Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The look of the alluring women on the wat was an echo of the coquettish girls selling silks and postcards and soft drinks on the ruined walls, calling out, "Come back—take me with you," "I will be your girlfriend," "Take me!" Just teasing to make the other girls giggle and smile.

The Khmer smile is not a mere expression of happiness but a representation of an assortment of moods as well as a sort of unreadable rebuttal. The great range of smiles is codified at Angkor, and it has been intensively studied. Philip Short cites Charles Meyer, a French adviser to Prince Sihanouk, on the subtleties of the Khmer smile, "that indefinable half-smile that floats across the stone lips of the Gods at Angkor and which one finds replicated identically on the lips of Cambodians today." It serves as an "ambiguous and likable" mask, but is also a smile that "one erects between oneself and others...[like] a screen hiding an emptiness that has been deliberately created as an ultimate defense against any who might wish to penetrate the secret of one's innermost thoughts."

Much of Angkor was broken—you can see it in its patches—suggesting not only the passage of time, perhaps seven or eight hundred years of erosion, but also epochs of severe trauma. It was built in a succession of historical periods; it was damaged and much of it destroyed over time, too, shattered by the Siamese in the fifteenth century, subsequently by marauders, and as recently as twenty-five years ago, when it was besieged by the Khmer Rouge and the whole sacred city became a battlefield.

Angkor is also a place of human damage, crudely appropriate to the legless and armless statues and smashed images. I had hired a tuk-tuk—this one a motorcycle pulling a small two-wheeled carriage. It was mood-softening, breezy, slow going. The biker, Ong, didn't know much about Angkor, but he was patient and ferried me around all day. I had a guidebook and a map and made my own way.

I often came upon the victims of Cambodia's more recent violence—amputees, the land mine victims, human amputees among amputated statues. (Guidebook: "Cambodia has more than 40,000 amputees, more per capita than any other country in the world.")

Deep in the jungle at Ta Prohm Temple, along the narrow grassy path, a whole orchestra of land mine victims played music on gongs and flutes and stringed instruments—music that tore at my heart, for its beauty and for its being played by blind men, and one-legged men, and men with missing fingers or burned and bandaged arms. With their prosthetic legs neatly stacked to the side, their twanging music rose in counterpoint to the forest screech, the ringing whine of cicadas, the loud peeping of insects, the squealing of bats.

Near another labyrinthine temple called Banteay Kdei, I was strolling along and saw what looked like a group of small schoolboys posing for a picture—or was it a choral group? There were thirty of them standing in three rows, the tallest boys in the back row, though none was very big. They stood straight, facing forward, smiling.

I said hello and asked the man near them who they were.

"Orphans, sir."

The man, Sean Samnang, ran an orphanage in Siem Reap. He went in search of homeless children and orphans, and fed and trained them.

I had been encountering beggars in large numbers since arriving in north India. It was as though there were a whole underclass of people, millions, whose livelihood depended on begging. I wondered why these particular children were so affecting—and not just them but the amputees and the solemn women crouching near a basket of coins. Was it because they seemed so reluctant, such hesitant beggars? I would defy any passerby to resist emptying his wallet, confronted by the sad smiles of thirty children standing shoulder to shoulder by the roadside, with the utterance "Orphans, sir."

Cambodians could be forthright, rude, conditioned by their harsh recent history—toughened and taught survival skills by the years of tyranny. Yet even these hardened people were no match for the wave of visitors, the sex tourists and predators, that were the reason for the many signs forbidding sex with children and warning of penalties for child rape. Throughout Angkor, all around Siem Reap, were signs saying Report Sexual Exploitation.

I asked Ong, my tuk-tuk driver, if he knew anything about this.

Now and then, he said, men visiting from Europe would hire him as a driver and ask him to find them young boys.

"How young?"

"Just kids, little boys," Ong said. "But it's wrong. And I don't know any."

"What about Cambodian men—do they ask?"

"Never. But one man from Switzerland ask me for a ride on my motorbike. He sit behind me and touch me—here and here. I was so frightened! I don't know what to do. He say me, 'Come up my hotel room. I give you money.' I say no. I no like to think about it. I so scare."