by Arnold Zable
Ta Prohm had offered relief, spaces of solitude and a sense of something far more enduring. Forty-three years later, after hearing Keo Narom’s story, and the stories of others who had lived through the Khmer Rouge tyranny, I am drawn back there.
The boat from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap is a single-hull steel ferry. The locked cabin windows are smeared with grime; a karaoke DVD is blaring on a television. The space on the tiny steel deck is tight, but blessedly out in the open, with a view of the banks: a slow-moving landscape of elephant grass, sugar palms, hamlets and pagodas.
The calm is disrupted by the booming voice of an ex-marine. He stands in the narrow aisle between the deck and the guardrail with two cameras slung around his shoulders. His monologue rises above the engine.
‘God, this place is beautiful,’ he shouts.
His voice is loud and abrasive, his monologue a distraction. Passengers lie on the deck, shielding their faces. Their heads rest on rolled up sleeping-bags and luggage. Their legs are curled, knees tucked in, bodies conforming to confined spaces. But the ex-marine is on his feet. He is untroubled by the heat. He points his cameras at the shore and shoots at random.
‘I am in the prime of life,’ he says. ‘Sixty-five years old and never felt better.’ A US marine during the era of war and occupation, he has returned to Vietnam and Cambodia for the first time since 1970.
‘We were not there on a picnic,’ he shouts. ‘We were out there hunting with assault rifles, our M16s against their AK47s. We were shit-scared and we were trained killers. We saw our mates being wounded and killed, and it drove us crazy. We were trigger-itchy. We didn’t know who was enemy or ally. It was no picnic. We were out there getting killed, and killing.
‘I didn’t know what to expect when I came back here, scared of what I might find. Freaked out, and afraid of the memories. Been back a month and I’ve fallen in love with the place. I’m gonna go back home and fix up my affairs. Gonna pass on my concreting business to my son and come back singing. Gonna spend the rest of my life here. Have fun. And teach the locals about concrete.
‘I know everything there is to know about concrete. The concrete here is shit. If a typhoon hit, the buildings would fall like matchsticks. Gonna show the locals how to construct buildings that can last forever.’
His voice rises in and out of hearing. The boat bounces on the water. It moves precariously close to motorised sampans and fishing boats. The ex-marine has got the gift of the gab, and an edge of madness.
‘Had a great childhood,’ he says. ‘Grew up on my grandpa’s farm in Nebraska. We raised hogs, grew cherry trees, planted corn and soya beans. We brewed our own beer and made our own corn liquor. It slid down your throat smooth and easy. It brought a smile to your face and warmed your innards. We kids worked on the farm, bailing hay. We sat on the backs of tractors and we roamed the property, hordes of grandchildren running wild together. Man, it was beautiful.’
The boat has moved out onto the Tonle Sap Lake; in this season, it’s an inland sea, an expanse of pale blues with a hint of mud floors in its shallower areas. The hours are drifting and the sun is moving towards its zenith. The passengers crammed on the deck are dozing, but the ex-marine is still up and talking. His manic energy is unflagging.
I ease myself off the deck, grab hold of the rail, edge my way to his side and introduce myself. The ex-marine’s aftershave is stronger than the breeze-born smells of the water. He exudes a bullish strength that belies his age. He is pleased to have an attentive listener.
‘You’re a writer, eh? I’m gonna become a writer too. Gonna write a book about the people I’ve been meeting over a beer on the beach in Sihanoukville, at Sharky’s Bar. Every night’s a party at Sharky’s. You meet people from all over, coming for all kinds of reasons, running away from all kinds of miseries.
‘You name it, and you’ll find it. Screwed-up marriages. Shonky businesses. Shady dealings. Terminal illnesses. People who hate themselves. And boredom—folks so wealthy they don’t know what to do with themselves. They fall in love with the place and bury their troubles. The living’s cheap and easy. You would not believe the tales they tell you. Yep, there’s a book in this, and I’m gonna write it.
