A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  His Buddha had saved him on a number of occasions, and I said the same of mine. Perhaps it was true, but I had never thought about it before. I had it around my neck that time in Poipet when the Khmer Rouge were about to shoot me, but neither then nor afterward did I make the connection. For me that Buddha was not an amulet, it was a matter of habit, like the watch you automatically put on your wrist every morning. I had had it since 1972. When I first came to Cambodia I had noticed that in battle the soldiers would put the Buddhas they usually wore round their necks in their mouths. They told me it helped to repel the bullets, and I decided that I needed one too.

  I bought a little ivory Buddha and had it mounted by a Chinese goldsmith. It had to be blessed by a monk, and Pran, my interpreter—who later became famous when the story of his life under Pol Pot and his flight into Thailand became the subject of the film The Killing Fields—suggested that I go to the head of the most sacred pagoda of Phnom Penh, at the top of the mysterious hill in the middle of the city. He organized the ceremony and fixed the price: I would pay to have a scene from the life of the Enlightened One frescoed on the coffered ceiling which the monks were restoring.

  And so one afternoon I found myself sitting on the ground in front of a dozen or so monks who intoned strange litanies designed to protect me.

  “From what?” the head of the pagoda asked Pran, between one chant and another.

  “They ought to know,” I whispered. Pran translated back and forth, but the monk still did not understand what I wanted to be protected from.

  “Well, just tell me, what work does your foreigner do?”

  “He’s a journalist.”

  “Ah. Very good,” exclaimed the monk, as if this finally clarified everything. “Then he must be protected from fire, water and syphilis.” And he returned energetically to his chanting with the others. The little Buddha was handed back to me, I made the agreed offering, and since then none of those three dangers has troubled me.

  But my Buddha also has its taboo: I must take it off when making love. Pran explained to me, however, that “in urgent cases” it was enough to swing it round to my back by a simple tug of the chain. The important thing was that it should not see!

  The beautiful cook began reading some comics in the hammock under the fan. Then, realizing it was hopeless waiting for the captain, she fell asleep. We carried on chatting. After the first bottle of gin the captain wanted to start a revolution to free Burma from the dictators, Leopold wanted to free the world through meditation, and I wanted to take everyone back in history to find the point where we had taken the wrong turn.

  At last I went to my sleeping place under the funnel. With a rustling sound the ship continued to cleave the phosphorescent waves. The night was extraordinarily dark, and the sky, with millions of stars, seemed to have a depth that I had never seen before. I slept very well until a wonderful smell of incense and fried eggs reached me from the kitchen. The beautiful cook had been the first to get up; she had tidied everything, made her offerings at the little altar, and was now preparing breakfast.

  “One day she too will free herself from her slavery to the captain, and we’ll find her as a hostess on a Thai International Airlines plane, serving frozen omelettes,” said Leopold. She undoubtedly dreamed of such a future, but I could not wish it for her.

  We entered the harbor of Kompong Som one day late. Somerset Maugham, more than half a century before, had taken a fraction of the time to cover the same distance. The beaches were whiter than white. Behind the crests of the palm trees there were no buildings to be seen, and from a distance Cambodia looked like a desert island. The sailors were ready to disembark, having showered and put on clean trousers and shirts. As we came closer we could see the port nestling in a bay, but the motorboat that should have delivered the pilot didn’t leave the shore. “Nagarose here … Nagarose, do you read me?” the captain called repeatedly on the radio. Nobody answered. An hour. Two hours. Nothing. The crew got back into their work clothes and returned to their various jobs around the ship.

  Stretched out on one of the benches in the dining room, I read Maugham. On disembarking, he too had gone to Phnom Penh and from there to Angkor. Like so many other visitors he had been especially struck by Ta Prom, the temple that had been left to the jungle. There, in the nature that was reconquering the stones laid by man, he had felt “the most powerful of all divinities.”

