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