Song for an Approaching Storm

by Peter Froeberg Idling

  Then her mother says: I’ve heard that your friend Vannsak has been offered safe conduct, as long as he gives the prince a public apology for the excesses of the election campaign. That’s a generous gesture he would probably be wise to accept. And Mother continues in a mutter: This obstinacy, if they had kept their heads they could have achieved something. Filled certain posts. But not when they behaved like that. She then continues in a conversational tone: Take a look at our own plantations—look how many of the workers are communist sympathizers. It was obvious they were going to vote for a People’s Party candidate. We can be certain that virtually all of them voted for that Red Sophal fellow. Officially, though, he didn’t get a single vote. The prince’s candidate got thousands but Red Sophal not a single one. That’s what happens when you think you can overthrow the monarchy. It’s over now, anyway, and just as well.

  She sees the distorted reflection of her face in her mother’s sunglasses and says, with unintended vehemence, that the combination of conservatism and cynicism is so joyless. Mother turns her head away and says indifferently that it may be so, but that is what came out on top, isn’t that so? And: now let’s talk about something else.

  She shrugs her shoulders as a kind of confirmation even though her mother is not looking in her direction. It had sometimes been an enchanting dream to dream, but she always knew—silently, in her heart—that it was not actually her dream.

  Now is now and a different time has already begun.

  They talk about the following day, about practical matters. Which pagoda to visit first, and in what order to visit the rest. It’s the start of the sort of conversation Somaly is constantly longing for, which shows how rarely it happens. What she and Maman actually talk about is unimportant, the important thing is that the distance her mother always seems to keep is diminished for a while. At least, it is no longer the distance between parent and daughter, nor that between older woman and younger. No, Somaly would describe it as the cool and reserved look that a sophisticated woman gives to someone who lacks sophistication. She can understand that. She is constantly aware of her shortcomings. But she has also come to recognize that outsiders see their relationship in a different light: in the eyes of the outside world they are enviable—an attractive princess and her attractive daughter.

  In Maman’s defence, it has to be said that Somaly thinks she can sense a hint of underlying goodwill in that cool and reserved look, as if Somaly is some kind of natural resource, as yet unrefined. Or rather, perhaps, a domestic animal that can be trained. In any case, someone something can be done with.

  Establishing distance when she needs to, behaving in a haughty way, being difficult to approach in company—all these come quite naturally to Somaly herself in most situations. But however distant she manages to be, she has never succeeded in turning the tables on her mother. It never leads to any compensatory approach on Maman’s part, just detachment and a lack of interest. Maman, with her poise and self-awareness, her life experience and her intellect, remains on top.

  But there are occasions, such as the present one, when they are close. They discuss the coming evening as though they were bosom friends. They have no intention of making their entrance in the shadow of some self-important man. Two women arriving without a male protector (like some sort of taxi girls) will doubtless cause a general undercurrent of confusion and disapproval. But who could possibly say anything publicly? Mother is—formally speaking—still married. And she is engaged. Moreover, she is now the national beauty queen, a role that has made her a kind of institution sanctioned by royalty and thus above everyday convention. And, of course, escorted by her mother.

  Why is Sar not providing them with male company? On a number of occasions during their first years together, he and Somaly attended soirées and dances together. He was as appreciated a dancer as he was a talker, able to slip pleasantly and effortlessly in and out of conversations. And then he went abroad.

  The letters they exchanged during his years in Paris formed the basis of a new intimacy between them even though, in his last year abroad, Sar devoted more and more space to radical and critical interpretations of the prince’s policies. It seemed to Somaly that these comments were directed at someone other than her. At some sort of imagined audience even. As far as possible she tried to view them as confidences of a sort.

  But this room of their own, this room built of letters, proved impossible to enter when they were eventually reunited. It existed, no doubt about that, and they could both feel it, but the doors remained stubbornly locked.

  During his long absence Somaly became dependent on her mother again in order to function in social life. And she reluctantly came to recognize that she no longer felt like a child being dragged along and that, unlike her girlfriends, she liked having her mother at her side.

  To Somaly’s disappointment, moreover, when Sar did return he immediately enlisted in a partisan unit fighting far away from the capital city.

  Given this renewed loneliness, which even the postal service could not alleviate, she realized how much she valued the occasional closeness to her mother that feast days offered. She knows that he doesn’t like the arrangement. Over the years she has learnt that in spite of his radical ideals, he is quite astoundingly traditional where she is concerned.

  But in the end he gave her the freedom to go out with Maman without putting up any resistance. And she likes the idea that an anxious social world considers her to be frightfully independent.

  Initially she found it hurtful that her mother made no comment about the unusual arrangement. She could not read anything into it other than that her mother was indifferent to the togetherness Somaly felt they shared. But she has overcome her resentment. As always, she has nothing to reproach her mother with. And Maman in her turn treats Sar with irreproachable amiability, even if there is a rather distrait quality to it.

