The Picture: all harsh contrasts; black and tired white. The wall of a building—bright, with a dark oblong opening to the left. In the middle of the picture: him and her (turning slightly towards each other). Smiling, eyes hidden in shadow. She is wearing elbow-length gloves, sunglasses instead of a hairband. Her skirt comes down to her ankles, as is traditional. He in a dark suit, as usual. White (?) handkerchief in his breast pocket. Beside them a young middle-aged man in a shirt is standing erect, smiling broadly with uneven teeth. Impossible to see his eyes too.
They go in. (The queue forms again behind them.)
Still dazzled, he feels as if the classroom has remained in twilight. (All the officials have risen to their feet and are only visible as bowing silhouettes.)
He asks the chairman where people’s identities are being checked. The man laughs (heartily) and says, of course there’s no need for that in his case. Yes, there is, he says abruptly (unconcerned that the man’s subordinates will hear him being corrected). We are no different from everyone else.
They are directed to an elderly lady who nervously takes their identity cards, which are embossed with the arms of the government. Looks them up and down and quickly, hands them back without comparing them with the electoral list.
They move on to the next table and each of them takes a white voting paper with a portrait of the prince (Sary thinks that the monarch looks a touch too plump in the picture—a point that will doubtless be taken up later). They hand them to the chairman who has stationed himself by the ballot box. The two slips are ceremoniously dropped through the slit in the top of the metal box. The inkwell is pushed in front of him. He dips the top of his right index finger into it, blows gently on the finger.
(A glow (a vague mixture of pride and affection) spreads through him when he sees Em sticking her finger into the little bottle. This simple action, apparently unassuming, is the final confirmation of her long and indefatigable work.)
They find themselves standing there, each of them with a blue forefinger pointing at the ceiling. He sees that she can see the funny side of the situation, her eyes are twinkling with suppressed laughter.
But instead of giggling she suggests they stay a while and see how their new constitutional system is working in practice. He says why not (despite the fact that the chairman cannot hide his satisfaction).
The whole queue has squeezed into the doorway. (Everyone wants to see what they are doing.) The chairman’s brother bellows at the onlookers/voters to get back in line. A thin elderly man with sticking-out ears ends up at the front. The woman with the electoral roll reads out his identity papers: a tailor (with a Vietnamese surname). Slowly and ceremoniously, as if to savour her moment of significance, she puts a tick in one column, draws a line (with the help of a ruler) through the tailor’s name in another column. The man (following her instructions) then moves uncertainly on to the table with the voting papers.
The prince’s white paper lies all alone in the middle of the table. (The other voting papers, all in different colours, are on a shelf behind the table.) The official stationed at the table offers the man a white paper, which he immediately accepts.
Right choice, the chairman announces loudly (winking at Em and Sary). The tailor’s eyes shift evasively and a rather bashful smile forms on his face.
Sary himself takes the voting paper, which the man is holding out with trembling hands. Posts it into the silence of the ballot box. The man thanks him repeatedly while Em holds out the inkwell. (Cautiously, as if the ink is going to bite him, the tailor dips his fingertip.) Then he backs towards the door, bowing.
Next in line is a wholesaler in dry goods. Then a shop assistant. Then a teacher.
That will have to be enough. The chairman bemoans the fact that they have to leave so soon, but looks relieved all the same (as if it has all become a bit too much of a good thing).
The queue moves aside as they walk towards the exit.
They are out in the glare of the sun again. The dust in front of the step is white. The rumour of their presence has attracted even more people to the school. He raises his hand, forms a V for victory with his blue forefinger and his middle finger. His gesture is greeted with scattered cheers and applause.
They walk on through the shimmering heat haze. (He sees the driver coming to head them off on the way to the car.)
Then attention shifts. Heads turn to watch jerky movements under one of the trees. Irate voices, a raised baton and an angry scream when it comes down. He sees uniforms and something, someone staggering in the middle. Onlookers approach the scene cautiously.
He asks a woman going in the opposite direction. She answers bluntly that some poor so-and-so had been urging people to vote for the People’s Party.
He tells Em to wait by the car. Strides briskly through the gathering crowd. He thinks this is an opportunity not to be missed. The opposition must not be given another martyr. In front of all those present, this will give him an opportunity to demonstrate how fair the government is. A chance to show that, in spite of everything that has been said and written, brutality and a lack of accountability are not things that have been ordered or will even be tolerated.
(He doesn’t have to elbow his way forward. He just has to place his fingers lightly on the shoulder of a sun-warmed shirt or on a bare arm and they move aside as if burnt.)
But at the very moment he reaches the scene of the trouble, the man in the middle tears himself free. He is in time to see torn clothes and dark patches of sweat (or blood). Two soldiers give chase but the man is barefoot and they are running in heavy boots.
The three figures disappear in among the buildings beyond the school grounds, but the tension is still present like a concentrated force-field. He can feel the pulse in his neck throbbing. But there is still something that can be saved from this scene. Who is in command here? he asks sternly. A young sergeant answers (with the assertive pondus uniforms give young men).