‘My hobby is women,’ he says, switching tack. There’s a glint in his eye. ‘I love the women here. Back in ’70, I hunted with M16s, now I’m making love not war, like those long-haired pot-smokers used to say. We hated them back then, but now I’m a convert, a believer. I’ve got no quarrel with anyone.
‘Had a great time night before last. Spent it with a lovely lady, a bit older than the others, experienced. She knew what she was doing. And I treated her right. I know how to treat a lady.
‘She has two kids to support and I gave her a decent tip in the morning. I also gave her the soap from the bathroom. I gave her the shampoos and conditioners. And I gave her the drinks in the fridge. I gave her the snacks and sweets for her children. Mars bars. Chips, cashews, peanuts, tea bags and biscuits. Salt and sugar. I piled in whatever I could and sent her home happy.’
He laughs a loud unrestrained laugh and snaps pictures of a passing fishing canoe. ‘I’ve got one camera on motor drive,’ he says. ‘Got another in case the battery runs out, and a bag full of lenses. Zoom lenses. Wide-angle lenses. Telephoto lenses. Got lenses comin’ out of my backside. I don’t want to miss anything. Life passes by, and if you’re not quick it gets away from you.
‘I’ve got a dream. I’m gonna build a boat, a beautiful boat with a serpent’s head on the prow. Nagas—that’s what the Cambodians call ’em. Gonna have a naga’s head on the prow and a naga’s tail trailing behind it, like you see on the walls of the temples. I got a Cambodian friend who knows how to make ’em. We’ll fit it out with orange sails, a loud colour. Man, you’re gonna notice this boat.
‘I’m gonna sail it all over. Gonna live out my dream. I figure I have twenty years left. A good chunk of time. I’m in reasonable shape; got longevity in the genes. My grandparents lived into their nineties. My parents are still alive in their eighties. Yep. I’m quitting everything. Should have done it long ago. Now I’m doing it for real,’ he says, ‘and no one’s stopping me.’
We motor into the mouth of the Siem Reap River. The waters are down. The banks are lined with ramshackle settlements. The boat scrapes the riverbed as it edges towards its anchorage. The ex-marine is not waiting. He is anxious to get on with it. He hoists himself off the boat, scampers up the clay embankment and dashes across the parking lot to where the tuk-tuks and taxis are waiting. He is out on his own, a tough, nuggetty bastard in shorts, singlet and workboots. A go-getter, pot belly offset by thick thighs and calves, sprinting ahead of the pack, rucksack bobbing on his back. He disappears in the throng; it is the last I see of him.
It’s only later, when I examine a map, that I realise that the boat journey, and its route to Siem Reap, has essentially followed the route Keo Narom and her family were ordered out on, northwest, on a brutal journey to slavery: from Phnom Penh via Oudong District to Kampong Chhnang, and from Pursat Province to Battambang.
What had occupied more than three years of horror, I have traversed on a parallel route in a five-hour boat trip, accompanied by the soundtrack of an ex-GI in search of Shangri-la and impoverished women to boost his ageing virility.
It is mid-afternoon when I reach my hotel. I leave my bag in the foyer. Angkor Wat, the main temple, is still open. If I leave now, I can make it. Tourists are heading there to catch the sunset. On the highway, a flotilla of buses, cars, motorcycles and tuk-tuks is travelling in the same direction. Thousands queue at the massive way-stop for tickets, then head back to the highway to rejoin the procession.
I detour to Ta Prohm and get there just before closing time. A band of seven landmine amputees, seated on a wooden platform, play zithers and flutes, two-stringed fiddles, gongs and percussion. Their crutches and prosthetic limbs are stacked against the platform, and their CDs are lined up in front of them. A silver urn sits on a stool, for takings an
d offerings.
The men play to the chatter of bats and the trill of cicadas. The music blends with the melody of the surrounding forest. The shadows are lengthening, and the air is thick with the scents of a tropical night. The temple appears as it was when I was last here over four decades ago, tree and rock embracing. It is a homecoming.