  They certainly aren’t short of offers of company for Saturday’s event. Several of Mother’s so-called gentleman acquaintances have been in contact. These gentlemen have ambitions that are quite unambiguously more than acquaintanceship, and in the longer term they are hardly likely to be satisfied with escorting a married woman to sundry events or occasionally being granted the honour of taking her out for a meal. Somaly has no difficulty in seeing what it is they see in her: Maman is well-off again, and of good family. Above all, however, she is different, rather as if she has been imported from a much larger and more stylish context.

  She has sometimes found these gentleman acquaintances unsettling, because she feels that her own relationship with her mother is cool and therefore weak. If Maman takes a new husband, who perhaps already has children, she is afraid that the distance between them will increase even more. What is more, several of Maman’s distinguished suitors have shown a discreet but inappropriate interest in Somaly herself, which means there is the risk of future family conflict of a kind she would rather not contemplate.

  But in spite of her mother’s lack of maternal closeness to her daughter, she has still not allowed anyone to come between them. In their public social lives they arrive and leave festivities together and more often than not they eat their meals at home together, spending the evenings together, even though each of them is occupied with her own business. The only one allowed into their fellowship is the son/big brother, but he left them several years ago to continue his studies at Chasseloup Laubat in Saigon, where he is now the agent for the raw rubber from the plantations owned by their mother and the rest of the family.

  She tells Maman that her brother rang that morning to ask what she would like for her birthday. (Somaly is the one who has insisted that everyone in the close family should celebrate each other’s birthdays, just like Europeans. She feels that there is a sense in which this implies that they belong to something wider than their own little country with its tradition of everyone having their birthday on New Year’s Eve.) But she had not been in the mood to chat with him and had told him that she would like an empty
mirror, a mirror that only reflected itself. Her brother, who, according to Somaly, is only concerned with things that are attainable or can be made attainable, told her (with a touch of annoyance, insofar as subtle nuances of that sort can be picked up over a crackling telephone line) to be serious. She then said she wanted a dark starry sky, one with only black stars. The line had hummed emptily for a minute, after which her brother answered, d’accord, just as long as he could find someone to wrap it.

  That, she thought, was an unusually original answer to come from her brother, and her mother agrees with her, but makes no comment about the nonsense requests, which were Somaly’s real reason for recounting the anecdote in the first place.

  The conversation dies away, Mother lights a cigarette and walks back to the flower bed, secateurs in hand.

  Somaly hangs on a little longer, pokes a patch of small feathery plants with her foot. They are growing wild at the foot of the bench—they quickly close up and then cautiously open again.

  She decides to go inside and write the rest of her conversation with Chinnary in her notebook, which she keeps hidden—more or less—in a box in her bedroom. It is not a diary in any real sense. Her entries are not daily and rarely deal with things that have just happened, although this entry will. She has no shortage of girlfriends to confide in, but the conversation she carries on with herself in the pages of the book is a mixture of the trivial and things she cannot express anywhere else. Her handwriting is so untidy that it is virtually illegible even to her. But that doesn’t matter. She seldom reads what she has written: she writes for the moment rather than for later. When she first began, in her early teen years, the entries tended to be accounts of what she had done since the last entry. In those days she sometimes flipped back and relived various episodes. But the focus has changed with the passing of time, becoming more and more a catharsis of her consciousness in which there is also space for contradictory thoughts or for things that are otherwise censored. The fact that her handwriting is so difficult to decipher is thus a conscious barrier to discourage anyone who might take it into their heads to read her writing book (as she calls it) in secret. She excludes the idea that her mother could be interested in what she has written but she doesn’t trust the housemaid. That’s always assuming that Kunthea is literate, of course. She buys her notebooks here and there from different stationers in the city, and in recent years, just to be on the safe side, she drops them into the river once they are full. She lets the book slide surreptitiously over the rail when crossing the broad brown river on one of the little ferry-boats. And since she always writes in blue ink, she can be certain that the swirling waters will have washed away the text within a few moments.

  WEDNESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 1955

  It is still dark when she wakes. The unchanging monotonous chanting of the monks can still be heard. It was there when she drifted close to the surface of consciousness earlier in the night. But time after time the peaceful voices lulled her back into her dreams—dreams that have been unusually powerful the last few nights.

  It’s a pity, she thinks, her thoughts still in the twilight zone, that they don’t chant their verses all night every night.

  It’s a cool morning and she turns down the speed of the fan on the ceiling. The sheet, which had been sticking to her body in the close heat of the night, now feels too thin.

  The new housekeeper is awake. Maman, too, perhaps. One of them has already lighted the incense on the altar below her window.

  She stays in her bed and feels she can sense the spirits that are said to be still moving freely around this world before the impending closure of the portals of the realm of the dead. She senses them hugging the walls and wonders how many forefathers’ forefathers there actually are. It’s as if the spirits are a concentrate of the emotions they left behind them when they were living people, as if the room is full of their hatreds, their regrets and their worries. She imagines them poking around among the amulets she has inherited, which are lying covered in the ash on her dressing table. Imagines them bitterly asking themselves why she isn’t wearing the necklace with those wonderful wonderful tiger teeth, those wonderful wonderful crocodile claws. She can certainly see herself wearing the small faceless ivory figurines, and she has thought of having the paper-thin gold charm with its small indistinct markings turned into a bracelet.

