by Pico Iyer
1998
HAPPY HOUR IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS
For almost twenty years now, Tuol Sleng has been a notorious memorial to the Khmer Rouge killers who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Bump down a potholed backstreet in the capital of Phnom Penh, and you come upon a former girls’ school bare except for the rusted beds on which Pol Pot’s men interrogated victims, and the U.S. munitions cans they used as toilets. Display cases are littered with the hoes and shovels and iron staves they used to beat people to death; along the walls hundreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed or terrified, recalling the people, often children, and often themselves Khmer Rouge executioners, who were executed here. One large wall is dominated by a map of Cambodia made up entirely of skulls.
Outside, in rough letters, the regulations of the place are written out by hand, in English and Cambodian—“While getting lashes and electrification, you must not cry at all.” Step out into the sun, and cripples swarm around you, crying, “Sir, I have no money to buy rice. Sir?”
The “Museum of Genocidal Crime,” as the road signs call it, has long been one of the principal tourist sights in Phnom Penh, long enough for locals to have stubbed out cigarettes in the eyes of Pol Pot in one photograph. But a little while ago, the currency of the torture center changed when the man who had overseen it for four years, Kang Khek Ieu, generally known as “Duch,” was suddenly discovered, by foreign journalists, in a western village. He was running a crushed-ice stall in the countryside and had certificates of baptism to prove his status as a born-again Christian. The man who oversaw the execution of at least sixteen thousand of his countrymen had papers from American churches testifying to his “personal leadership” and “team-building skills.”
Like many of his Khmer Rouge comrades, Duch, now fiftysix, had been a teacher (educated, as it happens, in U.S. A.I.D. schools); unlike them, he admitted that he had done “very bad things” in his life. More recently, he claimed, he had been working for international relief organizations, helping out in local camps. “He was our best worker,” said a refugee official when told that the man who had tried to protect children from typhoid was the notorious torturer who had once written Kill them all over lists of nine-year-olds.
Such black ironies are still much too common everywhere you turn in this bleeding, often broken country where every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself in a labyrinth of sorts, every path leading to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. In 1998 Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as “the Butcher,” was captured in March, and now (alone among them) awaits trial. For the first time in more than a generation, there are no Cambodians in refugee camps across the border in Thailand, and the Khmer Rouge, held responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during their four years in power alone, are silent.
Yet every prospect of new sunlight in Cambodia brings new shadows, and justice itself seems a rusty chain that will only bloody anyone who tries to touch it. To try the Khmer Rouge chieftains would be, in a sense, to prosecute the whole country: almost everyone around—from the exiled King Sihanouk to the one-eyed prime minister to the man next door—has some connection to the Khmer Rouge killers. And even those who don’t have come to strange accommodations: the local lawyer who agreed to represent Ta Mok lost his own wife and twelve-year-old daughter to his client’s comrades. “So many people killed many people,” says a young Cambodian in the western town of Siem Reap. “Even my uncle, he killed many people. That is how my father was safe. So we say, ‘If you kill Khmer Rouge, you must kill everyone.’ ”
To pursue the old men who committed their worst crimes twenty years ago is to risk setting new furies into motion, the government protests, and to perpetuate the cycle of violence when already forty thousand Cambodians are limbless and more than 50 percent of the country’s children are stunted. Yet to turn over a new page and let bygones be bygones is to leave justice itself as broken and legless as the Buddhas in the National Museum. Almost certainly, the government will try to stage enough of a trial to satisfy the international community, on which it depends for funds, while disrupting as little as possible.
Even the sudden death of Pol Pot left a hollowness in many Cambodian hearts: the man who obliterated the country, its society, and its fields, died, without explanation, just as there was hope of trying him. “I don’t want to think more about Khmer Rouge,” says Keo Lundi, a gaunt, sad-eyed thirty-nine-year-old who shows visitors around the blood-stained floors of Tuol Sleng. “I don’t want to know that Duch dies.” He bangs his hand against a rusted post. “They killed my brother. They pulled down my life. They took my education—everything—to zero. I want peace.”
The prospects for that are better now than they have been for many years: the main war visible in Phnom Penh is between five rival “hand-phone” companies fighting for the loyalties of ubiquitous cell-phone addicts, and a few weeks ago the country was finally admitted to the Southeast Asian economic community, ASEAN. Women who would otherwise be pushed towards prostitution are now employed in huge numbers—135,000 of them in all—in 165 government factories, and tourists, for the first time in thirty years, can fly directly to the great temples of Angkor, bringing money to the country’s empty coffers. Yet the suspicion remains that peace can be acquired only at the expense of justice. To embrace the future, it seems, is to evade the past.
