The Turk Who Loved Apples (25 page)

Douglas, who was far more at home in this underworld, was, I sensed, disappointed in me, and after lunch the next day we embarked on a trip to Svay Pak, a brothel village eleven kilometers from the city. Why did we go? I can't speak for Douglas, but for me it was simple fascination that there existed in this country, on planet Earth, a village of brothels. To this twenty-two-year-old, it sounded fantastical, unreal, something out of Bukowski or Vollmann. Or maybe it was because I wanted to test myself, to see how far I'd descend into Cambodia's dark heart. Or maybe we had no reason—it was just something to do,
something that one did
, on a hot afternoon in Phnom Penh.

We found two motorbike taxis, told them “Kilometer 11”—Svay Pak's distance marker on the highway—and soon we were wandering around a sleepy compound of shacks and long, low, warehouse-like buildings with corrugated tin roofs. It was in one of these that we found ourselves sharing a beer with two Vietnamese girls. I can't remember their names, only that they both had long
hair, loose white dresses like Edwardian heroines, and too much makeup. Douglas chatted comfortably with his girl in Vietnamese, while I struggled to ask basic questions like “How old are you?”

After his beer, Douglas announced, “I'm going to get a massage.” I'd like to say that Douglas winked at me, but he probably didn't. Then he left me alone on the long, sticky black nylon couch with my girl.

This was awkward. I asked her where she was from, how long she'd been in Cambodia, did she want to go back. I sipped my beer, and pulled out my camera. She tried to look alluring—pouting, draping herself across the couch, giving sidelong glances, even kissing me on the cheek—as I took a few shots. But clearly, this was not going where everyone—she, Douglas, Douglas's girl, the middle-aged mama-san who'd met us at the door, the taxi drivers who smirked and dropped us off—assumed it should go.

I asked about her mother. She said she missed her.

My Vietnamese conversational skills exhausted, we lapsed into silence.

Douglas and his girl returned. He looked refreshed. He may very well have had a massage.

“Ready to go?” he said.

It was not many more days before Douglas and I were back at Martini's, along with Ravudh, the young desk clerk from our hotel, and his friends, most of whom were the well-heeled children of government officials. I was half-drunk. Or mostly drunk, I can't remember. Ali cornered me, rubbed up against me, restated her desire, and I led her back to our table in the garden, where we ordered snacks. I got Chinese dumplings. Ali got a mango and sucked lasciviously on the sweet, fuzzy pit. Ravudh and his friends departed. Without my ever saying anything, everyone understood that Ali was coming home with me.

There was one problem left to deal with: Douglas and I were sharing a hotel room, and he was not going back there alone. Ali got
up, walked over to the dance floor, and returned with a baby-faced girl for Douglas.

“How old is she?” Douglas asked.

Ali spoke to the girl in Khmer, then turned to us: “She says she's eighteen.”

T
hirty minutes later, Douglas and I and our dates, Ali and Baby Face, walked into the lobby of the Morakat Hotel, where the night clerk and the shirtless, gun-wielding security guard were watching a porno starring a black guy and a white girl.

Upstairs, we got down to business right away, no drinks, no TV, no lights. Ali was not much for kissing or foreplay, and while I wasn't sure where to begin, I also had no clue how to ask Ali to help me out. Luckily, we were interrupted by Douglas and his girl in the next bed.

“I can't do this,” Douglas whispered to me, turning on the bedside lamp. “She's too young. There's no way she's eighteen. Ali, how old is she?”

“She says she's eighteen.” Ali's voice was suggestively neutral.

“Tell her she can go home. I can't do this. She's just lying there doing nothing.”

Ali relayed the message, Douglas handed over $10, and Baby Face left.

“It's too bad. She's going to think it's easy to make money now,” Douglas said. He turned out the light. “You two can carry on.”

We carried on. Ali put a condom on me, I got inside her, and soon I was done.

“Did you come?” she asked me quietly.

