Highways to a War (2 page)

 

 

Excerpts from six poems appear in the narrative.

The first, quoted by Aubrey Hardwick, is from
The Widow at Windsor
by Rudyard Kipling. The second, quoted by Madame Phan, comes from
At White Deer Spring,
by the Ming poet Yüan Hung-tao. The third, quoted by Dmitri Volkov, comes from Alexander Blok’s
The Twelve.
The fourth, which Jim Feng recalls, is from Arthur Waley’s translation: number nine of
Seventeen Old Poems.
The fifth, given to Jim Feng by Captain Nguyen Van Danh, is
The Fish in Water,
by the Vietnamese revolutionary poet To Huu. The sixth, quoted by Aubrey Hardwick, comes from
Waiting for the Barbarians,
by C. P. Cavafy.

—C.J.K.

YÜAN HUNG-TAO,
“The Slowly, Slowly Poem,”
translated by Jonathan Chaves

In April 1976, my friend Michael Langford disappeared inside Cambodia. Twelve months earlier the Khmer Rouge had taken power, erasing the past and restarting the world from the beginning. We were now at the end of Year Zero.

Langford was forty years old, and at the height of his reputation as a war photographer. He’d first left Australia at the age of twenty-nine, and had spent the rest of his life in Asia. Now, it seemed, Asia had swallowed him. 

 

The story was carried by the international media on the evening of Thursday, April 8th. I got it in advance from Rex Lockhart, who phoned me from the
Launceston Courier
in midafternoon.

“Mike Langford’s missing,” he said. His tone made it sound like my responsibility; but Lockhart was like that. I asked him for details, but he didn’t want to give them on the phone.

“We’ll be running it tomorrow morning,” he said. “But I think we should discuss this tonight. Come over for dinner.”

It was still light when I drove from my office to the Lockharts’ place at Trevallyn. Nowhere’s far, in Launceston, and it took me about ten minutes.

Climbing at low speed up the winding ascent to Longview Road, I glanced at the eastern hills: rim of the gray blue bowl that contains the town. There was snow on Mount Barrow, but it was perfect autumn weather, the air thin and still. At the end of the road, on the summit of the hill, I halted the car outside the Lockharts’ brown picket fence and tile-roofed garage; but I didn’t immediately get out. I wasn’t deeply worried at that stage: not consciously, at any rate. Langford had dropped out of sight before and had turned up again: he was known as a survivor.

Sunset had begun, and I sat on in the car, squinting through the windscreen against the long, slanting rays. On a latitude as far south as ours they linger for a long time, transfiguring roofs, distant roads and gold slopes of grass beyond the last suburbs: a light whose counterpart I’ve found only in Greece. Early electric lights were coming on. Launceston touched me with its smallness, as it never fails to do.

 

“He’s done this trick before,” Diana said. “We all started writing his obituaries that time he was wounded in Vietnam, remember? He’ll turn up.”

Rex was delayed at the paper, and she and I sat on stools on each side of the counter in the kitchen: a refuge that we often made for while one of the Lockhart Saturday night parties thundered from the living room, since we lacked the stamina to stay with the heroic drinking and singing that went on into the small hours. The counter’s top was of dark-stained Tasmanian black-wood : rather handsome, but scarred by drunken cigarettes. Diana had produced a bottle of Riesling, and I topped up our glasses. I asked her whether Rex had given her any more details about Langford than he had me.

“No,” she said. “You know what Lockhart’s like.” She generally called him Lockhart or Locko, as his friends did. “He’ll announce it all when he gets here,” she said.

She sipped her wine, the dark brown hair she still wore long hanging on each side of her face. She had on a close-fitting, jade green cashmere dress she’d probably been wearing during the day: she’d only just got home from the boutique she ran in St. John Street. I was fond of Diana, as I was of Rex. She was forty-six, and looked younger; her oval face with its strong, straight nose and transparent skin had been bequeathed by the Scots ancestors quite a few of us have in Launceston. I remembered her in her early twenties, when she was one of the most beautiful girls in town: the daughter of Angus Campbell, owner of our largest department store.

“I haven’t taken much interest in Cambodia,” she said. “What do they call it now? Kampuchea? What’s actually happening there? ”

I told her what I knew of the Khmer Rouge. “But it’s all just rumors,” I said. “No one really knows what’s going on, not even the press.”

She frowned at me. “So it really wasn’t sensible of Mike to go in there,” she said. “Why would he do it?”

I shrugged. “The story, I suppose,” I said.

I heard the back door bang, and Rex’s tread in the hall. He entered the kitchen without smiling, dropping his battered satchel on a chair, and came around the counter to kiss Diana on the cheek; then he looked at me, his arm about her shoulders. “Ray,” he said. “Glad you could come.”

He sighted the bottle, searched out a glass, and poured himself some of the white. Diana watched him and waited; then she asked: “Has anything else come through?”

