THE VILLAGE OF DEAD CHILDREN
The dead had invaded Carter's home. He tried to leave them in the
morgue, but they persisted in overrunning his kitchen, his courtyard, his shed.
They did little, content to lie where they had fallen or been laid, but their
presence was torment enough.
He woke on the first day of a two-week
break, wanting nothing more than to read a biography of Orwell. Opening his
eyes, he scratched the stubble that coated his angular chin and tried to count
time to the metronome of his throbbing head. He seemed thus far to be alone.
Crawling from his tumbled bed, he slid open the wardrobe door and saw the beaten
six-year-old who had crept away to hide with his concussed brain and blackened
eyes. There he lay, curled among the shoes, thumb still in his mouth and a faded
plush elephant clutched to his ribs. A low moan of pain leaked from
Carter's chest. Shutting the wardrobe door gently, he left the room
wearing only his striped pyjama bottoms.
In the hall outside the bedroom
door slumped the old lady who had died on the anniversary of her husband's
death. The whole office had been convinced she was a suicide, but a stroke had
laid her low. He stepped over the house-coated figure; her thin, spotted legs
stuck out at an awkward angle and ended in rubber-soled puffs of pink
fleece.
In his bath sat the curly-haired blonde, naked in a rosé
wash of her own blood. She had the sweet face and pallor of a Rossetti angel.
Some man must have caused it all, he supposed. 'God, we're
bastards,' he muttered before washing his face and combing the fur from
his tongue with his toothbrush. He stared into the mirror, at his own grey
complexion and shadow-sunken grey eyes, then looked back at the bath. This time
it was empty, which cheered him a little. He decided to make tea.
But
lying on her side in front of the fridge was the wife who had broken the yolk of
one of her husband's frying eggs. Her pinched face was as one sleeping,
but the back of her head was a flattened mess and spilled orange juice lay
around her in a sticky pool. Clenching his teeth, Carter forced himself jerkily
toward the sink. He took down a mug with wavering hands and filled the kettle.
It was a good minute before he realised that it was full and water was bubbling
into the sink. Aside from the corpses that littered the place, Carter
kept a clean house. He washed his dishes of an evening; scrubbed his bathroom
with bleach; never left underwear on the floor, newspapers on the kitchen table
or petrie dishes of leftovers in the fridge. The house itself was single-fronted
and built like a train, with all the rooms down the north side and a hall on the
south. Study, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, it went, ending at the back in a
lounge room with French doors. Outside was a paved courtyard and a brick shed.
The previous owners, not Carter, had renovated it, but they had divorced soon
after the work was finished. Or so the real estate agent had told him, hoping,
possibly, for the trust that confidentiality can inspire in the unthinking.
Carter hadn't really cared; he liked the house and the
area.
'A good thing they chose not to build, then,' he
remarked. 'If renovation drove them to divorce, the strains of building
may have incited them to murder and then I may have met one or both of them
professionally.' He smiled pleasantly at the agent.
But these were
the days before the dead began to dog him, the days when his sense of humour,
dark and dry, had been enough protection. He was detached then, comfortable with
the dead. If he felt anything, it was a cool curiosity and the desire to find
out what had killed the person who lay before him. He suspected that people
thought he was a bit of a cold bastard, but sensitive types tended not to last
long in forensic pathology. Pity could paralyse. His colleagues called him
Cutter, and the police and lawyers had all followed suit. Everyone loves a
nickname, and it had secretly pleased him. It was a long time since anyone but
his father had called by his first name, Nick. 'Cutter' was even the
name he used to berate or congratulate himself. He was his job and his job was
him; he was a perfect circle. The water boiled, and he poured some into
his mug. The teabag puffed up and bobbed unobligingly about the surface like a
flotation device. He added two sugars without spilling any, of course. His
grandmother used to tell him that spilled sugar meant joy to come. Carter
took his tea onto the terrace. The bare vines twining the verandah let in the
sunlight, but it was thin and diluted at this time of year. He crossed his long
legs, ankle on knee, and the bricks felt chill and clammy to his naked sole. He
took a sip from his mug and thought for a moment about weak tea. He had always
considered it a serious character flaw to prefer second-hand leaves, or worse
still, to dunk the bag only once in the water and call the result brewed.
