Black Heart, page 19
now if'
'I don't want to hear that!' It was a full-fledged scream and
180
it brought him up short. '1 want to know that he was content! "That he wasn't a misfit there. That at least he had a home he could call his own before ... my God ... before he was slaughtered!'
'Now, Lauren -'
'Well, that's what he was! Right? Slaughtered!'
'There were no easy deaths over there. I've told you that.'
'But especially' she had to stop now between enormous sobs
- 'especially for Bobby!'
He was holding her now as she wept into his chest, her lean body shuddering in quick convulsive bursts like explosions.
Afterwards, while he was wiping the tear streaks from her face, she said, 'You never answered my question."
'I think I did,' he said softly. 'Now come to bed.'
Curled up together beneath the sheets, he fell asleep with his chin in the hollow of her shoulder. She stroked his thick hair and watched the patches of light thrown and pulled back across the ceiling as traffic rushed by below them.
Across the room, two stone statues stood on either end of the bookcase. Age had pitted them in spots, smoothed them in others. On the right was a naga, as Tracy had explained it, a seven-headed serpent out of Cambodian mythology. On the left was a garuda, a man with a bird's head. They were symbols of neither good nor evil but they hated each other just the same. As in so much of Khmer mythology, no one could quite remember the cause of the enmity.
She would never tell Tracy this now but she could barely remember what her brother was like. Oh, yes, as a child, a gawky adolescent there were many memories. But he had died a man and Lauren did not know him at all.
Silent tears coursed down her cheeks and she turned her head away so that they should not touch Tracy and wake him. Perhaps that small movement affected him for he stirred in his s'eep, his legs scissoring. She thought he might be dreaming.
Then he arched up out of her embrace and uttered one word luite clearly.
His eyes snapped open and he felt her arms around him, "adling him.
181
'It's all right,' she whispered close to him. 'It was just a dream.' 'None of it's a dream,' he said without thinking. His voice
was still furred. 'Cambodia.'
Running his hands across sleek flesh that was not there, his lips searching for a mouth of air, a female heat that was the sodden drenched atmosphere of Southeast Asia. The jungle exploding shells and flickering chemical flame, gouting blood and fearful screams, life seeping irretrievably away into the black muddy earth, Bobby's face, pinched and white with pain, the eyes of betrayal, the burning and Mai's admonishing voice, How much of her do you see in me? The commandments broken Could I be her sister? The foundation's commandments. 'Tell me now, Tracy.' Lauren's voice. 'Why did you go?' 'I wanted to be there.' So close to sleep there wasn't time to
think properly.
'To kill.'
'No.' He shook his head. 'Not to kill.'
'Killing's what war's all about. There's no secret to that.'
'I went because ... there was something I had to prove. To myself.' His eyes were clouded; he stared at nothing. 'My mother was always afraid that I'd die. That fear was very deep in her. I woke up one day and thought, I've been infected by it and I knew I had to combat it so I turned to my father and
asked him for his help.'
'And he took you to the place where he worked.'
Tracy nodded.
'And you fell in love with ... I don't know, whatever it was
they did there.'
'I wanted to be purged of fear. To do that I had to throw
myself into the most dangerous situation I could find.' 'But you weren't vulnerable ... like Bobby.' 'No. I'd've been far more so in the Army. That... place foi-
tified me well.'
'And now you truly are fearless.' He said nothing but he was
still breathing hard. 'You spoke in your sleep.'
'What did I say?' A cold tentacle writhed through him'You called out a name.' Oh, God. Not Bobby.
182
'Who,' she said, 'is Tisah?'
And he lied to her. 'I don't know.'
jChieu sat cross-legged on a small rug in the middle of the room, studying the horoscope he had just completed. Though Preah loha Panditto might have outwardly denied it, for Khieu the link between his Theraveda Buddhist teachings and the rituals of astrology were strong indeed. Both were a way of life for him, beliefs that went beyond questioning or even conscious thought. They provided a continuity, a quotidian affirmation of the individual's interlocking place among all living things; a seeping in. Home.
