Song for an Approaching Storm

by Peter Froeberg Idling

  The photograph stands alongside the sheets of words written in pencil. The black and white one in its scalloped white frame. You angle her eyes towards you and think Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today is Friday.

  You have devoted five years to the struggle. In Paris it was initially a matter of company, of filling lonely evenings with discussion clubs that turned out to be dynamic and entertaining. And the conversations and the pamphlets that passed round led you from clarity to clarity, from one insight to the next. How everything fits together, how there is a coherent answer to all the difficult questions with all their contradictions. The fact that history has a direction and that, as a consequence of that, every individual action is a significant part of forward development. And all these individual actions of yours soon began to take over from your studies. They led you to miss lectures and eventually there wasn’t even time for the exams. You felt yourself being absorbed into the body of the revolution, and you enjoy being part of the fist that is going to smash the oppression of imperialism and capitalism, the worldwide realm of injustice.

  And yet.

  You are even afraid to put it into words to yourself, an irrational fear that it might leak out. That the secret might be revealed. But you really do want Vannsak to win the election. You want him to put you in a beautifully furnished office in the chancellery and give you an influential mandate. For not even a dreamer like you can imagine there is any other way to a life with Somaly. And since the two of you were reunited after your years in France, you know that you want to see the world through her eyes. You want to be embraced by her enthusiasm and you want to hear her calm breath beside you when you wake in the night.

  A future of that kind would compel you to compromise with the lie, but, you think, there are revolutionaries much more committed than you who have climbed down from the barricades for similar reasons.

  And anyway, the struggle can continue in many other ways.

  You look at her black and white smile and think of the past year and all those times in Vannsak’s living room, which is empty during the day and at your disposal. How the two of you talked about every thing and, when you finished talking about everything, sat there silently—in a silence that seems to you to contain everything that hasn’t yet been said. You with her hands between yours, struggling to overcome your desire to hurl her back on the sofa and unbutton all the buttons on whatever garment she is wearing—whether it was an import or one designed by her, it was equally frustrating.

  But merely leaning over her and inhaling the scent from the neck of her dress has often been sufficient to induce a haze of intoxication light as a butterfly’s wings.

  You believe you have convinced the Organization that your continued engagement to Somaly provides sophisticated cover for your purposeful infiltration of the political establishment. Secretly, however, the situation is quite the reverse: the infiltration is what provides cover for the real ambitions of your heart.

  In the past you never understood traitors. Never understood how they could sacrifice the struggle for petty egotistical reasons. But in that respect, too, you have now been forced to move from clarity to insight.

  You put the photograph to one side and return to the dog-eared book with all the underlinings. Concentrate, you think, concentrate, concentrate: but it’s more of a mantra than anything else.

  You have given up waiting for Vannsak and you are looking out over the sparse traffic on the Boulevard Norodom. The lights of the cars are yellow and red in the twilight and the cyclos haven’t yet lighted their paraffin lamps. You are standing leaning against the wall that surrounds the school behind you. Vannsak’s house stands on one corner of the block that is occupied by the ochre-coloured barrack-style buildings of the school. His house is yellow too, its window arches red and its shutters grey. You had arranged to meet each other on his veranda and you have been waiting in vain.

  Not even Vannsak’s French wife was there to open the door to your knock. But the door had not been broken down and through the window you could see that there were no papers, clothes and books scattered all over the floor. That calmed your concerns.

  You have any number of things to be getting on with. Reports to write, statistics to be broken down, tactical thoughts to be thought. The meeting that has failed to occur has given you a gift of a couple of hours that you really don’t have. Your sense of duty demands that you get into your black car and drive home to the piles of papers.

  But you stay, your back resting against the school wall that is still holding the warmth of the sun, and you smoke yet another Cigarette du Globe.

  The lights of Ciné Lux a couple of blocks away can be picked out between the dark tree-trunks along the boulevard. Your wristwatch tells you that it is a few minutes before six and the pale street lamps come on along the middle of the narrow boulevard.

  You think of the cinema adverts in Parisian newspapers. They filled several pages and there seemed to be a film for every occasion, for every mood. You often chose a film without knowing where the cinema was. You would go down into the Métro with just an address and your well-worn map. The one that eventually split where the folds met. Whole districts disappeared into those holes.

  You would walk along unfamiliar streets between unfamiliar buildings looking for a neon sign and a brightly lit entrance. You particularly recall the cold half of the year, remembering what it was like to let your body sink into the warmth of a new auditorium.

  And you can remember the feeling of shoving your hand into your jacket pocket looking for matches or for a couple of centimes and feeling all the stiff little tickets from your visits to the cinema.

  But you have to go further back in time to reach your most fantastic film experiences. They were preceded by the anticipation sparked by the arrival of a lorry driven by tall, pale, lightly dressed Frenchmen. Its wheels had wooden spokes and it carried a projector and screen on the back. They always arrived unannounced. Or perhaps it was just that you were too small to understand the rhythm of the visits.

