“I was wrong about you. You are not a bastard. That is an insult to bastards. You are . . .”
“Right,” he finished her sentence. “But you didn’t have to say it.”
Pratt, in his Thai police uniform, wearing a blue beret, sat in the back and leaned forward as Calvino opened the door. Calvino climbed into the back and Carole sat in front beside Shaw. He made the introductions and a few seconds later they had cleared the checkpoint, driven out of UNTAC headquarters and headed toward T-3 Prison. The short ride was mostly in silence. The traffic was light. Carole was sullen from the exchange before getting into the Land Cruiser. She lit a cigarette, rolled down the window, and the wind made the tip of the cigarette glow a hot red.
“Are you alright, Miss Summerhill-Jones?” asked Shaw.
She turned her head and looked at him. “I’ve had better days,” she said.
He left it at that. As they came to the prison, Shaw parked the Land Cruiser in front.
“The cloud hanging over T-3 has always been as black as the roof of hell,” said Shaw with a burst of Irish eloquence.
The memory and history were too recent. Unlike Angkor Wat the prison had not disappeared for six hundred years. It seemed like it had always been in the middle of Phnom Penh where the French had constructed this huge colonial cage. Maybe it was easier to forget a temple than a prison; punishment in the hereafter had a certain threat but it never managed to compete with the punishments meted out in this life, thought Calvino.
Shaw explained how the French had introduced the tradition of keeping the Khmer prisoners on a diet of red rice, heads shaved, and awakened at the crack of dawn for prayers. The tradition had survived the colonial period, he said. The prison may have been one of the most enduring relics of the French colonial period. Calvino tried to think of a tradition where people had gone to prison half a century before they had been permitted to go to school but he couldn’t think of any other people. Maybe the nineteenth-century theory was that incarceration better served the French colonial policy than Khmer education. The French had staffed the colonial administration with Vietnamese. The Vietnamese made good bureaucrats. Now the Vietnamese left behind were on the run. Fishermen or whores. The history of T-3 proved Calvino’s law on colonialism—Charity begins at home; and in the colonies it stayed at home. After the French abandoned the country in 1953 the prison fell into the hands of the Khmers.
They sat for a few minutes looking at the prison. One of the lingering horrors of the colonial occupation was captured in the architecture of local prisons—warehouses for natives who were treated like they had always been treated for centuries—as animals. The irony of the post-colonial period was that liberation governments never bothered to pull them down. T-3, the old French prison, had survived through Year Zero. As a prison built by the French to terrorize and brutalize the Khmers, it continued to serve its original purpose.
This past had connected emotionally for Shaw. He said in the Land Cruiser, “You know, the British built T-3s in Ireland. How can you forget or forgive a people who locked you behind high walls because you wanted freedom? But we can’t right all the world’s wrongs, now can we?” he asked.
No one in the Land Cruiser had an answer for a question which was unanswerable by its very nature.
Shaw’s plan had a simple elegance. He had paid visits to T-3 at least once a week—and extra visits on holidays—for the past year, knew all the guards, officers, and the commander. He had deposited one year’s worth of trust and friendship in the bank account, which had been painstakingly earned by conferring many special favors on the officers in charge. Nor had he forgotten the guards. His account had accumulated sufficient goodwill funds for what he had in mind; and he was going to collect on all the small kindnesses of cigarettes and whiskey. His face was familiar; they trusted him, and he made them laugh with simple jokes. No one at T-3 would even think to stop or to question him.
He weighed the advisability of Pratt’s presence. Would Pratt bring another layer of UNTAC respectability? Or would he raise questions, such as is this some kind of an official visit? How would he ask Pratt not to come along?
Pratt had some similar thoughts and spoke first.
“Why don’t I stay with the vehicle? Another uniform might slow down things,” said Pratt.
Calvino looked at Pratt. “Or make them more fearful,” he said.
“They fear authority. I have none in Cambodia.”
He was right, and both Shaw and Calvino knew it. “Besides if something goes wrong, I can call in for back-up.
