Cambodia:
Remnants Of The Khmer Rouge (cont.)
Not personally, I almost said. But
the tone of his voice made me hesitate.
"Pol Pot killed my father,"
he said.
He paused. Following a raspy breath
in the hot, dusty air, I waited for him to continue.
“I was only two, and so I have no
memory,” he said. “My father had an education, and
Pol Pot killed all the people with an education. We
never saw his body. We don’t know where his grave
is. My mother had to take care of us, of all my brothers
and sisters. They are years no one in my family will
speak about. Years that no one that remembers.”
The bus diver honked for us to return
to the van, my body wailed in protest. Beebee told
me about the bus driver. We learned he made the excruciating
journey either to or from the border every single
day. He rarely saw his wife, and often made as little
as one hundred and fifty US dollars a month. "He
used to be child soldier for Khmer Rouge," Beebee
said. "Tank driver. He was not happy then, but
he is happy now. He is happy because he is free."
After we made our way back to our
seats, the van's interior was dark, and Beebee’s face
was shadowed, his expression hard to discern. He leaned
into me, like a child I gathered closer, keen to receive
his deepest secrets. Outside, the fireflies punctuated
the darkness
The van stumbled over a particularly
rough series of holes, and involuntarily, we crashed
into each other. The solemn mood was lost in our tangle,
but Beebee wasn't done. “Whenever I take people to
Pol Pot’s grave, you know what I do?” he said, bright-faced,
as if he had remembered some outlandish joke.
“I piss on it!” he exclaimed, and
laughed uproariously.
Later there were spots of light,
flashlights, sway-dancing over the fields. Beebee
motioned toward the lights and explained that they
were farmers, searching for frogs in the night-puddles,
just another thing to sell. He told us about snake
soup laced with marijuana available at a restaurant
in a certain town; he could take me there in his tuk-tuk
if we liked. Being a vegetarian, I had an easy out.
Apparently they also specialized in barbequed rats.
When we arrived in Siem Reap, Beebee
offered to show me around town. Along the slum-lined
river of mud, among the vast five-star hotels, men
and women slashed by puckered scars and missing limbs
beg in the street. The juxtaposition is especially
poignant here. The affluent fly here en route to Angkor
Wat, they spend freely, but the locales never see
the money.
Beebee took me to the outlying land
mine museum, which was just a disheveled series of
huts around a courtyard featuring piles of disarmed
mines. Cambodia remains littered with Pol Pot’s “perfect
soldiers”, although a disproportionate amount of mines
were planted by American soldiers during the Vietnam
war.
Forty times per week, someone is
gravely wounded or killed by one of the four to six
million lingering mines.
After the mine museum we stopped
at an overpriced restaurant with open walls. As soon
as I stepped inside two girls ran towards us. The
older one had a monkey kept on a length of chain,
and the younger caught a praying mantis and brandished
it with pride.
"For free," she
said, and the praying mantis flew away.
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