  Your older brothers and their friends helped to put up the screen and tension it. They ran errands for the Frenchmen. Then hundreds of you sat down under the stars and watched their films. You can remember the dull hum of the generator, the explosive bursts of laughter in unison, the insects crawling across the black and white movements of Charlot. You can remember watching the alien milieux through which he was being chased. Even the dogs looked different. Then you all walked home through the night, full of the film, whose twists and turns would be talked about for days afterwards.

  You light a cigarette from the glowing butt of the one before and stroll across the boulevard. The spire of Wat Phnom can just be picked out far along the boulevard and you take the pavement on the other side.

  There are cars and cyclos waiting outside Ciné Lux. People are silhouetted against the foyer and the performance will be starting in just a few minutes. Big hand-painted signs above the entrance advertise Les Affameurs. There are pictures of threatening-looking men in cowboy hats. James Stewart. Rock Hudson. And a woman, beautiful in a Western way.

  The soundtrack of the film comes booming out of loudspeakers facing the boulevard. Dialogue, the sound of horses’ hooves, grand music.

  You buy a ticket and for one quick moment you are back in Paris where you also used to go to the pictures on your own. It is several years since you last did so and the empty seat beside you is different now. It is no longer an empty space filled with freedom. Rather the opposite. Now it is the sort of emptiness that takes you by the arm and accompanies you into the darkened auditorium.

  And you think how it might have been, how you and Somaly might have squeezed into a cyclo as you usually do. She would sit on your lap and you would feel her soft weight on your thighs. You would have discussed the film and she would have seen connections that neither you nor anyone else you know would have noticed. The two of you would be trundling through the night towards her mother’s house, and you would have t
hat fragile sense of happiness that comes from never knowing whether you will accidentally let slip something that will cause her high spirits to turn into irritation or a sullen silence. But that is precisely the reason why your feeling of being the chosen one is constantly being renewed.

  You sit down to watch a film with James Stewart and Rock Hudson and Julia Adams.

  You have been watching a film with James Stewart and Rock Hudson and Julia Adams.

  You think of James Stewart and the way he is betrayed by his greedy friends. The moment of pain on his face when he realizes their deceit. But what really makes an impression is that he does not allow himself to despair, he re-establishes his honour by taking revenge. Tight-lipped, purposeful. However confused and uncertain he may be, he still dares to trust that what he is doing is the right thing.

  And you remember how, when he is with the wagon train, he says that his country has been destroyed by incomers. That the purity it had in the beginning has been lost.

  JEREMY: Good country, Glyn.

  GLYN: Yeah, real good country.

  JEREMY: Let’s hope we can keep it this way. Missouri and Kansas was like this when we first saw ’em… good, clean. It was the men who came in to steal and kill that changed things. We mustn’t let it happen here.

  Your feelings are still coloured by that film and you know that it affects your judgement. And you cannot avoid drawing a parallel between James Stewart’s Oregon and your own country. Now just a fragment of what it once was. Under constant attack from all points of the compass. Everyone wants the fertile soil of the lowlands and the timber and precious stones of the mountains. You think about the way the prince’s grandfather was forced to ask for help from the French to prevent his kingdom being swallowed by the Vietnamese and the Thais. And how the monarch in his time of need put his faith in the assurances of the Europeans.

  In the film James Stewart saves his friend Arthur Kennedy from the gallows. His reward is yet another act of betrayal.

  It is a good land, Glyn.

  In the case of your own country almost a century of slavery followed, during which convoy after convoy of your natural resources disappeared down the Mekong River.

  We mustn’t let it happen here.

  It has already happened here. And, you think, it must never be allowed to happen again.

  The rain is lashing down in the night and you are sitting with your back against a discoloured wall covered with mould. The plaster is bulging and pocked. You have stopped thinking about the film with James Stewart and a couple other white Americans.

  You have just finished the second bowl of long white noodles of the day. It’s standing on a rickety folding table in front of you, the chopsticks lying neatly alongside it.

  The neon light from the food stall reaches a metre or so out into the darkness. The torrential rain makes the street look as if the surface is coming to the boil. The light from the second noodle stall can scarcely be seen through the wall of water. Brown rapids are foaming along the deep gutters that line the pavements. The air is saturated with the fine mist formed by the rain beating down on roofs and streets.

  You drink weak and watery tea, smoke your cigarettes and wait for the rain to ease off.

  You remember the light sunny showers of your first summer months in Yugoslavia. The rainbows that arched over the mountains. The cool that those welcome showers brought to the heat of the day.

  You were all working together to widen the old road. You did not just double its width, you quadrupled it. And the crumbling verge was buried deep beneath the smooth new carriageway.

  Together you shovelled gravel while heavy yellow steamrollers rolled out the black tarmac that refused to set in the heat. It stayed hot enough to burn the soles of your feet far into the night.

