Dragon Apparent, page 25
One of them surprised me by speaking understandable French, and this was such a rarity that I asked him if he would act as a guide to one or two of the outlying monuments I wanted to see. At the same time I thought that I would be able to question him as to the existence of legends, and particularly about the legend of the leper king which was supposed to be the only memory of the Khmer rulers that had survived. The boy said he would be delighted, but when? I said that night, as it was practically full-moon, and I believed that I could get a rickshaw in Siem-Reap to bring me out to Angkor. His face fell. He was sorry, it couldn’t be managed. I asked why not? Were the ex-bandits unreliable at night? Oh, no it was not that. On the contrary they were very disciplined, and with Dap Chhuon in command you were in fact safer at Angkor than at Phom Penh. Well, then, what was it? … the tigers, perhaps? No, it wasn’t the tigers, either … but the fact was that after dark Angkor was a very bad place for the néak ta eysaur and the néak ta en – in other words, the spirits Siva and Indra.
Thus had the powerful Brahmanical gods of the Khmer Empire shrunk and shrivelled along with the Empire itself. And now they were no more than néak ta – mere tree spirits to frighten babies with; of no more importance than the khmoo pray – the wicked dead, such as women who have died in childbed; the beisac – the famished souls of those who have died violently, who return from hell to implore food; the smer, who, losing their reason, have become werewolves, and the srei ap, beautiful girls, who through dabbling in black magic have inadvertently turned themselves into heads, accompanied only by alimentary canals, and live on excrement. The Khmer gods have accompanied their worshippers in their decline.
* * *
A rumour existed in Siem-Reap of the survival of a troupe of heavenly dancers. At the hotel there was a knowledgeable hanger-on who had learned enough English from American visitors to describe himself as an officer’s pimp. From him I made inquiries.
His first reaction was to produce the slow compassionate smile of the sensitive man who dislikes to disappoint. There were dancers, but they were very old – at least fifty – and quite ugly. On clarifying the nature of my inquiry, he said that they were not only old, but charged a lot for their services, that he did not know where they could be contacted, and that they had no proper clothes to dance in. These had to be hired from a Chinese, who ‘would not be there’. It was clear that my informant’s services as an intermediary would only cover the simplest arrangements and that he had now retired behind this squid-like effusion of negatives. But at this point, some of my fellow-guests became interested. Among them was an Anglo-American business executive from Bangkok, who had lived a number of years in Siam and said that he was used to tackling situations like this. The Chinese, he said, was the key to the problem. The thing was to find the Chinese … if possible the one who hired out the costumes. There was no doubt about it that this man could make arrangements for us to see a Cambodian dance.
Down to the town, therefore, went my friend, and in due course a suitable Chinese was discovered. He was one of those octopuses of commerce that plant themselves squarely in the centre of the business life of such towns; the kind of man – Tes Heak, I believe his name was – whom anyone could lead you to, and who was to be discovered sitting unassumingly, pencil behind ear, on a sack of dry fish, surrounded by his stocks of dried milk, his cobra skins, his coffins and his Algerian wine. Tes Heak also ran the bus services, conducted an undertaking establishment, with a hearse most lavishly equipped with miniature puppet theatres, and supplied an American car for weddings, to the wings and roof of which gilt dragons were attached. Taking in the situation with a saurian flicker of the eyelids, he produced a number of reasons overlooked by the officer’s pimp why it would be infeasible to persuade the heavenly dancers to perform. He even complained that they had artistic temperaments, hastily adding, however, when it looked as though he was being taken seriously, that a performance would cost 1500 piastres – about £27.
This seemed an enormous fee for a short demonstration by the five ladies, who, Tes Heak said, might be induced to go through a short repertoire. My hopes had been to arrange something that would be as spontaneous and unselfconscious as possible – perhaps in a back yard. But Tes Heak was revolted at so shoddy a proposal. Such a spectacle, he thought, should be staged in the forecourt of Angkor Vat itself, and by moonlight. It was clear that he knew his tourist, and that this negligently sown seed would probably fall on fertile soil. Just as there is a collective crowd-mentality which is a little more (or less) than the sum total of the mentalities of its individual members, so the single traveller multiplied by thirty becomes a tourist with a certain garishness of taste that he did not possess before; a kind of temporary distemper provoked by gregarious indulgence, that commits him to extravagances. The idea of a spectacle in the grand manner was, therefore, enthusiastically acclaimed.
