Serey’s shrill voice silenced him. ‘Mistah McCue, do you know what age I am?’
McCue sighed. ‘No, lady, I don’t know what age you are.’
‘I am thirty-eight.’ She said it proudly.
And Elliot realized, with a shock, that she was two years younger than himself.
‘I may look old to you. Withered, perhaps. But I still have a mind, and a free spirit. I am not stupid. Which is why I am still alive.’ They heard her shift in the dark, but gently so as not to disturb her children. ‘I survived the slaughter of the educated and intelligent by virtue of my education and intelligence. You cannot for one minute imagine what life was like under the Khmer Rouge. To remain silent when all around you saw only senseless destruction. And yet only in silence was there safety.’
Elliot was surprised by her sudden and unexpected clarity of mind. She had barely spoken in the days since the raid on the commune, except to pursue her dogged insistence that she would not leave Cambodia without her son. There was something compelling in her voice now, a power and intelligence that Elliot had never suspected.
‘In the first year after the Khmer Rouge victory, we were moved around from village to village. We were the new people, those from the cities, regarded with suspicion and often disliked by the ancients, the peasants in whose name the revolution had been made.’ She paused to brush stray wisps of grey hair from her face. ‘After several weeks building small-scale irrigation ditches in the paddies, we were assigned to build a larger canal to bring water from a nearby lake.’ Her remembered frustration was audible in a deep sigh. ‘They made us sleep in the open on mats, without tents, close to the site. We were forced to huddle round fires at night to stay warm and keep away the mosquitoes. Every hour of the day was spent digging. Thousands of us digging — a canal that ran uphill.’
The sarcasm in her tone was acid.
‘The site had not been surveyed, there were no plans, no records. The Khmer Rouge appeared to believe that revolutionary fervour could defeat the laws of physics.’
McCue had ceased sewing, his needle held suspended.
Serey’s voice continued to rise and fall in an oddly monotonous cadence, the hint of an American accent in her nasal tone. ‘The banks of the canal were constructed from loosely piled earth. In the unlikely event that water would someday defy gravity and actually run through it, the banks would simply be washed away. If men and women and children had not been dying all around us from exhaustion and hunger, it would have been laughable.’
They heard her breathing in short, sharp gasps in the dark.
‘One poor brave fool who had, until then, concealed his identity as an engineer tried to tell the Khmer Rouge idiots how it should be done. They paraded him before us at a merit festival. He knew nothing about the revolution, they said, and yet he was trying to tell them what to do. He was the living proof of imperialist arrogance. No doubt he died to prove their point. We never saw him again.’ She paused again, her voice trembling now, choked with emotion.
‘Qualifications, they told us, were saignabat — the invisible signal. All that mattered was physical work, saignakhoeunh — the visible signal. That was tangible. Therein lay honour.’ Elliot realized now it was anger he heard in the scratch of her voice, years of pent-up fury. ‘One listens, one obeys, one says nothing. It takes intelligence to create such evil, stupidity to enforce it. You cannot reason with stupidity.’
Elliot glanced at McCue, who appeared not to be listening. He was staring vacantly into the fading light of the fire.
‘In nineteenth-century Cambodian history there was a sage called Puth,’ Serey went on. ‘Puth prophesied that his country would suffer a dreadful upheaval, that traditional values would be turned on their head, houses and streets would be emptied, the illiterate would condemn the educated. Thmils — infidels — would take absolute power and persecute the priests.’ A tiny shower of sparks burst from the embers of the fire and caught her face briefly in its light, eyes glazed now, lost in painful memory.
‘As an educated woman I might once have poured scorn on such prophecies. But Puth also predicted that the people would be saved if they planted the kapok tree. In Cambodian the word for this tree is kor, which also means “mute”. It was said that only the deaf-mutes would survive this period of chaos. Say nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing.
‘I knew the canal we were digging would never carry water. I said nothing, my children said nothing. We just kept digging.’
From somewhere, perhaps a mile away in the direction of the city centre, came the crackle of automatic fire. A short single burst that was smothered by the night, leaving the silence to be broken again only by the screeching of the cicadas. They sat for so long in the quiet after Serey had finished speaking, that Elliot thought she must have drifted off to sleep. McCue had never stirred. The fire was virtually dead. The brief flare of a match momentarily illuminated the room, sending undefined shadows dancing around the bare walls as Elliot lit a cigarette.
McCue inclined his head a little and turned to look at him. His voice was a hoarse, broken whisper. ‘Whatya gonna tell her old man?’
‘Tell him what I told you.’ Serey’s voice drifted softly across the room, and Elliot peered blindly in the dark in a vain attempt to catch the outline of her face. ‘I don’t expect to see him again.’
McCue’s head drooped forward and he shook it slowly. ‘Guess you win, Elliot.’
But Elliot felt no satisfaction. Only an emptiness. And a desire to sleep.
The sound of voices pierced his restless slumber. Shrill, insistent, argumentative. His eyes flickered open to the hard, painful glare of daylight. He blinked away the grit, but they still stung from the smoke that had filled the room the night before. McCue was sitting back against the wall below the window, the smoke from his cigarette drifting in lazy blue ribbons in the still light.
‘What’s going on?’
McCue’s expressionless glance across the room reflected his indifference. ‘Who knows? They’re all in the garden.’
Elliot rolled over and climbed stiffly to his feet to pick his way through the debris to the back door. Serey and Ny were on their knees, digging with calloused hands in the soft damp earth of what had once been a carefully tended flower bed. Now it was overgrown with weeds and creepers that snagged on their arms and wrists. The boy, Hau, stood defiantly before them, hands on his hips, brows furrowed, anxious and intense, speaking rapidly in a husky high voice. His thin brown legs poked out like sticks from the green canvas of the shorts McCue had made. McCue’s T-shirt hung voluminously from his narrow shoulders, gathered at the waist and tucked into the shorts. He bore little resemblance to the pathetic creature they had found huddled in the back room only twenty-four hours earlier. Children, Elliot thought, had the most extraordinary resilience. And, yet, for all his lack of height, and his meagre twelve years, they were old and knowing eyes that he flicked darkly towards Elliot as he appeared in the doorway. Even more incongruous was the Kalashnikov slung casually across his shoulder. A hand slipped instinctively towards the barrel and held it firm. Ny glanced back over her shoulder, but her mother paid no attention and kept digging.
‘What is it?’ Elliot asked.
Ny said, ‘He want guide you through city tonight, put you on road west. My mamma forbid it.’
‘We could do with a bit of help,’ Elliot said. ‘If the boy knows the way...’
‘You can find your own way!’ Serey’s voice was sharp and hostile, but she did not stop digging.