Advent in Battambang goes unremarked, except for by my landlady's family, whose hints about the loveliness of the previous barang tenant's christmas tree were added to by a fantastically garish santa card that plays a medley of jingle bells and deck the ?something? halls?walls?
The nights have been getting a bit cooler now, though with a strange unpredictability that makes me sometimes still sweat away and sometimes need more than my fleece blanket. Sensitive Khmers keep their woolly hats and multiple jackets on until about nine each morning. Its also drier, and the roadside leaves (and my trousers and teeth) are thickly dusted pinky-brown. They fall on me sometimes and sometimes i reach to catch them. And they make the same satisfying crumple underfoot.
I returned to the city an hour ago along the bumpiest road I regularly travel, the first long drive I've done at nighttime. There was a stillness in the air as we inhaled (the celtophile head of primary education, my friend and colleague Loeurt and me) the dusty darkness and the purple familiar taste of bonfires. The huge (or it seems it in this flat land) sheer sides of Phnom Sampov were causing the smoke to turn from two funeral pyres, and it wheeled around in the air as we left at dusk. I love, I love I love, the sound of Cambodian funeral music. It is like flamenco grief. It surpasses the stories it tells and the grief it indicates.
Mountains in Cambodia, or those in Battambang anyway, challenge my geological imagination. Working out how time + conditions make the apparently unmoving earth shift so drastically is a stretch of mind and faith and time-sense in any mountain or cave or strange bouldered rock shape (my mind surfs above the world like a google earth angel, covering the isle of eigg, the climb towards applecross, the stepped-hexagons of Staffa in a blink of an instant). But here, they come out of totally flat land like they were pushed, with no other mountain for maybe several kilometres around.
One story is of rain, I today came to reckon. These shapes were formed from the squeezings and burstings of a temperamental earth, and steady strong rains (or maybe just one) have filled in the deep parts, concealing the underside consequence of the rises.
Another story is of the bitter consequences of a philanderous ancient king. His lover, rejected and spurned, dejected and despairing, called upon a magic crocodile she had nursed at her breast to kill the king and queen while they sailed in the sea. The chicken coop on deck was hurled towards him, to quench his hunger and quash his diligent destruction. But it failed. Growing huge, the crocodile snapped the boat into two. There was something with a turtle. And then the queen, who had apparently been trying other strategies first, lifted her magic hair off the toppling deck. She placed it in the water, where it soaked up all the sea.
So tonight, leaving day two of a workshop on 'effective teaching and learning' at a school nestled at the bottom of Ship Mountain, Mister Kim Hoern, Loeurt and I drove flat along the old sea bed and stopped at the side of the road between Crocodile Mountain (which looked exactly, but exactly, the same as the crocodile constellation the older man had drawn for me earlier, though neither looked quite like a crocodile) and Chicken Coop Mountain. We ate bananas. I threw propriety to the wind and climbed a dust-laden tree. I looked at the big blue animals of other mountains grazing to the south west, and the growing pinkorange glow of the sunset to the right of them, heavy and light in the dust thrown up from the road by carts and cows and motos. Rural landscapes like this are punctuated by tall slender palm trees that sometimes make me gape at their strength. A woman in red and purple was walking through the yellowing paddy field (harvest time has just about begun). I regretted that my camera, newly em-batteried, seemed to not work. Please forgive a thousand words painting a photo.
And another: the bananas were finished. I sat and drew the palms. Mister Kim Hoeurn taught me words and attempted to define my learning style into one of the seven types he'd just been teaching about ('interpersonal'). Loeurt rested from a long day on the seat of his bike. I chatted away about bats, sonar sensation, the day my dad woke me up late in the evening to meet a bat woman with three little injured orphan bats in my livingroom (it sounds like a dream..pa please verify..i was about eleven and they chattered sounds out of our hearing range with strange horizontal toothy mouths and i remember the delicate skull under fur under my hesitant finger).
and then they were there
OO@ooooooo,,,,,..................,,,.. a line of smoke to the east, like a giant candle snuffed just behind ship mountain. But instead of snuffed and dead, the smoke kept trailing. Low in the sky, a thin black line. More and more and still more. And the wisp turned with the wind and rose and broke into multiple lines, bending and folding through variations of script.
They were still flying out of the cave as we drove back underneath them, uncountable unknowable bat-billions. They are out all night, and at dawn return again, a peppered shadow funnelling and blackening back into their long cool hole.
It made me think: they always do this. they always always do this.
When Europeans are taking coffee breaks and when the Khmer Rouge were executing Mister Kim Hoeurns father on ship mountain and when I ponder the strangeness of being here and doing this job and when the family of the internet shop tires and when I go home and look at crocodile and chicken constellations with my Khmer family and when little kids sit outside the tourist restaurant with puffy gluey eyes and plastic bags for inhaling and for taking the leftovers off the plates and when the bats are completely forgotten by every human head, they always do this.
Kato asked me to tell her some stories of where i am. There are more. I will try to record some more of them.
Enjoy your flight and feeding.
