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7

The Hospital of Horrors

Preah Monivong Hospital, Prison Ward, Phnom Penh, CambodiaJuly 2008

“Everything all right.”

The physician stands up, puts his dirty stethoscope into an even dirtier canvas bag, and tosses it into its case. “You are well,” he repeats in his scratchy English.

Kasper looks at him through half-closed eyelids. Fuck you, he thinks. If I’m so well, why do I feel so awful? Why can’t I get back on my feet? But don’t breathe a word of that to this so-called doctor with the parchment face. Kasper watches him blathering in Khmer with an officer of the guards. He sees him nod: he’s well, he’s well.

Four months.

That’s how much time has passed since his capture.

Since then he’s lost about twenty pounds, he suffers from dysentery and extremely high fevers, and he lives in a state of permanent exhaustion. When he’s weaker than usual, he can barely drag his feet. His eyes are lost in the void. He’s like a zombie. One of the many zombies shut up in this hospital.

The smell of “lunch” heralds the arrival of the guard who distributes food. A privilege reserved for few. If you want to eat decently, you must pay your guards, and to pay your guards you must have money. Those who have none survive on the watery swill provided by the hospital: vegetable scraps and substances it’s useless to scrutinize, swimming in some thin liquid.

It’s always better than when meat’s on the menu.

Kasper has stopped wondering what strange kind of animal goes into the stew they serve him every so often. Some say it’s dog, some say rat. Whatever it is, it makes him puke.

Before arriving here—Preah Monivong Hospital in Phnom Penh—he’s been a roving prisoner. Months in the worst hovels in Cambodia. Or in the Phnom Penh barracks of his CID tormentors. Never in an official 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. And more accurate. “By being an asshole,” he replies. “They grabbed us both, Clancy and me. They separated us. I have no idea what happened to him.”

“Are you injured?”

“I’ve got dengue fever and various infections.”

A male nurse approaches and attaches a drip to Kasper’s arm. He gives the Western intruder a filthy look and goes away. The clear liquid descends, drop by drop, into Kasper’s veins. He gets one bottle of the stuff per day, but instead of perking up, afterward he feels wearier than before.

“What are they giving you?”

“Vitamins. According to them.”

“But nobody’s doing anything for you in Italy? Politically, I mean. Your government, the Vatican, the Red Cross, somebody . . .”

Kasper barely shakes his head. The movement could mean: I don’t know. Or also: Nobody.

The Dutchman looks around and whispers, “Listen, my friend, what can I do for you?”

“Maybe you could get in touch with somebody and tell him where I am. Tell him you saw me.”

“Of course I’ll do that. Tell me who he is.”

“An American. His name is Brady Fielding. You’ll find him not far from here.”

Kasper gives him the address and other pertinent information. Brady owns a repair shop. He fixes motorcycles and scooters. Rents them out, too.

The Dutchman gives Kasper a strange look. “A mechanic . . .,” he mutters doubtfully. He looks as though he wants to object: wouldn’t someone from the embassy or someone with a humanitarian organization be a better choice? Just as he’s on the point of making this suggestion, Kasper repeats the address: “Krala Hom Kong, on Tonlé Sap. Brady Fielding.” Brady’s the only one he can trust in this situation.

“Okay, I’ll go and see your mechanic,” the Dutchman murmurs. A doctor gestures to him to leave the ward. “But you haven’t told me what the hell happened to you. Why did they detain you? How long ago?”

“It was the twenty-seventh of last March,” Kasper whispers. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Damn! Four months ago? Four months in places like this?”

“Right.” Kasper smiles. “This one isn’t even the worst of them.”

“Do you think your American friend . . . do you think he’s being held in the same kind of conditions?”

“I don’t know,” says Kasper.

He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t know what to think. He’s in a swamp. Allies, friends, enemies; nothing is clear.

Clancy the shrewd, Clancy the wise. Where is he now? Maybe he got himself out of trouble. Maybe he signed so they’d let him go home.