there?
In one sense at least, Stephen’s papers somewhat resembled her mother’s. Her mother had collected newspaper cuttings about the Royal Family. Stephen seemed to have collected ageing yellow items from court circulars. She came across a little wad of them, stapled together, with some items picked out in fluorescent pink. He had highlighted the movements of various aircraft of the Queen’s Flight, had saluted the General Committee Dinner of the Kennel Club and the reception at St James in aid of the Racing Welfare Charities, and had noted royally attended events in aid of the NSPCC, CARE, MIND and Mencap. As Stephen had been a known republican, his intentions could not have had much in common with those of the late Rita Ablewhite. Except, perhaps, madness. Collecting newspaper cuttings is a well-known sign of derangement. Why on earth should anyone have wished to note that the Annual Newsletter of Moxley Hall School would be published in May of 1984 with full details of Old Moxleian Day? What junk, Liz found herself thinking, what a waste of time!
Atrocity stories, Parisian revolts, Mumm champagne, Kennel Clubs, Pol Pot’s baby niece, John Stuart Mill, they add up even less than Hestercombe and Oxenholme on a silver wine cooler. At least the Hestercombes and the Oxenholmes had inhabited the same country and spoken the same language. This stuff was all over the place.
On her third evening of study, she came across the photograph of Mme Savet Akrun. It was cut out from a newspaper, and the reproduction was not good, but nevertheless it had a power. The image looked hauntingly familiar. Had she seen it somewhere before? The caption was ‘Where is my son?’ Mme Savet Akrun, erect and dignified, her hands folded on her lap, sat on a low chair and stared at the camera. Her eyes were large, her face thin and wasted, her lips gently curved. She wore what looked like a slightly Westernized sarong. Her greying hair was neatly pulled back into a bun. Her expression, adopted perhaps for the camera, was of grave suffering. It was a posed shot, slow, expressive. (If Liz had thought to look for a credit, which at this stage she did not, she would have seen for the first time the name of Konstantin Vassiliou.) Liz read the story, which told her that Mme Savet Akrun, mother of four, was held in Camp Site Ten, on the Thai–Kampuchean border. She had walked over the border in 1979 with her three younger children, from the countryside of Siem Reap province, where she had been living and working in a village. Her husband, her parents, her parents-in-law, her sisters, a brother and several of her nieces and nephews had all died in the terror, some of illness and some by violence. Her husband had owned garages and a small cinema in Phnom Penh. She had taught in an infants’ school and was now employed in the camp by the Khmer Women’s Association Centre for Adult Education. ‘I am one of the lucky survivors,’ she was quoted as saying, ‘but my life can give me no joy until I find my son.’ She had last seen him in a small village near Battambang. He had been marched away by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers, the article said. ‘Is he still alive? How can I find him?’ she asked. The journalist went on to say that she was one of thousands trying to trace lost relatives through the International Red Cross and other agencies.
A human interest story, not a hard-news story, and as such it interested Liz. She understood it. She had a displaced tremor of feeling for Mme Savet Akrun, sitting there so patiently with the sorrows of thousands resting on her thin, unbowed shoulders, asking, ‘Where is my son?’ Liz hoped very much that he was alive, but had to doubt it. How could he be, amongst the more than a million dead?
And if he were alive, searching for him would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. A needle in the haystack of the wide, wide world. She leafed through the pile of cuttings. Khmer refugees had spread to far corners of the earth, to Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, even to Britain, to any country with the space and generosity to take them. They came from families fragmented over ten years by war and violence, and many of them did not know whether their relatives were alive or dead. Tracing was difficult, for the Khmer language was little known and hard to transcribe, and the spelling of names varied widely. Many had changed their names many times, for many reasons. For safety, for policy, to forget the past, because they carried forged papers. Where, indeed, was the son of Mme Akrun? Did she believe he was alive, or had she offered herself for this photo opportunity in a sacrificial spirit, as an emblematic figure for her nation?
Liz, until this moment, had not given much thought to the displaced people and refugees of the world. She had noted horror stories from the PLO camps, from the Afghan camps, from the Sudan. She had read of the Vietnamese Boat People. She had known of the existence of the Thai–Kampuchean camps, although she had not known they were so large. One of them, Site Two, with its population of over 170,000 people, was said to be the second largest Khmer city in the world, larger than Sisophon, larger than Battambang, nearly as large as Phnom Penh. Liz had, like many middle-class British citizens, given money to Oxfam for years by banker’s order, and had very occasionally, and against her better judgement, allowed herself to be moved to particular donation by a particular appeal for a particular catastrophe. She was surprised to find herself spending so much time gazing into the two-dimensional newspaper eyes of Mme Savet Akrun.
That same week Liz, her attention newly alerted to all things Kampuchean, was informed, along with the rest of the media-fed world, of a new atrocity in the west of America. An archetypal, all-American atrocity. A lone gunman in Darlington, California, had run mad and attacked an elementary school. He had killed five, and wounded dozens. Bad enough, one might say, too cruel anywhere, but the secondary wave of background information managed to compound the horror. For these children had been the children of Khmer refugees, who had escaped the terrors of their own country, who had escaped the Year Zero and the dreams of Pol Pot, and who had reached the land of the free. They had settled there, in the small town of Darlington, and they had been greeted with special schooling, special language tuition, special resettlement officers to advise them. And there they had died, in the school playground, amidst the smell of hot tarmac and jelly beans and popcorn, mowed down by a 24-year-old dressed in military fatigues wielding a Chinese-made AK47 assault rifle. He shot more than a hundred rounds at them. And then he blew out his own brains.
One of the mothers was quoted as saying of her daughter, ‘I brought her all this way to die.’ Irony had kept this woman company until the end. Or had the words been placed in her mouth by a newsman with an ear for a good line? Can one believe anything one reads in a newspaper?
The young gunman, it emerged, was the son of a soldier who had been on active service with the United States Army. Some reports said the father had served in Vietnam, others denied this. Some said he had died in a psychiatric hospital. Some said he had been honourably discharged ‘on mental grounds’. The killer son had been a fan of Libya and the PLO, said one paper. He was a copycat cretin, said another.
Since the war ended, 60,000 veterans have committed suicide, more than the number killed in combat, one of the stories claimed. ‘From generation unto generation,’ suggested another. We survive the ordeals of bunker and jungle and bombardment and Diarrhoea-Aid of the East to run amok amidst the fair fields of the West.
It makes one think. And Liz thought.
She came, at the end of the week, to the conclusion that she was making no progress with Stephen’s dossier. She did not know enough about Indo-China to tackle it. (Somebody told her that the very phrase, ‘Indo-China’, was no longer acceptable. She was so ignorant that she could not see the objections.)
Maybe there was some message in there for her, but she began to doubt it. Perhaps it had arrived at her address by accident? She needed help.
She thought of ringing Alix again, or their old friend Esther Breuer, or her ex-husband Charles, or her ex-husband Edgar Lintot, or her new half-sister Marcia Campbell. Any of them would lend an ear and some understanding. Then she thought of her stepsons Alan and Aaron, and her daughter Sally. They too would listen with sympathy. (Stepson Jonathan and daughter Stella had defected: she rarely dared to ring either of them now.) Or perhaps she should ring Charles’s friend Melvyn Stacey, who worked for the International Red Cross and knew about the Thai–Kampuchean
