Song for an Approaching Storm

by Peter Froeberg Idling

  But it is you after all. You really did come back.

  Being in love is one thing, but this is something quite different. Something that lies beyond your control. It’s as if everything else shrinks into insignificance when the two of you are in the same place. You don’t turn up for work and you arrive late at important meetings.

  You really did come back.

  In the beginning you hated yourself for acquiescing so easily. It was months before you made peace with yourself. Even then it was only on conditions that were dictated by her mere existence.

  You are sitting in an open-air restaurant on rue Angkor and you know you have to come to a decision. It is not a matter of both, it is either/or. But your usual decisiveness is not sufficient in this case. And your three-sided game is becoming more and more complicated all the time.

  Even though her absence torments you, the situation is simpler when she doesn’t get in touch. Two days have passed since you heard from her and you have already managed to get a good deal more done.

  There is nothing unusual about her silence. You have learnt that her unpredictable behaviour is quite predictable. One week she is present at every event, filling the days with her ideas and her apparently unstoppable creativity. She writes, draws and deluges the tailor with new sketches and suggestions. She is always on the way somewhere, always with at least one girlfriend on each side. And the following week, or even two, she stays at home. And then you seldom hear from her. But you have got used to it. You bide your time and devote it to other things.

  If these empty days stretch out and become three or four, a couple of pretty words in a letter, or the odd, small, well-chosen present left at her gate are quite sufficient. In return you may receive a slip of paper with a lipstick imprint on which the words je t’aime have been written in tiny letters between the lips. You have saved all of them and keep them in an envelope in one of the drawers of your desk. Under your party membership book, the one with the paper covers.

  It is only two days since she last telephoned and there is no need to do anything yet. Her silence is open to many explanations. So you can concentrate on what Vannsak is saying to you.

  Being seen out among ordinary voters like this is part of the strategy the two of you have adopted. You show yourselves in places where your opponents do not. Word spreads across the country. You are young, well-educated, privileged people, but you have renounced your privileges in order to be with the people.

  It is not completely true, but the two of you understand the value of setting a good example.

  In your view, the people who walk behind the plough and the oxen, the people who tap the sap from rubber trees, the people who empty their nets in the light of dawn, are not fit to govern a country. Not yet, anyway. The colonial power intentionally saw to it that the majority remained in ignorance. Only a few were picked out and enabled to become obedient public servants in the lower levels of the machinery of state. The population numbers many millions and the country has no more than perhaps a hundred schools. It is going to take years to educate the electorate to understand the principles of democracy.

  So the two of you are very conscious of your responsibility. You are the advance guard sent to mould the people. Your task is to take the lead and draw up plans for the new society that the next generation will build. If you desert the cause there are no others to take your places. In which case new foreign rulers are waiting in the wings. The Vietnamese. The Thais. The Americans. The British. Perhaps even the French again. One as bad as the other.

  Which is why you order more coffee and take out your fountain pens and clean sheets of paper. Folders of documents pass from one briefcase to the other. The sun has sunk even lower and the waiters are lighting the lamps. High above the lamps the glow of the stars is beginning to show in the night sky. Inappropriate things have been written in La Liberté. There was a speech in which someone accused you of taking bribes. And some election workers have been roughed up.

  The two of you set to work.

  THURSDAY, 25 AUGUST 1955

  In front of you lie the dark, heavy swirling waters of the river and the eye of the lighthouse. Not the river you grew up by, but a different one.

  And behind you the city, with all its cars, its restaurants and its gleaming palace. But also with its darkness. You have taught yourself to see it. Not just to focus—as you used to—on the patches of light, but instead to calculate how much room for manoeuvre exists between those patches. And it is considerable.

  Turn around and look at the people strolling along the quay. Elegant young couples arm in arm, in frocks, jackets slung over shoulders. Families, whose carefully combed and plaited children chase one another. Street vendors selling lotus seeds, roast fowl and candyfloss. Fortune tellers with their cards spread out. Bowed widows, hair clipped short, in black skirts and white blouses, rattling the small change in their begging bowls. A thin balloon seller walks past, a colourful cloud of balloons above his head. The glow of cigarettes shows up more as the colour fades quickly from the sky.

  Your own countrymen in among delicate-limbed Vietnamese, round Chinese faces and Europeans with noses like the beaks of birds.

  Clouds of insects swarm around the heavy lamp standards along the quay.

  Electricity is the master here, and Saigon—that huge city—is a boat-trip downstream, after which comes the wide world. But the greater part of your city still relies on paraffin lamps and cooks its food over open fires. It is only the stone buildings here in the Quatrième Quartier that gleam with light.

  But one day, or night rather, you think, all the towns and villages in the country will be lit up. One by one by one. The question then will be whether your need for the protective cover of darkness will be greater or smaller than it is now.

  You recognize some of your pupils and they recognize you and put their hands together in greeting. In the evening light and freed from school uniform they look older.

