Incendiary Circumstances (33 page)

She didn't see her mother again until 1979, when she came back to Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese invasion. She managed to locate her as well as two of her brothers after months of searching. Of the fourteen people who had walked out of her house three and a half years before, ten were dead, including her father, two brothers, and a sister. Her mother had become an abject, terrified creature after her father was called away into the fields one night, never to return. One of her brothers was too young to work; the other had willed himself into a state of guilt-stricken paralysis after revealing their father's identity to the Khmer Rouge in a moment of inattention—he now held himself responsible for his father's death.

Their family was from the social group that was hardest hit by the revolution, the urban middle classes. City people by definition, they were herded into rural work camps. The institutions and forms of knowledge that sustained them were destroyed—the judicial system was dismantled, the practice of formal medicine was discontinued, schools and colleges were shut down, banks and credit were done away with; indeed, the very institution of money was abolished. Cambodia's was not a civil war in the same sense as Somalia's or the former Yugoslavia's, fought over the fetishism of small differences: it was a war on history itself, an experiment in the reinvention of society. No regime in history had ever before made so systematic and sustained an attack on the middle class. Yet if the experiment was proof of anything at all, it was ultimately of the indestructibility of the middle class, of its extraordinary tenacity and resilience, its capacity to preserve its forms of knowledge and expression through the most extreme kinds of adversity.

Molyka was only seventeen then, but she was the one who had to cope, because no one else in the family could. She took a job in the army and put herself and her brothers through school and college; later she acquired a house and a car; she adopted a child, and, like so many people in Phnom Penh, she took in and supported about half a dozen complete strangers. In one way or another she was responsible for supporting a dozen lives.

Yet now Molyka, who at the age of thirty-one had already lived through several lifetimes, was afraid of driving into the outskirts of the city. Over the past year the outlines of the life she had put together were beginning to look frayed. Paradoxically, at precisely the moment when the world had ordained peace and democracy for Cambodia, uncertainty had reached its peak within the country. Nobody knew what was going to happen after the UN-sponsored elections were held, who would come to power and what they would do once they did. Molyka's colleagues had all become desperate to make some provision for the future—by buying, stealing, selling whatever was at hand. Those two soldiers who had stopped her car were no exception. Everyone she knew was a little like that now—ministers, bureaucrats, policemen, they were all people who saw themselves faced with yet another beginning.

Now Molyka was driving out to meet Pol Pot's brother and sister-in-law, relatives of a man whose name was indelibly associated with the deaths of her own father and nine other members of her family. She had gasped in disbelief when I first asked her to accompany me. To her, as to most people in Cambodia, the name Pol Pot was an abstraction; it referred to a time, an epoch, an organization, a form of terror—it was almost impossible to associate it with a mere human being, one who had brothers, relatives, sisters-in-law. But she was curious too, and in the end, overcoming her fear of the neighborhood, she drove me out in her own car, into the newly colonized farmland near Pochentong airport.

The house, when we found it, proved to be a comfortable wooden structure built in the traditional Khmer style, with its details picked out in bright blue. Like all such houses it was supported on stilts, and as we walked in, a figure detached itself from the shadows beneath the house and came toward us: a tall, vigorous-looking man dressed in a sarong. He had a broad, pleasant face and short, spiky gray hair. The resemblance to Pol Pot was startling.

I glanced at Molyka; she bowed, joining her hands, as he welcomed us in, and they exchanged a few friendly words of greeting. His wife was waiting upstairs, he said, and led us up a wooden
staircase to a large, airy room with a few photographs on the bare walls: portraits of relatives and ancestors, of the kind that hang in every Khmer house. Chea Samy was sitting on a couch at the far end of the room. She waved us in and her husband took his leave of us, smiling, hands folded.

"I wanted to attack him when I first saw him," Molyka told me later. "But then I thought, it's not his fault. What has he ever done to me?"

Chea Samy was taken into the palace in Phnom Penh in 1925, as a child of six, to begin her training in classical dance. She was chosen after an audition in which thousands of children participated. Her parents were delighted: dance was one of the few means by which a commoner could gain entry to the palace in those days, and to have a child accepted often meant preferment for the whole family.

