Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (54 page)

The Khmer smile is not a mere expression of happiness but a representation of an assortment of moods as well as a sort of unreadable rebuttal. The great range of smiles is codified at Angkor, and it has been intensively studied. Philip Short cites Charles Meyer, a French adviser to Prince Sihanouk, on the subtleties of the Khmer smile, "that indefinable half-smile that floats across the stone lips of the Gods at Angkor and which one finds replicated identically on the lips of Cambodians today." It serves as an "ambiguous and likable" mask, but is also a smile that "one erects between oneself and others...[like] a screen hiding an emptiness that has been deliberately created as an ultimate defense against any who might wish to penetrate the secret of one's innermost thoughts."

Much of Angkor was broken—you can see it in its patches—suggesting not only the passage of time, perhaps seven or eight hundred years of erosion, but also epochs of severe trauma. It was built in a succession of historical periods; it was damaged and much of it destroyed over time, too, shattered by the Siamese in the fifteenth century, subsequently by marauders, and as recently as twenty-five years ago, when it was besieged by the Khmer Rouge and the whole sacred city became a battlefield.

Angkor is also a place of human damage, crudely appropriate to the legless and armless statues and smashed images. I had hired a tuk-tuk—this one a motorcycle pulling a small two-wheeled carriage. It was mood-softening, breezy, slow going. The biker, Ong, didn't know much about Angkor, but he was patient and ferried me around all day. I had a guidebook and a map and made my own way.

I often came upon the victims of Cambodia's more recent violence—amputees, the land mine victims, human amputees among amputated statues. (Guidebook: "Cambodia has more than 40,000 amputees, more per capita than any other country in the world.")

Deep in the jungle at Ta Prohm Temple, along the narrow grassy path,
a whole orchestra of land mine victims played music on gongs and flutes and stringed instruments—music that tore at my heart, for its beauty and for its being played by blind men, and one-legged men, and men with missing fingers or burned and bandaged arms. With their prosthetic legs neatly stacked to the side, their twanging music rose in counterpoint to the forest screech, the ringing whine of cicadas, the loud peeping of insects, the squealing of bats.

Near another labyrinthine temple called Banteay Kdei, I was strolling along and saw what looked like a group of small schoolboys posing for a picture—or was it a choral group? There were thirty of them standing in three rows, the tallest boys in the back row, though none was very big. They stood straight, facing forward, smiling.

I said hello and asked the man near them who they were.

"Orphans, sir."

The man, Sean Samnang, ran an orphanage in Siem Reap. He went in search of homeless children and orphans, and fed and trained them.

I had been encountering beggars in large numbers since arriving in north India. It was as though there were a whole underclass of people, millions, whose livelihood depended on begging. I wondered why these particular children were so affecting—and not just them but the amputees and the solemn women crouching near a basket of coins. Was it because they seemed so reluctant, such hesitant beggars? I would defy any passerby to resist emptying his wallet, confronted by the sad smiles of thirty children standing shoulder to shoulder by the roadside, with the utterance "Orphans, sir."

Cambodians could be forthright, rude, conditioned by their harsh recent history—toughened and taught survival skills by the years of tyranny. Yet even these hardened people were no match for the wave of visitors, the sex tourists and predators, that were the reason for the many signs forbidding sex with children and warning of penalties for child rape. Throughout Angkor, all around Siem Reap, were signs saying
Report Sexual Exploitation.

I asked Ong, my tuk-tuk driver, if he knew anything about this.

Now and then, he said, men visiting from Europe would hire him as a driver and ask him to find them young boys.

"How young?"

"Just kids, little boys," Ong said. "But it's wrong. And I don't know any."

"What about Cambodian men—do they ask?"

"Never. But one man from Switzerland ask me for a ride on my motorbike. He sit behind me and touch me—here and here. I was so frightened! I don't know what to do. He say me, 'Come up my hotel room. I give you money.' I say no. I no like to think about it. I so scare."

I was not prepared for people so poor to look so beautiful. Maybe I was remembering the child prostitutes cooped up in the Singapore brothel. I had foolishly begun to associate poverty with ruin and bad health, and Cambodians were so hard-working it seemed outrageous that they were struggling just to eat.

