Butterflies in the Killing Fields
Cambodia is a country filled with butterflies.
I've been afraid of butterflies since the age of five. At the time I harbored a belief that moths and butterflies were one and the same; moths were just how butterflies looked at night. An easy mistake, at five. My mother told me one day that moths would eat my clothes; she neglected to add, "While they're in the closet," and children are very literal creatures. I assumed that anything that could eat my clothes must have a large mouth full of teeth for chewing through sweaters, and I didn't see why a moth, having finished snacking on my sweater, should stop there. My childhood was tormented by fluttering, darting moths and butterflies that were all intent upon devouring first my clothes and then my flesh.
Childhood fears are not acquainted with the rules of logic. They exist, like the monsters under the bed, without reason and in a dimension all their own.
I watched a pair of butterflies, white, the size of quarters, swirl together in a whirlwind mating dance in a narrow green field. The wheels of our taxi, a modern rickshaw pulled by moped rather than manpower, crunched and skidded over the rusty red dirt of the road and the butterflies dashed through the spokes of the wooden wheels, disappearing beneath us. I felt a familiar cowering within my heart and picked my feet up off the floor of the rickshaw as I watched the scenery go by.
Fields passed and rickety wooden houses on high stilts, dripping with drying laundry and napping dogs and playing children. Cambodia is the same scene, kilometer after hot, dusty kilometer, like someone filmed a few frames of stock footage and replayed them over and over in the background. The whole country is like a Flintstones cartoon, the same hut scrolling by hundreds of times. There's the same square pit where a front lawn might have been, turned into a pond by the high water table, palm trees growing beside it. There's the same rusted out bicycle heaped in the shade underneath the house, along with the dented plastic barrel and the liberal scattering of trash. The same naked three-year-old playing with the sleeping mutt's tail, the six-year-old boy in a pair of red shorts, the rotted stair halfway up the steps that lead up to the front door, which isn't a door but just gaping hole in the front of the house. I could have closed my eyes for an hour or a day and opened them again to the same scene. We turned off the red dirt road into a red dirt alley.
Spaces are all open in Cambodia, the buildings low and sparse, the roads unpaved and treacherous with potholes. The alley was just a short and narrow road with a field off to the right, shacks on stilts behind, and a single story concrete building to the left. Ahead the alley ended in a wall of bougainvillea bushes that had grown higher than the building, blazing with pink and white flowers. A butterfly fluttered past my head, big as a finch and painted in patterns of brilliant orange and crisp black. I'd never seen one that size, the wingspan wider than my hand. I ducked and shied away from it, keeping a wary eye on the enormous insect. It flew with no particular pattern, darting randomly this way and that, keeping me guessing, never telegraphing its intent. There should be a martial arts style named after butterflies.
I walked across a covered path and into the small field behind the little concrete building. The sun beat down on my head and a layer of sweat plastered my light cotton shirt to my back, midsummer heat in the first week of January. A sunburn began to creep into the part in my hair.
The grass was tall and overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. Bougainvillea grew up in thick walls on all sides of this enclosure, small enough to be almost a courtyard rather than a field. The concrete walls that surrounded the place were almost invisible through the grass and trees and flowers. I stepped into the shade of a mango tree and let my gaze fall on the enormous hunk of rusted, twisted metal in front of me. It had been a tank at one point in its life. A wooden sign in handpainted white letters stated in English, "Destroyed 1998." Such signs were pounded into the ground at intervals, roughly arranged into lines or perhaps even a grid, but the pattern was lost. The place was overgrown and wild, and would not take kindly to having order imposed upon it. In the corners of my vision I could see two pale yellow butterflies darting, wild, reclaiming their territory. I stayed close to the mango tree, nearly clinging to it.
A Cambodian man approached me. He wore khaki shorts and a pair of flip-flop sandals, and a bright blue t-shirt imprinted with the design of the war memorial museum. He was in his late twenties, casual, and beamed a brilliant and gentle smile at me, his manner as genuinely polite and accomodating as everyone I'd met in the country. His left arm was missing from the shoulder.
We walked slowly through the overgrown field, past rusted tanks and mortars. American, Chinese, 50mm, Decommissioned, Destroyed, 1997, 1998, the faded handpainted signs marched past us, tilted at odd angles and choked by weeds and high grass, worn smooth at the edges. The jungle claims its prizes quickly, and in the tropical climate every year wears like a century through man-made things. These tanks could have been in Great War, by the look of them. Little flashes of white and yellow and orange darted through rusted holes, and I kept a wary eye on them as we passed.
"When I am a boy, five years old, maybe six years old," the guide was saying with that bright and gentle smile as radiant as the midday sun, "I am in field, and mine, it blows, kill father, mother, brother. Live in temple after that, yes. Priests, very kind." He made a wai, the gesture of thanks in this part of the world, hands pressed together prayerfully over the heart and combined with a small bow. With one hand he made the gesture seem all the more exotic, like a blessing. I was struck by the thought that he does not know how old he is.
