The Edge Of Darkness

1. The Widow

Dani Stricker crossed the Paradeplatz and walked down the Planken, towards Mannheim’s historic water tower. It was an old tradition. With Harald, she’d walked down the city’s shopping mile every Saturday afternoon, no matter what the weather had been like. For twenty years.

The Cambodian woman frequently remembered her arrival in Mannheim in 1981. The shops had dazzled her and she’d thought that the fountain in front of the Kaufhof, the biggest mall in town, sprayed liquid gold instead of water into the air. She’d been sure of it. The people, the Germans, they were huge. And rich. Today she could see the differences in incomes and lifestyles, but in those early months, she’d almost believed that money grew on trees in Germany. Of course, money didn’t grow on trees anywhere, unless you owned the tree. She knew that now.

Everything had been strange. Dani had never seen a tram, never mind an escalator. Such things did not exist in Cambodia. In the supermarket, she’d been overwhelmed by the enormous variety of cats and dogs available in tins, which crowded the shelves of an entire aisle. The first pretzel that Harald had bought her had tasted disgusting. She’d felt she was going to suffocate on the heavy, salty dough. But she’d forced herself to eat it anyway, for Harald.

As scary and foreign as her new home had been then, she had not wanted to return to Cambodia. There, death lived in the rice fields and would be able to find her people in their flimsy huts even a hundred years from now, to drag them from their homes into the darkness and make them vanish forever. Dani had been homesick, but she’d understood even then that the country she called home no longer existed. No one returned from the long night that had covered Cambodia like a suffocating blanket for decades. Only ghosts flourished in the rice paddies. Harald had saved her life. Harald was Dani’s hero. Everything she had seen and learned in the past twenty years had come from Harald. And now, Harald was dead.

Sometimes, they’d taken the tram from the city centre to Harald’s house in Käfertal. Sometimes she’d taken the tram into town all by herself, as Harald hadn’t been keen on public transport. She’d never learned to drive. Now she really needed the tram, was dependent on it for the first time in her life. Now she was alone. She would sell the BMW straight away.

Dani boarded a Number 4 in front of the water tower. An inspector silently took her ticket, looked at it with deliberate, antagonistic care and handed it back, having switched his expression to trained boredom. A couple of rows behind Dani, two youths with coloured hair and buttons in their ears raised their voices against the police state. After the funeral, she’d put the car in the local newspaper and hope for a buyer.

The tram slowly passed the city cemetery. Harald had died on October 11th, just a week ago. The poplar leaves blew around the pavement like shiny, copper-coloured bank notes. That looked pretty disorderly by Mannheim’s standards, but a municipal employee would soon come with a machine and hoover the leaves out of this world and into another.

One day, Dani’s coffin would be laid to rest here as well, thousands of miles from home. She’d promised Harald. Nevertheless, the idea of a burial remained unsettling. How would she fare in the next life if she was not cremated? But promises had to be kept. She’d learnt that as a young girl, working alongside her mother on the family’s farm. Without keeping promises, life wasn’t worth a thing. It wasn’t worth much anyway.

Her parents and her sister hadn’t been cremated either. She dreamed that if she returned to Cambodia, she would be able to locate the mass grave in which they’d been dumped. Her contact had suggested starting some investigations, but Dani had turned his offer down. Too many old bones belonging to too many people lay in those graves and she would never really be certain.

Her mobile rang. The foreign number. The call Dani had been waiting for. She’d been waiting for more than twenty years. It was time to let her past bleed into her present life. The past, the present and the future coexisted next to each other. Every child in Cambodia knew that. But here, in Germany, in the West, one’s life cycle was split into distinct parts. Dani wasn’t interested in the parts alone. She knew them too well. Now she would finally take steps to take control, to bring closure to reunite past, present and future. Revenge could do that. Anonymous and ruthless revenge.

Dani took a deep breath and answered the call.

“Hello?”

“Everything is ready. Tomorrow I will be in Bangkok to catch a flight to Phnom Penh.”

Dani was surprised. The man spoke Khmer, albeit with a strong accent. A barang. Dani was shocked at her own reaction. After all, Harald had also been a barang, a white man. As a child she’d never asked herself whether the term the Khmer used for Westerners had positive or negative connotations. During the Khmer Rouge years, barang had meant as much as devil or enemy. She forced herself back into the present.

barangbarangbarang“Find him and get in touch when you have learned what has happened to my sister. Force him to talk. When you have proof of what happened to her, kill him.”

The man at the other end of the conversation said nothing. He had been recommended by a fellow Cambodian whom she had met on the long journey from a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border to Germany, some twenty years earlier. The barang had apparently done jobs like this in Cambodia before.

barang“If that doesn’t work, please kill him immediately.”

The miserable ticket inspector passed her again. He was in another world. A world she had learned to love. A world in which you were not pulled out of your house in the middle of the night, to be butchered, because you allegedly worked for the CIA. She was back in the rice paddy behind her farm. The feeling of displacement was so intense, she was sure she was able to count the clouds above her family home if she only looked up. She could almost taste prahok, the pungent, fermented fish paste, which her mother prepared every day, the best prahok in the village. One day, the Khmer Rouge, the Red Khmer, had come and killed everyone who had worked for the CIA. It was only after Dani had lived in Germany for some years, that she’d learned what the CIA was.

prahokprahokShe was flustered and tried to find the right word to continue the conversation.

“I mean, that’s what I hired you for.”

“Yes, you did,” he answered.

She had no idea what else to tell a contract killer, an assassin. There was nothing to say.

“Be sure to get the right man.”

“I have received your money and the information. I will only call you one more time. Please do not worry.”

The man had a gentle, almost feminine voice. She knew that was meaningless of course. In the past week she had transferred some fifty thousand Euro, a large part of her inheritance, to the various accounts of this man. Harald would have understood. Or would he? He would have accepted it. But Dani had never dared to tell her husband about her plan. And now it was too late.

The man hung up. She stood motionless and stared at the silent phone, unable to disconnect from what she’d just said and heard. Six thousand miles east of a small town in southern Germany, death would stalk through the rice paddies once again, in search of the red devil that had destroyed Dani Stricker’s life. She almost forgot to get off in Käfertal.

“Last stop, all change,” the miserable inspector shouted. She smiled at the man. He wouldn’t beat her to death.