And something else about their beauty. Even as beggars they had dignity. They weren't cringing or rapacious; they stared, they looked solemn, they hardly spoke. But most of all they were familiar. They looked like their own statues. The Cambodian face is also the face of a Khmer statue; their bodies are sculptural and finely made; they seem iconic, authentic, part of the culture, the slender boys like willowy Buddhas, the women like
apsaras
and angels.

Some of these
apsaras
and angels, these living sculptures, resided in the Old Market district on the east side of the Siem Reap River, where I idled in pajama bottoms under the trees in the mellow guesthouse for $10 a day, plus noodles. It wasn't lechery; the gentleness of the people made it easy for me to linger. It was a pleasant stroll in the perfumed air to the riverbank. And now and then, seeing me walking blithely, a tuk-tuk driver would ask, "You retired here?" because many grizzled men like me in faded T-shirts and pajamas had hunkered down in Cambodia. At these prices I could stay until my visa ran out, months from now. It is sometimes that way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.

It had happened before, and I knew why. "At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house," Henry T. wrote in
Walden.
For the traveler this season never ends. Yet I knew what I had to do.

A
T THE CENTER OF CAMBODIA
, in its enormous floodplain, lies an inland sea, Tonle Sap Lake, so broad in the rainy season that when you're on it you might be in a great ocean, no shores visible. It is not a big blue ocean but a brown one, the frothy chop beaten by the brisk wind to resemble the foam on a latte. It is not deep. Even in the middle it is full of mud banks and shoals, and in the unlikeliest places there are fish weirs and perhaps a narrow sampan sitting low in the water, two or three men and boys on board wearing lampshade hats, the whole scene in profile like an image of graceful brushstrokes on a ancient pot.

I took a jeep about seven miles from Siem Reap to the low-lying and mucky north shore of the lake, a fishing village, Phnom Krom, where in the early morning one or two long and usually overloaded motorboats leave for Phnom Penh. They travel southeastward down the lake to where the Tonle Sap River begins its flow, and continue along the river to the jetties of Phnom Penh, about six hours, the water route to the capital.

The departure of the boats is an event in Phnom Krom and the nearby village of Chong Khneas, where the fishing families live in basketwork huts perched over the shore, the places busier at six in the morning than most other inland villages at noon. Apart from the outboard motors on a few of the sampans, the scene could not have changed in hundreds of years: naked children slapping at mud puddles, women selling bananas and rice, but most people mending nets, tending cooking fires, and sorting fish in baskets.

Snakehead fish are caught here. They are the key ingredient in
amok,
one of Cambodia's delicious national dishes, the snakehead simmered in coconut milk with spices. Because the snakehead has natural enemies here, the fish grow to only a few feet and are not the monsters they've become in some places in the United States where they've been introduced.

I found the gangplank to my boat and was about to climb into the cabin when a big man in a Hawaiian shirt—obviously American—said, "I wouldn't go in there if I were you."

I smiled at him because he'd said it so confidently. I stepped back and let other passengers stream into the cabin.

"Look. There's only one way out," he said. "This thing capsizes and it's all over. How would you escape? You read about ferries that sink in places like this, and you wonder why so many people die." He shook his head. "Now I know."

So we sat on the roof together and he introduced himself—Mark Lane, explaining that he was a mate on a ferry out of Homer, Alaska, making runs to the Aleutian Islands. He was taking a break from that cold work by spending a few weeks here in the sunshine.

We had pulled away from the bamboo pier and out of the inlet and were about a quarter of a mile into the lake when the boat slewed and tipped sharply and almost slid us into the water. There were howls from people down below, trapped in the cabin. The boat had snagged on a mud bank and yawed. For about fifteen minutes the slanted boat did not move but only sent up mud and bubbles from the churning screws.

"This might be a long trip," Mark said.

But after we got under way once again, the boat went fast. The only other snag was a mud bank in the middle of the lake, out of sight of land, another slew and swerve and delay.

In stretches of the lake, floating villages were whole water-world communities of houseboats and buoyant huts, an economy of water people enclosed by the perimeters of their nets and bobbing net floats.

