To give him something to flee with – I think – To save himself, to outrun avalanches.
Thank God we didn’t have to spend the night. A bloody hellhole, I tell you.
A train rumbles and sways in the kind of cadence the body remembers. In the seats ahead, the saris of women ripple in the evening breeze. Akram’s head tilts to his chest in a doze. Already I feel the new growth of stubble roughen my chin, the border of India fifty kilometres ahead in the dusk, the passing farmland statued with goats and waddles of geese being led to their grassy creeks by shepherds in white turbans.
I wake in the night as the train suddenly slows. We crawl forward in approach to a crowd, a hundred men, semi-circular, crammed tight to the tracks. The sea of their faces passes my window near enough I smell the heat off their skin. In the mass of them, I swear I see one with the face of Mr. Mason, cold-eyed, acquitting, the whites of his irises flashing at me beneath police lights. There is the flapping of furious wings against my stomach, a whole flock panicking as one bird falls in a spray of feathers, hooked by the predator’s claws. Through a break in the crowd, there is a dune of cloth and severed flesh, the dusty heap of a man on the tracks, his shalwar soaked in red, the skin of his feet, still in sandals, turned grey.
LES 3 CHEVALIERS
Our motorcycle pulls up in front of the bar; its red sign reflects in the puddles below the crumbling sidewalk. We step and scatter the red into ripples. The night air settles wet over our surfaces.
Yeah? On my life, you like this bar! – Piat, wide-grinned, leans the bike on its stand, twirls keys on his fingers – You come in! Come this bar, I show you girls. You see if you like, and if you no like, you no buy.
Wet season. Rain clouds hover on the horizon until four o’clock and as the sun descends, they scuttle over the city and wring themselves out in short bursts. Emerging into the clear air beneath, the sun licks an orange tongue over their bottom surfaces and turns the shivering reflection of the lake into a pit bright as magma. Travellers gather on the wooden porches of the surrounding guesthouses snapping photos in pleasant disbelief Phnom Penh has turned out to be so beautiful. Water hyacinths drift in clumps. Hammocks creak their sway along the beams. Piat wanders from table to table selling bags of skunk weed and Zippo lighter knock-offs. When someone asks about the corrupt government or how’s life in Cambodia today for a boy of eighteen, he cries – It not good! On my life, it not good!
The Killing Fields is on for the third time in the background. Shlomi looks over his shoulder at the TV then lays his head on his arms on the table.
I say – Fuck, that joint did me in too. What’s it like in Israel anyway? Ever shoot a man with your gun? – and then stub the roach out in the plastic lid of the water bottle.
Never killed a man.
Israelis. I’ve always wanted to get to know one of them but they’ve always been ones to dance off to the side of things, cigarettes propped in tanned faces, shirtless, shooting pool with the newly arrived Swedish girls. They carry themselves proud like the French, still with their army dog-tags, whiffs of arrogance and stick-together. Whole guesthouses in Bangkok just for Israelis. But this one broke off the pack. He stood next to my table, looked down into my milkshake and said – What is that? Coconut?
Banana.
It doesn’t look yellow to me – he’d lifted his chin with Israeli smugness.
Never killed a man – baked and bleary-eyed, he lifts his head from his arms – We weren’t there to kill them, just to make them uncomfortable, you know. Just to keep them on edge. We were trained not to admit weakness to the enemy. So what if we make them wait five or six hours at checkpoints? So what if they have to line up for gasoline? It lets them know we’re not kidding. That’s our job. We fuck up their lives a bit. They wait because they have to, and we make them wait because we have to. It’s all just a bunch of kids in uniforms anyway…
For no reason?
Of course there’s a reason. Do you know what it takes just to keep a war going? Year after year with all the soldiers in their uniforms, the complexity of that machine? You know they invented bullets that change directions in your body? It goes in your shoulder, fucks up your bones, fucks up your organs then leaves through your leg. What do you think that shit costs?
Smoke ponders the space above the table.
Do you know what a bullet costs?
I’ve got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country… – From the bar, Khoi stares across the room at the TV with indifferent noontime eyes.
