had found her. She huddled again among sacks of strong-smelling fish and stacked bamboo poles until the ferry began to move. At first the lake felt empty, and very cold, in spite of great heat during the day. Scores of feet began to pass overhead, until the ferry filled. Soon the upper and lower decks were crammed with three times as many people as it could safely hold. The ferry, powered by an asthmatic diesel engine, shuddered and roared, causing the vessel to lurch from side to side. When they had been underway an hour or more, Jessie, fearing she might suffocate, crawled out of the hold into the light. In the stern, the coldest part of the boat, a group of women sat huddled in sarongs and
krama.
When she appeared, they looked at her curiously, uncomfortable and afraid. One of them, different from the rest, moved aside to let her sit down.

This woman was dressed in European clothes, of a kind. Well-creased slacks, a high-necked sweater and a checked coat and, on her head, a peaked cap. Sportin’ Life, Jessie thought, a female version. She must have spent time with Americans. In her lap, Sportin’ Life held a plump sleeping girl, perhaps two or three years old, her spread-eagled limbs appearing almost lifeless. An unnatural sleep, perhaps. Jessie
looked more closely at the child. Although the woman was Khmer, the girl was not. The perfect slanted seams of her closed eyelids suggested Chinese Cambodian, and a strand of fairer hair made Jessie wonder if there had been a Caucasian parent — an American soldier, perhaps, or a French planter. A pink bow held the girl’s hair in a topknot on her head. Someone had painted her fingernails and toenails bright red. Jessie gestured to the woman, offering to let the child lie across her knees. Looking down at the small face, and feeling her warm body against her own, she thought that the girl had been drugged.

‘She’s so pretty,’ she remarked, not knowing whether she could make herself understood.

The woman in the peaked cap nodded in agreement, and pinched the girl’s flesh. ‘One hundred dollar,’ she said.

‘Oh my God,’ Jessie said, to no one in particular.

‘You have her. One hundred dollars. Very good price.’

‘No,’ said Jessie. ‘No, I don’t want to buy her. I’ll take her picture.’

‘No picture,’ the woman said. A man appeared on the ladder leading from the upper deck. He waved his finger with an angry gesture at Jessie. The other women had pulled away, so that they were not connected with Sportin’ Life, or the child. They knew what was going on here, and were powerless to stop it. The woman in the peaked cap must be a regular traveller on the ferry, stupefying the children she was taking to the markets and disposing of them in Phnom Penh. The man above threw a blanket over the woman and child, covering them from Jessie’s view.

In her left sock, which she hadn’t taken off for a week now, since she left Phnom Penh the week before, Jessie still had one hundred and fifty American dollars.

As the ferry pulled into the city, Jessie said to Sportin’ Life: ‘I will take the child. She’ll be my child now.’

This was the girl whom Jessie would call Bopha, which means flower. She would be known to the nuns in Phnom Penh as Jessie’s daughter.

In the beginning, the convent was built of thatch and mud. The floor was hard earth from which fine red dust emanated in small ceaseless eddies. The nuns swept it down before prayer. There were four sisters at the Home of Holy Rescue — Sisters Perpetua, Veronica, Therese and Mary Luke. They had come, they said, because God had called them to feed the destitute. They combed Phnom Penh’s dusty streets, wearing their wimples and crosses, looking for the hungry, and found plenty. This was a favourite joke among them. Jessie could see how often they made it, passing it around in conversation like an incantation that made them laugh. Sister Veronica was the cook. When she discovered Jessie had once been a chef, she threw her arms around her and said that God had brought her to them. I’ve never been good at bread, she said, perhaps you could do bread for us. Jessie had never made bread, but she did then, in the weeks that she stayed at the convent. It was good bread, sweet-smelling loaves that sprang back at the touch. Her new family, as she had come to call the sisters, were delighted. You can stay with us a long time and get to know the little girl, they said. Sister Perpetua was the administrator, the person who ordered supplies and kept the records; Sister Therese took care of housekeeping, which included emptying the latrine buckets, something she did as if God’s grace smiled on her every day; Sister Mary Luke ran the nursery, because they found not only hungry people but also abandoned children in the streets. There was just one, at first, a little boy whose mother appeared to have died giving birth to him; her body lay beside him in a pile of rubbish near the markets. And then someone brought another baby who they said they’d found too, although they never did hear the real story, and suddenly Sister Mary Luke, who had found it hardest to adjust to the heat, and cried very easily, had discovered the meaning in her life that God had been just
waiting for her to find. When there were six children, the sisters decided to call themselves an orphanage and sent home for funds to build an outpost mission dedicated to the care of lost children. This was where Jessie brought Bopha, the girl she had bought for a hundred dollars.

