The Turk Who Loved Apples (26 page)

“Take off your clothes,” I said, but not out loud. “Take them off right now.”

Instead, she spoke first. “Tell me about your girlfriend,” she said.

I gave Lina the bare facts—I was dating a pretty fashion student from Taiwan who had a lovely smile and a great appetite—while telling myself that what I really wanted bared was Lina's body. But telling myself and telling Lina were two vastly different things, as distant from one another as America and Cambodia, honesty and betrayal, wealth and poverty. If only she would ask . . . but she didn't, not even when I led her up to the airy, lofted sleeping area and showed her my mosquito-netted bed. It was as if by refusing her that other night, I had exempted myself from the world of sex, and that by so strenuously insisting—against all common sense—that she and I relate as human beings, as equals, I had actually succeeded. I had gotten what I wanted, even if what I wanted was changing.

Finally, meekly, I told Lina I wanted to take her picture, and she followed me out to the deck. Beyond us was the river at dusk, and
beyond that a Muslim neighborhood whose landless inhabitants worked the local slaughterhouses, and beyond that fields of rice and land mines, and I took a few long-exposure shots of her face. She looked defiant in them, but then again, with her fierce eyes and upturned nose, she always looked defiant. Then I walked her downstairs to the street.

Before we parted, Lina said: “Don't show the pictures to your girlfriend.”

“I won't,” I told her. “I promise.” I wasn't lying.

F
ive years later, I was back in Phnom Penh to research my novel. Much of the city's anarchic quality had been tamped down, restrained by Cambodia's expanding economy, not to mention the dictator in charge of the country. Martini's, Sharky's, the Heart of Darkness, and all the other hooker bars still existed, but I avoided them. They didn't fascinate me any more. They were real, I knew, and their reality was too much for me to handle. My life would be, for a few weeks, regular and calm.

But I did make it back to the Café Santepheap. Since I'd last been there, Dave's wife had been killed in a grenade attack (the accidental result of a dispute at a neighboring karaoke bar), and he'd moved the bar across town, down to where all the NGOs he loved to bitch about had their offices. He'd remarried, his son was now five, and he remained as intense and gregarious as before, railing on about Cambodian corruption in light of the Stalin biography he was reading.

“The hooker with a heart of gold?” he said when, inevitably, I asked after Lina. “She's in Kompong Som”—a backpacker-filled beach town better known as Sihanoukville. “She hooked up with the Starfish Project, you know them?”

I nodded. The group took street kids in and taught them useful skills: baking, handicrafts, restaurant work. Starfish were good people;
at least, they didn't receive the whiskey-and-Coke-fueled abuse that Dave heaped on World Vision, UNICEF, the Assemblies of God, the Mormons . . .

“Well,” Dave continued, “she went down there and adopted a few of the Starfish kids. Lovely girl. Works in a couple of the bars down there as a waitress. Lovely girl. Of course, she was always a problem at the bar. Would drink too much and puke. You puke on my bar, I give you a bucket and you clean it up yourself. That was her. She had a boyfriend for a while named Mark. She'd get drunk and nostalgic about him and then puke all over my bar . . . She's older now, and maybe not as cute. She doesn't want to be a hooker anymore. 'Course, who wants to be a hooker?”

This was good news. Amazing news, really. A prostitute of unusual verve and spirit had, on her own initiative, gotten out of the business and was now keeping kids from following the path she'd followed. My own path was now clear—I had to find her, hear the story from its source and offer any help she might require.

S
ihanoukville was not an impressive place. Like many Cambodian towns, it felt haphazard and unorganized, encompassing a series of beach areas of varying quality: the backpacker-friendly Victory Beach; the private, guarded area at the five-star Sokha Beach Resort; the long, long stretch of sand at Ochheuteal Beach, where everyone from tourists and expats to street vendors and middle-class Cambodians would hang out. To the north was Cambodia's main shipping port. Inland was an uninspiring downtown and a bunch of cheap guesthouses on a hill above Victory Beach. I'd been through here before, and while I didn't mind soaking in the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand, I found Sihanoukville dull—a beach town that existed solely because Cambodia felt it should have a beach town. But I'd come this time only partly to sunbathe, and as soon as I had
a chance I made my way to the Starfish Project's café in downtown Sihanoukville to ask after Lina.

