Song for an Approaching Storm

by Peter Froeberg Idling

  You lie there in your bed and count Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday. And now it is Saturday.

  Almost a week and not a word. You used to get restless after two days of silence. Then it became three. But every time you wait for Somaly’s silences to end you become less concerned. The pattern repeats itself—she will suddenly get in contact, apologize and brush away the silent days with a joke. And when she does that, she teases a laugh out of you and you realize that all the things you have saved up to say just seem so petty.

  It is a Saturday at the end of August and you will soon be getting up and setting off for the morning classes at the school. You are going to meet your brother in the evening, but at the moment you are counting the number of silent days and every time you count them your irritation grows. And your irritation itself irritates you. You ought to be able to rise above it. You ought to be able to focus on other more important and more constructive things. But you lie there in your bed stuck in a cycle of counting.

  You wish things were simple and you could just go to her house and ask what is going on. But if she is withdrawing, as she is now, she is hardly likely to want to meet you. To make an uninvited visit would simply be to risk lengthening your waiting time. You have made that mistake many times before and you don’t intend to make it again. So the only thing to do is to cultivate patience and devote your time to waiting—that occupation of the powerless.

  You lie in your bed watching the light get lighter and you think that there must have been at least one occasion on the Tuesday or the Wednesday or the Thursday or the Friday when she could have found time to send you a card.

  These are not new thoughts. You should be used to them. But these days in particular, in the run-up to the election, you need her presence more than ever, because now, in exchange for a life with her, you are prepared to sacrifice everything you believe in. Her unexplained absence is the last thing you need: at first you enjoyed the peace to get on with your work, but that has been replaced by a stubborn and nagging anxiety. What is she doing, you ask yourself angrily, that is so much more important than getting in touch?

  Your sudden flare of anger is immediately replaced by shame. You know that she is not doing this to be unpleasant but because she cannot do otherwise. What you should do instead is count all the small slips of paper bearing the outline of her lips in various shades of red. The ones you have collected and keep in the drawer of your desk. The ones she has sent you over the years. There are considerably more of them than the days that have just passed.

  You decide to think constructively during the minutes that remain before you throw back the sheet and step out onto the creaking floorboards.

  You think that every day of waiting means one day less.

  Good.

  It is a Saturday at the end of August and the postman will do three rounds of your district in the course of the day. Three real possibilities.

  Good.

  Your various tasks will take you back and forth through the city many times, so—perhaps—luck will allow you to bump into her. Luck has been generous to the two of you in the past. And, after all, you are a man with luck on his side, you think.

  Good.

  Now you can get on with your day. It is a cool morning and the air is fresh after the rain in the night. And if a card with a lipstick kiss should arrive, you can suggest something for tomorrow. It will be a Sunday and you have few fixed tasks. Just the day for a trip to the hammocks by the lake at Tonlé Bati or for going to the pictures hand in hand.

  You are standing in front of a blackboard. You have a piece of white chalk in your hand. There is a moment of stillness.

  You have just written out Hugo’s “Demain dès l’aube” by heart, and behind your back you can hear the sound of pencils scratching away on notebooks. A chair makes a short, sharp scraping noise as one of your pupils changes position.

  The light is falling into the room from the left, your gaze goes out through the light. As so often when you read poetry, the beauty of the poem has given you a sense of the great immensity of space beyond the world around you, of there being a greater context into which everything fits together in harmony.

  It has also caused your early morning peevishness to fade. All you feel now is a quiet devotion to Somaly. That is how she is, you think. That is how you both are, you think.

  The chalk feels smooth in your hand and you think that she needs someone like you. Someone who can indulge her whims and fancies. Someone who can see beyond her self-willed independence and is prepared to forgive her.

  No other couple is like you. You make the most handsome couple in the city when you sweep into restaurants and dances. You have seen it in people’s eyes, seen how their warm glances cling to the two of you, as you walk past on your way to the table at which her friends are sitting with glasses of champagne and smiling faces. Long ago your friends began to tease you by referring to her as the beauty queen. That has now gone from being a nickname to being a fact since her election as Miss Cambodia. And you with your gleaming car and your French manners make an almost perfect partner for her.

  She needs someone like you, someone who can see beyond the surface and recognize the restless, truly kind and talented individual that lies behind the pleasing surface.

  People meeting her for the first time may be tempted to believe that all her qualities are pleasing qualities. But you know her, and you know that the positive things are counterbalanced by what others might consider to be negative. You, however, are above that. It is her wilfulness and destructiveness and touchiness that creates the dizzying depths that lie concealed behind her attractive exterior. You know that her inner beauty—because of the imperfection that you believe very few men would tolerate—makes her even more beautiful. There is a darkness there that you, with your bright disposition, will be able to dissipate.

