Cambodian Book of the Dead by Tom Vater Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œWhy didn’t you stay?”
    â€œFor 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.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I do not like to watch my best friends die. And this country finishes off even the best. Especially the best.”
    â€œSo you expect problems on the coast?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œI survived quite well without you for the past ten years, Maier. You’re just commitment-shy.”
    â€œThat I am. But that has nothing to do with me going to Kep alone.”
    â€œThen 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.”
    â€œAll men are the fucking same,” she hissed, lifted the net and fell towards him.
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    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 seemed to be 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 pyjamas 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 smouldering, badly smelling fire. Angkar, the mysterious and powerful organisation that fronted and obscured the communist party of Cambodia, had forbidden the private preparation and consumption of food. What Angkarsaid 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. Angkarcould 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