That Savage Water (6 page)

Where'd you hear that?

That's what all the guidebooks say. You should pay more attention to what they write in there. They're trying to warn you so you don't get yourself hurt. This is my vacation and I don't want to get rolled up in a lot of shit. Here it's not like Israel, or Canada, wherever. Things can get serious. You can't walk around at night and trust people's manners will keep you safe.

Piat is taking me.

And what do you think he'll do for you if you end up in shit? You think he'll put his ass on the line to keep some tourist from getting killed? Nice guy, sure, but not about to lose his skin over you. Yeah? You smoked this weed before?

You think I shouldn't go?

Go if you want, just don't forget where you are. This stuff is great, smells strong as shit.

Twenty-two, fresh from mandatory army service, tanned with near-black Israeli scruff, a shaved head, shirtless, red jogging shorts. He lights the joint and passes it to me – You've been to Angkor?

Brilliant, yeah, but crowded with touts. Not even a moment to just let it soak in without some kid trying to sell you postcards. Everyone scrambling on top of the temples for the sunset, rich ones on elephants, beggars lined up with all their amputations displayed. You've got to see it but the place is a circus really.

Why you think that?

Siem Reap is like a giant theme park. Five-star hotels, limousines…

I mean, why must I see it?

See Angkor?

Yes, why must I see this thing everyone tells me I must see? Why must I take a photo of something everyone else has the same photo of?

Pause.

Pause because he's right. Because he's twenty-two. Because it all suddenly hits me that memories end up piled and forgotten like postcards anyway, because it's just another form of capture, because I've got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country.

Because it's Angkor – I say – And you don't come to Cambodia and not see Angkor…

Fuck it – Shlomi says.

What do you mean, fuck it?

Fuck having to go to Angkor. Do I really miss out on anything besides what everyone else has already seen?

Cheap Charlie, he's right. I've been conned. Sucker.

The Killing Fields
plays for the third time in the background. Shlomi looks over his shoulder and then lays his head on his arms on the table.

I say – Fuck, that joint did me in too. What's it like in Israel anyway? Ever shoot a man with your gun? – and then stub the roach out in the plastic lid of the water bottle.

A knock on my door grabs at the edges of my sleep. The clock reads six-thirty, the voices of the women murmuring through the walls, already in the kitchen for hours. I open the door and a small girl with dirty feet is standing in the doorway. Fourteen, maybe twelve.

Hey, mister. You let me in? You want feel sex ten minutes cheap price? – her hand shoots up the leg of my boxer shorts.

What? Jesus Christ. No.

From the empty hallway, the first light of dawn already seeps like grey dishwater. She came directly from the street or wanting a few more bucks after the last traveller upstairs or next door.

Come on – she pleads at me softly – Only ten minutes. Why you don't want?

I close the door in her face. Like a stray dog, her biscuit dropped and sagging tail. It's not worth the potential damage. Door to door, so early and barefoot. I wonder where she came from, who she finds next, what her options are and if I've just exhausted them.

Khoi sighs and says – Now Cambodia have many problem. But before, Cambodia have big problem.

He walks to the edge of the wooden deck and looks out over the lake at the distant lights of the Tuol Kork district. The hyacinth continents drift and gather, a Pangaea dispersing and congealing according to tide and surface winds. Boeng Kak, the urban lake and stagnant bladder of Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge?

Khoi half smiles – Why does every tourist like so much the Khmer Rouge? Every day they want to see Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng prison. Sometime I think Khmer Rouge is very good for Cambodia.

Politely, sarcastically, empathetically, I laugh – And the tourists?

They just tourists, you know. They have lots of money, they give our place good business. I work at this guesthouse so I don't mind about tourists. This is my job, you know, to pay for school, to get good money. Then I will travel to America and Portugal, one day even Uganda!

The hyacinth clumps pause in their break from the wooden posts. The water laps as Khoi says – My father die, you know. I live with my mother, my grandmother, two sister, two brother. Khmer Rouge come and look in our house, under the floor. They say we keep too much rice, they say we hide it. My father tell them no, but they keep looking for rice. They can't find it, you know, because we don't have. Then they take my father.