I’ve got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country! – Sam Waterston’s voice shouts from the speakers under chopper blades – That’s their law. That’s our law.
…up the Cooper-Church Amendment’s ass…
Well, up the Cooper-Church Amendment’s ass!
Khoi looks over at us – Sure, I know this movie. One hundred thousand times I see this movie. Every time new people come to this guesthouse they want to see Killing Fields. Maybe one million times I see this movie!
Shlomi says – These your cigarettes?
Every time. Every time they want Killing Fields. Hey, you have an iPod?
Khoi and I sit on the wooden deck built out over the water. Sparse lights dot the opposite shore like a band of constellations. Somewhere on the lake a motor throbs through the hyacinths, its wake knocking them against the posts of the deck. In the dark their surface looks solid enough to stand on.
As boys, we ride on the back of the buffalo and they take us through the rice – he says – Yeah, really! They don’t care. You just sit on their back and they walk around the fields and eat grass. In the monsoon we go into the rice and look for snake, you know, because snake don’t like water and so they are more easy to catch. Even when we have nothing to do, my brothers and sisters we play and we walk outside and make games. That is life here. Yeah. Now Cambodia have many problem. But before, Cambodia have big problem.
Piat tosses words with a man swinging in the hammock beside the entrance of the bar. With a chewed toothpick he pries into the crusts of his knuckles. Two girls with bare midriffs play with their nails on blue stools along the wall. A curtain of red beads is pinned back from the doorway.
He ask if you have weapon.
No weapons.
The bar is humid and foul-smelling inside. The walls are black and coated in red light from the bulbs in the low ceiling. At one end, a small platform supported by crates serves as a stage. Three girls are inside – one in the corner, one behind the bar, one just disappeared into a back room with her arm around a shirtless man. The girl’s face at the bar is familiar as all of Southeast Asia. Red lips, a low nose with a flat bridge and flared nostrils. She has a patina to her skin that reveals exposure to heavier atmospheres, to particles of history that have burrowed into her irises, lined her face, accumulated beneath her lacquered fingernails like someone who has pawed at the earth for a reason.
Hi, handsome, what you want for tonight? You stay with me? What you like? – Thick as honey, her dripping voice. She chatters to the girl from the corner with the bigger nose, rolls of brown fat, a bad haircut. The uglier one who takes the sadder jobs.
Piat orders whiskey and flips through a binder of CDs.
She speak English. Tell her what you want.
What I want. What is that thing anyway? A trail of inflammations the bedbugs left from a dirty mattress in Bangkok I want to X through with my fingernail? Want. The shade of damp marijuana, a fishing net anchored by hyacinth roots? That’s their law. That’s our law. Ass. Firm brown nipples rubbed against sheer. Want is an imagined future harvested from lake bottoms of bones. At the door, an argument happens in sign language: two deaf lesbians.
Black storm clouds hover in the west over the lake. Two boys fish in a canoe using nets they lay and pull back in. Shlomi spies on them with the binoculars and says – Every day for hours and hours. What will they do when it starts to rain?
Cover their heads and paddle to shore. Our definitions of risk are different. They ride six to a bike here.
Piat strolls into the guesthouse with deliberate footsteps, his keys twirling. Wild eyes, high, sunken cheekbones, gestures he throws beyond his body limits into the surrounding air – On my life, man! You still here? I come from the market, you know, I meet my honey, eat noodles. You want to buy some skunk?
A recovering glue sniffer, a street kid who’s found a profession, he must be. His face doesn’t twitch but stretches into the most crazed and opened expressions. His laughs string enormous bridges of saliva across the corners of his lips. Selling skunk to stoner backpackers earns him a few thousand riel to buy noodles for his girlfriend at the market and a few tabs of M. He’ll take you on his motorbike to Choeung Ek and wait around as you tour the fields and collect souvenir photos in high-def – skulls towered in pyramids, thigh bones stacked like timber, torn fabric still sprouting from the soil. Just like in the movie. Ten thousand riel for the day, S-21 prison included – Before, Cambodia no good, you know? – Isn’t that what I want to hear?