King Sisowath was in his eighties when she went into the palace. He had spent most of his life waiting in the wings, wearing the pinched footwear of a crown prince while his half-brother Norodom ruled center stage. The two princes held dramatically opposed political views: Norodom was bitterly opposed to the French, while Sisowath was a passionate Francophile. It was because of French support that Sisowath was eventually able to succeed to the throne, in preference to his half-brother's innumerable sons.

Something of an eccentric all his life, King Sisowath kept no fixed hours and spent a good deal of his time smoking opium with his sons and advisers. During his visit to France, the authorities even improvised a small opium den in his apartments at the Préfecture in Marseille. "Voilà!" cried the newspapers. "An opium den in the Préfecture! There's no justice left!" But it was the French who kept the king supplied with opium in Cambodia, and they could hardly do otherwise when he was a state guest in France.

By the time Chea Samy entered the palace in 1925, King Sisowath's behavior had become erratic in the extreme. He would wander nearly naked around the grounds of the palace, wearing nothing but a
kramar,
a length of checkered cloth, knotted loosely around his waist. It was Princess Soumphady who was the central figure in the lives of the children of the dance troupe: she was a surrogate mother who tempered the rigors of their training with a good deal of kindly indulgence, making sure they were well fed and clothed.

On King Sisowath's death in 1927, his son Monivong succeeded to the throne, and soon the regime in the palace underwent a change. The new king's favorite mistress was a talented dancer called Luk Khun Meak, and she now gradually took over Princess Soumphady's role as "the lady in charge of the women." Meak made use of her influence to introduce several members of her family into the palace. Among them were some relatives from a small village in the province of Kompong Thom. One of them—later to become Chea Samy's husband—took a job as a clerk at the palace. He in turn brought two of his brothers to Phnom Penh. The youngest was a boy of six called Saloth Sar, who was later to take the
nom de guerre
Pol Pot.

Chea Samy made a respectful gesture at a picture on the wall behind her, and I looked up to find myself transfixed by Luk Khun Meak's stern, frowning gaze. "She was killed by Pol Pot," said Chea Samy, using the generic phrase with which Cambodians refer to the deaths of that time. The distinguished old dancer, mistress of King Monivong, died of starvation after the revolution. One of her daughters was apprehended by the Khmer Rouge while trying to buy rice with a little bit of gold. Her breasts were sliced off and she was left to bleed to death.

"What was Pol Pot like as a boy?" I asked, inevitably.

Chea Samy hesitated for a moment. It was easy to see that she had often been asked the question before and had thought about it at some length. "He was a very good boy," she said at last, emphatically. "In all the years he lived with me, he never gave me any trouble at all."

Then, with a despairing gesture, she said, "I have been married to his brother for fifty years now, and I can tell you that my husband is a good man, a kind man. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, has never made trouble between friends, never hit his nephews, never made difficulties for his children..."

She gave up; her hands flipped over in a flutter of bewilderment and fell limp into her lap.

The young Saloth Sar's palace connections ensured places for him at some of the country's better-known schools. Then, in 1949, he was awarded a scholarship to study electronics in Paris. When he returned to Cambodia three years later, he began working in secret for the Indochina Communist Party. Neither Chea Samy nor her husband saw much of him, and he told them very little of what he was doing. Then, in 1963, he disappeared; they learned later that he had fled into the jungle along with several well-known leftists and Communists. That was the last they heard of Saloth Sar.

In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge seized power, Chea Samy and her husband were evacuated like everyone else. They were sent off to a village of "old people," longtime Khmer Rouge sympathizers, and along with all the other "new people" were made to work in the rice fields. For the next couple of years there was a complete news blackout and they knew nothing of what had happened and who had come to power: it was a part of the Khmer Rouge's mechanics of terror to deprive the population of knowledge. They first began to hear the words "Pol Pot" in 1978, when the regime tried to create a personality cult around its leader in an attempt to stave off imminent collapse.