  Take the packet of Cigarettes du Globe from your breast pocket and allow yourself a cigarette. Let the moisture-laden river air mix with the harsh tobacco smoke. There is no wind and the smoke rises at right angles to the white paper.

  High above the heads of the crowds the silhouette of the Wat Ounalom is slowly fading into the night sky. It is a long time since, barefoot and cloaked in orange, you passed in and out through the wheel of life of its iron gates.

  Yet another home you have left behind.

  Now there are new boys chanting the verses written in miniature script on palm-leaf paper, new boys cleaning the older monks’ quarters. You still remember the words, and where the brooms are kept. The same rituals, the same discipline. But you know your history and you know there was another age, an age of temperamental Hindu gods. And another age even before that. The spirits, though, are constant throughout the centuries. They inhabited the trees and watercourses of your country even before the arrival of the gods.

  The palace stands just beyond the pagoda. Religion and monarchy so close that the prince and the abbot could wave to one another from their bedroom windows.

  You think: soft oppression and hard oppression respectively.

  The prince’s security police and the abbot’s upholding of a regime in which individual freedom can be ignored. A human life always depends on lives that were lived in past times.

  Poverty is the well-deserved punishment of the poor; the list of entries in a bank-book is the well-deserved reward of the rich.

  Marx is wrong about this, you think. Religion is not the opium of your people. It does not offer the solace of eternal paradise after a life of poverty as Christianity does. There are no angelic wings deluding them into believing in a flight up and out of penury.

  Instead, the words of the abbot are shackles that fetter thought and guarantee that the social order will remain as static as it is unjust. Any attempt to exchange one’s lot for a better one is an attempt to effect a minute shift in the order of the cosmos. It is hardly any wonder that peop
le resign themselves to their fate, however unjustly they are treated.

  It has taken time for you to recognize this. Religion has many advantages. But you have let yourself to be convinced that the advantages are not so tightly tied to faith that they cannot be achieved in other ways. You kept your objections to yourself when you were first introduced to the discussion club through La Maison de l’Indochine in Paris. The others followed lines of reasoning that were absent from your own thinking. The way they drew apt and appropriate support from philosophers you only knew by name. If that.

  But there are nevertheless aspects of the existence of barefoot monks that can serve as examples even in the radical political struggle. In this respect, you think, your people have an advantage over many other nations. The monks live in the very simplest of circumstances. They play no part in the spiralling and stupefying cycle of material consumption. They submit to a higher goal and they strive indefatigably to attain it. It is a way of life that can be learnt from. Devotion worthy of admiration. It is, moreover, an experience which the majority of your countrymen share, so the groundwork is already in place. That will be important when the day comes—as it surely will—when people will have to accept suffering and privation in order to make the reform of society possible. The day when resources and opportunities will be redistributed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

  You learnt the importance of discipline during your time with Prince Chantharangsy, if not before. His forces could have played a decisive role in your country’s fight for freedom, and you went straight to them once the boat from Marseilles had docked in the harbour you can see below you now. But when you were with them you realized that the revolution was not going to be their work. Chantharangsy made a great commotion, demanding first one thing and then another, while he himself lived comfortably in Chbar Morn with his concubines. The preconditions were certainly present, but not the ability.

  Consequently, his soldiers refused to sacrifice their lives when they went on the offensive. Instead, they killed civilians, burnt houses indiscriminately and thus brought the wrath of the poor peasants down upon their own heads. The same poor peasants who had silently supported them and voluntarily joined their ranks. You did not stay in that company for long before moving on to the more revolutionary partisan phalanx.

  Humility and a preparedness to make sacrifices, along with the importance of setting a good example. Those were some of the experiences you made a note of and later reported to the Organization.

  The monks, of course, even have a wheel as their central symbol. You could not avoid noticing the connection when you first encountered Marx’s wheel. But the similarity is one of form alone. The wheel of history is rolling towards a more just future. If anyone sticks a foot in to try to stop it, his leg will be snapped off. The wheel of life, on the other hand, merely stands and spins on the same unjust spot through the decades and the centuries and the millennia.

  You are sitting at your desk and in front of you there are piles of pupils’ work waiting to be marked, party reports to read and secret documents for the Organization to prepare.

  The paraffin lamp is smelling of smoke because you bought the fuel from a stall on the street. A sooty smell for you and money for the poor woman instead of for the multinational petroleum companies, you think—she was sitting there among her bottles of petrol and paraffin, her eyes glazed by the fumes. In this respect, however, as in many others, you are less than consistent. The petrol that drives your car, for instance, was bought from the pump on Avenue de Verdun.

  It is a good evening. You are working in a disciplined way. One thing at a time. You mark mistakes and write figures with your red pen, write cramped lines that are difficult to read with your blue pen. The piles of paper shrink and grow. In the darkness outside the noodle seller can be heard drumming his usual low call-sign with a chopstick on half a coconut. Wood against wood in a lonely and intricate rhythm that slowly comes nearer, reaches a climax and then fades away. But you do not rush out and stop him; you pour more tea into your glass instead.