She wasn't around, the Cambodian employees said. They seemed wary as well, reluctant to talk, and suggested only that she might be down at Ochheuteal Beach. A Scandinavian woman working for Starfish asked me if I was sure Lina was Cambodian. “It doesn't sound like a Khmer name,” she said.

At Occheuteal, I asked anyone I could find if they'd heard of Lina. A woman selling snacks seemed to recognize the name, but said she hadn't seen Lina in a few weeks. Maybe she'd gone back to Phnom Penh?

I wasn't sure what to make of this. If she'd adopted children, wouldn't she be here with them? Or was the Cambodian sense of “adoption” something different? Or had Dave been wrong?

No, people here at Ochheuteal knew Lina—or at least knew a Lina. At the Sea Dragon restaurant, a foreign bartender reacted strongly and happily to the name. “Oh, sure, Lina,” he said. “Tall girl? Light-skinned? Works with Starfish?”

Now I was in a quandary. Were there two Linas in Sihanoukville, both of whom had turned their lives around to help street kids? Dave had definitely known who I meant, but this bartender seemed fairly certain himself. Well, I thought, whichever Lina I find, I'll be happy.

But no Lina turned up that day or that evening. The next day I tried asking at Victory Beach, whose vendors and bartenders sent me up to Weather Station Hill, where the town's crummier backpacker hotels and bars were located, to see the owner of a guesthouse, who might know. The owner pointed us to a room in the compound where, he said, a friend of Lina's was staying. Lina herself might be there, too—he didn't know.

I approached the flimsy door and knocked. A young woman who looked Vietnamese answered. “Lina not here,” she said. Behind her
I could see a man with his shirt off. Quickly, so as not to interrupt further, I apologized and backed away.

Again, I asked at the front desk for help, and finally the owner lit up. He led me out of the hotel and down the street, to a small, low concrete house with a portable sandwich cart out front. The guesthouse owner pointed at the old woman running the cart and said, with evident pride, “Lina mama!”

Could this be Lina's mother? She certainly resembled Lina with her dark skin, kinky hair and slightly upturned nose. In my beginner's Khmer, I began to explain: “I'm an old friend of Lina. I knew her five years ago. I am trying to find her. Please, do you know where she is?”

“She's gone back to Phnom Penh,” the old woman said, hardly looking up from her cart to answer.

“Do you know, was she working with Starfish? Was she helping kids? What is she doing in Phnom Penh now?” I could feel my questions getting more desperate, and the woman growing more indifferent. She'd told me Lina—some Lina—was in Phnom Penh, and that was all.

Suddenly, I realized what was going on. To her, I was just another foreign john looking to sleep with her daughter, the daughter who, for one reason or another, had left again to work as a hooker. With every question I asked, with each insistence that she was a smart girl and just a friend, I was reminding her she'd raised a prostitute—just as, so many years ago, I'd unintentionally reminded Lina of the same thing. I wanted to help, but I couldn't help hurting.

A week or two later, I was back in Phnom Penh, and I did what had to be done: I went to Martini's. The place was bigger now, with a sprawling outdoor space that led to a small stage. Electronic music thundered in the night, and the crowd looked the same as ever: foreign guys drinking, local girls dancing. I ordered a Tiger beer and sipped it as I walked around, shaking my head sadly as girl after girl approached me with a slightly scared smile. I climbed the steps up
onto the stage and looked out at the sea of prostitutes and their potential clients, but I saw no Lina—no Linas, either, no one who showed the slightest bit of individuality or energy or wit.

Or rather, they were all Linas, all wearing “sex girl” dresses, all equally trapped in a system that rewarded fuck-machine tactics and laughed at any expression of hope or determination. It was stupid of me to expect otherwise. I left my half-finished beer on a concrete ledge and went home to sleep.