Within the heart of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu had had to discard it all. For them, Buddhist monks, prostitutes and astrologers were all lumped together as 'the lice of society'. And while he was with them, he had to believe that, too.
Aspects, retrogrades, the houses themselves ... something seemed curiously out of alignment. But the longer he studied the chart, the further the disturbance seemed from him. It was as if some unseen force were manipulating events. There was only the vaguest hint of that here but if it were indeed true, he would have to take some kind of action on his own.
In all ways but this, Khieu was wedded to Macomber. He obeyed him in all matters. But the world of astrology was another affair entirely. What Macomber could not understand, he could not work.
Khieu set pen and paper aside, closed his eyes. He felt the presence of the house like a living entity around him and, within that, Joy's loneliness like a sharp pain in his heart. She kept the household together yet she and Macomber rarely connected on any level Khieu could fathom. Her inner sadness seemed cruel Jnd unjust to him in much the same manner his own childhood Denied cruel and unjust. His hand began to throb just as it did during the nightmares of Malis that robbed him of sleep. His °wn kmoch rode him hard.
He wore a loose-fitting black cotton blouse and trousers with a simple draw-string top, the end of the legs coming to just ab°ve his bare ankles. This was the uniform of the Khmer
183
Rouge. Though it had been washed many times since, it still retained the stink of those days of fire and death in Cambodia No amount of modern detergent could rid them of that.
Yet he refused to throw them away. Rather, he chose to wear them on certain occasions. Curiously he seemed to find a certain dark strength from them that kept him going when his days as well as his nights became filled with the shuddering nightmares that stalked his sleeping mind.
At other times, he would open the bottom drawer of his campaign chest and, finding them there, neatly folded and laundered, he was certain they belonged to someone else; it was a struggle to remember what they had once been.
He sat in the precise centre of the floor of the basement. He began the ritual chants: 'I go to the Buddha for refuge', tuning himself into the cosmos as he stared with unblinking eyes at the small bronze Buddha surrounded by twelve thin sticks of incense, slowly burning, their columns of smoke like fingers pointing the Way. He glided down the long snaking corridor in his mind that firmly linked him with the centuries. His mind's eye saw himself: a black crow, the land burning all around him, quaking with thunder falling from the sky, running with blood. He became the fish in the stream, the tiger in the bush, the serpent coiling itself around the rough bole of a tree. And he became the tree itself, the blade of grass entangled in its root, the hot wind soughing through the branches of the forest. And then he became nothing at all, floating free, egoless, a holy man. It did not last long. Malis. His eyes flew open and he rose. He felt heavy as lead as he crossed to a rosewood, altar-topped cabinet. There was a peculiar brass lock in its centre. From around his neck he unfastened a small brass key. This he slid into the side of the lock, snapping it open.
From the darkness inside, he produced a leather-handled steel implement. It was perhaps a foot long. It was round and had a leather thong attached to the handle. Khieu put his hand through it, gripped it. It was like putting on a gauntlet. It calmed him in the way his prayers should have and did not.
Silently he rose, moving across the room like a shadow. The was one overhead light a bare bulb. There was an old bW' <
184
f
couch along one wall, a TV set from the 1950'$ with its rounded picture tube, piles of dropclothed odds and ends. And a rawhide covered four-and-a-half foot-heavy punching bag hanging from the ceiling. Its sharklike sides were scored with oblique marks as if some hellish giant cat had been using it to sharpen its claws.
Khieu seemed to look at everything but the bag as he crossed the expanse of the basement. When he came to within two feet of it, his left leg moved with such blurring speed that if anyone had been witnesses he would have thought it a mirage.
