Highways to a War (37 page)

Under his oratory, and under Volkov’s as well, there’s a note I hear now that I didn’t hear in Saigon: a sound of genuine pain. He turns to Bill Wall, and speaks in a quick aside. “Sorry, Bill; sorry to have spoken ill of your nation and your president, but you know it’s all true.”

Bill Wall sighs, toying with a glass of the cognac that we’re recklessly continuing to drink with the couscous. “Sing your song, Trevor, don’t mind me. You know I got no time for Tricky Dick. And some of what you’re saying is right. But when anyone asks for peace, those Khmer Rouge won’t even negotiate. So who are the war-lovers around here?”

Langford speaks, his soft voice only just reaching me. “The Cambodians need help on the ground, Harvey, and they’re not getting it. It’s true that some of their generals are on the take, and living it up in Phnom Penh. But there are some good commanders.”

“Just like Vietnam,” I say.

“Just like Vietnam,” he says. “And the ARVN have done all right there, lately. Now that the American troops are pulling out, I believe the ARVN will hold the line—and it could be like that here. These troops are fighting for their lives: there’ll be no mercy if they lose. They know that. But a lot of them are in despair.” He’s addressing Griffiths now, pointing a finger at him. “Their confidence got worn down in that first year of the war, when the Americans pulled out. They’re very simple people; they’re not tricky. They thought the Americans would back them to the hilt; they thought they’d stay, and they don’t understand why they didn’t. Nor do I. But they still have real patriots here.”

“Oh shit,” Griffiths says. “Patriots. Those Lon Nol Army of ficers of yours? Is that it, Snow?”

“No,” Langford says. “Not the officers. The ordinary troops: the men and the women. They’re what matter. They’re what always matter.”

He says no more, and there’s a silence. What he’s said has been obvious; even innocuous; yet something is causing everyone at the table to look at him. Was it something in his voice? Time’s projector has jammed; we’re all fixed in stillness. I look down at my hand on the table and can’t move it, and look back again at Langford. His face, in the light of one of the wall lamps, seems suddenly like a fanatic’s: stony and angelic. Or is it the effect of the couscous?

The silence, which has set around us like jelly, is finally broken by Jim Feng. “Well, whichever way it goes, the people pay.”

The Nurseryman nods in agreement, his vast face setting into lines of sorrow. “You speak true, squire. You speak true. The people pay. And we have to look at it, and send our little stories.”

Another silence, whose length has no measure:ment: faces nod and nod around the table, and young Clayton is out of it, his head buried in his folded arms. Then Volkov speaks.

“Yes, Hubert, we have to look at it. This afternoon I shot film on Highway 1, in a village south of Neak Luong. Khmer Rouge are hitting Government forces there. I took pictures of a farmer with his small daughter in his lap-dead from a stray bullet. I talked with him: my driver translated. This is the last child the man has. There have been two sons and another daughter killed, and his wife as well. Now he is all alone, and what he is saying, over and over, is: ‘What will I do? What will I do? Now I have no one.’”

Dmitri sniffs. He raises a hand to his eyes in ugly dismay, and I see that he’s weeping. Silence resumes around the table, but it isn’t the silence of embarrassment: it’s the silence of communion. . The waiters have vanished like spirits, and all the figures at the table are now individually distinct to me. The Nurseryman has tears glistening on his cheeks; he blows his nose into a white handkerchief. He saw the little boy with the flag die the other morning; is he weeping for him?

To round out that story, I had followed truckloads of wounded boy soldiers to the city’s Russian hospital: little boys with red stumps where legs had been; boys with shrapnel inside them; boys with head wounds. They’d been dumped in the corridors because all the beds were full, and there were only two doctors there—one Cambodian, the other French—working like laborers to patch up the hundreds of wounded from the battlefields around the city. Parents sat with the wounded boys in corridors where puddles of blood and urine stood, feeding them bowls of gruel: a grisly children’s party. And thinking of this, I find that I’m weeping too, not knowing when it began.

The Nurseryman’s pink mask looms close, and speaks to me.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” he says. “We all shed a few tears on couscous night.”