Really, he preferred tea made in a pot, but did not like having to remove the
soggy mass of leaves afterwards. A Murray magpie flew into the yard,
uttering his pealing cry. Carter blinked and turned his head, half-surprised to
find something alive in his charnel house. And having looked, he could ignore
them no longer. Forty-four draped figures lay, neatly ranked in rows of eleven,
nearly filling his narrow yard. Thirty-four of the bundles stopped short, as
though they contained the bodies of the dismembered, but it was worse: not one
of those thirty-four motley shrouds hid a child over ten. An ugly pall of
burning had settled about the yard and the smell worked its way deep into his
sinuses. From a slight tremor, Carter's hands began to shake like
those of a Parkinson's sufferer. He dropped his mug, but hardly noticed
the mess of china and tea on the bricks. His hands hovered ineffectually for a
moment before clasping his head; he began to rock gently in his seat. He
had been on holiday in Cambodia, desperate to see the temples at Angkor without
a tour group, despite the supposed dangers of the road. Along the way, he had
stopped to rest in a small village before Siem Reap and was thinking of his
midday meal when he heard the explosion. An old DC10, damned by its cargo, had
fallen from the sky and pushed its way through the jungle, into the little
school. Snatching his medical kit, Carter had run all the way to the crash
scene, following terrified locals towards the spiral of black that stained the
sky. An acrid fog filled the square around the school, and orange flames
snatched and tore at all they could reach. The ground was strewn with
disintegrated and charred wood and metal and with smashed vegetation from the
jungle, but no bodies. White bricks were also scattered about, smouldering and
bubbling in their plastic wrappings, and Carter realised that the bricks were
heroin. He seemed briefly to have gone deaf, but his hearing returned with a
roar, and his ears as well as his eyes were suddenly filled with the horror of
that afternoon: screams of terror and pain, parents howling their
children's names. The houses nearby began to catch and men tried to
fight the fire, but there was little hope. It was a tiny place without mains
water, and only the hiss of the afternoon rain finally stilled the flames.
Silently, Carter treated minor burns, irritated eyes, smoke inhalation, shock
and more shock; none of the people on the plane or in the school would be
saved. Forty-four bodies were brought from the seething ruin. Carter
picked over the soggy, charred ground, looking for body parts. There were the
children; two local teachers; three young backpackers from Australia who had
been volunteering at the school; the elderly sweeper woman; a man cycling home
for lunch; and three bodies which must have belonged to the plane and which
turned out to be those of Lao men. Forty-four bodies, all crushed and burned and
shredded in forty-four ways. It occurred to Carter, as he marked the place where
a blackened foot had rested, that the ruined heroin had still managed to claim
its quota of lives. The bodies were laid in a shed behind the medical
clinic and covered with whatever people could spare: sarongs, table clothes,
sheets. One woman even brought a western-style satin wedding dress, but was
persuaded that it was not large enough to serve the purpose. The local doctor
looked helplessly at the bodies, not knowing where to start. He had never
performed an autopsy, and they were rarely done even in Phnom Penh. Carter did
his best to number the bodies and photograph them, hopeless as it all seemed.
Parents and relatives gathered around the sad bundles, rocking on their
haunches, keening softly, hugging themselves and each other.
Carter could
not bear to watch and instead sat outside, chain-smoking strong Asian
cigarettes. The villagers knew from the man who ran his guest house what he did
for a living, and the pretty brown-skinned women and their husbands came to
where he sat. He spoke no Khmer and few of them spoke English, but their
pain-dulled eyes were enough to tell him that they were begging to know which
draped figure to mourn. He could only shake his head wretchedly and say,
'Not yet,' hoping they would understand. He didn't even know
whether all the bodies would be identified, nor whether DNA testing could be
done here. The adults would likely be identified, but the children? He sighed
deeply and kneaded his forehead.