Chea Samy was working in a communal kitchen at the time, cooking and washing dishes. Late that year some party workers stuck a poster on the walls of the kitchen: they said it was a picture of their leader, Pol Pot. She knew who it was the moment she set eyes on the picture.

That was how she discovered that the leader of Angkar, the terrifying, inscrutable "Organization" that ruled over their lives, was none other than little Saloth Sar.

A few months later, in January 1979, the Vietnamese "broke" Cambodia, as the Khmer phrase has it, and the regime collapsed. Shortly afterward Chea Samy and her husband, like all the other evacuees, began to drift out of the villages they had been imprisoned in. Carrying nothing but a few cupfuls of dry rice, barefoot, half starved, and dressed in rags, they began to find their way back toward the places they had once known, where they had once had friends and relatives.

Walking down the dusty country roads, encountering others like themselves, the bands of "new people" slowly began to rediscover the exhilaration of speech. For more than three years now they had not been able to say a word to anyone with confidence, not even their own children. Many of them had reinvented their lives in order to protect themselves from the obsessive biographical curiosity of Angkar's cadres. Now, talking on the roads, they slowly began to shed their assumed personae; they began to mine their memories for information about the people they had met and heard of over the past few years, the names of the living and the dead.

It was the strangest of times.

The American Quaker Eva Mysliwiec arrived in the country in 1981; she was one of the first foreign relief workers to come to Cambodia and is now a legend in Phnom Penh. Some of her most vivid memories of that period are of the volcanic outbursts of speech that erupted everywhere at unexpected moments. Friends and acquaintances would suddenly begin to describe what they had lived through and seen, what had happened to them and their families and how they had managed to survive. Often people would wake up in the morning looking worse than they had the night before: they would see things in their dreams, all those things they had tried to put out of their minds when they were happening because they would have gone mad if they'd stopped to think about them—a brother called away in the dark, an infant battered against a tree, children starving to death. When you saw them in
the morning and asked what had happened at night, what was the matter, they would make a circular gesture, as though the past had been unfolding before them like a turning reel, and they would say simply, "Camera."

Eventually, after weeks of wandering, Chea Samy and her husband reached the western outskirts of Phnom Penh. There, one day, entirely by accident, she ran into a girl who had studied dance with her before the revolution. The girl cried, "Teacher! Where have you been? They've been looking for you everywhere."

There was no real administration in those days. Many of the resistance leaders who had come back to Cambodia with the Vietnamese had never held administrative positions before; for the most part they were breakaway members of the Khmer Rouge who had been opposed to the policies of Pol Pot and his group. They had to learn on the job when they returned, and for a long time there was nothing like a real government in Cambodia. The country was like a shattered slate: before you could think of drawing lines on it, you had to find the pieces and fit them together.

But already the fledgling Ministry of Culture had launched an effort to locate the classical dancers and teachers who had survived. Its officials were overjoyed to find Chea Samy. They quickly arranged for her to travel through the country to look for other teachers and for young people with talent and potential.

"It was very difficult," said Chea Samy. "I did not know where to go, where to start. Most of the teachers had been killed or maimed, and the others were in no state to begin teaching again. Anyway, there was no one to teach. So many of the children were orphans, half starved. They had no idea of dance—they had never seen Khmer dance. It seemed impossible; there was no place to begin."

Her voice was quiet and matter-of-fact, but there was a quality of muted exhilaration in it too. I recognized that note at once, for I had heard it before: in Molyka's voice, for example, when she spoke of the first years after the Pol Pot time, when slowly, patiently, she had picked through the rubble around her, building a
life for herself and her family. I was to hear it again and again in Cambodia, most often in the voices of women. They had lived through an experience very nearly unique in human history: they had found themselves adrift in the ruins of a society that had collapsed into a formless heap, with its scaffolding systematically dismantled, picked apart with the tools of a murderously rational form of social science. At a time when there was widespread fear and uncertainty about the intentions of the Vietnamese, they had had to start from the beginning, literally, like rag pickers, piecing their families, their homes, their lives together from the little that was left.