Sary mentions the danger of creating more martyrs. Especially this close to election day.
A couple more pieces of pineapple disappear into the prince. Chewing impatiently: No, Vannsak has to be neutralized without coming to any harm. Make an obvious example on Thursday and by Friday morning at the latest I want documents to show that the problem of King Vannsak has been solved. Understood? Are we finished?
Sary (chuckling): King Vannsak. That’s good.
Sihanouk (brightening up): It is, isn’t it?
And he nods once again. The prince stands up. They walk (noiselessly) across the soft carpets, part at the door. And, the prince calls without turning round, don’t forget to invite your Miss Cambodia.
(Later) The telephone rings. It’s her. Why does the secretary connect it without checking with him? He says that this really is a surprise and then answers the question that follows: No, not at all unpleasant, I can assure you of that. Quite the contrary!
But then he says that unfortunately he doesn’t have time just now, that he will get in contact soon. With a suggestion perhaps. A suggestion which he would in any case advise her to accept.
He rings off (and at once goes out to the secretary).
(Later still) He is sipping from a spoon, his mouth fills with French tastes. Moments from the past, light as gauze.
Just the odd word stands out from the hum around them. His wife (in the chair opposite) gently dips a piece of bread in her soup.
A quick glimpse of Monsieur Mignon himself in the kitchen is visible as the waiter passes through the serving door.
She says that she appreciates him making time even during a week like the present one. He looks at her but cannot detect a trace of irony and says that even if war breaks out their table at La Taverne will remain reserved for twelve o’clock every Monday. She smiles, turns her profile to him, chews a piece of bread. You shouldn’t talk about it so flippantly, she says, slowly soaking another piece of bread in her soup. With her eyes on the bread: I hear what is said among my teachers and students.
He sucks his teeth. We don’t have complete control, he admits, lowering his voice. He says that we have gone beyond the plan. The problem is that more people than we would wish are improvising off their own bat. It has irritated the prince, and rightly so.
The starched stiffness of the white linen napkin under his fingertips. She sips her wine. (Her lips leave a red shadow on the rim of the glass.)
He says that he and the prince are trying to regain control of the course of events, but there is far too much at stake for far too many people. And, he asks (rhetorically), how far can a branch be bent before it breaks?
She brushes a crumb off the cloth and says that she won’t be worried as long as the table they are sitting at is reserved every Monday. He puts his hand over hers (smooth). And, she adds (roguishly), she is looking forward to a time when these moments can once again be extended by an extra hour.
And he feels a quick hot flush at the nape of his neck as he meets her smile.
She looks playfully into his eyes, draws her hand away. Touches the corners of her mouth with the napkin.
She passes on greetings from their children. They are getting on well both at home and at school and the fever the little one had has not come back. The soup plates are removed and he says he is sorry that he won’t have time for them before the end of next week at the earliest. But perhaps they can take a trip to the seaside then?
It is an attempt to be artful. He thinks and hopes that that little promise might succeed in focusing her mind on the prospect of an excursion—her feelings of goodwill will distract her from the rest. There is no time for hesitation now, he must get it all said in the same tone and tempo, and so he says (as if it were an aside) that he will actually be going there himself the following evening. Yet another of these soirées dansantes the prince insists on. At the casino. And on the way there he can drop in by the house and let Kosal know that the whole family will be coming weekend after next.
She asks whether he will also be spending the night there, that would be the practical thing to do, and he answers, perhaps, we’ll have to see: heavens above, there may be dancing but discussions will still be going on. And it may be that the prince will require them to stay up on the mountain. Or they may return to the city the same night. Everyone knows that the only thing you can be sure of with the prince is that you can’t be sure.
A small-calibre lie. He daren’t meet her eye to check whether she has seen through it. Hardly even a lie. But if he looks to see whether she has seen through it or not, she will certainly see through it then (if not before). She has an amazing talent in that respect, seems to sense every unconscious shift.
(Em (long ago): I can read you like an open book, mon cher Sary.)
Had it been possible, she ought really have become an examining magistrate rather than a college principal, he thinks and nods to the waiter, who is waiting attentively by the serving trolley with their suprême de volaille.
The conversation continues but now it feels as if a veil has been hung between them. He considers asking whether there is anything the matter. But if he is wrong, she will immediately start wondering why he is wondering. He decides to ignore the slight crackle he feels he can hear between the words. It might be the sleepless nights, the pills, the stresses that have put his nerves on edge. He takes a large mouthful of his wine.
Now, instead, she is the one to ask if there is something he isn’t telling her (probably because of the hasty swig of wine). He shakes his head and mentions sleepless nights, pills, stresses, exhaustion. There are only a few days to go now, she says. Then it will be over.
He says, yes, then it will be over, but thinks that nothing will be over, everything will just continue.
He closes his eyes just for a moment. Opens them. Gets up. Walks briskly across the boards of the platform, taps the microphone lightly. Hears the tap echo out over the faces that are turned up to him.
The sky is grey, the sun a shadow. He will be forced to cut his presentation short in order to avoid the rain.
In a loud and clear voice he says: My dear countrymen!
