Song for an Approaching Storm

by Peter Froeberg Idling

  Vannsak’s house is behind you. It is still empty and silent. Suzanne is probably teaching. And you think that this unwanted dilemma has at least brought one benefit, which is that you cannot think the thoughts you would otherwise be thinking.

  You are standing in front of your small blotched mirror with a half-knotted tie in your hands. You have wrapped the shiny black material round your slim fingers and are holding it up to your throat while staring into your own eyes. The years are beginning to show there, around the eyes. The rest of your face is still a young man’s face. But something about this utterly habitual movement has caused time to concertina—memories, after all, don’t tend to index themselves in the same chronological order as the calendar.

  You are standing in front of a mirror getting ready for a soirée dansante. It is the first for many weeks and had it not been for the fact that it is being organized by an ad hoc combination of the youth sections of progressive groups you would not have been going to it.

  Outside the stars are already bright and the bullfrogs croaking their bass notes. The oil lamp is on the bedside table, diagonally to the left.

  You are a good dancer but you have never felt less like dancing. The only person you want to dance with won’t be there.

  Get on with tying your tie. You don’t have much time.

  Don’t think about the cardboard box at the bottom of your wardrobe. The one filled with letters that were sent from here to Paris and then came home with you. Letters you have read many times and ought to destroy. It is not right for a revolutionary to be carting around sentimental souvenirs of that sort.

  But you haven’t reached that point yet. For four years the two of you were held together by letters and letters alone. Four years of saved letters should be a souvenir of love worthy of display in a glass cabinet in your home. A letter with a lock of hair tied in a silk ribbon, another containing gold glitter that has dribbled out and stuck to everything else.

  You see Somaly before you. Her long neck, high cheekbones, small ears. The dress she is wearing is black with sparkling silver details, it is pale yellow with red patterns, it is olive green with graphite-grey silk crêpe de chine, it is gold silk that shifts to lilac. The nails on her long fingers are deep red and rose pink and dark brown. She is sitting in armchairs, on chairs, on sofas. She is sitting on a rug on the grass with the river behind her. In your car. She is walking up and down stairs. On her left wrist she is wearing a slim gold watch you gave her.

  One thing that is constant throughout is the way her hands work while her thoughts are elsewhere. Mechanically picking to pieces a rose you have given her, tearing up a bit of scrap paper, taking apart a decorative bow that came with a present from you.

  You can also change the memory picture to one in which she is drawing as she listens to someone. She is not short of talent, particularly when it comes to designing exclusive clothes. But she never knows when to stop. Every sketch reaches a stage at which it could be considered finished. There is almost always one more line that could be added, shading that could be deepened, a detail that could be filled in. But it could also be left as it is. Beautiful. But you watch her adding more, always adding more. She doesn’t stop even when, distractedly, she thickens up elegantly sweeping lines or gives coarse weight to something that began as a light suggestion. In the end the portrait or the landscape or the objects she was drawing have all but disappeared under pencil or ink.

  You think of everything else you could think of and you are amazed that these particular scenes are the ones that return the whole time. Ones in which she is reduced to being a kind of absence, or that reveal the instinctive destructive will of her hands. She is actually quite the opposite. Everyone she turns to is made to feel they are the most remarkable person in the world.

  You don’t have time to look for clues in letters that contain no clues. They are too old and too well read too many times to be hiding an answer to the questions you are now asking. Nor do you have time to burn them, which seems a more and more sensible alternative.

  Instead, straighten your tie-knot and turn down the collar of your shirt. You have a front to keep up, now more than ever. Turn off the oil lamp and let the darkness close around you. Walk the few steps to the door. Open the door and step out into the clear starry night, where the full moon is bathing the city in silver light.

  You pick up the scent of perfume. An expensive and leafy perfume that you know well. You have detected traces of it in the innermost folds of her letters, you have known it to fill cars and to wash over you when she is standing in front of you.

