Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  “He’d sit there for hours on that balcony, surveying the whole life of the district. He clearly loved the apartment, and his life with Vora’s family. And when people pointed out to him that he could lose it all at any time, he showed an odd blind spot. Cambodia wouldn’t fall, he’d say; and even if it did, he’d never leave. He’d become like a lover: unable to accept that some final disaster could happen to deprive him of the loved one.

  “The apartment was a statement; a confirmation. He’d furnished it himself, and a good many personal effects had been shipped up the Mekong from Saigon—including a collection of wood carvings, bronzes and paintings, selected with the help of Madame Phan. In his spare hours there, I see him as rather solitary; almost domestic. That’s the last way most people see a war photographer like Langford, of course; but it was true. The place was so incredibly neat. Cage birds out on the balcony; his Vietnamese and Cambodian artifacts arranged to advantage. Even a Burmese cat, called Sary. His papers, his photographs, his customs declarations and work diaries—all organized as though by a neat secretary. Well, Ly Keang changed all that.”

  Harvey looks down at the photograph again, which still lies between us: at the laughing, black-and-white faces of Langford and Volkov; at the solemn face of the young woman.

  “The Battambang Stringer,” he says, and lets out a soft breath of laughter, affectionate and regretful. “She was a one-off. I can understand how Mike felt about her.” He points with his big finger. “Look at that face,” he says. “It’s all there.”

  It’s a shrewd, compelling face, as well as being attractive: strong yet delicate, with a wide, humorous mouth. Her exposed, well-shaped ears create a schoolgirlish touch: I would have thought her a girl of seventeen or eighteen, rather than a young woman of twenty-four. She’s typically Sino-Khmer, I’ll discover; it’s my ignorance of Cambodian characteristics that have made me see her as Indian. Probably the large, expressive eyes—which stare at me directly—do most to create the impression of Indian ancestry, despite their Chinese almond shape. She’s let her eyelids droop a little, and looks up under them with what seems a hint of mockery as well as sadness, leaving white half-moons exposed under the irises. Her long upper lip is drawn down taut. It’s a curious expression: is she actually sad, or just serious?

  “She doesn’t look happy,” I say.

  “Look again,” Harvey says. “There’s a joke behind this picture : Jim told me. Ly Keang was hardly ever serious. Mike always said that she laughed and fooled so much that she wouldn’t be able to stop laughing while this photograph was taken. He made a bet with her that she couldn’t. So this is her attempt at a hang-dog look: but you can still see her fighting back a giggle.”

  He puts down his beer, and stares through the iron grille.

  “She was a friend of Volkov’s at first,” he says. “But only a friend. I think both he and Langford had the idea that through Ly Keang, they could tune in to Cambodia at some special level. And she’d probably have encouraged the notion—like a game. Most things were a game, with the Stringer.”

  2.

  HARVEY DRUMMOND

  For some weeks after I arrived in Phnom Penh, she was just a nickname I kept hearing at the Press Center: the Battambang Stringer.

  It was a title that began as a joke, and that was how I pictured her, at first: as a joker; a tearaway. But that was because I hadn’t yet met her. By February, coverage had become very demanding: the B-52 bombing by the U.S. Seventh Air Force, flying out of Thailand, had begun again on a massive scale, and few of us had much time for social life.

  She was a young local journalist, working on a Cambodian-language paper—but she had a yen to be a foreign correspondent. She came from the Cambodian middle class: her father had been an army officer up in Battambang. I gathered that he’d been killed in action, and that she now lived with relatives in Phnom Penh. She’d finished her education at a good lycée here, and both her French and her English were fluent. She hung about Western correspondents and photographers at the Press Center; I don’t think she spent much time at her paper. The words most used about her among my colleagues were “crazy” and “zany”—but a lot of Cambodian girls had that kind of sense of humor, and I’d eventually find that this didn’t really sum her up.

  For some reason—mainly as a joke, I think—she took it into her head that although she was a print journalist, she wanted to learn to use cameras; even cinecameras. And Volkov was the one who enabled her to do it.

