Black Heart, page 47
Malis, apsara, danced in his mind, her dextrous fingers weaving a silent story to the soundless music, echoing. His mother, nodding her head, sightlessly singing nursery rhymes to ward off the overpowering pressure of the outside world. And of his tiny brother and sister? His mind shut down that avenue of thought, shrinking back in abject horror from the myriad possibilities.
'Look at you,' Tol jeered. He touched the muzzle of the AK-
47 to the strap holding Khieu's Nikon around his neck. 'I no longer know what you are.' He was heartened by Khieu's physical and mental collapse. He did not know what had caused it, did not particularly care, merely gloated at the result. 'Are you a soldier or a spy? What were you going to take pictures of?'
He grunted. The rain sizzled along the deck, pinged loudly against the metal fixtures, ran in rivulets out the gunwales. The surface of the river was gunmetal grey, stippled as if by an impressionist's stiff brush. The treetops bowed and swayed beneath the assault.
Tol jabbed Khieu in the Adam's apple with the automatic
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weapon to get his attention. 'Your hand gun,' he said, almost shouting to be heard over the clatter of the storm. 'Give it to
me.'
As if he were sleepwalking, Khieu unsnapped the leather
holster at his left hip, lifted the pistol out.
Apsara danced, sending her message to the gods. Sometimes she was dressed in her traditional outfit; sometimes she was naked, her body oiled and glistening, flaming braziers sending flickering tongues of light shooting across the erotic planes of her thighs, her hard breasts lifting and falling rhythmically to her controlled breathing. And sometimes she was pale and headless, a jerking grotesque thing, whose spastic dancing was but a parody of the beautiful and delicate Khmer ballet.
Khieu was trembling, his eyelids flickering in arrhythmic spasm. His hair was plastered to his head and he felt the pain of the hard-driving rain against his skull as acutely as if each drop were a needle piercing his flesh.
'Get up, now,' Tol said. 'You've had enough of a rest.' He jabbed Khieu viciously in the ribs. 'Just think. It'll be the last rest you'll ever have.' He laughed harshly. 'In this life, anyway.'
Khieu stood up, his head still filled with his roiling vision. Clothed, naked, acephalous. Love, lust, horror. They mixed now in an inexorable swirl.
'Take up your burden, Mit Sofe,' Tol commanded. Khieu carried the three heads before him as he moved along the deck, Tol just behind him. They went slowly around the stern and off onto the tiny plank dock.
Twenty metres into the jungle, Tol bade him stop. 'Over there, Mit Sok,' he said triumphantly. 'You of all people should appreciate that sight.'
Khieu swung his gaze dully in the direction Tol indicated. Beneath a tangle of low-lying trees, he could make out the brown uniforms with the red star insignia. There were three of them, three more soldiers in the same uniform he was wearing:
RPK.
'They could not save their officers,' Tol said. 'They did not know how to fight.' He prodded Khieu again. 'Get over there
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now with your burden, Mil Sok. I have just had an idea that gives me immense pleasure.'
Khieu stumbled over a half-buried tree root, righted himself before he fell to his knees. His dripping bundle scraped against the ground. He lifted it up, carefully wiped mud from Malis' chewed cheek.
'Stand by those men,' Tol directed. The rain was already lessening, the driving hiss of the downpour being slowly replaced by the dolorous drip of moisture sliding from myriad leaves. When it had abated entirely, Tol came over to where Khieu stood and took the heads away from him. He made a grab for Malis' head and Tol slammed the backs of his hands with the barrel of his weapon.
'Go over there,' he directed. He held up the heads, put one booted foot on the back of one of the Soviet corpses. He bent quickly, detaching a red star from the uniform, pinning it over his heart. 'There. Now. Be a good comrade and take my picture ... Wait, not yet.' He twisted the bundle of heads around. 'I want this one facing the camera. He was a colonel, after all.' He chuckled. 'He deserves the place of honour by my side.' In fact he was holding the trio of heads in front of him, roughly at the centre of his chest. 'Besides,' he added, 'we need him very recognizable for propaganda purposes.' His voice rose. 'Think of the good you will do by taking this one photograph, Mit Sok. Think of how you will advance the cause of the Black Heart.'
