Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

don’t know what deflected the bullet – his thick skull, a metal plate in his brain, or just his wayward aim. I don’t know. Whatever…it was kind to me. All I got was a face full of cranial matter and this.”
    He ran his finger along the scar that slashed across his forehead like a cancellation.
    “It’s very masculine.”
    “The noise had deafened me and I was in this blissful, pristine silence. Everything seemed so peaceful. I looked up and saw this figure leaning over me. I wondered whether it was one of the angels come to collect me but it was Thursday. He pulled me to my feet and cleaned off my face and half-carried me into the darkness beyond the school. I’m sure there was a lot of wildness going on around us then, guards alerted by the gunshot, people searching, tentative shots into the shadows, I don’t know. But it was all such a dream that I felt I was floating off. And they were all around, the spirits of the dead. There were thousands of them lounging about in the deserted suburbs. Slouching in doorways. Crouching by the roadsides. They watched us pass like crowds along the route of a royal motorcade. It was all quite beautiful, I remember. Moving.”
    He seemed to be reliving the moment with a smile on his face.
    “How did you get out of the city?” Daeng asked.
    “Him. Thursday. He was one of theirs too. A Khmer Rouge. He spoke some Vietnamese. He’d been stabbed in the back in one of their purges. He’d been a colonel in the Region Eight command. He knew the city. Knew which parts were occupied, which were deserted. We stayed the first few nights in his relative’s house. There was nobody there. The whole suburb was uninhabited and untouched. It was bizarre. We stayed long enough for us all to recover from our respective injuries and illnesses. There was canned food. We boiled water. My hearing returned. The child somehow shook off a malarial fever.”
    “Who was she, the woman?”
    “She was nobody. No threat. No reason to be interrogated at all as far as I could see. Her husband had been a schoolteacher. Chinese descent. She had no more idea of what was going on in that place than anybody. Now, Thursday, he was our saviour. His home town was Siem Reap. He had people there, family. It was perhaps a reflection on the oppressive cloud hanging over us that led him to question whether he could trust them. But we had no choice. That’s where we headed. It’s over two hundred kilometres. It took us a week just to get to the outskirts of Udong. Foraging, stealing food, avoiding soldiers. We slept in the day and travelled at night. To our favour, there was chaos everywhere. Nobody knew who was in charge. None of the soldiers had orders. On the few occasions we were discovered, Thursday sprang into Khmer Rouge colonel mode and talked us through. It worked. Most of the young cadres in the villages were desperate for authority figures. There had been so many purges there weren’t enough chiefs for all the Indians.
    “Then, one day, we got lucky. Thursday marched us into a village and took over the place. When a supply truck passed through he talked us on to it. I think if he’d set his mind to it, he could have taken over the country all by himself. When we got to Siem Reap we met up with Thursday’s brother and father. They were commanding officers in charge of large units around Angkor Wat. Thursday told them I’d saved his life and that of the young woman and her child. They were nervous about having me there but they agreed they owed me a debt of gratitude. They had to find a way to smuggle me out of the country. And here, my darling Daeng, we arrive at one of the most peculiar elements to my whole story.”
    “It couldn’t get any odder, Siri.”
    “Trust me, it did. I learned that there are only two air routes into and out of Cambodia. One is a fortnightly flight from Peking. The other is from Bangkok to Siem Reap.”
    “You’re not serious?”
    “All this while, all through the slaughter and the genocide, they’ve continued to run tourist flights to visit Angkor Wat. It’s absolutely true. Well-heeled Europeans and Americans pop up to the temple, take a few snaps, buy their souvenirs, eat ice cream and none of them are any the wiser that the population around them is being decimated. “Honey, did you hear that? It sounded like a gun’. ‘Don’t be silly, doll. Probably popcorn.” It’s all part of the KR public relations campaign to make the outside world believe