by Arnold Zable
In Keo Narom there is no self-pity and no false sentiment. Only when she talks of her children do her eyes well with tears. But they are quickly kept at bay with a gesture of the hand and an extension of her fingers, as if it would be a disservice to her children to falter. En avance, she says as we make our way back to R’s car from the cafe. Always forward.
I think of Narom as I move about the city, on foot and on the backs of motorcycles, riding pillion passenger at peak hour, swerving in and out of traffic, absorbing the pulse of an expanding metropolis. There is no place for hesitation; a slight gap in the dense traffic, and the motorcyclists must go for it, or remain stranded.
Tables and chairs are lined up outside carpenters’ workshops. Market stalls are piled high with sandstone and wood carvings of elephants and Angkor Wat replicas. Gangnam-style dancers are pictured on massive billboards. Women are at work in a cluster of florists’ stalls. Their feet rock their babies’ cribs, leaving their arms free to place flowers in intricate arrangements.
The struggle to exist is on open display. There is no concealment; the affluent possess that privilege. Beyond the mansions of the inner city and the five-star hotels and palaces down by the river, all is frenetic movement. Enclaves of destitution sprawl beside pockets of abundance, vast disparities in wealth and impoverishment heightened.
Yet there is energy and spirit, and songs of love and longing echoing like a muezzin’s call over loudspeakers, couples walking hand in hand, couples speeding by on motorcycles, and children at play in massive schoolyards. My thoughts return to Narom, and the drive home, late afternoon, from the cafe. She stepped from the car outside her house, unlocked the gate, and headed for the front door.
It was then that I saw clearly what I had not noticed when we picked her up hours earlier. Narom’s house, which she still lives in with her sister, is clad in steel and surrounded by barbed wire. Its windows are barred. It speaks of her abiding terror. How can it be otherwise?
I think of Keo Narom when I return to Cambodia in the following two years to conduct writing workshops in other cities. I think of her as I accompany four colleagues to the outskirts of Battambang for a meeting with a man who claims to be Voy Ho, a pre-Khmer Rouge-era songwriter.
Some say Voy Ho is no longer alive, and that he died during the Khmer Rouge era. Some say he has retreated to a life of contemplation. Others say he still writes songs under an alias. Word has come through. He has come to the city from his home in a Thai border village.
We turn off the main road and follow a clay path. Night is falling. Dogs bark in the gathering darkness. Children play hopscotch under street lamps. An elderly couple shuffles by. We pull up at a two-storey house. Voy Ho and his youngest daughter are at the door to greet us. He lifts his clasped hands in greeting.
The effects of a recent stroke are visible; he trails his right leg as he leads us into the house and up a stone stairway. We step into a large room, part storeroom, part bedroom, cluttered with cooking utensils, tins of oil, packaged food, boxes of cutlery, cooking pots and crockery.
The light is dim. The walls are bare except for a leather satchel hanging from a nail. A statuette of Buddha sits on a wooden shelf, suspended from the ceiling by wires threaded through the ventilation slats. A door opens out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the neighbourhood.
We sit in a circle on the tiled floor. Voy Ho folds his legs and settles himself in a lotus posture. He places a black leather case in front of him, unlatches the hinges and takes out a photo album, two exercise books, a grey-cloth diary and a tattered songbook.
A man of eighty, he wears a white shirt, khaki flannel-trousers and silver-rimmed glasses. His greying hair is close-cropped. A wisp of a beard sprouts beneath his chin. His face is disfigured by a purple scar. It extends from his forehead to his neck and upper chest, and continues beneath his shirt, where it can be glimpsed through the buttonholes.
Voy Ho speaks with a vigour that belies his age. He punctuates his speech with slaps on the floor and sudden bursts of hand gestures, then resumes his Buddha-like stillness. Shadows dart on the floor with each outburst. My companions are keenly focused on what he says. They want to make sure of his identity. The conversation is in Khmer, with some fragments translated for my benefit.
