Tyrants' Day Out By John Auchard Special to The Washington Post Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page E01

Yet outside the hotel the atmosphere was not, I can report, grim. There was excitement in the air as we waited, talked and sometimes even joked.

"Here we are," I said with a sad shake of my head, "waiting for Elizabeth Taylor to come out." A journalist from a French news service nodded with a weary smile. "Yes," she replied, "mass murderers on tour." None of us took our eyes from the doorway for a second, and even my guide and driver seemed to want a glimpse. I must admit that I was content I already had mine.

Another American, a tourist from Manhattan's West Side, joined the crowd, and soon he was voicing his fury that there were no Cambodian demonstrations outside the hotel, no wails of hatred, not a morsel of rage in the air. At the age of 5, my guide had lost his parents and grandparents to Pol Pot, but he stood patiently and seemed in good spirits. When the New Yorker declared that we foreigners were more angry with the Khmer Rouge than the Cambodians, I kept my mouth shut. I could not help noting, however, that in spite of the fierceness of his rage at genocide, between sputters this tourist was constantly adjusting his camera for the right f-stop. In any case, about half an hour later, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, their families and their government hosts eluded the reporters with a kitchen-door escape.

I felt purer that I had no camera to fiddle with in the face of evil. Later, however, when my purity began to wane, I kicked myself for not having picked up one of those throwaway Kodaks at Dulles, because Samphan, Chea, their wives and extremely sluggish guards had rooms just down the hall from mine. When I soberly asked my guide, Pech Dara, if Cambodians had not surrounded the Siem Reap hotel because of persistent fear of these two heavily escorted killers, he laughed. Oh no, he cried, they have no power now!

I was a bit disappointed that a poisonous air did not continue to threaten as something eternally and infinitely foul. Like Hannah Arendt with Eichmann in Jerusalem, I had expected to be hit hard by the breath of evil, and instead I was finding the air thick with banalities. Samphan and Chea were taking in the splendid sights and having a nice time, much like me. Finally, their menace seemed over and they already were beginning to appear bourgeois and even a little foolish. Yet in spite of how Khmer Rouge outrage may blur into the world of sightseeing packages and congenial tours, Pol Pot does not go away, not even at Angkor, not even with Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea smiling at poolside.

Any tourist who visits the Taj Mahal remembers the interminable trek through the gantlet of beggars and hawkers coming at you as you aim for the gleaming white thing just, just, a bit farther ahead. Once you pay your admission and are inside the walls, for a time you are sealed off in the age of Shah Jahan, and for a time you may choose to forget the other Indias seething at the gates. With Angkor, however, at least for the present and one hopes for the years ahead, there is no such demarcation between the world of real Cambodia and the magic kingdom.

In a gesture that may reflect the present lack of infrastructure more than any kind of political enlightenment, the government apparently does nothing to keep the locals out of the holy of holies. Each day, a foreign visitor must pay $20 to enter the expansive temple region, but there seem to be no barriers for those who live there or for those Cambodians who for whatever reason need to pass through: men hauling slaughtered pigs on bicycles, young motorcyclists roaring by, women strolling with baskets balanced on their heads, children playing and sometimes begging only as an afterthought, the generally attractive sweep of people wearing the ubiquitous kramas scarf wrapped in innumerable ways around their heads, their necks, their shoulders (my guide gave me a lesson in eight proper ways of tying it). Impossibly frail elderly monks and nuns emerge from portals in faded saffron robes, and here and there soldiers stand around with nothing much to do. Of course, these people add to the atmosphere for the tourist. But the others are the ones who make the difference.

Not everywhere among the temples but with an assertion that keeps you aware of what was just yesterday, you meet people who have been maimed by land mines--sometimes children but more often than not soldiers in ragged uniforms. Not infrequently you turn the next corner to confront a new marvel and another staggering staircase, and as you do so, you note a young man without hands. He is profoundly depressed, not really even begging, but simply waiting for nothing and ignoring you when you give him a 500 riel note.

Sometimes a tourist primed for yet another explanation of the great King Jayavarman VII may tense and turn away from the presence hobbling or lurching toward him from out of the shadows, but inevitably you must meet that human gaze and deal with it as you can. In the midst of as great an aesthetic achievement as perhaps may be seen anywhere in the world, the ferocious human damage never goes away, and you cannot forget that fact--and you don't want to forget it. In some way that fact tempers the profanity that always stalks sightseeing in the Third World. At least in some way, even at Angkor Wat or Banteay Srei, the pulse of human suffering--and the empathetically assertive present tense--are the things that, when you are standing breathless before an 11th-century carving, keep you honest.