The morning after the crash, with the
foul smell of burning still hanging in the warm, wet air, people arrived from
Phnom Penh. They were mostly Cambodian, but several, including a Canadian
forensic pathologist, were attached to the UN, and others came from the
Australian Embassy. There were those among them who had worked on uncovering the
secrets of the killing fields, but they gratefully accepted Carter's offer
of help with the awful task at hand. Full autopsies were out of the question,
but the sweeper had to be separated from the Australians, the cyclist from the
traffickers. The days following the crash were the worst Carter had ever
known. He and the Canadian worked hour after hour, stopping only to force down a
little food and to lie, wakeful, in their beds for a few hours of each
monkey-wild, insect-crazed night. They ran against time and the tropical heat;
within a day, the conditions were nightmarish. Carter had always worked
in a clean, spare morgue cooled and ventilated by strong fans and cleansed of
flies by the humming blue bug catchers. This makeshift theatre in a village with
no hospital made him wonder into which circle of Dante's hell he had been
cast. In four days, he had worked on twenty-four bodies, including nineteen of
the children and all three of the Australians. At first, the heroin had made the
police and other government officials watch closely during the examination of
the men, but they were sickened and soon fled.
Carter knew that things
were bad when he started from a few minutes' sweat-drenched sleep to find
a small, blackened body lying clenched in the corner of his room. His stomach
lurched and he managed to get outside before being ill. Water ran from his eyes
and an odd noise was in his ears. After a moment, he released that he was
sobbing, 'Oh Christ, oh Christ!' He retched until he had nothing
left to lose, but still the little body accused him.
When the dead had
been examined and measured, and the samples taken in the hope of science, only
the backpackers, the old sweeper woman and the cyclist had been identified. The
bodies of the locals were cremated and those of the foreigners taken by
refrigerated truck to Phnom Penh. Carter felt for the Australians who would soon
arrive to take their daughters home, but the children gave him the most
grief.
The whole village had been at the cremations, and by the time the
monks' rhythmic chanting was finished, Carter felt numb. He found he no
longer had any wish to see Angkor. Nevertheless, he forced himself back onto
his
rented motorbike and along the road to Siem Reap in the hope of finding some
sort of absolution at the ancient site. The green jungle and weathered,
lichen-dappled stone soothed his tired eyes, but did nothing for his tortured
mind. Not even the serene stone faces of Bayon could help. Bad river fish got
the better of him and, finally, he flew home, thin, hollow-eyed and still
sweaty-pale. He felt as though he had been crushed beneath the heel of
God's boot.
At home, he was given counselling, leave and sleeping
pills. His friends and colleagues encouraged him to talk, and newspaper hacks
were desperate to tell his story, but he gave up talking about the village after
the second counsellor left in tears. The crash victims had been with him since
that first night, and he would come upon them in unlikely places: his
doctor's waiting room, the supermarket, a service station, the men's
room in a pub. Sometimes there would be only one; sometimes all of them would
assail him at once. Returning to work seemed like a sensible idea, and at
first Carter found some peace in the windowless morgue with its orderly glass
cabinets of instruments, its white butchers' gumboots and its disinfectant
scent. The dead left him alone here. He was assigned no autopsies for the first
week and spent three days of the second in a murder trial, mostly being pecked
at by a shrewish defence. His first new case gave him little trouble, or
so he thought when he finished the autopsy. This was the sad young man who had
hung himself and who now creaked gently from a rafter in Carter's shed.
For four days, Carter had not known that the man was there, but then a washer
needed changing and he had gone to fetch a wrench. The sight of the compressed
neck and purplish tongue sent Carter staggering back to the house, the leaking
tap forgotten. In his study, he dashed four fingers of bourbon into a glass and
drank it without breath. He gasped like a drowning carp and wiped sweat from his
forehead. Would every case the Cutter cut now move into his home to reproach
him? He soon found that it was not only his house that the dead would
colonise. The massive old gum tree at the end of his street acquired a crumpled
car and its teenaged thief; the other end of the road displayed a cyclist run
down and dragged by a drunk driver. Only the Cambodians seemed able to follow
him anywhere. Except, of course, the morgue. Because they belonged there, the
dead perversely refused to enter.
