Vanished Years (23 page)

After breakfast our ‘mission’ moves with military precision, from
project to project, morning after morning, in the blazing heat, as I get sicker and sicker. Not a moment is wasted: the cars arrive at eight o’clock with our people on the ground. One is an extremely bossy girl from Poland, named Inga, and the other is a matchstick-thin, wild-eyed pharmacist from France, Emanuel. We clamber aboard, making sure we are sitting next to our new best friend on the trip – mine is the German prince; David’s is Emanuel – and off we go, beep-beep through the traffic, past scooters carrying whole families side-saddle, taxi bikes with stately matriarchs looking daggers from the back, SUVs with diplomatic number plates and black windows sealed against the heat and the rest of humanity, and brightly painted trucks crammed with half-naked men, all honking and belching towards one another in a cloud of dust and diesel. A traffic conductor stands ignored at the very epicentre of the crush in what at first glance seems to be white tie and tails but in fact is just white gloves. He is in a trance, pointing this way and that, his forearms rotating from his elbows, blowing his whistle as another lorry screeches to a halt before his outstretched arm. He is Marcel Marceau searching for the opening to an invisible door. He finds it and motions us through and suddenly the crazy city has disappeared like a magic trick and we are driving over a low flat horizon into the huge pale Cambodian sky.

It’s a strange third-world phenomenon, that dusty caravan of care that grinds and bumps its way towards some faraway clinic in Cambodia. The vans are packed with total strangers. Collisions from different worlds. Chat starts cautiously about conditions in the field, but I drift off with the view – after all, I’ve never seen a paddy field before. Solitary palm trees are scattered across the horizon. Little naked kids play in the muddy waters by the road. The red-tiled roofs of distant temples (
wats
) flash past and a man waves from a small canoe on an emerald-coloured field. In the bus MA tells us about the Global Fund.

‘Rrrruperrrrt! Arre you listening?’

‘Yes, Mariangela. I’ve got my notebook out.’

Formed in the wake of the G8 convention in Genoa of 2001, the Fund is mostly underwritten by government and to a certain extent the private sector. It is an unusual charity in that it does not seek to control its recipients.

‘Just its celebrities,’ I whisper to the prince.

‘Frosty!’ he warns.

MA continues.

The Fund simply responds to the needs and requests of each individual organisation in each country. However, every time a new major player enters the field of international health care, whole new systems and protocols are created. The money must be protected, as it navigates its way from the banks of Geneva, through greedy drug companies, corrupt governments (first and third world) and sometimes dodgy recipients, to the patient on the ground.

‘Yes. Which means that now, if I want a new photocopier,’ says Emanuel, ‘I must send a memo to my superior. But if he is in the field, then I must send this memo to myself! Then I must have quotations of four different machines, which I must send to Geneva.
Putain merde
!’ (Whore shit.)

Today we are visiting the
Wat
Opot clinic, two hours outside of Phnom Penh. It’s a Christian mission in the grounds of a Buddhist wat at the end of a long straight track surrounded by paddy fields. The centre comprises a couple of shacks and an outdoor kitchen under a flapping green tarpaulin. In its green shade sits a large bear of a man with a grizzly beard and half-dead eyes in the middle of a group of kids. A teenage girl stands over an ironing board. The kids scream and play and the man stares into the distance. He is the spitting image of Bruce Weber and for a moment I think it is the great photographer himself. Perhaps he is shooting the new Abercrombie & Fitch campaign and I can strip off and take part.

The bus has hardly stopped but Inga leaps from it with Iron Curtain mania and frogmarches us through introductions – she is already really getting on my nerves – while Bruce shuffles around finding chairs and our cameras flash and focus. Our sound man
holds his boom in that ludicrous way and a little child points and they all laugh and imitate him, making us all feel suddenly bashful and stupid. I fix my charity beam in place and soon I am sitting with Bruce in this makeshift pagoda, ready for the first interview of the trip. The kids are tiny shimmering things in the underwater light. They have no inhibitions and they climb on us and jump off or hang their arms around our shoulders, inspecting us closely, fixing us with their large innocent eyes. Bruce is in fact called Wayne and he sits there, a leftover from
Apocalypse
Now, dishevelled and distant, a huge octopus on the seabed, wrangling a child here with one long tentacle, while stopping a table from falling over with another. The girl irons on regardless.

