Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (55 page)

While the sun beat down on our heads, frying us on the boat's metal roof that was like a griddle, Mark told me about the storms on his ferry run to the Aleutians, the days of fog, the way the whole boat would ice up and freeze and become top-heavy and unstable. In the distance I
could see some half-naked men tossing fishing nets and others pulling up crab pots.

Borne by the current, we passed higher banks, bigger houses, riverside settlements, fishing boats, motorboats, and fortified embankments. The houses piled up and became more dense, and the city appeared as we approached the landing stages.

***

PHNOM PENH HAD A SCRUFFY
, rather beaten-up look, like a scarred human face in which its violent past was evident; it was a city that had suffered extreme punishment of a kind that was impossible to conceal. It was a city under repair, which is also the look of a city falling apart, and there were very poor neighborhoods, but unlike India, it was poverty without squalor. There are architectural marvels in Phnom Penh—the royal palace, residence of Sihanouk's successor, Prince Ranariddh (Cambodia had reverted to being a kingdom), the national museum with its imposing collection of Angkor treasures and statuary, some colonial-era villas, the main post office, the Grand Market, some temples—yet instead of raising the tone of the city, these dignified buildings only made the rest of it look worse.

Spelled out in pebbles underwater near a temple, I found the message
If you want a good rebirth you must liberate from the delusions.
It seemed to me that Cambodians had few delusions. Within recent memory, they had seen everything—terror, starvation, mass murder. They had needed to be tough to survive, so they did not have the geniality of Thais or the dreamy obliqueness of Burmese or the practicality of Singaporeans. But even the streetwise Cambodians in the city, who were direct and demanding, were capable of graceful gestures. With good reason, they had lost hope in the promises of government and justice. Once, in casual conversation with a Cambodian, I said I'd like to come back someday. He looked at me with disbelief. He said, "Why you want to do this?"

It seemed incredible to him that anyone would want to return to this death-haunted country. He wanted to leave Cambodia; everyone he knew wanted to leave. Phnom Penh was thronged by pedestrians, by cycle rickshaws and scooters. No one had money for cars. That alone made it picturesque for me, trying hard not to be a romantic voyeur, though it was obviously a struggle for everyone else.

For superficial reasons, I was happy—happy in the way the big pink middle-aged men were happy in Cambodia, though most of them were in beach towns like Sihanoukville. It was one of the greatest places in the world to be a barfly. Cheap beer, good food, fine weather, and any number of congenial companions—other barflies and beautiful women who, it seemed, had little else to do but watch you drink and smile.

On a side street of Phnom Penh, at Sharkey's bar, one of many such bars, big ugly Western men drank beer and played pool in the company of small pretty Cambodian women, who pawed them and poured their drinks. This arrangement is a kind of heaven for many men. It was the atmosphere of cheap beer and mild debauchery I had seen all those years ago in Vientiane. It wasn't outdated; it had just moved farther down the Mekong River.

"What do you want?" the tuk-tuk drivers asked in Phnom Penh with a smile, confident that they could provide anything I named—heroin, a massage, a woman, a man, someone to marry, a child to adopt, a bowl of noodles, or a souvenir T-shirt.

As in Siem Reap, the Phnom Penh hotels ranged from the luxurious to the basic. The sumptuously furnished and Frenchified chateaus like Le Royal, set in walled compounds with guards posted outside, had rooms for $500 a night; at the other end, the little side-street pension where Mark Lane was staying was $15 a night. But his room had no windows. I found a hotel overlooking the river for $25 a night, with breakfast. Since Burma, my usual morning meal had been noodles or a mound of rice with a fried egg on top.

I wanted to read about Pol Pot. I found a bookstore near the national museum and swapped my copy of Robin Lane Fox's life of Alexander for Philip Short's life of Pol Pot. On the shelves, to my surprise, were copies of my own books: bootlegged copies, smudgily printed, looking homemade.

"Where was this printed?" I asked, picking up a copy of
Dark Star Safari.

"It's a photocopy," the clerk said, though it was a chunky book, more like a bound proof copy than the finished article.