Having easily won the first round, Tes Heak now suggested drummers, a local orchestra, and an escort of torchbearers – at a slight extra charge, of course. This too was agreed, and finally, at a cost of 3000 piastres, the thing was arranged.
At ten o’clock that night, therefore, the hotel bus stopped at the end of the causeway leading to Angkor Vat. News of the performance had spread, and to my surprise what must have been most of the population of Siem-Reap, and probably of the neighbouring villages as well, had put in an appearance. A fiesta atmosphere prevailed with stalls selling hot sausages clamped between two slabs of bread, sugar-cane juice – crushed out while you waited – mounds of pale green jelly, and mineral waters. In addition to the hundred small shaven-headed torch-bearers, in the old style, who awaited our coming along the causeway, waving bundles of resin-soaked rags, at least five hundred of the hurrying crowd flashed electric torches as they walked, to the natural detriment of the archaic effect.
The passengers, mostly women, who had dressed with painstaking informality for the occasion, stepped down gingerly into this carnival scene. With their charming, defeated smiles, the sellers of crossbows pounced upon them and in the background a group of Dap Chhuon’s men, lean from their peacetime rations and physical jerks, eyed the occidental display with the wistful sincerity of tethered peregrines.
Along the causeway the torch-bearers, descrying a European among the padding Cambodians, would gesticulate and wave their flaming rags. A small group had deserted their post and clambered down into the water where, torches aloft, they were looking for something – a living fountain-group in bronze. Shutting out half the horizon was the long, low mass of Angkor Vat, moonlight glinting feebly in its towers. There was a certain poetry in the scene, and the ridiculous march of the tourists, flinching from its wan escort of bow-sellers, was part of it.
By the time we arrived at the forecourt the Cambodians were already installed on the best vantage points, riding the mute lions and perched on the necks of beheaded serpents. The torch-bearers now broke away and stormed raggedly forward; the rearguard of a triumph. Four acetylene lamps lit up a white amphitheatre of expectant faces and a player seated himself at a semi-circular xylophone and began a discursive tinkling. Although I had no standards by which to judge, the dancing seemed lifeless – a mime of embalmed postures. Only four dancers had appeared, and two – as we had been fairly warned – were indeed past their prime.
Although no doubt perfectly correct in their rendering of such episodes as the fight between Hanuman and the Demon King, the two fifty-year-old ladies could hardly be expected to galvanise us with the impetuosity of a combat which, according to the Epic, was conducted chiefly with thunderbolts, aerial javelins and arrows of wind. But if the old ladies were lacking in vigour, their youthful pupils showed no signs of having been schooled in such elementary feats as going through fairly long interpretative passages while balancing on one leg, the other being bent backwards from the knee, and held at right angles. There were some perilous wobbles, causing on one occasion an elderly lady to animate the powdered mask in which her features were set by the most unclassical of grimaces.
But the girls came into their own soon after, deposing the heavy, multi-tiered crowns, and exchanging the stiff, hired finery for sarongs and blouses. Joined by several more girls and partners from the audience they gave a sparkling demonstration of the lap ton. It was a dance with a sense of humour – an extraordinary thing in these countries – particularly the version which mimicked a husband and wife quarrelling, and there was as much of Eastern grace as could be combined with the vigour of the West. There was no dead symbolism here, nor were there traces of ritual intended to assist the growth of the crops. But the performers were thoroughly enjoying themselves, skipping about and twirling their hands, evidently relieved at the release from the puppet-antics of a prehistoric tradition. These were the low-class caperings on the junk in bas-relief … and it was soon clear that this was what the audience had come to see.
