River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Her fumerie, in a residential part of town near the Independence Monument, was used mainly by the French. They were jealously protective of it and resented other westerners smoking there. When it was briefly closed at the outbreak of war by the authorities, one of the women who worked for Madame Chum decided to do away with the friction this resentment had caused and opened her own den. Her name was Chantal.

  The den was called 482 after the side street in which her wooden house on stilts was located. To reach it we pedalled by cyclo through the curfew-stilled streets, past the road checks, past the soldiers lounging at street corners, past the snapping dogs. We pedalled down the centre of the road, afraid that the sentries might shoot us in the darkness. Chantal’s first three clients were Kate Webb, a journalist, Kent Potter, a courageous young British photographer, and myself. Our pictures were pinned to the wall; we were part of her family. Chantal was a beautiful woman, soft, smooth and round like a plum. We adored her.

  Her house was partitioned into four rooms. Naked except for a sarong, we lay on the coconut-matting covering the bare wooden boards and smoked. Sometimes we had female company. Sometimes we had a traditional Cambodian massage. Sometimes we just talked among ourselves, reminiscing and reflecting on the adventures of the day. Often, one of us would launch into an impassioned soliloquy about the war. One recurring theme was who was the greatest war photographer – the late Robert Capa, Larry Burrows or Don McCullin?

  There was a lot of common ground as to why we were in Cambodia. With opium, our inner thoughts took wings. And it turned out that for most of us the enemy was not the deadly carnage in the Cambodian fields but the tedium of life itself; especially the perceived dreariness and conformity we had left behind in the West, to whose taboos and musty restrictions we dreaded having one day to return. During the day we might have experienced terrifying incidents and made life-and-death decisions as to where to go, and how long it was wise to stay on a battlefield. But the war also provided us with a certain freedom, which is why we liked being here. We felt we had broken loose and were accomplices in an escape from the straitjacket of ease and staid habits.

  Lying down and smoking, eyes closed, we were scarcely aware of the outside, even when, through the open window, an occasional flash and boom of artillery reminded us of the battles raging in the countryside. Later on, when the American B52 carpet-bombing came closer to Phnom Penh, we would feel a sullen rolling vibration as though we were on the periphery of a great earthquake. The whole house quivered. Yet, thanks to the soothing balm of the opium, I recall a strange, almost childlike, satisfaction, a feeling of absolute content in the mysterious certainty that we were utterly secure where we lay. Then at some stage, at two or so in the morning, our thoughts drifted away and we sank into an ocean of forgetfulness. Time did not exist in the limbo of the fumerie.

  Graham Greene, in Ways of Escape, said of the four winters he spent in Indo-China, it was opium which ‘left the happiest memory’, and I understand what he means. I took opium many times in Cambodia. It was sweet and left a lingering acrid fragrance on the palate. The ritual was seductive. I remember very well the old man who made us our pipes. He was spare and the skin on his face was wrinkled like crêpe. With a metal spike, he turned a small sizzling ball of sticky opium paste the size of his fingertip over and over in the flame of a little oil-lamp until it was cooked; then he inserted it into the ivory pipe and handed the pipe to me. Little bluish clouds puffed as I drew on it. There were no great visions; just disembodied contentment. It brought tranquillity to the mind and spirit as we lay cocooned in this sanctuary Chantal had created for us in the intimacy of her home.

  All manner of people visited her fumerie – French planters and their Cambodian mistresses, Frenchwomen and their lovers, diplomats, journalists, spies. None stranger, perhaps, than Igor, the resident Tass correspondent. Igor was an important KGB officer in Phnom Penh, a product of the new generation of sophisticated young Soviet spies who graduated from the Moscow spy school. A natty dresser with well-cut suits and wide flowery Italian ties, he spoke Cambodian and French. He cultivated the western press and was a good friend of Jean-Pierre Martini. But no one had ever seen him commit an indiscretion. He was too much of a professional. It became something of a challenge to get Igor drunk or, better still, into the opium parlour. Even when his skin was full of a fearsome concoction of vodka mixed with marijuana, a creation of some American journalists, he remained as solid as a rock. I have seldom found a drink more corrosive. The Americans loved it. And unlike them, Igor could take it.