  You can, perhaps, sense a kind of stiffness in her personality now compared with the receptive and wholly unresisting girl you left when you went to France. There are times when she looks at you with a distance in her eyes that you don’t remember being there before. It was not there before, you know that for sure. But it is of little importance. Your role remains the same, to be the one who enables her good sides, her talent, to overcome the destructiveness that is constantly giving rise to new difficulties.

  Even when you are arguing and she loses her self-control and tells you to go and never return, even then you think that what she is saying is you must never give up on me.

  You do not know whether she was made for you but there is no doubt that you were made for her.

  You catch yourself nodding gently at that last thought. And you realize that there is now complete silence behind you.

  The words in chalk on the board in front of you come into focus again.

  Take the first white sentence into your mouth and turn round.

  You are lost in memories. The swollen rivers are flowing beneath you. Their brown waters meet here at the quay. The enormous mass of water in one of them has reversed the flow of the other, so that while the Mekong rolls on southwards, the Sap is now being pushed north. You watch the torrents of water tugging at the hulls of the boats, constantly pushing them off course.

  Quai Sisowath lies behind you, the red-tiled roof of the Club Nautique to your right. But that is not where you really are. You are back among the swarms of people in Prey Nokor and you are walking up the gangway of SS Jamaïque, a vessel well past its prime, its French ensign hanging slack.

  Then came those weeks when the thin line of the sea surrounded you on every side. You remember how strange it was to come home on the same ship four years later. Strange because it was just the same. Because the sea was the same and because, by degrees, your skin remembered the climate as you sailed south. Because everything was just the same, but time had passed through your body, and the friends of your outward voyage, bored but full of expectations, were not even present as ghosts on your homeward voyage. The future and the pas
t were one and the same on the deck of that ship, just as the two rivers in front of you share their waters.

  But the years in Paris lay between. The city in which you got lost and at the same time desired so passionately to learn.

  At first you took the Métro wherever you were going. Straight lines, in clear colours, underground, easy to deal with compared to the confusion of crowded streets. And you can remember the sense of surprise you felt when making your way down into the Mabillon Métro station to go to Odéon where the Americans and Scandinavians tended to hang out. At the far end of the street you could just see another circular sign with an M on it. For a moment it felt as if there were two quite separate Métro systems, one on the map and the other—the one down the street—a secret one. You stopped on the staircase and let curiosity take the upper hand, even though you were already late. You turned back and walked along to the mysterious station. And you discovered that it was Odéon and that far from being kilometres apart there was no more than a couple of hundred metres between your intended départ and your destination. You stood there feeling rather foolish and you felt the city shrinking around you. After that you devoted every afternoon and every free day to taking extended walks in order to master the city, and so the islands around the Métro stations you had become familiar with slowly joined up to form a continent.

  You are sitting in the shadow of a tree watching the meeting of two rivers and remembering a time when the traffic was held up by a red light and for the first time you walked over to the railings in order to look at the Seine. Jacket in hand, you felt a moment’s disappointment. Was the most important river in France no wider than this? When everything else was big enough to defy scrutiny?

  The Mekong, you think, is so much mightier.

  You don’t usually wallow in nostalgia. Your memories are usually pale and anaemic unless, like now, you permit them to become parasites on the present. If you allow them to do that, they flare up in warm colours and you can smell scents and hear responses that you didn’t remember you remembered.

  But afterwards you are left with a vague sense of distaste. Not unlike the feeling you had after the self-abuse you could not avoid performing in your poky room on the rue Létellier. A stale feeling of transience.

  Now you are sitting under a tree in the slow capital city of your slow country and you are remembering.

  You run through memories of education, of New Year parties at La Maison de l’Indochine. People you met, your gradual entry into a more sophisticated circle. Those who did not simply live on their good contacts and privileged upbringing. Those who even enjoyed the respect of French intellectuals and were invited to seminars and to visit other countries. All those young people from all those oppressed countries that were on the point of taking the future into their own hands. The Vietnamese, the many different faces from French Equatorial Africa and the Polynesian islands. The many accents, which eventually became a language in their own right with French French as no more than one of the variants.

  Think for a while about the summer after the one you spent road-building in Yugoslavia, when you went back to camp in the same area. Remember how your skin darkened again in the sun, how you looked out over the Road of Brotherhood you had built. The humble pride you felt watching the traffic roll along the smooth tarmac. Your tarmac. Remember your feeling that it is possible to change everything, that roads can be built and landscape changed. The mountains that tumbled down into the strangely salty sea.

  It is a different evening again and the rains come earlier and earlier. You are sitting on a blue veranda, a paraffin lamp on the table that separates your chair from your brother’s. The neglected garden in front of you has disappeared in the darkness and the downpour. Only the two of you are here, with your cigarettes and the little lamp.

  The door number on the right-hand side of the street door below you is Forty-four. Four plus four equals a lucky number. You aren’t bothered about rubbish of that kind but the landlord is and, consequently, the rent is higher than that paid by the neighbours.

  You’re not bothered, but it is a lucky number anyway.