I make my way to the main temple of Angkor Wat each morning and spend the days moving about the temple complexes. I am reminded of Keo Narom: her sense of detachment is reflected in the neutral gaze in the sculptures of ancient Khmer rulers. Her hand gestures can be seen in the friezes of the Asparas—court dancers and female spirits of the clouds and water. They are carved in relief beside scenes of battle. The stone has been worn smooth and the surface glows like lacquer.
I return to Ta Prohm each afternoon. As evening falls, the temple sinks into semi-darkness. It is an in-between zone, a kind of No Man’s Land. With a difference. There are no guns here and no barren stretches of hardened earth, no barbed wire or sentry posts. The space is sheltered and protected. I find secluded spots within the temple walls and on the fringe of the forest, where I can sit, close my eyes, and vanish.
Back in Phnom Penh, R drives me to Narom’s house. She is waiting at the gate. She wears a blue sarong, a floral-patterned blouse and low-heeled shoes. We drive to a neighbourhood cafe. The streets are unusually quiet. It is the second day of a four-day mourning period leading up to Sihanouk’s cremation. Many businesses and restaurants are closed.
The previous day, Sihanouk’s embalmed body had been paraded through Phnom Penh in a gold casket on a circular route back to the palace and then beyond to the cremation stupa. The city had woken pre-dawn to the beat of drums, monks chanting, gamelan orchestras chiming, heralding a day of ceremony. Spectators crowded the length of the circuit, many dressed in white shirts, white blouses and white dresses: the colour of mourning.
The parade was a show of state might: the procession of floats and the gilded coffin chaperoned by the guards of the new order. Helmeted police patrolled, scanning the crowd, batons at the ready. Laughter erupted at the sight of a lone monkey brazenly strutting along the middle of the roadway, pausing to pose, expecting food in exchange for its performance.
The calm the next day is a sharp contrast. The trio is reunited: the teller, the listener and the interpreter. We are at ease, a reflection of the peace that has settled on the city on this public holiday, and of our growing camaraderie and sense of kinship. We are united in a common purpose. Narom is seated directly opposite me. There is a lightness in her being and a gentle rhythm in her telling.
She takes up her story where she had left off as we edged our way past the palace ten days earlier. Perhaps this is another reason for her lightness. She does not need to revisit the horrors. She resumes her account in Phnom Penh on 28 June 1975, her day of liberation.
She had returned to a metropolis where, in her absence, places of learning had been converted into prisons. Tuol Sleng, a primary school, had become a house of torment and interrogation. Now it is a museum of genocide. The dimly lit rooms contain the bricked-in cells and steel bedframes where the victims lay in between torture sessions, when they were driven to confess to the fabricated crimes their interrogators had assigned them.
The black-and-white mug shots of men, women and children are displayed on the walls of the converted classrooms where they were imprisoned. Their eyes are frozen in bewilderment. They stare at the blind eyes of a world that was going about its business as the killing continued. There was no one to save them.
On Narom’s return, much of the city was intact, the outer layers still standing, but it was an empty shell. People picked over the rubble in search of photos and heirlooms, shards of what once was, something to grasp hold of. In the evenings, a hush fell over the streets and boulevards. The city was reawakening to life, but it would take a long time before it was restored to wholeness.
Before the Khmer Rouge ascendancy, Narom had studied and taught music at the School of Fine Arts. She played violin and pipa and taught notation and melody, but after the deaths of her children, she lost interest. She succumbed to days of torpor and hopelessness.
Many colleagues had died; some had gone insane. But it was an encounter with a former colleague, a professor of French, that helped jolt Narom back to the living. At first she did not recognise him. He walked about crazed and destitute. All he had been and once possessed—a sharp mind, a lust for life and delight in conversation—had vanished. In their place, there was an expression of incomprehension.
It was not this that shocked her; there were many like him. It was the recognition. In his haunted eyes, she saw her eyes. In his despair, she saw her despair. His presence was a reminder, and an accusation. She had a little sister—ma petite soeur—orphaned in a country of the orphaned. Hers was the new story, and the new year zero. Her sister needed guidance, and a way forward.
