The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (7 page)

He marches towards the nearest exit from the royal grounds, which is through the eastern wall facing the river. His eye muscles twitch and his jaw tightens, but Sâr fails to relate his tension to the fact that he’s passing the royal monastery, Wat Botum Vaddei. He reaches the exit and knocks on the copper gate. The sentry, rooted in a stance of gruff suspicion, leans out of his guardhouse and asks: “Who’s there?” Dancers, of course, are not allowed to depart. When Sâr bows in respect, the sentry abandons his aggressive posture and smiles. It’s only Roeung’s little brother. He has seen him before and, like everyone, he enjoys the boy’s wide smile. The sentry opens the gate and lets Sâr exit without comment.

Now, out in the street, Sâr thinks about Wat Botum Vaddei. The pagoda and its sealed compound loom ominously behind him. He imagines its pointed, bluish-grey stupas toppling over and crushing him, a gruesome death beneath the heap of ruined beams, shattered and splintered
naga
heads. As if to escape the improbable threat, he jogs across the wide avenue and enters the expansive manicured park that hugs the riverbank.

The change of location doesn’t clear his thoughts. The royal monastery continues to irk him, fuelling his shame, funnelling Sâr into a state of limb-weakening emptiness that can only be described as despair. Although he hated his long year as a novice in Wat Botum Vaddei—but what nine-year-old boy would enjoy the rigid prescriptions and denials of monastic life?—that time now stands in stark contrast to his present, decadent existence. The bitter memory of the monastery’s privations and restrictions has faded with time, leaving Sâr with a distilled recollection of that period in his life: the pride warming him each evening as he lay on his thin pallet, staring at the ceiling’s wooden slats, weary from hours of prayer and study, from washing and sifting rice, from sweeping courtyards covered in banyan leaves, from countless mundane but purifying tasks that were executed in an air of enforced silence, that were always done with great awareness of right conduct, right diligence, right motivation. His muscles ached each night inside his red novice’s robes. Goodness, wholesomeness, and purity filled young Saloth Sâr all throughout that year. Yes, there was the constant threat of beatings—and the pain of actual abuse—but that was
nothing compared with this present torture, this pointless life of filth and shame.

Sâr walks towards the water, conscious of his body, all too aware of how his muscles move his legs. All around him the grass is mowed, the paths paved, the weeds pruned. Tall trees, mostly palms, spot the terrain. This pseudo-French park, extracted from a south Asian jungle and groomed into compliance, is located on a protruding elbow of land that marks the merging point of the powerful Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The wide blue sky above is fermenting into a longer spectrum of orange, yellow, red. The sun moves to kiss the horizon. An almost imperceptible breeze dries his skin. A distant
kahark
escapes from the throat of a grey heron riding the air currents above the river. Each step on the downy lawn forgives the trespass of his foot. Sâr wants none of this worldly stimulation. This body, this fleshy thing that pulses incessantly, that eats and ejaculates, imprisons with its various hungers, is not a welcome home. At this moment he would very much like to do away with it.

He finds a wrought iron bench beneath an ornate lamppost and takes a seat. The water passing before him is calm, almost still, and the far shore is imperceptible in the distance.
The Chaktomuk
, he thinks. Sacred Four Faces: the confluence of Cambodia’s two powerful rivers, merging, mixing, and splitting again into two separate entities.

He knows it was not right to visit them like that, to arrive at their small home fuelled by such desire. It was not proper at all. He must resist thinking about their bodies. He must not submit. But even now the boy can’t stop the flood of
images, can’t stop his recalled bliss—the unimaginable pleasure, the way they stroked and pawed him, those gentle kisses delivered with smoky lips, the long scratches from hard fingernails. All of it makes his ears grow hot. His stomach churns rice and
prahoc
. Digestion seems a base and loathsome thing. An image of Chanlina, glassy eyed and recumbent, too intoxicated to get herself dressed, steals across his mind, and he clenches his teeth in an effort to make it go away. “You must not visit those dancers again,” he says out loud. “You must begin to foster a pure consciousness.” If he does not think in a pure way, how can his behaviour be pure?

Now, closing his eyes, sealing them tight, Sâr tries to recall the sutras he memorized years ago, the ones he repeated by rote every day for the holy purpose of erasing himself and suppressing his desire, but the only thing he can manage to recall is the thrilling swelter of the dancers’ dingy room, the hot flush in their cheeks, the moisture of their brows, Chanlina’s smooth skin and tapered breasts, and the way her palm enveloped and cupped and stroked his—

No!