To get some peace, Carter began to
sleep on the hard couch in his office. He tried desperately to psychoanalyse
himself, too afraid to return to one of the counsellors or seek out a
psychiatrist, but he found no answers. Suddenly, it was all taken out of his
hands by Rafferty, his boss. Early one morning, Rafferty walked into the
men's room to find Carter shirtless and partially daubed with shaving
cream. What else could he do but confess? Rafferty's eyebrows rose almost
to his hairline and he suggested two weeks' leave and another counsellor.
Rafferty had been kind and very concerned, but Carter winced as he imagined the
other man going home to his wife, pouring scotch and saying, 'He sees dead
people.'
Nevertheless, he had gone to the counsellor and then to a
psychiatrist, a petite woman named Lou who wore expensively-streaked hair and
gypsy earrings. She had an alert, intelligent face and listened quietly as he
spoke of lapping flames and wild animal screeches in the delirious jungle
night.
'Is there anyone here now?' she asked,
finally.
'No, not now, but they plague me at home and on the
street,' he said dully. A jolt of fear rushed through him and he started
to his feet. 'What in God's name am I going to do?' he cried.
'We don't get involved in our cases. We're supposed to be
immune. This is what I am, all that I am and probably all that I ever will
be! How can I do my work and be myself if the dead won't let me rest?
I do my
best for them, and I have done for twelve years. In the past they've
had the decency to leave me be to do my work,' he said, his voice trailing
away. He was silent for a moment. 'I don't believe in ghosts,'
he said imploringly, sinking back into his chair.
The psychiatrist patted
his arm and told him that relaxation techniques could help post-traumatic shock
victims. Carter listened as she explained breathing exercises and elementary
meditation. He went home and found that her methods worked quite nicely in
combination with a half bottle of bourbon and three sleeping pills. And
there he was, sitting in his pyjama bottoms on his terrace, surrounded by
corpses and china shards and spilled tea, no closer to ridding himself of his
uninvited guests but a good deal nearer to alcoholism. He returned to the
psychiatrist. 'Why do you think the children worry you more than
any other case you've had, Carter?' she asked
him. 'Perhaps because there were so many and they were so badly
damaged,' he said, looking out the window into Lou's garden. A fat
orange cat slept in the sun as sparrows hopped about the
lawn. 'Over the years, how many autopsies have you
done?' 'Hundreds. Maybe more than a thousand. I've
never kept tally.' 'That's a lot of people. But none of
them has ever returned to you, and I'm sure some of them would have died
terribly.' 'Yes, but I've never had so many at
once,' Carter said slowly. The cat twitched, running in its dreams.
'I've never heard them still screaming as they
died.' 'No one could have saved them,' she reminded
him. 'I know.' 'Are you sure that there
isn't something else?' Lou said, leaning towards him. 'You
said that you were hoping for absolution at Angkor
Wat.' 'Yes, for not being able to save them. But
also...' He paused. 'Also for not being able to identify them. The
Australians, we whipped them away in a clean, refrigerated van because the
embassy people were there and westerners have a right to bury their dead and to
know that they have the right body. We took the samples from all of the bodies,
but I knew that no one would be paying to do DNA tests on those little children.
It was as though the villagers' pain was worth less, and I was partly
responsible for it. Every one of those poor mothers wanted me to take a little
body and put it in her arms and say, "This is your child."
Instead, they have a graveyard with numbers rather than names, and little hope
of ever calling one of those numbers theirs. God, it was too much like what the
Khmer Rouge did. Did you know that when they sent people to the killing fields,
no one was allowed to be called by their name?' He looked at Lou
with furrowed brows and found her watching him, solemn and quiet. He understood,
at last, what he had to do. The next day, Carter began to make phone
calls. The dead seemed to know his plans and did not visit as
often. Planes and visas and long service leave were all arranged easily
enough, and within ten days, Carter found himself standing in Phnom Penh's
airport. He breathed the conditioned air and thought that the green smell of
South-East Asia was something that never left a person. Familiar as a
lover's sweat, it was a background to every other smell the East had to
offer, from spices to open drains. He checked into a hotel in town and slept for
ten hours, emerging into a rain-wet evening to eat hawker noodles and drink beer
from bottles running with condensation. Ignoring the prostitutes who called him
John, he returned alone to his room and slept again beneath a slow-turning
ceiling fan. The next day, he started towards Siem Reap once more. He had
a rented motorcycle, a big old army bike that had probably carried a family of
five in a past incarnation, and which had sturdy suspension for the rough roads.
