Vanished Years

by Rupert Everett

  The Pharmaciens have done a brilliant – and almost impossible – job, infiltrating and educating this secret world, and, according to Emanuel, the girls have more or less got the message. Now they say no to unsafe sex, and infection rates are on the decrease. We are not allowed to film even though we have been promised we can, but I don’t want to. There is a terrible feeling in this place. These kids are sometimes as young as thirteen or fourteen. But this is the crème de la crème of the sex trade. In the poorer parts of town the safe-sex message seems less clear and for a dollar more anything goes. But the Pharmaciens are welcomed as friends here too, by the girls who live and work together (six to a tiny hovel) and also by their fem.pimp boyfriends who lounge together in the shade outside, giving one another facials, if you can believe it!

  There is something really touching about the Khmers. They seem so gentle. Fragile. Trusting. But a visit to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum brings home another facet to these sweet childlike people. Like the river, they can turn. Mercilessly.

  The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, with his agenda of continuous revolution, finally took Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975. Within days the city’s entire population was marched into the countryside at gunpoint. ‘Year Zero’ was declared with a ruthless programme to purge Cambodian society of capitalism, Western culture and religion. Phnom Penh was left empty for three and a half years. Except for the Tuol Sleng Prison – code name S21. The murderers of Tuol Sleng kept an intimate photographic record of each and every one of their victims. Today the walls of this former school are covered with the most moving portraits I have ever seen. Literally, they take your breath away. Terrified little children trying to smile for the camera, their arms shackled tightly behind their backs. Emaciated young men and women smashed to bits but still alive on bloody stretchers. All smiling.

  We walk silently through the museum, past the rooms with their torture beds still in place, the iron shackles still cemented into the floor, the tools of destruction standing by. Hammers, screwdrivers, electric wires, and the rules! The rules are written on the walls:

  6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all.

  7. Do nothing. Sit still, and wait for my orders.

  What has to happen in a country to turn a high school into a concentration camp? The answers are all in a brilliant book I got at the airport by a man called Shawcross. It’s about American policy in Cambodia during the time of the Vietnam War. I cannot put this book down. Reading it feels like walking on one’s own grave.

  On 18 March 1969, President Nixon launched a secret, illegal bombing campaign against Cambodia that was to last for three and a half years at a cost of $7 billion. It was called Operation Menu, and its various targets were named breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. An estimated 600,000 people were killed during this period. Cambodia was tricked by Nixon and Kissinger out of its neutrality and dragged into the Vietnam War. For what? In the end the country was simply abandoned. Not just abandoned, but destroyed. This state of shock and awe gave the Khmer Rouge all the leverage it needed to take over and continue where America had left off. Over the next three years 1.7 million people were starved or killed. Maybe that’s what happens when you bomb the wrong country for the wrong reasons. America’s ill-conceived military action, based on faulty intelligence and wishful thinking, unleashed a reign of terror and turned a whole people against themselves.

  It sounds familiar.

  A video plays every afternoon in Tuol Sleng Prison. It’s of a guy who used to be a guard. He tells how, every evening before nightfall, he would herd twenty or thirty prisoners into a truck. They knew better than to ask where they were going, although they were often told that they were being taken to have extra study. They’d drive to a field outside the ghost city and be made to kneel blindfolded in front of huge pits the soldiers had dug. Then they were bludgeoned, garroted, dumped and buried. ‘Still alive sometimes,’ the guard says genially in the video. He’s talking to one of the seven survivors from the prison. Strangely enough, he’s smiling too.

  Taking the same route to these killing fields in our SUVs, all these years later, as a beautiful creamy Cambodian dusk settles, it’s hard to imagine those terrified people bumping their way in the dark through the empty suburbs towards their final terror. It’s hard to imagine how life picks up and goes on, but it does. The killing field of Choeung Ek is a place where life meets death head-on.