He knows sutras of great austerity. He knows antidotes to desire. His Pali, however rusty, allows phrases of extreme admonition to slip from his lips. He will loop them, repeat them, ad infinitum, until his need is gone, his desire abolished, his body lost in rhythm. “
The eye is to be abandoned
,” he chants in a steady and monotonous tone.
“Forms are to be abandoned
.

The ear is to be abandoned. Sounds are to be abandoned
.

The nose is to be abandoned. Aromas are to be abandoned
.

The tongue is to be abandoned. Flavours are to be abandoned
.

The body is to be abandoned. Tactile sensations are to be abandoned
.

The eye is to be—”

“
Sra-thnot
?” interrupts a craggy voice.

Sâr twitches with surprise and opens his eyes to an old, twiggy Vietnamese man in wide trousers and a full-body robe standing too close to his bench. His turtle-like face is withered and toothless. From a long bamboo yoke draped over his narrow shoulders dangle a dozen or so hollowed sections of cut bamboo, fastened with twine. They bump and bong against each other like a pagoda’s wind chimes.

“You want some
sra-thnot
?” the Vietnamese man repeats. His broken voice, husky and soft, implies a larynx riddled with cancer, as well as a more rudimentary geriatric decay. “It’s very good
areng
palm. The best and strongest. Try it. I think you want to.”

The man has already tilted his yoke and started to untie a hollowed bamboo section filled with rich palm wine.

“No,” says Sâr, “please.”

The vendor holds a pungent cup of syrupy liquid beneath Sâr’s nose. “Here,” he says. “Take it. Very strong. You like to be drunk? Only one piastre.”

Sâr bows his head in deference. “Thank you,” he whispers, “but I don’t want any wine. Thank you very much, but I will say no.”

“It makes you laughing drunk. You don’t like that?” The man’s tone has grown more aggressive. “Why not? You’ve never had it maybe? It makes you laugh. You understand?
It’s fun. It’s very funny. If you’d had it before, you wouldn’t refuse.”

Sâr bows his head several times, exaggerating his respect. “That’s very kind, thank you. But no, I am sure. I must say no.”

The vendor grunts and retracts the wine. He takes a moment to study this mysteriously sombre boy, assessing whether or not he can push him into a sale. Conceding defeat, he ties the bamboo section back onto the pole with the twine. When the yoke is balanced on the vendor’s shoulders, he digs his hand into a hidden pocket and extracts a small packet of tobacco wrapped in banana leaf. He peels it open, takes a pinch, and packs it into his cheek. As he regards the grand scope of the riverscape before them, he gnaws at the raw leaf with his toothless gums.

The sun is half hidden behind a strip of foliage on the far shore. A jumping fish breaks through the surface and then cuts back into the deep. An egret flaps its wide wings and floats across the sky. Smooth water reflects the increasing orange of the sun.

“Very pretty,” says the man. “You like the sunset?”

“I do,” whispers Sâr.

The vendor spits a thick gob of tobacco juice on the manicured lawn. “Why not have a cup of
sra-thnot
to better enjoy this pretty dusk?”

Sâr, in lieu of another denial, presses his hands to his lips. “Thank you,” he says. “It’s kind of you to offer.”

The vendor grunts his disapproval and wanders along the path in search of other customers. His upper body remains a
fixed support for the seesawing cups of palm wine, his thin legs absorbing the shocks of the sloping pavement.

Sâr watches the vendor depart.
The Vietnamese are disgusting
, he thinks.

The air has cooled. The sunset stretches brilliant fingers into the sky before him. The intruder has disrupted Sâr’s attempt at equanimity, and now there’s no chance he will lose himself in sutra recitation. His skin tingles and his heart thuds. Desire is already recharging inside him. He tries to empty his mind, but his sharp and electric thoughts crack through that failed void like lightning. They were using him, of course. All they wanted was for him to put in a good word with Roeung. They read his desire—because it couldn’t have been more obvious—and found it innocent enough, maybe even charming, or amusing.
You are a fool, Saloth Sâr. Why did you let them know what you wanted? Why did you ever tell them your name? You are nothing but a plaything for the king’s superfluous wives. They will tell your sister Roeung. They know all your secrets. They know you
. Sâr’s face heats into crimson red; he wishes he could rip the sod beneath his feet and bury himself inside it.

