The Edge Of Darkness

5. Christmas Baubles

Carissa’s heavy breasts floated above Maier’s heavy head, as seductive as the baubles that his mother had fastened to the Christmas tree forty years ago. In his drunken state, a few heartbeats short of sunrise, this absurd association made passing sense. Gram Parson’s “Hickory Wind” was playing on Carissa’s laptop. The song, which she’d always liked, took Maier back to his early assignments in Cambodia. Another job, another life. Dangerous thoughts percolated in his mind.

“The nights were never long enough with you.”

“What nights, Carissa? Mostly we did it on the roof of your villa in the mornings, because we were working at night or because we were too wasted.”

“Nothing much’s changed with ten years having passed then.”

“Probably not.”

“Then I still turn you on?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Everything’s all right then.”

Carissa rolled out from under the mosquito net and stretched in front of the open window of her apartment.

Life wasn’t easy in the tropics, but a sunrise that you could never witness in Europe was about to point its first light fingers across the horizon, and get caught up in a decadent play of glittering sparks on the golden roof of a neighbouring temple before beginning to dance around Carissa’s neck and shoulders. Maier groaned.

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“For the same reason I will go to Kep alone.”

Carissa turned towards Maier in the faint light. Now she looked like the Hindu goddess Kali, irresistible and merciless.

“Why?”

“Because I do not like to watch my best friends die. And this country finishes off even the best. Especially the best.”

“So, you expect problems on the coast?”

“I do not expect anything. I don’t even really know why I am here yet. But I am sure that the son of my client is up to his neck in shit.”

“I survived quite well without you for the past ten years, Maier. You’re just commitment-shy.”

“That I am. But that has nothing to do with me going to Kep alone.”

“Then you love me a little bit and want to save me from the evil in this world?”

Maier sensed the sarcasm in her voice and replied as calmly as he could. “That I do and that is what I want to do.”

“All men are the f*****g same,” she hissed, lifted the net and fell towards him.

Maier was alone in his dream, crossing the country on foot. Everything was on fire. The air was filled with the stench of burned flesh. The smell was so bad that he was permanently retching. The corpses of lynched monks, policemen who had been skinned alive, dismembered teachers, postal workers, rotten and hollowed out by maggots, of engineers who’d been half eaten by stray dogs, artists who’d been shot, judges who’d been beaten to death and decapitated students whose heads grinned from thousands of poles that had been rammed into the rice fields, piled up by the roadside and slowly slid into shallow graves that they themselves had dug earlier. Except for a few farmers with closed faces, virtually all the adults had been killed. General Tep and his horde of undernourished, angry humans, clad in black pajamas and armed with blood-soaked machetes and sticks, marched with torches across the dying land and burnt one village after another to the ground.

Maier reached one of the villages, a typically dysfunctional cooperative on the verge of starvation, destined to fail because no one had any tools and all the tool makers had been killed.

Tep had caught a woman who’d been grilling a field rat over a smoldering, badly smelling fire. Angkar, the mysterious and powerful organization that fronted and obscured the communist party of Cambodia, had f*******n the private preparation and consumption of food. What Angkar said was law. And all those who opposed the laws or broke them, were taken away for re-education or training and were never seen again. Angkar could not be opposed.

There was good reason for this. Those who ate more than others were hardly exemplary communists and were not completely dedicated to help Kampuchea rise from the ashes of its conflicts. Those who ate in secret had other things to hide. With traitors in its midst, Kampuchea had no chance to fight the imperialist dogs. The enemy was without as well as within. And the CIA was everywhere.

Tep had no choice. He beat the woman to death with a club, split her head right open. As the woman’s skull cracked, a small noise escaped, “Pfft,” and the world lay in pieces.

The woman had two daughters. The girl in the rice field had watched her mother’s murder and was running towards her father who was working under a hot sun with his second, younger daughter.

Tep, soaked in blood, the liver of the woman in his fist, followed the girl. He listened as the father shouted to his daughters to flee. When he finally reached the man, he tried to kill him with a hammer, the last hammer in the village. Tep hit the man in the face, again and again, but he would not die. Tep began to sweat. Maier stood next to Tep. He was sweating as much. He was witness. He couldn’t stop a thing. The younger daughter stood a little to the side. She wore her hair short and like the rest of her insignificant family, wore black pajamas. She was a product of Angkar and had grown up in a children’s commune. She barely knew her father. She was a child of Angkar.

“What is your name?” Tep smiled gently at the girl.

“My name is Kaley.”

“Your father is an enemy of Angkar, Kaley. He works for the CIA.”

The girl smiled and looked down at the broken man, who lay beside her, breathing in hard spasms. Tep handed the hammer to the girl. She might have been twelve years old.

After she’d done as ordered, he shouted for his men to cut the man open and devour his liver.

The older girl had run and reached the edge of the forest beyond the paddy fields. Maier was also running. He looked back across his shoulder.

Tep’s men were queuing up to rob the little sister of her innocence, life and liver. Some had leathery wings and hovered above their victim like attack helicopters. Flap-flap-flap-flap.

Flap-flap-flap-flap.A white spider, as tall as a house, appeared on the edge of the village. The men shrank back and made a tight circle around the girl and her dying father. The white spider moved slowly towards the circle. It didn’t hesitate; it just took its time. Maier ran on, his mind locked in terror. He no longer dared to turn. The fire rolled across the family, the village and the land. Maier’s tears were not sufficient to put out the flames.

“Maier, are you crying in your sleep? Have you missed me that much or did you go soft back home in Deutschland?”

The morning breeze ran coolly across his sweat-soaked back and he crept deeper into the arms of the girl who’d become a woman. Carissa lifted her head, her white hair alive like the tufts of the Medusa.