 

 

It was still only nine o‘clock, with curfew in an hour, when we all emerged onto Monivong Boulevard. I was beginning to come down from the couscous, and the street looked almost normal. A circle of laughing Khmer prostitutes in many-colored sarongs surrounded us; but the Nurseryman waved them away.

“Not tonight, ladies. We’re off to Madame Delphine‘s, the woman I love best.”

Cyclo boys wheeled towards us in a flock, and the party began to climb into the black-hooded machines with shouts and laughter——including young Clayton, who now wore a permanent dazed smile, and had ceased to speak. I doubt that he knew where he was. Langford and Volkov hung back; Mike was trying to persuade me to come with them to Madame Delphine’s opium den: the next appointed phase of couscous night.

“Come and have a pipe or two, Harvey. It won’t destroy your brain. And Madame Delphine’s is a great place for meeting people. Everyone goes.”

No, I told him, a thousand times no. I’d avoided opium until now, and had no intention of being introduced to it on top of the couscous.

Dmitri took my arm, speaking to Mike. “Still a sensible man, the Harvey. Moderate; always was moderate, the bald one! He and I will go for coffee, and straighten out our heads.”

Langford looked at him in surprise. “You’re not smoking either, Count?”

“I smoke too much lately,” Volkov said. “Tonight I’m being sensible, as a matter of fact. Sensible with Harvey.”

Mike raised a resigned hand in farewell, and turned towards an expectant cyclo boy.

I was tired, and wanted to recover from the stew; I now told Dmitri that I’d prefer to skip coffee and go back to my room at the Royal. But the fingers still gripping my arm tightened urgently.

“Harvey, Harvey! We haven’t seen each other in seven years! Don’t be so goddamn middle-aged: do me a favor man,
come
with me! I need to talk to you.”

The dope was making his face transparent to me in the way dope tends to do, and I detected a hungry appeal there. From a Saigon brother, this wasn’t to be refused. We summoned two cyclo boys, and they pedaled us towards the river.

Under the cyclo’s little hood I relaxed, soothed by the hiss of the tires and the creak of the pedals in the quiet night. Watching Volkov’s machine run on in front, glimpsing his rope-yellow head and dark blue shirt when the vehicle turned, I was suddenly content to be carried wherever he chose to lead us. The alchemy of the Nurseryman’s stew made the city into a theater, the shop signs in Chinese, Khmer and French becoming tantalizing, cryptic and profound, the latticework on upstairs balconies screening airy and seductive secrets. My cyclo boy pedaled, my cyclo ran on, and I blessed it all, this theater of Phnom Penh, whose sounds were fading as curfew drew near. Here were the actors, just as I remembered them: monkey peddlers, curbside dentists, soothsayers, cigarette makers, dark-faced Khmer hawkers squatting beside braziers, pale-faced Chinese shopkeepers in their doorways, and the beautiful, full-bodied women with their warm, Sino-Indian faces. Radios sounded from glowing caves along the pavement; families reclined on cane chairs there, looking out at the night. Phnom Penh wasn’t changed by the war, I said; it was all as it used to be, and the thing that was gathering in the countryside could perhaps be ignored.

But as we neared the river, this illusion faded, together with the effects of the couscous. I couldn’t block out the sandbags in front of the public buildings, or the Government propaganda posters showing Communist soldiers beheading and raping civilians, or the crowds of refugees on the pavements and in doorways. They crouched by cardboard-and-thatch huts erected against walls, wearing the dark, funereal pajamas and sarongs of the countryside, and they begged from passersby, here where begging had once been rare. Their brown, half-naked children dodged about under the streetlamps, black hair flying, and I thought they were playing games.

Then I saw that they were catching insects that swarmed in the light, and putting them into jars for food.

 

 

“No proper water festival now, Harvey. No Prince Sihanouk to cut the string,” Volkov said.

His voice, in deference to the large, dark quiet, was low, husky and drawling. His accent sounded less American now, and more Russian. He sat holding his coffee cup in both hands, looking out over the Mekong.