He tells him who he is. He says that he demands an account of what is going on here.
Then he sees the soldiers returning without the man they were pursuing. He sees how the self-confidence in their stride deserts them when they catch sight of their sergeant cowering in the dust in front of him.
III. SOMALY
there is a short time when girls can do what they want.
therefore with a snap of their fingers they open the world, pull maps up from the ground, then go down on their knees and make plans. girls whose lungs are seething.
KARIN WIKLUND
What is love
MONDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 1955
Strawberries from Saigon, oranges from Battambang. White orchids with pink tongues. She strokes the cellophane with her hand. The card is in French, in gold print: Mon amourette. No clue is given.
TUESDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER 1955
The soft dry noise of rubber tyres on tarmac.
The creaking of the cyclo’s joints and springs.
The odour of sweat from the driver and his unwashed clothes, which settles around her every time he stops pedalling at traffic lights.
Where is she going? Nowhere in particular. She has him take her along the Avenue de Verdun. She has him take her along rue Sothéavong and Quai Sisowath. The river to her right, the other bank in the distance. The gilded spires of the royal palace to her left. People on the move everywhere, at the street stalls, on bicycles, in cars. Buses full, cyclos laden with groceries and with bundles of clothes the tailors have just finished. The only remaining signs of the election are the numerous posters bearing the prince’s face.
The billboards outside the newspaper kiosks all have the same word: VICTORY.
She looks at the people she passes. The way some of them stare, others sneak a look. People who don’t know her undoubtedly notice the slim cut of her dress in shades of grey and dark violet. The little French hat. The almond-shaped foreign sunglasses.
Then she tells the cyclo driver to turn left towards rue Pasteur. It’s a whim. But th
en the whole of this excursion is a whim. She just wants to be on the move. Recent weeks have been spent at home predominantly. In that state of listless monotony that results from the rising and the setting of the sun, the coming and the passing of the rains. The reasons are many. In the first place it’s all about avoiding meeting une personne en particulier. Or their mutual acquaintances. Vannsak, for instance. But she reckons that danger to be negligible today, particularly in the case of Vannsak who, from what she has heard, is under lock and key in Prey Sar prison. Apart from which the sky is cloudy and with the hood up, there is no risk of her skin being tanned by the sun.
She is now travelling through the leafy vault woven by the avenue of tall trees along rue Aimé Grand. The traffic here is less busy. The prince made his last election speech just a stone’s throw away last Saturday. She went to it, briefly, driven by the hope of catching a glimpse of Sary. She had remained seated in the cyclo, her face half concealed by a scarf. Unlike today’s light-hearted trip there was an unpleasant undercurrent of feverish expectation last Saturday. What was in store for them? A change of power? Riots? She had followed her mother’s advice about being careful.
The prince had stood on the platform, which was draped with the colours of the flag. A white suit, black tie, soldiers in full battle kit down below. The audience must have numbered thousands, they filled the streets and the open parkland between the walls of the palace and the river. The cheering and clapping were deafening and, as far as she could judge, genuine. The prince was a good speaker, absolutely relaxed at the microphone. But it had been a long speech; she had heard him on her way there while still some distance off and he was still going at full strength when she left to go home. The whole thing had become rather disjointed, as a result of his spontaneous digressions. She thought his visions of the future had been spoilt by the personal bitterness with which he settled accounts with the opposition. And Sary had not even been there.
The cyclo driver asks her for an address. She tells him where she wants to go and, allowing the cyclo to freewheel along, he tells her it’s impossible because that whole district is sealed off.
And, he adds, the police might be everywhere today but they certainly kept out of sight last Saturday night. She can’t decide if he is being sarcastic and twists round to look at him but the hood is in the way.
He lets the cyclo roll slowly to the side by the pavement, where it comes to a halt, waiting for further instructions.
You think the fire was started on purpose? she says, speaking into the curve of the hood. She does not get an answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear. Or is his silence sufficient of an answer? Or is he pretending not to hear?
They remain where they are while several cyclos and one or two cars drive past them. She tries to remember what her cyclo driver looks like. Whether he is young or old.
Where should she go now? The shops and markets are unbearably overcrowded with people shopping before the holidays. And she doesn’t want to go home.
She asks the cyclo driver whether he has seen the election result. He stays silent.
She asks him whether he likes the result.
No answer.
She raises her voice in an annoyed hello there (what is the matter with him?).
He says brusquely that he has never been to school and consequently doesn’t know anything about these things.
Did you vote? she says, returning to her earlier friendly tone of voice.
He says that he did but it’s no longer of any importance, and he wonders where they are going next.
She hesitates for a moment, then says Place de la Poste. Perhaps Mari, Nana or one of the others will turn up at the open-air café. But they have probably already left the city in advance of tomorrow’s holiday. Sar will probably be on his way to his family in Kompong Thom. And Sary, she thinks, has probably also left for… where is it his wife comes from… Kandal? Somaly has contradictory feelings about the countryside. She considers it a blessing that both her father and her mother are natives of the capital city. To pack every suitcase in the house in order to undertake an uncomfortable and sweaty journey to the back of beyond strikes her as a punishment she has done nothing to deserve.