  You have had it shown to you in the sort of boutique where the assistants wear white gloves. And the thought came to you that she is here.

  She is not. But inhale the perfume as you execute elegant turns among the other dancing couples in the muted light from the stage and from the small lamps on the tables. You don’t know from which couple the scent is coming. It swept past just as you were beginning to lose yourself in the movements, in the rhythms.

  Dance on. Brace yourself in case you should dance through that perfumed air again. Dance on in the forbidden recognition that you will leave everything behind once the election is won. Everything, in exchange for that perfume and for dance evenings more exclusive than this one.

  Most of the people dancing in couples are Europeans. You are one of three mixed couples. Your fellow-countrymen are dancing in an elliptical ring in front of the stage, making the traditional hand movements and smiling gaily at one another.

  But you curve and swing expertly among the couples dancing in the same style as you.

  It is hot to be wearing suits or tight-fitting silk dresses. All the men’s ties are still properly knotted and the women’s light gauzy shawls are draped over their shoulders.

  You follow the discreet four-four rhythm, leading a French friend of Vannsak’s wife. Without any affectation at all she

  J’ai caché

  introduced herself as Anne and she has green eyes. She is travelling through and she is a good dancer. You have been conversing

  Mieux que partout ailleurs

  politely about sights worth seeing and then about French lyric poetry. Verlaine, Hugo. Now the two of you are lost in the same dance but in different thoughts. Swing and turn, follow the beat with gliding steps. Sense the force-field of her body just a few centimetres away from yours.

  Au grand jardin de mon coeur

  You are seeking a perfume that is not hers. But you cannot find it. You want and you don’t want to find

  Une petite fleur

  it again. Perhaps it was just your imagination. Perhaps it was the ghost of a scent from other dances.

  So sink into the music. Close your eyes. Merge with the tones and the harmonies and the syncopation.

  Cette fleur

  Let them become colours to your inner eye. Breathe yourself into the beat. Turn around, turn in.

  Plus jolie qu’un bouquet

  Become the music.

  You breathe in, you breathe out.

  Elle garde en secret

  Your heart drums a dull rhythmic beat through your body. Breathe in, then out. Calmly, regularly,

  Tous mes rêves d’enfant

  a bass passage hands over

  L’amour de mes parents

  to a solo on the theme, the bright green, drawn-out tone of the clarinet. The dish of the cymbal sways, shimmers. And you

  Et tous ces clairs matins

  breathe in. You breathe out.

  Faits d’heureux souvenirs lointains

  The muffled rhythms.

  You breathe in.

  Quand la vie

  Par moments me trahit

  Tu restes mon bonheur

  Petite fleur

  You breathe out.

  You make a turn. You follow the gently lingering four-four of the music. There are five men on the stage. They are wearing

  Sur mes vingt ans

  crimson jackets, black bow-ties and shining
patent leather shoes. Their shirt fronts seem to you

  Je m’arrête un moment

  to be giving off their own light in the weak light, and now the drummer has exchanged his sticks for brushes and is moving them

  Pour respirer

  in a slow and absent-minded way. They are all playing with their eyes half closed and the saxophonist moistens

  Le parfum que j’ai tant aimé

  his lips and then makes a solitary note swell until it begins to coil capriciously through what the others are playing.

  Dans mon coeur

  Tu fleuriras toujours

  Turn, follow the beat. Lead your partner between the other couples. Feel the slight dampness of her hand in your left hand, the smooth silk of her back under the palm of your right hand. Let your steps glide across the floor.

  Au grand jardin d’amour

  Petite fleur

  You are here now. Nothing has changed but it is good for you to be able to disappear into the perspiring darkness of the dance. To dance with someone you don’t know, someone attirante. To concentrate your mind on an irrelevant conversation. And the quiet satisfaction—in spite of the state of emergency raging in your mind—of being able to carry on a witty conversation without for one moment revealing your inner turbulence. A real test of discipline.