  Until then, she’d just been nicknamed “Battambang.” The crowd at the Press Center had called her this because of her pride in her native province, which is up in the western tip of Cambodia, near the Thai border: the richest region in the country for rice growing. Highway 5, the Rice Road, was now cut so often by the Khmer Rouge that she could rarely visit her mother and her childhood home, and this made her even more nostalgic. She was always saying how beautiful Battambang was, and how much better than Phnom Penh; we used to make fun of her about it. It was only when Volkov decided to take her with him into the field a few times—and on one famous occasion actually sent her out to get film on her own—that the “Stringer” component was added to her nickname.

  This was a fairly extraordinary thing for Volkov to have done. He was risking her life, of course, but he claimed she was always pestering him to let her use a camera, and was very persuasive. CBS had ordered him on a trip to Saigon in a week when Khmer Rouge attacks were happening closer and closer to Phnom Penh; big stories were possible here, and he was going to miss them. So he asked Ly Keang to try and get him film while he was out of town. He didn’t expect her to haul his big sound camera to the front; he showed her how to work the little Bell and Howell. Well, we often hired male Cambodian photographers as stringers, but never women, in those days; so sending Ly Keang out was seen as extraordinary or outrageous, depending on your point of view.

  But she pulled it off. Action broke out on Highway 1, and she rode out in a taxi and got good footage, which CBS used. The Count claimed payment for her as a stringer, and it made her something of a celebrity around the Press Center.

  That was where I first saw her.

  The Phnom Penh Press Center was located in the courtyard of an old French villa off a side street in the middle of town. You can see the villa in Jim’s photograph: it was the Cambodian Government’s Military Information Office, and the Press Center itself was a long shed of woven bamboo featuring a bulletin board for military communiqués. It’s hidden in the picture by those trees. We’d assemble there in the mornings; in the evenings, we’d sometimes go back there to hear Colonel Am Rong give one of his notorious briefings.

  I can’t remember all the jokes that were made about that name. Am Rong’s plump face was always inappropriately smiling; he was an ex-film director for Prince Sihanouk, and spoke in French of battles of the imagination rather than those that had really taken place. His were medieval encounters, like those that had been fought in his films about the kings of ancient Angkor, and in these accounts, the Republic’s army was ever-victorious. With one of the most formidable guerrilla forces in history closing its circle around the capital tighter every month, this would have been funny if it hadn’t been desperate—and if journalists hadn’t been dying because of Am Rong’s confident assertions that the Government held territory it had already lost. The translations of the briefings into English were made by a sensitive-looking young Cambodian with curly hair who we discovered was a noted poet; he had an air of quiet desperation, and his glances told us to believe nothing of what he was being made to say.

  The Press Center sold breakfast, and we sat at rough wooden tables spangled with leaf-shade, over croque monsieur and bacon and eggs and coffee. Now that the Khmer Rouge had rejected the Paris peace overtures, and the B-52 bombing had begun again, a fresh wave from the international press was pouring into Phnom Penh, and many famous names could be seen here at breakfast: heavies from the New York and London dailies and the television networks. Some of these
new arrivals were a little impatient and self-important, and my first sight of Ly Keang is associated with one of them.

  I was sitting with Bill Wall, who suddenly put his coffee down, and jerked his head.

  “There’s the Stringer. God, that gal’s attractive. If the Count wasn’t so interested in her, and I wasn’t married, I’d be trying to cut him out.”

  She’d just come up the drive and was moving among the tables, greeting first one acquaintance and then another. All the journalists she spoke to, male and female, were laughing by the time she moved on. She wore green combat fatigues and jungle boots: she would have looked like a Cambodian female soldier, except that the fatigues were a little too well cut. She was bare-headed, and the long, cascading hair shone blue black in the sun, swinging as she turned her head from side to side, no doubt looking for Volkov. All her movements were quick and energetic.

