Bus from Poipet to Siem Reap
Scene 2
He had first heard the word in his early teens in the song «Holiday in Cambodia» by the Dead Kennedys – an incredibly distorted number, sung or rather rattled like in fever. The melody had reverberated in his memory ever since, together with the intriguing link between «Holiday» and «Cambodia» – which, given the punk nature of the band, could only have been meant ironically. «Pol Pot, Pol Pot» had resounded at the end of the piece as though it was being chanted by a mass of people – it had never failed to give him goose bumps. Naturally, Maille had heard of the mass murders and mines, of hunger, drug dealing and prostitution. But, in a geographically spiritual sense «Cambodia» had forever stayed linked with «Jadin» and a phase of his life during which he had unabashedly sought to grab all the opportunities that had come his way – though all of them had continued to remain distant, out of reach.
Even at that moment, while he was riding on a bus rattling over a road that the last monsoon had all but washed into the rice fields, his thoughts were curling back into those days. The road, like his memories, had a patina that consisted more of imagination than of substance. There surely had to be quicker and more comfortable ways in the jungles of Angkor.