"Why do you go to all the trouble to photocopy this book?"

"Because it's a bestseller."

"People read this guy?"

"Oh, yes, sir," he began, but before he finished I took out my driver's license and showed it to him. He held it in two hands, studied it closely, then shrieked—a gratifying reaction. Then he became anxious and said, "Are you angry with me?"

"Of course not."

His name was Cheah Sopheap. He asked me what I was doing in Cambodia. I took a bootlegged copy of
The Great Railway Bazaar
off the shelf and showed him the endpaper map. I had wanted to travel from Thailand through Cambodia in the early seventies, I said, but it had been impossible.

"It was a bad time then," Sopheap said. "The city was empty. All the people had been sent to the countryside."

"So there was nothing here?"

"Just prisons."

"And Pol Pot was making trouble for you?"

"Pol Pot was nothing," he said. He made a face and flicked his finger as though at a gnat.

To the world, Pol Pot was a moon-faced monster, so this was a surprising answer. Sopheap explained, saying that before the coming of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian society had evolved to the point where the rich were ostentatiously wealthy and the rural poor simply desperate. The countryside, especially in the east of the country, had been ruined by the war in Vietnam, which had spread to Cambodia. Khmer Rouge was what outsiders called Pol Pot's organization. In Cambodia it was known as Angkar, the Party.

Sopheap did not say so, but Nixon and Kissinger had secretly approved an invasion in 1969 and the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, in the ruthless and irrational belief that it would help win the Vietnam War. For the next several years, without any authorization from Congress, B-52s from Guam flew thousands of bombing missions. This outrage, accurately documented by the journalist Seymour Hersh, included the dropping of half a million tons of American bombs and the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the American-funded regime of Lon Nol. The blitz only made the Vietcong more resolute, and the bombing created havoc in Cambodia, killing an estimated 600,000 people and driving the peasants into joining the Khmer Rouge.

"The poor people hated the rich and hated the Americans who were
killing them," Sopheap said. "They were so angry! And when they came to Phnom Penh they did anything they wanted."

He meant the men in black pajama-like uniforms, who appeared in the capital in April 1975 and took over, expelling all the residents, looting their houses, and sending them into the countryside. These guerrilla soldiers had been living in the jungle, fighting and scavenging, some of them for many years. They were hungry, battle-weary, and resentful. A large number of the more recent recruits were in their early teens.

"They liked having power and killing. Pol Pot was not the only reason. The people themselves made the terror."

"What happened to your family?"

"My father survived because he was a farmer. He was lucky. He knew how to make sugar from palm trees."

Sopheap's father would have been shot. But in the midst of the terror and starvation, the regime introduced "dessert day." Rice soup was all that was available for people, but on dessert day, three times a month, it was decreed that the soup was to be sweetened with palm sugar—cane sugar was unavailable. Sopheap's father was able to provide homemade palm sugar. So he was not shot.

"I was sick," Sopheap said. "My body was swollen big. I almost died. It was a terrible time. You've seen the museum and the killing fields?"

***

THE KILLING FIELDS
Sopheap meant were only ten miles from the city. The place was locally known as Choeung Ek. It was one of many. There were 343 other killing sites spread across Cambodia, and numerous torture prisons too, from the Khmer Rouge period, 1974-1979. By then the United States was tacitly supporting the Khmer Rouge government, because of our humiliation at having been driven out of Vietnam. By allowing the Chinese to arm Pol Pot, we could hobble the Vietnamese, who were fighting the Khmer Rouge with Soviet artillery along the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

I rode a tuk-tuk through rice fields in brilliant sunshine to a grove of trees where birds were singing. In this peaceful place, formerly an orchard and a Chinese cemetery, twenty thousand people were murdered over the course of three years. An open-air museum, it was shaded by tall trees, its largest structure a tower with stepped shelves containing
some nine thousand human skulls. Many of the mass graves were still strewn with remnants of the victims' clothes. Most of the prisoners had been beaten to death with shovels, hoes, and pickaxes—among the cruelest and most painful deaths imaginable. Splits and cracks were visible in many of the skulls, from the force of a blunt ax head or the blade of a hoe. The skulls, young and old, male and female, said a great deal about who they had been and how they'd died.

