Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  The Nurseryman nods in agreement, his vast face setting into lines of sorrow. “You speak true, squire. You speak true. The people pay. And we have to look at it, and send our little stories.”

  Another silence, whose length has no measure:ment: faces nod and nod around the table, and young Clayton is out of it, his head buried in his folded arms. Then Volkov speaks.

  “Yes, Hubert, we have to look at it. This afternoon I shot film on Highway 1, in a village south of Neak Luong. Khmer Rouge are hitting Government forces there. I took pictures of a farmer with his small daughter in his lap-dead from a stray bullet. I talked with him: my driver translated. This is the last child the man has. There have been two sons and another daughter killed, and his wife as well. Now he is all alone, and what he is saying, over and over, is: ‘What will I do? What will I do? Now I have no one.’”

  Dmitri sniffs. He raises a hand to his eyes in ugly dismay, and I see that he’s weeping. Silence resumes around the table, but it isn’t the silence of embarrassment: it’s the silence of communion. . The waiters have vanished like spirits, and all the figures at the table are now individually distinct to me. The Nurseryman has tears glistening on his cheeks; he blows his nose into a white handkerchief. He saw the little boy with the flag die the other morning; is he weeping for him?

  To round out that story, I had followed truckloads of wounded boy soldiers to the city’s Russian hospital: little boys with red stumps where legs had been; boys with shrapnel inside them; boys with head wounds. They’d been dumped in the corridors because all the beds were full, and there were only two doctors there—one Cambodian, the other French—working like laborers to patch up the hundreds of wounded from the battlefields around the city. Parents sat with the wounded boys in corridors where puddles of blood and urine stood, feeding them bowls of gruel: a grisly children’s party. And thinking of this, I find that I’m weeping too, not knowing when it began.

  The Nurseryman’s pink mask looms close, and speaks to me.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” he says. “We all shed a few tears on couscous night.”

  It was still only nine o‘clock, with curfew in an hour, when we all emerged onto Monivong Boulevard. I was beginning to come down from the couscous, and the street looked almost normal. A circle of laughing Khmer prostitutes in many-colored sarongs surrounded us; but the Nurseryman waved them away.

  “Not tonight, ladies. We’re off to Madame Delphine‘s, the woman I love best.”

  Cyclo boys wheeled towards us in a flock, and the party began to climb into the black-hooded machines with shouts and laughter——including young Clayton, who now wore a permanent dazed smile, and had ceased to speak. I doubt that he knew where he was. Langford and Volkov hung back; Mike was trying to persuade me to come with them to Madame Delphine’s opium den: the next appointed phase of couscous night.

  “Come and have a pipe or two, Harvey. It won’t destroy your brain. And Madame Delphine’s is a great place for meeting people. Everyone goes.”

  No, I told him, a thousand times no. I’d avoided opium until now, and had no intention of being introduced to it on top of the couscous.

  Dmitri took my arm, speaking to Mike. “Still a sensible man, the Harvey. Moderate; always was moderate, the bald one! He and I will go for coffee, and straighten out our heads.”

  Langford looked at him in surprise. “You’re not smoking either, Count?”

  “I smoke too much lately,” Volkov said. “Tonight I’m being sensible, as a matter of fact. Sensible with Harvey.”

  Mike raised a resigned hand in farewell, and turned towards an expectant cyclo boy.

  I was tired, and wanted to recover from the stew; I now told Dmitri that I’d prefer to skip coffee and go back to my room at the Royal. But the fingers still gripping my arm tightened urgently.

  “Harvey, Harvey! We haven’t seen each other in seven years! Don’t be so goddamn middle-aged: do me a favor man, come with me! I need to talk to you.”

  The dope was making his face transparent to me in the way dope tends to do, and I detected a hungry appeal there. From a Saigon brother, this wasn’t to be refused. We summoned two cyclo boys, and they pedaled us towards the river.

