Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  Cambodians could be forthright, rude, conditioned by their harsh recent history—toughened and taught survival skills by the years of tyranny. Yet even these hardened people were no match for the wave of visitors, the sex tourists and predators, that were the reason for the many signs forbidding sex with children and warning of penalties for child rape. Throughout Angkor, all around Siem Reap, were signs saying Report Sexual Exploitation.

  I asked Ong, my tuk-tuk driver, if he knew anything about this.

  Now and then, he said, men visiting from Europe would hire him as a driver and ask him to find them young boys.

  "How young?"

  "Just kids, little boys," Ong said. "But it's wrong. And I don't know any."

  "What about Cambodian men—do they ask?"

  "Never. But one man from Switzerland ask me for a ride on my motorbike. He sit behind me and touch me—here and here. I was so frightened! I don't know what to do. He say me, 'Come up my hotel room. I give you money.' I say no. I no like to think about it. I so scare."

  I was not prepared for people so poor to look so beautiful. Maybe I was remembering the child prostitutes cooped up in the Singapore brothel. I had foolishly begun to associate poverty with ruin and bad health, and Cambodians were so hard-working it seemed outrageous that they were struggling just to eat.

  And something else about their beauty. Even as beggars they had dignity. They weren't cringing or rapacious; they stared, they looked solemn, they hardly spoke. But most of all they were familiar. They looked like their own statues. The Cambodian face is also the face of a Khmer statue; their bodies are sculptural and finely made; they seem iconic, authentic, part of the culture, the slender boys like willowy Buddhas, the women like apsaras and angels.

  Some of these apsaras and angels, these living sculptures, resided in the Old Market district on the east side of the Siem Reap River, where I idled in pajama bottoms under the trees in the mellow guesthouse for $10 a day, plus noodles. It wasn't lechery; the gentleness of the people made it easy for me to linger. It was a pleasant stroll in the perfumed air to the riverbank. And now and then, seeing me walking blithely, a tuk-tuk driver would ask, "You retired here?" because many grizzled men like me in faded T-shirts and pajamas had hunkered down in Cambodia. At these prices I could stay until my visa ran out, months from now. It is sometimes that way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.

  It had happened before, and I knew why. "At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house," Henry T. wrote in Walden. For the traveler this season never ends. Yet I knew what I had to do.

  THE BOAT SONTEPHEAP TO PHNOM PENH

  AT THE CENTER OF CAMBODIA, in its enormous floodplain, lies an inland sea, Tonle Sap Lake, so broad in the rainy season that when you're on it you might be in a great ocean, no shores visible. It is not a big blue ocean but a brown one, the frothy chop beaten by the brisk wind to resemble the foam on a latte. It is not deep. Even in the middle it is full of mud banks and shoals, and in the unlikeliest places there are fish weirs and perhaps a narrow sampan sitting low in the water, two or three men and boys on board wearing lampshade hats, the whole scene in profile like an image of graceful brushstrokes on a ancient pot.

  I took a jeep about seven miles from Siem Reap to the low-lying and mucky north shore of the lake, a fishing village, Phnom Krom, where in the early morning one or two long and usually overloaded motorboats leave for Phnom Penh. They travel southeastward down the lake to where the Tonle Sap River begins its flow, and continue along the river to the jetties of Phnom Penh, about six hours, the water route to the capital.

  The departure of the boats is an event in Phnom Krom and the nearby village of Chong Khneas, where the fishing families live in basketwork huts perched over the shore, the places busier at six in the morning than most other inland villages at noon. Apart from the outboard motors on a few of the sampans, the scene could not have changed in hundreds of years: naked children slapping at mud puddles, women selling bananas and rice, but most people mending nets, tending cooking fires, and sorting fish in baskets.

  Snakehead fish are caught here. They are the key ingredient in amok, one of Cambodia's delicious national dishes, the snakehead simmered in coconut milk with spices. Because the snakehead has natural enemies here, the fish grow to only a few feet and are not the monsters they've become in some places in the United States where they've been introduced.

