Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I was thinking of Henry T. saying, "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." That was how I happened to find Green Town Guest House, a Chinese-looking villa in a compound behind a fence, with a noodle restaurant in its courtyard, for $10 a night.

If luxury is, first of all, a high degree of comfort, this counted as luxury. The villa was clean, peaceful, friendly, and well run. It was always easy for me to find a quiet table to write my notes. None of the sort of unhelpful suggestions and obsequious interruptions that, in more expensive hotels, are excuses for tips.

It took me a day to recover from the overland jaunt from Bangkok. I slept late, wrote notes, got laundry done—two pounds of laundry was one dollar. The temperature was in the nineties, and humid. I went to a barber and got a shave, and sitting there in the peaceful shop on a back street of Siem Reap, I was reminded of the early morning in rainy Trabzon when I'd been shaved by a Turk with a flashing razor—how it had set me up for the road ahead.

And I walked. Siem Reap was a little town until a few years ago, where people went for the Angkor ruins, which are a few miles to the north. Now it's a sprawling city of a million people, of hideous hotels and expensive restaurants, a honky-tonk plunked down in the jungle.

No matter where I went here, I had a sense the place was haunted. I was creeped out—maybe an effect of my awareness of Cambodia's violent recent history, though I had not yet read the Pol Pot biography. The ghostliness was present even in the sunniest parts of town, a suggestion of the hideous past, of blood and unburied bodies, of torture, trickery, lies, punishment—like the darkness I had felt rising from the earth when I walked through Dachau, the stink of evil.

Most Cambodians have a memory of the bad years; perhaps they conveyed this sense of psychic trauma, carried it around with them. The hurt was apparent in their posture, in their voices, in their eyes. Another haunted landscape to suit me in my role of revisiting spook on the ghost train.

***

THIS HOVERING, HEAVY, oppressively haunted air was strongest in the jungle around Siem Reap, among the twisted lianas and dark leaves and sun-speckled shadows. It was like a foul vapor at the huge lake nearby, called Tonle Sap; it was palpable at Angkor, which was a place of both jungle and violated ruins.

Not just a temple, nor even a collection of them, Angkor is a ruined city. The name Angkor is derived from the Sanskrit word nagar,

meaning city. It contains a royal palace, a set of sacred precincts, monasteries, and residences, much of it surrounded by a wide stagnant moat and a perimeter wall. It lies brooding among tall trees, brilliant sculpted towers, and high walls, many of the structures half strangled by vines. It seems as though the temples were built to mimic symmetrical mountains, and their looming aspect, which is an assertive Asiatic Gothic, lends them tremendous power—power magnified by the way they have been eaten away by time, pitted by centuries of bad weather and neglect, their roughened texture like the volcanic rock at the edges of high Pacific islands lashed by waves, hollowing it and sharpening it like coral and giving it archways and great delicacy. In sheltered porches and doorways, and under jutting eaves, masterpieces of Khmer sculpture still stand, garlanded with flowers, with vigil lights and incense sticks. Even with tourists in silly hats scampering on its steep stairways and yelling to each other from cupola to cupola, the ruins epitomize sanctity, harmony, and radiance. At its peak in the early thirteenth century, Angkor covered one hundred square miles.

Almost as impressive as the monasteries and walls and temple complexes is the jungle—tall trees, miles of shaded paths, and cool groves. The foliage is at one with the stone stupas, seeming to grow out of the holiest places, the roots twining over walls and bas reliefs—thick, rounded, and supple banyan roots like tentacles. The trees are part of Angkor, some destroying it, others helping to secure and keep whole the fragile walls. The narrower paths lead to isolated shrines with images of bulgy elephants and what seems the dominant totem of Angkor, the king cobra, Naga—cobras in the form of balustrades, cobras slithering on roof eaves, or a single rearing cobra with its hood flared to protect the Buddha image.

Angkor is also a visual catalogue of smiles chiseled in sandstone. The most enigmatic—but serene at first glance, softening almost to mockery, becoming ambiguous—is the smile on the lips of the vast Buddha image at the Bayon Temple in Angkor Thom. Thousands of smiling im ages adorn the walls, from the thin smiles of praying monks to the happy-face smiles of bulb-breasted apsaras—half-naked dancing girls, demonstrating how the dance was part of Angkor ritual.