  Personally, I have always been more impressed by the temples in which the work of man seems in itself to touch the divine. There are a few places in the world in which one feels proud to be a member of the human race, and one of these is certainly Angkor. Behind its sophisticated, intellectual beauty there is something profoundly simple, something archetypal and natural that reaches the heart without needing to pass through the head. In every stone there is an inherent greatness whose measure remains firmly in the mind.

  There is no need to know that for the builders every detail had a particular meaning. One does not need to be a Buddhist or a Hindu in order to understand. You have only to let yourself go, and you feel that somehow Angkor is a place you have been before. “The ruins of Angkor had already appeared to me in the visions of childhood, they were already part of my museum,” wrote Pierre Loti in 1901, remembering how, as a child, he had looked out of the window of his home and tried to see those mythical towers.

  In 1972, from a window in the Grand Hotel of Siem Reap, I too saw those towers, the towers of Angkor Wat; but I could not reach them. The Khmer Rouge had occupied the whole temple complex, and those gray pinnacles, rising above the green of the forest, were for me an unattainable mirage. The road that runs from the hotel to the temple was cut by a ditch after five miles. That was the front, and to go near it meant to put one’s life in the hands of some sniper hidden in a tree.

  Eight years later, when I managed to go the last four miles of that road, Angkor seemed to me even more moving, more tragic, more mysterious than I had imagined it. The Pol Pot regime and the Khmer Rouge had just been overthrown by the Vietnamese intervention, and the Cambodians I met, ill and starving, seemed like survivors of a lost and disoriented race that no longer had any connection with the greatness declared by its monuments.

  Over the centuries the Khmer people had forgotten Angkor, the great capital built between the ninth and eleventh centuries and abandoned in 1431 after the Siamese devastated it with fire and sword. If it were not for Henri Mouhot, who “rediscovered” Angkor for the world, and for the Cambodians themselves, the Khmer would not have a history to look back on.

  And yet, in that immense complex there was everything. There was life: past and future. Yes, because Angkor was, among many other things, a sort of prophecy in stone left for posterity. Or at least so it seemed to me when I first stood there amid the screeching of monkeys and the chirping of cicadas. That impression has never left me.

  I was the only visitor at the time. Accompanying me was Pich Keo, one of the old guides, who had survived the massacres of Pol Pot. Cambodia was a vast field of death, and in a strange way the grandeur of Angkor seemed to reflect the greatness of that tragedy. In one of the great bas-reliefs I saw the same scenes of torture—people quartered, cut to pieces, impaled, beaten to death, or fed to the crocodiles—as those I had heard of while traveling through the country. The stories told to me by survivors of the death camps were there, carved in stone ten centuries before. A prophecy? A warning? Or simply the recognition of the immutability of life, which is always joy and violence, pleasure and torture? In the bas-reliefs it was so. Next to the scenes of frightful suffering were others of great serenity; beside the terrible executioners were sinuous dancing girls. Orgies of pain and orgies of happiness, all under the great stone smiles, under the half-closed eyes of those mysterious faces in the jungle. I had no doubts: the message of Angkor remained what it had been for centuries. On the lintel of a door, an ancient hand had chiseled a message that Pich Keo translated: “The wise man knows that life is nothing but a small flame shaken
by a violent wind.”

  The hours passed. Night fell. From the radio room I heard the voice of one of the crew constantly calling: “Nagarose here … Nagarose, do you read me?” No reply. Not until ten the next morning did the ship’s radio pick up an answer. The pilot would come, but not immediately. We must wait. He came on board in the early afternoon, and at four o’clock Leopold and I said goodbye to everyone and disembarked. We were in Cambodia, free to go where we liked … but without an entry visa. That would be a problem when we left, I thought. The most urgent problem now was to get to Phnom Penh.

  From Kompong Som to the capital is 185 miles. The asphalt road is one of the best in the country, but because most of the supplies pass over it, also the most hazardous. Government soldiers disguised as Khmer Rouge, real Khmer Rouge, and plain bandits lay tree trunks across the road, sack the trucks and rob the cars. Once in a while, to make sure of being respected, they murder a couple of people.

