The Road of Lost Innocence (5 page)

I felt like garbage, like I was nothing. I was also frightened of my husband finding out. In Cambodia a woman must not have sex with another man, and if it happens, many believe she should kill herself.

I tried. I swallowed a lot of Russian sleeping drops from the clinic. The next day I woke up stunned and bleary. When I went back to work a day later the chief nurse told me off.

Grandfather appeared again, from Thlok Chhrov. He needed money. And he had a letter for me—a letter! Phanna was to be married and she asked me to come, to be her bridesmaid. After Grandfather left, I got permission from the clinic to go. I paid a man to take me there on the back of his bicycle. I arrived the night before the wedding, and when I got to the house Phanna was getting ready.

I asked her, “Who is your husband?” She didn’t know. She waved her hand at a clump of young men outside the house, watching the preparations. “Maybe one of them,” she said. I asked her, “And are you glad?”

There was going to be a priest, several dresses to change into, makeup, cakes, a ceremony, but she looked at me emptily. I was fifteen, so Phanna must have been around seventeen by then. I thought she was very lucky to have been allowed to wait so long, though I knew some of the other villagers called my father’s household the house of the old virgins.

Father was a teacher, an intellectual, and Mother was educated too. They had not forced Phanna to marry. Mother came and asked her, “Do you want to marry?” and Phanna answered, “As you wish,” because that is what good girls do. That seemed normal to her, and it did to me as well.

She didn’t ask me about sex, and I didn’t tell her. Such things are never said. But I heard Mother say, “On the first night, you sleep facing your husband. If you turn your back on him that means you’ll divorce. And you let him do what he wants.” I realized that this always happened in marriage—that this was what marriage was about.

Grandfather wasn’t in the village, and it was decided that I would stay at Father’s house that night. Phanna had made me a dress. I was so proud at the wedding to be introduced as Phanna’s sister; the husband’s family just assumed that meant that this was my real father and mother, my real family. The husband was a boy of about eighteen, from a nearby village. He had been hiding in Thlok Chhrov from the government soldiers who had recently been coming around to conscript all the boys.

After the wedding, I returned to Chup. My husband returned, then shortly thereafter he left to fight again, this time much farther away. The fighting was becoming intense along the Cambodian border with Thailand. The Khmer Rouge forces were growing. They were now an organized army, based in Thailand. At the end of every year, the Vietnamese forces that occupied Cambodia would go on the offensive and destroy the guerrilla bases there, but after the dry season, as the rains resumed, the Khmer Rouge would move back into the country. Now the government was building a huge wall of land mines and mantraps along the border, to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming across.

My husband left with his contingent for the border. The weeks went by; he didn’t come back.

A month or so after he left, Grandfather turned up once more. The first time I gave him money, and he went away. The second time I had no money to give him, and he beat me. It had been a long time since he’d done that. Then he told me, “Prepare your bag. We’re going to visit an aunty, in the city.”

.4.

Aunty Nop

“The city” meant going to the capital of Cambodia. In those days Phnom Penh was nothing like the prosperous and wild city it is today. There was hardly any electricity. There were fewer vagrants in the streets. The buildings were wrecked and crumbling, the windows had no glass in them, and the roads were a jumble of stones, mud, and garbage. A decade after the Khmer Rouge had emptied the cities and sent all their inhabitants to work camps, the roads and basic utilities were still not repaired.

But I was bewildered by all the noise—by all the streets and the buildings. I had never been anywhere so wealthy and so crowded. The country was still Communist, but there were already nightclubs with local music, bars, and huge crowds of people.

There were giant, cacophonous markets selling everything from cooking pots to car parts, with massive displays of food—fruit and vegetables that I couldn’t even recognize, and what seemed like acres of fish. There were crowds of motorcycles too—more motorcycles than I had ever imagined could exist—and black Russian bicycles, shiny and new.

Even girls rode bicycles here. Some people looked like they were living in heaven. But I didn’t think that Grandfather was taking me to the city for any good reason. I knew nothing good could come from that man.

We arrived that first evening around dusk. Aunty Nop lived in a small, dirty apartment in the narrow old streets around the Central Market. We walked upstairs in the dark to the second floor, because there was no electricity in the building. She eyed me sharply through the half-opened door.

Aunty Nop was about thirty-five, I suppose. She was a Muslim Cham, like Grandfather, but she wore Western clothes and had her hair styled in waves. She had a fat face and wore too much makeup, with smears of paint and eyebrows that she penciled high up on her forehead. I thought she looked hideous, like a demon or some kind of evil spirit. Her face was expressionless—I never saw her smile.

