My first motorbike ride in Phnom Penh didn't bring me where I had intended to go, though I didn't realize this until two days later. Apparently I had asked to be taken to the riverside, the area where all the luxury hotels are located and where one can find a very decent room in a guesthouse for 5 USD, but instead was brought to the eastern shore of Beng Kok (Beng Lake), where all the backpacker guesthouses are situated. A simple misunderstanding considering that I was a girl with a backpack and the moto driver obviously spoke no English.

In the end, I benefited from the confusion. The lakeside guesthouses all have open air restaurants on the water where you can sit for hours and watch the rainy season lightening storms or contemplate the movement of the floating vegetation. I was charmed by the atmosphere and stayed a week at the Number Nine Guesthouse, a pretty little rat-infested oasis from the city.

Number Nine is built right over the lake, with one edge of the restaurant and 3 rows of rooms forming a little courtyard of water in the middle. There are plants everywhere, big-leaved bushes creating little enclaves for tables, and hammocks strung up in the space not occupied by carved wooden chairs. It was from this idyllic scene that one day I set out into the dark past of Cambodia with Ya, a local moto driver, as my guide.

Any visitor to Phnom Penh will eventually end up at the Choeung Ek Memorial, one of the infamous 'killing fields' made famous by the American movie of the same name, and the lesser known Tuol Sleng prison turned 'genocide museum' which no Hollywood film maker has dared to bring to the international eye. These places are only two among many which were used by Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea regime, otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge, to imprison, torture and kill all those deemed in opposition to Angkar (the name used by the regime to refer to itself). Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated twenty percent of Cambodia's population died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. This was the extent of my knowledge on the subject when Ya and I left early in the morning bound for the killing fields.

It had rained the night before (as is usual for Cambodia in May) and the unpaved road that led out of Phnom Penh was a muddy mess, made worse by the early morning traffic of trucks, motorbikes, bicycles and the occasional car. The road gradually improved and soon we were swerving around the enormous potholes at top speed, flying past shanty houses with chickens and waving children in the dusty yards.

We arrived at Choeung Ek in thirty minutes. It was quiet. Surprisingly green. An eerily peaceful landscape surrounded by shanties and dirt, with huge depressions where the bodies of over 8000 people were uncovered. There is a massive glass pagoda in the center where the bones of the murdered are arranged by age, from child to grandmother, tier by tier, stacked high above your head. There are little wooden signs next to each depression which give the number of bodies found in that particular hole. The grassy edges where I stood was where, only 25 years ago, people were lined up, hit on the back of the head and killed with an object they never saw, for a crime like knowing French. Or wearing glasses. Or being the family member of one who did.

I walked around in a kind of daze, chatting absently with the three children who were orbiting my legs, practicing their English. One guided me to a lady selling lotus flowers in front of the pagoda. I bought one and put it in a vase for the dead. I wandered back to the entrance and found Ya, who is 24 and whose father and brother were killed by the KR, eating noodles and chatting with the other moto drivers just outside the entrance. He smiled when he saw me. After he'd finished his quick breakfast, we got back on the bike, bound for Tuol Sleng, the prison where many of the killing field victims were held before execution.

On the way I watched the scenery fly by - the beautiful water filled rice paddies that reflect the sky like glass, naked children laughing and dancing with a wind-filled plastic bag. I chatted with Ya about his family, his life of constant work, his aviator glasses. He moved from the western countryside to Phnom Penh six years ago so he could work as a moto driver. He doesn't like the city, but the money is good. His father was a teacher. His mother still lives in his hometown which is only 30 kilometers from Phnom Penh, but since the roads are so bad and he has to wait for the ferries, the journey takes over an hour. He hasn't been home in two years.

The roads got smaller and became alleyways as we wove our way back into Phnom Penh. I reached behind and held the back of the seat as we swerved around an oncoming motorbike, avoiding a crash by an inch. Suddenly we were in front of the gates of Tuol Sleng.

Also known as S-21 (Security Office 21), Tuol Sleng prison was originally a high school in the early seventies, before the KR came into power, closed all institutions and evacuated the city. An hour long documentary shown in an air-conditioned room on the third floor (the only air-conditioning I encountered during my stay in Phnom Penh), revealed a slew of lurid details about the conditions of the prison, and tear-streaked interviews with ex-Khmer Rouge officials and a few family members of victims. There were no interviews with survivors though. Of the 20,000 people that were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, seven lived through it.

When the documentary was over, the audience filed out of the room in silence, faces to the floor. I looked out across the courtyard from the open-air hallway. Tuol Sleng is composed of three buildings arranged around a rectangular yard. The classrooms were converted into prison cells and torture chambers; some preserved so you can see the conditions people were kept in, some cleared for exhibitions of torture mechanisms or photos of the thousands that were incarcerated. You can walk through the mass prison cells where people slept on the bare floor, 20 or 30 of them in a row, their feet shackled to a six meter iron bar, beaten if they spoke or moved. You can see the rooms of the ground floor that were sectioned off into tiny single person prison cells, the chains that bound ankles still embedded in the concrete 25 years later. The air is oppressive, the gruesome reality of human capability is suffocating. It oozes out of the ceilings and the walls, out of the space around the bed frames on which the prisoners were tortured. Photos hang on the walls above the beds showing human shapes, faces obscured or beaten off, it's hard to tell; nothing is immediately recognizable in those tangled masses of mutilation. Whole lives reduced to crumpled heaps on metal springs, hovering over a pool of splattered blood.

I didn't take pictures.
This is not a tourist attraction.

I wandered around feeling sick, but not wanting to leave until I'd seen it all because this is REAL, this is something that happened in the not so distant past, something that occurred in my life time, our life time, and is probably still going on somewhere else at this very moment. This is part of Ya's life, this might be where his father was kept. This is how they all suffered and though there's nothing one can do about it now, we can dignify their suffering with our acknowledgement, our willingness to know the past, the steeling of our stomachs to face the simple information. We did not have to live through this.

The final rooms are pasted with faces. Thousands of faces, covering the walls, photos of those that were arrested by the KR because they were considered a threat to the regime. This hall of lives is mesmerizing. I walked slowly, looking into the eyes of the people who were murdered, giving a face and a place in history to each. Men, women, children, grandparents, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, each face frozen in time, forever young, forever old, forever terrified, surprised, impenetrable, angry, even smiling... I stood for a long time in front of the ones that are smiling.

The sun was beating down on me when I stepped into the courtyard. It was past noon and the heat was at it's height. Ya walked towards me with a smile. I squinted in the sunlight and followed his blurry shape. He didn't say anything and I got on the bike in silence. We rode slowly down the alleyway, and Ya asked me where I wanted to go. I didn't know, my mind was blank, but I couldn't go back to the guesthouse yet. So that's what I told him. He suggested I go to the riverside. Very nice, he said. I nodded. He chatted amiably on the way, and though at first I didn't feel like talking, I slowly came out of my daze and started chatting with him.

And suddenly I realized, in Cambodia, what's gone is gone.

Ya dropped me at the river promenade and, driving off with five bucks in his pocket, he waved and smiled. I smiled back, sweating in the sun, but suddenly cooled by a little breeze that blew across the water.

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