He says: Kinsmen of our revered forefathers who built Angkor!
He says (with a smile): Dear residents of Pursat.
Then with a serious expression, an expression almost of concern, he continues.
The loudspeakers are bloody awful.
The secretary takes the envelope with both hands. Reads the address label hanging from it. All there is on the front of the simple white envelope are the words “Mlle Suong Somaly” written in black.
He explains, as if in passing, that the secretary should deliver it personally. That a car should then be booked to collect the individual in question at lunchtime tomorrow, and she should then be conveyed to the Hôtel Knai Bang Chatt in Kep-sur-Mer where a room for two should be arranged.
The secretary confirms that this is understood. (Yawns. Excuses himself.)
Secretary:
Was there anything else?
Sary:
No, that’s everything.
Secretary:
I’ll be off to this address then.
Sary:
What’s the time?
Secretary:
Almost eleven.
Sary:
Make it the first thing you do in the morning.
Secretary:
Very good.
TUESDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER 1955
(Pursat again) He bites a hole in yet another longan. Presses the soft flesh of the fruit into his mouth. Throws the sand-coloured shell on the ground, chews and spits the seed the same way as the shell. Swallows. All of a sudden alone (at last) on the fringe of the chattering people.
Ill-fitting suits of synthetic fabric, traditional ankle-length skirts covering broad backsides. While he was making his speech he looked at every one of them. Farmers’ bodies. Dark-skinned, bad teeth. Admittedly some of the women teachers were young—but that is all they we
re.
The governor with a hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Broad, loud and self-opinionated in the grey uniform of a civil servant. Gold rings on stubby fingers that end in coquettishly long nails. Talks about nothing but issues that lie on this side of the horizon.
The three elderly monks (they handled the spiritual side of the inauguration ceremony) have sat down under a tree and are watching the excited gathering of local dignitaries. The saffron-yellow of their robes has faded to a shade of beige. The oldest of them is chewing betel nuts, his toothless jaws red with the juice.
(Outside the organizers’ programme) Sary leaves the vague shade of the awning and walks hesitantly towards the school building that has borne his name for the last hour. The plaster is hardly dry, the roof tiles are still an intense fiery yellow. People’s footprints form a wide path through the dust—where not trampled, the red dust is still bobbled by the rain. He chooses to walk alongside the footprints. Slightly ridiculous, of course (as he is the first to admit), but it feels better that way.
He stops by one of the wings of the building. No wind: the flag is drooping on the flagpole in the middle of the schoolyard. As are the pennants that have been hung up for the day. The banner welcoming him is hanging loose between its two poles. Over by the other wing four children in school uniform have stopped whatever they were playing. (White shirts, navy blue trousers.) Probably some of the children ordered to come to the inauguration. Now they are standing there in silence and watching him intently. (At this distance they could be mistaken for his own boys.) And through their eyes he sees his own apartness in this context: his dark, well-fitting suit, his polished shoes, the pale skin of his cheeks and the backs of his hands. Sunglasses.
He squeezes another longan into his mouth. (An innocuous fruit.) He holds the seed (dark brown, smooth, shining) between his front teeth for a moment before letting it drop into the dust. Glancing to the side he catches sight of the headmaster’s nervous face and discreet gesture calling him back.
But he turns his back on the crowd. He feels (with some surprise) unusually alert. As if the burden of work over the last few weeks had not existed. The muffled weariness that the pills leave behind has gone.
The hum, the smell of paint and damp earth. The milky-white sky. The rice fields with their grey wooden houses that take over where the concrete buildings stop. He breathes slowly. The pale pink lotus flowers reflected in the ponds. Through the back window of the car, he glimpses the silhouettes of his driver and his adjutant asleep in the front seats.
He thinks about the distribution of cloth and foodstuffs that followed the inauguration ceremony. The queue of paupers. The gratitude in their eyes for every gift he handed out. He understands why the prince devotes so much time to outings of this kind. (Even though the prince most often uses a helicopter. But the symbolism of that is just right for his simple subjects. The demigod who descends from the seraphic spheres in his shining steel bird.) The prince’s endless electoral campaign, which continues whether there is an election or not. The prince, who can’t get enough of that kind of feeble attention.
For his own part he senses a bitter aftertaste to the warm emotion. Every can handed out, every length of cloth, represents a sort of corruption of his self in relation to the world around. (His self-esteem is fuelled by his role as giver of good gifts.) But it would be a grave mistake to take political action based on that self-image. The important thing is, he thinks, to keep a firm grip on one’s sense of judgement.
Moreover, the distribution of one day’s bare necessities simply means that the recipient will survive until tomorrow (when there won’t be anything). The reward is immediate, but the change it effects is very temporary. Something different is needed if a lasting improvement is to be achieved. Which is why the work to reform, say, the distribution of rice is very much more significant to these poor wretches in the provinces. That and changing from the old piastres the French used to a currency of our own. But abstract ideas of that kind don’t win votes among illiterates. A bag of rice and a piece of cheap cloth are much more effective. If you promise them a new road and the tarmac is not there fresh and black by the time they wake up the following morning, they dismiss your promise as so much hot air. On the other hand, if the sun rises over a full saucepan your electoral victory is assured.