While she and Grandfather talked, I was told to wash. I went into a pitch-dark bathroom. In the daylight that place was filthy, and at night it was so small you felt it had become your coffin. I had to wash myself there often, in that little room.

That first night, Grandfather and Aunty Nop looked at me and talked some more. They sent me to the bedroom, where there was another girl a little older than I was—perhaps seventeen or eighteen. She had almond eyes, like a Chinese, but dark skin. She didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

I saw Aunty Nop give Grandfather money. He turned to me and said, “Do what Aunty tells you. I’ll be back.” Then he left.

Aunty Nop lived with another woman her age and the woman’s daughter, who was the girl on the bed. Her name was Mom. After Grandfather left, the women told me to sit still while Mom put makeup on me. Then they gave me a dress and shoes and said we were all going out.

When we left the apartment, it was already dark, and I stumbled over the debris in the street. They took me to a long, filthy, pitch-black corridor between two street-front shops. It led back into a dark courtyard and a warren of other alleyways. We went into a doorway and up a derelict flight of stairs. There were no railings left on the stairway—I suppose somebody had stolen them.

On the first floor, there was a kind of apartment. There weren’t any walls or floors to divide this place from the stairwell—it was just a bare concrete floor, and you saw the beds and the blackened cooking fire as you walked up. There were many beds—rotting pallets made of woven grass. The place was filthy.

The woman in charge of this place was Aunty Peuve. She was a small woman, rather plump—plump for those days, anyway—with a mole on her lower lip and her hair in a bun.

I am writing about this place now because I never want to have to talk about it again. I never want to have to remember this again. It makes me vomit.

A man arrived, and I watched as he talked to Aunty Peuve. She signaled to Mom, and before she got up, Mom said, “You’d better know what this is. It’s a brothel. Do what they say or they’ll hit you.” Then she left. Another man came in, and Aunty Peuve told him, “She is a new chicken, fresh from the country.”

In the corner, nearest the wall, there was a bed walled off with a partition of sarongs. The man went in there. Aunty Peuve came to get me and when I said no, she hit me on the head. She said, “Yes or no, you will do it.”

Her husband, Li, wasn’t there at the time, but guards were there.

I went into the room, feeling frightened, as if I had been locked in a place with a hungry wild animal. The man was tall, he wore a shirt, he was in his thirties—maybe he was a policeman, or perhaps he worked in an office. He said, “Take off your clothes, don’t fight me, I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

I was from the country—in Thlok Chhrov nobody ever took off all their clothes at once. We bathed wearing clothes and changed clothes under a sarong. I couldn’t do a thing like that, not in front of a stranger. I fought him, and he raped me. But it wasn’t easy, because I resisted.

So he did it again, to teach me another lesson. I was bleeding from the nose and mouth when he’d finished and felt dirty—blood and sperm were everywhere. It was morning, and when he left he said, “I’ll see you tonight.”

We went back to Aunty Nop’s apartment, where I washed and slept. I felt a black, dark anger at Grandfather and at what he had done to me. In the evening it was time to put on makeup and leave again. When we got to Aunty Peuve’s, she said, “Don’t do that again. I gave you to that man because he is so kind, and I knew he wouldn’t hurt you as some of the others would have done.”

I remember that the next man was Aunty Peuve’s husband, Li. He was fat and strong, and when I refused him, he hit me with his belt buckle. As a soldier, his foot had been blown off, so he walked with a crutch, and he had a beard. He smashed the crutch on me and raped me that night, and afterward so did his two guards. There was a Khmer guard with a puffy face like an alcoholic, and a hard-faced Chinese whose body was horrible, thin and coiled with muscles.

Cambodians are violent—they can beat you to death. Don’t give any credence to those myths about the gentle Khmer smile. Men in Cambodia can seem gentle, but when they’re angry they can kill you with their bare fists.

Afterward they took me down to the cellar. They kept animals there, snakes and scorpions. They weren’t meant to kill us—they kept them to frighten us. It was a small room, totally dark, and it stank of sewage. They tied me up and before they left, they dumped the snakes on me.

That was the punishment room. I was often taken there, because I was difficult. The clients used to say I was ugly, or that I looked angrily at them—they often complained about me. The other girls said people had died there and they were terrified just to be taken down the stairs, because of the spirits. But I wasn’t frightened of ghosts. The dead don’t scare me. I cried, but it was because I had no parents, because I was helpless, because I had been raped and beaten, and because I was hungry and exhausted. I cried from emotion, not from pain. I cried from frustration, because I couldn’t kill them. Grandfather, the guards—even my parents, who had left me to this. I missed having my real mother to love me and hated her for not being there. There was no love in my life.