  In a grassy park there is a huge tower filled to the brim with skulls. The glass doors are open so you can reach inside and touch them. There is no guard, no security system. No one minds what you do here, and I can’t stop myself. I pick one up. I’m holding a little skull in my hand. A huge crater has been knocked in the side of it. Further off, near the few excavated graves, the clothes and the bones of the dead can be seen sticking out of the hard earth. But chickens with the longest legs cluck and peck through the crime scene and a gang of boisterous kids run around and scream. This is their playground. One girl has a tiny plastic bow and arrow, which she fires at me, and ludicrously I feign death. They are happy kids. Full of life. The sun sets behind the tower and casts a huge shadow over the park but the kids play on. Ironically, Choeung Ek is a very peaceful place.

  It’s our last night in Phnom Penh and we’re all really sad. We’re going to the park with Emanuel and our new friends from Pharmaciens sans Frontières. It’s Big Wednesday Night for Phnom Penh’s emerging gay culture. There’s a small white bandstand at one end of the park and hundreds of kids listen and watch. There is no cheering here in Cambodia. The audience are as still as statues, drinking in the music. A girl with a mop of short black hair, in black trousers and an untucked white shirt, takes the stage. She begins a warbling, haunting lament to some romantic oriental classic. Her voice echoes through the clapped-out, third-world sound system and drifts across the sea of upturned faces. Boys are perched elegantly on the handlebars of their rickshaws and mopeds. They are beautiful, and they’ve been through so much just to get here tonight. War. Genocide. Famine. And now this. They don’t need weapons of mass destruction here in Cambodia. They have Aids and TB, and poverty is their billowing mushroom cloud. The HIV virus is spreading its message through this crowd tonight, at this very moment, and they don’t even know it.

  A boy in a baseball hat with a beautiful neck looks at me and gestures to the stage. ‘Good?’ he asks.

  ‘Very good,’ I reply.

  He leans his elbow on my shoulder and his eyes sparkle with joy and I nearly burst into tears.

  Suddenly we’re at the airport. Greetings and goodbyes are intense in Asia and I have a lump in my throat through all the bows, the hands joined in prayer and the eyes locked for the last time. We huddle on their side of the international divide, unwilling to tear ourselves away. We’ve been looked after so considerately by the people here. Nothing has been too much trouble for them.

  But eventually we move through the glass partition to the customs booth, bleary-eyed and sleepless. Our Cambodian friends stand together – Emanuel, incongruous, towers over them in the middle: a marvellous, modern-day Knight – and they are waving and laughing as an electric door swings shut and they disappear.

  The paddy fields recede through the clouds into a patchwork quilt stretching into the haze. The fragile huts on their spindly stilts are just little grey smudges now and the gilded tower of a wat sparkles in the morning sun, winking a last goodbye. We’re off to the International Aids Conference in Bangkok to rub shoulders with diplomats, politicians, drug company executives and activists. I’m scheduled to talk about my experiences in Cambodia and about the work of the Global Fund. I get out my notebook to jot down a few thoughts. All I have written down, during the entire trip, in a mad spidery scrawl is, ‘Funny old nun says one two three peace.’

  I can’t deal with it, so I take refuge in the Herald Tribune. In America elections are brewing. There’s a picture of John Kerry in front of a line of Vietnam vets. He is having his war record questioned. It says
he defended America on the Mekong River. I look out of the window, slightly exasperated, and there is the Mekong River, shimmering goodbye as it limps (dammed three times in China) towards the sea, from occupied Tibet.

