MD's Children of the Plains

24

       

Sandy Hibbard, Unsplash.

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.

24

Outside the palace, I find Vang squatting in the shade of the wall talking with the other moto drivers.  He leaps up when he sees me and strolls back to his bike which is parked at the nearby curb. I ask him if he knows how to get to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It’s a stupid question, of course he does. Along with the Killing Fields, it’s one of Phnom Penh’s major tourist attractions.  The places where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed under Pol Pot’s brutal regime now have streams of visitors filing through. By the end of the Khmer Rouge reign in 1979, almost a quarter of the Cambodian population had been wiped out.  I’m not sure I want to go but I feel it would be remiss of me to leave this town without paying my respects to those who suffered during that terrible time.

        We dart through the traffic across the grid of streets and it doesn’t take long to arrive at the former high school which in 1975 was commandeered by the Khmer Rouge for use as a prison. The three storey building has continuous balconies running along the front and it’s easy enough to imagine it once bustling with school kids joking and laughing as they change classrooms between bells.

         Outside the entrance a tall man in a dark suit with gloved hands and a blackened face has his hat out collecting money. When I get closer I realise he must be a victim of an acid attack, which Ellie and Steph had mentioned was a common form of payback in Cambodia. Jealous wives, jilted lovers, family feuds and land disputes have led to so many retaliations of this kind, there is an NGO dedicated to its victims.

        I pop some money in his hat and head across the neat lawns towards the school building. Once inside, I begin a slow walk down a long tiled corridor that runs past the former classrooms where the horrific crimes were carried out. The rooms are bare except for the instruments of torture — shackles, prodding irons and electrocution boxes, sitting on or beside a single iron bedframe. Water boarding, electrocution, beatings, rape, suffocation, medical experiments, sleep deprivation, neglect — all the tricks in the torturer’s handbook were used.

  At the door of one room I stop for a while to take it all in. A soft yellow light falls in through the windows causing shadows to dance on the walls. It is quiet, almost peaceful, which for a place of such unspeakable horror feels strange. The spacious emptiness of the rooms is misleading for up to 1500 people lived in the prison at one time and around 20,000 people were imprisoned here over four years. Only twelve survived, seven adults and five children. *

        I continue on down the corridor to another part of the museum where victim’s skulls are on display in glass cabinets. It’s a sobering sight, but I’m not prepared for the most chilling area of all. Freestanding boards display rows upon rows of black and white photographs — headshots of Cambodians of all ages, men, women, teenagers, children. Numbers pinned to their clothing, they stare blankly at the camera. The photos were taken during an obsessive documentation process that each person had to endure on arrival. Aside from their histories being taken in great detail, they were forced to confess to fictitious crimes against the revolution and give lists of family members and colleagues who were supposedly implicated. Confession didn’t bring freedom but would determine the severity or type of torture they were given. Held in mass cells or isolation, fed meagre amounts rice gruel and routinely tortured, most died from their injuries in two to three months. Among the victims were doctors, teachers, government officials, workers, children, Khmer Rouge cadres suspected of espionage — even some foreign tourists whose sailing boats wandered unknowingly into Cambodian waters.  

         It wasn’t the first time the Cambodian people had suffered in this way. During her years in Indochine MD witnessed plenty of torture and injustice being handed out by her countrymen to the Cambodians and Vietnamese. Their lands seized and turned into rubber plantations, farmers were forced into labour on government infrastructure programs. With little or no income they still had to pay the corvée tax and when they couldn’t, would be thrown into prison gangs. Chained together with petty criminals and political prisoners they were tasked with building roads in the boiling heat. Working fifteen hour days with little to eat, many died on the job. The blatant neglect of the cruel bosses meant a dead body could get dragged around with the gang until the overseer gave permission to deal with it. *

                 But it was children who suffered the most. In The Sea Wall MD describes the plains near their rice farm teeming with children slathered in saffron to keep the malaria carrying mosquitos at bay. ‘ They were everywhere, perched in trees, on the railings of the bridge, on the backs of buffaloes.’ Women gave birth every year and carried their children around on their backs until they were old enough to play in the mud, swim in the rivers, wander the villages and throw stones at stray dogs.  There were so many children the plain couldn’t possibly feed them all —they arrived with the seasons, and left just as swiftly — dying from cholera, dysentery, worms, diarrhea — falling into the mud where they played, to be left there by exhausted parents with other mouths to feed. *

        The same children could be staring out from these photographs now, their emotionless expressions holding the knowledge of their impending fate. It’s a shocking and moving experience. Even though the suffering in this place ended long ago its memorial remains a grim testament to human cruelty. There are no answers here, just the resounding question ‘why?’ *

I reach the end of the row and step outside. Tall palm trees rustle in a slight breeze. The sun shines brightly in the endless blue sky. I lift my eyes to meet it, in the hope that the tortured souls of this place have found their release.

        I get to the gate and look around for Vang. He is standing as far away as possible, his back turned to the complex. He doesn’t turn around as I approach and I get the feeling he wants to get out of there quickly. He doesn’t ask me how it was and I don’t offer an opinion, it’s not the kind of place anyone wants to make small talk about. I tell him I need a cup of tea and ask him if he knows the Living Room Café, another of Ellie’s recommendations. He does, so off we go, back into the bustle of the city, leaving the ghosts of the past behind, something most Cambodians seem to have done quite successfully, in appearance at least. Phnom Penh is booming with skyscrapers and development going gangbusters, boutique cafes and hotels popping up on every corner. Of course not everyone is getting rich and as usual it’s the poorest Cambodians who are the casualties of land grabs and forced relocations.  But the emergence of young Cambodian entrepreneurs willing to train disadvantaged youth in the hospitality and tourism industry is a positive trend.                                  

        The Living Room Café is such an example. The grand, two-storey French villa has tables, chairs and couches tastefully positioned upstairs and down. The walls are brightly hung with paintings of Reamker stories. The friendly young Cambodian staff buzz about, tending to customers on the wide upstairs verandah and various nooks and crannies where a scattering of expats and groovy young Cambodian business people are busy having meetings or doing all their internet business. 

        The haunting images of the Tuol Sleng children are still with me as I settle under a ceiling fan on the upstairs level. I get out my cheapo mini lap-top to send an email to my teenage kids updating them on my whereabouts, checking that they are eating properly and remembering to put the rubbish bins out on time. Thankful that their concerns, if they do manage to reply, will be relatively minor. I’m ignoring work emails and don't feel too bad about it as I have my vacation message on and there are no urgent messages to deal with. Before I switch off, I decide to do a last search on MD. I’m hoping my geographic proximity to another place where she once lived will bring me closer to any information I may have missed so far. If it doesn’t, then that’s the end of the matter, I will forget my quest and continue happily on my sightseeing holiday.

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* In 2003 Rithy Pahn made a documentary, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine that brought together two survivors with their former captors.

*Adler, p 44.

*The Sea Wall p 92-93

*An article about the Tuol Sleng photographs here.