Phnom Penh

Take a deep breath. Warm, humid, sticky air. You’re here.

From the bird eye’s view the Mekong River encompassing the city looks like legs of an old woman, crooked and spread wide, not caring anymore who is raping her. Cocoa-brown water is spilled just everywhere. Little patches of greenery here and there, but Water is really the major element here. Not Sun, frying the black sweating heads of peddlers, pushing slowly their food carts. Not Earth, disfigured by thousands of explosions of old landmines. Not wind, sweeping dust and exhaust fumes into your face. It is the omnipresent Water that makes a difference here.

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 For a few months the level of the Water will be so high that it will push the stream up north the Tonle Sap Lake. It will make fish from the ocean travel with the stream. Fishermen will spend days hunched over their longboats, pulling out catches from the lake. They will dry, bake, fry or cook the fish. They will mash it in the mortar to make the pone. They will mix it with salt and rice bran to prepare pla raa, leave it for a few months in a big jar covered with a wooden lid to be fermented and later they will stuff the mixture into bamboo pipes. They will then sell it at Psar Thei, Phnom Penh’s Central market to gain a few riels. Maybe a dollar or two, from an adventurous Barang.

Then will come months of dry season.

 The Mekong’s waters will plummet and the stream from Tonle Sap Lake will push the waters in the opposite direction, southwards, into the city of Phnom Penh, down the Mekong delta and into the South China Sea. Fish will again swim further into the Ocean.

A cold Coke at the airport. I’m sitting on a bench, already exhausted after the night of no sleep. Too excited to sleep, too early to wake up. A policeman looks at me, as if wondering whether to start a conversation by asking me if I need help, if my papers are in order, or simply what country I come from.


What should I say? Should I say Prague? And right after explain I am not Czech, so they would know I don’t feel Czech, I never did, and, what’s more, I never wanted to feel like Czech. Or should I say Slovakia, and expect a sigh, ahaaa with is particular melody, meaning they have no idea and so I would talk about my region, my village, from which I might be the first ever visitor in Phnom Penh. Maybe first ever in Cambodia.
 

 Then, finishing my Coke, I try to ignore the look of a tuk-tuk driver, who wants to offer me a ride. I don’t want a tuk-tuk. I want a real touch of the Phnom Penh air on my body… I walk a bit further from the parking lot and I see a man, waving at me, smiling and approaching very carefully, one step at a time. He just says a moto, lady? With this unmistakable Khmer accent I come to recognise a few days later…

I board his Honda, not sure, if I should hold on to him, or keep my minimum distance, balancing from side to side. Riding through dusty and chaotic streets of Phnom Penh, the Russian boulevard (a colonial heritage) to the Psar Thmei, my peroxide blond hair floats behind in the air, for I forgot to tie it in the hair band. I see them looking at me. I want them look at me. I want to be noticed. And then, I want to be noticed as someone, who doesn’t want to be noticed. Someone who wants to show she is one of them. And then, not. I am amazed at the driver’s dexterity in navigating in this maze of moving vehicles and carriages. Everything is moving on two wheels. Two, three, four people sitting or standing close to each other on an old Honda. Father, mother, two kids and an infant in mother’s arms, the whole family travelling on a single vehicle. Or a farmer and his wife separated by a bag of potatoes, rice, half-dead chicken (their lifeless heads flapping one against each other), a baby with a kroma wrapped around its head… Large boxes with post, furniture, fruit… I am amazed how much a single motorbike can handle. And how much lives of whole families depend on a motorbike, that, when used frequently and for a longer period of time, tends to break all the time.

 

A favourite hobby in Gerlachov would be to ride an old Java that would make incredible noise and leave coughing stench. Boys would gather around, take turns in riding the half-kilometre street back and forth, scarring off chickens, dogs and grannies. And when the motorbike broke down, they would sit around it like family at a hospital bed, each holding a tool, repairing it together, everyone offering some good advice, everyone getting their fingers black and oily from the lubricant. They would then wipe their hands into their old jeans that would never wash, no matter how many times and how hard mothers would try to clean it, using all kinds of proven methods and detergents and bleaches. And when finally the engine would start, they would all jump up and down, hollering happily YEAH! with their mutating voices. Then they would ride the bike even faster, vexing their fathers to the extreme. Finally a father would come out from a yard and confiscate the motorbike, usually before an accident could happen.

 I hand two dollars to the driver. I ask if we are really at “Psar Thmei” and he looks dazzled for a while. Then raises his eyebrows in comprehension, nods energetically and says “Pchaar tmee”. Keeps nodding and smiling. The Khmer smile. I would see it often. Everywhere. Smile that is so different from commercial enthusiastic smile of American teachers, who would shout and laugh loudly. The Khmer smile is silent and humble, a sign of friendship, a sign of hope. It is however not a smile of happiness. It is a search for Buddhist nirvana, the smile you see at Bayon temple in the ruins of the Angkor Thon city. It is a smile that remains after decades of hardship, civil war, Pol Pot’s regime, family members turning against each other and then decades of waiting. Silent waiting for the brighter future to come.