  I think of Arun’s father who is probably still at large in the USA. A retired soldier with a grown-up family, a grating, overweight wife, and no clue of the tragedy he helped to create. I suppose he too defended America on the Mekong River. I wonder what he’d defend if he was told the story of his son’s life. After all, what would it be like to learn that your child was starved, displaced, forced into labour and driven mad with longing for you all his life, and that he died painfully and alone, staring at the ceiling? You would probably sit down and never get up.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  From Russia Without Love

  There is a low inky sky over St Petersburg today as I arrive with David and Mariangela for this – the end of my charity career. Mariangela has moved from the Global Fund to UNAids and taken me with her, but pretty soon I won’t be worth my keep, since it is now clear, even to her, that my star is dimming and I will not be able to engender the necessary international interest. Actually it is one aspect of my latest fall about which I am slightly relieved. One needs nerves of steel to dip in and out of other people’s sorrow, and anyway I have rarely, if ever, even in my singing and dancing heyday, managed to do anything of any use on the charity circuit. One is a decoy – largely to oneself.

  But for the time being we are driving into Petersburg, talking to our UN man on the ground, a small Swedish gentleman with longish ex-blond hair, a kind face and blue eyes. He outlines the situation on the ground with the cosy bedside manner of a gynaecologist. His sidekick is a wiry American lady in her late thirties with a great figure and luxuriant hair. She is the type of woman you would normally expect to see on the board of a charity in New York. She is expensively and well dressed, and looks as tough as old boots. They remind me of Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers in Hart to Hart.

  ‘Definitely CIA,’ I whisper to David.

  ‘You always say that.’

  We are staying in the Grand Hotel on Nevsky Prospect. It is a far cry from the hotel I stayed in when I first arrived in Russia twenty years ago. Then you could make a phone call only using your credit card in the foyer under the beady lighthouse sweep of the hallway dievotchka. That foyer was dingy and neon-lit, with orange furniture and brown carpet upon which waves of packaged tourists flooded. In and out they came, on a revolving door from grimy buses outside, dragging with them into the dry, hot interior clouds of exhaust and the freezing air. I would sit in that foyer with my dog beside me – on the first days of the long year I spent in Russia – feeling completely isolated, waiting for hours for a call from home. In the quiet of the low tide, between one coachload and another, only a few scruffy salesmen remained, dealers of contraband baby foods and Wonderbras smuggled from the West. They were probably all future oligarchs. We were united briefly in that bubble between worlds by our common aim.

  ‘Telephon,’ the dievotchka’s command would ring out, the beam of her scrutiny spotlighting its recipient, and up one of us would jump to squeeze into the tiny booth – with a dog in my case – and listen to the news, accompanied by crossed lines and strange beeps and clicks, from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

  Now the foyer of the Grand has been garishly restored to its former glory. The gold leaf is blinding and so is the staggering display of wealth that is being paraded before this Disneyland backdrop. Stick-insect women swathed in furs with gigantic superimposed features – almost Neanderthal, from the needle of Dr Sebag in London or Dr Sandrine in Paris – stalk through the foyer, knocking people over with their cheekbones, followed by porters loaded down with every shape and size of bag in the Louis Vuitton catalogue. They are greeted or eyed by the suited eunuchs of oligarchs posing as their masters in dark suits and gold watches, fixing and folding up deals with a new breed of visiting tradesmen, oil and gas people, over tea and muffins. Russia has been stolen by these gangsters and their molls – or actually it has been inherited by the sons and daughters of the old gangsters.

  Outside, the early dusk is falling and I go for a walk. The same palaces are still tumbling down by the sides of the same roads, the yellows and greens of autumn leaves, funny Soviet entrances carved into their classical flanks. They still rise with miraculous elegance above the grime of the treacherous streets, jammed no longer with thousands of belching Ladas, but instead with fleets of Bentleys and Ferraris. The old ladies who used to sit proudly on the corners, selling pickled gherkins, have now been driven wild. New Russia overlooked them and they have lost their Soviet dignity. Progress has reduced them to howling beggars; their careworn faces are riverbeds of tears long dried up. One follows me now over a bridge, screaming, her arms outstretched like a soprano in an opera. I give her some money. She sobs hysterically but no sound comes out.