She had walked into the Foreign Correspondents’ Club with the girl on her hip. Annette Gerhardt watched her as she came up the stairs. The child was barely awake, but she clung to Jessie with a grip like a frightened monkey, scrabbling up and trying to attach herself to her hair.

‘Nice to see you’re alive then. You’ve been on a mission of your own.’

‘I’m sorry I left. You seemed to be managing.’

‘Oh don’t worry about it, we never expected a nurse. You’ve only got half the world’s press banging down the door of this place looking for you. I reported you missing.’

‘God, no. Please don’t tell them I’m here. I don’t want prying eyes.’

‘So what are you going to do with her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jessie said. ‘I haven’t thought really.’ She was
struggling
to hold the child, afraid she might fall from her arms. ‘I’m not giving her away, if that’s what you mean.’

‘But you’ve paid for her, perhaps? Oh I can see it in your face. It’s so obvious, or you would want to be out there in front of the cameras, telling your latest great adventure.’

‘I didn’t think you were a woman who judged others. I thought we were friends.’

‘Friends. Pah. What you have done is a crime.’

‘It was not like that,’ Jessie cried.

‘Like what? An impulsive moment. A rush of blood to the head. When we do good in the world, we have to be committed to it. We either leave it to others or we go on and on, even when it is difficult.’

‘You’re not modest, are you, Annette.’

‘Look at you, look at the child. She needs food and clean clothes. That is what she needs in the next five minutes and you haven’t an
idea how you will provide even those necessities. She’s not a puppy or a kitten. You can’t put her in a basket, you know.’

‘I have a friend who will help me.’

‘Your Mr Messenger. Oh now you are going down a dark tunnel, Miss Sandle. I would take care if I was you.’

One day, in the nursery, when Jessie and Sister Mary Luke were bending over the babies changing their napkins, the nun said, ‘Why don’t you stay here? You’ve never married. You could become a bride of Christ, like us.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ Jessie said, wiping hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘What is harder than this?’

‘I thought you were happy here, Sister.’

The nun crossed herself quickly. ‘I am, but I have children now. Isn’t that what you want too?’

‘You need a better building,’ said Jessie. ‘You need money and equipment.’

‘Bopha needs a mother.’

‘She has several mothers,’ Jessie said dryly. ‘You’d soon get sick of supporting me. I think you need someone to help you keep the children in better conditions.’

The convent moved to a concrete building with tile floors, and an open dormitory with fans on the top floor. Alongside the orphanage stood a small chapel, painted white and adorned with a plain cross, although it was difficult to see in the dust. The rooms in the orphanage were cooler than most in the city, with a sweet dimness that gave them a mysterious feeling. Whenever Jessie entered the convent, as she was to do many times, she was filled with a fulfilment of spirit she had never expected to possess. Sometimes she knelt in the chapel and put her hands together and prayed, even on days when she had gone to a
stupa
and placed incense before an image of Buddha. A slow unravelling had begun to take place within her, of how she had come to be part of this place, and the role she now played in shaping its future. For a long
time she had held to the view that history needed witnesses, and that what she had done when she had lived in the heart of danger and war had a meaning and purpose, that it was more than just adventure. Now that she had given the world stories, it seemed not enough just to tell people what had happened in this uneasy and restless country, now she must be responsible for changing it too, or at least restoring it. She never saw Annette Gerhardt again, but what she had said left its impression — that one must stand by goodness of purpose, not leave it to others. But there was more to it than that. In this wilderness of inscrutable shifting morality, she had had to commit a crime in order to do right, and there was so much she had to learn about reconciling the values of one culture with another. Her own life had been overwhelmed by a tremendous change that had occurred one wet night in a small town halfway across the world. When she was younger, she had held herself responsible in some way for what had taken place at the Violet Café.