  The whole country resembled an enormous building site. New dams drove new hydro plants and the new electricity from them powered new factories. New locomotives pulled new carriages on new rails. You were working alongside Americans and Armenians, Bulgarians and Britons, Swedes and Slovaks. But also Albanians and Croats and Slovenes and Serbs and all the rest, whatever they were called, who had previously been fighting one another but were now united behind one leader and one vision. They had put religion and history behind them. Every project completed was proclaimed to be a step forward in the victorious struggle for national self-determination.

  Is it possible to envisage a functioning federation between your country and its neighbours? A Federal People’s Republic of Indochina? Would it be possible to create a structure that prevented one country dominating the others? Or would that be impossible given that one of the countries is three times the size of the other two together?

  You remember how you used to sing the songs of your homelands to each other. And dance the dances of your homelands as the nights grew dark. You remember how the languages got mixed into something everyone could understand. You can remember scrubbing yourself in the dawn light—it is difficult to imagine now how cold water can be. Pumped straight from the mountains. You can remember your reluctance, which grew greater every morning. How you used to fill the palms of your hands with lather before beginning a shivering dance under the ice-cold jets.

  Then you would all sit there, skin rough with gooseflesh, drinking sugary coffee until the sun warmed the mountainsides and your bodies, and then the machines would roar into life in clouds of diesel smoke.

  Now you are sitting alone in an outdoor restaurant and the rain is pouring down in front of you with undiminished force.

  You are attracted by the assembly of nations you were part of for a few summer weeks. But how could something like that be achieved here? Do you have to have a devastating war first in order to make it possible to unite different peoples? A horrifying but necessary baptism by fire to clear the ground totally?

  And what do you do with people like the prince and Sam Sary? You find it difficult to imagine them anywhere other than in a prison cell. And it is doubtful whether even that would be secure enough.

  It would take an exceptionally powerful unifying force, one capable of compelling people to unite behind it—even people who have their own ambitions and different agendas. Otherwise everything would disintegrate into ever more fragmented factions. Political consciousness, discipline and a better future within reach—that is what will be necessary to bring about something that resembles your Yugoslav summer.

  And there was another journey. You think about it now. You went by train and it took several hours. There were four of you in the compartment and you recall that the journey felt like coming to some kind of decision. For the four of you, the journey marked a move from words to actions. The French autumn landscape outside the carriage window provided the backdrop.

  None of you could afford to eat in the restaurant car, so you had taken your own food with you.

  The train eventually stopped in Poitiers and with the help of a map and some enquiries you managed to find your way to the small house. Son Ngoc Than opened the door himself when you rang the bell. The legendary freedom fighter and former prime minister whom the prince had driven into exile. You assumed he was waiting for a new and more favourable situation to arise. The sort of situation you had come to offer.

  You sat down in his living room, described the Organization you represented and suggested he should lead it. It was not large but its members were well educated and well organized and, above all, dedicated. You all offered to return to your homeland with him during the coming year and to form the nucleus of the struggle for independence. Many, very many, people would be prepared to fall in behind his name. Ideologically speaking, you stand quite close to him. That is the conclusion you have drawn from his articles and speeches.

  He was smaller and slimmer and younger than you had imagined. None of you really succeeded in getting over your initial awkwardness, and he kept his thoughts to himself. When you had finished putting your case he remained silent. Then he shook his head and said that he did not believe in
an armed struggle. The preconditions were not present.

  He was interrupted by the telephone ringing and he went to answer it. He was away for some time and Mumm spent the wait in front of the well-filled bookcase. He ran his finger along the spines and found volumes by Marx as well as Lenin. When he took them off the shelf, however, the pages proved to be uncut.

  By the time you were on the way back to the railway station you were already beginning to draw up new plans—ones that excluded your former hero.

  And now, with his credit used up, he is occupying a shrinking base in the jungle, far away at the foot of the Cardamom Mountains. Sure enough, he did return. And, sure enough, he did take up the struggle, weapon in hand. But far too late and without the support of any of you. Having offered to ally himself unconditionally with the prince—without receiving as much as an answer—he is now a marginalized force.

  A good example that will later serve as a useful lesson in the Organization’s basic political education, you think. It shows what happens when someone doesn’t know how to keep up with the way society is developing—which is in great leaps forward. And while conflict and struggle are undoubtedly necessary to move mankind forward, it is vital to choose the right time and the right terrain.

  SATURDAY, 27 AUGUST 1955

  You are lying in bed, the mosquito net a large transparent cube over and around you. You are lying on your back and through the open windows you can hear the splashing of innumerable drops of rain dripping from leaves, roofs and branches. You can hear the clatter from a neighbour’s kitchen and there is the murmur of a radio.

  The light in your room is still the grey light of dawn and the hands on the clock point to five.

  Your house is a simple one. There is no ceiling and, lying on your back in bed, you stare up at roof tiles and spiders’ webs. You will get up soon and set about the business of the day.