  Under the cyclo’s little hood I relaxed, soothed by the hiss of the tires and the creak of the pedals in the quiet night. Watching Volkov’s machine run on in front, glimpsing his rope-yellow head and dark blue shirt when the vehicle turned, I was suddenly content to be carried wherever he chose to lead us. The alchemy of the Nurseryman’s stew made the city into a theater, the shop signs in Chinese, Khmer and French becoming tantalizing, cryptic and profound, the latticework on upstairs balconies screening airy and seductive secrets. My cyclo boy pedaled, my cyclo ran on, and I blessed it all, this theater of Phnom Penh, whose sounds were fading as curfew drew near. Here were the actors, just as I remembered them: monkey peddlers, curbside dentists, soothsayers, cigarette makers, dark-faced Khmer hawkers squatting beside braziers, pale-faced Chinese shopkeepers in their doorways, and the beautiful, full-bodied women with their warm, Sino-Indian faces. Radios sounded from glowing caves along the pavement; families reclined on cane chairs there, looking out at the night. Phnom Penh wasn’t changed by the war, I said; it was all as it used to be, and the thing that was gathering in the countryside could perhaps be ignored.

  But as we neared the river, this illusion faded, together with the effects of the couscous. I couldn’t block out the sandbags in front of the public buildings, or the Government propaganda posters showing Communist soldiers beheading and raping civilians, or the crowds of refugees on the pavements and in doorways. They crouched by cardboard-and-thatch huts erected against walls, wearing the dark, funereal pajamas and sarongs of the countryside, and they begged from passersby, here where begging had once been rare. Their brown, half-naked children dodged about under the streetlamps, black hair flying, and I thought they were playing games.

  Then I saw that they were catching insects that swarmed in the light, and putting them into jars for food.

  “No proper water festival now, Harvey. No Prince Sihanouk to cut the string,” Volkov said.

  His voice, in deference to the large, dark quiet, was low, husky and drawling. His accent sounded less American now, and more Russian. He sat holding his coffee cup in both hands, looking out over the Mekong.

  In the time of the monsoon rains, when the Mekong overflows, its tributary the Tonle Sap performs its annual miracle: it turns around to run backwards. Carrying the Mekong’s torrents to the lake from which it takes its name, the river enlarges the lake from a thousand to four thousand square miles. Whole forests are submerged at the country’s heart; fish swim among the trees. Then, at the beginning of the dry season, Tonle Sap river flows back to the Mekong. It siphons off the water from the Great Lake and the drowned heartland; it uncovers the underwater forests, leaving fish trapped there by the thousands; it exposes silt-rich acres for rice planting. The river is the engine of Cambodia’s bounty, deliverer of fish and rice to the people, and every November, back in the happy sixties, surrounded by dragon boats and fireworks and xylophone music for the river gods, the little Prince would honor Tonle Sap, cutting the magic string that caused it to come back again to the Mekong.

  But tonight this seemed a memory of play; a time of Cambodian childishness that would never come again. Reality now was the children catching insects for food, and wartime silence under a high, full moon.

  Volkov had brought me to a floating restaurant for our coffee: a gabled houseboat near to the point where the two rivers met. Its verandah was lined with potted shrubs, and connected to the bank by a gangway. The long room was half dark, and half empty. At distant tables were a few other Europeans—probably embassy people—and some middle-class Cambodians: Government officials and their mistresses. We were sittirng by a window with open glass louvers; out through the horizontal vents, the brown spaces of the Mekong gleamed in the moonlight. The river was so wide at this point that we could only just make
out the opposite shore, with tiny black heads of palms rising miles off against silver sky. Dimly, just for a moment, tracer rounds made soundless green arcs there on the darkness; then stopped.

  “Khmer Rouge,” Volkov said. “Scaring off ghosts from their camp. Even those bastards believe in ghosts.”

  By day, the convoys that brought American supplies from Saigon up the Mekong and into the Tonle Sap ran a gauntlet of Khmer Rouge fire from the banks. But tonight everything seemed peaceful: even the tracer fire had looked peaceful. Nearby on the water was the shape of a fishing sampan, its big net hung from a bamboo pole, like a dragonfly’s wing. Farther out were the lights of the small, moored ships that were keeping the city alive: battered freighters and South Vietnamese patrol boats, waiting to come in.

  “A beautiful night,” Volkov said. “In spite of war. Even now, Cambodia is such a beautiful country.” He put down his cup, looking out the window. “But why does beauty always bring pain?”

  He turned back to me abruptly, as though expecting an answer, and I saw that despite his quietness, he was in one of his frantic states. His eyes had what I thought of as their white look, in the dimness, and I wondered how high he still was from the couscous. “Maybe it doesn’t bring you pain at all,” he said. “Is that so? You are always so together, Harvey.”