  On New Year’s Eve 1970, Jean-Pierre and Igor organised a joint party. Jean-Pierre offered the champagne, I offered a tin of caviar saved from a stopover at Tehran airport, and Igor provided the food and vodka. Indicative of his rank and the respect in which he was held by the embassy was that he was given the Soviet ambassador’s personal chef for the evening. There followed a memorable Georgian meal of meat skewered on swords, roasted and flambéed, washed down with much vodka and champagne. Afterwards, Igor drove me back to the studio at Le Royal. I proposed a visit to Chantal’s. To my astonishment and delight, he accepted. Now, I thought, perhaps I can tickle some of those KGB secrets out of him. It was not to be. We each smoked a pipe and passed out on the mat. In the morning when I awoke, Igor had vanished.

  The little street 482 is still there near the old petrol station and the heinous Khmer Rouge concentration camp at Tuol Sleng. Years afterwards, I went back. The house had been torn down and there was no trace of Chantal. Had she somehow survived the Khmer Rouge purges and made it to a refugee camp in Thailand and perhaps on to France? Or did she succumb? She had simply vanished. It was almost as if she had never existed.

  At times, I would drive a little way out of Phnom Penh and sit by the banks of the great river at Koki. Or visit a Cambodian home and sit on the floor sipping bitter unsweetened tea out of tiny porcelain cups. Dawn was the best time. The countryside was cool and fresh, the air less heavy. A smell of woodsmoke hung in the air, and the water was touched by the first rays of sun. It was almost impossible to imagine that these peasants lived so close to insecurity. But their lives, which had not changed very much over the centuries, were changing now.

  The insurgents were often entrenched on the opposite bank of the Mekong. One August day, I sat and watched a Cambodian gunboat shell a Roman Catholic church which the guerrillas were using as a temporary headquarters. A few hours earlier, Spiro Agnew, the soon-to-be-disgraced US Vice-President, had visited the city on a morale-boosting tour. He presented Lon Nol with a baby white elephant, venerated as a sacred symbol of good fortune. In the circumstances, it was an absurd gesture. As the gunboat, anchored in the middle of the flood-swollen river, blasted the church, I watched two men, in khaki, break free of the building and run through the banana grove.

  Who were these mysterious insurgents? Were they the same people as this placid and virtuous old peasant man I was sipping tea with, while the women washed clothes and his children frolicked in the water? I often wondered what motivated them. And then one day I got the chance to find out.

  Kompong Cham, the main Mekong river port upstream from Phnom Penh – where Cambodia’s rubber is loaded for shipment down to the processing factory in the capital – had been the scene of heavy fighting. The Vietnamese communists had captured it early in the war. A South Vietnamese army taskforce, under General Do Cao Tri (later to be killed in a helicopter crash with his passenger, François Sully of Newsweek), recaptured it. When I arrived, a volcanic smoke plume was rising over the university on the city’s edge. The ripped-apart bodies of women and children accidentally caught in a South Vietnamese bombing raid lay scattered in the road, ‘collateral damage’ in the vernacular of the war. Down by the river at the command post, Major Ros Proeung of the Cambodian army asked if I wanted to see the prisoners.

  He pushed open a door to a tiny room which gave off a smell of raw meat like a slaughterhouse. Two wounded men lay on the floor, their hands bound with wir
e behind their backs. Their coarse olive-green uniforms were caked in a mixture of mud and blood. They were terribly mutilated, in agony, whimpering like animals in a trap. Suddenly, aware of a foreign presence, they stirred, opened their eyes and looked at me in the dim light. The look on their faces was one of intense hatred. Their eyes burned with loathing. I turned away, sickened by the spectacle. The Major jabbed their wounds with his stick.

  ‘What will happen to them?’ I asked. The Major did not answer. I offered to take them to hospital. The Major was irritated, angry. ‘Let them die,’ he said in a hard voice. ‘They are Vietnamese. We did not invite them to come to our country.’ And he struck the bodies again and spat on the ground.

