Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "When was that?"

  "Thirty-three years ago."

  "Bus is quicker."

  "I'm trying to be consistent."

  The Cambodian border wasn't far, only half a day's journey. The beauty of it, and its singularity, was that the train tracks ran due east, an almost straight line to another twinkling point of the Eastern Star.

  The train left at six in the morning and would be at the border town of Aranyaprathet in the early afternoon—plenty of time to struggle across the border and onward to Siem Reap. That was the other thing I'd wanted to do all those years ago, visit the Angkor ruins.

  None of this travel had been possible before, and the Thai side of the border had been thick with refugees, because the whole of Cambodia was in the grip of the Khmer Rouge, ruled by the reclusive tyrant Pol Pot. The Cambodian nightmare had ended in the late 1980s, but there were plenty of people who said that Cambodia was still tyrannized and hopeless. Now at least I could get a train to the frontier, and probably a bus after that.

  I was bleary-eyed in the predawn darkness when I boarded the train, which was almost empty, except for a Thai family and some huddled women, and at the far end of the open carriage, an Indian, obviously a trader, traveling with cardboard boxes.

  Indians were hated in Thailand, a Thai man had confided to me once when he saw an Indian standing on a street corner. I asked him why.

  "Because he is a kaek"

  "What's a kaek?"

  "Kaek is Indian. Also Pakistan man. Arab. Sri Lanka," the Thai man said. "Dark face, round eye."

  In the land of smiles, the races didn't mingle as much as it seemed.

  "We have a saying. If you see a snake and a kaek at the same time, kill the kaek first."

  The Indian got off at Chachoengsao Junction, about an hour into the trip. The train rattled eastward into the heat, past mango orchards and cane fields. I was happy being on the move again, with the pleasant prospect of crossing into Cambodia later in the day. All the way to the border were tidy villages and little shops, flags of royal yellow, and portraits of the king, commemorating the sixtieth year of his rule. After high-density Singapore and Bangkok, this was sunny, empty countryside and fresh air. Here and there I saw a rural village that was like a village in my Asiatic dreams, pretty bungalows surrounded by fruit trees, bananas, coconut palms, vegetable gardens, and browsing cows, in a wide-open landscape that ventilated my mind.

  I did not need to be told that we'd arrived at Aranyaprathet: everything about it suggested that it was the end of the line. The little station was empty, the road leading from it to the few streets of shops was empty except for some tuk-tuks. The town itself, like all border towns, had an unfinished look, a bit lawless, fatigued, provisional, undercapitalized, exactly the way travelers feel when they arrive in such a place, weary and noncommittal. The businesses cater less to the people living there than to the ones passing through. No one ever intends to stay long in a border town, and this antiromantic note makes them attractive to travelers, reflects their own restlessness.

  In Southeast Asia it seemed there was always a noodle shop that served as an agency for dealing with border formalities; that took passport pictures; that provided visa applications; that also sold cold drinks and fried rice and beer and stringy chicken; that owned a van for ferrying people to the border; that probably did laundry, too. And had waitresses who flirted with the travelers, because it was harmless, a gratuitous gesture—the guys would be somewhere else in an hour or so.

  I found the noodle shop in Aranyaprathet that provided all these services. I had my noodles and caught the next van to the border post, a mile or less from the town. I fell into conversation with an American backpacker, a recent college graduate, about the onward journey and Angkor. Somehow the subject of India came up.

  "I heard India sucks," he said.

  At the frontier on this hot day, children and young boys waited with big rubber-wheeled wagons to take the travelers' luggage and boxes, since, as with most national boundaries, the checkpoints were far apart, a town on each side. In this case, the salubrious one of Aranyaprathet was here, and over there was the disorderly gambling-paradise-on-the-rise of Cambodian Poipet, a few new casinos amid the rubble and slums of the scruffy town.

  I walked across carrying my small bag, finding it remarkable how similar this rural border was to others I'd crossed elsewhere in the underdeveloped world: the usual junk-filled creek, the usual touts and hawkers and moneychangers, the pests, the lost souls, the overburdened women with small children, the nervous-looking men.

  Then the line at Thai immigration, a little paperwork, a passport stamp, and out the door and the long walk to Cambodian immigration, more paperwork, another stamp, and a gauntlet of touts and hawkers and moneychangers. The Cambodian side was dustier, poorer, noisier, much more chaotic than the Thai side, and something of a shock.

  It is seldom necessary to look for transportation in such a place. At most borders of this kind the transportation is looking for you—buses needing passengers.