Khieu stepped back until Tol was just over three metres away. He snapped off the camera case and took aim. He set aperture and speed and, finding Tol centred, pressed the shutter stud.
Blue-white flame like a demon's tongue licked out of the centre of the lens as the miniature impact-explosive projectile blurred towards Tol.
The man just had time to open his eyes wide in alarm and shock before the thing embedded itself and detonated. He rocked back, thrown against the bole of the tree. He slid down it partway, then righted himself. The trio of heads had taken most of the impact of the explosion. Blood seeped from one shoulder but otherwise he was unharmed.
Tol made a dive for the rifle which had been whipped out
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of his grasp by the percussion of the blast but Khieu was already upon him.
The purpose of most disciplines, Musashi Murano had told him, lies first in immobilization of the opponent. This presupposes that there is an amount of time during the encounter - however minuscule that may be; remember we speak here not of seconds or even tenths-of. seconds but hundredths or, in the case of the most adept professional assassin, thousandths-of-a-second - when your opponent will have an opportunity to kill you.
This we cannot allow. If you seek to immobilize, you may die; if you seek to maim, you may die; if you think to yourself, A hundredthof-a-second cannot possibly be lethal, you may die; if you underestimate your opponent, you may die.
Remember kokoro.
Khieu remembered. He could not do otherwise. Kokoro was imprinted within him as strongly as Buddhism. In the hierarchy of the known universe it, too, was a celestial body. His training had not been like school. With Preah Moha Panditto, he had not attended classes: the training he had received from Lok Kru had been his life - all of his life, bound up in tradition, family, responsibility, the worth of being Khmer. It was not merely religious, as a Westerner perhaps enters a monastery to be ordained. It was social, anthropological, political and historical especially historical, which was why the Khmer Rouge hated and feared the Buddhist priests so virulently.
So, too, with kokoro. Musashi Murano, Khieu's sensei, had encompassed his life. For without believing, kokoro was nothing.
In Japanese, Musashi Murano had said, kokoro means 'the heart of things'. But as in many other languages, Japanese gives multiple meanings to words. For me and not for you kokoro means the interior ... the heart of my discipline: the void. The nothingness that fills you fuller than all things of this world: the emptiness that brings you a strength out of time.
Khieu employed kokoro.
With it, he used the stiffened tips of his fingers, slightly curved so that anyone with sufficient knowledge would have recognized in them the precise angle of the Japanese katana, as projectiles fully as lethal as the ones with which his bogus Nikon
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was loaded to puncture Tol's diaphragm. He ruptured spleen, pancreas and liver within the space of a single heartbeat then! rising, as the mist at dawn will reach for the cloudless sky, took up his camera and, with Tol's head resting against the puffed chest of his Russian quarry, with the last breaths of life rattling from his half-open tremulous jaw, took a final shot. And left one more headless corpse to add to the pile.
Kim was summoned to Seattle.
It was Thu, of course. He saw his crippled brother rarely, but now Kim was glad to be coming to see him. Over the last months, Thu had been even more withdrawn and uncommunicative in his letters and in the back of his mind, Kim had suspected that his brother was slipping back into his earlier morose pattern of behaviour. In fact, he regretted not coming out here sooner; it had been more than a year since he had broken the heavy cloud-cover here, as he was now, disembarking from the plane at Sea-Tac International Airport. The ultramodern three-stop underground took him to the main gate.
Thu lived high up in a building fronting Puget Sound. The apartment had a balcony that overlooked the water and, just to one side, a concrete marina where Thu had a 35-foot sloop berthed. Kim knew all of this because it was his money that paid for the various accoutrements of Thu's new life in the West.
It was his brother's fondest pleasure to take the sloop north up the sound past Port Townsend, then west beyond Victoria, in British Columbia, up the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Waada Island at the very Western tip of Washington. There, he would rendezvous with Makah from nearby Tatoosh or the Indian reservation across the water on the mainland.