  Afterwards, I looked through their papers. There was a diary in spidery writing, a little notebook with a faded photograph of Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam’s late President and revolutionary hero, pressed between the pages. It belonged to Lieutenant Dao An Tuat of the North Vietnamese army, one of a whole generation who had never known a real day of peace. Tuat wrote:

  To live is to give oneself to the fatherland,

  It is to give oneself to the earth, the mountains and to the rivers

  It is to clench one’s teeth in the face of the enemy,

  To live is to keep up one’s courage in times of misery,

  It is to laugh in times of anger,

  To live is to remain optimistic in the struggle,

  It is to crush, it is to break the image of the enemy,

  One must drink passionately of the blood of the enemy.

  True to his words, Lieutenant Tuat died in that stinking hole, clenching his teeth ‘in the face of the enemy’. The Cambodians took him and his companion down to the riverbank, poured petrol over their bodies and lit a match. Thus the Mekong became a funeral river like the Ganges.

  Tuat was one of Uncle Ho’s ‘children’. Four years before, he had answered the famous slogan that ‘nothing is more precious than independence and freedom’, and quit his peasant home in North Vietnam to fight for the ‘liberation’ of South Vietnam. I imagined his long night marches down the Ho Chi Minh trail under the illumination flares, the malaria, the damp-sweats, the terror of the constant bombing. But he never did get his wish to fight the ‘puppet’ soldiers in South Vietnam. The fortunes of war brought him instead to this spot beside the Mekong in Cambodia, a foreign country, where he was cut down and his body burned, a thousand miles from home.

  The Khmer Rouge were still very much an enigma, a mysterious, invisible force. We did not see much sign of them in the early months of the war. The dead on the battlefields were almost entirely Vietnamese communists, either North Vietnamese or Viet Cong. Then, little by little, that began to change as Vietnamese priorities shifted back to the struggle in South Vietnam and they left the fighting in Cambodia to their creation, the Khmer Rouge.

  The bodies in black pyjamas began to be those of dark and swarthy peasant boys from Kompong Thom, Kratie, Stung Treng, all Cambodian provinces which had been captured early in the war and where a ferocious Khmer Rouge recruiting drive and collectivisation programme was underway. What had begun in 1970 as a war of ‘national resistance’ by Lon Nol’s supporters to rid Cambodia of 50,000 NVA and Viet Cong soldiers was developing into a full-blown civil war.

  In Phnom Penh, there was one westerner with unique personal experience of the Khmer Rouge. François Bizot, a man of intransigent sincerity, had come to Cambodia in 1965. He worked with Bernard Groslier, the famous French archaeologist, in the Conservation d’Angkor. Later he became an ethnologist and with extraordinary diligence taught himself to read and write the Cambodian language. His passion was Cambodian Buddhist texts, for which he combed the countryside, riding into distant villages on his BMW motor bike. Bizot was more than a dry academic obsessed with obscure Khmer texts inscribed on palm leaves in ancient Pali script; he was a strong-minded man with an enviable serenity and calm strength. He struggled to understand the mind and feelings of the Cambodian peasant and achieved this better than anyone I know. Ultimately it was an advantage that helped to save his life.

  In 1968 his daughter, Hélène, was born in Srah Srang, a village in the shadow of the Bayon temple near Siem Reap. Her mother was a Cambodian girl, under twenty years old. It was a traditional Khmer birth with the birth fire to ward off spirits and the umbilical cord cut with a bamboo stick heated in the flames. In 1970, with the occupation of the temples by the North Vietnamese army, and stray shells falling on the village, Bizot had to abandon Siem Reap and move his family to Phnom Penh for greater safety. They settled into the wooden house next door to Madame Chum’s fumerie.

  One day in October 1971, Bizot went to Oudong, the former capital of the Cambodian kings, twenty miles north of Phnom Penh. He wanted to talk to some monks about some texts. As usual, he took Hélène with him in the Land Rover, but for the last stretch of the journey he left her with her nanny for safekeeping and walked with a guide through the fields to the village.

  He was suddenly surrounded by Khmer Rouge soldiers. His hands were tied behind his back and he was led off into the forest, blindfolded. At a Khmer Rouge encampment, he was questioned and accused of being a spy. His interrogator was Kang Kek Ieu, alias Comrade Deuch, the notorious commander-in-chief of the Tuol Sleng prison camp after the Khmer Rouge victory. (Bizot is the only westerner to have set eyes on this torturer and survived.) He was kept tied up and was often blindfolded. It was a terrifying experience in every way, but made more unbearable because he did not know what had happened to his little daughter. (Hélène had been taken back to Phnom Penh by her nanny and was in safe hands.)