  Then the music comes to an abrupt stop and the circular movements of the dancing couples around the dance floor are replaced by straight lines, as they make their way to the tables where their parties are waiting for them. Take your partner back to the table where Vannsak and Suzanne are sitting. See, the two of them are talking, with deep shadows among the smiles. The little lamp on the table appears to be standing in a pool of light, reflected by glasses and carafes. Pull out the chair for your Anne but don’t sit down yourself because you have seen a familiar back standing over by the door.

  Excuse yourself and walk over to the back. It belongs to a friend, yours and Vannsak’s. You were in France together and now you are in politics together even though the Organization directed you towards the Democrats and him to the People’s Party.

  Go up to your friend and the people he is with, and place your hand on his shoulder. There is relatively little danger in being seen with him, here anyway, and you can always point to your joint French past.

  He is talking in a loud voice and registers your presence with his eyes but continues talking. His eyes are bright with wine and his cheeks are flushed, but you know that does not necessarily imply intoxication. You all always joke about the way his appearance changes after just the odd glass. He only has to pull the cork out of a bottle for his shirt to get crumpled.

  When he has finished the point he is making one of the others takes over, at which he leans over and says in a low voice that he needs to talk to you. Not now, but very soon. He hasn’t finished the discussion he is having here, and he breaks in to continue his argument for a strong and pluralist parliament. Whatever that so-called king or prince or fellow citizen or whatever the bloody hell he calls himself, His High-Arsed Highness Norodom Sihanouk, may try to introduce.

  You feel the carefree charm of the dance leaving you, being replaced by something that calls for a very different edge of sharpness. Your friend’s errand must be very urgent, otherwise he would have chosen a safer, less public occasion. Probably, you think, there are urgent instructions from the Organization about how to behave with regard to both of your brothers. The Organization has taken its time about it, but any concerns you have that your passivity might have been found irritating are outweighed by your relief at finally getting instructions.

  Without concentrating you listen to your friend’s well-known volubility and you recall how frightening you found his intensity when you first met him a decade ago. His wide frog-like mouth and superior banter. Now you know his value and tend to worry that he will talk too loudly and too dangerously. It is people like him you’re going to need if you are ever to convince surly caretakers at the Ministry of Fisheries.

  He eventually finishes underlining his point yet again and, taking a light grip on your arm, he leads you to an alcove behind the table of refreshments. It seems such an obvious place to go for confidential conversations that you would never have chosen it yourself. Particularly not at a politically pinkish dance like this one, which will undoubtedly have attracted all kinds of informers. But you can’t bring yourself to wait any longer and so you don’t raise any objections. The face in front of you is serious although his hair is a mess in spite of his hair oil. He says that the news he is bringing is not too good. It has still to be confirmed, but it is not too good.

  You nod for him to go on and you think the police must have tired of blockading your brothers and smashed their way in. That the words not too good imply that violence has occurred. You get ready for one of those rapid scene changes in which the happy buzz and the music are replaced in a matter of minutes by the tight-lipped silence that rules at a hospital bedside. That you will find yourself standing in a room with tiled walls lit by the grey-white light of neon tubes and there will still be some residual sense of the dance left in your body. A sense that is as superfluous and alien in that location as a dance card clinging to the sole of your shoe. With a dry throat, you swallow and nod again, more impatiently this time.

  He tells you that someone on the edge of his circle of acquaintances, but someone he trusts, has told him that yesterday he saw your Somaly having dinner alone with no less a figure than the Deputy Prime Minister Sam Sary, of all the swine that this government has to show for itself.

  There is, of course, room for misunderstanding (he says), but a rumour is a rumour he’s sorry to say.

  Your friend falls silent and looks out over the dimly lit room where the band is making its way back onto the stage. The movements in the room look almost choreographed as new pairs of dancers form up.

  He pats you on the chest two or three times in a rather preoccupied way before nodding and returning to his party.

  And your anguish bursts out like the opening of an ice-cold burning flower, and it blooms, and it blooms.