  The two of you are sitting there in silence and you can see your brother’s face emerging and fading in the glow of his cigarette as he breathes in and out. A face that over the years has become more and more like yours. Or perhaps it’s the other way round.

  You are both careful about visiting one another. You prefer late evening, like today. The rain is making most people stay at home. The absence of moonlight makes the streets dark in districts like this.

  Your brother’s newspaper is still being allowed to appear. But you know that the security police are monitoring its editions and several other publications have been forced to close. A whole string of editors are now raking salt in Kampot or breaking up rocks to build roads.

  A moment ago the two of you were joking about having two such different circles of readers. One of them radical republicans, the other the secret police of a reactionary monarchy.

  As a matter of fact the two of you really should not be seen together at all. It is not in your interest and not in his. Or, to be more precise, not in the interest of the interests of either of you. But among your siblings you two are the closest to one another. Not just in age, but also in opinions. And on an evening like this when your eldest brother has let the two of you have the use of his house while he is visiting your parents, you have assessed the risk to be acceptable.

  As does your eldest brother. As a courtier in the king’s entourage for many years he has built up a significant capital of trust. But it is a currency that could quickly be devalued if the young prince’s suspicions were to be aroused. It is a small city and your relationship is no secret. The less you two irritants are seen together, the less likely the risk of the prince’s agents suggesting you are sent to the salt fields.

  So you are sitting with your brother on your big brother’s blue veranda and the rain is pounding down in the night. You have been discussing the politics of the day for the last hour. You don’t agree with one another though you share a great deal of common ground.

  You have warned him against continuing his agitation. You are two of a family of nine children. You were the lucky number four plus four. You don’t know what Marx’s theories say about luck but you do know that it has considerable importance. It is, after all is said and done, what separates you from those of your partisan comrades who were torn to pieces by French mines.

  You were number eight, one of the little ones who grew up in the corners of the house, silently watching your parents and your older brothers and sisters. One of those the others could hardly keep count of. Now you are sitting here with the somewhat less lucky number seven and you are surprised that he does not understand the need to be more careful. It’s a character trait you recognize from childhood. He would stick to his guns and argue his case until your father gave him a thrashing—or delegated the job to one of your older brothers.

  Now the two of you are sitting in silence in the rain. The paraffin lamp between you is burning with a yellow flame, and you are allowing your thoughts to be drawn towards Somaly’s silence. Another morning, another day and another evening have been added to the days of silence. Their number is now approaching the point when you will be forced to act. For one moment you wonder whether to confide in your brother. To tell him and only him how she has made it impossible to meet her and how much that torments you. With him you ought to be able to give in to the strain, stop being the inscrutable one for a while and just be his despairing little brother.

  But it is impossible to gauge the risk. He might say something to someone else who might in turn hint something to a third someone, and finally some story about your vacillating position will reach the Organization. So pull yourself together. Light a cigarette with steady hands, overcome this weakness.

  You light a cigarette, shielding the flame with both hands. The smoke gets in your eyes a little, making you blink two or three times.

/>   You more than anyone know the value of keeping things hidden. How many times have you seen people act on assumptions you have known to be false? With no more than a couple of sentences you could have made them aware of their error and then everything would have happened differently. But you kept quiet and watched them carry on.

  Just as your silence in the dark of this night conceals many things.

  The unsaid does not exist.

  You more than anyone know the value of being economical with information. It should be served in small portions, to the right people. You must, moreover, always remember who knows what and who is likely to pass the information on. Think where it will be collated and who might draw independent conclusions from it. That’s why it is impossible to tell your brother about Somaly’s silence, to tell him that she sometimes disappears and that you are desperate. It would be impossible to gauge the risk of such an action. Who, in turn, might he confide in? What does he already know about the two of you? About her?

  You tap the ash off your cigarette and feel vaguely grateful that you resisted the impulse to tell your brother. It would doubtless have been a relief, but you are stronger than that. And you will learn from this, become more close knit. To put it simply, you are no longer the sort of person who allows himself to be defeated.

  SUNDAY, 28 AUGUST 1955

  You are standing on a pavement. The sun is beating down mercilessly between the buildings and people are silhouettes among the shadows. You are standing in front of a cyclo and the man is leaning forward waiting to be paid. So dig in your pockets among old piastres and new riels. Pay him in a casual way so that your face will blend in with those of all his other customers.

  It is against your principles to travel in this way, to let yourself be transported by men who own nothing, who hire their vehicles from very rich Chinese and who are only allowed to keep enough money for a handful of rice, a couple of cigarettes and the right to carry on pedalling. You and your comrades normally refuse to be part of capitalist oppression, of your brothers in misfortune being exploited by foreigners. And that is precisely why it is your moyen de transport de préférence, because it is common knowledge that Organization men do their own pedalling. The fact that the personal secretary of one of the leaders of the Democrats chooses a cyclo rather than a car brings respect: had you chosen something even simpler, it would have made you a suspect.