  In the camp, Bizot befriended a beautiful little girl of about Hélène’s age – nearly four. After a few days, her father, a captive Lon Nol soldier, was marched into the forest by the guards and never seen again. Bizot grew fond of this girl, now doubtless an orphan, for he was haunted by the loss of Hélène and saw his daughter in the child. Sometimes they were able to play together. It was an important relationship which he built up to sustain him and to maintain his equilibrium.

  But the little girl was forced to attend Khmer Rouge indoctrination classes in the camp. Slowly her attitude towards the tied-up Frenchman changed from one of innocent childish affection to one of doubt and mistrust. Bizot’s spirits fell; he could feel her slipping away from him a little more each day. She lost her impish smile, was moody and sullen. Soon the Khmer Rouge possessed complete power over her little mind and she became another child of the revolution, spoon-fed on hate.

  The sad climax came a little later. One evening she entered his hut. As usual he was lying, his feet bound together, on the floor. She bent down and coldly and determinedly tried to insert her tiny finger between his ankle and the rope binding. All the time her eyes never left his torn face. When she found she could insert a finger in the gap, she screamed to a Khmer Rouge guard to come and tighten the ropes for they were too loose. This became a spiteful nightly ritual. Bizot found himself at the mercy of the little girl he had befriended, whom the Khmer Rouge had turned into a demon. It was the end of innocence, of a child’s love, of Cambodian beauty for him. By the time he was released three months later, the girl was well on her way to becoming another young Khmer Rouge revolutionary. And when Bizot told me the story much later, I understood better the unthinking ease with which very young Khmer Rouge soldiers could execute people without mercy and often for no reason. Order them to shoot their mothers and after such indoctrination they would not hesitate, I thought.

  The weeks passed and the Hôtel Le Royal had been renamed Le Phnom, conforming with Cambodia’s new status as a republic. It was just as sociable and homely. Beyond its walls, however, the indolent charm of pre-war Cambodia was fading as the city began filling with refugees. The jasmine-sellers were no longer small girls but mutilated soldiers who sidled out of the darkness, crab-like, on crutches. An irreversible process of destruction of a gracious way of life was underway.

  One night, I found myself abused a
nd physically attacked in a restaurant by a French planter, angry because I had reported that the communists had established bases in the French-owned rubber plantation at Chamcar Andong. ‘Voyou! Perfide Albion!’ he cried, yanking my long hair and accusing me of deliberate distortion of the facts and disloyalty to France. The story was quite without merit and would never have been noticed had it not been reprinted in the Phnom Penh press. But the planter was convinced that American reaction would be a B52 air raid on his plantation, resulting in its obliteration. As if the Americans did not have enough of their own intelligence sources to tell them what was going on. His unprovoked attack was symptomatic of the souring of mood.

  One day, the door of Studio Six opened and a man and a woman walked in. He was alert, tanned, taut, like a French para, as indeed he had been in Algeria. His name was Jacques Tonnerre and he was now a freelance French photographer. His companion was called Jacqueline. Her father was French and her mother Vietnamese and she lived with her mother in a little house in Saigon. She had been Claude Arpin’s girlfriend and she was here on a sad mission, to collect his belongings to return them to his family in France. As she bent to pick up the rucksack and camera bag off the floor, there was an expression of unbearable pain in her eyes.

  We exchanged a few words and I said I was bitterly sorry. Then she was gone, back to Saigon. I watched her leave the studio but, forced suddenly into silence before her sadness and beauty, I never even said au revoir. In that instant, however, I felt a silent complicity and regretted our casual parting. She was suffering dreadfully.

  Soon after this the Cambodian authorities revoked my journalist’s visa. I never found out why, but can only assume that it was because of my story about the communist occupation of the French rubber plantations. I had no choice but to leave the city to which I had begun to form such a strong emotional attachment. There was a possibility that I would be recalled to Paris, bringing a curtain down on my Indo-China adventure before it had really begun, and the following days were an agony of fretting. In the end, my French bosses at AFP came to the rescue. They asked me to get a South Vietnamese visa and become AFP’s envoyé special in Saigon.