Twenty Minutes

The drive out is strangely quiet. The skyline recedes into the distance. In Phnom Penh, the streets buzz with motorcycles and cars and chatter. Here, I hear motors only in the distance, the wind against the tall grass.

The tuk-tuk driver pulls off the marshland road into a small dirt lot. I walk through an adorned gate, roof the color of clay. On the other side is a walkway leading up to a large stupa, similarly adorned. On the outside, it appears solemn, beautiful. On the inside: bones.

Next to the stupa, the guide says, is where they brought them. It would have been a small shack, and the soldiers would take people off the bus and leave them there for the night. Sometimes it was longer than a night, the guide says, when the soldiers simply couldn't kill people fast enough.

Here, the guide says, is where the graves were. It was little more than a large ditch. The guide says that when these graves were found, they were more like mounds. The gas from so many decaying bodies caused the earth to bulge.

Next to the grave is a sugar palm tree, young, still sprouting from the earth. The area is peaceful now, flanked on one side by a quiet lotus pond and enclosed by broad canopies. The guide says that instead of knives, the soldiers used the serrated edges of sugar palm branches to cut their throats. The Khmer Rouge thought that using a bullet would be a waste.

As I walk around the stupa, the guide points out the nearby pond. Researchers have gathered up as many bodies as they could possibly find. But there are still remains. When it rains, teeth still come to the surface.

Next to the path is a large tree covered in bracelets and amulets. It was not just adults, the guide says, who were brought here. Children too. The sign beside it calls this the "Killing Tree." Here, the sign reads, is the tree "against which executioners beat children."

Before the stupa is another tree. It looks like a bodhi tree; a sign calls it the "Magic Tree." The name suggests an inspiring story, something redemptive in opposition to so much death. It has no such story. The tree is magic because it sang: executioners hung loudspeakers from its branches. They blared revolutionary songs to cover the sounds of the killings, the cries of their victims. The guide plays one such song. The piercing voice of a woman, thin and high, comes through my headphones. Clear, martial, striving. But this is not what it would have sounded like in the fields. No: beneath the voice comes a deep thrumming blare reverberating through my ears, the sound of the diesel engine that powered the speakers. It blares and blares, covering the voice, the two combining to make thought impossible.

Closer to the stupa, the bones inside become clear. Skulls, knuckles, all piled high into the air. The guide says it's something like 5000 bodies inside. The skulls stare back. I think, standing there, of what they saw. How they were pulled from interrogation centers in darkness and driven out into the fields, how they probably could see nothing but their fellow victims and hear nothing but the blare of engines and a distant singing. How maybe, if they heard anything at all, it was the dull crushing of skulls against iron bars, it was screams, it was children battered against an old-growth tree.

This was one field. There were hundreds.

I go back through the gate, flag down a tuk-tuk. The city grows and swallows me in it. I find a place for lunch. The midday heat begins to rise. I order. Twenty minutes.