Where'd they take him?

Khoi shrugs – I was a boy. Past is past. Nobody here thinks about Khmer Rouge anymore, just the future. People want good things, and good things come from China. You look at something and if it say ‘Made in China' it's much better than ‘Made in Cambodia.' Look at your iPod. It says ‘Made in China.' Sure!

But people died.

Sure! That's a life, people die! But now I work to save money for school. I meet tourists and if they want to go to cock-fighting or shooting range, I take them. If they want a bus ticket to Siem Reap or Sihanoukville, I buy for them. But for some reason they always ask about Khmer Rouge. I think – My God! We have Angkor Wat in this country! Why not ask about that!

Year Zero. Emptied streets of the capital, laundry on lines strung between deserted apartments. Glorious restart of civilization: The city dwellers marched along the highways out into the countryside, hospital beds poured out, newspapers careening down the abandoned sidewalks with no traffic to stop them like birds with propaganda wings. A forced evacuation, all of Phnom Penh empty as marrowless bone.

A girl knocked on my door this morning.

Shlomi picks up the binoculars and peers out across the lake at the boys in the canoe.

Ten minutes, she said. She had her hand up my shorts and Christ, I had to shove her out. Six-thirty in the morning. For some reason, I thought she was being chased.

That was a dream?

No, very real.

Every day, for hours and hours. What do they do when the rain comes?

Piat's motorcycle growls beneath us and pulls out into the alleyway leading from the guesthouse. I want to get lost in this city with its corners of orange carts, soldier-guarded bank machines, hundreds of parked motorcycles lined up outside the market, patient as cattle. Bicycles, guns, cement buildings with their corners held up by precarious scaffolds, workmen in bare feet ferrying baskets of crushed stone. We weave between trucks and then sit in thick exhaust at stoplights. I study the back of Piat's brown neck, the afternoon heat blazing heavy on my own. From the upper-story apartments, curtains blow like ghosts out towards the farmland.

We turn off the main road into a tidy division of parallel streets, each towering with open-windowed apartments, flowerpots, the smell of fruit peels forgotten in the sun. Snug behind a row of pink flowering shrubs and neat lines of palm trees, a low three-storey school building sits on its manicured lawn: Tuol Sleng prison, S-21 concentration camp, a former high school turned torture headquarters still with its nets of barbed wire guarding the open-air hallways.

What do you want to go there for? – Shlomi's leg dangles from the hammock – Why are people so fascinated by killing? It's the same with the Jews. Everywhere these memorials where people have been murdered. All their names and their pictures. It's like suffering in multiple lifetimes, I don't need to visit a place like that. There's nothing worth remembering about killing. It's not like the movies where the good guy shoots the bad guy. When there's war people die. It's not so clean as you think.

Okay, so stay here. But history happened. Being reminded of our mistakes prevents them from happening again.

Bullshit – he says – Is that what you think? With all our shrines to terrible things, you think we think twice before killing again? Israelis, we should know better! We should let these people heal and stop…whatever…picking the scab.

Wide-nose girl digs her fingernails into my arm as we walk towards the back room along a narrow, dead-end hallway with peeling black doors. Now in different light, I see the roughened texture of her skin, her clusters of acne, her eyes shadowed with dark aureoles – That guy no good! Everyday he try come and stay with me. Sometimes I do with him but now I don't want. Now you stay with me!

Filthy as a psych-ward mattress, this whole business of buying and selling. Hot fluid exchange, drip and stain, rodent viruses that chew canals into immunity linings then burst with swarms of shit-flies. And not even that, not simply the sickness, even if this whole thing was sanitized of danger, still that roar of want – teeth grinding, hold-her-down-until-I-finish, chopper blades thrusting through the sound barrier over enemy territory, smal hand up the leg of my boxer shorts,
want feel sex ten minutes cheap price
. Our law. Their law. The toll it must take and all I'm responsible for.