  We went to a hotel in Kompong Som. It had been opened not long before to accommodate officials of the United Nations and all the other organizations involved in the international effort to bring democracy to Cambodia. Our first impression was that democracy, marching to the tune of dollars, was definitely on the advance. Kompong Som, which only a year before had had only a few feeble lamps alight after eight in the evening, was now a ville lumière, with several restaurants and bars open until all hours, and a big discotheque where scores of girls flocked from the nearby villages, dressed like dolls and made up like kabuki masks. Prostitution, I have come to learn, is the first sign of liberalization and economic recovery.

  My room was right under the dance hall, and I did not fall asleep until one in the morning, when the pounding beat of the music stopped and a cheery crowd—girls for rent or already rented, experts in humanitarian aid, soldiers and international police, businessmen and election observers, all tired and sweaty—filed between two rows of Khmer beggars in old military uniforms, who appealed to their distracted charity with empty hats, amputated legs, arms without hands, and pathetic smiles. The international community, which had come to Cambodia to bring democracy, was finally going to bed.

  In Kompong Som the most important United Nations unit was a battalion of the French Foreign Legion. A colonel received us: tall and elegant, with blue eyes and two scars on his cheek that might have been made to measure, self-assured and most civil. On hearing Leopold’s unusual surname, he gave him a fixed stare: “Like the lieutenant of Dien Bien Phu?”

  “Yes. My cousin,” replied Leopold. The colonel stood to attention and gave him a smart salute, as if my friend had himself been one of the glorious dead in that battle and one of the Legion’s heroes.

  He invited us to breakfast, and after a little while he asked us the obvious question: why had we arrived by ship? I told my story, and the colonel observed: “Too bad you weren’t on that helicopter in Siem Reap. The fortune-teller told you: ‘If you survive an air accident in 1993’ … Well, then! You should have been in that accident and survived. That way you’d be sure now of living to the age of eighty-four.” He found it very amusing that I had not thought of it before.

  He advised us to leave soon for Phnom Penh, as the ambushes usually occurred in the early afternoon. He let us take an interpreter with us, an old Vietnamese whom we had already met at the market and who spoke Chinese, Khmer, English and French. He was a survivor, and had plied his trade as an informer for all the past regimes (except perhaps that of Pol Pot). The Legion gave him $50 a month to make a daily report on the rumors circulating in town. Often, he told us, the report consisted of just three letters: R.A.S., rien à signaler (nothing to report).

  The old spy was a great help. He found a car with a driver willing to take us to Phnom Penh. For miles and miles the road was deserted, without a single car coming the other way. We sped past the carcasses of cars that had been ambushed. The heat created mirages in the distance, and at times it really seemed that tree trunks had been laid across the road a few hundred yards ahead, and that armed men were moving about. Our silence was a sign of the fear that each of us kept to himself.

  On reaching the outskirts of Phnom Penh we all drew a sigh of relief. “Mission accomplished: R.A.S.,” said the Vietnamese spy. We burst out laughing.

  As we drove past the airport I saw the Thai Airlines plane that flies daily between Bangkok and Phnom Penh coming in to land. I had an idea. Telling the driver to park the car, I took my passport and Leopold’s, and went into the airport. With an air of some importance, waving a UN pass that had expired months before, I mixed with the passengers queuing up at the counter where entry visas were being handed out for $20 a time. I filled in the forms, signed for myself and for Leopold, paid the fee and presented myself at the immigration window.

  “And this one?” asked the policeman.

  “It’s my friend’s passport. There he is over there, looking after the luggage,” I said, pointing at the crowd. Thump … thump. Two stamps, and in no time I was outside.

  And that was how, on May 20, 1993, I arrived in Phnom Penh from Bangkok—officially by plane.