In the years since he had come to Seattle, the Makah remained his only friends. Kim often wondered what they had in common with his brother, save that they were both outcasts, misfits, deformed each in his own way, uncomfortable in society.
Thu taught them how to read their futures in the stars and *ey m turn taught him how to drink. Or, at any rate, that was
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how it seemed to Kim. The suicide rate on almost all India, 4 reservations was six or seven times the average for the rest of the country. The Indians seemed to like it better than peyote mainly because it had no religious overtones.
But it was not Thu who met him at the door to the apartment this time but a young woman he had never seen before.
She smiled on seeing him. 'You must be Kim.' She reached out and effortlessly and quite efficiently took his overnight case from him. She closed the door behind him and he followed her into the living room. She wore white shorts and a striped Izod
shirt.
She was tall with the kind of full-bodied figure Eastern women could not - indeed did not aspire to - attain. Her large breasts had just enough of a curve along their upper slopes for Kim to know they were real. Her legs were long and firm. Her blonde hair was naturally curly. She wore it like a thick mane, down to her shoulders. She looked as if she had stepped out of some magazine.
'Pardon me,' he said, 'but you are ... ?'
She laughed goodnaturedly and unaffectedly. 'God, I'm sorry.' She extended a hand and Kim thought, This one's American, very American. 'I'm Emma. Emma Poe.' Her voice was light and airy. Her cornflower blue eyes watched him with some humour. 'No relation, if that's what you're thinking. My family - all nine of us - comes from Minnesota.'
'Have you been ... with my brother long, Miss Poe?' Kim
asked.
'Emma,' she corrected him. 'Absolutely no one calls me Miss Poe. About six months, Kim.' She had very direct
eyes.
'Now,' she continued briskly, 'Thu is waiting for you out on the balcony. Why don't you join him? Meanwhile, I'll put your bag in the guest bedroom. Can I get you a drink?'
'Tea, thank you.'
'Hot, not iced, yes?'
Kim took another look at her. He nodded.
'I went out this morning and bought China Black for you.' Her eyes were smiling, too.
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Kim tried to ignore that. 'Thu drinks China Black.'
'Oh, not for some time now. We both enjoy an espresso now and then. Decaffeinated, of course.'
'Of course," Kim parroted, inwardly appalled.
The living room had been repainted he saw as he went quickly through it: pastel blue walls, eggshell ceiling. Decorative moulding, a feature unheard of in modern apartments, had been added sometime since his last visit.
He went through the sliding glass doors, out onto the balcony. This, too, had changed. Outdoor carpeting covered the concrete. Thu sat on an aluminium lawn chair, his useless atrophied legs stretched out before him. Kim looked around. There was no sign of his wheelchair.
Thu's head turned as Kim crossed the threshold. He wore mirrored sunglasses. He was dressed in a dark green Izod shirt and a pair of jeans. What was left of his feet were bare. A smile split his face when he saw his brother.
'Kim,' he said, 'it's good to see you again.' His voice was low and furred. That was its natural state since the holocaust, the permanent tattoo of smoke inhalation.
Kim went past his brother, stood with his stiff arms against the metal railing. He looked out at the sound and across it. He could make out houses in Winslow and Creosote. And he thought again, This is a hell of a place to live.
'I see there've been a lot of changes since I was last here.'
'You ought to get out more often,' Thu said. 'You've never liked surprises. But I didn't want to write; I wanted you to meet her.'
Kim noticed that his brother's hair was longer, lying thick and black like an animal's pelt along the nape of his neck. It made him seem somehow younger.
'I never anticipate anything,' Kim said, 'so I'm never surprised.'
Emma stepped out onto the terrace. She set a black lacquer tray down on a pebble-glass-topped table. There was a small rose-coloured porcelain pot and one handleless cup.
'It needs to steep several minutes more,' she said, then took a frosted highball glass off the tray, handed it to Thu.
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Kim watched the darkness of the open doorway through which she had just gone. 'Where did you meet her?'
'The marina.' Thu put his head back, sipped at his iced drink. 'I was having difficulty with the aft hawser. She gave me a hand.'
