George Fetherling's Travel Memoirs 3-Book Bundle. George FetherlingЧитать онлайн книгу.
indestructible type known to Canadians as Tilleys, after their Vancouver manufacturer). Soon he stepped out and walked toward the road where mobile-phone reception was evidently better. I watched the pantomime of him making several calls. I presumed he was arranging our next stop — possibly at some dilapidated guest house in Battambang, run by another imaginary family member, where he would receive yet another kickback. Suddenly he snapped shut the jaw of his phone and we were off down the road once again.
At length, we did indeed make it to Battambang, capital of the next province along, an old community, but one that hasn’t been part of Cambodia for very long — not in historical terms. Starting in the fifteenth century and for much of its existence thereafter, it was fought over by the Siamese, the Burmese, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, and, in a nasty series of civil wars, by the Khmers themselves. The first of these groups, the Thais, proved the longest-lived rulers. For more than a century, from 1795 to 1907, the title of lord protector, the name given to the overlord appointed by the Thais, was held by successive members of a single family. It was during the latter half of this period that the French, who already had the other part of modern Cambodia in their shopping basket, were scheming and finagling to get control of this area, as well. Among the advantages they saw there were the riches of Chuor Phnom Kravanh — the Cardamom Mountains. This range is the primary source of cardamom, a plant that is a relative of the ginger and whose black seeds are a herbal medicine as well as a spice. In the olden days, cardamom merchants from France — plump bearded men wearing white linen suits and sola topis — would turn up each year to bargain for the harvest and arrange for its shipment to Europe.
However difficult life was for the Khmers under the French, it was better than life under the Thais had been. There was a suffocating caste system somewhat like that of India, but in one sense worse. Khnhom or slaves comprised a large segment of society and their children became slaves, as well. Most were debtors, captured enemy soldiers or petty criminals. The fate of those in the third category easily might have been worse. Painful, degrading, and often hideous punishments were selected from an extensive menu. In those days before the French introduced the non-judgmental guillotine, prisoners, each wearing a red flower in his hair, were executed, sometimes extrajudicially, by an official who first bound them in front of an open pit and then performed an elaborate circular dance before decapitating them. Rules forbade a prisoner to be killed all by himself; the victims were always dispatched in pairs. The executioner’s weapon was a sword called srey khmav: the Black Lady. It was the personal property of the lord governor.
The lords governor owned all the rice fields, as well. They collected confiscatory taxes on the people who worked them and also on those who picked the cardamom seeds (thus igniting the Cardamom Rebellion of 1898, the only uprising against Thai rule). The last of the line of lords governor was said to possess an ice machine; everyone else did without this valuable commodity. The middle and lower classes lived on crocodile meat, fish, and vegetables. They got along mostly by means of subsistence farming and a few crafts. For example, they made both paper fans and gunpowder. For the latter, they used saltpetre they mined themselves, but the finished product was of such poor quality that it could be used only for cheap fireworks. Travel was often by elephant or buffalo. (When the French took over in 1907, they found that only four people in the province owned bicycles.) This particular bit of Indochina was in surprising ways both less Indian and less Chinese than one might expect. Battambang was a society without, for example, restaurants, tailors or barbers, though it was one that was avid for cockfighting and particularly rich in odd folk beliefs. When first the French administration and then the Catholic Church established hospitals in Battambang, the Khmers boycotted them on superstitious grounds.
A crude census taken in 1884 by the French, who were well on their way to supplanting the Thais through a policy of exploiting the complex ethnic animosities and wars, recorded six thousand Chinese in the province out of a total population of more than a hundred thousand. There were also Vietnamese, Burmese, Lao, and Javanese people, but surprisingly few actual Thais, only about eight hundred. Among the dominant Khmer population, however, were twenty thousand “Khmer who claim to be Thai.” Thais got control again, from 1941 to 1946, when the French temporarily lost the colonies to the Japanese.
Battambang today is much less interesting than the above might lead you to expect. One drives into town past an enormously long wall that supports a contemporary sculpture, donated by an admirer in California, in which scores of male figures in a line are holding a mammoth cobra: a retelling of the snake goddess legend. Then one crosses over the Sangker (also known, more quaintly, as the Sângkê), a river that, like numerous others in Cambodia, has been canalized as a flood-control measure. Then it’s right into the centre of the city where some of the large public buildings, such as the Commissariat de la police, are shabby and poor-looking. The best preserved is the former French governor’s mansion, painted the same shade of yellow one sees on old official buildings in this part of the world wherever the Tricolour once flew. There is a museum in town, open again after a long closure, and accessible by pounding on the massive metal doors suggesting the gates of a castle. It’s a tiny place given over to early Khmer carvings and other artworks, labelled in French in the most basic, and, well, primitive way in terms of museumology. Three or four staff sat at one end of the single room, playing cards and gossiping in low tones appropriate to the august surroundings. The place smells like a tomb.
In sharp contrast to Siem Reap, as little as three or four hours away by fast boat, depending on the stage of the river, Battambang has few foreigners. I saw none, in fact. This was a far cry from a decade or so ago when United Nations troops and bureaucrats were there. For Battambang is a market town, pure and simple. Certainly the multi-storey indoor/outdoor market is the scene of whatever activity exists. It squats, tumbling down slowly, in a large square, round which young people, desperate with the boredom of small-town youth, race their motos while yakking on their mobiles. At one end of the market is an art deco clock tower of four or five storeys; the clock mechanism itself was removed years ago, so that the only way one could determine the time of day would be by using the tower as a sundial. At ground level, three generations of women, who seem to be given spots in the shade on the basis of their seniority, haggle with potential customers over the price of vegetables. Just as so many markets in Europe or America once did, this one has a small and utterly unprepossessing hotel nearby (Hotel Paris Hotel — a Chinese establishment) to serve the needs of farmers who have travelled some distance to sell their produce.
I heard no French, indeed saw no French on signs or in newspapers. The old story I have heard so often all over Asia grows inexorably truer with time: English, English of a kind at least, is becoming the second language (though the future probably favours Mandarin instead). A few years ago one might have expected “Gecko Café — Good food, drinks & foot massage” to signify an expat establishment. But not necessarily any longer, or at least not here. It was full of Khmer youth who are encouraged to drive their motos right up to the bar. Along the river there are still old shophouses from the French period, many of them decayed, one burned, a large number of them functioning as mobile phone shops. In the market I found one shophouse with a stepped roof, like a house in Amsterdam. It can only have been built by someone from northern France. Otherwise, as far as my ears could detect, there was only the sound of the wind erasing the faint traces of European colonialism.
— DIPLOMACY —
The following day, as we were driving back to Phnom Penh, I could tell that Vorn was up to something, but I couldn’t tell what. Finally, not more than an hour away from the metropolis, he let it slip with perfect timing. Permit me to summarize what was in fact a long conversation often interrupted by honking at water buffalo and other drivers.
When all of Cambodia’s cumulative military troubles — Americans, rebels, Pol Pot, Vietnamese, peacekeepers — finally subsided, the country was left with an enormous stockpile of small arms and ammunition, tonne upon tonne of the stuff, cached or abandoned and turning up everywhere. If properly stored, ammunition can have a very long life before becoming unstable. Clever businessmen, testing entrepreneurial instincts that had lain dormant during long years of totally state-driven economics, started buying up the stuff and opening shooting