Inside the room, wide-nose takes her shoes off. Holes litter the toes of her stockings. Gold earrings bounce against her cheeks, her skirt clasp strains beneath her belly – I happy tonight you stay with me. That guy before, no good. What you want, handsome? – she takes off her shirt revealing two Asian breasts rorschached with bruises – Come here, I give you head.

It's okay…don't worry about it.

You no like? You want I call my friend?

No. Don't do that.

You watch me fuck myself?

Jesus Christ, I don't want anything.

What?

I said don't worry about it. Let's just sit and wait here.

The makeup on her face flexes in offence – So stupid. Piece-of-shit Cheap Charlie! Why you come here, you no want something?

I just want to sit. That's what I want.

I think maybe you want boy.

Concrete wall, metal bed frame, her brown body under the fluorescent bulb. This room is a strange underworld cavern I've surfaced in. Not my territory. Shining armour bullshit. Definitely not in the saving business. From behind the walls, the rhythmic creak of a rusted bed shifting positions, smell of wet skunk weed, water hyacinth, diesel fumes. The girl picks at her toenails through the holes in her stockings. After ten minutes, the sound of Cambodian rap translated through plywood.

I come out into the red-lit room again. Piat waits at the bar with the two girls. The lesbians and Cambodian men have disappeared.

You like my honeys? On my life! Tonight I cum so quick!

Take me back to the guesthouse.

How was the prison? – Shlomi says from behind his sunglasses, his shoulders tanned, reclined on a chair pulled out on the wooden deck soaking up the afternoon breeze off the lake.

How you'd expect. Barbed wire still, bloodstains on the floor. Nothing moved or changed. A horrible feeling of ghosts…thousands and thousands.

A girl from the kitchen brings him a plate of fried rice and a coconut milkshake.

I don't know why you wanted to go there – he scoffs – It's like taking your vacation at Auschwitz.

Khoi calls from the bar – Hey! Some guy gave me his iPod. You show me how it works? My iPod is your iPod. My wife, your wife!

The sun disappears behind the storm clouds. Rain patters on the wooden deck. We move the table and chair inside beneath a growl of thunder. Out on the lake the boys paddle to shore as the storm pulls closer. Suspended on heavy clouds, lightning shudders loose from their insides. On the street everyone on motorbikes is draped in plastic raincoats, tails of muddy street water spraying up behind them. Monsoon season. Tropical laundry day.

Bought some weed from Piat this morning. He's surprised me, that guy. Just a kid but sure knows how to make a sale.

The sky is dark now: The air smells fresh and cooler. The rain bullets down onto the tin roof, hard enough to wash stains from prison floors, to release bones caught in the ground still hung with the rags of their clothes.

I'll roll it.

Do you want to come to the girlie bar tonight? It's somewhere over in Tuol Kork district. More entertaining than the prison, I hope. I've never been to a bar like that before, but it's supposed to have some shows you don't forget. Ping-pong balls, birds, razor blades.

Khoi – Hey! Come see my iPod!

That's west of the lake. You aren't supposed to go there – Shlomi says, licking the Rizla closed – No thanks, I'll stay here.

Finally I say good-night to Khoi, passing the chalkboard beside the darkened bar:
Tonight – Killing Fields 7 pm
. Going to my three-dollar room hung with a pink mosquito net sticky with smoke resin, my bathroom still wet from the shower this morning, a smell I recognize from back in the Mekong Delta: swampland, cracked plastic soap dish, toilet roll soggy with condensation, I feel the entire weight of the city's history press down on me. Ghosts like grease marks on painted plywood. Lying in bed beneath the growl of street traffic, there's always that dread of making things worse, having left a more permanent stain. Year Zero. Jesus Christ. What do you want to go there for? This isn't my territory, done wandering through smoldering villages, climbing Angkor with all the tourist hoards, smug and empathetic. Wide-nose women never heard of being saved. What if I had let her in this morning? Just given her a few hundred riel, made sure she wasn't being chased. Tiny hand up the leg of my boxer shorts, piece-of-shit Cheap Charlie,
my God
, how does this all happen? The cost of one bullet, that blood on the prison floor, flared nostrils, Khoi riding the water buffalo through the emerald rice fields as the soldiers search his house and the rain clouds drift over.