A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  I found Olivier in his tiny office between the outer wall of the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. The prophecy of Buddha? Of course he knew it! It existed in several versions, he said, and he had found traces of it in different parts of the country. The oldest manuscripts went back about two hundred years, but that did not mean that the prophecy itself could not be far older. Banana leaves do not last long, and one of the traditional tasks of young monks was to make new copies of old texts that were becoming illegible. He had never heard Hoc’s rhyme before, but in his opinion it was possibly an updated popular version of the old prophecy, which, he said, ran more or less like this:

  “Around the middle of the Buddhist era” (the five-thousand-year era beginning with the birth of Buddha in 543 B.C., so the exact middle would be in 1957), “a palace of gold and silver will rise at the confluence of the four rivers.” (Where the Mekong and the Bassac rivers meet, forming four branches, Sihanouk had had a casino built. Subsequently, however, the vicissitudes of politics got in the way and the casino never opened. It has now been turned into the Hotel Cambodiana.) “After that there will be a devastating war in the land, and the blood of the victims will run as high as the elephant’s belly.” (The American war and then the massacres of Pol Pot.) “Religion will be eliminated.” (Pol Pot banned all Buddhist activities, destroyed the pagodas and killed most of the monks.) “Then will come a man disguised as a Chinese” (Sihanouk returned from Peking), “accompanied by a white elephant with blue tusks.” (The white UN vehicles with the blue berets of the soldiers on board.) “There will be another brief war, until a monk brings back the sacred scriptures from the Kulen Mountains” (today one of the bases of the Khmer Rouge), “and changes the name of the country from Kampuchea” (the Khmer name for Cambodia, meaning “karma of pain”) “to Nagar Bankat Puri. Only then will happiness reign, all illnesses disappear, every man have fifty wives and live to the age of 220 years.”

  Sure enough, this prophecy seemed exact … with hindsight. But even so it was impressive.

  The day of the elections began with a heavy and most beautiful downpour. It was Sunday. The Cambodians put on their best clothes and showed up enthusiastically at the polling stations. The atmosphere was festive indeed. Everywhere there were UN soldiers in their blue berets and the uniforms of their different countries; everywhere foreigners directing operations, observing, photographing; everywhere journalists, TV cameras, microphones. The act of voting itself was a novel and entertaining spectacle for the Cambodians. To prevent people from exercising their democratic right more than once, as soon as they had voted they had to dip their right index fingers in an invisible ink which made them glow under a special lamp. This was a piece of magic that left the Cambodians dumbfounded.

  Who to vote for? The parties were legion. Each one was represented by a symbol on the voting slip: there was a snake, a cow, the face of Prince Sihanouk, the towers of Angkor.

  The Communist Party, still in power, was the first on the list, and it had ordered people to make a good firm cross in the first square. But which was the first? You had only to turn the sheet upside down, and the first became the last. Many were those who stood perplexed in the voting booths, turning the ballot this way and that, unable to make up their minds.

  In the end everything turned out for the best, and the world’s conscience, especially that of the West, could congratulate itself on another “triumph of democracy.”

  On Prince Sihanouk’s return from Peking to become once again the head of state, the Royal Palace had been repainted and refurnished. It was passed off as the seat of Sihanouk’s ancestors, though in reality, like all the finest buildings in Phnom Penh, the palace had been built by the French during the colonial period specifically to give the local monarchy a touch of regal pomp.

  The famous Silver Pagoda was also of recent date, while the so-called “crown jewels” consisted of a modest collection of small gifts presented to Cambodia by visitors at the end of the last century. The all-steel Napoleon III Pavilion had been built by the French to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. Having served its purpose in Egypt it was sent as a gift to the King of Cambodia, who had had it erected in front of the Throne Hall.