As I curled up with Ali that night, I couldn't help noticing how relaxed she'd become, how soft her skin felt against mine as we spooned. Was this the brazen mango-sucker?

The next morning, Ali put her blazer back on, accepted my $20, and left, her face once again hard and proud.

T
his is where I'm supposed to talk about the rightness or wrongness of what I did that night, and yet I find that a really difficult thing to do. Obviously, prostitution is bad. Except in supposedly enlightened places like Amsterdam or San Francisco, no one ever really aspires to the world's oldest profession. Most prostitutes have no choice—they're trafficked by mafias far from their homes to places where they have little recourse to legal help or nongovernmental support. African women wind up in Italy, Vietnamese girls in Cambodia, Moldovan women just about everywhere. Many of them are taken against their will, some are sold by their families, and a sickening number are children. When men take advantage of the sex industry, especially in the developing world, they perpetuate a system that ruins lives and keeps countries hobbled and poor. It is bad.

At the same time, I find it hard to condemn the younger me for his behavior. Knowing what I know now about the evil depths of the business, knowing that the experience would be less than good, I think I might still have done the exact same thing. For all his naïve ambitions and literary pretensions, the younger Matt Gross was trying to figure out, on a very basic level, how to relate to other people, people whose lives and experiences were light-years from his own. But to do so, he first had to find his own limits, to see what kind of person he actually was, or could become. An insensitive brute? A sucker? A timid aesthete? Or—and maybe this is what he learned from the whole episode—a confused young man whose capacity and desire for empathy could be dangerous.

T
wo and a half years later, I was back in Cambodia, biding my time in Phnom Penh before heading to Angkor Wat for the millennium. The capital felt different already: Since I'd left, a power struggle between the first prime minister, a royalist prince, and the second prime minister, a one-eyed ex-communist, had erupted in violence that left the latter prime minister, Hun Sen, the clear victor.
Few Cambodians, and fewer foreigners, thought Hun Sen would be anything over than a kleptocratic dictator, but many were relieved nonetheless: For the first time in decades, one person (and one party) had firm control over the entire country. I saw fewer armed guards in the streets. Peace was in the air.

It was therefore only appropriate that I spent my first few evenings at the Café Santepheap—the Peace Café. Unlike almost every other Phnom Penh bar, it wasn't fast or wild, hookers didn't congregate there, the wayward teenage children of Cambodia's ruling class didn't start fights and leave without paying. People went for an Angkor beer and a basket of fries and a chat with the British owner, Dave, whose Cambodian wife had recently given birth to their son.

At the Santepheap I met Cambodians from the emerging middle class, like Pepsi, whose income level and English ability allowed him to drink and talk about sports, politics, and the weather as, essentially, an equal to the foreigners like me who surrounded him. So when Lina walked in one night, climbed onto the barstool next to mine, ordered a Bailey's on the rocks, and complained about her long, tiring day, I figured her for a regular, albeit a young-looking one. We made small talk. I left, impressed at the clientele the bar had managed to attract. This was the new Cambodia!

A few days later, however, I ran into Lina at Martini's, and all became clear. At Martini's, guys could be there for sex, or just for a drink (and an ogle), but women, especially Cambodian women, were there for one thing only: work. On the dance floor, the bass excruciating, I told Lina I'd met her at the Café Santepheap. She didn't seem to remember, but at the same time, I think, she could tell she'd made an impression on me.

I began to see her everywhere: at Heart of Darkness, where I played pool, or back at Martini's. Always we talked a little, and I learned a little about her. Her father lived in Bangkok, and she missed him terribly. She sent him money. I listened to one of their phone calls: She spoke Thai fluently, and insisted to me she wasn't Khmer
at all. (“What are you talking about?” Mark said later. “She's completely Cambodian.”) She was sweet and energetic—she may have been a prostitute, but she didn't let that demean her. Like Pepsi, she considered herself my equal. She may have needed a cell phone, but she didn't ask me for one, and I didn't buy one for her. She wasn't my responsibility, and I liked it that we could speak without her demanding I fuck her for money, and while I wasn't naïve or romantic enough to think she had a heart of gold, I started to think maybe she wasn't like all the other working girls—that she remained capable of having relationships that weren't predicated on sex and cash.