Beside the bar, the blackboard reads: Tonight – Killing Fields 7 pm. Ceiling fans whirl and scatter threads of smoke unravelled from hands in sagging hammocks. A few travellers eating eggs watch CNN, compare the routes they took to Angkor, how much they enjoyed Laos. Beyond the deck, the morning sun has not yet risen into the bank of grey clouds.
I say to Piat – Where you been? Stay out all night?
Laughing, wild eyes with morning hair – No, man, I get this! Fresh today, you see? Best weed grows in Battambang, but in Phnom Penh you can only buy from me. No buy in Siem Reap or Sihanoukville. If you want, buy now. Later, I don’t have, you know. I smoke too much!
I dunno…
Why not! Come on, man, just buy my skunk!
A little weed for the coming weather isn’t such a bad idea. The guy’s price is high, but he’s so damn charming I feel I owe him the business.
I’ll buy skunk and you take me to S-21 prison today for free.
His mouth stretches open in a huge gulp of laughter, his eyes disappear and those constant tendons of drool – Free? Come on, man! Now gasoline is very high price! Now Cambodia no good! Skunk already good price, you know, friend price. On my life! How much you pay?
Bag of skunk, Tuol Sleng prison, and tonight a trip to his favorite girlie bar – only couple thousand riel. But if he’s happy with it, I know I’ve gotten screwed. Here it’s always this push–pull: Don’t rip or get ripped off. Cheap Charlie peeling bills from a sweaty money-belt, his peripheral vision on vigilant lookout for thieves. The sucker white guy with bottomless pockets of dollars.
Piat pitches his skunk deal to an Australian in a hammock. The Israeli walks across the deck over to my table, looks down at my milkshake and says – What is that, coconut?
Girl with the flat nose shouts over to Piat and their thick Khmer tumbles over the bar. He hands her a CD to put into the portable stereo in the corner on the floor by the stage. She bends over, a hole yawning open in her stockings – the upper thigh near the crease of her ass. Cambodian rap punches through shitty speakers. The lesbians sit brooding on the bar stools in silence. The two girls from outside sidle up to us.
Piat says – See look, my honeys!
The wide-nosed girl says – What you like, handsome? You want to see my menu? You want see how we do for you? We play, we do fun. If you want, we can do more. If you no like girl, maybe you want boy?
No boys.
She leans in, her tongue playing at her lips – You want to watch friend eat my pussy?
Two men walk through the doorway, small bony-framed Cambodians with sparse moustaches, plastic sandals. Booze. Greasy undershirts. One man walks directly for the wide-nose girl – a torrent of Khmer – he grabs her arm and pulls her towards the back room. Wide-nose screams, her fingernails flared into his shoulder. She yanks away from him, runs and drapes her arm around my neck.
Tonight you stay with me! You stay. That man no good! Say you stay with me!
Undershirt-man pauses, then totters over to me with blood-shot eyes, his dark skin oily from the heat and unwash. He spits and brings his face so close I see the concrete dust clinging to the fibres of his moustache. Stink of long camel teeth. The smell of his armpit, cough, a phlegm wad chewed then spat. He ask if you have weapon. No weapon. Not in the saving business.
Shlomi says – That’s west of the lake. I hear you aren’t supposed to go there. No thanks, I’ll stay here – he licks the Rizla closed.
Where’d you hear that?
That’s what all the guidebooks say. You should pay more attention to what they write in there. They’re trying to warn you so you don’t get yourself hurt. This is my vacation and I don’t want to get rolled up in a lot of shit. Here it’s not like Israel, or Canada, wherever. Things can get serious. You can’t walk around at night and trust people’s manners will keep you safe.
Piat is taking me.
And what do you think he’ll do for you if you end up in shit? You think he’ll put his ass on the line to keep some tourist from getting killed? Nice guy, sure, but not about to lose his skin over you. Yeah? You smoked this weed before?
You think I shouldn’t go?
Go if you want, just don’t forget where you are. This stuff is great, smells strong as shit.
Twenty-two, fresh from mandatory army service, tanned with near-black Israeli scruff, a shaved head, shirtless, red jogging shorts. He lights the joint and passes it to me – You’ve been to Angkor?
