The boy plunged the needle, released the opium and flipped the bowl over the flame. The General eased her gently towards the outstretched pipe till her lips touched the ivory mouthpiece. The boy held it patiently as she took her first tentative draw, breathing it in as the General had told her. At once the smoke burned the back of her throat and she choked in a fit of coughing. The General held her firmly. ‘Again. Don’t be afraid, it will be easier this time.’ Her mouth and nostrils were filled by a musty, sweet taste, her throat still burning. She drew again and this time felt the smoke filling her lungs. And as she slowly exhaled, a soft relaxing wave seemed to break over her. ‘Again,’ the General’s voice was softly urging. She drew a third and fourth time before exhausting the opium and lying back, filled with a wonderful warm sense of euphoria. She closed her eyes, hardly aware of the General gently lifting her to lay her out along the length of the bed. Weightlessly she drifted back through space. Falling. Flying. Free.
When, finally, she opened her eyes the room seemed oddly cool. She shifted her head a little to one side. The oil lamp had been doused and the houseboy was gone. A hand turned her head back to face front, and soft wet lips pressed against hers, a tongue forcing them apart, flicking into her mouth. Panic rose in her throat. ‘No,’ she said, turning her face to one side, and the sound of her refusal seemed to come from very far off. She tried to push the General away, but her arms had no strength. ‘No,’ she said again, hearing the urgency in her own voice now. But it was all too late.
Chapter Thirty-One
The rain raised a fine spray like mist from the river in the first grey light of dawn. It battered on the tin roofs of the buildings all along the wharf, filling the air with a constant drumming, drowning the slow chug-chug of the launch as it nosed its way gingerly into a deserted berth. The docks had a haunted air, eerie in the half-light, devoid of any sign of human existence.
McCue crouched, dripping, on the roof of the cabin, supporting himself on the machine-gun mounting and peering keenly through the saturated gloom. For a moment he tensed as he thought he saw a movement beyond the dark shadows of the empty sheds, then relaxed as he realized it was only a skinny scavenging dog nosing its way through the debris in search of food.
There was a jarring bump, and a grinding of wood against concrete, as the launch came to rest against the wharf. The engine coughed and was silent, and McCue saw Elliot emerge from the cabin, crouching as he ran through the rain to the forward section of the boat to gather up the coiled painter. The Englishman glanced back at McCue, who nodded once and watched as Elliot leaped on to the quay and quickly wound the painter around a rusting metal capstan. Elliot now dropped to a crouch, swinging his M16 into readiness, and glanced around him. McCue jumped down on to the deck. Two pairs of frightened eyes peered back at him out of the gloom of the cabin.
‘Right,’ he whispered. He heaved his pack on to his shoulder and lifted a second. Ny already had Slattery’s pack firmly strapped to her back. They were heavy, stuffed with as many of the boat’s provisions as they could carry. McCue flicked his head towards the door. Supporting her mother on her arm, Ny moved out into the rain and headed forward towards the sodden red flag of the defeated Khmer Rouge.
Elliot waited with outstretched arm to help the two women on to the quay, M16 pointing up toward the leaden sky. Ny looked around in the growing light. She remembered the last time she had stood on this quay, with her mother and father and Hau, one family among thousands waiting to board the boats that would take them across the river to the Royal Palace to celebrate the Fêtes des Eaux; a colourful happy crowd, noisy and excited. Elliot touched her arm. ‘We’ll follow you.’
She nodded. He swung his pack on to his back, gripping her upper arm firmly, and the four moved off through the falling rain, passing beyond the vacant, dripping sheds, west towards the centre of the city, unaware that less than ten kilometres to the south the leading Vietnamese divisions were already on the move and would be here in a matter of hours.
Serey hobbled along behind, struggling to keep up, clinging to McCue’s arm, half dragged, half carried by him. The hard paving felt odd beneath her feet after the years of soft mud squelching between her toes in the paddies. Even the smell of the city seemed strange, though it was different now — not as she remembered it. There was a stink of decay carried in the air by the rain, like stale cooking and rusted metal. All around them lay the carcasses of war: tanks burned out by the victorious Khmer Rouge in ’75, jeeps overturned, APCs with noses buried in the walls of buildings. Drab, rain-streaked apartments loomed overhead, gaping windows staring down like sightless eyes, doorways smashed in like so many missing teeth in a sad smile.
She hardly knew where they were. Up ahead she caught glimpses of Ny pointing uncertainly, the tense figure of Elliot urging her forward, clinging to the shadows of empty buildings, hesitating at every junction. And always, the voice of the American whispering close to her ear, coaxing, encouraging. On, on. Somewhere, far off to the west, the distant crump of an artillery shell increased the urgency. Serey found it difficult to breathe, a pain tightening across her chest, legs buckling as her head swam. Daylight had grown around them almost without their noticing, the ghost of the city emerging from the shadow of night to reveal its full horror. It was unreal, like some flickering monochrome image from an old movie. This was not her home. She didn’t know this place.
Almost as suddenly as it had begun, nearly twelve hours before, the rain stopped, and the tropical sun rent a great chasm in the dark sky, lining black clouds with gold. The streets were immediately awash in soft light shimmering and reflecting from every wet surface to create the illusion of a newly painted world in which the paint had not yet dried. The sticky humidity gave way to a scorching heat that burned their skin, and they felt naked and exposed. Steam rose like smoke from the wet streets, and from their sodden clothing.
They emerged into a large, empty square, and Serey gasped as though struck by a blow. On one side, the station towered above them, an imposing facade crumbling from years of neglect. A row of tumbledown apartment buildings led her eyes to a vast open space the size of a football pitch, incongruous, like a piece missing from a jigsaw. Mist rose in clouds from rainwater gathered across it in great pools. McCue put an arm round her waist to keep her on her feet.
‘What is it?’ But she could not speak and he followed her gaze.
‘The cathedral,’ she whispered at last. ‘It is gone.’ She remembered seeing it as a child, vast and imposing, a monumental stone edifice to a strange God. It had dominated the centre of the city, built by the French colons in the Thirties, the symbol of civilizing Catholic colonialism. How could it be gone? It had seemed for ever. And yet not a stone remained.
Serey’s head dropped. If the cathedral was gone, what hope of finding her son in this bedevilled place? She had known all along that he would not be here. Hope had remained alive only for as long as Phnom Penh had seemed an impossible goal. She felt her heart wither inside her. A soft hand on her arm raised her eyes to see a reflection of herself twenty-five years ago, and she recognized the same hopelessness in the eyes. ‘We are almost there. We must not give up now.’ The hope in Ny’s voice belied the desolation she felt.
The crump of artillery shells came again from the west, but closer now. Somewhere out towards the airport.
Elliot’s voice was strained. ‘We must keep going.’
Ny led them on past the site where the cathedral had stood, along a tree-lined avenue leading to a tree-covered hillock, Le Phnom, from which the city had taken its name. They hurried by a tall, crenellated building that had been the country’s most famous and celebrated hotel, Le Royal, renamed Le Phnom after the Lon Nol coup in 1970. Once, French colons and their stagiaires, planters and tourists, had sat on its grand terraces sipping Chablis and dining on fabulous fish from the Mekong. Now those same terraces gazed out on the avenue with dilapidated indifference as the stricken group limped by: an Englishman and an American, and two Cambodians who were survivors of a holocaust even the Nazis could not have imagined. Fleetingly, Elliot wondered if the French colonizers on their mission to ‘civilize’ this country a century before could ever have dreamt of such things. History had a power and will of its own which could not be predicted. Only in retrospect could understanding be found, and sometimes not even then.