  There is simplicity in this. An escape into a purely mechanical activity. You can put your other concerns aside and work on indefatigably into the silence of the night.

  FRIDAY, 26 AUGUST 1955

  You are sitting in a dark and empty classroom preparing a lesson on classics of French literature. Strips of light filter through the closed shutters, and a little while ago you saw him. You think of the truth of what your grandmother used to say, that people should be careful what they say. That talk can bring trouble down on your head.

  A short time ago you had a quick lunch. Another overcrowded open-air restaurant. Vannsak was sitting beside you, his shirt collar unbuttoned, his tie loose. You watched how he carried on talking without a pause, not even pausing when he shovelled noodles into his mouth.

  The conversation between you was a serious one. Not many smiles. You tell him what you were told when you rang party headquarters during the morning. That another two candidates had been reported missing. A thirty-four-year-old in Kompong Speu, a forty-three-year-old in Kompong Thom. You also told him that several more politicians from rural areas have turned up in the capital, hoping to take advantage of its relative safety. And Vannsak stated the obvious—that it is impossible to run a nationwide election campaign when all the candidates are campaigning in one and the same area.

  The two of you ate your noodles, supped up the juice and discussed Sam Sary, the deputy prime minister. It looked as if there were no limitations being put on him any longer.

  The government used to be satisfied with drowning out the loudspeakers at election meetings by using even bigger speakers. Then there came a stage when they used megaphones and yelling crowds. Recently, however, Sam Sary has taken to emptying the prisons of criminal elements, and that lot are not satisfied just to chant obscenities. Now there are these disappearances, which are becoming more and more common. Some candidates are found in work camps; some are found face down in their own brain matter, hands tied behind their backs; some are not found at all.

  The terror, which up to this point has been aimed at the Organization and the People’s Party, has spread to include the Democrats. That is not surprising, perhaps, but you really did not expect it of the prince. Did not expect him to resort to the kind of thing that is quite alien to the European democracies he claims to admire.

  The two of you discussed Sam Sary, the prince’s favourite minister. The strange thing is that during his years in France he seems to have adopted the colonialists’ view of his own people. He uses the same methods against his fellow-countrymen as the French are currently using against the freedom fighters in Morocco. Batons and brutality. But—you remind Vannsak—even when Sary was an examining magistrate he used to interrogate suspects to death with his own hands. Yes, Vannsak remembers your telling him, and he says he has since had it confirmed by others.

  It was afterwards, when you had finished eating and gone your separate ways after arranging to meet later in the evening, that you saw him. You were taking your usual route. But your usual route was different this time because there was a gleaming black car parked on the rue du Palais in front of the yellow palace wall with its leaf-shaped battlements. And he and his driver and a young newspaper seller were standing between the car and the wall. You passed them, your eyes fixed on Sam Sary and his driver. He was wearing a suit as black as the car; the driver was in a driver’s uniform, complete with epaulettes. The newspaper seller seemed to be crouched between them, smiling uncertainly. You watched this incomprehensible scene as long as you could, until the street curved and a wall blocked the view.

  He was shorter than you had thought. Or perhaps his driver was unusually tall? But standing there on the pavement he exuded a kind of pondus, and you don’t know whether it was natural to him or whether it came from the power he enjoys or whether you and your fear simply projected it onto him.

  You are sitting in a dark classroo
m and in a short while you will be teaching a lesson on Rousseau’s Emile. It’s an important lesson. Not because Emile is one of your favourite books but because it is very well suited to the political discussion that will follow. The kind of political discussion that you as a teacher are not allowed to hold but which can easily be concealed behind the book.

  Just now, however, you have turned your head towards the window and in your mind’s eye you can see the gleaming black car and the three men in the far distance. You brush away a mosquito, imagine yourself pressing the accelerator to the floor and, when you are about ten metres from them, forcing your car up onto the pavement. The car lurches and bounces on its suspension and the three of them turn towards you, their faces horror-stricken. Then you continue south at high speed, mudguards buckled and the front of the car spattered with blood. Newspaper pages drift slowly to the ground in your wake.

  Up to this point the fantasy has been a pleasant one. The fact that two innocent lives have been lost merely serves to underline your decisiveness, your preparedness to commit an unforgivable injustice in order to achieve a more just world, your readiness to relinquish your place in the community of the blameless for their sakes. But then, when you have to dispose of the car and explain why and provide yourself with a convincing alibi, things quickly become complicated. The fantasy loses all its attraction when the prince declares a state of emergency and Sam Sary is given a state funeral and Vannsak and the whole party leadership are executed by firing squad. So you rewind back to where you see the three of them by the palace wall and cut the bit about accelerating away south, engine roaring.

  You are sitting at a desk made of dark heavy wood, the whole of its flat surface covered with your books and notes. There are twenty-five minutes to go before the classroom fills with thirteen-year-olds whom you, in turn, will fill with potentially subversive knowledge.