he is wearing a spotlessly clean brown police uniform, and he seems to be patrolling Angkor Wat in some official capacity. As if in passing and wanting nothing from you, he starts explaining the pools to you in good English. The four dry basins you see so high up in Angkor Wat symbolize the four great rivers flowing from Mount Meru.
The information is of better quality than you expected. You smile, say thanks and try to edge away, dreading another request for money.
‘You’ve missed the main bas-reliefs,’ he warns, again as if in an official capacity. ‘Come this way.’ He leads you down steps, to the bas-relief gallery. The stone is polished, the detail amazing. Map explains scenes from the Mahabarat and the Ramayana. He turns a corner and explains that the roof of this gallery is how all the galleries would have looked.
You might ask him if he is a trained tourist guide. He tells you, ‘I work for Professor Luc Andrade of the United Nations dig team. I do their website.’
That throws you for a moment. Who is this guy?
He points to carved soldiers in strange uniforms. ‘These are mercenaries. Nobody trust those guys,’ he says. ‘Like me. I used to be Khmer Rouge, but I changed sides and joined Hun Sen. They made me march in front, to step on landmines.’
Then he tells you, smiling, that he guarded a Pol Pot camp. It wasn’t a camp; it was a village, in a commune; but Map knows what Westerners expect. He knows he has you hooked.
He takes you on a tour of hell, the long bas-relief of people being tortured. Map lists them all for you.
The frying pan, for people who kill embryos.
Pot baking for trusted people who steal from gurus.
Forest of palm trees for people who cut down trees unduly …
‘We need that in Cambodia now,’ he says and smiles. ‘People cut down all our forest.’
He points to someone hammering nails into people’s bones. ‘I was that guy there,’ he says.
Howling, for those who are degraded …
Today, 11th April, Map gets up later than William does, but then he worked all night. He’s a Patrimony Policeman, protecting Angkor from art thieves. He sleeps off and on in a hammock strung across the doorway of the main building.
Then he works all day as well, anything to add to his salary of sixteen dollars a month.
This morning, he has persuaded an adventurous barang to sleep alongside him in another hammock. The foreigner, a German, is swathed in mosquito nets and smells of something chemical. He is pink and splotchy and still has on his glasses.
Map rocks him awake. ‘Come on,’ Map says in German, ‘it is time to see the sunrise.’ The man has paid him ten dollars for the privilege but like all tourists is so scared of theft that he has hidden his tiny digital camera in his underpants. Can you imagine how it smells? Map thinks to himself. I wonder if it’s taken any pictures inside there by mistake.
The German sniffs, nods.
Map chuckles. ‘You never been in a war.’ The German looks miffed; he thinks he’s a tough guy. ‘You wake up in the morning in a war, pow! Your eyes open, wide, wide, wide, and you are looking, looking, looking.’ Map laughs uproariously at the once daily prospect of being shot.
In the early morning mist, the five towers of Angkor Wat look magnified, as if the air were a lens. Map leads the German up steps, past scaffolding to the empty pools. He considerately takes hold of his elbow to lead him up onto the next level.
Here are tall staircases to the top of the temple. They taper to give the illusion of even greater height, and they are practically vertical, more like ladders than staircases.
‘People say these steps are narrow because Cambodians have small feet.’ Map grins. ‘We’re not monkeys! We don’t like pointing our bums at people. These steps make people turn sideways.’ He shows the German how to walk safely up the steps.
Then, as a joke, Map sends him up a staircase that has worn away at the top to a rounded hump of rock with no steps or handrails.
The German finds himself hugging the stone in panic. From here, the drop looks vertical. Map roars with laughter. The German looks back at him and his eyes seem to say: this wild man wouldn’t care if I fell!
He is not wrong. There is something deranged about Map. He has been shooting people since he was twelve years old.
Map chuckles affectionately, and nips around him and up and over the stone on his thick-soled policeman’s shoes. He crouches down and pulls the German up.
‘You have a lot of fun! You don’t want to go up the staircase with a handrail.’
‘Uh,’ says the German, just grateful to be alive. He turns and looks down and decides that, after all, he has just been very brave. Adventure was what he wanted. ‘Not too many old ladies do that!’
Even at this hour, the pavilion around the main towers is full of people. Other Patrimony Policemen greet Map with a nod and a rueful smile at his tourist catch. A large image of the Buddha shelters in the main tower, robed in orange cloth. Blacktoothed nuns try to sell the German incense sticks. He buys one and uses that as an excuse to get a series of shots of an old woman with the Buddha.
Map leads the tourist through a window out onto a ledge, high up over the courtyard, which is itself above ground level. It is what, a hundred, two hundred feet down to grass?
The ledge is wide – twenty people could easily sit down on it. The German grins and holds his camera out over the edge to take a picture. Over the top of the surrounding wall, trees billow like clouds, full of the sounds of birds and smelling like medicine.
‘So,’ says the German, fiddling with his automatic focus. ‘There are many bas-reliefs on Hindu themes. Did Cambodians become Buddhist later?’
‘There was a king,’ says Map. The morning is so quiet and bright he wonders if he can be bothered trying to make this foreigner understand who Jayavarman was and what he means to Cambodia.
‘When Angkor Wat City is conquered, he takes it back from the foreigners. He make many many new temples. Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Neak Pean, Preah Kahn, all those temples. He make Cambodia a Buddhist country. After there is Hindu revolt, but Cambodians still remember him.’
Map says the King’s name, feeling many complex things: respect, amusement, love. The German asks him to repeat it.
‘Jayavarman Seven.’ Map can feel his smile stretch with sourness.
He thinks about the five-hundred-dollar bribe he paid a few years ago to get a job removing landmines. He bribed the wrong person and didn’t get the job. He’d sold his motorbike to get the money. Originally he wanted to use it to pay for his wedding, but he thought the job would be a better investment. His fiancee left him.
He thinks of all the so-called leaders and the tangled, selfserving mess they are making of the country. ‘Now we need Jayavarman.’