All the visitors I met at Angkor said the same thing. This place, they predicted with no apparent irony, is going "to explode." Even the Italians said that about Cambodia--scoppiare--and a few were particularly fearful that by their next visit, the country would erupt into "un altro Disneyland." The recently completed Intercontinental Hotel has rooms at $270 a night and suites at astronomical prices, and like an abandoned Cecil B. De Mille set, several other big yet unfinished Siem Reap hotels line the road to the temples. Tourism is on the move, and the locals, beginning to understand the economic revolution it may bring, already are adapting to it.

When late in the afternoon at Angkor Wat I noted that a pretty girl with an ironed blouse and neatly combed hair, but without hands or feet, had been at distant Angkor Thom at 8 a.m., my guide explained that she had been moved to follow the sun. Tourists prefer Angkor Thom at glorious daybreak, but sunset is spectacular at Angkor Wat. Some kind of canny system is slowly accreting behind the apparent casualness of selling, guiding, feeding, housing, exploring, begging, of just waiting.

Such terrible encounters grieve any tourist, but for relatively long stretches you forget them as you walk around dumbly and happily enough, taking in some of the most magnificent sights on earth. You worry, unbelievably selfishly, and you report that worry back home, that since the country suddenly seems relatively safe, things may move quickly and go blindingly commercial and then really wrong. You arrogantly tell your friends to make the trip tomorrow, make it today, before it becomes that new Disneyland or something worse. And undeniably--at least at scattered moments--that worse is already there.

When I took a motorcycle taxi out of Phnom Penh into the country to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, almost before we had gone a hundred yards my driver began the pitch. "Small girls," he promised me, way way out, much farther than we were heading. It took me a moment to comprehend that his word "small" was the same as the Italian word piccola--small meaning young, in this case very young, very very small, he kept urging. So very young, and so far out, he promised hopefully and in slightly wild syntax, that there was no chance of "AIDS" and so I wouldn't need to wear "a condom," he promised and he promised and he promised. I had heard such talk before, but anticipation of the bleakest monument to Pol Pot's victims made me want to speak out for Cambodia, to tell this man he should care for these girls, they were his daughters.

With the wind howling as I sat behind him on the motorcycle, I tried my best, with every possible elemental locution, to make my point. But he understood none of it. Eventually, it became clear that he did not understand any English. He was an older, more crass, cheerless version of the small children who hang around Angkor and recite to you, with surprisingly clarity, the information they have surreptitiously culled from English-speaking guides standing right on that spot. When you ask them their names, or anything else, they look baffled, for none of them has any idea what your English words might mean, or indeed what might mean the English words they have magically uttered to you. You are astounded by their feat of wondrous rote--la plume de ma tante. You admire them immensely and cannot help loving every one of them, but outside Phnom Penh these older guys work a similar trick that saddens you deeply. Clearly the moto driver knew no more real English than the children at the temples, but in the past year or so he already had picked up phrases of sex talk and sex trade as some mystically profitable lingua franca to spew in the direction of new foreign men.

In Phnom Penh I thought about the Khmer Rouge more than I had at Angkor, for in the capital no temples distract you from the political realities. Soon, however, I stopped asking guides, drivers, waitresses, eager cafe owners, women mopping floors and even congenial bank clerks for their personal holocaust. It does not take long before earnest sympathy with atrocity feels profoundly intrusive and then unclean. Yet I suspect many tourists in Cambodia have a nagging desire to return home with some really good Pol Pot stories. Sometimes you perceive that the pain seems too tangled, too deep, too confused even for your speaker to begin, but your driver is afraid of disappointing you, and I suppose you know it. So you pay for lunch, wait patiently and then let him stumble on to some broken, ghastly conclusion. Almost as disturbing is when, with someone else, your gentlest prompt elicits an immediate tale that has the feel of practice, of elaboration, of achieved dramatic structure, of frequent delivery to the sincere tourist of the day, and, sometimes, even of pleasure in the telling.

If the heritage of Pol Pot may uneasily offer itself to the tourist, there remain places of political contemplation where, at least for the present, you breathe real evil. The Holocaust museum in Washington provides a great memorial, and it does so in a fine building where fine exhibits do what they can to offer the origins, chronology, touchstones and agony of inexplicable horror. The habit of the modern museum is such: to explain, organize, articulate, stimulate and teach. And the modern museum--even of the Holocaust--does so in a setting that is well-conceived, controlled, dignified and clean. Perhaps there is no sane way for most people to approach the heart of darkness but by the path of well-lit and immaculate corridors.