These fishing communities looked self-sufficient, orderly, and discreetly territorial, far from government intrusion and regulation. Even before Pol Pot, the government in Cambodia, whether French colonial rule or American puppetry, had brought nothing but war and destruction, torture and death. Left to themselves, in the middle of this lake, the Cambodian water people functioned perfectly.

Sitting side by side on the roof of the boat, using our small duffle bags as cushions, Mark and I talked about Angkor and what we'd seen.

"I did something in Siem Reap I've never done before in my life," Mark said.

"What a great opening," I said.

"No, seriously," he said. "I had a tuk-tuk driver—my wheelman. He only had one eye, he's twenty-five, lives with his aunt—really nice kid. You know how it is. You spend a few days with these guys and you hear their story.

"His name was Sar. He didn't talk much about his past, just about his future. He had it all mapped out. His aim was to be an accountant. Ever heard anyone say that? 'I want to be a doctor,' yes. Or an airline pilot. Or an astronaut. But an accountant? So it seemed to me he was on the level. He had been to high school and done some courses, but to get his accountant's degree he needed college.

"He told me that there's a certain man in Siem Reap who's a well-known teacher of accounting and economics. This tuk-tuk driver Sar wanted him as a mentor and teacher. 'So what's the plan, Sar?' I asked him.

"'The plan is that I earn enough money as a tuk-tuk driver to pay for my education. I live with my aunt. I study with this man. I get an accountant's degree and then a job in Siem Reap. All the new hotels need accountants. New businesses also need them. It's a perfect plan. But one thing—it's impossible.'

"He's staring at me with his good eye, and he's smiling. I asked him why it's impossible.

"'Because I rent this motorbike. I can't make enough each day to pay rent and save money. So I'll go on driving, and first I'll make enough to buy a motorbike. Then I'll use the bike to make money, and I'll save some of that. When I have enough, I'll study to be an accountant. But that time is far away.'

"I said, 'Good for you.' He took me to Angkor. He took me around town. I kept thinking about his plan. And by the way, he didn't ask me for money. I paid him the usual, ten dollars a day.

"Couple of days went by. I kept waking up at night—couldn't sleep. I was thinking about Sar and his plan. I also thought how, when I was sixteen, my father kicked me out of the house—'Get out of here. I don't want you.' My father was a complete bastard. A man in the neighborhood took me in and treated me as his son. He's my real father. He was a Navy
SEAL
. If he hadn't done that, I would have become a druggie, on the street, a lost soul. That helping hand made the difference. I thought about that a lot.

"Next day I met Sar as usual. I said, 'Let's go to the motorbike dealer.' I got all the prices and compared them. I put down eleven hundred dollars and he got the motorbike, a Suzuki 110—just what he needs to be a tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap and make some money.

"I said, 'Okay, now it's up to you. It's not impossible anymore.' And I gave him my e-mail address. We'll see what happens. It might be interesting.

"Hey, it was the last of my money, but I didn't really need it. It might make the whole difference between success or failure in his life."

"That's a good story," I said. He wasn't boasting. It had just happened and he was still ruminating about it. He was a nice guy with a good heart, not a wealthy man but a hard-working mate on an Alaskan ferry, nearing retirement, with a modest income. He seemed something of a loner, but I could see he was energized by his good deed and eager to see how it would all turn out.

When I told him about my experience with the rickshaw driver in Mandalay, he said, "The great thing is, it's not like foreign aid. Every dollar is being used. No middlemen!"

All this time we were traveling along the wide brown inland sea, under a cloudless sky, in sunshine that blistered my face and arms. My perch on the cabin roof was so bright and so blowy, I had given up trying to read—it was Robin Lane Fox's biography,
Alexander the Great.
A shore appeared to the south, and as we approached it, a shore to the north became apparent as a black line in the distance. Farther on, the shores closed in, and houses on stilts teetered at their banks. In the distance was a large gold temple, and then we passed through a break in the shore that narrowed to a river. This was the Tonle Sap River, the major outlet from the lake, which joined the Mekong at Phnom Penh and continued south through Vietnam.