But he can, however, see that there is something wrong with that reasoning. Namely: the communists in the People’s Party have nothing to distribute but promises, but they still… So?
According to one of Ly Chinly’s many surveys, the said communists, les khmers rouges, might form an alliance with les khmers roses (the Democrats), a pretty incongruous alliance but nevertheless one that would amount to nothing short of a coup d’état. Hatred of the establishment (him, the prince, their network of protégés and lackeys) could undoubtedly drive them into a coalition for long enough for life as he knows it to be over. But the prince would never sit still and allow himself to be deposed and put in a display case in the National Museum. And what could we expect if that were to happen? A civil war? (With North Vietnam fanning the flames of the red fire, and South Vietnam and Thailand the white. So we would be back with the chaos that ruled before colonization by the French, back to a time when our neighbours used our country as a plaything/buffer zone/source of natural resources/battlefield? Back to the centuries when the only thing our enemies could not agree on was the exact lines along which they should slice us up?)
Sary remembers how the prince reacted when they hid incognito in the building next to the Democrats’ party headquarters. They had listened together to attacks on the monarchy accompanied by the sound of rising jubilation. Beside himself with rage the prince had stared straight ahead, tears running down his plump cheeks. And he thinks of the return of Son Ngoc Than a couple of years ago and the way the people filled the streets. Of their own free will, not because the authorities had encouraged/commanded them to do so as, for instance, when the prince returns home from one of his visits abroad. The prince had shut himself away for days after seeing such crowds of people coming out voluntarily to greet the old rebel Than.
Than, however, is now sitting in the jungle outside Siem Reap, having outmanoeuvred himself. Out of step with developments, rejected by the prince, marginalized within his own party by Vannsak and the other smart young leftie bastards. Soon to be so peripheral, Sary thinks, that we’ll be able to fetch him in and put him in front of a firing squad. Whether the Chinese are right (about Than being seriously courted by American intelligence) is less important. At the same time, however: Than may have proved to be his own worst enemy but he hasn’t yet been rendered totally innocuous. So, CIA man or not, he needs to be written off once and for all. Well, he thinks (hearing the governor calling out his name behind him), the election will decide Than’s fate too.
He turns round. They are all standing in silence watching him.
(Next stop/Kep-sur-Mer) The road through the landscape. Not wide enough to allow two vehicles to pass at high speed. He watches paddy fields flash past, and the occasional clusters of huts. Blue mountains in the distance. He ought to take the opportunity to get some sleep but his whole being feels like the car—a well-oiled engine running at high revs. His thoughts are running on smooth gleaming rails. (Below the surface, a buzz of expectancy about tonight.)
The first time he saw her. That clumsy beauty contest. Why can nothing be organized with any degree of sophistication in this country? But what did he see? A light-skinned, comparatively tall, young woman in a close-fitting dress (he can’t remember the colour which, as he knows, says more about him than about the garment in question)? That remarkable aura that made the other girls pale into insignificance? Yes, yes, all that, but also something more.
He had let it be known that her presence was requested at his table. Then he had watched closely how she received the message, how she had leaned towards the waiter in his white jacket to listen to him, then turned her head towards the table he was shari
ng with colleagues/acquaintances/others (only men). How she had asked the waiter something and how he had pointed in their direction as confirmation. Was that when it had happened? Or was it when she came over to them? (Rather warily, but more curious than shy. Her face beneath the diadem flushed, her long neck, her erect bearing.) Or was it the direct way she met his gaze? Not challengingly but self-aware. It had confused him, though he did not let it show.
This Somaly is very different from the usual flighty girls. (Alongside others of the same age, he thinks, she stands out as being genuine. He cannot think of any other way of putting it. But what does it mean?) He tries to find something to compare her with. Is she perhaps like his wife Em when Em was her age? No, Em may well be beautiful in her own way but she would not have won beauty contests. (Her beauty is revealed when she is picking a problem to pieces or coming up with a simple explanation of something that seems tangled to the point of incomprehensibility.)
Somaly had accepted his invitation to dinner by return (which did nothing to diminish his confusion). He did not know then how to take it (nor does he know now). Perhaps she lets anyone and everyone invite her? (But if that were the case he would surely have heard of it.) The dinner had been pleasant but wary. And, besides, he had had to hurry on to an evening meeting with the prince. But she had at least said perhaps when they were parting and he had asked her whether they could do the same again some time. A perhaps that undoubtedly meant yes. (The surprising telephone call the day before undoubtedly reinforced that interpretation.)
But: he wishes that he had been allowed to determine the pace himself. If it had not been for the prince’s sudden whim, if the prince had not insisted, he wouldn’t have invited her to join him this evening. (He likes to give very careful consideration to whom he will invite to the sort of scene of speculation and gossip that a soirée dansante represents.) In his view, it would have been better to meet tête-à-tête a few more times. Not just to work out what she expects of him (what ambitions she has). But also to come to a better understanding of what he himself feels. Because the way she intrudes into his thoughts in the most unexpected contexts is not something he is used to.
Song for an Approaching Storm Page 13
