‘Brother Son Sen, Sister Khieu Thirith, have also told me about this. But—’
‘But if the villagers complain, they rape the women and the girls. Sometimes they beat and kill the men whose only crime is to want to survive and play their part in liberation, for Vietnam as well as Cambodia. It’s true, I tell you. And that’s not all, they also—’
‘But we must continue to work with our Vietnamese brothers if we can, mustn’t we?’ Sihanouk said. ‘Are not the Americans our greatest enemy, and also the greatest enemy of our Vietnamese brothers?’
‘Of course, Your Majesty, you are correct. That is why we endure the situation, complaining with tact and humility. But America will leave here one day soon – they no longer have the stomach for the war in Vietnam – whereas the contemptible Vietnamese will always cast a shadow over Kampuchea. They are imperialists first and good communists second.’
Sihanouk shuffled in the dirt. He had no interest in Kiry’s complaints, whether or not they were true. Such petty squabbles were not his problem. Besides, he recalled the advice of the Vietnamese general who had delivered him into the Liberated Zone: ‘Please, Your Majesty, do not speak too openly about all of the help we have been giving you recently. Our Khmer Rouge brothers would not approve.’
‘Will we be finished here soon, do you think?’ Sihanouk said. ‘My darling wife looks very tired.’
‘Of course, Your Majesty. We need several more photographs but, yes, we can leave soon. I am sure that you are eager to spend some time alone with Princess Monique. And to eat. Comrade Sok, please hurry up. His Majesty cannot wait all day.’
‘Yes, comrade, I am ready,’ Sok said, fiddling with a light meter. ‘Please forgive me, Your Majesty, the conditions are not ideal. Now: please stand close together.’
Sok looked through the viewfinder of his camera. He imagined that the small circle, designed to centre the image, now enclosing the tip of Sihanouk’s nose, was a rifle sight.
‘Please stand closer to Comrade Kiry, Your Majesty.’
Sihanouk took a short step to his left. The two men’s shoulders kissed.
‘Please smile, Your Majesty.’
Sihanouk beamed and stood to attention, his shoulders pulled back hard, as if someone was poking the small of his back with a stick. The sun illuminated his face. As he smiled his moist lips glued together. His cheeks turned into crescent moons and shone.
‘Are you ready?’ Sok said. ‘Excellent, excellent. Brother Kiry, please smile. A little more. Good. Brother Sody, could you perhaps smile a little less. Good. Perfect.’
Kiry grasped Sihanouk’s hand.
‘Liberation,’ Sihanouk said.
‘Solidarity,’ Kiry said.
‘Peace,’ Sody said.
Above them, the mid-afternoon sky bled into the tree line.
At dusk, Bun Sody crouched at a riverbank and splashed his face. Although victory was near, he was troubled. He thought it very possible that his old friend Saloth Sar – Pol Pot, as he was now calling himself – might be going a little crackers. Pol Pot had declared that as soon as the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh and the other cities and towns, the people should all be herded into the countryside. Every single one of them.
‘We must ask him to reconsider this madness,’ Bun Sody told Nhem Kiry, who paddled about in the river’s deeper water, clutching a cake of soap. ‘Surely there are other ways to wipe the slate clean.’
Kiry waded out of the water. He patted Sody on the shoulder and murmured something so quietly that Sody suspected he had made gentle, soothing noises, like a mother cooing at a baby, enticing him to sleep.
‘What?
What?
’ Sody said. ‘I can’t hear you.’
‘I said, don’t worry so much. It doesn’t become you. I said, let’s eat.’
That night Bun Sody slept badly. He passed in and out of consciousness, burdened by the thoughts of his countrymen tramping to all corners of the country for no sane reason. What was Pol Pot thinking? he wondered. Did he really believe the people were so tainted that they needed to be born again?
The next morning, Sody decided he must relay his unhappiness to Pol Pot, who was camped a day’s walk north. The young man he chose to deliver his message was sensible and trustworthy. Years earlier, at a high school in Phnom Penh – when the prospect of a communist take-over had seemed like nothing more than a dream – Sody had taught him mathematics by day and Marxist theory by night.
‘Tell Brother Pol Pot that in my opinion his strategy to empty the cities is not completely rational. Tell him, with the greatest respect, that it will cause great pain and create widespread problems – problems we will then have to fix, at great cost to both our reputation and the national budget. Tell him it’s not too late to do things differently. Tell him I stand ready to come to him to explain an alternative strategy. Tell him I honour and respect him and cannot wait to embrace him in liberated Phnom Penh. Tell him I’ve had my fair share of harebrained ideas, so I know what I’m talking about. Tell him that I stand ready to serve the movement in whatever capacity he sees fit ... but that if he chooses to appoint me as, say, foreign minister, then I would be joyful beyond words.’
Three days later, in the heat of the early afternoon, Sody lay in a hammock composing a sonnet on the subject of the female form and drifting towards sleep. The messenger, Sody’s former student, found him lolling with his eyes closed and his dry, cracked lips silently moving.