The word healing is too trite. Narom had survived, but it was a matter of luck. She entertains no simple notion of resilience. Hunger, disease, beatings, slave labour, exhaustion—and murderers—had not killed her, but they had killed many others, upwards of two million, one quarter of the population.
No one will ever know the exact figure. The landscape is dotted with mass graves. Eighty per cent of Cambodia’s teachers and up to ninety per cent of its doctors, lawyers, engineers, civil servants, academics, artists and musicians lost their lives—an entire generation of professionals, along with its immense store of knowledge. The Khmer Rouge destroyed critical thinking, and in its place attempted to install blind allegiance. For Narom, it was not a healing, but a calculation, and when the costs were counted and weighed, it added up to an obligation.
Narom was invited to teach in the Ministry of Education. She trained as an ethnomusicologist and travelled the country in search of melodies. She spent time with indigenous groups and learnt about their instruments. As she describes them, her hands trace the shapes of the little-known instruments she came across in the provinces.
She sat in forest homes and listened. She spent time in the mountain regions and collected tales of genies and demons, sprites and forest spirits. She travelled to the eastern borderlands and compared the instruments of Vietnam and Cambodia. She returned to the western borderlands, the territory of her enslavement, and researched areas once occupied by the Thais, and again made comparisons.
She saw a deeper truth in the language of folklore and music, the commonalities that gave lie to the propaganda of ideologues and scoundrels. She understood the terror that lies in wait when leaders talk of purity and crude notions of blood and nation. Blueprints of Utopia: preludes to massacre, new killing fields.
In 2005, Narom published a book on the music of Cambodia. The title is embossed in gold lettering on a plain crimson cover. It has become a key reference for music scholars. She is extending her research to Laos, and working on a second volume. She has earned a doctorate exploring the complex relationship between the arts and sciences.
There was something else that saved her, she says. A return to Buddhist teachings and a growing sense of obligation to journey through life with purpose. It was either this or wither from despair. This, she says, is one of the reasons she had approached me during the afternoon tea break, two weeks earlier, with her story; and why she had given me permission to write it. Maybe what she had endured would be of value for others. Maybe it could act as a warning. She wanted future generations to be spared the horror. She wanted to alert them to the dangers.
In 2000, Narom took a new tack. There were children who lacked direction. They were the offspring of a lost generation. Outwardly their parents seemed well enough, but inside some were simmering. The anger could break out at any time, in bouts of violence and drinking, leading to family crises. Narom wrote fables for children, in the hope that people would not repeat the brutal ways of the Khmer Rouge and inherit their disregard for life and contempt for education and their hatred of those who loved the arts, scie
nces and humanities.
Keo Narom knows it is not over; the lust for power and wealth that drives people to commit murder is never over. She has sat with the children of post-Killing Fields generations, and understands their need for guidance. And she has found the language in which to express it: music and the written word, and the civilising power of knowledge.
She espouses simple homilies: Children, be grateful for the food you receive, lest you know real hunger. Children, be self-sufficient, know the value of work. Children, be aware of the hardship of those who live in the rural areas. Her resolve is evident as we sit, face to face, in this sunlit cafe, on a rare day of public quietude.
Light streams through the large windows. Light slips over our table. Light plays on the rims of Narom’s glasses. Light creates space. It illumines the rings on her fingers, the flower motifs on her blouse, and the gold studs in her ears. It traces the ceaseless play of her hands, the looseness of her wrists and the suppleness of her fingers. It highlights the ridges between her eyes, and her pursed lips when she speaks of darker moments; and it accentuates a composure honed by years of endurance.
Her presence returns me to Ta Prohm, and the eerie calm that inhabits the ruins of fallen empires. And it takes me to No Man’s Land, that barren stretch of dirt between fortified borders, and that uneasy walk forty-three years ago on the eve of a reign of terror. In No Man’s Land, all hangs by a thread, all is reduced to the sound of a heartbeat. Guns point from both directions, holding each other at bay in an uneasy ceasefire. There is nowhere to hide. In No Man’s Land all is transparent, stripped back to pure being.
