Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

All this time we were traveling along the wide brown inland sea, under a cloudless sky, in sunshine that blistered my face and arms. My perch on the cabin roof was so bright and so blowy, I had given up trying to read—it was Robin Lane Fox's biography, Alexander the Great. A shore appeared to the south, and as we approached it, a shore to the north became apparent as a black line in the distance. Farther on, the shores closed in, and houses on stilts teetered at their banks. In the distance was a large gold temple, and then we passed through a break in the shore that narrowed to a river. This was the Tonle Sap River, the major outlet from the lake, which joined the Mekong at Phnom Penh and continued south through Vietnam.

While the sun beat down on our heads, frying us on the boat's metal roof that was like a griddle, Mark told me about the storms on his ferry run to the Aleutians, the days of fog, the way the whole boat would ice up and freeze and become top-heavy and unstable. In the distance I could see some half-naked men tossing fishing nets and others pulling up crab pots.

Borne by the current, we passed higher banks, bigger houses, riverside settlements, fishing boats, motorboats, and fortified embankments. The houses piled up and became more dense, and the city appeared as we approached the landing stages.

***

PHNOM PENH HAD A SCRUFFY, rather beaten-up look, like a scarred human face in which its violent past was evident; it was a city that had suffered extreme punishment of a kind that was impossible to conceal. It was a city under repair, which is also the look of a city falling apart, and there were very poor neighborhoods, but unlike India, it was poverty without squalor. There are architectural marvels in Phnom Penh—the royal palace, residence of Sihanouk's successor, Prince Ranariddh (Cambodia had reverted to being a kingdom), the national museum with its imposing collection of Angkor treasures and statuary, some colonial-era villas, the main post office, the Grand Market, some temples—yet instead of raising the tone of the city, these dignified buildings only made the rest of it look worse.

Spelled out in pebbles underwater near a temple, I found the message If you want a good rebirth you must liberate from the delusions. It seemed to me that Cambodians had few delusions. Within recent memory, they had seen everything—terror, starvation, mass murder. They had needed to be tough to survive, so they did not have the geniality of Thais or the dreamy obliqueness of Burmese or the practicality of Singaporeans. But even the streetwise Cambodians in the city, who were direct and demanding, were capable of graceful gestures. With good reason, they had lost hope in the promises of government and justice. Once, in casual conversation with a Cambodian, I said I'd like to come back someday. He looked at me with disbelief. He said, "Why you want to do this?"

It seemed incredible to him that anyone would want to return to this death-haunted country. He wanted to leave Cambodia; everyone he knew wanted to leave. Phnom Penh was thronged by pedestrians, by cycle rickshaws and scooters. No one had money for cars. That alone made it picturesque for me, trying hard not to be a romantic voyeur, though it was obviously a struggle for everyone else.

For superficial reasons, I was happy—happy in the way the big pink middle-aged men were happy in Cambodia, though most of them were in beach towns like Sihanoukville. It was one of the greatest places in the world to be a barfly. Cheap beer, good food, fine weather, and any number of congenial companions—other barflies and beautiful women who, it seemed, had little else to do but watch you drink and smile.

On a side street of Phnom Penh, at Sharkey's bar, one of many such bars, big ugly Western men drank beer and played pool in the company of small pretty Cambodian women, who pawed them and poured their drinks. This arrangement is a kind of heaven for many men. It was the atmosphere of cheap beer and mild debauchery I had seen all those years ago in Vientiane. It wasn't outdated; it had just moved farther down the Mekong River.

"What do you want?" the tuk-tuk drivers asked in Phnom Penh with a smile, confident that they could provide anything I named—heroin, a massage, a woman, a man, someone to marry, a child to adopt, a bowl of noodles, or a souvenir T-shirt.

As in Siem Reap, the Phnom Penh hotels ranged from the luxurious to the basic. The sumptuously furnished and Frenchified chateaus like Le Royal, set in walled compounds with guards posted outside, had rooms for $500 a night; at the other end, the little side-street pension where Mark Lane was staying was $15 a night. But his room had no windows. I found a hotel overlooking the river for $25 a night, with breakfast. Since Burma, my usual morning meal had been noodles or a mound of rice with a fried egg on top.