  Suddenly he leaned forward across the table and grasped my wrist. He was wearing his sternly challenging expression, and his eyes searched my face; but his words were incongruously friendly.

  “It’s good to see you back, brother. Any help you need, you only have to say. Any story that breaks, I will tell you about. You understand? Can I do anything right now?”

  I thanked him and told him I needed nothing, and he nodded. He was still holding my wrist, still leaning forward to examine my face as though for clues to something, and despite the space left in my brain by the couscous, I began to feel uncomfortable. We sat frozen in melodramatic tableau: captor and prisoner.

  “Tonight I have to talk to you,” he said. “Do you understand, Harvey?”

  I nodded and waited, and he finally let go of my wrist; but his eyes remained fixed on my face. “You think I am simply stoned,” he said. “But I am not; grass doesn’t do anything for me now, as a matter of fact. Only opium. Tell me what you’ve been doing, Harvey, all these years. Tell me how it is in Europe now. I have not been back to Paris for a long time.”

  I talked to him of my life and coverage in the UK and on the Continent; I suspect that the couscous made me ramble, but he listened with absolute intentness, interrupting only to ask questions. He gave the same intensity to listening as he did to speaking, and seemed to find my affairs more absorbing than I did myself—as though there were other meanings there than I’d realized. He’d always been like that. When I tailed off he sat nodding, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. Then he said: “There are things I want to tell you, Harvey. Tonight is the time to talk in this way, and perhaps not again. These are things I cannot speak of to the others—not even to Mike. And I know you will offer wise opinion—or at least you will hear me with understanding. You are a man of special sympathy and intelligence, and I greatly respect you for it. Yes! Don’t deny it. You wriggle with Anglo-Saxon embarrassment, but it’s true.”

  He laughed under his breath, his pale blue stare widening, his pupils hectic dots. “You have always been sane, Harvey,” he said. “I knew this in Saigon days. The rest of us are not, as a matter of fact. Only you are sane, with solid marriage. You are a good man, I know this.” He leaned towards me again, waving away possible objections. “You wept tonight, in Pagoda! You wept for Cambodian people. And you will weep a lot more, before things are over.

  His voice had become increasingly resonant: unlike the rest of us, he didn’t need stimulants to get to this exalted level of his, and maybe he told the truth when he said that the couscous wasn’t its cause. But the agitation that I now saw accompanying it seemed unusual even for Dmitri; I could almost sense him trembling. I couldn’t read the agitation’s cause; couldn’t even decide whether it sprang from elation or distress. I only knew that he needed my company.

  “We spoke of beauty,” he said, and waved a hand at the louvers. “Beauty is what we all secretly want, you agree? Beauty leads us on, Harvey, and for some of us presumably it brings satisfaction; peace. But for others, like me—” He broke off and sat back, still staring at me, his stretched mouth open in a smile that mingled cold amusement and outrage; then he went on more quietly. “Beauty mainly torments us, as a matter of fact. Beauty is very small point of light on horizon we can never reach; beauty is the sound we can never hear. And yet we go on pining for it, and can never stop. Yes, Harvey: beauty! Unfashionable concept, now. Even word has gone out of fashion among current fuckwit intellectuals. But beauty is all that matters, under everything. Beauty is opening to that world we can never see, but know is there—always nearby, like something through a screen—if we have a soul. But how many have souls? Do you know there are people without them, Harvey? Or with souls that have dried up, like corpses of insects?”

  It seemed to be my night for being subjected to passionate dissertations. There were so many things that my friends wanted me to know, now that I’d reappeared: perhaps it sprang from the nature of the war here, and the nature of their existence in a beleaguered city. They needed a fresh slate to write on, in order to explain things to themselves—and just now, I was the slate. It was flattering but somewhat demanding, in my present dysfunctional state; even when Volkov’s fury was merely a fury of the spirit, it was somehow more intense than the emotions of others —even Trevor Griffiths. And yet I liked him, even when I half despaired of him.

  He was looking at the table now, and his voice had suddenly dropped, becoming flat and sober. “But there are those who love beauty too much,” he said. “Bad mistake.”

  Only if beauty’s an illusion, I suggested.