Not that you will need it, but it might make everyone feel more comfortable.” He nodded at the radio set.
“Good idea,” said Carole.
Respectability and fear were part of the Asian equation in designing an official course of action. But looking at the French-built prison it was clear this process had expressed itself in the Western mind as well.
Shaw’s plan was simple enough—Calvino and Carole were to be passed off as the two civilian UNTAC-accredited correspondents who had come along with Shaw on a routine tour of the city. This was another stop in the rounds they had already made. He had thought on the spur of the moment that they might like to have a look-in, a quick whip-around tour of facilities in Phnom Penh. This was a nasty piece of French colonialism and they, so he would tell the prison official s, would remind the world of the terrible legacy of French colonial days and how this was largely responsible for the current state of Cambodian affairs.
“Sounds too intellectual for prison guards. And what if they don’t buy it?” asked Carole.
Shaw sighed. “If you’re frightened, of course, you shouldn’t go in.”
“I didn’t say I was scared,” she shot back.
“Christ, why is everyone projecting their own fear onto me?”
Shaw glimpsed Calvino and Pratt sitting in the back wearing poker-faced expressions.
“He’s saying it’s up to you,” said Calvino. Carole turned around in her seat.
“You men in Asia use women so often it never occurs to you that women don’t like being used. I don’t see why I should just accept whatever bullshit you want me to accept. It doesn’t mean I’m afraid. It only means I want some idea of what goes down if this goes wrong.”
But it was Pratt who answered this shot across the bow. This came as a surprise to Shaw. Thais avoided confrontation; it was in their blood to turn away from conflict unless cornered. No one could have said what appeared to have been an outburst of rage had cornered anyone. Pratt saw something different in her play for certainty. The weakness of the Western man always plodding for the clear, the definite, the finite answer. In the flight carried aloft with logic and reason, the end result was the cross-winds of confusion, doubt, and second thoughts that came with crossing a threshold of danger and not understanding the sky from the ground, losing all sense of the horizon.
“ ‘. . . let your own discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action,’ ” said Pratt, quoting Hamlet. He sometimes wondered with Shakespeare’s wisdom if he had been a Thai in a prior life.
“The Colonel knows his Shakespeare,” said Shaw.
Of course he knew his Shakespeare, because the blood feuds and feudalism of which Shakespeare wrote were little different from the social and political terrain of Southeast Asia. Factions, warlords, betrayals, divided loyalties, retainers, servants, and the constant backdrop of conflict on the shoulders of everyone stepping onto the stage of the tragedies. Pratt adopted Shakespeare as an Asian playwright as he had adopted Calvino into his own family.
“You can stay. Give me your camera. I will take the pictures,” said Pratt.
“I’ll return your camera. No one here will ever reveal that I took them. Whatever credit will fall to you alone.”
But she had already opened the door and was halfway out. “I do my own work, Colonel. But thanks,” she said, slamming the door.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” said Calvino
, as he climbed out.
“I think she can look after herself,” replied Pratt.
Calvino turned back and smiled at Pratt. “Then maybe she can keep an eye on me.”
Shaw, his long bare legs sticking out of his blue shorts, looked like a boy-scout leader as he passed through the wire gate in the fence. He headed, smiling and with his hand out, straight for the guards milling beside a wooden bench with Honda motorbikes parked on a dirt path. Calvino and Carole followed him inside the compound of T-3. They stood in the no man’s land of overgrown grass, which ran between the outer rim of barbed wire and the inner prison wall.
