by Amitav Ghosh
In the course of their work, the sergeant and his colleagues had become friends with several Cambodian members of their team. But the better they got to know them and the better they liked them, the more feckless they seemed, the more hopeless the country's situation appeared. This despite the fact that Cambodians in general have a standard of living that would be considered enviable by most people in Bangladesh or India; despite the fact that Kompong Thom, for all that it has been on the battlefront for decades, is neater and better ordered than any provincial town in the subcontinent. Despite the fact that the sergeant was himself from a country that had suffered the ravages of a bloody civil war in the early seventies.
"They're working hard here because they're getting paid in dollars," the sergeant said. "For them it's all dollars, dollars, dollars. Sometimes, at the end of the day, we have to hand out a couple of dollars from our own pockets to get them to finish the day's work." He laughed. "It's their own country, and we have to pay them to make it safe. What I wonder is, what will they do when we're gone?"
I told him what a longtime foreign resident of Phnom Penh had said to me: that Cambodia was actually only fifteen years old; that it had managed remarkably well, considering it had been built up almost from scratch after the fall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979, and that in a situation of near-complete international isolation. Europe and Japan had received massive amounts of aid after the Second World War, but Cambodia, which had been subjected to one of the heaviest bombings in the history of war, had got virtually nothing. Yet Cambodians had made do with what they had.
But the sergeant was looking for large-scale proofs of progress—roads, a functioning postal system, Projects, Schemes, Plans—and their lack rendered meaningless those tiny, cumulative efforts by which individuals and families reclaim their lives—a shutter repaired, a class taught, a palm tree tended—which are no longer noticeable once they are done, since they sink into the order of normalcy, where they belong, and cease to be acts of affirmation and hope. He was the smallest of cogs in the vast machinery of the UN, but his vision of the country, no less than that of the international bureaucrats and experts in Phnom Penh, was organized around his part in saving it from itself.
"What Cambodians are good at is destruction," he said. "They know nothing about building—about putting things up and carrying on."
He waved good-naturedly at the Cambodians, and they waved back, bobbing their heads, smiling, and bowing. Both sides were working hard at their jobs, the expert and the amateur, the feckless and the responsible: doughty rescuer and hapless rescued were taking their jobs equally seriously.
Later I got a ride with an Austrian colonel in an UNTAC car, a white, air-conditioned Land Cruiser. He was a small, dapper, extremely loquacious man. He'd spent most of his working life on UN missions; he rated the Cambodia operation well above Lebanon, a little below Cyprus. But he was still planning to get out of Kompong Thom—too much tension, too many shells overhead.
We stopped to pick up a Russian colonel, a huge man, pear-shaped, like a belly dancer gone to seed. His khaki shorts looked like bikini briefs on his gigantic legs.
The Russian reached for the radio, which was tuned to the UNTAC radio station, and turned it off. "Yap, yap, yap, yap," he said, glaring at the Austrian.
The Austrian shrank back, but plunged into battle a couple of minutes later, mustache bristling. "I like that station," he cried. His voice was high, terrier-like. "I like it, I want to listen to it."
The Russian jammed a tree stump of a knee across the radio and looked casually out the window. The Austrian snatched his hand back, but his defeat was only temporary. He turned to look out the window and sighed. "Such a beautiful country," he said, "such wonderful people—always smiling. But why are they always at war? Why can't they get on with building their country?"
He grinned at the Russian. "I suppose we'll be going to Russia next—eh, my friend?"
The Russian sprang bolt upright, sputtering. The veins on his temples bulged. "No," he barked, "no, not Russia, never, maybe Ukraine ... But not Russia, never."
Then a truck appeared on the road ahead of us, gradually taking shape within a cloud of dust. It was packed with people, many of whom seemed to be wearing olive-green fatigues. A man was leaning over the driver's cabin, looking directly at us: he had an unusual-looking cap on his head. It was green and looked Chinese, like something a Khmer Rouge guerrilla might wear. The Russian and the Austrian were suddenly on the edge of their seats, straining forward.