  "Battambang! Siem Reap! Phnom Penh!"

  "Siem Reap," I said.

  I was hustled to a waiting bus, an old one, with weary faces at the windows. I handed over my $5. It was very hot inside.

  The tout said, "No a.c., but we can open the windows."

  When the bus started down the bumpy dirt road I thought, If the road is this bad so near this town, it must get much worse farther on. This proved to be the case. The next 150 miles, from the border to Siem Reap, took six hours. Locals said that in the wet season it could take twelve hours, the unpaved road turned to sludge by big tottering trucks, buses mired behind them, sometimes tumbling over the edge into the storm ditch. Today it was only dust and slowness and one blown-tire episode, near enough to a noodle shop to serve as a pit stop. On a wall of this shop was a poster that I was to see in fifty more places in Cambodia: a photo of an adult holding a child's hand, and in big black letters, Sex with Children Is a Crime.

  Jouncing along the rutted road, looking out at the hard-pressed villages—poorly built huts, littered paths, rice harvesters working in flooded fields, ox carts blocking our way, men on old bikes—I had a vision of northern Malawi, in central Africa: the same bad roads and rusty bikes, the same sunshine, the same weariness. And something else: a creepy feeling that I put down to bad vibes.

  African landscape, I scrawled in my pocket notebook. It's impossible to write on a bus, so that was about all I wrote until nightfall.

  The negative vibrations I felt were not imaginary. They were the effect of the beat-up fields and broken huts, but most of all they were the effect of people's faces, a distinct derangement of features. Often, in a poor country the faces of old men, and especially their eyes, hold a look of terror. It can also be a look of fatigue and resignation, and underlying that, a tortured face, one that has seen horrors. Old women's faces too, but women in such places are stoical and resigned to violence; the men seem weaker and more deeply wounded.

  This feeling wasn't hindsight, though I learned later that a half dozen of the 167 torture prisons and killing centers of the Khmer Rouge regime were located along this route. The book that gave me this and much more helpful information for understanding Cambodia was Philip Short's Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, which I bought and read after I got to Phnom Penh.

  "The landscape ... and the life style [of rural Cambodia] were, and still are, closer to Africa than China," Short wrote in his book. Coincidentally, he had been a newspaper correspondent in Malawi for some years. I had worked in Malawi at about the same time.

  "The resemblance to Africa is overwhelming," he went on. "Every village has its witch, or ap, and its k'ruu, or healer; each rural community its neak ta, the ancestor figure ... who inhabits a stone or ancient tree and must be propitiated by offerings of incense and perfumed water. In the countryside, more murders are attributed to sorcery than to any other single cause."

  As in remote parts of Africa, the carrying of a talisman w
as useful for protection in Cambodia. A so-called passport mask—a small beaded object, a dried monkey's paw, a lion's tooth, or an elephant-hair bracelet—might serve to defy the foul fiend in Africa. In Cambodia, the strongest talisman was a fetus that had been ripped whole from its mother's womb and then killed and mummified. Called a kun krak, a smoke child, this piece of ghoulishness was the most prized of the magic talismans, and had been used by Khmer Rouge soldiers as well as by villagers.

  On this trip I saw the truth of Short's saying that "rural life in much of Cambodia is not essentially different from what it was five centuries ago." So traveling down this road was like banging through Africa, and then night came, and we were banging through the darkness.

  "See those blue lights?" the young Cambodian man next to me asked. He pointed to bluish fluorescent tubes that dangled near the huts in the villages (not many) that had electricity. "Know what they're for?"

  I said I couldn't guess.

  "To catch cockroaches and crickets," he said.

  "Good idea"

  "Then they eat them," he said.

  Sometime after the sequence of blue lights flickering in the jungle, we came to the junction of a good road.

  "This is the road to the airport," the young man said.

  Of course, the only paved road in this whole western province was the one that served the tourists who flew in, almost all of them foreigners; everyone else, the masses, bounced and rumbled on the bad roads, or sat in ox carts, or steered bikes around the potholes. And if I hadn't come this inconvenient but illuminating way, I wouldn't have known that.

  Then—after the solemn and scarred countryside of weary farmers—bright lights, luxury hotels, casinos, girlie bars, strip clubs, fancy restaurants: Siem Reap and ancient Angkor.

  The bus was still rolling. I asked the Cambodian man his name. He said, "Saty."

  "Saty, I'm looking for a nice hotel that's not expensive."

  He said, "I know one."