It is a curious thing these days to wander around Phnom Penh, a city of potholes and puddles where most of the elegant French colonial buildings behind gates look like haunted houses taken over by squatters too concerned with their survival tomorrow to worry about upkeep today. Side streets are piled high with rotting garbage, and the small handmade signs above the open sewers say things like SAVING AIDS AND MADMAN VICTIM ASSOCIATION. Policemen crouch on the sidewalks, playing tictac-toe in the cracks of the pavement, and the fanciest hotel in town shuts its gates every night as if to keep the jungle and the darkness at bay.
The potholes extend psychically, too: almost every Cambodian you talk to has huge gaps in his life story, long silences. Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as of orphans, and you still will not find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age. No one knows what their neighbors suffered, or how exactly they survived. To survive today, school-age girls sell themselves for two dollars a visit— ignoring what may be the fastest-rising AIDS infection rate in the world—and children scramble in the dust for foreigners’ coins long after midnight. Their faces, you can’t help but notice, are the same as the ones in the torture center.
Amidst all the dilapidation, there are gaudy, anomalous explosions of affluence—huge, multistory palaces offering KARAOKE MASSAGE in neon letters, and ads in the local paper for Harry Winston jewels. Above the Mekong a grand casino posts notices about what you must do if you have $3,500 in cash, and the minimum bet at many tables is $20. The security guards who frisk you—NO KNIFE OR OFFENSIVE, say the signs, NO MILITARY⁄POLICE UNIFORM UNLESS ON OFFICIAL VISIT— wear yellow smiley buttons.
Much of the money comes, of course, from overseas investors eager to make a killing out of need, and gambling that the economy can only improve. “This is the first time since I came here in 1992 when I can feel truly confident of making a profit,” says a Singaporean businessman, sipping pumpkin soup with gold leaf in it (in a hotel where even the telephone receivers are scented with jasmine). The appetizer alone costs as much as a local judge (generally uneducated) earns in maybe six months.
Along the broad streets—still called Quai Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung and Yugoslavie on many of the maps—there are clusters of Irish pubs and new French cafés, “Little Tokyo�
� restaurants and Filipino drinking-places. Local boys in fezzes sit outside a new Turkish restaurant along the Mekong, and the Royal Palace—almost too fittingly—stands where Lenin Boulevard meets “English Street” (so nicknamed for all the English classes on offer). Outside the latest cybercafé, urchins in wheelchairs swivel around at foreigners, crying, “No have mother!”
For a certain kind of foreigner, there is a half-illicit thrill in living in a place where the officials are running drugs and girls and antique Buddhas when the guerrillas are not. At night, in the Heart of Darkness bar, the talk is all of $200 hit men and whole villages in the business of peddling thirteen-year-old girls. Pizza restaurants are called “Happy” and “Ecstatic” in honor of their ganja toppings, and two of the main sites of entertainment are shooting ranges (public and private) where you can lob hand grenades or fire away with M-16 assault rifles. To rent a twenty-four-room guest house on a lake, with a view of distant temples, costs $425 a month.
“I lived for two years without electricity,” says a South American restaurant owner, sitting at a café while a woman crouches at her feet, giving her toenails their weekly polish. “Only by candle. It cost me two dollars a week.” Wander off the main streets and you are in a maze of little lanes—completely unlit and unpaved—where a former Zen monk runs a guest house and Africans on the run live by teaching English.
In such places Cambodia has the air of a society with no laws where some protective coating, some layer of civilization keeping Darwin’s jungle remote, has been torn away. The local paper reads like it was written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than twelve thousand “ghost soldiers”—nonexistent employees—have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys.
It seems almost apt that half the cars you see have steering wheels on the left and half have them on the right, ensuring bloody accidents every day.
In the midst of all this, the ones who live among ghosts conduct their own private investigations. “My friends think I’m crazy,” says a well-to-do Cambodian who returned here from Canada. “People tell me, ‘Why do you want to look at these things? It’s easier to forget.’ But I want to understand why it happened”—he means the self-extermination of his country— “so it will never happen again.” When Pol Pot died, Keo Lundi, from the Tuol Sleng center, says, “I spent my own money to go to his province, to talk to his brother and sister. I wanted to know what he was like as a child.” What he found was that Pol Pot— born Saloth Sar—was a notably mild-mannered boy, pious and delicate, who “never played with a gun” and often accompanied his mother to the pagoda. His own siblings claim not to have known that it was their courteous brother who was “Brother Number One,” the man who loosed a national madness.
The hope now is that Duch, the last Khmer Rouge leader to leave the city when the country’s longtime enemies, the Vietnamese, took over in January 1979, may shed some light on what happened. But though the government has, for the time being, acceded to the demands of the world, and the U.N., to hold a partly international tribunal of the Khmer Rouge leaders, almost everyone agrees that terms like “justice” and “democracy” are virtual luxuries in a country as desperate as Cambodia, where politics can often look like a Swiss bank account under a false name.