We walked to a little covered area, a three-walled building open to the field and shaded by palm trees. He began speaking of history as we walked, recent history, stories he remembers and those he's learned by working here. "Claymore mine, you see. See? Ball-bearing inside, make shrapnel." He reached out with his remaining hand and picked up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, hefting it easily onto his shoulder, deftly flipping the trigger assembly into place. "Very fast, you see. Make fire, flame on this end, three meter," referring to the open back of the weapon. Each piece he picked up and handled easily, peaceful smile never fading. When he offered them to me I shook my head, silently declining. Gas masks and canteens and uniforms he showed, always offering them to touch and test and try, but I couldn't bring myself to come so close to the ugly bits of plastic and metal which had no other purpose but death.
Around the small field we made a slow circuit of rusted weapons and the trappings of war. The sun beat down on our heads, the humidity stifling, the still air oppressive and somehow ominous despite the blooming flowers and shining sun. Every so often he paused to explain how a twisted lump of metal was used to kill more efficiently than the previous model, how a mine was set to detonate to precise heights. Vivid pictures conjured in my imagination of twisted bodies, blood, the remnants of battle. In one corner was laid out a mock minefield filled with decommissioned bouncing betties, tripwires, claymores, all roped off with familiar rusted circular signs painted with skull and crossbones. Every visitor to Cambodia knows the "Beware Landmines" sign. A single white butterfly landed upon a pineapple-shaped mine, pausing for just an instant before flitting off again. The weight of a butterfly wouldn't trip a mine, and it had no reason to fear.
Another three-walled building held a cooler filled with ice and water and soda, and I paid 3000 riel, about 75 cents, for a bottle of water. A few paces away a taxi driver in his mid twenties was explaining to a middle aged Australian man how he'd fought for both sides in the war. As each swept through his village he was pressed into service as an ammunitions distributor or a supplies driver, the job and uniform varying each time the village changed hands. "Very dangerous, driving," he said. "Mines on the roads, and shooting. Very dangerous. I had fifteen years," he noted, borrowing the grammar from French, Cambodia's second language. He smiled shyly as he said it.
Eight kilometers away I ate lunch under a wide green umbrella. The sun slipped under the edge of the umbrella and bored into my back, baking my shirt to my skin as I ate a dish that attempted to impersonate spaghetti bolongese. Behind me a small lawn of mowed green grass hosted a party of butterflies. I could feel the eeriness of their presence even without looking at them, a specter just over my shoulder. "When I am small, three, four, Khmer Rouge take families apart," my taxi driver said. He spoke slowly, his head down, with a faraway look directed into the space between himself and the table. A faint, sad smile curved his lips.
"They say people must go, must leave, but can come back in a week. So not need to take things, belongings, food. So people go, and then... then not can come back. They make long buildings, bed, bed, bed, and separate out men, women. Mother go, sisters go, I am with my father. And still not have seen sisters since then, don't remember my sisters. We think maybe can find, sometime, or maybe die, malaria, mines, yes. Maybe we still find. Don't know." He folded his hat in his hands, turning it over and over, never looking up. Taxi drivers in Cambodia all wear tan baseball caps. His was worn and crushed and tattered, and I suspected it spends a lot of time in his hands.
I watched the road go by, kilometers of red dirt, mopeds, bicycles, the same shack on tall stilts passing by over and over. The taxi driver stood up on his moped, avoiding the potholes, driving like it was a motocross course. He wasn't far off. The rickshaw bounced on the uneven dirt, clouds of it choking me even with my shirt pulled up over my nose and mouth. The locals wore masks and handkerchiefs like a dusty parade of nurses and cowboys. Always we were chased by butterflies, pacing the rickshaw and then darting into the bushes and strong sunlight of the fields.
Every so often a field was fenced off, an acre or a few, and posted with a large handpainted wood sign. Though the writing was in Khmer script, the prices and phone numbers clearly marked them as real estate for sale. It seemed there was small-scale construction going on everywhere, dusty pickup trucks filled with bricks, the bones of buildings covered in makeshift scaffolding of slender tree branches. People milled about or sat in shacks and lean-tos at the sides of the road beside rows of cigarette boxes and Fanta bottles filled with gasoline. Children of all ages played everywhere, even in the middle of a Thursday.
A group of children played at one of the ubiquitous ponds at the side of the road, laughing and jumping and dodging, paying no heed to the butterflies that floated around them. One small boy of about six was covered in grey-white mud, plastered all over him from head to foot. I wasn't sure how he managed that, since the dirt in Cambodia is all red with iron rust, but it coated his sun-darkened skin and red swim trunks. He was missing his left leg from the knee and his left arm from the elbow. I could hear his laughter drifting across the road as he jumped gleefully into the pond.