'She gave you a hand.'
'Yes. Is that a crime?'
'Had you seen her around before that?'
'Jesus, I think I'd've remembered if I had.' Thu squinted up at his brother. 'Wouldn't you?"
'I remember everyone I meet,' Kim said somewhat stiffly.
'Not really your type, is she, Kim?'
'She's got too much of everything.'
'Oh, yes. Including brains. You like your women under a hundred pounds and three steps behind you with their heads down.'
'I want to know more about her.'
'Oh, don't be so goddamned suspicious. Every event in life isn't full of sinister shadows.'
'What are you drinking?' Kim asked suddenly.
Terrier.' Thu held out his glass. 'Here, want to sniff?'
Kim turned away from him, contemplated the beaten brass of the sunlight on the water.
'I don't drink anymore,' Thu said. 'At least not the way I used to. A Margarita once in a while, or some champagne to celebrate.' He sat up straighter in the chair. 'I don't get drunk anymore ..."
'You don't do a lot of things you used to do.' Kim poured himself some tea. 'You don't drink China Black anymore; you dress like an American, you talk like an American, you have an American woman living with you. You've forsaken tradition. Don't you think about your family anymore?'
Til tell you what I don't do, Kim,' Thu said. 'I don't wake up in the middle of the night covered in cold sweat; I don't sit and think about what might have been if that burning beam hadn't crushed my legs; I don't pull my hair and wail for all the death that night; I don't try to run away from my present by passing out stinking drunk every night.
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'And I'll tell you something, brother, Emma's been a good part of that. I'm happy now. I think about the present; I'm content with it. And every once in a while I catch myself dreaming about the future. That's something I haven't done since I was twelve.
'We sail, we fish, we go for walks. We even make love together. We do what every couple who are in love do with their time.' He stared hard at Kim. Tell me this is what you disapprove of.'
'I disapprove,' Kim said slowly and carefully, 'of you abandoning all that makes us unique in the world.' He gestured. 'Look at you now, with your designer jeans, your Izod shirt, sipping your Perrier water. Buddha, you're so Americanized even our own mother wouldn't recognize you.'
'But I'm happy,' Thu said leaning forward. 'I'm happy, Kim, and you're not. You'd better face it. You're a dinosaur. You and your kind have outlived your usefulness.
'I know you can't see it but I'm free now. Free of the past, free of the guilt that still weighs you down like a lead cocoon."
'And what of our revenge ... what of the time you spent in Phnom Penh tracking down the murderer of our family ... what of all the time and effort I've put in to setting our revenge in motion.'
'It's the way of death,' Thu said, 'don't you see that? Our life isn't for revenge. It's for us to live to the fullest.'
'And what of honour?' Kim said. 'Are we to forget about that? Wave away centuries with the careless sweep of one hand? We have a duty to our family. Their spirits will not rest.'
He put down the cup of now-cold tea, knelt beside his brother. 'Don't you see that without honour, without duty, we are nothing?'
Thu sighed, put his hand over Kim's wrist. 'It's a beautiful day. Clear and clean. On days like this Emma and I take the sloop up north to see the sunset. We eat dinner on board. Won't YOU come with us today?'
Kim looked at the black reflective glasses covering his brother's eyes for a long time. Then he carefully slid his arm
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from beneath Thu's embrace, rose and walked back into the apartment.
Emma stood in the middle of the living room, smiling slightly. 'He's right, you know.' Her voice was soft, kind. 'There's time for us all now to be together.'
'You understand nothing,' Kim said. 'You're an American.'
'I know I have him to sleep beside me at night,' she said simply, 'to comfort me and to give comfort to. To talk to. Tc make love to.
'Tell me, Kim, what do you have at night to give yoi comfort? You have your nightmares of the past. And, wher those fail you, there is only your hate.'
He wanted to know if there had been any calls for him, thi moment he awoke, forgetting where he was.
The nurse with the smiling sympathetic face said, 'No, bu there was a young lady here about an hour ago inquiring abou, how you were doing.' There was a secret twinkle in her eye.