  II. SARY

  Let us stick to the truth:

  It can create beauty.

  The light of its fire is wonderful in the darkness of night.

  WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

  Close to the Eye

  FRIDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 1955

  And look, there he comes, the steps flit past beneath his Italian shoes, his manicured hand rises in a quick greeting, long strides, a half-smoked cigarette left lying on the marble floor. (The echo of heels.) And he moves on. In and out of rooms, up and down staircases, a signature here, a couple of comments there, before he sinks nonchalantly into an armchair while the permanent secretary stands at attention behind the desk.

  And up. And on.

  SATURDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1955

  He puts the document with the others he has signed. A hand movement not unlike that of a Catholic priest. Unlike the sign of the cross, however, which dissolves into the air, his movement leaves a trace. An unbroken ink line. Not wrapping around itself in ellipses and bows as is usually the case. No, no, no.

  The mark of power. His name.

  Seven small hard clear letters (now drying on the paper).

  Where is he? In his office. What time is it? He does not know, but darkness fell hours (several) ago.

  The day’s newspapers are lying scattered on the floor. (7,000 DEAD IN ALGERIA HARD BATTLES IN GAZA THE OUTLOOK FOR A POLITICAL SOLUTION IN MOROCCO WORSENS THE MAU MAU REBELLION IS WANING STATE OF EMERGENCY IN ARGENTINA, etc., etc.)

  The next document. With an accompanying map. He turns it the right way up, bends forward to look at the various districts. They have been drawn in such rudimentary detail that it is little more than a sketch. It depicts the area of the forthcoming EXPOSITION INTERNATIONALE DE PNOMH-PENH 1955. That is the southern part of the Troisième Quartier. Or the European part of the city. (The division is not quite that categorical but, on the whole, the amb
itions of the colonizers have been realized. That is, one part of the city dominated by the whites (Power), one by the Chinese (Capital) and one by the Vietnamese (Bureaucracy). Many people (Sary, for instance) feel that the majority population of the country has been passed over. Disadvantaged, as in many other respects.)

  Sary runs his finger along the thick black line that marks the enclosure around the exposition. On the north-western side of Wat Phnomh he finds what he is looking for: six ovals marked with the figure 8 (defined in the column alongside as “zoo”).

  He thinks: so our nation is supposed to regain its proper place in the world with the help of a zoo. A bloody zoo.

  Give a big hand to the yellow niggers and their monkeys!

  He thinks (it’s late, his concentration is not what it should be, the pills have worn off) of another exhibition, at another time, in another country. To be more specific: the carnival in Graneville in Normandy in 1949 (the year before he came home from France). A long pier running out to sea. White-painted wood, stained by standing where wind and water meet. Seasons which—unlike here—came and went. Pennants fluttering colourfully in the wind and people walking around in their Sunday best. Their eyes lingered on the foreign faces—his and his friends’. But he had been smartly dressed (it was just after his annual stipend had been paid). And for the war-marked participants at that festival, money had been almost as important as origin.

  (That strange freedom he had in the land of his colonial masters: there, but not here in his own colonized homeland, he could sit anywhere he wanted in the bus.)

  He varies the scene. Take out: his friends Bith and Van. Add in: Somaly (dressed in a close-fitting red—no, cream—dress. Parasol in the same shade.) He imagines them walking together on the boards of the pier. The whites stare at them open-mouthed. They stroll (slowly) out towards the strip of the horizon. She has placed her gloved hand on his arm. (In his mind he has veiled the sky with thin white cloud.) Her voice through the wind, something that makes him smile (something like: He: “Why won’t you take the diamond ring?” She: “Don’t want it.” He: “But it’s a symbol of my love and you know that diamonds are forever.” She: “But it’s not me.” He: “What is the right thing for someone like you, then?” She: “I don’t know—cut flowers perhaps.”). His eyes never leave her face. And there is something he notices in particular: even her ears are perfectly formed.