The Most Peaceful Place on Earth

“We are preaching hope, standing on the bones of the past.”

―John Rucyahana, The Bishop of Rwanda

The trees tell the story.

It is the middle of the afternoon—midsummer in Cambodia. A bulky heat binds itself to the body, little movement is asked for, and I don’t have the strength to offer any. I twist open the purified water bottle and pour it—all of it—down my throat. I recover and collect my senses. This is a place of uncommon beauty. In one corner, there is a building with a thick matted roof and long eaves that shade the visitor. Bushes of all shapes and sizes straddle a well-worn path that weaves around the compound. There are trees everywhere, their leaves dark green, their trunks thick bodied, their canopies wide. These are trees that draw in a visitor. Gratefully, there is a bench under many of them, arranged in a broad circle around this restful place. I sit down. This is a place that invites solitude and its inevitable by-product, reflection.

The trees tell the story.

The Chankiri tree leans to one side as if recoiling from repeated blows. Thick roots curl around its base, running over bricks that line one side of what appears to be a pit. The gently ruffled brown-gray earth around the tree is the result of visitors who have walked up to the tree and touched it, looked up at it, looked around it trying to figure out where the blows were aimed, how this tree was used in that fateful year in Cambodian history, 1975. But try as she might, the visitor cannot picture the act that has come to define this tree—for Chankiri in Khmer means Killing, and this is the Killing tree.

Babies and young children were trucked in from the Tuol Seng prison in nearby Phnom Phen along with their parents who had “confessed” to crimes against the state. The Khmer Rouge executioners, most of them still teenagers, would pick up the babies by their feet, swing them in a wide circle, and bludgeon them against the tree. Their still soft heads would burst on impact, leaving their mark—a bright blood red—in the deep crevices of the tree trunk. The shattered heads and twitching bodies would be thrown into a nearby pit, and the assembly line work would continue. The next baby would be taken from her mother and smashed against the tree and then onto the next one and the one after that.

I look around for the pit where the torn bodies were thrown and see it right away, hiding in full view. Just to the right of the tree. Just a little dip in the ground, a small concave of green. I measure the distance—two large steps away, or one easy swing of the arm. I judge the practicality of the location, which is far enough away that the roots of the tree did not interfere with the pit’s banks and close enough so that no extra exertion would be needed.

The trees tell the story.

The history of the Killing tree is hidden, was hidden for many years, by another tree. A bigger, more beautiful, and resplendent tree today obscures the Killing tree from view. It’s a weeping fig, the most ubiquitous of trees in East Asia, known for its towering topiary (usually over hundred feet tall), long tangled branches, and shiny, glossy leaves with unique acummate tips. The weeping fig is, if nothing else, stately. Here in the Cheung Eeok Killing fields, it has another, odd name: The Magic Tree. Magic because it made the sounds of work at the nearby Killing tree magically disappear. In the days following the Vietnamese army’s ouster of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and the discovery of Cheung Eeok, farmers working in the rice fields nearby reported that they had heard nothing and knew nothing of what had happened less than a mile from their homes. And with good reason. Strung along the drooping branches of the Magic Tree were loudspeakers, two, three, or even four blaring out songs of the revolution, songs of the glories of the Angkar, songs of the freedoms the Khmer Rouge revolution had brought to the land.

The trees tell the story.

Circumambulating, I sit down on another bench. There is a tree that encircles (yes, that’s the right word) this bench. It’s a banyan, a thick, sinuous snake of a tree but one clearly without evil intent. The tree appears to give this bench—and its occupant—a tight, unencumbered embrace, the kind one gives to an aging relative when one knows that there may not be another time to visit with them. An embrace that one could say simultaneously enacts remembrance and forgetting.

Just across from this bench lies a line of trees shading a series of shallow mossy pits. Bright green in the midday sun, they are a gentle undulating presence in this bucolic place. The adult prisoners, typically a dozen a day (sometimes hundreds a day) were brought here, made to kneel at the edge of these pits, their hands tied behind their backs, their names checked against a “must-smash” list. Then the day’s work would begin. Bullets were hard to come by and rarely used. The lucky ones had their throats slashed with knives or swords. Others had to wait on death as they were systematically bludgeoned with hoes or their necks broken with an iron ox-cart axle or a wooden club. The broken bodies would tumble into the pit. The executioners would then throw in a thin layer of dirt. At the end of the day, the inspectors would come to examine the work and typically order chemicals to be spread over bodies. This would serve two functions—kill the stench and kill those still alive under the recently spread dirt. The inspectors would double-check their list to make sure that no prisoners were unaccounted for. The executioners would wash their tools, placing them on shelves in the storage room, or propped up on its side, ready for the next day.

