Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Convinced that the city’s loveliness lay in its newness, the king decreed that nothing old should ever appear within its precincts. Nothing should stain the city’s beauty. So all old things were removed or hidden, and in time even old people were banned from its streets and ramparts.

  There was one old man who had lived in a simple hut for as long as anyone could remember. But he, too, was forced to leave the city that had been built around him. He took up his things and fled, coming after a time to an old cave that lay on the banks of a roiling river.

  The years went by, but of course all things change, all things are impermanent, and the day came when the armies of the great enemy, the Cham from far-off Vietnam, arrived at the gates of the city. They arrived with elephants and war chariots and were clearly the superior force. The young king of Angkor, in desperation, sought to negotiate with the king of the Cham before his city was laid waste.

  The king cowered before the Great Cham, and the conqueror laughed and mocked him. This Great Cham was a lover of riddles and saw a chance for some fun. “You can keep your kingdom,” he told the Angkor king, “if you can answer this.”

  He held out a piece of wood. It was as long as a thigh bone and just a little wider, cut as it was from a young tree not far from the palace. “Tell me,” the Great Cham said, “which way this branch has grown. Which is the bottom and which is the top? Give me the right answer, and I shall spare your city. You have one day to decide.”

  Frantically, the young king went down to the swirling river to think. He sat on its bank and stared at the riddle stick the Cham had given him. Which was the bottom? It was impossible to tell.

  Eventually, the old man emerged from his cave. He saw the distress on the young king’s features. Moved by the monarch’s weeping, he asked if he could help. When the king showed the branch to the old man and explained the riddle, the old man snatched it and heaved it into the water.

  Near the shore was a small whirlpool, and as the piece of wood approached it, the old man told the king to watch the branch carefully. It would, he said, be pulled down on the side that was the heaviest — its bottom. That was where it had grown from. The top would bob up, and the river would tug at the bottom.

  And so that was what happened. The king pulled the branch from the whirlpool and ran with the answer back to the mighty Cham. When all was done and the armies of the Cham had departed, the young king realized the truth. He saw at last that beauty was fleeting and that the wisdom that came with age was infinitely more important. The old man had saved the kingdom, so the king fell on bended knee and asked for forgiveness. The elderly, he decided, were the wise ones of the land, and thereafter at Angkor the old ones became the most honoured. It was the old ones whose souls inhabited the stones in the river. It was the old ones who remembered everything most clearly.

  There is a famous saying in Khmer: Ngoey skát àon dák króap. It translates as: “The immature rice stalk stands erect, while the mature stalk, heavy with grain, bends over.” What it’s really about is bowing, humbling oneself before one’s elders. Khmer parents teach that to their children. They must show respect toward their elders by bowing to them. In Khmer the word àon is used to describe this show of respect, though it’s also used to describe the bending over of the mature rice stalk. Seen in a rice plant, it’s an indication of the bounty, richness, and maturity of the grain. In a person it indicates good character and respect and, of course, wisdom.

  The Mon-Khmer language is spoken by more than seven million people in Cambodia. It belongs to a family of languages called Austro-Asiatic. Most of the other tongues in this group are quite small. They’re spoken in pockets from northeastern India all the way to Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago. The two largest languages in the family are Khmer and Vietnamese. But unlike Vietnamese (with six tones) or Chinese (with four tones) or even Thai (with five tones), Khmer is somewhat unusual in Asia because it isn’t tonal.

  Even so, I confess that I didn’t learn very much Khmer. Vana spoke English well enough to converse on almost any subject, and even when I asked him some difficult questions about Buddhism, he looked up the English words he didn’t know — he must have had a dictionary in his hut — and then gave me a better answer in the morning.

  On my last day in Angkor, Vana and I visited a section of palaces and terraces called Angkor Thom in the very heart of the city, a site encircled by a massive twelve-kilometre wall. In each of the cardinal directions there were gates, and guarding the gates and lining the roads that entered them, were long columns of carved stone figures. When we puttered through the southern gate on Vana’s scooter, I saw something quite remarkable. Between the statues, strung from one stone figure to the next, was a long balustrade. Vana told me to peer closer, and when I did, I spotted a snake. It was Vasuki, the naga, and these were the gods and demons from the Churning of the Sea of Milk. The story was obvious, but this time Angkor was being spun into existence from the very fabric of the universe. The Khmer had taken the ancient Hindu epic and made it their own.

  Above the gates I noticed a large carved Bodhisattva face. Many believe that this is the face of the last and greatest of the kings of Angkor, gazing down upon all who enter his city. In 1181, Jayavarman VII came to power, and it was he who built Angkor Thom.

  Vana squinted at the sun and told me that Jayavarman’s royal palace was inside these walls. Little is known of this king, though one thing is certain: he broke with the Hinduism that had come before him and became a devout Buddhist. Since that time, Cambodia has been a Buddhist country.

  In the centre of Angkor Thom sits an ancient Buddhist temple called Bayon. At its entrance are fortune tellers and sellers of incense, though saffron-robed monks still glide through the galleries of Bayon. Buddhism, of course, has a particular relevance here. A release from the suffering of the world is available through Buddhism, and no one can argue that Cambodians haven’t had their share of misery.

