Life is but a dream

27

       

Dear Friends

We are almost there — after this, only one more episode to go! Let me know in the comments how you enjoy the ‘denouement’. (One of my fave words!)

It’s been a long journey to get to this place, given that this book began way back in 2009. But who’s counting? Not me. I’m just marvelling that I’ve managed to hang in there all this time. Then again maybe it’s not so surprising — after all that’s what we writers do. As Gail Sher says in her Four Noble Truths of Writing: 'If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.’

Once this book is put to bed it will be back to weekly posts — I have an India story to write and other things up my sleeve that I’ll be letting you know about. In the meantime, before the year is out, if you want to support this process in a more tangible way, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a friend.

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap or browse all chapters here.

27

It’s the day of the workshop but first I’m meeting Rob at Starfish Café. Starfish NGO was set up as a training school and fundraiser for disadvantaged Cambodians and Rob’s friend Erika is the project manager. I bring Bo along, as afterwards we will be going straight to the workshop. On the way in the tuk tuk he jokes that people might think he is my younger lover.

        ‘In this town no-one would bat an eyelid,’ I laugh. He is after all an attractive man and I am a couple of decades older than him. I decide to take it as a compliment.

         We find the café and its adjoining bakery in an urban area behind a supermarket. It’s connected to a craft shop and massage sala. Rob is sitting at an outdoor table with Erika, a thirty-something, slim dark haired woman who has the look of a person who gets things done. Rob introduces us and she tells us a bit about Starfish, how it was set up initially to help families whose kids were forced into child prostitution. Now they have a number of projects running, focusing on shelter, healthcare, microfinance and sanitation.  There are a number of NGOs like this one in town trying to help, but Starfish was among the first. I’m impressed with all the things they are doing but knowing our time is limited I move the conversation to the topic of MD.  I ask Erika if she can tell me how to get to the place where MD’s mother Marie, established their rice farm.

       ‘Oh sure,’ Erika says, ‘it’s out in the Ream National Park.’ It turns out that along with other locals she’d been roped into working as an extra on Rithy Panh’s movie based on MD’s novel The Sea Wall. 

        ‘It’s less than an hour out of town, the sets they built for the movie are still there, I can give you directions.’

        This is exciting information. And I can’t believe it’s being transmitted to us person to person — not from a book or a dusty old research document hidden high on a shelf in a library, but from local knowledge.

         She draws us a map and I ask Rob if we can hire a car to take us out there after the workshop. He thinks his neighbor might oblige. Rob is caught up in the MD story now too and is keen to come.  We could easily stay chatting all day, but it is almost time for the workshop so after thanking Erika profusely, Bo, Rob and I pile back into the tuk tuk and head for Q&A bookshop at nearby Ochheuteal Beach.  There we meet the Aussie owner, Andy, who has a bookshop filled with a few thousand secondhand books with a café in the front. Our workshop bookings have gone from four to twelve in the space of a day. Some travellers have seen the ad, some local expats have turned up, and a Cambodian philosophy professor has brought along a number of his students, including a prize-winning poet.

        The workshop runs from 11am to 2pm and includes a light lunch of delicious spring rolls and green papaya salad. For the expats and tourists it is the same price as my leg threading and for the Cambodians it’s free. It is always so interesting to meet local writers — the Cambodians have never experienced a writing workshop before, and the local expats of course have great tales to tell of how they came to make Cambodia their home. Listening to their stories reminds me how each person I have met on my journey has made a contribution to my story — Mr TF, the women writers, the Halong Bay lovers, the Saigon taxi driver, the staff at Rainbow Hotel, our river guides, the elderly NZ couple, and so many more — I might be obsessed with MD’s story but they are helping me find my own.

        When the workshop wraps up, Bo says he isn’t feeling well and heads back to the hotel.  I wait around among the shelves of books while Rob goes home to get his neighbour’s Camry. Soon he is back with his wife Sopheak and their six-month-old baby who take the back seat as we drive out of town on the main highway. Sopheak is in her early thirties, tall, with a generous smile and a definite world-wise vibe about her. From knowing Rob I feel I know her a little and despite their considerable age difference it’s clear they make a great couple. As we follow Erika’s directions to the turn off to Ream National Park I tell them about MD’s mother and the land she bought from the corrupt agents. How they knowingly sold her bad land and tried to extort more money from her when she wasn’t able to meet her crop quotas. Rob and Sopheak are fascinated to be hearing stories about the local area that they had no knowledge of before.

         Rob tells me that the national park was set up in the early nineties to protect the natural resources of the Prey Nop coastal region.  It also has a naval base and a weather station situated on a couple of its twenty-one islands. Covering 210 square kilometres, its pristine mountains, mangroves and rivers are home to rare forest animals and marine life. Our excursion however is not taking us too far into the wilderness, which is a good thing, as Rob is a little worried about damaging the underside of his neighbour’s car. The road we are on has turned to dirt but it’s sandy, not rocky, so I don’t think it will be a problem. I assume from what Erika has told us, that the original bungalow is long gone, and with it the exact location. Rithy Pahn actually leased land out here and built replica buildings so he could have unlimited access to his film set. But he also wanted to honour the struggle of MD’s mother against the sea by filming in the same area where she laboured for years trying to reclaim her rice fields from the annual sea tides. Due to her pioneering efforts, today they are known as some of the best rice fields in the district.