  Then there was a shout from the driveway. Dmitri had appeared and was urgently gesturing to her: he seemed to be in a hurry to get off, and I guessed that he had a car or taxi waiting, and was taking Ly Keang to the action. She waved and began to move towards him between the tables, still speaking to people she knew. At the last table sat a New York Times correspondent who was fairly new here, and whom I found somewhat pompous: Broinowski, his name was. He had a brown Vandyke beard and the air of a noted intellectual forced to analyze tragedies whose implications could scarcely be comprehended by gross lesser mortals: which meant most of us. He wore a panama hat. Unlike the ruined specimen worn by Hubert Whatley, this panama was new and shining and stylishly slanted, and it attracted the Stringer’s attention. She snatched it from Broinowski’s head and put it on and posed for him, smiling. It looked very good on her.

  He managed a pained smile, looking up at her. We were too far away for me to hear anything, but from the gesture she made, I guessed that Ly Keang was asking him to let her keep the hat. He shook his head and half rose, reaching for it, his face growing uneasy. But Ly Keang also shook her head, turned, and ran down the drive, holding the panama on with one hand.

  Clapping and laughter rose from the tables: people were amused by Broinowski’s evident annoyance. The waiting Volkov also looked amused, and it was evident that Broinowski’s panama was in danger of going to the front.

  The man had no sense of humor. His desire to get his hat back far outweighed his sense of dignity, and he shouted and ran down the drive after the Stringer. Cheers and more laughter greeted this. I imagined Ly Keang would relent, as she looked over her shoulder; but instead she increased her pace. Reaching Volkov, she took his hand and dragged him along with her. They both ran through the gates, and Broinowski disappeared after them. A few minutes later he was seen returning, red in the face and hatless, and was greeted by a round of clapping. I heard later that his hat reappeared the next day in his room at the Royal, unmarked, accompanied by a bunch of flowers.

  That was my first sight of Ly Keang. There could be no doubt that she was different.

  “She makes me go on hoping for Cambodia,” Volkov said. “Even now, with Khmer Rouge all around the city. If there were more like Ly Keang, they would never win. A crazy optimist—and a genuine patriot. This is a remarkable girl, Harvey. Intelligent. Fearless. Full of electricity. And she makes me laugh.”

  We were eating breakfast together in the bistro of the Hotel le Royal. The bistro was a reassuring place, with its fragrances of croissants and coffee and its white-jacketed Chinese waiters. They spoke only French, but were friendly and attentive, creating the illusion for me each morning that I was back in the sixties or earlier; that the war didn’t seriously exist. The bistro opened onto a terrace that overlooked the garden and the swimming pool—whose reclining chairs, tables and umbrellas had once been the undisputed preserve of Phnom Penh’s French community. Now, most of the chairs and the pool had been commandeered by the hordes of invading correspondents, and the few remaining French had retreated to one end, where they pointedly ignored the barbarians.

  I asked Dmitri the obvious question. Was he romantically interested in Ly Keang?

  He looked at me, chewing, his eyes gone blank as metal. “No. That bank account is spent,” he said. His tone warned me against pursuing the subject, and we both went on eating in silence.

  When he’d finished his croissant, he brushed away crumbs with his napkin, picked up his coffee and addressed me again.

  “Anyway, she is too young. And this is a respectable girl, Harvey. You know what Cambodian middle class are like: if a woman sleeps with men before marriage—especially Westerners —she is ruined. It’s the nineteenth century here. She is watched. She lives with aunt and uncle, and is in contact with friends of her father’s high up in Army circles, who seem to take paternal interest in her. Ly Keang is a young woman of spirit, who will do anything—but I would say she is quite possibly virgin.” His stare forbade me to disagree. “First woman I have ever been friends with—not a lover. For me she is simply a comrade; a daughter; a battle companion.”

  “Battle companion? Jesus, brother, be careful with her,” I said.

  He shrugged. “What she wants to do, she does. Try and stop her.”