“I don’t want to watch the trials,” a diplomat in a Western embassy says with feeling. “Because everything that has happened in the past year has been staged. So we know already what will happen. They will blame everything on Pol Pot, on others who are gone. Or on the Americans. Or the King. It will be lies.”
On New Year’s Day, as a visitor inspects carvings of demons and gods and mythological battles at the haunted temple of Angkor Wat, suddenly a Cambodian standing nearby clutches a pillar till his knuckles turn white. “Look,” he says, swallowing. “There’s Khieu Samphan!” He points to a trim elderly man in white shirt and slacks, walking with relatively little protection towards his helicopter. “He killed so many,” says the visitor. “He killed my mother, my father,” says the man, who was himself forced out of his home as a boy to work in the fields. Khieu and Nuon Chea are walking through a city they have orphaned, among people whose lives they have destroyed, VIP sight-seers (courtesy of the government) this bright festival day.
“Let us finish the war,” says a twenty-five-year-old local nearby, flush with the promise of a new future. “We are Buddhists: if you do badly, bad will come to you. Let us shake hands.”
Six months later, the debate continues like a tolling bell. On the twenty-third anniversary of Pol Pot’s announcement of national collectivization, a thousand or so people gather at dawn in the killing fields, among 129 mass graves, some of them reserved for women and children, some for 166 corpses found without heads. For years the rite was known as the “Day of Hate.” Now, in more hopeful times, it is called the “Day of Memory.”
1999
DEAD MAN WALKING
The classic travel writer takes us on a quest, even if he doesn’t know exactly what he’s after; with the haunted German wanderer W. G. Sebald, the dominant impression is always that of flight. A flight from the past, and from all that he has suffered there; but also—agonizingly—a flight into the past, since everywhere he goes, whatever he sees, and whomever he meets reflect back to him precisely the world he’s trying to put behind him. There’s no escape. With the classic traveler we generally feel that we’re being taken by the hand and led out into the world; with Sebald (so uneasy he can’t even acknowledge to us that his journeys are a fact, nonfiction), we are always looking back even as we move forward, like cursed figures from an ancient myth.
You get a sense of this predicament—flight not as liberation, but as compulsion—as soon as you pick up the latest of his books to be translated into English. The dust jacket of Vertigo, at least in the British edition, tells you, not very helpfully, that it belongs to the genre of “Fiction/Travel/History.” The table of contents, even in translation, offers two sections, out of four, with Italian titles. The author refuses to give us his first name, in the style that now seems archaic, and his alter-ego narrator will check into a hotel room under a name not his own. Sebald has lived in England for more than thirty years—teaching literature, no less—and yet he chooses to write still in his native German.
Clearly, you gather, his sense of identity is slippery and his theme, at some level, is all the things he cannot speak about (he was born, the book’s cover tells you, in Germany, in 1944). And as soon as you open the cover and fall into his restless nightmare of a journey, you find you are moving with no hope of orientation or forward motion. There is no sense of home around you in his world, no sense of family, or community, no sense, even, of a settled reality. By page 4 you are being introduced to weird drawings of “horses that plunged off the track in a frenzy of fear” during Napoleon’s Italian campaign in 1800; by page 5 you are moving into a “light that is already fading.” The thrust of the opening section is that nothing is what it seems: most of what the “perennial traveler” Stendhal remembered about the Napoleonic campaign he accompanied never happened.
Then the curtain rises on the second section of the book, and the never-changing Sebald narrator, the author’s double in a sense, comes out from the wings and takes us into the voice, the theme—the world—that are fast coming to seem Sebaldian: “In October 1980 I traveled from England, where I had been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county that was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.”
Though Vertigo is the third of Sebald’s books to be translated into English, it is the first of them to have been written, and so lays out the foundations for what increasingly seems to be one long, lifetime’s work that could be called À la Fuite de Temps Perdu. In all these works,
a narrator, in all ways indistinguishable from the author, takes off on long, unsettled wanderings, in pursuit of some riddle that will not leave him alone. He mixes up his travels with portraits of other enigmatic wanderers and misfits, and the text is broken up at regular, irregular intervals with cryptic photographs, copies of receipts from trains or restaurants, maps taken from old books. Uncaptioned, and bearing only the most oblique relation to the text around them, the scraps serve only to intensify the sense of placelessness and silence.
There are few other beings in this desolate, black-and-white world, and those we meet are as disconnected as the narrator: solitary eccentrics lost in their own obsessions, sad outcasts set aside as mad. We see coffins, hear tolling bells, pass down streets that always seem deserted. The long sunless paragraphs, often going on for three pages or more, come to us in an English so antique that it seems a foreign tongue: words like “contagion” and “perdition” recur, we are introduced to “boatmen” and “watchmen.” Our first impression may be of Nabokov lost inside a haunted house.