  Only the three sacred jewels, symbol of the monarchy’s power, were said to be antique; but these had mysteriously disappeared with the departure of the last head of the pro-American republic, General Lon Nol, shortly before the arrival of the Khmer Rouge. One of these jewels was a sword used in divination: whenever the king had to take an important decision, the court fortune-tellers would read heaven’s answers to the problems of state in the patterns of rust on the blade.

  Thus it was that Sihanouk, on his return to the palace which had seen him first as king, then prime minister and finally prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, found himself without any of the traditional emblems of power. But he did not need them. He had been on the political scene for more than half a century; most Cambodians revered him as the father-god of the nation, and that was enough for him. He reigned with a kingliness that was his own, over this palace furnished with hideous armchairs in fake Empire style, cheap carpets, and a few old portraits of him and his wife, Monique, which had been foraged from the cellars. Sihanouk had no need of trappings. He felt himself to be the direct heir of all the greatness of Cambodia.

  “You’re sitting at the table of the kings of Angkor,” I was told while lunching at the palace a day after the elections. The table was a long affair of polished wood, bought in Thailand; but it was true, as Sihanouk observed with pointed irony, that I had been preceded at this table, or another very like it, by such figures as Mitterrand, Tito and General de Gaulle—“my hero,” as Sihanouk called him.

  As we ate we were constantly under the eyes of North Korean guards whom Kim Il Sung—“my great friend”—had loaned him. The conversation was about politics, but I soon managed to introduce the subject of ghosts by telling Sihanouk I had gone to look for André Malraux’s in the old Hotel Manolis. In that building on Post Office Square, now rotten and crumbling, the French writer had stayed with his wife at the time of his famous expedition to Angkor, from which he had stolen one of the great carved slabs of stone from the temple of Bantei Serei. He was caught and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, although he never served them.

  “Malraux wasn’t a thief, he was an art lover,” Sihanouk interrupted me. “What he did wasn’t stealing. It was an amorous abduction!” Sihanouk said his aunt had always refused to shake Malraux’s hand on that account, but for him he was a great man.

  I asked Sihanouk if any of the court fortune-tellers whom his aunt and his mother used to consult were still alive. I was interested in this tradition, I explained. Sihanouk referred the question to one of the ladies present and she, like all those addressed by him, joined her hands on her breast, bowed her head and whispered the reverential formula “Pom Cha … Pom Cha;” and my question was lost.

  Not that Sihanouk was uninterested in the subject. From the moment he returned to the palace—entering through the “Gate of Victory” and as first priority going to thank the spirits of his ancestors—he had had to concern himself with the world of the occult as much as that of politics. He had not been back long when there were rumors of a prophecy according to which he would die within a year. To avoid that fate—or so it was said in the markets of Phnom Penh—he had made a pact with the King of the Dead: his life in exchange for those of five thousand young Cambodians, many of whom were to offer themselves voluntarily. The palace had to issue an official communiqué denying both the prophecy and all the rumors that surrounded it. The story had been taken seriously to the point that many young people had begun tying white threads around their wrists to let the King of the Dead know that they did not wish to be among the victims.

  Another crisis had been provoked by Buddha’s eyebrow. Forty years previously, Sihanouk had brought this precious relic back from his travels in India, where it had been given him by Nehru. The astrologers ruled that the m
ost propitious place to preserve the eyebrow was in front of Phnom Penh’s railway station, so Sihanouk had erected a stupa, a reliquary, in the middle of the forecourt. But he had a niece, a dancer and magician, who thanks to various premonitory dreams had escaped the Khmer Rouge massacres in which Sihanouk lost fourteen of his children and close relatives. In 1992 this princess “discovered” that the stupa was in the wrong location, that all Cambodia’s problems stemmed from the fact that the relic was disrespectfully housed near a dirty and chaotic place like the station, and, worst of all, that it was constantly exposed to the sun. “As long as Buddha is in the heat the country will burn,” the princess said.