  He looked out over the pool, where the Nurseryman could be seen swimming on his back, belly curving majestically towards the sky. He followed the Nurseryman’s progress as he spoke.

  “She is always asking me questions about Mike Langford,” he said. “Wants to know about his work, his views, everything. Always looking out for him at the Press Center. Admires him. She sees his pictures as big propaganda influence, to help the world notice what is happening here, and to cause Americans to send back their troops. She is serious about this. Well, she is young idealist.” He looked back at me. “She has already been to visit him, in that shophouse apartment of his. Her interest is professional, I know this-but I am hoping it remains that way. That apartment is goddamn love nest, right? Langford has whole life there he keeps hidden. Ly Keang is special, and Snow never stays with any woman. Don’t want to see her hurt.”

  3.

  A color photograph of Langford sitting on the balcony of his apartment. Taken by someone unknown: Vora, perhaps. The latticework at the end of the balcony and the fronds of a palm tree that reach up here from the street cast a dream-grid of shadows. The calligraphy of eternal Holiday; of old Cambodia.

  Mike is enthroned in an outsize rattan rocking chair the back of which is like a fan: a Manila chair, as they used to be called. Dressed in a loud red shirt and blue cotton trousers, he smiles at something out of sight, his expression sleepy and content.

  The voice on the tapes has altered a little now, as voices do when first youth is gone. It’s deeper, slower, a little less eager; but the chords of expectancy are still there. He’d always be expectant.

  AUDIO DIARY: LANGFORD

  TAPE 42, MARCH 19TH, 1973

  —Ly Keang came here last night, at about seven o‘clock.

  -I was sitting in the rocking chair, just outside the doors that open onto the balcony. Dusk. The Khmer traders were lighting their petrol lamps, across by the railings of the Old Market. Couldn’t see around the high back of the chair, so I didn’t see her come into the room behind me.

  -I knocked but you didn’t hear, she said. Excuse me.

  —That was the first thing I heard: the voice. It’s a voice you wouldn’t mistake: drawling, and perhaps you’d call it flat. But attractive: a special energy underneath.

  —She was standing just inside the doorway to the balcony. I got up and came into the room and we stood facing each other.

  —Dmitri gave me your address. And Lay Vora said I could come up, she said. Your front door was open.

  —It’s usually open, I said.

  —It was half dark in the room, and in this light the irises of her eyes were very black, the whites very white. She was half-smiling, with a little twist to her mouth. She wore a white blouse, and one of those tailored Cambodian sarongs that outline the hips: indigo blue, and held by a heavy silve
r belt. She has beautiful hips: it was hard not to look at them. Instead of telling me why she’d come, she said: I have interrupted your thinking, Mike.

  —No, I wasn’t thinking at all, I told her. Just watching the street traders light their lamps. The police chase them off, but they always come back. They steal aviation fuel for their lamps, and sometimes the lamps explode. They get scars on their faces like napalm burns—but they never learn.

  —She laughed. I thought she might tell me now why she’d come; but she didn’t. She looked out the door at the lights.

  —I like this time of day, she said, when everyone is getting ready for the night. It was once a beautiful city at all times of day—but now it gets sad, with the refugee huts everywhere. I’d like to leave: I get more and more homesick lately.

  —For Battambang? I said. Isn’t that in the Wild West?

  —I was taking the mickey, but she didn’t mind: she smiled. You should go at rice harvest, she said. The plains are gold, and you can see for miles. Everyone is working together, all carrying bundles of rice, even the small children. And always the mountains in the distance. When I was a child my father told me that neak too lived in those mountains: the forest spirits the farmers believe in.

  —I was about to offer her a chair; but now she started to walk about the room, looking at things. Every so often, light glinted on the silver belt. I waited to see what she wanted. It was quiet, and a few cyclo bells and the shouts of kids came up from below in the street. She stopped and turned to me, and said: Don’t you also miss your home?

  —Sometimes I do, I said. Sometimes I miss the coolness, and the peace. But Cambodia’s my home now. I love it here.