T-3 was a nineteenth-century fortress, with twenty-foot walls and masonry peeling away to expose red brick like a wound laid bare under torn skin and flesh. Shaw carried plastic PX bags. He dipped inside one and began handing out PX ciga- rettes to the guards like a street priest in a mean neighborhood. The prison guards looked well fed and relaxed. They were on home turf. They called out to Shaw by name. Running up to get their spoils. They greedily took his cigarettes, stuffing them in their pockets. Homeless men in a city park had this kind of jerky reflex action, taking in whatever was handed out because it was there. Only the homeless probably had more creature comforts, thought Calvino. What the T-3 guards did have in spades was power—they had enough political or family connections to get them a uniform, a job, and status. They were someone in a society where almost everyone was a nobody. To be a nobody was to be a victim, to invite aggression, and to never walk down a road without feeling dread. They grinned at Shaw who put his arm around the shoulder of one of the officers who had been standing in the circle of guards.
“These are my friends, Tap,” he said to the Khmer officer, giving his shoulder a friendly squeeze. “They want a little look around. I thought you’d be able to help them out,” he said, handing the officer a bottle of Johnny Walker Red in a brown bag.
Tap, the T-3 duty officer, peered inside the bag and the grin widened into a full smile, displaying a lower jaw of teeth the color of an extinct animal bone. His eyes glistened as his face caught just the right angle of the sun. He had scored more than a month’s salary. This didn’t stop him from taking an official position and looking over Calvino and Carole and checking their UNTAC press cards. He had his official duties to discharge.
“They have letter?” asked Tap, with his crooked-tooth grin.
“Regulation say, must have letter. No letter then a problem.”
Calvino stood with his hands inside his pockets.
“No time to get a letter,” said Shaw. The drill would have been for Calvino and Carole to apply in writing to the Ministry of Justice and ask for permission to visit T-3. This was a waste of time since no one had ever been granted official access.
“Here’s a letter,” said Calvino, folding two twenty-dollar bills into the officer’s hand.
Shaw slapped Tap on the back. He stared long and hard at the money, then at Calvino who was grinning and Carole who was frowning. They looked like a married couple that had been fighting.
“His wife?” asked Tap, pointing at Carole. Shaw nodded.
Carole choked back the desire to scream that never under penalty of death would she ever be married to Vincent Calvino. But the photos were too important so she remained silent. She slipped her hand into Calvino’s and gave it a hard squeeze.
“It’s our honeymoon,” she said. “Isn’t it, darling?” Calvino nodded at the officer.
“She have a baby, we call him Tap,” said Calvino, patting her belly. He watched the blood drain from her face. She looked pale enough to be no threat to anyone.
Tap walked over and stashed his PX haul, and by the time he returned he had bought the story, or even if he hadn’t bought it, had decided the downside risk was small. He gestured to Shaw and nodded to his right. They quickly entered T-3 Prison through an opening in a high cement wall that ran to the other side of the fortress. A moment later they were inside vast private grounds. One corridor off the path led to a quarantine section where shirtless prisoners with caved-in chests spit blood in the dirt.
“TB ward,” said Shaw. “Want to take a picture?”
Carole had her camera out, put one foot inside the TB colony and snapped off a dozen shots.
Off to the right was a large prison garden and several women prisoners in straw hats were bent over the rows of vegetables. A couple of small children hovered nearby, playing, laughing as if they were in a park. Mothers who were thrown into prison arrived with their children. T-3 Prison was a page out of Dickens’s nineteenth-century England. The practical consideration overrode any legal issue. Who else would look after the children other than the mother? Shaw walked a step ahead as he gently guided Tap through the prison grounds, stopping where a group of women prisoners worked on clothes detail—their job was to wash the prison guards’ laundry. Free laundry was another perk of the guard’s job. The women were too shy to speak; they never broke from their soap and buckets of water. Their tired faces glanced at the visitors and then looked away. To stare was to invite trouble later after the visitors left. Their plight was a perfect illustration of the difference between power and powerlessness; being on top and being on the bottom. The women smiled as Carole photographed them. Then Shaw steered them around a corner and they entered an archway. Inside the airless corridor was the stench of men confined in a closed space. They were hidden behind iron doors, large padlocks threaded through bolts hung on the outside. Tiny barred windows looked like they had been bored through the doors as an afterthought.
“Can we have a look inside here?” asked Calvino, pulling his head back from one of the windows.
