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separate worlds is breached, and it is never quite clear in which world one stands. Koch
describes, for example, how the rains which belong to late April might suddenly arrive in
March, revealing ‘the dry, yellow, dead-flat land to the southeast’ and the mountains on the
Vietnam border which had been hidden by the haze, but now ‘stood straight up out of the plain
like a mirage’. Among them are Cambodia’s magic mountains, where holy men inhabit old
Buddhist shrines and pagodas, and guerrilla groups, bandits, and spirits inhabit caves. Koch
writes, ‘They’re not very tall, but they’re eerie: peaks of whitish rock, with green vegetation,
like mountains in a vision’ (HW, 274-75).
The mountains form part of the political border between Cambodia and Vietnam, and
also the metaphysical border between two worlds. Another division is marked by the Mekong
River—that between the regions of control of the forces of the Army of North Vietnam and of
the Khmer Rouge, allies in the war against the successors to the colonialist Indochinese
regimes, but enemies in the macrocosmic war between forces of dharma and adharma. Koch
allows himself to indulge in a symbolic crossing of the Mekong, likening it to the
Hindu/Buddhist idea of crossing the river to Nirvana. Jim Feng tells of how the Soldiers Three
experienced escaping Khmer Rouge territory with their North Vietnamese captors. The river
itself begins as an unknown, and the other side is impossible to discern:
I smelled the Mekong before I saw it; then its big brown spaces
appeared, shining under a half moon. The black trees of the far-off east bank
were hard to make out; there were no lights over there … . (HW, 297)
Section 13.7. discusses the Bodhisattvas and Tirthankaras, the figures who are to guide
those who are crossing the river to the other bank to nirvana. It is important here only to note
how Koch is fulfilling the ancient, pessimistic Jainist philosophy when he has an ‘old bent
Cambodian in a limpet-straw hat and black pyjamas’ (HW, 297) ferry them across the Mekong.
According to the Jainists, at the end of the present, catastrophic cycle of time, while humans’
physical size will have shrunken with their moral strength, the Tirthankara saviors will have
disappeared entirely as the earth becomes ‘an unspeakable morass of violence, bestiality, and
grief’ (Zimmer, 1969, 226-27), leaving the atrophied peasant to steer Langford, Volkov and
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