Bad Things Happened Here

It was cool inside the cave and the water-smoothed surfaces of the rock were damp under my finders. The air was green-tinted beneath the ragged square of white light at the head of the steps. There were creepers and thorn-tangles, and the Buddhist prayer flags hung in limp lines from the rough green-brown of the cave walls. It was very quiet, but you could hear the sound of water dripping somewhere, and small birds fluttering and chirruping on the edge of the daylight. There was a smell of green moisture in the place.
The gape-eyed skulls and the long, slender tibias and the shattered pelvises and cracked ribs had all been piled very carefully into metal cages, bone, slotting neatly alongside bone. They had all turned to a waxy yellow, and in the damp air of the cave moss and green algae was beginning to grow on the smooth surfaces.

Phnom Sampean – the Boat Hill – rose out of strange, still countryside south of Battambang. There was something odd about the land here: the roads were strips of hissing white earth, and the ditches were clogged with weeds. It was dry, and a yellow breeze scurried over the untilled fields in sudden, unexpected moments. There were trees with great spreading-heavy canopies that shifted in the wind, and everything seemed very fertile and soft-edged. But there was something half-abandoned about it all. Occasional white cattle grazed fugitively along field boundaries, and small girls with sun-touched hair and dirty tee-shirts dawdled on the roadside. But it looked almost as though someone had forgotten to work the land, forgotten to regiment it, to press it into busy, endlessly productive service. It was not like Bali or Java, or even Thailand, just forty miles to the west.
Phnom Sampean stood up abrupt like something manmade from the unremitting yellow-green flatness. There were concrete steps up its knobbly limestone flanks under the jackfruit trees with their huge, swollen fruits, already mildewed and mouldering before they were ripe.
There were long low buildings of blank concrete on the levelled platform near the outcrop’s summit. The rooms were bare now, and a few lean monks with heavy eyebrows and thick orange draperies padded along the corridors or swept the walkways with bundles of twigs. It was all very still and silent under the hot breeze. The caves – three of them – were just beyond the buildings, crooked cavities in the blunt molar-tooth of the hill.
They had held people – monks and collaborators and intellectuals – in the low concrete buildings under the jackfruit trees. They had tortured them and killed them, then tossed them into the caves – separate caves for the men, the women and the children. The senseless absurdity of this segregation made it worse somehow. Sometimes they tossed people down into the green, putrid gloom when they were still alive, people said; they killed 10,000 here, people said. You cannot verify any of these things, but it doesn’t matter.
Now the monks had swept the concrete compound clean and turned it into a monastery. They had arranged the bones in their neat cages and hung their prayer flags in the gloomy caverns. There were little altars and grey twists of incense ash beside the bones.
Sometimes tourists, like me, hired a motorbike from Battambang and rode out to the hill and climbed the steps under the trees and stood for a few minutes down in the cool dankness near the piled skulls, silent with the half-sincere reverence of tombs and antique churches. Then they went back to town and continued across the border to the beaches and fleshpots of Thailand.

I went back out into the daylight and looked out over the strange flat earth of western Cambodia, a tree-speckled blank, a lost white road, and an empty horizon. Bad things happened here.

***

The Golan Heights were like Dartmoor in winter. Sodden, bone-chilling mist ran over the thin, sour soil of the swelling, rocky hillsides and rain wriggled like tantrum-teardrops over the windscreen of the bus. The dank backrooms of the Syrian checkpoints along the road smelt of paraffin and coffee and stale cigarettes, and the soldiers who checked my passport and permit shivered and wore green balaclavas.
There were broken barricades and muddy puddles wrinkled by the wet gusts before Quneitra, then there was what was left of the town. It was a place of sick concrete, but all the walls had been blown away and fractured flat roofs lay on top of the rubble like drunken mushrooms. The roads were full of shell holes and everything was sodden-damp.
A few cows grazed on the thin grass between the ruins. Only the church and the mosque and the hospital were still standing, bare and blank-eyed. Like skulls. The floors inside were thick with broken glass and shards of mortar. It crunched noisily underfoot whenever you moved, uncomfortably so.
Inside the skeleton of the hospital there were smears of charcoal and places where some missile had gone through more than one wall, and shivering on the flat roof you could look out over the cold, wet sweep of land beyond what was left of the little town to where the hills rolled upwards into the mist again. You could pick out the blurred headlights of cars moving along a narrow road over in the Israeli-held part of the Heights.

Down beyond the last of the pathetic concrete-mushrooms of the blown-out houses was the checkpoint of the de facto border. You could see the blue and white Israeli flag snapping in the wet wind, and the Danish peacekeepers in their green uniforms and blue UN berets. They looked much bigger and happier than the Syrian soldiers back along the road to Damascus. There were tangles of barbed wire, and little red signs, creaking in the wind, marked with a single word in English and Arabic: mines.
The Syrian government, in a moment of uncharacteristic understatement had added only one small piece of propaganda paintwork to the place: a blue sign on the bullet-riddled wall of the hospital. "Destructed by Zionists" it said. Even that was unnecessary.
Bad things happened here.

On the noisy street in the middle of Kuta twittering Javanese schoolgirls in white headdresses and Japanese with cameras and paunchy Australians, red-faced and squinting in the heat paused for a moment before the bomb memorial and scanned the list of the 202 dead, and stood with their hands on their hips frowning at the fenced-off vacant lot, fuzzed over with coarse tropical grass, where the Sari Club used to stand. Then they went on their way and within twenty yards normal conversation had resumed. Bad things happened here too.

But it was all much too easy. Too easy to make those half-sincere pilgrimages to Phnom Sampean or Quneitra or the War Crimes Museum in Saigon, or the other killing fields outside Phnom Penn, to pause for a moment before an incongruous gap between the shops of Jalan Legian in glib silence, aping the rhythms of a foreign faith, with pressing palms and dipping heads – bad things happened here – then move on, back into bright sunlight.

Bad things did happen here, but take a minibus out of Kuta up into the heavy green hills in the ageless countryside and amphitheatre-steps of the rice fields near Ubud. Bad things – worse things – happened here. They went berserk here, ran amok here, hacked people to death here, and the army, who had egged them on to kill the communists in Java, lost their nerve as the fire ran wild in Bali. There are mass graves beneath the luxury hotels at Nusa Dua, people say. You cannot verify any of these things, but it doesn’t matter. Bad things happened here.
Bad things happened all the way back along the road to Damascus, and they hunted people along the ditches all the way through that strange flat countryside beyond the Boat Hill. Unspeakable things happened in every village in China and every village in Indonesia and every village everywhere. And anywhere you go between Delhi and Rawalpindi they hacked at people with long knives and stabbed at them with sharpened bamboo staves and they cut off men’s genitals and stuffed them in their mouths and they chopped babies in half and sent trains full of corpses in both directions, east and west, and they had to hose down the station platforms in Lahore and Amritsar to get rid of the blood. And when you drive across the scorched core of Spain if you pull over on some white road in the heat of the afternoon and walk away slowly in the shimmering light over the stones and yellow grass you might find bones buried under the rocks, hundreds of them, thousands of them. And there is a reason why all those Armenian churches are empty-echo ruins now, under the heart-breakingly clear blue light of Eastern Anatolia. Bad things happened here, very bad things.
Bad things happened here; bad things happened everywhere, and pausing in the cool, green damp of the cave for a moment, and pushing a dirty, tattered Riel note into the monks’ collection box then leaving the hill and riding back into town and going on merrily with your journey is not enough.

© Tim Hannigan 2008