  I found the gangplank to my boat and was about to climb into the cabin when a big man in a Hawaiian shirt—obviously American—said, "I wouldn't go in there if I were you."

  I smiled at him because he'd said it so confidently. I stepped back and let other passengers stream into the cabin.

  "Look. There's only one way out," he said. "This thing capsizes and it's all over. How would you escape? You read about ferries that sink in places like this, and you wonder why so many people die." He shook his head. "Now I know."

  So we sat on the roof together and he introduced himself—Mark Lane, explaining that he was a mate on a ferry out of Homer, Alaska, making runs to the Aleutian Islands. He was taking a break from that cold work by spending a few weeks here in the sunshine.

  We had pulled away from the bamboo pier and out of the inlet and were about a quarter of a mile into the lake when the boat slewed and tipped sharply and almost slid us into the water. There were howls from people down below, trapped in the cabin. The boat had snagged on a mud bank and yawed. For about fifteen minutes the slanted boat did not move but only sent up mud and bubbles from the churning screws.

  "This might be a long trip," Mark said.

  But after we got under way once again, the boat went fast. The only other snag was a mud bank in the middle of the lake, out of sight of land, another slew and swerve and delay.

  In stretches of the lake, floating villages were whole water-world communities of houseboats and buoyant huts, an economy of water people enclosed by the perimeters of their nets and bobbing net floats.

  These fishing communities looked self-sufficient, orderly, and discreetly territorial, far from government intrusion and regulation. Even before Pol Pot, the government in Cambodia, whether French colonial rule or American puppetry, had brought nothing but war and destruction, torture and death. Left to themselves, in the middle of this lake, the Cambodian water people functioned perfectly.

  Sitting side by side on the roof of the boat, using our small duffle bags as cushions, Mark and I talked about Angkor and what we'd seen.

  "I did something in Siem Reap I've never done before in my life," Mark said.

  "What a great opening," I said.

  "No, seriously," he said. "I had a tuk-tuk driver—my wheelman. He only had one eye, he's twenty-five, lives with his aunt—really nice kid. You know how it is. You spend a few days with these guys and you hear their story.

  "His name was Sar. He didn't talk much about his past, just about his future. He had it all mapped out. His aim was to be an accountant. Ever heard anyone say that? 'I want to be a doctor,' yes. Or an airline pilot. Or an astronaut. But an accountant? So it seemed to me he was on the level. He had been to high school and done some courses, but to get his accountant's degree he needed college.

  "He told me that there's a certain man in Siem Reap who's a well-known teacher of accounting and economics. This tuk-tuk driver Sar wanted him as a mentor and teacher. 'So what's the plan, Sar?' I asked him.

  "'The plan is that I earn enough money as a tuk-tuk driver to pay for my education. I live with my aunt. I study with this man. I get an accountant's degree and then a job in Siem Reap. All the new hotels need accountants. New businesses also need them. It's a perfect plan. But one thing—it's impossible.'

  "He's staring at me with his good eye, and he's smiling. I asked him why it's impossible.

  "'Because I rent this motorbike. I can't mak
e enough each day to pay rent and save money. So I'll go on driving, and first I'll make enough to buy a motorbike. Then I'll use the bike to make money, and I'll save some of that. When I have enough, I'll study to be an accountant. But that time is far away.'

  "I said, 'Good for you.' He took me to Angkor. He took me around town. I kept thinking about his plan. And by the way, he didn't ask me for money. I paid him the usual, ten dollars a day.

  "Couple of days went by. I kept waking up at night—couldn't sleep. I was thinking about Sar and his plan. I also thought how, when I was sixteen, my father kicked me out of the house—'Get out of here. I don't want you.' My father was a complete bastard. A man in the neighborhood took me in and treated me as his son. He's my real father. He was a Navy SEAL. If he hadn't done that, I would have become a druggie, on the street, a lost soul. That helping hand made the difference. I thought about that a lot.