  He looked up, clenching and unclenching one fist on the table in front of him. “You think? Possibly you are right. Anyway, for this illusion I would have been prepared to do anything. Anything. I am speaking of my recent marriage.”

  There was now not long until curfew. I’d been told that unpredictable Government soldiers were liable to shoot at you in the streets after that, but I knew better than to suggest that we should go at this stage. “I heard about your marriage, Count,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He lit one of his Gauloise cigarettes, sat back in his chair, and stared at the river in silence. When he resumed speaking, he went on looking out through the louvers, one elbow propped on the table, cigarette poised, his voice taking on the throaty, gliding sound I thought of as Russian.

  “Always I have chased after beauty. Beauty of women; beauty of action. But I do not picture myself as noble and spiritual person, Harvey. I am a sensual man; I live and die by the senses. All my life I have been an asshole; woman-chaser; bully. Well, you know that, from Saigon—you know about my sex life and my fights. When I was young, I let down my parents by quitting Sorbonne. They had seen me as scholar and intellectual: ornament to the family. Bad investment, that.” He drew on the cigarette. “My first marriage when I was young I also blew. She was good French girl, but I wasn’t in love with her—and she has not really liked me, as things turned out. It lasted one year: then I went off to United States. I am not proud of this. But nothing, no one, satisfied me.” He widened his mouth, released smoke and squinted at me. “Does it come from God, the hunger for be:auty-or some bloody demon? I am Russian Orthodox—still a believer, as a matter of fact, although not going to church. When I was young, I knew all the time that God was there. I looked always for goodness—because it was so hard to find in myself. And I wanted to fly—but not in any dimension of reality: can you understand? I would see below me a landscape of lights, and a wind would rush past my ears. I would remember the poem by Alexander Blok—a revolutionary, but nevertheless great Russian poet:The wind, the wind!

  It will not let you go.


  The wind,the wind!

  Through God’s whole world it blows.

  “What I am saying is: I always wanted life to be like that. I wanted to smash down door; to dive through space of air that separates us from that other life. Now I am forty, and I still feel that way: that is my problem. Bloody silly bastard, you will say. Yes: silly bastard. But sometimes, filming combat still gives me that. And music always gives me that: Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Beatles—it doesn’t matter; there are only two kinds of music, good and bad, as the great Duke Ellington has said. In both music and action is something eternal, Harvey—and we want what is eternal.”

  He poured the last of the pot of coffee slowly into our cups.

  “For a time,” he said, “with this woman that I married, whose name I still can’t say, and who was beautiful in way very few are—for a time love gave me that. It was first time in my life I had truly been in love. Came to me after some delay—at age thirty-eight.” He glanced at me sideways, perhaps suspecting he’d find amusement in my face; reassured when he didn‘t, he went on. “I had found at last the woman I had always searched for without knowing it—or so I thought. Everything exquisite—even her hands and feet. I have read that in poetry, and not understood it: who cares for hands and feet? When you love like that, you understand. But what I had also found was ice: the beauty of ice.”

  He drew on his cigarette again and was silent, closing his eyes; then he leaned forward. “Listen to me, Harvey. To die here in Cambodia is now very easy; can happen any time. Maybe it happens to me soon; maybe not. This is just a fact, and no big deal —I think you know that. And because it is the fact we live with, I want to tell you these things tonight.” He paused, looking into his coffee. “You guys take the mickey, and call me Count. I am not one, of course, but as a matter of fact my grandfather Alexis was. Small-time nobility in czarist days—it didn’t mean much, even then. The family wasn’t rich; had no big estates: he was government official. When he fled with his family to Paris from the Revolution, my father Peter was fifteen: old enough to know what he was losing, and to remember it for rest of his life. He made me remember it too—so I have always lived with memory of Holy Russia. Memory that is not my own: a dream. This is incurable, Harvey: it was introduced from birth! Dreams are what White Russians feed on, along with their goddamn borscht and piroshkis. French citizens but never French, they waited always to go bade-for Communists to fall. Can you imagine that? Imagine it! Russian cathedral in Paris on Sundays: Orthodox service, with male choir singing music from heaven. And opposite, a Russian tea shop where we would go afterwards to eat pastries, all in our best clothes. The women looking beautiful. There were all the faces: the Russian faces. The poor lost bloody nobility, and the ones who were pretending to be.”