The truck went past in a flurry of dust, the people in it waved, and we got a good look at the cap. There was lettering on it; it said "Windy City Motel."
7
I got blank stares when I asked where Pol Pot's village was. Pol Pot had villages on either side of Route 12, people said, dozens of them; nobody could get to them, they were in the forest, surrounded by minefields. I might as well have asked where the State of Cambodia was. Nor did it help to ask about Saloth Sar; nobody seemed ever to have heard of that name.
One of the people I asked, a young Cambodian called Sros, offered to help, although he was just as puzzled by the question as everybody else. He worked for a relief agency and had spent a lot of time in Kompong Thom. He had never heard anybody mention Pol Pot's village and would have been skeptical if he had. But I persuaded him that Pol Pot was really called Saloth Sar and had been born near the town; I'd forgotten the name of the village, but I had seen it mentioned in books and knew it was close by.
He was intrigued. He borrowed a scooter and we drove down the main street in Kompong Thom, stopping passersby and asking respectfully, "Bong, do you know where Pol Pot's village is?"
They looked at us in disbelief and hurried away: either they didn't know or they weren't saying. Then Sros stopped to ask a local district official, a bowed, earnest-looking man with a twitch that ran all the way down the right side of his face. The moment I saw him, I was sure he would know. He did. He lowered his voice and whispered quickly into Sros's ear. The village was called Sbauv, and to get to it we had to go past the hospital and follow the dirt road along the River Sen. He stopped to look over his shoulder and pointed down the road.
There was perhaps an hour of sunlight left, and it wasn't safe to be out after dark. But Sros was undeterred; the thought that we were near Pol Pot's birthplace had a galvanic effect on him. He was determined to get there as soon as possible.
He had spent almost his entire adult life behind barbed wire, one and a half miles of it, in a refugee camp on the Thai border. He had entered it at the age of thirteen and had come to manhood circling around and around the perimeter, month after month, year after year, waiting to see who got out, who got a visa, who went mad, who got raped, who got shot by the Thai guards. He was twenty-five now, diminutive but wiry, very slight of build. He had converted to Christianity at the camp, and there was an earnestness behind his ready smile and easygoing manners that hinted at a deeply felt piety.
Sros was too young to recall much of the "Pol Pot time," but he remembered vividly his journey to the Thai border with his parents. They left in 1982, three years after the Vietnamese invasion. Things were hard where they were, and they'd heard from Western radio broadcasts that there were camps on the border where they would be looked after and fed.
Things hadn't turned out quite as they had imagined. They ended up in a camp run by a conservative Cambodian political faction, a kind of living hell. But they bribed a "guide" to get them across to a UN-run camp, Khao I Dang, where the conditions were better. Sros went to school and learned English, and after years of waiting, fruitlessly, for a visa to the West, he took the plunge and crossed over into Cambodia. That was a year ago. With his education and his knowledge of English he had found a job without difficulty, but he was still keeping his name on the rosters of the UN High Commission for Refugees.
"My father says to me, there will be peace in your lifetime and you will be happy," he told me. "My grandfather used to tell my father the same thi
ng, and now I say the same thing to my nephews and nieces. It's always the same."
We left Kompong Thom behind almost before we knew it. A dirt road snaked away from the edge of the city, shaded by trees and clumps of bamboo. The road was an estuary of deep red dust: the wheels of the ox carts that came rumbling toward us churned up crimson waves that billowed outward and up into the sky. The dust hung above the road far into the distance, like spray above a rocky coastline, glowing red in the sunset.
Flanking the road on one side were shanties and small dwellings, the poorest I had yet seen in Cambodia, some of them no more than frames stuck into the ground and covered with plaited palm leaves. Even the larger houses seemed little more than shanties on stilts. On the other side of the road the ground dropped away sharply to the River Sen: a shrunken stream now, in the dry season, flowing sluggishly along at the bottom of its steep-sided channel.
It was impossible to tell where one village ended and another began. We stopped to ask a couple of times, the last time at a stall where a woman was selling cigarettes and fruit. She pointed over her shoulder: one of Pol Pot's brothers lived in the house behind the stall, she said, and another in a palm-thatch shanty in the adjacent yard.