In spite of which she sometimes finds herself wondering whether she is missing a special relationship with something authentic. Several of her friends, actually the most travelled and worldly members of her circle (we might even say cosmopolitan), seem to feel a special sense of certainty when getting ready to visit their ancestral homes for national feast days. Links that initially seem painfully provincial but which clearly mean something to them. She doesn’t understand this. When they come back afterwards they go on about the tedium and narrow-mindedness they encountered while away, about the dark-skinned peasants. But reading between the lines she senses there are other warmer feelings.
They are now trundling along rue Ohier, passing the untidy muddle of people, carts and trucks that is Kandal Market. Then on over what used to be the bridge linking the European quarter of the city with the Chinese quarter.
The cyclo driver is shouted at by a group of his colleagues parked on a street corner. He pedals even more slowly (if that’s possible) in order to answer them. That gives her time to look at the canal that is no longer there. As new young lovers her parents used to meet here and walk along the bank. Watching the fishermen landing their catches. She can picture the gleaming sheatfish, carp, elephant fish, the men shouting. The different bridges. But then the French filled in the watercourse as part of their campaign against malaria and blood fever. It’s grassed over now and there are some badly tended flower beds. The only things left from those days are the parapets of the bridges.
It is certainly better like this, she thinks. Healthier. But she still feels a vague sense of sorrow for an era she did not experience. As if her handsome, happy young parents had disappeared at the same time as the canal. And perhaps she herself would have been more at home in an earlier age? An age that was easier to understand than the complex age she inhabits.
Rather like the narrator played by Anton Walbrook in the film she saw recently: We are in the past. I adore the past. It’s so much more restful than the present. So much more reliable than the future.
The film was beautiful. And Walbrook was attractive even though he must be almost three times her age. The people in the story were acting in their own small dramas, in which love arose in unexpected contexts. At the same time, though, she did not like the recurring image of love as a carousel with an autonomous mechanism that spins its riders in the same circles.
That is not how she sees herself.
They are now moving in among European buildings and she thinks that even though the time may be right the place is wrong. She needs to move to a metropolis. To her brother in Saigon first, perhaps. Then to Paris which—she imagines—is buzzing with the kind of sophisticated and interesting people who are very rarely born here or, for that matter, move here. (People like me.) Invitations to work abroad as a model would be coming soon enough. Miss World, Miss Riviera and Miss Elegance had been invited to her own pageant. She didn’t have an opportunity to talk to them properly, but she understood that the occasion was just one of many similar ones they had taken part in.
Paris. She already knows the city from what Sar and Sary have told her, but even more because of the films she has seen. Endless. Enormous buildings. Trams. Or perhaps they don’t exist any longer? People with big noses but oh, so enviably pale! People who always seem to be wearing too many clothes.
She tells the cyclo driver to stop outside the Café de la Poste. This gives her the chance to look at him. His face is immediately familiar to her, although she also knows that in ten minutes’ time she will be quite unable to give a description of him. Neither young nor old. Something very everyday and vague about his features. The colour of his skin points to him being a farm labourer who has moved into the city. He accepts the coins without the kind of obsequiousness men usually show her. Was she wrong about
the reasons for his lazy pedalling? She says goodbye and walks in among the tables. For one moment she thinks of turning round to see if he is looking at her. But she resists the urge and immediately dismisses him from her mind.
She looks around the few customers present but none of her friends is there.
The usual waiter is standing at her usual table. He takes her usual order but, as usual, pretends not to recognize her. On one hand, it makes a welcome change from most people’s strutting and preening; on the other hand, she finds him ridicule.
He returns immediately carrying a diabolo menthe. She sucks up the icy chill, the bubbles and the mint through the straw, her eyes fixed on the post office over the road.
She thinks: think of all the times I have hurried impatiently up those steps.
Then she thinks: think of all the times I have come down those steps feeling happy.
And: all the times I have come down those steps feeling unhappy.
Sar had written to her often during the years he was in Paris, but not as often as she had visited the post office. He did not want to send his letters to her home address. To avoid gossip, he had explained. And she had let herself be convinced. As so often by him. She had accepted the arrangement even though it had struck her as unnecessary, incomprehensible and cumbersome. What sort of gossip? They were engaged, weren’t they? Perhaps it was a way of exercising control over her from the other side of the globe? Forcing her to perform the frequently meaningless ritual of going to the post office for better or for worse?
What else does she remember from those years of love by letter? She had missed him dreadfully at first. She kept and cared for photographs and small souvenirs (shells, entrance tickets, picture postcards) from trips they had made together. And she had read his first letters (postmarked in Singapore, Colombo, Djibouti, Port Said, Marseille, Paris) so many times that she knew them by heart. For months after his departure she was still living in the single year they had had together up until then. Childish, she thinks now. But she had only been sixteen when they met, and he was twenty-four. He seemed so grown up, so urbane. Now she is almost as old as he had been then.
Song for an Approaching Storm Page 21
