prison. Because when you go to jail you get registered, because a Westerner would be conspicuous, because the prison grapevine could reach the wrong ears. No, it’s better to avoid official places of detention.
He’s a ghost prisoner.
From the moment he was taken, it’s been a steady descent into hell. His malarial fever comes on in violent waves; in its worst moments, it gives him hallucinations. Weeks, months of physical and psychological torture have done him in.
They wake him up in the middle of the night to move him to another jail. He’s thrown into rural cells in remote villages surrounded by rice paddies and swamps that extend as far as the eye can see. His minders are dull-eyed men and women who watch him without understanding what they’re seeing. They plainly feel neither interest nor pity. They’re specters. Anonymous extras in a world devastated by unremitting violence. Its ferocity has something pathological about it, and it unites everyone, victims and executioners, transforming them into bombs ready to explode over a trifle.
A third of Cambodia’s population disappeared at the hands of the Khmer Rouge; between 1975 and 1979, in less than four years’ time, whole generations were wiped out. The genocide and the infinite cruelty of those years subsequently played a large role in shaping the culture and attitudes of the population. Hun Sen, prime minister since 1993 and dictator since 1998, is a former Khmer Rouge with total control over his country.
More than thirty years have passed since 1975, but very little has changed. Death can come for revenge, for repression, for political expediency. That’s the particular kind of justice that the regime considers appropriate. And often, indispensable.
The land mines in Cambodia’s rural and mountainous regions have never been cleared. Every day people with shattered faces and mangled limbs are transported to Preah Monivong. Perhaps their lives will be saved. Others less fortunate don’t even make the trip to the hospital. Their fragments are collected and put in a bag, and the bag winds up in a pit. Or gets burned.
The violence is palpable, breathable. You can see it in people’s gestures and in their eyes. Poverty, desperation, horror. And the loss of all hope. That’s the Cambodian blend.
Preah Monivong Hospital’s prison ward is a big room with metal cots for beds. Many prisoners, especially the “politicals,” are chained to their cots. The common toilet area, on the left side of the room, contains a large earthenware jar with water the prisoners can use to perform their “ablutions.” As to the rest, there’s a latrine and no provision whatsoever for privacy. Waste is channeled into a fetid collector in the middle of the floor, where a hole swallows everything. Suffocating heat and decomposing organic matter provide the ideal habitat for gigantic cockroaches and for huge rats straight out of horror films. At night, these enormous rodents scurry across the floor and feed on whatever they find. To avoid being bitten on the legs, you have to barricade your cot and lie there hoping no rat will be bold enough to mount your barricade.
Meanwhile, barely a hundred meters away, city life goes on as usual. A door, a little yard with a two-meter gate, and a former garden now used as a dump separate the hospital’s prison ward from the center of the capital. The chaos of Boulevard Pasteur is around the corner, not far from the main market. In Preah Monivong, people die from torture or privation in the middle of the city, where others are living and rushing about and shopping.
Kasper knows that right now death is close, only an instant away. Maybe it would be a liberation. Even that thought has crossed his mind in certain moments. Then he regretted it: no self-pity, no sniveling. He mustn’t give in. He doesn’t want to die.
Kasper wanted to be hospitalized. He tried as hard as he could to get in. It’s possible to escape from hospitals. Or at least you can try. It’s surely easier than breaking out of regular prisons.
And so he has a project.
He receives his daily food ration, which the guard procures from somewhere outside the room. Kasper tries to eat. “Chicken” and stewed vegetables. He closes his eyes and brings some food to his mouth. Maybe his response is just psychological, but today the food seems worse than usual. He gulps down the first mouthful, then the second. He finishes in two minutes and then forces himself not to think about it.
What day is today?
He lost track some time ago.
It’s July 2008, more or less, perhaps the nineteenth. His fiftieth birthday. Turning fifty in the Hospital of Horrors.
He blows out a little imaginary candle.
Happy birthday, old boy.
—
The last time he was in touch with his family, Patty and his mother told him the foreign minister would be taking an interest in his case. Attorney Barbara Belli was working to bring about a government initiative.
An initiative.
People in the Farnesina Palace, the seat of the foreign ministry, say they’ll do it. They’ve been saying so for weeks. He’s skeptical. He knows how those things work. Too much time has passed by now.
He’s about to stretch out on his cot again when he becomes aware of a presence very close to him.
The man has the moustache and beard of a lone yachtsman. His blue shirt accents his pale blue eyes. He’s tall and burly, maybe seventy years old. Another Westerner in the hospital ward for Cambodian prisoners. It could be he belongs to a humanitarian organization. Maybe he’s a doctor. Or something like that.
“I know you,” the old man says, without coming too near. “Damn, I’m sure I’ve met you before. I even think I know where. We had some drinks together one evening. My name’s Jan. Jan van Veen.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Yes, of course,” he says with a smile. “But in economic science.”
Kasper takes a closer look at him. Dutch, judging by his name and his English. No, he’s not familiar. “Well, Doctor van Veen,” Kasper says, “I’m—”
“Sharky’s!” van Veen exclaims. “Aren’t you the Italian who owns Sharky’s, here in Phnom Penh? We had drinks together. A year ago, maybe a bit less. I was at dinner with two friends, two Englishwomen, and you sent us a bottle of champagne. You were really great to do that. We’ve often talked about you, the girls and I. You don’t remember. . . . Your partner was there too, the American with the white beard. . . . Everybody calls him . . . Wait . . .”
“Clancy.”
“The very same! A great character, that American. Look, I must thank you again. It was Veuve Clicquot, if I remember correctly. My favorite.”
Mine too, Kasper feels like saying. But instead he simply asks, “So what the devil are you doing here, Jan van Veen?”
“I came here to see a guy who used to work for me. He got in trouble with the law, and then he got sick. I came to see how he is.”
“And how is he?”
“Worse off than you. He can’t last long.” The Dutchman lowers his voice. “What happened to you? How did you wind up in this place?”
It’s a long story, Kasper would like to warn him. I was ambushed, he thinks. Betrayed. But he decides to say something that seems easier.