  I was thinking of Henry T. saying, "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." That was how I happened to find Green Town Guest House, a Chinese-looking villa in a compound behind a fence, with a noodle restaurant in its courtyard, for $10 a night.

  If luxury is, first of all, a high degree of comfort, this counted as luxury. The villa was clean, peaceful, friendly, and well run. It was always easy for me to find a quiet table to write my notes. None of the sort of unhelpful suggestions and obsequious interruptions that, in more expensive hotels, are excuses for tips.

  It took me a day to recover from the overland jaunt from Bangkok. I slept late, wrote notes, got laundry done—two pounds of laundry was one dollar. The temperature was in the nineties, and humid. I went to a barber and got a shave, and sitting there in the peaceful shop on a back street of Siem Reap, I was reminded of the early morning in rainy Trabzon when I'd been shaved by a Turk with a flashing razor—how it had set me up for the road ahead.

  And I walked. Siem Reap was a little town until a few years ago, where people went for the Angkor ruins, which are a few miles to the north. Now it's a sprawling city of a million people, of hideous hotels and expensive restaurants, a honky-tonk plunked down in the jungle.

  No matter where I went here, I had a sense the place was haunted. I was creeped out—maybe an effect of my awareness of Cambodia's violent recent history, though I had not yet read the Pol Pot biography. The ghostliness was present even in the sunniest parts of town, a suggestion of the hideous past, of blood and unburied bodies, of torture, trickery, lies, punishment—like the darkness I had felt rising from the earth when I walked through Dachau, the stink of evil.

  Most Cambodians have a memory of the bad years; perhaps they conveyed this sense of psychic trauma, carried it around with them. The hurt was apparent in their posture, in their voices, in their eyes. Another haunted landscape to suit me in my role of revisiting spook on the ghost train.

  ***

  THIS HOVERING, HEAVY, oppressively haunted air was strongest in the jungle around Siem Reap, among the twisted lianas and dark leaves and sun-speckled shadows. It was like a foul vapor at the huge lake nearby, called Tonle Sap; it was palpable at Angkor, which was a place of both jungle and violated ruins.

  Not just a temple, nor even a collection of them, Angkor is a ruined city. The name Angkor is derived from the Sanskrit word nagar, meaning city. It contains a royal palace, a set of sacred precincts, monasteries, and residences, much of it surrounded by a wide stagnant moat and a perimeter wall. It lies brooding among tall trees, brilliant sculpted towers, and high walls, many of the structures half strangled by vines. It seems as though the temples were built to mimic symmetrical mountains, and their looming aspect, which is an assertive Asiatic Gothic, lends them tremendous power—power magnified by the way they have been eaten away by time, pitted by centuries of bad weather and neglect, their roughened texture like the volcanic rock at the edges of high Pacific islands lashed by waves, hollowing it and sharpening it like coral and giving it archways and great delicacy. In sheltered porches and doorways, and under jutting eaves, masterpieces of Khmer sculpture still stand, garlanded with flowers, with vigil lights and incense sticks. Even with tourists in silly hats scampering on its steep stairways and yelling to each other from cupola to cupola, the ruins epitomize sanctity, harmony, and radiance. At its peak in the early thirteenth century, Angkor covered one hundred square miles.

  Almost as impressive as the monasteries and walls and temple complexes is the jungle—tall trees, miles of shaded paths, and cool groves. The foliage is at one with the stone stupas, seeming to grow out of the holiest places, the roots twining over walls and bas reliefs—thick, rounded, and supple banyan roots like tentacles. The trees are part of Angkor, some destroying it, others helping to secure and keep whole the fragile walls. The narrower paths lead to isolated shrines with images of bulgy elephants and what seems the dominant totem of Angkor, the king cobra, Naga—cobras in the form of balustrades, cobras slithering on roof eaves, or a single rearing cobra with its hood flared to protect the Buddha image.

  Angkor is also a visual catalogue of smiles chiseled in sandstone. The most enigmatic—but serene at first glance, softening almost to mockery, becoming ambiguous—is the smile on the lips of the vast Buddha image at the Bayon Temple in Angkor Thom. Thousands of smiling im ages adorn the walls, from the thin smiles of praying monks to the happy-face smiles of bulb-breasted apsaras—half-naked dancing girls, demonstrating how the dance was part of Angkor ritual.

  The look of the alluring women on the wat was an echo of the coquettish girls selling silks and postcards and soft drinks on the ruined walls, calling out, "Come back—take me with you," "I will be your girlfriend," "Take me!" Just teasing to make the other girls giggle and smile.

  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."