We drove into the yard and looked up at the house. It was large compared to those around it, a typical wooden Khmer house, on stilts, with chickens roosting underneath and clothes drying between the pillars. It had clearly seen much better days and was badly in need of repairs.
The decaying house and the dilapidated, palm-thatched shanty in the yard took me by surprise. I remembered having read that Pol Pot's father was a well-to-do farmer, and I had expected something less humble. Sros was even more surprised; perhaps he had assumed that the relatives of politicians always got rich, one way or another. There was an augury of something unfamiliar here—a man of power who had done nothing to help his own kin. It was a reminder that we were confronting a phenomenon that was completely at odds with quotidian expectation.
Then an elderly woman with close-cropped white hair appeared on the veranda of the house. Sros said a few words to her, and she immediately invited us up. Greeting us with folded hands, she asked us to seat ourselves on a mat while she went inside to find her husband. Like many Khmer dwellings, the house was sparsely furnished, the walls bare except for a few religious pictures and images of the Buddha.
The woman returned followed by a tall, gaunt man dressed in a faded sarong. He did not look as much like Pol Pot as the brother I had met briefly in Phnom Penh, but the resemblance was still unmistakable.
His name was Loth Sieri, he said, seating himself beside us, and he was the second oldest of the brothers. Saloth Sar had gone away to Phnom Penh while he was still quite young, and after that they had not seen very much of him. He had gone from school to college in Phnom Penh, and then finally to Paris. He smiled ruefully. "It was the knowledge he got in Paris that made him what he is," he said.
Saloth Sar had visited them a few times after returning to Cambodia, but then he had disappeared and they had never seen him again. It was more than twenty years now since he, Loth Sieri, had set eyes on him. They had been treated no differently from anyone else during the Pol Pot time; they had not had the remotest idea that Pol Pot was their brother Sar, born in their house. They found out only afterward.
Was Saloth Sar born in that very house? I asked. Yes, they said, in the room beside us, right next to the veranda.
When he came back from France, I asked, had he ever talked about his life in Paris? What he'd done, who his friends were, what the city was like?
At that moment, with cows lowing in the gathering darkness, the journey to Paris from that village on the Sen River seemed an extraordinary odyssey. I found myself very curious to know how Loth Sieri and his brothers had imagined Paris, and their own brother in it. But no. The old man shook his head: Saloth Sar had never talked about France after he came back. Maybe he had shown them some pictures—he couldn't recall.
I remembered from David Chandler's biography that Pol Pot was very well read as a young man and knew large tracts of Rimbaud and Verlaine by heart. But I was not surprised, somehow, to discover that he had never allowed his family the privilege of imagining.
Just before getting up, I asked if Loth Sieri remembered his relative the dancer Luk Khun Meak, who had first introduced his family into the royal palace. He nodded, and I asked, "Did you ever see her dance?"
He smiled and shook his head; no, he had never seen any royal dancing, except in pictures.
It was almost dark now; somewhere in the north, near the minefield, there was the sound of gunfire. We got up to go, and the whole family walked down with us. After I had said goodbye and was about to climb onto the scooter, Sros whispered in my ear that it might be a good idea to give the old man some money. I had not thought of it; I took some money out of my pocket and put it in his hands.
He made a gesture of acknowledgment, and as we were about to leave he said a few words to Sros.
"What did he say?" I asked Sros when we were back on the road.
Shouting above the wind, Sros said, "He asked me, 'Do you think there will be peace now?'"
"And what did you tell him?" I said.
"I told him, 'I wish I could say yes.'"
8
On July 10, 1906, one month after their arrival in France, the dancers performed at a reception given by the minister of colonies in the Bois du Boulogne in Paris. "Never has there been a more brilliant Parisian fête," said Le Figaro, "nor one with such novel charm." Invitations were much sought after, and on the night of the performance cars and illuminated carriages invaded the park like an "army of fireflies."