Tuol Sleng is nothing of the kind. Signs and guidebooks call it a museum, but it is a malignant carcass. Until 1979 it was the main prison of Phnom Penh, where, as if at a satanic Ellis Island, tens of thousands of people got interrogated, categorized, registered and photographed before their trip from this dreary suburban neighborhood to the Killing Fields, about nine miles out. You pay a fee at a stand and give your nationality for the record book, but there is no real entrance to the few unimpressive block buildings with their many doorways. As you and some stray people just wander about, you see on the walls countless photographs of people who had been there and then were killed, their glances impenetrable as they waited for what was to come. Primitive paintings, not photographs, depict obscure details of torture and monstrosity. And although in one room a large map of the country has its entire surface covered with human skulls, you find that such a grisly display nauseates you less than the subtle, vague, accumulated foulness of the place.

A few battered signs in Cambodian, French and occasionally in English tell you some slim thing about what went on there, but for the most part you are left to imagine the unimaginable in mostly empty, decaying rooms. You pass crumbling brick partitions, vicious metal beds with chains attached and weird metal boxes, random barbed wire, strange chairs with devices that hint at complicated and devious torture. But you can't figure out how the devices worked. There is almost no curatorial enlightenment, and the few cards on the wall are very inadequate--just on and on and on and on past the photographs of the catalogued dead. The apparatus sits there stubbornly silent and malevolent, with pieces that screw or things that turn, as you drift through one dreary, monotonous, dusty, hellish room after another. Although only in the dimmest possible way it may suggest something of how it was, it is more than you need, and then you decide you have had enough. When you leave, although the buildings have been gutted, washed down and disinfected, you feel filthy.

Outside Tuol Sleng, I recalled the vague excitement in Siem Reap as we waited for Khien Samphan and Nuon Chea to appear. Simone Weil was right when she recognized that imaginary evil is often romantic and varied, but "real evil," she wrote, "is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." On the weed-covered lawn, I noticed a cracked, overturned toilet bowl. I suspect that it has been there for many years. In the ragged yard I saw chinning bars of various heights, and I remembered that before Tuol Sleng was a prison, it had been a high school. I was hungry to return to the familiar bustle near my hotel down by the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers, where the night before people had rolled out mats, sat on their haunches, cooked lovely food and laughed quite a lot.

In the Cambodia that is being reborn, I found guides ready to laugh a good deal, and they liked telling jokes that were, to me, unfathomable. If today few Cambodian guides speak even passable English, and even at Angkor you hear syntax that makes you wobbly, that should not be a problem for long. By our fourth day together, even the fine Pech Dara began to tire and at moments his English grew exhausted. During the final morning, he pointed to a bas-relief and recounted an episode in which, if I understood him correctly, a young mother ate a refrigerator and then broke the frozen toes of her hairy children. I stopped him right there, gave him an emergency English lesson, and when a half-hour later we happily continued our tour, he was still astonished by the revelation that the word "citadel" was not pronounced "pipidel." I would bet, however, that even at this present moment a few months later, his English has come a good way. He recently gained access to cable television, has gotten hooked on CNN and is already sliding into smoother English syntax and choicer diction. Like many other Cambodians, he showed me great kindness and, so often, remarkable good cheer. Like many other Cambodians who live very difficult lives, he remains resilient and is, I think, optimistic for the future.

Cambodia is not Angkor, but Angkor will provide the relentless draw. Surely a country that has survived so much may survive what now will come: vast busloads of sightseers from Cleveland and Yokohama, Big Macs and the Colonel, massage parlors and all species of prostitution, the inevitable packaging of genocide, a tourist infrastructure that may shove away the more obviously damaged people, lavish vacations played out next to insane poverty, the inevitable corruptions, gambles, cons and cheats--and of course the cash, which for some and perhaps for many may bring a better life.

Angkor is no ordinary wonder, and now that the Khmer Rouge finally seem spent, its greatness is more than a little fearsome. The place already is rumbling into a tomorrow that makes even the most jaded traveler gape like stout Cortez in Keats's poem:

He stared at the Pacific--and all his men/ Looked at each other with wild surmise--/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

No, there is no doubt about it: This maimed, ravishing, intensely human country is again going to explode.

John Auchard is a professor of English at the University of Maryland.