Glass in hand, Lockhart looked at her and frowned, eyes narrow, cheeks heavy with portent. He tended to create such moments of hiatus and apprehension—his moods, like those of most drinkers, being unpredictable. Now in his mid-fifties, he was a big, heavy man who still had the remnants of handsomeness, and who always held himself well. He still had a head of thick sandy hair, streaked with gray, and his mustache—a relic of his days in the RAF in World War Two—was a foxy color. He pulled up a stool, loosened his tie, took his first sip of wine, and at the same time fumbled in the inside pocket of his tweed sports coat. Finally he pulled out a sheet of paper, which he spread on the counter.

“Better read this,” he said.

Diana and I read it together: it had been torn from a teleprinter.

“Langford must have snapped his twig to do this,” Lockhart said.

“He’s got out of bad situations before,” I said. “He presumably knew there was a way out of this one.”

Lockhart lit a cigarette and looked at me sideways, waving the match out. “One would hope so, mate, yes,” he said. “But I assume you do know the situation. The country absolutely sealed. No telephones, no post, no air links except with Peking, no foreigners allowed in at all, and that means no journalists either. And mass purges going on. So what did he think he was doing, for Christ’s sake?”

Diana’s expression had now grown mildly fearful; but when she spoke it was to attempt once again to reject any serious concern. “Ray’s right,” she said. “Michael’s always taken risks he knew how to handle. There must be a reason.”

Lockhart looked back at her without expression, and their eyes continued to hold in a married way I couldn’t read. To break the silence, I said: “He may have made a deal with the Khmer Rouge for safe conduct.”

Lockhart turned to me, his cigarette suspended halfway to his mouth. “With the Khmer Rouge?” he said. “I’m sorry, Ray. How much do you know about them? No one makes deals with the Khmer Rouge: not even Langford.”

There was a brutal note in his voice that puzzled me. Lockhart had been deeply fond of Mike in the old days, to the point of sentimentality; yet the only hint of emotion I could detect in him now was repressed anger. Perhaps it was the only one he trusted himself to release. He needed his veneer; he was a man of too many feelings, underneath.

 

 

There was nothing about Langford on the seven o‘clock ABS newscast on television, which we watched before dinner. Afterwards we sat over coffee and brandy in the living room, waiting for the second newscast, at nine o’clock.

The Lockharts’ house always seemed to me to smell of the 1930s. One of those chiming clocks from the period sat in the center of the mantelpiece, its bow-shaped wooden case matching the dark timber trimmings in the room. Above it hung a black-and-white photograph of Lockhart’s wartime Lancaster in flight, and next to the clock were more framed photographs: a portrait of Diana, a studio picture of their two daughters as children, and a snapshot of three young journalists—the young Lockhart one of them—standing outside a hotel in Singapore. After being de mobbed from the RAF, Lockhart had become a foreign correspondent, working both in Europe and in Asia, and I’d never understood why he’d come home in his mid-thirties to bury himself as news editor on our modest local daily.

The clock now showed eight forty-five; we’d been sitting in silence for some time. Lockhart looked across at me from his armchair.

“You’re his oldest friend, really,” he said. “Isn’t that right? And he used to say that you were his solicitor.”

“Yes. But I’ve never acted for him,” I said. “He wasn’t the sort of man who has legal problems. He never even owned a house, as far as I know.”

“Did he leave a will?”

“Not with me.”

“Oh, for God’s
sake!”
Diana was sitting stiffly upright, staring at us with what looked like anger. “Will you stop talking as though he’s dead,” she said. She seemed frozen, one hand spread stiffly on the arm of the chair, the other holding her brandy suspended in front of her.

“I’m sorry, Di.” Lockhart’s voice dropped so that it could only just be heard. “But the possibility does exist. You do see that.”

He drained his brandy, and lit a cigarette; then he looked at me again. “Unless definite news about him breaks tomorrow, I suspect Foreign Affairs in Canberra will get in touch with his relatives,” he said. “And maybe with you too, Raymond, if Mike’s left instructions that way.”

The clock began chiming nine. Lockhart got up immediately and moved across to the television set in a corner of the room: a newsreader in thick-framed glasses looked at us from his studio desk in Sydney. He ran through the headlines.

We watched in silence as the first two items were dealt with. When the item on Langford came up, the announcer adopted the grave expression usually worn when dealing with a death, and went through much the same detail as we had in the Reuters report. It quickly became apparent that there was no new information—but this report was somewhat fuller.

A blow-up color photograph of Langford had been projected behind the newsreader’s desk, and we stared at it as though at a piece of magic. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Diana had clasped her hands in her lap, her face reflecting the light from the screen. Langford looked nearer to twenty-eight than forty, I thought—unless you took in a subtle hardening about the eyes. Otherwise the looks of his youth were unmarred, the blond hair a young man’s.

He already looks dead, I thought.

Instantly, I tried to dismiss the thought; to disbelieve it. But it did seem to me that Mike’s face had the final, fixed, historic quality of the dead. The newsreader continued, and the picture of Langford disappeared, to be replaced by film clips of black-clad Khmer Rouge soldiers with automatic rifles, marching through paddy fields and villages.

“Violent purges within the country are reported to be continuing, and any Western journalist apprehended entering the country could expect immediate arrest and detention. However, Australian embassy officials in Bangkok have received no report of Langford’s arrest. Enquiries concerning his whereabouts directed to the Government of Democratic Kampuchea have received no response, and the embassy
is
treating his disappearance as serious.