The trees tell the story.

I complete the circle and find myself across from a Stupa, a memorial built to honor the memories of those who died here. I find a nearby final bench and sit down. I realize it’s not as shady as the other benches and looking up, I realize why. This tree is clearly a new addition. Recently planted, its location chosen with the tourist in mind. It offers an unobstructed view of the entire Killing field, a soothing landscape of trees, mossy pits, and smoothed dirt paths that visitors are trickling through.

It’s time to take stock. I sit down. Looking to the right of the Stupa, I see that some of the trees are fruit trees (Cheung Eeok was originally a fruit orchard). These trees, I’ve been told, bulge with fruit when in season. For some unaccountable reason, I remember a song from my adopted home in the Deep South. I begin to hum it and catch myself looking around for raised eyebrows or glared looks. Lucky. I am sitting alone. But the song—and its sound—remains in my ears. Billie Holiday sings,

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh.

I’m lost. Lost in thought, lost with this song in my head, lost trying to make sense of this paradoxical place. I tell myself, things—even thoughts—happen for a reason. Could this song hold a clue? The song, I think, is inseparable from the smoothness of its delivery. Its nuanced punctuation marries simmering anger with deliberate grace. The song is nothing, if not an act of virtue, making a nation accountable for its past through a singer whose voice is so pure that it breaks through the most recalcitrant of souls.

I wonder if there is virtue in this place. The visitors walk around the Stupa peering in to get a better view. A little over two hundred in height, it has seventeen separate shelves for prisoner remains from the Killing fields that surround it. The Stupa is paneled by glass on all sides, and all the eye-level partitions contain the skulls of bodies found at Cheung Eeok. There are no names attached, just the remains with the eye sockets facing out toward the onlooker. As the shelves rise higher and higher, they are filled with bones from arms, legs, feet, and hands. The visitors, I note, walk with an exaggerated obeisance to the murdered, save for the obligatory teenagers (German, in this case) who make goofy faces and death gasps as they pose for pictures next to the skulls.

I get up. It is a little too hot to sit, let alone take stock. What I need is more water. I remember a stand near the entrance where I can get some. I walk over.

There is no tree or bench near the gate. There is, however, a smidgen of shade to sit under the eaves of the entrance building and some empty chairs presumably for the guards to sit on. I sit down, drink some water, pull out my sweat-soaked notebook and turn to a time-trusted ritual: Figure out the angle, while still on location.

Billie Holliday cannot be seen as voice of redemption. She died in 1959 before any stocktaking in the national conscience, before the full-fruition of the Civil Rights movement. Strike out any parallels on that front. However, she was a harbinger, a voice for the future. There may be something there. One might say these trees have held a story—a dreadful story, buried deep in their concentric rings, waiting, holding their secrets, until the right moment in time when it was safe to speak again.

There is a problem here. It’s the Stupa. Like any visitor, I know only the bare bones of the Cambodian story, but I do know that a Stupa is never a place for the dead. It is a place for the living to memorialize their ancestors—the known, loved dead. In Cambodia, as in much of the Buddhist world, the souls of the dead are sent to their next life with respect, decorum, and gifts. And this is a place of fragments—fragmented children and adults, torn not just from their families but from their own bodies and then thrown together into defiled pits.

So what is it this place? Absentmindedly, I looking toward the gate and beyond, and what I see upsets me—a group of land mine victims with their shattered arms or legs begging for alms. They are not permitted inside the grounds. And then it hits me. Rather than a place for the dead, this is a place for the living. It is a place for the Cambodian people to find their own place in the wider world, where their brutal history can jostle comfortably with the needs of their present as a desperately poor country finding tourism, even the dark kind, as a temporary salve.

I look for proof and it’s right there in front of my eyes. Inside Cheung Eeok, tour guides, who I have learnt are treated with great honor in Cambodia, are everywhere, walking, gesticulating, explaining the Stupa, the pits, the trees, all of it to groups of tourists. These guides are, like guides everywhere, making a place consumable in ways that the contemporary traveler has come to expect—anger, grief, reconciliation, all in one place—and preferably in the space of one afternoon.

But then I realize that they are doing something else, something much more important: They are taking over the telling of the Cambodian story. And this, I decide, is what Cheung Eeok is—a place whose overburdened story is starting to be remade, where a broken country is beginning to mend, where Peace, whatever that might be, is beginning its own story.

The trees, I now realize, tell only part of the story.