  Sihanouk took heed. He had the eyebrow removed and placed in the shade of a great tree at the foot of the hill in the center of Phnom Penh. He then began work on a great new stupa, 150 feet in height, which will change the skyline of the capital. The mysterious hill built by Cambodia’s enemies to weigh down the head of the naga, symbol of the country’s strength, will no longer be the highest point in the city. Sihanouk’s new stupa will dominate it—thus changing Cambodia’s destiny, according to legend.

  After lunch, while Sihanouk gave me a tour of the palace and introduced me to Micki, his dog, one of the court ladies asked if I would like to meet the woman who had been the queen mother’s fortune-teller. She would come to the palace at five that afternoon. I took my leave of Sihanouk and the Princess Monique, and with much discretion I was taken to wait in a building used by the secretariat.

  The fortune-teller was a thin woman with very short hair, a long black silk skirt and white blouse. We sat on the floor around a towel on which she laid out her cards.

  “You’re the son of a very rich and powerful family,” she began, making me think that I might as well leave there and then. She went on for the best part of an hour: at the age of ten years and ten months I had been very ill; a couple of influential people had stolen an idea from me; in October I must beware of two individuals who would try to ruin my reputation, one of them eight years younger than me, the other of my own age. She said that never in my life would I make money, and that if someone offered me a business deal I should stay clear or I would lose everything.

  I wanted to thank her and leave, but I could not. From the window I could see Sihanouk walking in the garden with Micki. It would have been terribly embarrassing if he had seen me there after I had formally taken leave of him. In the end I asked the woman if she saw any dangers lying ahead. Yes: between July 20 and August 1. “That’s the time when you shouldn’t cross any borders. But if you really must, then take great care of your travel documents,” she urged. That was precisely the time when I was planning to leave, overland, for Europe.

  Not much remained with me from that fortune-teller, except the fun of sitting at the feet of the woman who in her time, with her chitchat, had influenced the destinies of a court, not to mention the fun of hiding from the king as he walked in the garden with his dog. When I finally managed to escape without being seen through a side door of the palace, I felt as if I had just stepped out of a fairy tale.

  One of the haunts where the representatives of the international community met in the evening was “No Problem,” a sort of club-café-restaurant which had opened in an old colonial villa. One evening, sitting next to a table of strangers, all UN officials, I heard someone talking about a German journalist who had been told by a Cambodian fortune-teller not to fly, and who had saved himself at the last minute by not boarding the Russian helicopter that had crashed in Siem Reap. By now the story had a life of its own; it would be told and retold, each time with new details and new additions, and thus would become more and more true.

  I spent my last evening in Phnom Penh at the palace. Sihanouk was showing the diplomatic corps the latest product of one of his old hobbies: filmmaking. The film was a love story between a young man dying of cancer and a nurse. The title seemed designed to exorcise one of the many prophecies that concerned our host: See Angkor … and Die.

  The palace, faintly illuminated by the warm glow of a few torches against the ochre-colored walls, seemed more and more beautiful and unreal. Sihanouk, on great form, was clutching a microphone and translating the Khmer dialogue into French and English. We were in the small open-air pavilion in front of the Throne Hall. A fresh breeze drifted lightly among the columns. Under the star-studded sky reigned a magnificent, surrealistic peace.

  At dawn, Hoc and I left by taxi for Battambang, expecting to reach the Thai border by nightfall. The Khmer Rouge had been relatively quiet and the traffic was running smoothly as far as Poipet. The frontier post was theoretically closed, but we had heard that the UNTAC officials could go to Aranyaprathet in Thailand for shopping or dinner.

  In Poipet the taxi set us down in the market square. I instinctively went to see the wall against which the Khmer Rouge had put me in April 1975. I stood there a few minutes in silence, as if it really were somebody’s tomb. I thought of the many things that had happened to me since, of the many places I had been, the people I had known, the countless words I had written. I thought of all the things I would not have done had my life ended there—so much, and after all, nothing.