  Among the Buddha’s last words to his disciples were: “If a snake lives in your room, and you wish to have a peaceful sleep, you must first chase it out. And so it is you must break the bonds of worldly passions and drive them away as you would a snake.” Here again is a transcendental idea. The snake that churned Angkor into being must now be chased away. The symbols were changing, and it was time for dissolution, time for the great collapse.

  Around the lower galleries of Bayon there are more bas reliefs. As they do at Angkor Wat, the carvings encircle the temple, but here the stone gives way to something wholly different. Perhaps it’s the Buddhist influence, but for once there are no scenes of kings and their epics. Here instead are carvings of everyday people, the lives of Khmer peasants from eight hundred years ago.

  The reliefs show the women of the city gathering at the market, potters producing cups and plates, and a group of wine drinkers watching a distant performance of royal dancers from a window. There are seeming legions of shopkeepers touting their wares. Farther on there are fishermen on nearby Tonlé Sap Lake. One man has mysteriously fallen overboard and a crocodile rises to meet him. The reliefs blend together so that in the next scene there are gamblers betting on a cockfight. Another huddle of men trues a wheel. It’s a kingdom of the people under the wise and gentle rule of Jayavarman the Buddhist.

  After Jayavarman died in 1221, there were no more temples built at Angkor. The city began its long, inevitable decay. It was almost as if, in only a generation or two, the people left behind their desire for worldly things and all ideas of grandeur. Year after year the jungle encroached on the great city. The wooden buildings rotted and collapsed, and at last the temples themselves were lost in the undergrowth. It was the end of Angkor. The churning had been completed.

  I said goodbye to Vana that night. I would be leaving early in the morning and wouldn’t see him again.

  At dawn I clambered into the long boat that would take me across Tonlé Sap Lake and eventually to Phnom Penh. There had been a mighty crack of thunder the night before, heraldin
g the advent of the rains. Tonlé Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia, swells wildly in the rainy season, and the river at its other end might be one of only a handful on Earth to actually reverse direction from season to season. In the dry season it flows south toward Phnom Penh, emptying into the Mekong River. In the rainy season it flows north into the lake. Bizarre.

  I rode on the roof of the boat for a while, gazing at the fishing villages tucked among the reeds of the shore, but then the sun came out of the clouds and I fled into the cool shadows below the deck. For many hours we chugged along the river until finally we came to the docks at Phnom Penh.

  Suddenly, things were quite different. In this sad, dusty city, not only did I see no old people, I also noticed a frightening amount of younger ones missing legs and shuffling about on makeshift crutches. Cambodia is still one of the most heavily land-mined countries in the world. Many are leftovers from the Vietnam War, and a great deal are American. The Americans bombed Cambodia heavily in the early 1970s in an attempt to break up Vietcong supply lines. These supply lines took no notice of the official borders, of course, so they penetrated deep into Cambodia.

  One type of land mine is made entirely of plastic explosives and can’t be located with traditional metal detectors. The big problem is that, during the rainy season, these plastic land mines often float off. They’re now dispersed across the country and can be found almost anywhere. Sadly, it seems as if every tenth person in Cambodia has had an appendage blown off by a land mine.

  Phnom Penh is a nasty, windblown hellhole. The taxis are mostly motor scooters, and when I hopped onto one, the driver first addressed me in French. He was probably thirty-five years old, one of the few people of that age around. I wondered what he had done during the Khmer Rouge years. He scowled a lot, and I imagined he might once have been a child soldier of the Khmer Rouge. His French was quite fluent, but he switched to broken English when he realized I wasn’t European.

  “You want to shoot gun?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Kalashnikov, M-16, you choose.”

  I had heard of this sort of thing. You were taken out to a place where you did indeed have a choice of weapon at a dollar a round. “I’m not really interested.”

  “You want to throw hand grenade?” The city whizzed by us.

  He tipped his head back slightly so I could hear over the wind.

  “What?”

  “Is okay,” he said. “You throw grenade into water.”

  Apparently, this was the best idea they’d come up with for tourism. Someone else had told me that for $50 I could shoot a rocket launcher at a water buffalo and watch it explode.

  “Okay, okay …” My driver paused for a moment. “So you want girl?”

  “Look, just take me to the market.”

  The Russian market in Phnom Penh was on Ho Chi Minh Boulevard. I got a kick out of that. The market was so wide open a place that you could not only buy almost any pirated music CD or DVD movie, you could pretty much purchase any computer software you wanted, as well. Ho Chi Minh would have loved that.

  It was hard to make light of Phnom Penh, though I was trying my best. One hot, dusty afternoon when I was walking back to my hotel, I saw a familiar sign — the red-and-white logo of Pizza Hut. I had a real yen for pizza, so I went in and had one. I was the only one there. Actually, it didn’t taste that great, and when I went back out to the street, I studied the sign more closely. It mimicked the Pizza Hut logo exactly, but instead of saying Pizza Hut what it really said was Pizza Hat.

