The King’s Last Song

‘And I will hear you in my head,’ promised the Prince. ‘Now. Eat.’

April 13, April 14, 2004 (#ulink_1eb8db40-a092-5083-bae6-a2e370a10229)

People heard the shots and thought at first that they were fire-works.

Then sirens streamed out towards the airport and ambulances screamed back. Soldiers had been shot. It was said the King had left his residence, his large dark-windowed car squealing as it pulled out of the drive.

Pirates in the back of pick-up trucks drove around the city, their faces covered with kramars. They had guns and took aim at hotel signs. All along the airport road, it was said, every hotel sign had been shot. Tourists walking on Sivutha Street had been screamed at. They turned, and saw a rifle and a deadly grin pointed straight at them.

Cambodians in town for New Year scurried to their cars with suitcases. Traffic began to build. More shots were heard. Buses full of tourists came back from the airport and gathered in the hotels, forlornly asking if they could have their rooms back. At New Year? ‘I don’t know what’s goin’ on,’ said an American. ‘But they closed the airport. No more flights and all these big ugly dudes are stopping all the traffic and checking everybody’s bags.’

Then the power went. The hotels outlined in Christmas-tree lights, all the blazing karaoke signs, and all the brightly lit forecourts fell dark. In an instant, the music booming out of beer gardens and bars went silent.

People panicked. The last time the Khmers Rouges attacked Siem Reap was in 1993, and it was just like this. They closed the airport and the power station.

Soon the streets leading out of Siem Reap were crowded with unmoving cars stuffed with plastic bags, aunts, and wide-eyed children. Workers trudged home, holding their good city shoes and walking barefoot. Dust billowed up like a fog. Murky car headlights crept through it. Motorcycles weaved unsteadily around pedestrians. A woman lay on the side of the road, unconscious, bundles scattered, her tummy being plucked by anxious, helpful passers-by.

Just outside town, the cars encountered the first roadblocks. Furious-looking soldiers pulled people out of cars and emptied luggage onto the street.

‘Our colleagues have been shot and killed!’ the soldiers shouted.

People despaired. Was war really still this close? All it took was a few shots, and here they were, repeating history. Evacuating the city.

It’s late in the evening at New Year, but the restaurants outside Angkor Wat are dark and silent.

The temple guards are glad.

Normally at New Year, cars stop at the crossroads to beam their headlights on the temple towers. From across the moat, the karaoke drums, the pounding of feet and voices, the revving of engines, the celebratory beeping of car horns and the light-scattering mist of exhaust fumes, all would usually have risen up as a haze of light and noise.

This New Year, poor people keep their privilege of having Angkor Wat to themselves at night. Only moonlight shines on the temple. The towers are ice-blue and streaked with black like solidified ghosts. Bats flit across the moon.

The guards sit on the steps of the main temple entrance, the gopura, at the end of the long causeway. APSARA guides and Patrimony Police relax together. They lean against the wall in shorts or kramars and wish each other Happy New Year in quiet voices that the night swallows up.

Poor people still have to work. Village boys lead their oxen to pasture in the wide grounds of the temple enclosure. Farmers putter past on motorcycles.

The temple guards share a meal of rice and fish from plastic bags. They’ve pooled together four dollars to buy twelve tins of beer, and they are all tipsy.

‘Did you see those city people run? They all came through here going Uhhhhhh!’ An APSARA guide waves his hands in mock terror. He sports bicycling shorts with Velcro pockets: his best clothes.

‘Oh! Oh! Somebody turned out the lights, it is a disaster!’ They mock their richer cousins.

‘They all sleep out here tonight.’

‘Good, let the mosquitoes bite them for a change.’

In the hot dry season there are few insects, except in the temple park with its sweltering moats. The guards slap their arms and wipe their legs almost unconsciously. Malaria is as common as a cold. They get sick; they go to bed.

Map sits with them wearing only his underpants. His police uniform is laid out on the steps like shed skin.

Map is about to go to work. He will walk the corridors armed until about midnight. Then he will string his hammock across the main entrance and get some sleep.

Once he caught thieves hauling off a celestial maiden they had hacked out of a wall. Chopping Angkor Wat, what jerks! He opened fire and they ran. Everybody thought that they’d got away with the treasure, but Map knew they couldn’t run that fast with a statue. He figured out which way they’d gone, and so he went swimming. Sure enough, they’d hidden her in the moat, to come back for her later. So he camped out by that moat for weeks and got all five of them. Just kids. Man, they’d been in prison for years.

One of the APSARA guides sighs and stretches. ‘I get to go home and see my wife next week. That will be my New Year.’

‘New Year is not always such good luck.’

‘Tooh! That is true.’

The guide has a story. ‘My village is out towards Kompong Thom on Highway 6. Every year they have the party on the road. They don’t think that trucks ever come that way anymore.’

Map’s says in his quiet spooked voice, ‘It used to be dangerous to drive that road.’

The guide from Kompong Thom holds his ground and keeps talking. ‘One year all the kids were out on the road singing, and at midnight a truck came driving through. It just smashed into the kids. It was like the war all over again. Bad, bad luck, all that year, for everybody.’

‘Then bad luck for us this year as well,’ says one of the police. The theft of the Golden Book has been big news.

Map’s face settles into a lazy, hooded grin. ‘I drove that road when the Army told you not to do it. I wanted to go to Phnom Penh to see this girl, and they said, you go that way those bastards at Kompong Thom will steal our motorcycle.’

The guard from Kompong Thom chuckles. ‘Did we?’

‘No. I killed all you guys.’ More chuckles, heads shaken. Map is always extreme. He sits up and mimes riding a motorcycle one handed, while armed. ‘I tell you. I had one automatic here. I had my grenade here, my buddy was on the back and he had his grenades too. We had guns like a tiger has teeth. We just drove, man, no lights. We drove full speed across bridges that were just one plank of wood. Nobody touched us.’

‘What about the girl?’

Map beams. ‘She touched us.’

They all laugh. Map shakes his head, with the same sleepy smile. ‘She was a nice girl, my buddy’s sister. Oh, she was beautiful. I thought I would get married to her and then me and my buddy, you know, we’d make a new family for ourselves. He was like me, all his family dead. It was a good thought. A meritorious action.’ He raises his can of beer up in salute. It’s empty. ‘More bad luck.’

A motorcycle coughs its way towards them from the main gate. ‘Oh man,’ says Map. He recognizes the sound of this particular bike.

‘Bad luck,’ grunts an APSARA guard.

Map calls out in English. ‘Mister, you want cold beer?’

The guards murmur laughter. Nobody else treats the Captain this way. Map is so rude.

The causeway is high off the ground and the steps are higher still. Map’s boss Captain Prey straddles his bike four metres below them. He shines a torch up at them. ‘Ch’nam t’mei,’ he says to the men who murmur respectfully back. Then he raises his voice. ‘Chubby. How can you be wearing even less of your uniform than normal?’

Map’s smile is thin, like a snake’s. ‘I could be naked.’

‘Wild man,’ says Kompong Thom with something like affection. Map is famous for shunning the police village and camping out in the woods around the temple, as if it were still wartime.

His boss laughs, weary and tough. ‘I tell you, one day I’ll come past here and you will not be modest.’

‘You can come and guard all night too if you like.’

‘If I see your bum in this temple, you’re fired, OK, no job.’ Captain Prey sounds mad, but not that mad. It’s New Year and Map is at his post. I do my job, thought Map, just in my own way.