‘Welcome to Wat Opot.’

He even sounds like Bruce Weber. We face each other and the cameras zoom in for the interview. I explain that I am from the BBC and want to find out what is going on here in Cambodia.

‘What’s going on?’ he repeats in a dead voice.

He looks deep into my eyes. His are ringed watery moons. They are saying this is a waste of time. But Inga has persuaded him to let us come. Us and all the other do-gooders who make it up the bumpy track to Wat Opot and never return. And so he sighs and launches into his story for the thousandth time. He is a Vietnam vet, invalided out in 1977.

‘What made you come back?’

He doesn’t answer for a moment. ‘I needed a change,’ he says finally. ‘The States wasn’t working out.’ He’s been back in Cambodia for seven years and he takes children on their last journey. ‘Nobody dies alone here.’ The result is that he hardly sleeps. The kids adore him. One, a six-year-old, is almost attached to his shoulder. ‘He’s only got two T-cells.’

‘Do you get back to the States much?’ I ask.

‘Only for funerals.’

Paul Schrader could have written this.

Wayne used to burn the bodies of the kids outside on a bonfire.
‘But sometimes the rains would come and put the whole thing out, and then we’d have to wait for everything to dry.’ Now he has built a crematorium, which he shows us. It’s a square building, like a little tomb, with a corrugated-iron roof, divided into three rooms. In the first there are two plastic chairs, ‘where I sit sometimes when there’s a lot of people around’.

On the walls are pinned photographs he’s taken of all the kids while they were alive. Underneath, on a shelf, are little gold plastic urns that hold their ashes. Through a window you can see some woods and the red tower of the nearby
wat
. The trees are waving in the wind. We sit down among the ashes and Wayne tells many stories in a slow deliberate voice.

The one that moves me the most is of a man called Arun who died here last year. He was in his early thirties. His father was an American soldier who was evacuated from Cambodia in 1975. They never met. Throughout his childhood, during the terror, Arun became angrier and angrier with his mother. He blamed her for driving his father away. Of course, in reality it had probably been the other way around. But the boy got worse and worse, violent and dangerous, did terrible things to his mother and then got Aids. It was some years before he came limping up the track to Wat Opot.

‘Arun was a tough cookie,’ says Wayne, ‘but three weeks before he died he softened up.’

He asked Wayne for some money to go and make peace with his mother, but the trip was a disaster and the mother sent a message to Wayne never to let the boy come near her again.

‘Funnily enough,’ says Wayne, ’he’s the only one here who died alone. We came in the morning and he was lying there with his arm behind his back, looking up at the ceiling. Just how he always was. But dead. That was Arun all over. He did everything alone.’

A large American lady appears in the doorway of the little hut.

‘Hey, Jeanie,’ says Wayne.

Jeanie is Wayne’s best friend from home. She is a large Southern
woman of sixty built like a prison warden. She shrinks the tiny room with her size and energy.

‘I came to visit and – when was it, Way?’

‘’Bout five years ago.’

‘That long? Well, I couldn’t just leave him here, all alone, could I?’

‘So you moved from Oregon to Cambodia just like that?’

‘Just like that!’

She laughs and looks at Wayne. Childhood sweethearts. He stares back at her, sombre, broken somehow.

‘Are you getting money from the Global Fund?’ I ask him.

‘Ha!’ laughs Jeanie, leaving.

‘So much paperwork,’ he replies.

Wayne and Jeanie take us across the field to visit the wat. It is deserted. A large garish statue of the Buddha, looking like a tricky tranny with Gary Glitter eyes, dominates the interior, which is open to the four winds. A monk looks sleepily from a window in one of the outhouses that surround the temple but otherwise there is nobody around. We walk to a nearby village where the ladies are making silk scarves on huge wooden looms and the men are seated around an enormous piece of paper on a low stage. They are writing a communal will. Strangely enough, the atmosphere is quite festive but there is a lot of debate. Everyone has an opinion. The kids play on the ground, unaware that their dying parents are assigning them new lives as orphans. There are no grandparents. Nixon, Kissinger and Pol Pot took them; now Aids is taking their children. The women listen but keep on weaving and it makes one wonder about all those scarves and rugs and things one acquires and loses, the little Christmas presents and birthday gifts. We have no idea of the living drama sewn into them as the needle slides endlessly on. If only they were labelled: ‘Handmade by a dying woman in Cambodia. A living will.’