I am Voy Ho, he says. A writer of songs, renowned during the Golden Era, before the bombings and before the armies of Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh. I had fame. I had wealth. My songs were played throughout the city and in Cambodian movies. They were performed on stage and on state television, and were loved by the people. Voy Ho recites some of his lyrics. This is the pattern of his talk: a cascade of anecdotes, remembrances and snatches of song, then a return to stillness.
The people thought I was dead, he says. They said the Khmer Rouge had murdered me, as they had murdered many songwriters and artists. I survived, but they killed me in other ways. Some people doubt my existence. They say I am not the real Voy Ho, and that I have assumed his identity. Rumour is stronger than truth. Speculation is preferred to reality.
He still writes, he says, pointing to his notebooks. Each song is dated, the first entry: 4 April 2010. No one in his home country performs his new songs. He now writes for Khmer singers who live and perform them across the Thai border. He is better known elsewhere. He directs us to insert a disc in the CD player that sits on a table beside us. These are my songs, he says, recorded in Thailand.
His four questioners seem to move between belief and suspicion. They flip through the pages of the diary and scrutinise his notebooks. They are on his side; they want to restore him to the pantheon of Cambodian songwriters. But they want to be sure. The tone of their questions edges towards interrogation.
Voy Ho is taken aback. His bursts of frustration are offset by deep-throated chuckles. In the dim light, his scar is softened. The album of photos is passed between his questioners. There are montages of singers, mics held to their lips, performing alongside a garlanded pianist, mini-skirted dancers, young men with bell-bottomed pants, and a singer with a beehive hairdo: markers of the late 60s and the early 70s.
Voy Ho produces evidence of the Khmer Rouge era: paper currency with images of a villager bearing an urn on his head, and a farmer in yellow shorts guiding a wooden plough drawn by a pair of bullocks. He takes two passport-sized photos from his wallet, one of him in his twenties, the other in his thirties. He points out a pre-Khmer Rouge photo of him in the album, as a young man in a suit jacket, his hair combed back from the forehead in an Elvis pompadour. His face is over exposed and the image is out of focus. This is me, he insists, stabbing his fingers at the photo. He is unflagging in his defence, defiant.
For three hours, the questioners persist. Voy Ho holds fast. He does not flinch. When we finally descend the stairs, I see him clearly in the downstairs light. The welt that extends down his left side is in stark contrast to the smoothness of his complexion on the right. Voy Ho’s face is like the two sides of Janus: one facing a dark past, the other, an uncertain future. It reflects the brittle state of his nation. He accompanies us outside and embraces each of us at the doorway. We make our way back on the dirt path to the roadway.
Later, my companions debrief over an evening meal at a pavement restaurant. They remain uncertain, but the balance has shifted in Voy Ho’s favour. There is talk of organising events in which he will be recognised and honoured. As we talk, one of our group points to the old cinema across the road where, in 1974, Khmer Rouge soldiers tossed a grenade into a crowded movie show.
He was a young boy on the day it happened. He saw the fleeing crowds, their panic, the carnage and mayhem. The trauma lingers. In Battambang the reminders are potent. This was a Khmer Rouge stronghold and a way-stop on Keo Narom’s journey. The past is ever-present.
The following afternoon, one of the workshop convenors drives us six kilometres north to the outskirts of the city. The streets are quieter here. It is late afternoon. Children are on their way home from school, satchels slung over their shoulders.
A farmer drives a cart loaded with watermelons; a cat scampers by and disappears into a vegetable garden.
P draws up to his home, a wooden house encircled by fruit trees. We make our way to the back garden beneath a canopy of palm leaves and banana fronds, to a back gate that opens directly onto a fairground with a mini Ferris wheel, rundown carousels and a miniature train—all dormant.
Beyond the fairground is a stream. A stone bridge leads to a clearing and a stupa, crowned by a spire that reaches to the heavens. Beneath the winged roof, on wooden shelves and encased in glass, are skulls and other bones. Engraved on one of the walls are the words: The Well of Shadows.