  18/BUDDHA’S EYELASH

  In Cambodia I never slept well. There was something in the air, something that haunted me in the silence of night, that hovered around me, that made me stay on guard, and never let me sink into a deep slumber. When I did drop off, it was for a brief, light nap, from which I kept waking to feel that presence again. During the war this had never happened to me. It began when I returned there shortly after the fall of Pol Pot.

  What had happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 under the Khmer Rouge regime defies any fantasy of horror—it was more frightful than anything a man could imagine. The whole society was turned upside down, cities were abandoned, pagodas destroyed, religion abolished, and people regularly massacred in a continuous purificatory orgy. A million and a half, perhaps two million Cambodians, a third of the population, were eliminated. I looked for those I had known and found no one. They had all ended up as “manure for the fields”—because, as the Khmer Rouge said, even the “counterrevolutionaries,” or at least their corpses, must serve some purpose.

  I traveled for a month through a tortured land, collecting eyewitness accounts of that folly. The people were so terrorized, so stunned by horror, that often they could not tell me about it, or did not want to. In the countryside I was shown the “collection centers for the elimination of enemies”—usually former schools—where the traces of torture could still be seen. I saw wells from which you could no longer drink because they were filled with the dead, rice fields where you could not walk without treading on the bones of those who had been clubbed to death on the spot in order to save bullets.

  Everywhere new mass graves were being found. There were survivors who could not bring themselves to get on a boat since they had seen their relatives taken to the middle of a lake and fed to the crocodiles. Others could not climb a tree, because the Khmer Rouge had used trees to test their victims and decide who should live and who should die. Those who could reach the top were considered peasants, who could be employed; the others were intellectuals, to be eliminated.

  Since that time Cambodia has never been the same again; the marks of that suffering were everywhere, and the invisible weight of pain which had built up during the four years of Pol Pot filled the air, made every silence oppressive and every night sleepless. Even I could no longer hear the voice of the gecko, the speaking lizard, without counting its cries and asking, as with the petals of a daisy, “Will I die? … I won’t die … Will I die?” I could no longer see a row of palm trees without thinking that the tallest were those most fertilized with corpses. In Cambodia even nature had lost its comforting innocence.

  Leopold and I stayed at the Monorom Hotel in the center of Phnom Penh. It was hard to find a room. The city was invaded by foreigners: soldiers, bureaucrats, experts in this or that, journalists. After years of ignoring the tragedy of Cambodia, at last the international community had intervene
d on a massive scale. Not, of course, to punish the murderers or to restore order and a minimum of decency in life. To do that was “politically impossible”: China, which had always supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, was not willing to abandon its protégés. And so, for little Cambodia, the “Great Powers” had found one of those solutions that serve to justify any immorality: a compromise. With the Paris Agreements, signed with great pomp in 1991, the massacres were forgotten, executioners and victims were put on the same level, the combatants on both sides were asked to lay down their arms, and their chiefs to stand for election. May the best man win! As if Cambodia in 1993 were the Athens of Pericles.

  By the time I had been in Phnom Penh for a few days, I had the impression I was watching a colossal show of folly. In a palace of the 1930s, once the residence of the French governor, the United Nations Transitory Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) had set up its general headquarters. Every day, standing on a beautiful terrace, a young Frenchman issued information and instructions to the five hundred journalists who had come from all over the world to witness “the first democratic elections in the history of Cambodia.” An American explained that it was forbidden to photograph voters at the ballot boxes or to ask them who they had voted for as they left the polling station.

  On the upper floors, in small offices carved out of the large halls of former times, were other international officials, lawyers and judges borrowed from various countries, and university professors on contract to the UN. They sat at their computers and drew plans for the development and modernization of the country. They drafted a new constitution, wrote laws for the reorganization of the customs services and prepared regulations for the restructuring of the school system and the efficient functioning of hospitals. To hear them talk, one would believe that this was a unique opportunity for Cambodia to get back on its feet, to become a normal country again. The whole world was there to help it.