Brilliant, yeah, but crowded with touts. Not even a moment to just let it soak in without some kid trying to sell you postcards. Everyone scrambling on top of the temples for the sunset, rich ones on elephants, beggars lined up with all their amputations displayed. You’ve got to see it but the place is a circus really.
Why you think that?
Siem Reap is like a giant theme park. Five-star hotels, limousines…
I mean, why must I see it?
See Angkor?
Yes, why must I see this thing everyone tells me I must see? Why must I take a photo of something everyone else has the same photo of?
Pause.
Pause because he’s right. Because he’s twenty-two. Because it all suddenly hits me that memories end up piled and forgotten like postcards anyway, because it’s just another form of capture, because I’ve got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country.
Because it’s Angkor – I say – And you don’t come to Cambodia and not see Angkor…
Fuck it – Shlomi says.
What do you mean, fuck it?
Fuck having to go to Angkor. Do I really miss out on anything besides what everyone else has already seen?
Cheap Charlie, he’s right. I’ve been conned. Sucker.
The Killing Fields plays for the third time in the background. Shlomi looks over his shoulder and then lays his head on his arms on the table.
I say – Fuck, that joint did me in too. What’s it like in Israel anyway? Ever shoot a man with your gun? – and then stub the roach out in the plastic lid of the water bottle.
A knock on my door grabs at the edges of my sleep. The clock reads six-thirty, the voices of the women murmuring through the walls, already in the kitchen for hours. I open the door and a small girl with dirty feet is standing in the doorway. Fourteen, maybe twelve.
Hey, mister. You let me in? You want feel sex ten minutes cheap price? – her hand shoots up the leg of my boxer shorts.
What? Jesus Christ. No.
From the empty hallway, the first light of dawn already seeps like grey dishwater. She came directly from the street or wanting a few more bucks after the last traveller upstairs or next door.
Come on – she pleads at me softly – Only ten minutes. Why you don’t want?
I close the door in her face. Like a stray dog, her biscuit dropped and sagging tail. It’s not w
orth the potential damage. Door to door, so early and barefoot. I wonder where she came from, who she finds next, what her options are and if I’ve just exhausted them.
Khoi sighs and says – Now Cambodia have many problem. But before, Cambodia have big problem.
He walks to the edge of the wooden deck and looks out over the lake at the distant lights of the Tuol Kork district. The hyacinth continents drift and gather, a Pangaea dispersing and congealing according to tide and surface winds. Boeng Kak, the urban lake and stagnant bladder of Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge?
Khoi half smiles – Why does every tourist like so much the Khmer Rouge? Every day they want to see Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng prison. Sometime I think Khmer Rouge is very good for Cambodia.
Politely, sarcastically, empathetically, I laugh – And the tourists?
They just tourists, you know. They have lots of money, they give our place good business. I work at this guesthouse so I don’t mind about tourists. This is my job, you know, to pay for school, to get good money. Then I will travel to America and Portugal, one day even Uganda!
The hyacinth clumps pause in their break from the wooden posts. The water laps as Khoi says – My father die, you know. I live with my mother, my grandmother, two sister, two brother. Khmer Rouge come and look in our house, under the floor. They say we keep too much rice, they say we hide it. My father tell them no, but they keep looking for rice. They can’t find it, you know, because we don’t have. Then they take my father.
Where’d they take him?
Khoi shrugs – I was a boy. Past is past. Nobody here thinks about Khmer Rouge anymore, just the future. People want good things, and good things come from China. You look at something and if it say ‘Made in China’ it’s much better than ‘Made in Cambodia.’ Look at your iPod. It says ‘Made in China.’ Sure!
But people died.
Sure! That’s a life, people die! But now I work to save money for school. I meet tourists and if they want to go to cock-fighting or shooting range, I take them. If they want a bus ticket to Siem Reap or Sihanoukville, I buy for them. But for some reason they always ask about Khmer Rouge. I think – My God! We have Angkor Wat in this country! Why not ask about that!
That Savage Water Page 4