 Psar Thmei looks like the Tower of Babylon. And it really is one. People swarm around with their food carts and bags, around the stalls which sell anything from used tyres to fried grasshoppers. On the makeshift wooden counters, Khmer women sit in the squat position. It has occurred as a habit out of necessity in Cambodia: during the rainy season there are so few dry places you can sit on, so few spots clean of omnipresent bugs and litter, that Khmers developed their own way of resting. Squatting is not comfortable for Westerners; we are not used working in the rice paddies or walking or cycling miles and miles though the marshes. You need strong thighs, patience, but, most of all, the lack of shame to permanently rest in the defecation position.

This street… you would almost believe that the advertised ten percent growth was true.

 Preah Norodom is a large French-style boulevard fenced from both sides by the most important institutions of Cambodia, Ministry of the Interior, of Agriculture, Pannasastra University of Cambodia and embassies of some richer (or more corrupted) countries such as Japan, Thailand, and Myanmar.

Only a dead rat brings you back to the reality. It lies there in the middle of the boulevard, just a few meters from the richly decorated colonial mansion, housing Price Waterhouse Coopers. A big fat dead rat.



On the way to the Killing Fields the rain beats against the flaps of the tuk-tuk… The street of shabby houses is flooded with water, and mud streaks in all directions. I feel sorry for the driver, sheltered only by a helmet, wiping the sweat from his forehead regularly. But there is nowhere to stop.

 It rains when we arrive at the Monument built for the victims of the genocide that took place more than thirty years ago. A tall glass pagoda-shaped building, housing thousands of human skulls, sorted according to their sex and age. Skulls of the children send cold shivers down my spine… In the yard as I weave around the holes, dug in the marsh field, off and on I stumble upon a piece of old cloth, scattered probably by water from mass graves… There is a tree, with huge roots that sprout and wreathe around it like tentacles of an octopus. They call it a killing tree. Red Khmers used to beat their victims to death against it, smash babies against the bark… And the blood sunk into palm trees and so the milk in their coconut fruits has turned pink…

Then suddenly the rain stops, and as if by a magic wand. The grim grey area is transformed into a colourful peaceful garden. From a distance the pagoda looks like any other Buddhist temple.

There is, however, something horrid and scary about the chicken that scour about the garden, cackling on the top of their voices. It is as if they didn’t respect the rule of silence. Chicken never do. Chicken have this cruel habit of going happily on when people have thousand reasons to be unhappy and silent.



There were chickens cackling in the school garden of the Chao Ponhea Yat High School which Pol Pot’s men turned into an ill-famous Security prison no. 21. They now call it Tuol Sleng, the Hill of the Poisonous Trees. Nobody knew about these torture chambers. Nobody except for the seventeen thousand men, women and children imprisoned here. Out of seventeen thousand, only six survived, two of them still living. They survived because they had special skills the Angkar needed. One could use a camera and he took pictures of the prisoners. Another could weld the iron and he closed shackles of the victims. The third man was a doctor and treated the patients, so that they would not die, not here, so that they would survive before they were transported elsewhere. Victims were not meant to be killed here. They were sent to the Killing fields. And when Youns, the Vietnamese army invaded Phnom Penh, they didn’t at first discover these horrible scenes. Only when the stench from the corpses started to give way and people began wondering, did they discover IT. Chicken cackling around the place, eating bugs and flies from half-rotten bodies.

At midnight in my guesthouse I’m reading First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, a girl that survived and escaped the Khmer Rouge regime. And I can’t sleep because I hear the thumps upstairs, and I don’t feel like wondering about the origin of that sound. But exhausted after all-day walking and observing the city I am too tired to venture out anyway… The soles of my feet burn from miles I walked during the day. I apply wet towel to my soles which gives them some relief… and my head still swirls and cannot get any rest …then I drink two Angkor beers before the sounds fade out and I slowly fall asleep… but still in my mind I am thinking about hundreds of thousands of Khmers smashed against the wall of the Angkar, supreme authority in Cambodia in Pol Pot’s regime…

Khmer Rouge preached self reliance. But not in the Ghandi-style, not only peaceful civil disobedience, spinning your own clothes, resisting foreign domination with hands unarmed. They promoted devastating self-reliance, destroying all signs of civilisation and foreign influence: clothes, jewellery, books, schools, hospitals, glasses, and underwear, all that was said to have corrupted the Khmer culture. Only Angkor Wat survived; a place too sacred to be destroyed.