No one wore a helmet here, despite the frenetic, bicycle-clogged traffic, so
Carter followed suit, riding with the wind pushing its moist fingers into his
hair. He was as close to happy as he had been in months, lulled by the rough
baritone hum of the bike. He was travelling with only a rucksack of clothes and
two saddlebags; and the dead, of course. In the afternoon, he stopped on
the outskirts of the jungle-fringed village and turned off the bike's
engine. He sat for a few minutes, listening to the unseen birds squawk in the
trees, waiting to feel something: terror, panic, nausea, anything. Instead,
there was that nascent sense of peace again. He wiped away the sweat that had
collected in the stubble under his lip and restarted the bike. He
returned to the same guest house as last time, and the owner's children
rushed up to him. 'Dr Nick! Dr Nick!' they clamoured, all white
teeth and merry brown eyes. Carter shook the boys' hands solemnly and the
little ones gaggled happily away to fetch their father. This family had been
lucky: the children went to school in the afternoon, not the
morning. Carter settled himself into the same room in which he had slept
on his last visit. He unpacked papers and the equipment he would need, laying
everything methodically on the table in the corner. This done, he went to speak
to the owner: he needed a translator. Languages had never come easily to him,
and with the best will in the world, he could barely pronounce the names of some
of the people he had to visit. Sokhem was a quiet, thin young man in his
early 30s who spoke beautiful English and French, as well as Khmer, Vietnamese,
Thai and a few dialects. He was university-educated, and had worked for the
government, but had returned to his home village a month or so before. Now, he
made a living from repairing bicycles and doing a little guide work when the
opportunity presented. Carter did not ask, but he had the feeling that the move
had been caused by political difficulties. 'Do you have
family?' Carter asked the younger man as they sat on the guest house
verandah, drinking Tiger beer. 'No,' Sokhem said, in a
matter-of-fact voice. 'The Khmer Rouge tortured them all. Even my sister,
Sopath, who was seven, and my grandmother died. My whole family was hiding in
the a rice paddy in the dark, and I was the only one they did not find. They
took them away, and I never saw them again while they were alive, but I have
seen their photos on the wall of the dead in the torture prison at Tuol
Sleng.' 'I'm sorry,' Carter said
uselessly. 'Yes, so am I,' Sokhem said with a sad smile.
'But this happened to so many. You see how few older people there are
here? Khmer Rouge killed and killed until there was hardly anyone left. They
would tie a man's hands together with only a thread, and if the thread
snapped while he marched, then he would be killed. They would kill a child
because his mother hugged him. Khmer Rouge would say that there was no profit
for them whether someone lived or died. When the killing was over, many Khmer
Rouge went back to their old lives, as though nothing had happened, living next
door to relatives of the people they murdered. 'The man on the
bicycle who died when the plane crashed? He was Khmer Rouge once. Veha, your
host, he says this man killed his parents. But what could he do? Veha is a good
man and would not take a life in vengeance. But that man has finally paid for
what he did. He is surely a hungry ghost now.' 'A hungry
ghost?' 'Yes, people who have died violently or accidentally,
they cannot rest. Cambodia is a country of ghosts,' Sokhem said. Carter
felt a chill skitter over his skin, raising the hairs as it
went. 'What do hungry ghosts do?' he asked. 'If
one does not keep them happy, they will haunt you, or cause misfortune,'
Sokhem said with a few quick nods. 'Every year, in September, there is a
Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the gates of hell open and let them out. We make
offerings so that they will not haunt us, and instead will choose to return
before the gates close. Of course, this is done in many Buddhist countries, but
Khmer are particularly conscious of spirits.' Carter nodded, but
the chill had come upon him, despite the jungle heat, and it would not be
shaken. He had returned to a land thick with shadows to try to exorcise his own.