  I saw a white car with the UN logo heading toward the border. At the wheel was a young Japanese woman on her way to Aranyaprathet to meet her fiancé. Both she and the military frontier guards thought that I too was from UNTAC, and in a flash I found myself outside Cambodia. I found a car, and during the last couple of hundred miles to Bangkok I slept, without nightmares and without dreams.

  19/THE DESTINY OF DOGS

  The month of June had passed without the prophecy of the virgin of Medan coming true. I had not met my xiao lao può—the second “little wife” she had promised me—or if I had met her I was not aware of it. I had used that month to prepare for my annual trip to Europe. Above all, I had been trying to obtain visas for the different countries whose borders I would have to cross by train. This was no easy task, because some of them, including Vietnam, would like all visitors to arrive at an airport. Only after long explanations and arguments would they concede an overland visa, valid only for the particular frontier post named in the passport.

  I spent the last evening choosing what to take with me, knowing that where I was going there would be no trolleys, escalators or porters to make things easier. I had said goodbye to everyone and was already feeling the familiar thrill of beginning a journey, the sense of relief that always fills me when I know that I cannot be reached, that I am not booked or expected anywhere, that I have no commitments except those created by chance. How wonderful it is to mix with a crowd as an ordinary traveler, free from one’s own role, from one’s self-image, which at times can be a cage as tight as that of the body; to be sure you won’t meet anyone with whom you will have to make conversation, and to feel free to send to the devil the first person who tries to start one.

  In this mood, with only the weight of a backpack on my shoulders and one piece of hand luggage, I left Turtle House one morning to begin a great journey, one of the longest of my life and one of the slowest: Bangkok to Florence. Though I was heading west, I had to begin by going east. As it was impossible to cross Burma toward India, I had to enter Cambodia and then pass through Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Siberia, and on and on until I reached home.

  “Even a journey of ten thousand leagues begins with the first step,” say the Chinese, who have a proverb for every situation. My journey would be about 12,500 miles, but that very first step seemed the most difficult: how could I get to the station in time? Sukhumvit Road was completely choked with traffic; in half an hour my car had moved barely a dozen yards, and there was no hope that the situation would change. I thanked the driver and jumped on the back of a motorcycle-taxi which, by zigzagging between cars, cutting through narrow side lanes, going the wrong way down one-way streets and often mounting the pavement, got me to the station on time.

  The train took five hours to reach Aranyaprathet, speeding through the “kingdom
of smiles” that smiles no more. The Cambodian border was crowded with people pursuing an extremely profitable activity: smuggling. Loaded with bags and bundles, hundreds of Thais and Cambodians went back and forth undisturbed from one country to the other, under the eyes of the soldiers of both sides. I tried to slip through by mixing with the crowd, but my white clothes betrayed me and I was stopped at once: “No, no, foreigners cannot cross. It is forbidden,” said the soldiers. “Foreigners must go by plane.” I knew the old refrain, but did not lose heart. In Asia no prohibition is absolute, no rule inflexible; and soon, for a very reasonable price, I was “smuggled” into Cambodia on the backseat of an “authorized” car.

  Before the war the Cambodian railway line went all the way to Thailand; but with the country in ruins and all its resources up for auction, the tracks from the border have been sold as scrap iron. The train to Phnom Penh now starts from the city of Sisophon. The train? Well, not exactly. Two or three times a week a string of broken-down cattle cars, loaded with contraband and passengers, many sitting on the roof, braves the 206 miles to Phnom Penh. The time of departure is erratic and is never announced in advance, so as to confuse the bandits who regularly attack and loot the train. All it takes is a mine or a tree trunk on the track; the bandits—or soldiers of the regular army?—open fire, kill one or two luckless passengers to scare the others, grab everything and leave. The news is given at most two lines in the local newspaper. Sometimes not even that.

  I settled down among the baskets, bundles and passengers. They were all Khmers with very dark skin, the Khmer of the countryside and the forest, people of another age.