I don’t know when they let me out—a long time later—but I was there perhaps the entire next day. By the time Mom walked me out, my legs felt as though they weren’t working properly. Aunty Nop was so angry with me she said, “I’m not feeding you,” but I didn’t want to eat anyway. It was Mom’s mother who stopped Aunty Nop from beating me, because I’d had enough, she said. It was true, I could see double. She made me clean all day, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep because I hadn’t earned any money. Mom took pity on me and dabbed peroxide on my wounds. She knew what it was like.

After that I accepted the clients. There wasn’t any choice.

During the day we lived at Aunty Nop’s apartment. Later a third girl arrived. Aunty Nop specialized in new arrivals, girls straight from the countryside. She had the connections. But she rented rooms out to respectable people and she didn’t want clients in her apartment, so at night Aunty Nop took us to Aunty Peuve’s brothel.

It was Aunty Nop who owned us, but Aunty Peuve handled all the business. I suppose Aunty Nop gave her a cut. Aunty Nop and Aunty Peuve were
meebons,
women whose business is dealing in prostitutes. They looked after us, they fed us, they dressed us—though that was usually an expense we had to repay—and they lived with us. At night they rented us out.

Some prostitutes are sold to the
meebon
by their parents or relatives, or by their husbands. The price depends on their freshness and beauty, as well as the cleverness and connections of the seller. Today some girls are kidnapped into prostitution, but I don’t think that used to happen so much when I was young. Most of the girls at Aunty Peuve’s house were there as a kind of downpayment, to pay back a debt. They were supposed to work until they paid back the money their families owed—unless the families took out new debts that extended their daughters’ servitude.

Nobody wants you back after you’ve worked in a brothel. The word for prostitute in Cambodia is
srey kouc,
“broken woman”—broken in a way that cannot be mended. You are forever ruined and your existence shames the family. Nobody wants people to know they have a prostitute in their family.

The clients were horrible. To them we were meat. They would say, “I paid a fortune, and you’re not even pretty,” and
smack,
hit you against the wall. Some of them liked hurting us and did it for sport. They were dirty. They stank. In my memory, their dirtiness is the most repugnant thing. That and the smell.

The soldiers and former soldiers were the most violent. They had a special kind of anger and ferocity. You felt it was uncontrollable, and they might kill you at any time. I remember one man who had been a soldier with Li and whose legs had both been blown off to two short stumps. He was sick in the head. I still have nightmares about him.

I tried never to look a client in the eye. I didn’t pretend to like them. I closed my eyes and I often cried, though this never bothered anyone. Clients were policemen, shopkeepers, soldiers, construction workers. Young and old. Sometimes they were truck drivers or long-distance taxi drivers who rented beds on the sidewalks along the Central Market. They were just beds, wooden platforms with mosquito nets, which people brought out onto the sidewalks at night—you could rent one for about twenty-five U.S. cents. Being with a client on one of those beds was humiliating in another way.

It was common for a man, most often a Chinese man, to hire one of us and take us to a room where there were ten or twenty men. When the same people came back, we still had to go, even if we knew what was waiting for us. If we didn’t go, we were punished.

We wore thick white makeup, like geishas—a kind of paste we made of white face powder from Thailand mixed into coconut oil. It made our skin whiter, which was what the clients wanted, and it hid the bruises.

The worst thing was how dirty I felt all the time. Aunty Peuve’s brothel was filthy, the streets were filthy, the beds were filthy. I felt I stank of sperm. I hate that smell. Sometimes, even now, I’m invaded by the stench of it, usually after I’ve been talking to a girl about her experiences as a prostitute. Never during—she needs me to be controlled, to listen to her. But afterward, I’m overwhelmed, I feel sick, I feel I stink—it’s as if I will never be clean. I keep a cupboard full of perfumed creams, but nothing takes the smell away.

I was always trying to get clean at the brothel. I’d learned in Chup to boil tamarind leaves in water, with salt, and wash wounds with it. I did that as often as I could. The other girls didn’t seem to bother so much about cleanliness. We didn’t talk much, either. When you’re in a brothel, there’s only one reality, which is the clients, and nobody wants to talk about that. And Aunty Nop and Aunty Peuve didn’t like us talking among ourselves.