T
he French millionaire was barefoot. It was a cool day in May 2008, and, like me, he'd just gotten off the ferry from Dover to Calais. From the ankles up, he looked the picture of the cosmopolitan Gaul: pressed pants, cashmere V-neck, clear blue eyes, close-cropped silver hair. An air of confidence and self-satisfaction emanated from him. He was returning to his home turf, happy.

But he wore no shoes. His feet were clean, but tough-looking, and I didn't even catch a glimpse of his presumably leathery soles. On the taxi we shared from the port into town, he explained that he'd first gone barefoot sometime in the 1960s, and from that point on, he'd never reverted. Unless a social occasion or sport activity absolutely called for it, he was shoeless. In winter and summer, in first class and in restaurants. Sure, he sometimes got looks from people, but what did he care? He had money, he knew who he was, and he didn't want to wear shoes. A few weird glances were worth the freedom.

The taxi dropped me off in the center of town, not far from Rodin's famous
Burghers of Calais
statue, memorializing six prominent citizens who'd surrendered themselves to British forces to ward off a siege during the Hundred Years' War. To my eyes, Calais looked as proper as the French millionaire. Its stately buildings, artsy atmosphere, and clean, slightly chilly air were what I thought a northern French town should be, and the local appetite for beer and
pommes frites
gave it a human aspect, too. As I checked into Le Cercle de Malines, a meticulously designed but still whimsical bed-and-breakfast—there was a taxidermic crocodile in the Indochine room, a huge claw-foot tub in the Rome room—I had the sense that Calais might be a place where I'd feel at home, on that fine line between highbrow and low.

I knew, however, that Calais had another side. In the past several years, it had become a magnet for refugees, who'd come from all over the world and hoped that here, where the English Channel was narrow and cargo trucks plied the tunnel beneath it, they'd manage, at last, to reach Great Britain. Until 2002, many of the refugees had stayed in a nearby camp called Sangatte, but Nicholas Sarkozy, then the interior minister, had closed it, and officials had declared the problem solved.

But that hadn't stopped refugees from arriving. Hundreds of them, I'd heard, lived in hiding around Calais, and as the Frugal Traveler I felt it was my duty to learn what I could about these travelers who were frugal not by choice but out of necessity.

One day I walked over to an empty lot near one of Calais's canals, where Anne-Sophie, the proprietress of Le Cercle de Malines, had told me the refugees gathered each day to receive free meals. Two hundred or so were milling around, waiting for La Belle Étoile, one of three aid organizations that feed the refugees, to open up its trailer. The majority—I learned through interviews—were Eritreans, Iraqis, Afghans, and Palestinians, many of whom had paid tens of thousands of dollars to escape their homes and would give what little they had left for illegal passage across the channel. Some had spent eighteen months getting to this point—others longer—and their voyages were never easy.

“You cannot imagine,” a young Eritrean man told me before turning away to join the lunch line.

Life was tough for them, sometimes in nonobvious ways. France would not give them asylum, nor would it deport them, nor would it allow them to stay and work temporarily. Worse, refugees and aid
workers told me, the police would generally arrest them for walking in public during the day—simply for being in the country illegally. They'd be held twenty-four hours, then released, perhaps to be rearrested mere hours later.

For some, this was a minor inconvenience. Many were being trafficked in a semi-organized way, and would wait only a few days in Calais before getting word of a truck that would take them to the port, then—if they were lucky—to England.

In this respect, Roshan and Ahmed, a Sri Lankan and a Somali I was introduced to by aid workers, were atypical. Both had fled their war-torn homelands, but not with asylum in England as their goal—they'd simply fled for their lives. Roshan, a round-faced, kindly bus driver in his twenties, had run away after his conductor was murdered; he'd received word he himself was next. His seven-month boat journey brought him via India first to Italy, then to Paris as well. As for Ahmed—known to aid workers as Eddie Murphy for his good humor and
Deliriously
red jacket—when both his parents were killed in a single day (his father in the morning, his mother in the evening), he took a boat to Djibouti with four friends, who then locked themselves in a container on a cargo ship, and several days later found themselves in France.