  The city is on the verge of winter. The water in the canals is black and ready to freeze, perfect conditions for suicide. Splosh and the clock’s ticking. Two minutes till hypothermia. The bridges over the canals are crumbling and, like Venice, Petersburg has a sinking feeling. Sandwiched between the low slate sky and the ground, you feel as if your bones and your spirit could be crushed at any minute. I stand on the bridge and look out over the city. A row of Hummers with flashing lights and sirens ploughs through the traffic in a flotilla of motorbikes. This is how the powerful move in Russia. People run to get out of the way, and cars screech to a halt as the caravan speeds by. When I lived here I fell in love with Russia. Something tells me that on this trip I will learn to loathe it.

  The next morning we drive for an hour outside the city, leaving the smart new highways for the roads I remember from the old days: dangerous torrents full of potholes around which the traffic swerves at breakneck speed, with banks of crusted rubbish and the submerged skeleton of the odd car. The countryside is flat and misty and you can suddenly feel the vastness of Russia. We drive beside a wide river for a few miles and then turn off into a tree-lined avenue towards a cluster of modest buildings on the edge of some woods. Perhaps we are in the stable block of some long-forgotten villa. Through an archway a red-brick asylum, built in the Soviet style, is pale in the mist. The noise of children playing and the shrieks of rooks in the bare trees above remind me of my schooldays and my blood runs cold.

  A man appears through the fog, wearing a white laboratory coat. He introduces himself as Dr Veronin. He is a gentle giant, built in the tradition of Soviet Reality, with a pronounced jaw, extended limbs and large hands. He takes us to his office where we have coffee and he tells us about the children in his care. They are all abandoned, most of them with HIV and some with full-blown Aids. He is joined by a pretty nurse, and we all set off to look around.

  The children have put on a show for us. A sweet lady plays a piano and the kids sing. They sit on little chairs in a circle but one of them is in a bad mood and refuses to take part. He sits with his head in his hands while the others dance and scream around him. We are all enraptured. There is something indescribable in the eyes of these children. They leap trustingly into our arms while we walk around the hospital, chattering, pointing and showing us their beds, while Dr Veronin explains how each one comes to be here. They all adore him and every child has his or her favourite nurse or, in one case, the cleaning lady. These ladies care for them so selflessly that you want to burst into tears. Some of the older children go out in the morning to the local school, but they are often bullied for being HIV positive and have to leave.

  The four-year-old boy sits away from the others in the large playroom, silent and motionless in the blur of activity around him. The other kids scream about, being planes and monsters, but this boy just sits on his stool as though time has stopped. He has a thin worried face with black eyes, tense lips and thinning hair. He could be four or forty. He arrived at the hospital with his younger brother two years ago. Theirs is a familiar story. The elder one inherited th
e HIV virus from his mother, who injected drugs. The younger one, however, did not. Even though he was hardly a couple of years older, the big boy looked after and protected his younger brother and was always by his side. They lived in squalor in a suburb of Petersburg. Their mother rarely fed or washed them – when they were found, they were nearly feral – she spent most of her time gagged out on heroin. The father of the boys died of an overdose, in the flat. She met another man and immediately got pregnant. As soon as she had the new baby, she abandoned the other two. On the street. According to Dr Veronin, when they arrived at the orphanage they communicated in a special language and were happy as long as they were together. But then one day, the mother’s mother, babushka, arrived and took the healthy boy away to live with her, leaving the older brother on his own. That was a year ago. The boy hasn’t spoken since.

  That afternoon we visit the Botkin hospital in the heart of St Petersburg, another rambling Soviet edifice, and a labyrinth of passages and staircases. It is a twenty-minute walk from the entrance, about which a few clapped-out ambulances are cluttered, to the bright airy showroom on the third floor where three smart doctors in crisp white coats stand in the corner with their stethoscopes around their necks, looking busy. The room is white. The floor is white. The large windows are spotlessly clean. One of the doctors is a stocky woman with cruel eyes and grey, wiry hair, swept back like Einstein. She would have been nominated luchshiye rabotnik in the old days – best worker – and she is probably still a KGB grass.