Tap ordered the guard forward and he unlocked the padlock and led them inside a concrete cellblock—a square bunker with walls rising twelve feet. Darkness obscured most of the cell and the men inside. Shaw pushed the door ajar, letting in a small arch of sunlight. A rat the size of a small rabbit ran across Calvino’s foot and through the room. Silent faces watched in the half-light. Carole immediately switched to flash, stepped forward and started taking pictures.
“God, I can’t believe this,” she said under her breath to Calvino. “No one would ever believe this. Christ.”
“Get photographs of the leg irons,” whispered Shaw.
“They’ve been told they are illegal. Human rights people have taken them away. But they always find new ones to replace the old ones.”
She snapped several more shots.
“Ask your friend about Nuth,” Calvino said to Shaw.
The cellblock smelled of decaying food, urine, smoke, and sweat. The inmates wore blue shorts. In the sweltering heat they were squeezed together like an experiment in cloning gone terribly wrong, some of the men were shackled to the concrete floor in irons. Flash of the camera. Calvino saw the metal rings around the iron bar which ran the length of the cellblock. The condition was not the human condition. This was the condition of hell, a concentration camp. A priest had once told him, “Without evil there would be no need for God.” Inside that cell was evil enough to exclude any concept of God.
Shaw, with Tap at his side, walked down the center of the two rows. The men, obscured in the shadows, squatted, arms folded around their knees, some lifting their heads, others with their heads down. Calvino watched as Carole knelt on one knee. Click. Click.
She felt her knee, raised her hand to her nose.
“I just knelt in something wet and sticky,” she said.
“Keep shooting,” said Calvino. He didn’t want to tell her that it was a large gutted rat. She had stepped on the entrails. Someone had killed the rat, probably for food. He kicked the carcass to the side.
“What was it? Tell me.”
“Someone’s dinner.”
“Rice?”
“It rhymes with rice.”
She opened her camera and slapped in another roll of film. Her flash illuminated for a second the Khmer prisoners—they were mostly teenagers—who, like two opposing teams, faced each other
over a damp concrete drain filled with plastic sandals, leaking buckets of water, and bamboo baskets. On the wall behind each row a wire had been strung to hold a few old towels left to dry. At the far end were two small barred windows. With all those young men what struck Calvino was their disciplined, absolute silence. No one spoke a word or moved. The only sound came from rats running over the chains. He looked at the towels, thinking how nothing would dry in such heavy, rancid air. Anyone who ever wanted a glimpse of an image of hell only need go as far as that room of nearly a hundred men. Their eyes divided them into three groups: the eyes of a man standing on the gallows as the executioner adjusted the rope; the listless eyes of a man exhausted by bouts of fever, dysentery, endless diarrhea; the eyes with the glaze of a three-day-old road kill.
“Anyone named Nuth here?” asked Shaw. Tap translated the question into Khmer.
A voice called out of the darkness.
Nuth wasn’t in this cellblock. He was being held across the corridor in a special holding cell. A large number of the men in T-3, like those in the municipal jail, had not been charged with a crime, they hadn’t seen a judge nor had a trial and had no idea when they might see the light of day again. They were detained without purpose, without reason, and without legal justification.
Great work is being made on the constitution, the spokesman had said at the news briefing. Law and order and a new start, a new era. That was the promise from the committee with responsibility for finding the time for Cambodia after Brother Number One had taken them to Year Zero. Centuries of Brother Number Ones and Cambodia had never advanced much beyond the Year Zero of any of the ruling warlords. The beast had been set loose in Year Zero, thought Calvino, and he had built many an evil den along the way, housing the young, devouring their hearts and souls. He had seen it with his own eyes. He watched Carole jumping up on one section of the block and snapping shots, dropping down into the sewer line, climbing up on the other block. She was a pro. Her camera never stopped moving, looking at the faces, the bodies slimmed down to skin and bone, and knew that what she saw through the lens were the images that came only once or twice to any foreign correspondent.
Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 28