  "Next day I met Sar as usual. I said, 'Let's go to the motorbike dealer.' I got all the prices and compared them. I put down eleven hundred dollars and he got the motorbike, a Suzuki 110—just what he needs to be a tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap and make some money.

  "I said, 'Okay, now it's up to you. It's not impossible anymore.' And I gave him my e-mail address. We'll see what happens. It might be interesting.

  "Hey, it was the last of my money, but I didn't really need it. It might make the whole difference between success or failure in his life."

  "That's a good story," I said. He wasn't boasting. It had just happened and he was still ruminating about it. He was a nice guy with a good heart, not a wealthy man but a hard-working mate on an Alaskan ferry, nearing retirement, with a modest income. He seemed something of a loner, but I could see he was energized by his good deed and eager to see how it would all turn out.

  When I told him about my experience with the rickshaw driver in Mandalay, he said, "The great thing is, it's not like foreign aid. Every dollar is being used. No middlemen!"

  All this time we were traveling along the wide brown inland sea, under a cloudless sky, in sunshine that blistered my face and arms. My perch on the cabin roof was so bright and so blowy, I had given up trying to read—it was Robin Lane Fox's biography, Alexander the Great. A shore appeared to the south, and as we approached it, a shore to the north became apparent as a black line in the distance. Farther on, the shores closed in, and houses on stilts teetered at their banks. In the distance was a large gold temple, and then we passed through a break in the shore that narrowed to a river. This was the Tonle Sap River, the major outlet from the lake, which joined the Mekong at Phnom Penh and continued south through Vietnam.

  While the sun beat down on our heads, frying us on the boat's metal roof that was like a griddle, Mark told me about the storms on his ferry run to the Aleutians, the days of fog, the way the whole boat would ice up and freeze and become top-heavy and unstable. In the distance I could see some half-naked men tossing fishing nets and others pulling up crab pots.

  Borne by the current, we passed higher banks, bigger houses, riverside settlements, fishing boats, motorboats, and fortified embankments. The houses piled up and became more dense, and the city appeared as we approached the landing stages.

  ***

  PHNOM PENH HAD A SCRUFFY, rather beaten-up look, like a scarred human face in which its violent past was evident; it was a city that had suffered extreme punishment of a kind that was impossible to conceal. It was a city under repair, which is also the look of a city falling apart, and there were very poor neighborhoods, but unlike India, it was poverty without squalor. There are architectural marvels in Phnom Penh—the royal palace, residence of Sihanouk's successor, Prince Ranariddh (Cambodia had reverted to being a kingdom), the national museum with its imposing collection of Angkor treasures and statuary, some colonial-era villas, the main post office, the Grand Market, some temples—yet instead of raising the tone of the city, these dignified buildings only made the rest of it look worse.

  Spelled out in pebbles underwater near a temple, I found the message If you want a good rebirth you must liberate from the delusions. It seemed to me that Cambodians had few delusions. Within recent memory, they had seen everything—terror, starvation, mass murder. They had needed to be tough to survive, so they did not have the geniality of Thais or the dreamy obliqueness of Burmese or the practicality of Singaporeans. But even the streetwise Cambodians in the city, who were direct and demanding, were capable of graceful gestures. With good reason, they had lost hope in the promises of government and justice. Once, in casual conversation with a Cambodian, I said I'd like to come back someday. He looked at me with disbelief. He said, "Why you want to do this?"

  It seemed incredible to him that anyone would want to return to this death-haunted country. He wanted to leave Cambodia; everyone he knew wanted to leave. Phnom Penh was thronged by pedestrians, by cycle rickshaws and scooters. No one had money for cars. That alone made it picturesque for me, trying hard not to be a romantic voyeur, though it was obviously a struggle for everyone else.

  For superficial reasons, I was happy—happy in the way the big pink middle-aged men were happy in Cambodia, though most of them were in beach towns like Sihanoukville. It was one of the greatest places in the world to be a barfly. Cheap beer, good food, fine weather, and any number of congenial companions—other barflies and beautiful women who, it seemed, had little else to do but watch you drink and smile.