        We drive further on through the scrubby landscape and all the different versions of MD’s childhood story start to roll about in my mind. There’s my self imagery from reading The Sea Wall, The Lover and The North China Lover, then there is the celluloid imagery of the films I’ve watched — The Lover, The Sea Wall (Un barrage Contre Le Pacifique) and This Angry Age.  As we draw closer one set takes over and jolts my mind like a distant memory. We round a bend and the feeling is unmistakable. I recognise this place, the red sandy road, the small bridge, the tall coconut palms bending into the sea breeze, the thin strip of pristine white beach. A little further on and there it is — Marguerite’s stilt house, the one her mother built, as she so often described it. The thatched roof with the sunrise motif carved under the eaves, the generous verandah with its decorative wooden bunting and railings, the cool underside of the house with rain water jars standing tall, a hammock for afternoon siestas, the teak platform for sitting, sleeping, eating, peeling vegetables, a small rudimentary spirit house with incense and flowers in a tin can.  It’s not a crumbling French villa, and not a school house where MD may have lived, not a vacant lot, or the tomb of her lover — it is an actual Khmer stilt house, the one place that Marguerite and her younger brother Paulo loved, where they roamed barefoot in the jungle and swam in the small river, while their mother went crazy fighting the authorities, wrangling the workers and pitting herself against the elements. The place where MD says she discovered nature.

        We are out of the car and I spin around to take it all in — the house, the coconut palms, the beach, the small river, the tall rain jars, the presence of this place. The fact that it is Rithy Panh’s imagining doesn't bother me at all.  There is no way the original timber bungalow would have survived. The fact that it is a replica house and not a real house in a city with a plaque stating ‘This is the house of the famous writer Marguerite Duras and her family,’ doesn’t bother me either but only contributes to my elation. I love that my journey to find MD has led me here. That my poorly researched, spur of the moment pilgrimage has somehow dreamed up this scenario. That Rob invited me to Sihanoukville, that Erika was his friend — that I didn’t discover Prey Nop until I was right on its doorstep.  I recall a quote from MD that Vircondelet used as an epigraph at the beginning of his Duras biography. *

‘The story of your life, of my life, doesn’t exist, or perhaps it’s a question of semantics. The novel of my life, our lives, yes but not the story. When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.’

        We spread out to explore. Rob and Sopheak are as excited as I am at our discovery. They had no idea it was here, and there is no-one else around except for a security guy lying in a hammock on the verandah who tells Sopheak that we can’t actually enter the house. I’m not bothered, I snoop around underneath and explore nearby, taking loads of photos I will later lose in a computer meltdown. I pick some small yellow flowers and leave them in the tin can in the makeshift spirit house, and imagine Marguerite and her brother Paulo splashing about in the river, the mother yelling at them to come in and eat their supper. Their servant, The Corporal, cooking swamp bird in the rudimentary kitchen beneath the house. The rich lover’s limo parked at the gate. A 20s dance tune on the gramophone, jaunty jazz notes echoing into the early evening air.

        I rejoin Rob and Sopheak and their baby on the beach. Tiny waves lap at our feet. We marvel at the day, at our find. The breeze is light, neither too warm nor too cool. We drink in the peace of the afternoon, the serendipity of the day.

        As if finding MD’s house isn’t enough, not far down the road on our drive back, we come across another building to the left side of the track — the set of the dance hall, Chez Bart. In MD’s novel The Sea Wall, it is a rough and ready canteen bar, not far from their rice farm, frequented by big game hunters, sailors and plantation owners. The mail boat pulled in regularly and passengers sat with naval officers drinking champagne supplied by their fat and sweaty host, Bart. Dance music crackled out of a wind-up phonograph. It was here in The Sea Wall that the young girl met the son of a rich landowner, a similar but slightly different affair to the one described in The Lover.

       Rithy Panh’s set is a large wooden barn of a building with archways that look out to the sea. It has been left to the elements with parts of the walls and roof missing and birds have made nests in the beautiful old wooden bar. Still it’s not hard to imagine the place filled with rowdy laughter, music and the swish of foxtrot feet on the dance floor. We walk around inside and conjure up the characters: the rich landowner’s son with his Leon Bollé limousine parked outside, approaching Marguerite’s table and asking her to dance. The mother falling asleep in her chair and her brother making rude comments. The moon rising over the calm sea below, casting a moody light of hope across them all.

        When we’ve done enough nostalgic ruminating over a moment that existed in a movie based on a book we’re not even sure is true or not, we head back to town.  On the way Rob suggests a local riverside restaurant for a sunset dinner. It’s a brilliant idea, there are no other diners on the bamboo balcony and we have the river to ourselves.  Small birds dive low across the mirrored water chasing the last insects before nightfall as Rob gives me updates on the book he is working on based on his and Sopheak’s stories. *

       Sopheak * has childhood tales worthy of a several books. As a young child she lived alone for a time in the jungle solely in the company of monkeys. Like me he’s grappling with how to tell different stories in different leaps of time and place. We have a long and productive talk and it is a nice antidote to my obsession with MD, although it doesn’t dim my feelings of joy on our exciting find. Silently I’m still marveling at the gift this day has given.  The accidental finding of an illusory house where MD spent the happiest part of her childhood, is a perfect outcome for me. Not just as a reminder of the Buddhist notion (and the famous rowing song) that ‘life is but a dream’ but also a validation of the willingness to be open to the road, to dare to dream up your wildest imaginings.

________________

Vircondelet, Duras, epigraph, MD quote from an interview, Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 Sept 1984. 

* Serendipity Road by Rob Schneider. https://www.scribd.com/book/351301431/Serendipity-Road-between-heaven-and-hell

* The Girl with the Tiger’s Eyes. Sopheak’s story by Rob Schneider. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/736922