  There is a knock at the door, it opens and Kunthea comes in without waiting for an answer: Somaly thinks that whatever amulets may protect you against they don’t protect you against idiots. The maid is hopeless and only obeys rules that exist in her own head. The sort of person who doesn’t know her place. That can, of course, be an admirable trait, but not in a pudgy clumsy body like this one. And by the time the girl’s youth has withered, the trait will have turned into intolerable presumption.

  She stays in bed and watches—without seeing—Kunthea opening the shutters out into the darkness and laying out the clothes she selected the evening before. On a day like today any room for personal taste is minimal. But, she thinks, even traditional clothing can hang well or hang badly and colours can harmonize more or less well.

  What it actually all comes down to, according to Somaly, is a fundamental distinction between the small minority of people who understand what is beautiful and the great majority who do not. The latter think that everything they have been brought up to think of as beautiful is beautiful. And everything that the majority dismisses as ugly, they find ugly.

  But if you really want to see what is beautiful, Somaly argues, everything else must be peeled away. The object must be seen in itself, in its own right. Without regard to anything else. Only then can its beauty be judged.

  Wrapped in a sarong she goes out into the yard where the water butt stands. She pours scoop after scoop over her head. The cold water drives away the last of the sleep.

  The stars are already fading in the morning light.

  Then Kunthea helps her with her dress. It’s rust-red silk with emerald green details. Not as classic as the sampot pamuong that most women will choose, but it couldn’t be considered unsuitable. She tears off pieces of a croissant while Kunthea puts up her hair using long hairpins with coloured glass heads. Washes down the bread with fresh milk tinged pink with grenadine.

  The film about the carousel of love comes back to her. She particularly liked the introduction. Why? Well, the raconteur ascends a short set of steps in the twilight, continues across a simple candlelit outdoor scene, carries on past some film cameras that brutally reveal that everything has been constructed inside a studio, moves out into the streets of Vienna where the sun is suddenly shining and where he stops by a hatstand, which has been placed on the street, to change into tails and a cape. In the sweep of this movement Somaly sees all the essentials of life, so to speak, although she couldn’t express it any more clearly than that.

  As a whole, however, she thinks that the film is contradictory. As if it doesn’t really take itself seriously. She finds the six love stories rather banal, too, although every scene, when viewed as an image, is unarguably beautiful. At the same time she can’t get away from the thought that even the simplest decisions made by the characters will have incalculable significance further on. That the passion of love makes such definitive claims on people that the future is changed as a result.

  She thinks that if she ever has the chance to talk to the prince about the film she will take it. But then she hesitates. The prince has grand ideas about his own filmmaking, though he always claims the opposite. He might take it badly if she were to show more enthusiasm for Max Ophüls as a director than for him. Or she might fail to draw sufficiently interesting parallels between their respective oeuvres. If it is just a case of pleasing the prince it would be less risky to stick to talking about current models of sports cars.

  For the whole of her life her relationship with the prince has been an effectively non-existent one. The number of princes and princesses is not far short of a hundred, and these days her family belongs
on the wrong side of the family tree. All the descendants of the old king Ang Duong are invited to the royal palace a couple of times a year as a matter of course, but in a crowd like that meetings with the prince are limited to hello and goodbye. So it was unusual for the prince to be as charming and attentive as he was in Kep-sur-Mer the week before.

  But as far as Somaly is concerned the prince’s sudden interest in her is really just a belated correction of an anomalous state of affairs that resulted from the formal distinction between them. She understands, of course, that it has to be like that, but if you ignore everything around them (in the same way as when deciding what is beautiful and what is not), Somaly does not consider herself to be in any way inferior to the prince, whether in terms of artistic talent or in terms of qualities of leadership. Nor does she see the formal or informal structures as being barriers that are insurmountable. It’s true that the country has never had a reigning queen but there are many examples overseas. She is especially fascinated by the young monarch of Great Britain, who is only a few years older than her. In reality, of course, she is not in the least attracted by taking over the prince’s role, but it’s fun to play with the idea.

  So she hadn’t been nervous when he asked her to dance under the crystal chandeliers at the casino. The man who bowed to her bowed as an equal. (The champagne may have had something to do with it.) He was a good dancer and he had even joked about being the shorter of the two of them.

  But she doesn’t let that deceive her. His geniality is based solely on the diadem lying by the mirror in front of her (with Miss Cambodia 1955 engraved on the silver in among all the gemstones). And in spite of its apparent straightforwardness, the prince’s game is quite artful, there’s no doubt about that. He organizes a beauty contest, all international luxury and prestige, and then by dancing with her he ensures that the lustre of his own creation reflects on himself.