‘In May 1976,’ reads the inscription, ‘the Khmer Rouge seized the Buddhist Temple complex Wat Samrong Kong, turning it into a prison and an interrogation centre and the surrounding area into a killing field, where 10,008 people were put to death. The full extent of Cambodia’s tragedy will never be known. The remains of some of the victims of this genocide may never be recovered, nor their murderers identified.’
The plinth of the stupa is adorned with bas-relief sculptures depicting the atrocities in confronting detail—the mass evacuations; the confiscation of possessions; slave labourers at work in rice paddies; children being herded away from their parents; enforced mass weddings; throats being slit with palm-leaf sinews; and figures being bludgeoned to death with axes and cudgels.
P’s family were forced from their home in Battambang at about the same time as Keo Narom and her family left their home in Phnom Penh. When his family finally returned, they learnt that the area beside the house they had grown up in had been a site of mass killings. It has taken a long time to learn to live with it, says P, and to walk by the Well of Shadows without being outraged by reminders of the years of terror.
He pauses at the stupa, lights incense and makes an offering. There is a disorienting air of normality. Couples stroll by. Children ride bicycles in the clearing. Families are making their way to a festival in the temple precinct beyond the stupa. They cross a walkway overlooking a pond covered with lotuses.
The temple grounds are crowded. People mill around stalls selling offerings and trinkets. We climb the stone steps to the colonnaded foyer of the central pagoda. Inside, pilgrims light incense at the base of a massive statue of a Buddha seated on a carved wooden pedestal. We step onto the balcony. P and his companions purchase caged birds which they release over the parapet. The same birds will be recaptured, returned to crowded cages and released again in an endless ritual of liberation and imprisonment.
As evening falls, the fairground springs to life. The food stalls are lit up and the Ferris wheel and carousels are in motion. We return via the back gate to the veranda of P’s house, where his family is gathered. The day’s work is over. We eat and chat. Our voices rise into a languid night. All appears normal.
But sometimes, when I lie in my bed at night, says P, I hear the souls of the dead children. They are laughing, and playing. I cannot breathe. I cannot bear it.
P drives us back to central Battambang. ‘It’s not over,’ says Y, later that night over dinner. ‘It did not end with the Killing Fields. You cannot finish the story with Pol Pot. You cannot cut one time off from another. The conflict continues in new guises. It has never ended.’
Y is in his twenties, an aspiring writer. He had attended the first workshop in Phnom Penh, and has helped organise the workshop in Battambang. He wears tight-fitting jeans and a black T-shirt with designer label motifs. He is strongly built, and exudes strength and a ferocious energy. He speaks with intensity. ‘The dust has not settled,’ he says.
It was in his village, deep in the forests, that he first heard of the black-clad cadres, as his grandfather, grandmother, uncles and aunts, and neighbours talked late at night. Y lay close to sleep and heard fragments. He could not make out which brother had turned on brother, who had been slave and who had held the whip, who had been victim or perpetrator.
Outside the wind blew through the forests. It was the familiar music of the night and the melody of his childhood. The trees bore witness. They had survived in far greater numbers than the people. When the killing times were over, the villagers returned to their most precious possession, the forest. It was the source of their meagre living and the sacred grounds of their ancestors—a home to spirits and deities, and to cheeky gibbons and a choir of bullfrogs.
The bulldozers stole in during the night. The villagers woke to chainsaws and trees falling. They registered each thud as the death of a fallen comrade. They were being stripped of their livelihoods and their trusted companions. Where once were trees, there are now ghosts, says Y.
At night, the ghosts inhabit the emptied spaces. They can be heard moving about, as can the disoriented animals. They are sniffing the air, seeking new shelter and retreating ever deeper into remaining enclaves of forest. The sound of their amiable chatter is fading. The melody of the forest is being silenced.
Where the forest once stood, says Y, the land stretches desolate to the horizon. Day and night, trucks piled high with logs drove to the borderlands, protected by the police and military, the profits returned to the few who hold the levers of power. Why do my people remain so destitute? Y asks. He seethes at the injustice. His people had been orphaned twice over, robbed of their families and, now, of their forests.