  On a side street of Phnom Penh, at Sharkey's bar, one of many such bars, big ugly Western men drank beer and played pool in the company of small pretty Cambodian women, who pawed them and poured their drinks. This arrangement is a kind of heaven for many men. It was the atmosphere of cheap beer and mild debauchery I had seen all those years ago in Vientiane. It wasn't outdated; it had just moved farther down the Mekong River.

  "What do you want?" the tuk-tuk drivers asked in Phnom Penh with a smile, confident that they could provide anything I named—heroin, a massage, a woman, a man, someone to marry, a child to adopt, a bowl of noodles, or a souvenir T-shirt.

  As in Siem Reap, the Phnom Penh hotels ranged from the luxurious to the basic. The sumptuously furnished and Frenchified chateaus like Le Royal, set in walled compounds with guards posted outside, had rooms for $500 a night; at the other end, the little side-street pension where Mark Lane was staying was $15 a night. But his room had no windows. I found a hotel overlooking the river for $25 a night, with breakfast. Since Burma, my usual morning meal had been noodles or a mound of rice with a fried egg on top.

  I wanted to read about Pol Pot. I found a bookstore near the national museum and swapped my copy of Robin Lane Fox's life of Alexander for Philip Short's life of Pol Pot. On the shelves, to my surprise, were copies of my own books: bootlegged copies, smudgily printed, looking homemade.

  "Where was this printed?" I asked, picking up a copy of Dark Star Safari.

  "It's a photocopy," the clerk said, though it was a chunky book, more like a bound proof copy than the finished article.

  "Why do you go to all the trouble to photocopy this book?"

  "Because it's a bestseller."

  "People read this guy?"

  "Oh, yes, sir," he began, but before he finished I took out my driver's license and showed it to him. He held it in two hands, studied it closely, then shrieked—a gratifying reaction. Then he became anxious and said, "Are you angry with me?"

  "Of course not."

  His name was Cheah Sopheap. He asked me what I was doing in Cambodia. I took a bootlegged copy of The Great Railway Bazaar off the shelf and showed him the endpaper map. I had wanted to travel from Thailand through Cambodia in the early seventies, I said, but it had been impossible.

  "It was a bad time then," Sopheap said. "The city was empty. All the people had been sent to the countryside."

  "So there was nothing here?"

  "Just prisons."

  "And Pol Pot was making trouble for you?"

  "Pol Pot was nothing," he said. He made a face and flicked his finger as thou
gh at a gnat.

  To the world, Pol Pot was a moon-faced monster, so this was a surprising answer. Sopheap explained, saying that before the coming of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian society had evolved to the point where the rich were ostentatiously wealthy and the rural poor simply desperate. The countryside, especially in the east of the country, had been ruined by the war in Vietnam, which had spread to Cambodia. Khmer Rouge was what outsiders called Pol Pot's organization. In Cambodia it was known as Angkar, the Party.

  Sopheap did not say so, but Nixon and Kissinger had secretly approved an invasion in 1969 and the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, in the ruthless and irrational belief that it would help win the Vietnam War. For the next several years, without any authorization from Congress, B-52s from Guam flew thousands of bombing missions. This outrage, accurately documented by the journalist Seymour Hersh, included the dropping of half a million tons of American bombs and the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the American-funded regime of Lon Nol. The blitz only made the Vietcong more resolute, and the bombing created havoc in Cambodia, killing an estimated 600,000 people and driving the peasants into joining the Khmer Rouge.

  "The poor people hated the rich and hated the Americans who were killing them," Sopheap said. "They were so angry! And when they came to Phnom Penh they did anything they wanted."

  He meant the men in black pajama-like uniforms, who appeared in the capital in April 1975 and took over, expelling all the residents, looting their houses, and sending them into the countryside. These guerrilla soldiers had been living in the jungle, fighting and scavenging, some of them for many years. They were hungry, battle-weary, and resentful. A large number of the more recent recruits were in their early teens.

  "They liked having power and killing. Pol Pot was not the only reason. The people themselves made the terror."