What right had he to peace, anyway? How many of the people of this village, with
their murdered families and incinerated children, had peace? He finished his
beer in one bitter gulp, arranged to meet Sokhem the next morning, and went to
his room. Lying on the hard, clean bed, he tried to read Heart of
Darkness, a book he had packed in a moment of irony. Suddenly the dead were
crowding in on him, and though he held the book close to his face to block them
out, the smell of burning was strong. The morning broke hot and wet, the
air a damp towel that wrapped itself about Carter's head and chest,
moulding itself to his bones and working wet threads into his lungs. He bought
cigarettes and sucked greedily at the fierce, black tobacco as though it could
dry him out. Sokhem looked at Carter's mauve-shadowed eyes, but said
nothing. At the first house they visited, when Sokhem had explained why
they were there, to Carter's utter misery, the young mother threw herself
on the floor in front of him, sobbing and thanking him at the same time. At
house after tiny wooden house, the farm workers, noodle sellers, seamstresses
and market gardeners who had lost their children sat before him, listening in
silence or in tears. In the end they all gave the samples that Carter needed to
tell them which sad little grave was theirs. After nearly seven days of
visits, and nights of work to prepare and preserve his samples, Carter had
enough to take back with him and compare with what the Canadian forensic
pathologist had sent him. He would do the tests himself; he knew how, but if he
found he didn't know enough, then he'd pay to have them done. On the
evening of the seventh day, he and Sokhem were sitting in the same cane chairs
on Veha's verandah, bottles of beer in their hands. Mosquitos hummed in
the tropical darkness and giant moths swatted the light with their dusty wings.
A jewel-bright beetle landed with a thud on Carter's boot toe, before
creaking away into the heavy night. Carter felt as though he had ashes on his
tongue and that no amount of beer could be enough to wash them away. He had
expected, hoped, that the peace he had begun to feel when he first returned
might have taken hold by now, but the dead would still not let him
rest. 'Dr Nick.' Carter had given up saying, 'Nick,
just Nick,' as everyone in the village insisted on calling him ‘Dr
Nick'. 'Yes?' 'Why are you doing
this?' Sokhem asked, swatting a mosquito and flicking away the corpse.
'I know you want to help these families, but why are you
doing this?' Away in the night, a monkey screamed and Carter wondered
absently about tigers. 'A lot of reasons,' he said finally.
'Guilt and selfishness are the two big ones, I
suppose.' 'You did not cause the plane to crash,'
Sokhem said, puzzled. 'What part of this guilt can be
yours?' 'I couldn't identify them at the time,'
Carter said. 'The foreigners were identified, even the man whom you say
was Khmer Rouge, and the drug smugglers. Those children come from families so
poor that they have little but their names. The parents had nothing, no
grave of their own to grieve over. I didn't like it, but I accepted it.