In the time of the monsoon rains, when the Mekong overflows, its tributary the Tonle Sap performs its annual miracle: it turns around to run backwards. Carrying the Mekong’s torrents to the lake from which it takes its name, the river enlarges the lake from a thousand to four thousand square miles. Whole forests are submerged at the country’s heart; fish swim among the trees. Then, at the beginning of the dry season, Tonle Sap river flows back to the Mekong. It siphons off the water from the Great Lake and the drowned heartland; it uncovers the underwater forests, leaving fish trapped there by the thousands; it exposes silt-rich acres for rice planting. The river is the engine of Cambodia’s bounty, deliverer of fish and rice to the people, and every November, back in the happy sixties, surrounded by dragon boats and fireworks and xylophone music for the river gods, the little Prince would honor Tonle Sap, cutting the magic string that caused it to come back again to the Mekong.

But tonight this seemed a memory of play; a time of Cambodian childishness that would never come again. Reality now was the children catching insects for food, and wartime silence under a high, full moon.

Volkov had brought me to a floating restaurant for our coffee: a gabled houseboat near to the point where the two rivers met. Its verandah was lined with potted shrubs, and connected to the bank by a gangway. The long room was half dark, and half empty. At distant tables were a few other Europeans—probably embassy people—and some middle-class Cambodians: Government officials and their mistresses. We were sittirng by a window with open glass louvers; out through the horizontal vents, the brown spaces of the Mekong gleamed in the moonlight. The river was so wide at this point that we could only just make out the opposite shore, with tiny black heads of palms rising miles off against silver sky. Dimly, just for a moment, tracer rounds made soundless green arcs there on the darkness; then stopped.

“Khmer Rouge,” Volkov said. “Scaring off ghosts from their camp. Even those bastards believe in ghosts.”

By day, the convoys that brought American supplies from Saigon up the Mekong and into the Tonle Sap ran a gauntlet of Khmer Rouge fire from the banks. But tonight everything seemed peaceful: even the tracer fire had looked peaceful. Nearby on the water was the shape of a fishing sampan, its big net hung from a bamboo pole, like a dragonfly’s wing. Farther out were the lights of the small, moored ships that were keeping the city alive: battered freighters and South Vietnamese patrol boats, waiting to come in.

“A beautiful night,” Volkov said. “In spite of war. Even now, Cambodia is such a beautiful country.” He put down his cup, looking out the window. “But why does beauty always bring pain?”

He turned back to me abruptly, as though expecting an answer, and I saw that despite his quietness, he was in one of his frantic states. His eyes had what I thought of as their white look, in the dimness, and I wondered how high he still was from the couscous. “Maybe it doesn’t bring you pain at all,” he said. “Is that so? You are always so
together,
Harvey.”

Suddenly he leaned forward across the table and grasped my wrist. He was wearing his sternly challenging expression, and his eyes searched my face; but his words were incongruously friendly.

“It’s good to see you back, brother. Any help you need, you only have to say. Any story that breaks, I will tell you about. You understand? Can I do anything right now?”

I thanked him and told him I needed nothing, and he nodded. He was still holding my wrist, still leaning forward to examine my face as though for clues to something, and despite the space left in my brain by the couscous, I began to feel uncomfortable. We sat frozen in melodramatic tableau: captor and prisoner.

“Tonight
I
have to talk to you,”
he said. “Do you understand, Harvey?”

I nodded and waited, and he finally let go of my wrist; but his eyes remained fixed on my face. “You think I am simply stoned,” he said. “But I am not; grass doesn’t do anything for me now, as a matter of fact. Only opium. Tell me what you’ve been doing, Harvey, all these years. Tell me how it is in Europe now. I have not been back to Paris for a long time.”

I talked to him of my life and coverage in the UK and on the Continent; I suspect that the couscous made me ramble, but he listened with absolute intentness, interrupting only to ask questions. He gave the same intensity to listening as he did to speaking, and seemed to find my affairs more absorbing than I did myself—as though there were other meanings there than I’d realized. He’d always been like that. When I tailed off he sat nodding, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. Then he said: “There are things I want to tell you, Harvey. Tonight is the time to talk in this way, and perhaps not again. These are things I cannot speak of to the others—not even to Mike. And I know you will offer wise opinion—or at least you will hear me with understanding. You are a man of special sympathy and intelligence, and I greatly respect you for it. Yes! Don’t deny it. You wriggle with Anglo-Saxon embarrassment, but it’s true.”