  Off on a side street of Phnom Penh is the city’s dirtiest little secret — the building known as S-21. Even the name sounded ominous to me. Once, in fact, it was simply a school, an L-shaped building filled with classrooms set on a small wooded hill near the centre of town. The Khmer Rouge took it over, though, and it became the most imfamous prison in Cambodia.

  It’s known to the locals as Tuol Sleng. The name is a play on words. Tuol is simply the name of the small hill. Sleng, though, has a double meaning, actually, a triple one now. It’s the name of one of the indigenous trees of Cambodia. The fruit of these trees, however, is highly poisonous, and in the Khmer tongue, sleng has also become an adjective that signifies “bearing poison.”

  There was that naga thing once again — the poisonous vomit of Vasuki. But in Khmer slang sleng also means “to have guilt.” Bearing poison … and guilt.

  That’s pretty apt. S-21 became the very gates of hell. When the city was being cleared of people, the intellectuals were taken here. Even knowing a language besides Khmer was enough to warrant the death penalty. Individual classrooms were walled into smaller cells and fitted with bars. In effect, the former school became a torture chamber.

  Even more alarming, the real shock troops of the Khmer Rouge were the orphaned children, roving gangs of heavily armed ten- and twelve-year-olds, completely brainwashed, as vicious as any mercenary. They seemed to have no consciences. Like packs of dogs, they bit and snapped and did the dirty work of the new regime.

  S-21 is now a sort of museum. Much of it has been left as it was during those grim days. There are burn marks on the floors and rusty patches that might be blood.

  What I found hardest to take were the photographs. After being arrested, each prisoner had his or her Polaroid picture taken. These have now been collected and are displayed on the walls in a macabre gallery of faces. Some faces stare blankly, puzzled, but a good number flinch at the camera flash. There’s clearly fear in their eyes, and their mouths are tight with anxiety.

  Of the 10,499 prisoners who were brought to S-21, it’s believed that only seven survived. I was reminded of the concentration camps in Europe. Here is another black mark on humanity that will take many generations to erase.

  In a squat little building in Phnom Penh is the Cambodian Institute for Human Rights. Its director is Kassie Neou. He’s responsible for the day-to-day operations of the institute, which is a thankless, almost overwhelming task. Neou is bent with age now, but he’s no ordinary person.

  He was a teacher before the darkness set in, and when the Khmer Rouge came, he was imprisoned. His only crime was that he was suspected of speaking English. Neou, though, is a survivor. He was tortured and sentenced to be executed, but his guards were mostly children. The wise Neou escaped death night after night by telling stories to his keepers, by appealing to the scraps of childhood remaining in these ravaging mobs of child warriors.

  Neou recounted the old Hindu myths and what he could remember of Aesop’s fables, and they sat at his feet, gazed up at him, and listened. And he told them the Cambodian folktales, as well.

  Perhaps he narrated the one about the old man and the river, about the king and the stick and the riddle. It’s astonishing really. Like the old man of legend cast out of Angkor, Neou, too, was banished from his city. He also lived in hiding for months, though it wasn’t in a cave. Finally, however, he was discovered and taken away to what he thought would be certain death.

  Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, Neou prevailed by spinning tales. Our stories are everything, of course. Built from the bricks and mortar of meaning, the stories we tell ourselves over and over become our worlds. We have come from them and we return to them.

  There’s still a lot of work for Neou to do. Cambodia isn’t out of the darkness yet. There are remnants of the blue poison everywhere.

  From the glory and beauty of Angkor to the very depths of hell, Cambodia has seen it all — the very best and worst humanity can muster. Slowly, the tourists are dribbling back. Neou will continue his work, though there are few others like him. The old ones are mostly gone, and the villages in Cambodia belong to children. But the country’s youth herald what will come. Slowly, like the endless cycle of lives in both Hinduism and Buddhism, the soul of this country is re-emerging, churning itself into a new and better world.

  7

  One Thousand Words for Rice

  The capital of Thailand is Bangkok, but that’s
not what Thais call the city. Bangkok was the original site of the capital more than two hundred years ago, but King Rama I decided to move the seat of power across the river to another place called Krung Thep. Today Krung Thep is what we mistakenly call Bangkok.

  Actually, Krung Thep is the city’s shortened name. The real moniker is slightly longer. It’s Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit, which translates into “The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city of Ayutthaya, of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous royal palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.”

  That’s a mouthful, so in English we call the place Bangkok. And it’s no city of angels. It might not be the most dreadful town I’ve been to, but it’s big and ugly and more than a little squalid. Ten million people are spread over the mud flats. Sluggish brown canals worm through Bangkok’s centre, their fetid water lapping against building stilts and supports. Every spare stretch of sidewalk is lined with street vendors’ carts, noodles simmering in oil, sun-darkened hands busy in endless toil.

  In spite of everything, though, Thais are a friendly bunch. Smiles come easily, and the poverty isn’t quite as grinding as it is in other places. This is simply life in Asia — crowded, dusty, and noisy. Rusty bicycles clank down rutted streets, and songthaews — covered pickup trucks with bench seats — putter along with engines no more powerful than lawn mowers. The antique taxis spew black exhaust and bleat tinny horns every few metres.

  The angels must wear earplugs.