The young men and women of the village were enraged, but powerless. At the best of times their families barely made a living. With the death of the forest, there was little work for them in their barren homelands. They yearned to get out and explore the world beyond. They made their way over the mountain roads to the cities. The journey began on foot, and continued by motorbike. As the roads widened, they travelled by bus, passing remnants of forest in dust-ridden wastelands.
Y tells me of his anger and his efforts to tame it, and the warring inner voices pitted against each other. ‘Use your mind, not your body. Present your case. Tell the story.’ ‘This is easy to say,’ the opposing voice replies. ‘Thousands of hectares have been stolen, livelihoods trashed, dreams trampled, and our stories have not saved us.’
For now, the stories have won out. He stands in front of the workshop participants and reads extracts of his work. He is an expressive storyteller and a natural performer, his intensity allayed by detours into humour. He stands tall and straight. His muscular shoulders and chest are open. He is streetwise, and burns with a yearning for experience. He is sorting it out, weighing it up, as are many of his generation. Looking forward.
And Keo Narom listens. She talks with Y in the breaks, and connects with the younger writers. She is at ease in their company, and at one with their passion. She too stands and reads her stories. She is Nak Kruu Keo Narom, a revered teacher in a country in desperate need of elders. Her quiet, insistent voice commands attention. Use the power of your mind, she says. Travel the country, she urges, and come to know your people.
I am reminded of Narom’s passion as I travel on provincial roads and highways—in the stone masons’ works-in-progress lined up on the roadsides, Buddhas in meditation postures alongside the busts of famed rulers of Khmer kingdoms; in stalls piled high with mangos, watermelons and pineapples, the tropical trinity; in the fishing villages jutting out from the banks of the Mekong; and in the bobbing boats of the river nomads.
In the ring of coconut trees, bent inwards, like a circle of whispering conspirators; in the young men in footpath garages mending motorcycles with the loving attention of mothers tending new-born babies. In the hammocks slung in the cool spaces beneath village homes; and in the young woman seated on the stoop of a hut, mirror in hand, combing her waist-length hair, just metres from a dirt pathway.
And I think of her as I am driven to the garment district, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in the late afternoon, mid-January 2014. Workers in the thousands are making their way home over unpaved roads. Dust clings to their clothes and around the workers’ hostels and apartment buildings. My host pulls his car up to the gates of the Canad
ia Industrial Park. It was here, he says, two weeks ago, that thousands of striking textile workers assembled, after marching in protest at their one-hundred-dollar-a-month wages and Dickensian work conditions.
The rage erupted. Workers battled riot police and security forces. Stones and Molotov cocktails were pitted against steel batons, and a burst of gunshot from AK-47 rifles. The protesters turned and ran. They were pursued through the billowing smoke. They dodged burning barricades and ducked beneath bullets. They fled past the dead and the wounded, fending off beatings, seeking refuge in the back streets and neighbouring houses.
Now, weeks later, the post-work trek continues, as it has for years. Each evening, weary men and women in the thousands, on foot and on bicycles, make their way home as if in a trance. Others crowd the trays of trucks returning them to the villages they had left at sunrise. Those seated on the edge dangle their legs over the highway. Their bodies jolt with each lurch of the truck, each pothole.
A city of dust is giving way to dusk, and still workers pour out of the factory gates, and my thoughts return to Keo Narom, her journey through a broken country, consumed by sorrow, and her epic trek back to her wounded city. I try to imagine her unfathomable grief, and the resurrection of her spirit; and her return, years later to the sites of her loss and terror—notebook and recorder in hand, and the people gathered about her gifting her their music.
I see her at the gate of her house, turning to wave, then disappearing into her steel-clad haven—my last sight of her; and I think of the gift she has given me, the doors she has opened for me, allowing me a glimpse of her beloved country. And of the gentle spirit that, despite it all, resides within her.
There is a coda to this tale that demands to be told, an uncanny parallel. I sensed the resemblance when we first met: in Keo Narom’s fine complexion and dyed black hair, and in her innate beauty and unobtrusive manner. She reminded me of Hadassah, my mother, in her times of serenity.