While the performance was in progress, a correspondent spotted the most celebrated Parisian of all in the audience, the bearded, Mosaic figure of "the great Rodin...[going] into ecstasies over the little virgins of Phnom Penh, whose immaterial silhouettes he drew with infinite love."
Rodin, now, at the age of sixty-six, France's acknowledged apostle of the arts, fell immediately captive: in Princess Soumphady's young charges he discovered the infancy of Europe. "These Cambodians have shown us everything that antiquity could have contained," he wrote soon afterward. "It is impossible to think of anyone wearing human nature to such perfection; except them and the Greeks."
Two days after the performance Rodin presented himself at the dancers' Paris lodgings, at the Avenue Malakoff, with a sketchbook under his arm. The dancers were packing their belongings in preparation for their return to Marseille, but Rodin was admitted to the grounds of the mansion and given leave to do what he pleased. He executed several celebrated sketches that day, including a few of King Sisowath.
By the end of the day the artist was so smitten with the dancers that he accompanied them to the station, bought a ticket, and traveled to Marseille on the same train. He had packed neither clothes nor materials, and according to one account, upon arriving in Marseille he found that he was out of paper and had to buy brown paper bags from a grocery store.
Over the next few days, sketching feverishly in the gardens of the villa where the dancers were now lodged, Rodin seemed to lose thirty years. The effort involved in sketching his favorite models, three restless fourteen-year-olds called Sap, Soun, and Yem, appeared to rejuvenate the artist. A French official saw him placing a sheet of white paper on his knee one morning; he "said to the little Sap: 'Put your foot on this,' and then drew the outline of her foot with a pencil, saying 'Tomorrow you'll have your shoes, but now pose a little more for me!' Sap, having tired of atomizer bottles and cardboard cats, had asked her 'papa' for a pair of pumps. Every evening—ardent, happy, but exhausted—Rodin would return to his hotel with his hands full of sketches and collect his thoughts."
Photographs from the time show Rodin seated on a garden bench, sketching under the watchful eyes of the policemen who had been posted at the dancers' villa to ensure their safety. Rodin was oblivious: "The friezes of Angkor were coming to life before my very eyes. I
loved these Cambodian girls so much that I didn't know how to express my gratitude for the royal honor they had shown me in dancing and posing for me. I went to the Nouvelles Galeries to buy a basket of toys for them, and these divine children who dance for the gods hardly knew how to repay me for the happiness I had given them. They even talked about taking me with them."
On their last day in France, hours before they boarded the ship that was to take them back to Cambodia, the dancers were taken to the celebrated photographer Baudouin. On the way, passing through a muddy alley, Princess Soumphady happened to step on a pat of cow dung. Horrified, she raised her arms to the heavens and flung herself, wailing, upon the dust, oblivious of her splendid costume. The rest of the troupe immediately followed suit: within moments the alley was full of prostrate Cambodian dancers, dressed in full performance regalia.
"What an emptiness they left for me!" wrote Rodin. "When they left ... I thought they had taken away the beauty of the world ... I followed them to Marseille; I would have followed them as far as Cairo."
His sentiments were exactly mirrored by King Sisowath. "I am deeply saddened to be leaving France," the king said on the eve of his departure. "In this beautiful country I shall leave behind a piece of my heart."
9
The trip to France evidently cast King Sisowath's mind into the same kind of turmoil, the same tumult, that has provoked generations of displaced students—the Gandhis, the Kenyattas, the Chou en Lais, among thousands of their less illustrious countrymen—to reflect upon the unfamiliar, wintry worlds beyond the doors of their rented lodgings.
On September 12, 1906, shortly after their return to Cambodia, the king and his ministers published their reflections in a short but poignant document. Cast in the guise of a royal proclamation, it was in fact a venture into a kind of travel writing. It began: "The visits that His Majesty made to the great cities of France, his rapid examination of the institutions of that country, the organization of the different services that are to be found there, astonished him and led him to think of France as a paradise." Emulation, they concluded, was "the only means of turning resolutely to the path of progress."