But the flat of the sole had landed squarely against the side of the bag, setting it swinging in great arcs, away from Khieu, then back. At the height of its inward arc, Khieu lifted the steel implement up and back, snapping his wrist at the last. With no noise at all, the implement shot out over his head, telescoping to a length of more than three feet.
It made a hard whistling sound as he swung it around so that it slammed into the two-hundred-pound, sand-filled bag. Again and again, Khieu struck it, circling slowly, methodically excoriating the leather. The heavy chain holding the bag jangled and finally hummed with the force of the constant jolts.
Fury was a white-as-ice ember implanted within his heart. It throbbed now like a wound long untended, left to fester, infected, turned black as the depths of an unknown night.
His eyes squeezed shut, his corded muscles jumping as he swung from the soles of his feet, he felt again the heated humid air of Phnom Penh, sitting cross-legged, watching Malis dance, her hair catching the lights, the look of intense concentration in her eyes, the unending, sinuous motions of her hands and arms and then, at last, the fluid, animal sensuality of her whole body as she walked across the floor towards him.
No, no, no, no ... This now was his chant as he swung again and again, the sweat running down his sleek sides, across the arched and ribboned cables of his muscles.
Denied, denied, denied, he thought, and Joy is like that. So s^d about us.
A sound came from behind and above him made him whirl.
Hls
eyes were black and lost, staring at the figure at the top of
185
the stairs. It stood quite still for a moment as if undecided as to whether or not to make the descent into the basement. Khieu stood with his feet planted wide, the weapon raised high as if
about to deliver a blow.
At last the figure came slowly -down the steps. Joy Trower saw him only when she was all the way down.
'Oh,' she said. 'I wondered why the light was on down here.' Khieu continued his practice. His face was shiny with sweat. Behind him Joy made a move to leave, then apparently changing her mind, came towards him. She winced every time the weapon struck the shuddering bag with a loud, thick thwack.
'Dinner is ready ..."
Khieu nodded. He went on with what he was doing, laying
it to the leather with even more fervour.
'But if you'd rather ...' Joy's voice trailed off as she watched him. '1 know you practise' - she winced again as he struck, thwack, the leather bag with the steel truncheon 'every day and I don't like to disturb you.' She came all the way down the stairs into the basement proper; she never took her eyes away from him. 'I feel just the same about your praying. I wouldn't' thwack, thwack - 'think of disturbing you then, either.'
Droplets of sweat flew off him now as he worked and he shed his black cotton blouse. His flesh seemed oiled, almost as if it had
turned molten.
'I don't know what happened,' Joy went on, apparently oblivious to the fact that he had not answered her, 'but all of a sudden 1 couldn't bear it being alone up there in the house. I'
- thwack, thwack, thwack - 'I'm sorry for intruding but I ... I
needed some human companionship.'
Khieu allowed the weapon to rest at his side after the last
blow. The red rage still flickered but only intermittently now.
The physical release had somehow exorcised for the moment his
personal demons. He turned to face her. He was breathing
altogether normally.
'Will you think it evil of me if I tell you he doesn't make me happy ... that he can't make me happy anymore?'
Joy could not look at him when she said this. It came out all in one spastic gust, a spent storm's last gasp. All she could see
- O £.
186
1
was an image of herself and Macomber endlessly circling one another, searching for a lost element they would never find. She wondered why she didn't just turn around and get out of there. But, she told herself, she could not bear to return upstairs just yet; the oppressive atmosphere had become too much for her. Or was there another reason entirely?
'Won't you please say something,' she said, lifting her eyes to his. 'Anything.' Then all sound fled her. His eyes defeated her mind, her body, her emotions, even, in some awesome, unfathomable way. She felt him. His presence was like a white-hot heat fanning her. The force of his personality reached out across the gulf between them and touched her like a phantom hand. She felt the muscles along the insides of her thighs begin to jump-
And yes, Khieu thought now, as he watched her, Macomber has not made her happy. It was not his fault, perhaps. Nature was a beast impossible to tame. Macomber's nature made him the genius he was, made his love for Khieu pure and whole; without it he would not be Macomber and Khieu would, in that event, be dead now, along with Sam and Malis, the rest of his family. Buried beneath the scorched earth of Kampuchea.