Until that night she offered to buy me out. Until I stammered in shame. Until I wrecked the evening even further by failing to play along with a linguistic game started by Lina's friend Quyen, whose difficult accent had me constantly asking, “What?” To which Quyen would reply, “Wat Phnom.” At which point Lina would chime in with “Phnom Da.”

As Mark explained to me, Wat Phnom was the temple on the hill near the river, and Phnom Da was a big hill near Takeo, to the south. “They're trying to help you save face,” he said, “so it doesn't look like you don't understand them.”

But I didn't understand them, and I understood even less why I was clinging to my virtue. I was halfway around the world with people I'd most likely never see again, and I could lie. I'm good at that. People want to believe me. They really do.

A
fterward, I didn't bump into Lina for a while. She had vanished into the limbo prostitutes vanish into whenever you don't want to find them. But I did want to see her again, if only to take her picture. This was the compromise I made with myself, and I considered myself very clever for having made it: I would see Lina before I left, and I would invite her to my sublet apartment, where I'd ask her to undress for my camera. I'd pay her whatever she asked. I wouldn't
touch her—that would be cheating on my girlfriend. Still, it was dirty, so I felt obligated to pay her something. After all, that was her job, to accede to the filthy wishes of the rich-by-comparison. Denying her altogether would be like refusing a Michelin-starred chef's offer to cook you dinner, provided you pay for the groceries.

Of course, I did nothing at all to make my tepid fantasy a reality. I left Phnom Penh for Angkor Wat, where I caught the flu and missed out on all the fun, then returned to the capital for a twelve-hour stopover before catching my flight home to New York. Twelve hours—my last chance to find and photograph Lina. But instead of tracking her down at Martini's, I spent the afternoon hanging around the Foreign Correspondents Club of Cambodia—probably the least sordid bar in the country. It was full of brown leather club chairs and burnished wood, and diplomats and businessmen met here to relax and gaze out across the Tonle Sap River, their pints of Angkor beer covered with their coasters to keep out flying green bugs.

Three tourists of the high-class variety sat down in the chairs near me. They were in their forties and dressed fairly well: khaki pants, not shorts; shirts buttoned up and tucked in; no visible cameras or backpacks. They had just come from Ho Chi Minh City, and we traded intel: I asked about places I used to frequent there, they asked about the tourist attractions and political situation in Cambodia. I'd only been there a month, but I knew about the shaky government, the corruption, the crazy stories about cheated-on spouses of high officials who threw acid in the faces of their younger rivals. As I told these stories, I gave off—possibly intentionally—the image of being a bright young man, an adventurer in the dangerous zones of the world, eager to put things in literate perspective for my fellow Americans. I could see these tourists were hanging on my words, impressed.

And then Lina walked in, looking more like a prostitute than she ever had before. It wasn't anything she was wearing, not a miniskirt
or too much eyeliner or cheap, Chinese-made high heels. She was simply young and local and brazen, with alert eyes always seeking something, or someone. Girls like her didn't come in here, ever.

Within seconds, Lina and I had greeted each other and brusquely left the tourists behind. For a few minutes, we stood at the balcony, watching the wide, muddy river below, the awkward encounter of a week earlier forgotten, or at least unmentioned. This was my chance.

“I'm leaving tonight,” I told her. “Come back to my place—I want to take your picture.” As we walked out, I could feel the tourists watching me, no doubt horrified.

The apartment, around the corner and down an alley, belonged to a reporter for a Spanish news service, and Lina regarded everything inside with a detached air. Why should she care? She'd surely seen its equal, and she'd probably see this place again, especially since Buckminster, her benefactor that one night, had lately been crashing here as well.