When Vietnamese soldiers liberated Phnom Penh—against the wishes of the United States—129 mass graves were found here at Choeung Ek, one of the graves containing 450 corpses.

The victims were mainly people from the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, who had been tortured into confessing that they'd been spies or counterrevolutionaries. Many of them had been Khmer Rouge soldiers who'd fallen under suspicion, or been casually ratted on, or who'd just been unlucky. They were clerks, teachers, landlords—education was equated with wealth ("such people oppressed the poor")—or they were hapless bystanders who'd been pounced on for no good reason. Most were urbanites, termed "New People," considered inferior to peasants because they hadn't fought and suffered. According to David Chandler in
Brother Number One
(another pirated book I bought on a Phnom Penh street corner), they were mocked with the saying "Keeping you is no gain, losing you is no loss." These enemies of the state were driven in trucks the ten miles from the prison, twenty or thirty to a truck—frightened, starved, blindfolded, sick from torture.

When the truck arrived, the victims were led directly to be executed at the ditches and pits,
a little sign at Choeung Ek said. Because the execution methods were so crude—it was not possible to club more than three hundred people to death and also bury them on any given day—a backlog of doomed people built up, and many of the prisoners had to wait in locked huts for their turn to die, listening to the screams from the edges of the pits.

A sign on one tree said,
The killing tree against which executioners beat children—
and it explained that these children, the offspring of the despised privileged class of doctors, lawyers, and teachers, were swung by their heels and their skulls smashed against the tree.

Pathways linked the mass graves with the trees and the shrines—small platforms on poles, like bird feeders—where the clothes and
sometimes the bones of the victims were stacked. On this hot sunny day, just the sort of day on which the killings took place, these platforms were thick with buzzing flies.

This tree was used as a tool to hang a microphone which make a sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed,
another sign said on a tree at the edge of one of the mass graves.

I was stunned and depressed by the visit to Choeung Ek. I had also begun to read the Philip Short book, which was not only a biography of Pol Pot but also a chronicle of Cambodia's recent history. One of Short's themes was how, today, the genocide was being marketed to advertise the virtue of the present government, which wasn't virtuous at all. He also emphasized that it was important to look closer at Khmer culture to understand the deep roots of this violence. The apparent anarchy was "a mosaic of idealism and butchery, exaltation and horror, compassion and brutality that defies easy generalization."

Writing of "the eternal Khmer dichotomy between serenity and uncontrollable violence, with no middle ground between," Short said that the killing fields were less an example of Pol Pot's excesses than the sort of behavior that was endemic in Khmer society. "The peculiarly abominable form [the ideology] took, came from pre-existing Khmer cultural models," he wrote. "Every atrocity the Khmer Rouge ever committed ... can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor [and] in paintings of Buddhist hells"

It was self-serving for the United States to call it genocide, Short wrote, for after all, we had helped bring Pol Pot to power. And the existence of these museums of Khmer Rouge slaughter was also a way of suggesting that Cambodia had reformed, which was untrue. The present government was "rotten" and "utterly corrupt," and many men in it had been in the Khmer Rouge and had not repudiated their past crimes.

Horrible as the killing fields were, this museum of atrocities distracted attention from the corruption of the present regime. Far from being an aberration, they were an example of Khmer culture run riot. A French missionary had called the terror "an explosion of the Khmer identity."

But Pol Pot had lit the fuse. All his life he had the Khmer smile. No one ever knew what he was thinking or feeling. Few people knew his real name. He was born Saloth Sar, and over the years he changed his name at least a dozen times. "The more often you change your name, the
better it confuses the enemy," he said. What Pol Pot did not say was that the name changes reflected his multiple identities. He'd had a privileged upbringing, some of his childhood spent at the royal palace. His colonial education allowed him to travel to France in 1949, where he was known as a bon viveur, if a bit secretive, and eventually as an anticolonial ideologue. He discovered Stalinism. He became a utopian socialist, a leveler, unsentimental, but in the Khmer way, capable of preaching extreme violence.