Khieu felt duty engulf him. In givingjoy pleasure, in dissolving her pain, he was honouring Macomber. He knew how important Joy and her brother were to Macomber. If Joy did not find satisfaction within this house, she might very well seek it elsewhere. That Khieu could not allow.
He had seen her tears, had recognized her pain. That he could accomplish what Macomber could not seemed right and proper to him. Not to allow her access to that part of him was meanspirited.
'You must learn to listen to more than the spoken word. You must learn to hear with your eyes and your heart as well as with your ears.' He was very near her now, near enough to see the trembling of her body, to feel the fluttering of her heart in fear °r excitement.
AH at once, she sensed the room around her as if it were a
weathing, living entity: she became slightly aware of the deep
ass thrum of the central air conditioning unit, could feel a slight
187
breeze on her cheek from some hidden crack. She inhaled the rich scent of dampness and sweating walls mingling with some
strange spice.
But most of all, she was aware of Khieu's eyes. They seemed as black, glossy and depthless as a bird of prey's. She saw her own image replicated on their convex surface but she could not
recognize herself.
She felt abruptly hot, beads of sweat popping out on her broad forehead and upper lip and, before she had time to think, Khieu had come against her, the leather and steel truncheon a bar behind her head, a pressure. She bent her head towards him, felt rather than saw his tongue come out to lovingly lick each drop off her. The gesture was so sensual that she moaned a little, her knees giving way slightly, her head coming back without volition so that she was supported only by the steel bar warming now to her own blood heat. She still felt the bite of the metal but now it did not disturb her.
Rather it seemed to relax her as she stared at Khieu. It was almost, she thought, as if she were seeing him for the first time, She saw how completely hairless he was. This fascinated her and she reached out a hand, smoothing her palm across the sleekly muscled contours of his chest. She gave a little cry. It was like putting her hand in a river of fire that had raced up her arm, through her torso to a pool between her legs. She felt wet and
open and vulnerable.
He wanted to come against her once more but she held him off, wanting first to eat him with her eyes. He was the colour of bronze here, copper there in the shadows along his sides. He had a scent that she wanted and when her gaze returned to his eyes, she was dazzled as if she were looking into the sun itself. She was limp and full of coursing energy, all the solid flesh inside her turned'to liquid. Her arms and upper torso felt free of gravity, all her weight pooled in her hips and thighs. Joy had, in fact, the distinct impression that she had been transformed into a creature of someone else's imagination. And, staring into Khieu's hot black eyes, she knew whose it was.
Her lids fluttered down like wings as his lips covered hers with a heat she thought impossible. She felt his encircling art«s
188
pulling her slightly forward and then the pressure against her pubic mound, a soft circular stroking. She thought of the Siamese she had had when she was a child and how it fell into an ecstasy of purring when she scratched it behind its long pointed ears. God, she felt the same way now.
She shivered, her arms rising up his body to encircle his neck and now it was she who was pulling him towards her, opening her lips to drink from his mouth in greedy gulps as if, having been starved by Macomber, she could now not get enough.
She felt in the centre of her being, at the fulcrums of their bodies' contact, the hard bar of his manhood but it seemed to her as if his entire body were one enormous sexual organ and she was drunk on it, saying, 'Here, oh here!', lifting the hem of her dress with one hand and feeling the intimate rubbing corning closer to her flesh. She was heated, her vagina swelling. She already felt as if she were in orgasm but her ecstasy continued to climb instead of abating and, for the first time in her life, she used her voice as a sexual instrument to croon to him, plead with him to enter her. She wanted more than anything now to feel that silken intimate stroking, to feel the bump and grind of his pelvic bone against her clitoris. She was wild for it.