Although his humiliation is complete, the desire to return to those dancers surges through him, churning his blood and swelling his veins. His feet are tapping inside their clogs. Were it not for the evening’s rehearsal and his sister’s interruption, Sâr knows he’d be crossing the wide avenue again right now, en route to the royal compound. “I am weak,” he says out loud. His desire dampens at the
acknowledgement and his eyes fill with tears. “I am weak and exposed.”

Despair nails him to the bench. He regards the serene vista before him. How wide the river is. How slow and peaceful. Sâr pans north and spies dozens of covered boats permanently moored at jutting angles along the shore of the river. He sees the peasants’ tiny plots of cultivated riverbank, their tobacco and vegetables. These are seasonal gardens, since that coastal slope will be submerged a few weeks into monsoon season, when the swollen Mekong River overwhelms the Tonle Sap and—amazingly, majestically, almost incomprehensibly—reverses the flow of the Tonle Sap away from the sea and back into the great lake. The river’s reversal is the origin of much of his childhood joy. Days upon days of sweet torrential rain, cooling the air, burying whole villages, transforming the dusty roads of his hometown into deep canals. He loved the way his parents’ home, raised on its mangrove piles, became an island every year. He recalls sitting on their porch in early monsoon season, watching the water encroach and bury the earth. Now, thinking of it, Sâr begins to feel a vague hope. Can’t his desire, like the April heat, be quenched by a change of season? If the rain can reverse the flow of a wide and mighty river, why can’t he change his personal direction? His decadence is no more solid than the ground beneath his parents’ home. Why can’t he also flood his path and flow in reverse?

Sâr leans forward and bites his lip. Maybe it’s possible. Maybe he can do it. The sole requirement, it seems, is a
proper loss of self. Don’t monks achieve nirvana? Didn’t the Buddha achieve nirvana? There must be some means for a layperson to disappear.

He recalls the previous November’s Water Festival, when his cousin Meak and his sister Roeung invited him to the open-air Chan Chhaya Pavilion to witness the annual dances. Sitting on one of the raised viewing platforms, his back pressed against the balustrade, Sâr absorbed the light of a thousand candles—although he himself, outside their range, was bathed in the more diffuse glow of the evening’s full moon. The scene impressed him deeply. He remembers how King Monivong daintily extracted an Abdullah cigarette from a bejewelled tin on a side table and offered it to a nearby guest. He remembers the king’s wide-brimmed crown and sacred sword, his rigid posture in the large throne underneath the interior arch, while the muscular arm of a statuesque servant held the royal seven-tiered parasol (about which Sâr had heard so much) above his head. He also remembers, to the right of Monivong, displeased like a child by his less ornate chair, the Résident Supérieur dressed in a European suit. He wore gaudy insignia on his breast to designate his authority as colonial governor of the Cambodian protectorate of French Indochina. He sipped gin and quinine with his legs crossed effeminately, waiting for the evening’s dances to begin.

That dance was the first time Sâr had seen Chanlina. She was stunning, no older than seventeen. At first he could only look at her, although she was merely one of the
seven motionless background Apsaras, each frozen like a chiselled figure in an Angkoran relief. Then came the lulling and enchanting music of the
pin peat
orchestra: the wailing, nearly vocal line of the wind instrument, the
sralai
; the multi-rhythmic clangs and pings of the xylophones; the throbbing pulse of the
samphor
and
skor thom
drums beneath. And when the central dancer, in a bodysuit and brocade skirt as white as her foundation, stepped forward to play Mera and the xylophones and high flute promptly dropped away and the vocalist’s mournful lines soared like a night insect, Sâr’s skin erupted in goosebumps. But what Sâr remembers most, right now, sitting on the park bench, is how the background dancers, with their peaked Apsara crowns and strings of jasmine flowers dangling from their ears, stepped forward to move in unison with their leader. It was only then that Sâr realized the full value of the event, the personal religious significance it would secretly hold for him.

In the synchronicity of music and movement, the dancers lost their individuality and moved as one. Their pigeon-toed feet tapped on the pavilion’s smooth tile, sliding and pushing against the hard floor in syncopated steps. Their heads waved in almost imperceptible figure eights. The dancers kneeled on one knee, with their hands extended in superhuman contortions and the flattened soles of their back feet facing the ceiling, as if they were indeed goddesses soaring through the sky. The music exploded into a frenzy of atonal xylophones and pounding drums, led by a single, screaming flute. Yes, they were goddesses, their boundaries blended by
music, their individuality lost in their precise movements, in routines that had been passed down for generations. They were no longer women with concrete histories but, in fact, Apsaras.