"No money for that," they told me. "This is a poor
country." I went home, expecting to feel better in time, but the children
came with me. They won't leave me.' 'Ah, Dr Nick, for
you the gates of hell do not shut,' said Sokhem. 'I know a man who
can help you, a kru. You come with me.' He put aside his empty
bottle and stood up. 'I'm not a Buddhist, Sokhem,'
Carter said wearily. 'I barely even believe in my own
god.' 'This man won't mind, you'll
see.' Carter pulled himself to his feet, leaving his half-drunk
beer paddling in its own sweaty pool. It was not his first, his second, nor even
his third. He had lost count and felt more than a little drunk as he followed
Sokhem. Nhean had been a monk once, but now he was a sort of shaman who
could heal and who knew about ghosts, and was much respected in the village,
Sokhem explained. Nhean shaved his head and wore small wire-framed glasses; his
broad brown face ended in a surprisingly pointed chin. He was in his 50s and had
his own tale of survival. The Khmer Rouge had done their best to wipe out the
monks along with the country's intelligentsia. Nhean's pagoda had
been razed and he and his brother monks forced to work as manual labourers; he
still bore on his back the scars of the beatings. But he, at least, had survived
where so many other monks had died. The kru listened in silence as
Carter explained his trouble. The three men sat in Nhean's kitchen, on a
mismatched trio of wooden stools. Like so many others in the village, this hut
was dark and smelled strongly of incense. A small shrine in the corner held a
statue of the Buddha, some flowers and little candles with flames that were
strangely still in the unmoving air. Shelves on one wall carried jars of herbs
and powders and other vaguely sinister things that Carter didn't want to
identify: bones and fungus and who knew what else to heal the sick and banish
the dead. It all swam before Carter's eyes as he spoke, each thing he
focussed on becoming the centre of a slowly-swirling pond and adding to the
dream-like feel of the night. He finished his story and waited for Nhean
to speak, but the man continued to look at him intently, head tilted, almost the
way a cat will watch a lizard. He began to wonder if Sokhem had set him
up. 'But then you probably think I'm a farang taking
too many drugs,' Carter said lightly, ready to leave. 'And
are you?' 'Well, yes, but I can't do anything about
being foreign and I'm only taking what the doctors give me,' he said
dryly. Unsmiling, Nhean stood and began to scrounge in a long, narrow
wooden box from one of the shelves. It looked like a coffin for a
leg. 'Come back, see me tomorrow, and I have what you need,'
Nhean said without turning. 'Until then, you burn incense and offer food
to the dead.' Carter frowned, unsure as to whether he had just been
dismissed. Sokhem thanked Nhean formally and bowed to the older
man's back. Jerking his head towards the door, he indicated that Carter
should follow him. 'What do I need?' Carter asked as soon as
they were out of the closeness of the wooden shack. 'An amulet,
probably,' Sokhem said. 'Look, I wear one myself.' He twitched
something from under his shirt, and looking closely, Carter saw it was a curved
claw suspended on a red string. 'It is for good luck and protection
against bullets.' 'Has it worked?' 'So
far, not shot,' Sokhem said, raising one arched brow. 'People here
believe that the kru can create a magical link between an amulet and its
owner. Worth more to you that way than an amulet you just buy from the market,
even if it is blessed by a monk. Don't worry, Dr Nick, he will help
you.' The next morning the two men went to the village shrine with
flowers and mangoes and sandalwood sticks. Carter arranged the offerings
carefully and lit the incense, feeling like a fraud, while Sokhem said the
prayers. Towards midday, they returned to Nhean, who presented Carter
with a tiny carved stone Buddha on a piece of leather thong. Carter accepted the
little figure humbly, pressing his palms together and bowing as Sokhem had shown
him, while Nhean kept up a rhythmic chant which sounded to Carter's
foreign ears disturbingly like the funeral dirges. Of course, the dead
did not leave him immediately. They were still with him when he took his leave
of the village and returned home. They were still with him when he did some of
the DNA tests himself and paid for the rest to be done by someone more expert.
They were there when he built a little shrine in his courtyard using mossy rocks
and a small bronze Buddha; but gradually, he found that they were with him less
often. In time, he was able to give names to all of the children, and he found
himself going days without seeing a corpse in his house. While he never found
religion, he did find a measure of quiet and was able to return to work without
accumulating fresh shades. 'And what do you think happened?'
the psychiatrist asked him when he returned to her for a final
visit. 'To tell you the truth, Lou, I really have no idea.
I'm a scientist, and I hope that logic was what saved me from a nervous
breakdown, but I always wear the amulet,' Carter said with a small shrug.
'Sokhem told me that Buddhism has nine truths, and one of them is that
life is suffering.' From time to time, mostly when he was tired or
under pressure, Carter would smell the mingled scents of charred flesh, burnt
wood and humidity. Sometimes he would find a few of the exotically draped
corpses lying in his courtyard, but they were less solid and had stopped
clamouring for his attention. And besides, he had grown almost fond of them.
|
