Cambodian Book of the Dead Read Online Free Page B

opening act for the communist revolution of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, that managed to kill off a quarter of the country’s population in less than four short years. The genocide was choked off by the Vietnamese, unwelcome liberators, and almost two decades of civil war followed. Finally, UNTAC, the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia, had shown up, organised elections of sorts and had then fled the burnt out, tired country as quickly as possible. The last Khmer Rouge fighters had thrown in their blood-soaked towels in 1997 and joined the county’s government troops. Maier had stood right next to them. It had been a painful process.
    Since then, Cambodia had known peace – of sorts.
    The women were beautiful. It had always been like that, if you were to believe the silent stone reliefs of countless apsaras , the heavenly dancers of the Angkor Empire that graced thousand-year-old temple walls in the west of the country. The highly paid UN soldiers had noticed the sensuousness of the women too and had promptly introduced AIDS, which now provided the only international headlines of this otherwise forgotten Buddhist kingdom – a kingdom that had ruled over much of Southeast Asia eight hundred years ago. Past, present and future, it was all the same, every child in Cambodia knew that. Maier was looking forward to it. All of it.
    The plane made a wide curve and barely straightened for its landing approach, descending now with the coordination of an uncertain drunk towards the runway. The sky was gun-metal grey. Dark, heavy clouds hung low to the east of the city over the Tonlé Sap Lake. The country below looked dusty and abandoned. Here and there Maier spotted a swamp in this semi-arid desert, an old rubbish-filled fish pond or a clogged-up irrigation canal. Dots of sick colour spilled on a blank, diseased landscape.
    The aircraft abruptly lost altitude. Glittering temple roofs amidst the grey metal sheds of the poor that spread like a cancer around the airport, shot past. Beyond the partially collapsed perimeter fence, children dressed in rags raced across unpaved roads or dug their way through gigantic piles of refuse. The Wild East. This didn’t look like Prague or Krakow.
    The Cambodian Air Travel flight began to shake like a dying bird and Maier could not help but overhear one of the passengers in the seats behind him, a dour but voluptuous Austrian woman. What was he thinking?
    â€œGerhard, are we crashing? Will we die, Gerhard?”
    Maier was just able to spot a few skinny cows grazing peacefully on the edge of the runway. Then they were down.
    Welcome to Cambodia.

 
    THE PEARL OF ASIA
    Â 
    â€œVodka orange, please.”
    The Foreign Correspondents Club, the FCC, was Maier’s first port of call in Phnom Penh. As the sun set, Maier sat on the front terrace on the first floor of the handsome French colonial-era corner building and watched the action along Sisowath Quay, the wide road that ran along the banks of the Tonlé Sap River. Since his last visit three years earlier, things had changed. Some of the roads in town had been resurfaced and in the daytime, the city was safe. Amnesties and disarmament programs run by the government and international aid organisations had wrestled the guns from the hands of the kids.
    Sisowath Quay woke up in the late afternoon and made a half-hearted attempt to resurrect the flair of the Fifties, when the Cambodian capital had been known as the Pearl of the East. Half the establishments along the river road were called something like L’Indochine, Pastis was served on the sidewalks and the cute young waitresses in their figure-hugging uniforms had learned to say bonjour . The bistros, bars and restaurants did brisk business with the tourists who had, looking for temples, somehow got lost and ended up in the city. A few galleries had opened, offering huge and garish oil paintings of Angkor Wat to less discerning visitors. Too loud