Early afternoon is the hottest part of the day, and I took shelter in the shade of a Buddhist temple. Temples in Cambodia look very much like temples in Thailand, with roofs ending in wooden flames, shingles painted red and orange and gold, the floors marble, the spade-shaped boundary stones surrounding and marking out sacred ground.
Beside the temple was a tall pagoda, formerly painted red and in process of being repainted gold. A woman stood high on a rickety scaffolding of bamboo and thin branches, dabbing a paintbrush into the crevices of the intricately carved posts. Another woman used a wire brush to clean the stones piled in the center of the pagoda; both tasks looked like backbreaking work. The day was hot and sticky and they worked tirelessly in the shade of the pagoda, wearing lightweight long-sleeve shirts and ankle-length skirts. Out in the open sunshine a pair of yellow butterflies skirted the edges of the sacred ground. I fancied them as little demons kept at bay by the boundary stones and the five-headed naga carved into the staircase rails.
I ventured into the hot sun again, into butterfly territory, crossing a wide paved courtyard to a tall stupa, a narrow replica of the temple. Its sides were glass and within rested a heap of human bones and skulls. The pile was chest high and haphazard, the bones beneath and skulls piled on top, but all allowed to tumble and fall where they may. One skull rested upside down at the base of the pile, orbital ridge pressed up against the glass. I found it profoundly disturbing that it had been cast aside so. Were I dead, I wouldn't want to spend an eternity standing on my head, looking out through the glass at an upside down world. My thoughts sounded silly even to myself, but despite my shirt sticking to me with sweat and the sun burning my cheeks, I felt chilled.
These fields around us were the Killing Fields.
Behind the stupa there was a large board mounted on posts and covered in plastic. Photographs of the Pol Pot era were tacked up under the plastic and subtitled in English. The first photo was a woman standing in profile, her hair disheveled and her dress ragged, but her shoulders back and her head held high, an expression of exceptional dignity upon her features. Against the back of her head rested the point of a long screw, mounted on a bracket. The caption read, "Method of Killing."
There were a series of photos of political prisoners, each holding up a sign listing their name and a number. Middle-aged men and teenaged girls, the pictures ran the spectrum. One was a boy of about eight. Toward the bottom of the sign the photographs were faded with age, overexposed into faint ghosts of gold and sepia. The climate ages everything at lightning speed. Captions read, "Method of Killing: Child," "Method of Killing: Adult," "Method of Separating Child From Mother," and one simply, "One At A Time." All I could see of it was the slender curve of a palm tree. The hazy images left their subjects mostly to the imagination.
The stupa's contents were simply those skeletons that had been found in the fields around this temple when it was built and the land mines cleared a year or two ago. It was part of a vast network of fields, all infamous and shocking, all the territory of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and then the Vietnamese from '79 to '96 officially, '99 in reality. The remains of at least three million people lay scattered in the fields around that little temple, across a swath of the country's interior from the southern capital to the northern temple ruins. Land mines litter the fields and the jungles, along with forgotten graves and discarded tanks. And above them all play the butterflies.
How can a nation heal itself when the implements of its distruction still lay buried in its crop lands, still kill and maim its children at whim? How much horror can one person see and understand? I cannot fathom the mind of the one-armed Cambodian museum guide who smiles kindly as he shoulders a Vietnamese rifle. Everything made of metal in that country is ugly, twisted, and chilling. Rusting in the jungle is the product of a global industry of destruction, of tools for making genocide convenient.
I watched a little white butterfly rest calmly upon a land mine, and my fear of the butterfly was overwhelmed completely by my horror of the device on which it perched. Man-made shapes of metal and plastic, so simple and efficient, are infinitely more terrifying than are the monsters under the bed. I found I had no room for fear of the creatures that played and whirled and danced through the fields when I understood what lay beneath the overgrown grass and bougainvillea flowers.
The insects floated by me on the dirt road to Siem Reap, and I watched them dart and turn and flutter. They appeared to have no awareness of us at all, flying according to their own whims and instincts into patches of sun and away from clouds of dust. These are creatures that live beside us but not among us, in a world all their own. What marksman could shoot a butterfly in flight, with its random paths and tangents? What explosive would notice a butterfly's weight? Our dangers are not theirs, and their concerns are not ours. I watched a small orange and black one slip past the taxi driver's shoulder as he stood up on his moped. Neither noticed the other.
As the kilometers passed and the dust clouds settled a faint red haze into my clothes, I noticed that I did not mind the butterflies that darted past. I've no great love for them. They're insects and my general disgust for such creatures applies, and one does not simply toss away twenty-five years of phobia in a day. But an understanding of real horror can sometimes override an unreasoning fear, and I've come to know the Killing Fields as a thing that ought to be feared, that ought to inspire horror. Knowledge of them is knowledge of mankind's amazing ability to inflict a maximum amount of suffering with a minimum amount of effort, and then to quickly and efficiently forget all about it.
And beside that, a little butterfly is simply irrelevant.