CHAPTER 16
Bandit Country
THERE WAS an intrepid American girl at the hotel. She was not a member of the tourist party from Siam, but had straggled in unobtrusively from Tokyo, via Macao and Saigon and many other intermediary China Sea ports with remote and evocatory names. She was writing, and living on a small, carefully managed allowance and appeared never to stop travelling. One of the motives for these uneasy wanderings was her connection with the Des Moines Register, the leading newspaper of her home town. Her assignment was to look up all the Des Moines citizens she could find living in the Far East and write a chatty, human account of their doings for the benefit of the people at home. So far she had only found one exile from Des Moines in Indo-China.
She was brave and indefatigable with an appetite for regular achievement. The spirit she enshrined, with its voracity for random facts and experiences, was rather that of the late twenties than the early fifties. I came across her continually in the ruins. Guidebook in hand, waving guides aside, she tracked down all the most obscure pieces of sculpture (‘Say, have you seen Indra on a three-headed elephant?’) and the isolated temples, half-submerged in the jungle, that others overlooked. She was as pre_occupied with numerology as the Khmers themselves, checking up on the exact numbers of gods and demons and marvelling, as the great kings would have had her marvel, at the sixty-four faces of the temples containing the sixteen images and all constructed in best selected sandstone, with the regrettable laterite patching kept well out of sight.
Now this dauntless girl, having digested all that Angkor had to offer, had decided to go on to Siam, but had no intention of going all the way back to Saigon and flying from there by the regular route. Instead she was determined to cross country somehow or other to the Siamese border, a matter of a hundred miles or so, where she could get a train to Bangkok. There was, in fact, a road through Sisophon which joined up there with the railroad, and doubled it to the Siamese frontier town, but there were no trains on this side of the frontier owing to the presence of one or more of the five bands of Issaraks who had not yet shown signs of surrendering. Nor, according to reports, was the road safe for most of its length; but she had persuaded the French army, who were always delighted to oblige in such matters, to take her on the first military transport to go through.
I mention all this because I had to get back to Saigon fairly soon now; either to go on the trip to the Viet-Minh-occupied territory or to take up the seat I had booked on the plane to Laos, and I had learned that if I wanted to return to Pnom Penh by the safe road – the one policed by Dap Chhuon – which runs along the eastern shore of the great lake, it would mean a wait of several days for transport. But there was another way of returning more quickly, although apparently with some risk, down the west-shore road. Under some kind of sub-rosa arrangement Tes Heak ran a bus which slipped out of Siem-Reap in the early morning hours and took this route. It occurred to me that if the American girl-journalist was prepared to take the chance in a French military car, there was no reason why I should not do so under Tes Heak’s auspices, as a man with his business flair would undoubtedly have an arrangement with the bandits through whose territory we passed.
* * *
The bus to Pnom Penh stole out of the town at four in the morning. Like all Asiatic buses it was packed solidly with passengers, and only by paying nearly twice the right fare had I been able to obtain one of Tes Heak’s attractive tickets, covered in red ideographs. In the bus I was given the place of honour on the right of the driver, who was obliged to jostle me continually as he changed gear. Three distinguished citizens of Siem-Reap were squeezed in on his left and a complete row of yellow-robed bonzes sat, with cultivated impassivity of expression, immediately behind. Although vowed to lives of self-abnegation there were certain minor bourgeois affectations which they were not forbidden. One was the wearing of sun glasses, which they and all the other passengers of distinction put on as soon as the dawn came.
The passengers carried with them strings of dried fish, just as they might have carried sandwiches. These, hung up within easy reach, filled the bus with a rich, seashore tang. As soon as we were under way, one of the bonzes, bothered by his parasol, leaned over and hooked it over the windscreen. The others followed suit, leaving the driver with half his normal field of vision. He paid no attention to this handicap; in any case, it would have been unthinkable to criticise the holy men.
It was a bad thing if you were in the least mechanically minded to sit next to the driver because you couldn’t help noticing some of the things that were wrong with the car. In these countries cars are driven on relentlessly until under the strain something goes. Patched up with ingenious makeshifts they are put back on the road again where they carry on, come what may, until finally, with elliptical cylinders, worn-out bearings, burnt valves, crippled transmissions, flattened springs and shattered bodies, not another mile can be forced out of them. In the meanwhile, and until this final disintegration, their drivers handle them with confidence and verve.