It becomes clear as the trip continues that there is a lot of tension between the NGOs and the Global Fund. The money that the fund pledged is not getting through and there is a lot of frustration.

‘It’s early days,’ is all Mariangela will say, but the fact of the matter seems to be that Cambodia is so corrupt, nobody has managed yet to find a way of getting money onto the ground without it being stolen en route. One nurse, talking secretly to David, begins to scream, while near by – on camera – I am hearing the official version from Mariangela. The other truth confronts us each day in the perplexed faces of the doctors and nurses on the ground. Debate lasts late into the night but Mariangela gives nothing away. She is a genius actually, because we all get pretty heated and drunk, which is a bad combination, while she sips at a sparkling water and denies nothing.

‘It’s not easy,’ is all she will admit, laughing as usual. ‘By the way, you’re not going to write all this in
Vanity Fair
, are you?’ she asks, suddenly serious.

In the evenings we take to the streets of the capital. Boys on mopeds jostle for our trade, and soon we’re off in opposite directions. It’s as exciting as the bumper cars when you were a kid. The stifling heat is finally bearable as we speed across intersections and dart through the oncoming traffic. We peel off the main boulevards with their French colonial mansions and fairy-lit wats onto the lampless side streets, where guys sleep in the backs of their rickshaws. Every night, back from the field, we jump on our moped taxis – our favourite scooter boys are always waiting for us. They have heard the prince call me Frosty.

‘Come inside, Fosty,’ they scream and off we go.

We speed along the river front to where the Tonle Sap meets the Mekong River. At last there’s a cool breeze on the promenade that overlooks this famous junction and it blows away all the smells and noises of the city behind us – the cabbage and the cheap gas, the honking scooters and the tinkling bikes. It also blows away all remaining sense one has of one’s own world. Before us the two rivers are a vast shimmering blanket under the stars. The other bank is miles away – just a black line and a string of tiny lights that divide the river from the sky. Strange oversized thrushes sit in the flowery trees near by, their large blind eyes staring at the moon. Far out, men in
straw hats are perched on the prows of their canoes and throw their nets into the water in breathtaking silhouettes. Their voices carry on the breeze. So this is the Tonle Sap. Its very name sounds magical and in fact it is the only river in the world that flows in two different directions. Once a year she turns around and flows backwards. Perhaps this is the elusive piece of the Cambodian jigsaw.

Emanuel takes us to a bar called Heart of Darkness where girls in sawn-off miniskirts play pool with travelling hippies, and there on the TV as we walk in is Madonna yapping away in Chinese. Suddenly there is a big close-up of me, also dubbed by some Hong Kong tranny. I freeze. Normally the reaction to this film has been rather violent so I slink into the shadows with a beer without mentioning anything to the other members of the group but the prince has eyes in the back of his head.

‘Oh my God, Frosty, you’re on the TV,’ he screams but luckily no one hears.

David and Mariangela are deep in conversation with Emanuel but the rest of the clientele are completely wrapped up in the film. It’s the scene where Madonna tells me she is having my baby. All action has come to a halt around the pool table as the boys and girls watch, horrified or entranced – one can never tell in the Orient. Their eyes are narrow and their faces are bathed in the weird light from the TV. They lean on their billiard cues, strange warrior folk from another planet. They hardly move during the whole film, and a big tear rolls down the alabaster cheek of a girl sitting on a bar stool at the end. I am thrilled. I’m a star in Cambodia, if not California, and I feel vindicated. Lying in bed later at the Raffles Hotel, writing my diary, I realise that as usual I am getting a whole lot more out of this trip than the people I am supposed to be helping.

There is a roaring sex trade here in Phnom Penh and our friends from Pharmaciens sans Frontières take us to the ‘karaoke houses’ where young teenage girls work to support their families. The girls sit on red-velvet stairs behind plate-glass walls, dressed in virginal white
slips. They are sometimes beautiful, at other times homely. It is just like being in a zoo. They chat together in twos and threes behind the glass wall and men peruse them from the other side. They too are zoo animals, impounded apes running back and forth along the glass, eyeing the girls, who wave hopelessly back or just return their gaze with tired, frightened eyes.