Sinarth: Chapter 6 Extract: The Return

Collapsed trees lay where fallen, their dirt-filled stumps rising higher than a man. Telephone and electrical wires drooped down, touching road level, stretched and frayed from sun and neglect. Wrecks of cars and trucks rested sunken in mud, stripped of their wheels and axles and now used for oxcarts and Ho Chi Minh sandals. The wood panelling removed from the vehicles had been used for building and burning, the doors ajar and windshields missing; vinyl and stuffing from crumbled seats exposed to the weather oozed an old rubbish-dump smell. Weeds grew across it all with old clocks hidden in among the rubble face up, without hands.

Ceramic toilet bowls and sinks, ripped from their moorings and difficult to destroy, were now the last vestiges existing of the bourgeois. Thermals and breezes rocked loose pieces of tin, while unidentified objects banged in wafts of wind, forlornly signalling for help. Between those bangs rested a dreadful silence, now too late, with nothing mortal left alive. Death and its cohorts were still present here, injured but not put out of their misery, not just yet. Visiting a cemetery, often the souls hover around the graves, too afraid to leave their old bodies. Sporadically a disturbance occurs and a collective moving and jostling results, a sort of sigh rippling across before eventually settling.

In Siem Reap critically injured souls resided, not just of people but of life eternal itself. Nearby trees were desolate, animal souls nonexistent, nothing alive floating in the rancid air. Occasionally a cry of despair and suffering reverberated through it all, but now likely from those living, having returned to wade through the wreckage. People squatted in the houses with their front walls missing, allowing inquisitive passers-by to peer in; some picked through rubbish around the buildings. Things that are uninteresting when functioning create a curiosity when destroyed, human minds wanting to piece together another’s demise. Nobody owned anything and likely the previous owners did not exist any more to return and reclaim anything.

A flag, tattered and torn, waved in swirls of wind hoisted by someone unknown. People slept on the sides of streets with objects protecting them, even if only an old banana leaf or a sheet of damaged building material. Bats radared along, flitting in clumsy disorientation, unable to find reliable surfaces to navigate, the physical world contorting so much even bats having difficulty finding direction, luckily blind, unable to see the devastation.

In the centre of town beneath palm trees, were shallow hastily dug cremation sites, containing charred grey skeletal parts exposed to the wind and rain. Dried-out remnants of unburnt palm fronds from mad cremations lay scattered around on stinking diesel-soaked ground. Black swollen corpses, left unburnt with their clothes bursting open, writhed with maggots that crawled from their open mouths and eyes, gases rumbling and belching, giving the impression they were still alive.

Prisoners had bagged the ash and relics creating fertiliser for vegetable gardens; those prisoners killed, cremated and replaced by new prisoners. The rising white smoke from their graves coated Siem Reap with the stench of burnt flesh, the fires burning to the very day the Vietnamese arrived.