In this case the engine seemed to be loose in the chassis as the control pedals jiggered about quite independent of the floorboards. The driver was obliged to hold the foot-brake off by hooking his toe under it, and to drive with one hand on the gear lever, to prevent its jumping out of gear. The steering wheel turned freely through about ninety degrees before the steering was affected, and the lights went off and on as we hurtled over the bumps. None of these inconveniences seemed to worry the driver in the least. He was a small, elderly Chinese, who conducted the bus with quiet determination. Whatever happened and however terrible the road, he drove straight on at the bus’s maximum speed – a bellowing forty-five miles an hour.
It seemed that we had taken a cross-country cut, avoiding the towns I had expected to pass through, because somehow or other we missed Sisophon. A few miles away over on our left would have been the shores of the great lake which, although in the present dry season was only about ninety miles in length by about twenty in width, has the habit of tripling its area and flooding many square miles of forest at the height of the rains. It is this flooding of the forest which produces the enormous annual increase in the number of fish, which are so concentrated when the shrinkage takes place that they are practically scooped out of the water, rather than fished. At this season when the waters were at their lowest (and when this great exterminatory fishing was actually going on), the water had receded from ten to fifteen miles, leaving behind sticky prairies, with temporary villages where they grew a few vegetables, and temporary roads. On the lake itself, always out of sight, was a fringe of floating villages, which moved backwards and forwards across the map with the expansion and contraction of the waters.
Soon after sunrise we found ourselves on a main road. You could tell it was a main road because, although the surface was even more awful than that of the temporary track, there were permanent villages and bridges. One modern bridge we passed over was a reconstruction of an ancient Khmer one with the remnants of a balustrade formed from the body of a seven-headed serpent. In a few places the jagged stumps of ruins rose above the ground.
We stopped at a village for breakfast, a half-circle of slate-coloured shacks with all the uprights newly plastered, as if for the visit of a circus, with vermilion Chinese New Year posters. A few daydreaming Cambodians had found posts to lean against and there was a great collection of the hyena-faced dogs in the street – which our driver carefully avoided.
Since eating in strange surroundings is half the pleasure of Asiatic travel, the passengers all tied their dried fish to the backs of the seats, got down and made for the dark cavern that was the local café. Two of the senior bonzes seated themselves together at a table. One got out a fountain pen and began to write a letter, while the other took a snack out of an American mess-can.
The four other junior bonzes who were travelling with us now lined up in the gutter, graded in order of height, each one holding his basin. Walking a few paces until they were opposite the first house, they stopped and left-turned. A woman came out of the house, ready as if warned by premonition, with a bowl and ladle. Facing the line for the moment, rather like a sergeant inspecting a parade, she then squatted down and raised the bowl for a moment to her forehead. Getting up again, and starting at the leading bonze, she passed briskly down the line, depositing a ladleful of rice in each bowl. This completed, the bonzes right-turned and marched in single file to the next house.
Having a fad for the interior decoration of such places, I preferred to go right into the café’s forbidding interior instead of sitting outside. I was rewarded with a picture of Sun-Yat-Sen (Chiang-Kai-Shek had quite disappeared and Mao-Tse-Tung had not yet arrived), a badly cured tiger’s skin, a collection of imitation rhinoceros’s horns and an advertisement for the Khmer National Lottery, consisting of four pictures of Cambodian family life. The first scene, shortly entitled ‘Misery’, showed an ordinary household, its members squatting about on the floor of their house, doing, as you would expect, nothing in particular. In the second picture the husband, struck by an idea contained in a balloon floating above his head, suggests buying a lottery ticket. In spite of their misery, the money is found for this. In picture three – they win, and, on being told the grand news, express their joy with the hand-flourishes of temple dancers. Fourth picture, ‘Happiness’, is refined and sedate. The wife wears a red jumper, a short skirt and carpet slippers. Her man has put on a coat with lapels, a collar and tie. In the ordinary way both of them would now die of heatstroke; but the lottery has taken care of that too. They sit in front of an electric fan.