‘Wake up, comrade, Brother Pol Pot sends you news. But we must talk in private,’ the messenger said.
The messenger led Sody along a winding path that cut through thick foliage. Sody had come this way earlier in the day, just far enough to find a spot where he could squat in privacy to shit. He had groaned at the effort. Not for the first time, his intestines were rebelling against living rough. Sody couldn’t wait for all this to be over. Phnom Penh beckoned. Or somewhere even better: maybe Pol Pot really would appoint him foreign minister. Even minister for trade would do. If not, perhaps he could plead for an ambassadorship, get himself posted to Paris for a couple of years, recuperate with galleries and concerts and gourmet food and fine beaujolais and a city full of white women.
The messenger took Sody’s elbow and led him off the path and into the jungle.
‘Is this necessary?’ Sody asked, but the other man did not reply.
After a short time, less than a minute, they reached a small clearing. Three soldiers, barely more than boys, stood waiting. Two of the soldiers trained their rifles on Sody; the third held out a shovel.
‘What is this? I demand that you explain yourself,’ Sody said, although he knew instantly what was happening. ‘Do you have a message for me or not?’
The boy soldier threw the shovel at Sody’s feet.
‘Dig. That’s your message. Dig your grave.’
A little while later the messenger returned to the camp. He approached Nhem Kiry, who was sitting amongst a group of soldiers and aides, eating a bowl of rice flecked with greens.
The messenger leant close and whispered in Kiry’s ear. Kiry frowned slightly, then nodded. He stood up and walked to a spot by himself, where he crouched in the dirt and continued eating.
* * *
Nhem Kiry reached the centre of Phnom Penh a day and a half after the first Khmer Rouge troops. Fifty metres from where he stood, past an abandoned car and upturned cyclos, sat the convoy of jeeps that had borne him and his personal battalion into the city. A radio operator sat in one jeep, twiddling the dials of a box that occasionally stopped farting to relay a message. Four soldiers stood by, three boys and a girl, battle-hardened and clear-headed, guns trained north and south. The other soldiers, their weapons protruding like tentacles, surrounded Kiry and his awed chief aide, Akor Sok. This strange organism proceeded north along Monivong Boulevard.
Kiry paused in front of the twin-towered dirty white cathedral. Catholic architecture did not interest him – he had lived in Paris for three years without visiting Notre Dame – but he needed a reason, however flimsy, to pause. Not for the first time that day, Kiry’s body felt too light: his fingertips tingled, his kneecaps wobbled and the tip of his tongue kept catching in the gap between his front teeth. He thought he might vomit or faint or float away.
He steadied himself by briefly touching Sok’s elbow. Sok mistook the contact to be a command and obediently commenced a disdainful assessment of the four-metre statue of Jesus that stood above the cathedral’s entrance.
‘What’s he doing there, imposing himself on our city? Look, he’s all dirty. No one has washed him in years. What is that, dove shit? Look, the plaster’s peeling off him. They don’t care about him. Pathetic.’
Kiry drank from his water canister and tipped the last of it over his head. The flow ran dry at the base of his neck, where his top vertebrae bulged. Sok blinked, surprised by this uncharacteristic show of waste. He sensed that Kiry might be ailing and began to fuss.
‘Are you unwell, comrade?’ He handed Kiry a fresh canister of water. ‘Are you dehydrated?’
‘No.’
‘Have you got stomach cramps again?’
‘No.’
‘Have you got a temperature? Please, no, is it malaria?’
‘Stop it. I’m suffering from exhilaration.’
‘I understand,’ Sok said, flabbergasted.
Seeking respite from the sun, mostly seeking a quiet place to sit alone and gather his thoughts, Kiry pierced the circle of soldiers and moved towards the cathedral. He made stuttering progress up the widely spaced stairs. When he glanced at Jesus, who looked down his nose at him, he tripped. He broke his fall first with the palms of his hands and then with his ribcage. He lay half in sun, half in shadow, marvelling at the first thought that entered his head: finally, a legitimate war wound.
‘Quick, comrade, get up,’ Sok whispered. ‘They’ll think you’re praying.’
Kiry laughed at that unlikely proposition. ‘Praise be to God,’ he said. ‘I’m going inside.’
‘We will stop here for now,’ Sok called out.
Several soldiers stayed with Kiry. Others sat on the road, nursing the blisters on their feet. A couple lobbed stones at Jesus. One young man entered a bakery. He emerged pushing a woman, who half-turned to protest. He raised his rifle. She ran. As he lowered the gun he let off a shot. The bullet thudded into the woman’s thigh. She collapsed, howling. The soldier blinked – his stunned face suggested the rifle had come to life of its own accord – and turned away.
Kiry stepped inside the cathedral. The air was heavy with the smells that encapsulated the building’s history: the lake of lemon oil rubbed into the walnut pews; waxy effluent from thousands of candles; the mustiness of damp, black-spotted hymn books, which still sprouted like mushrooms on every pew; small pyramids of refuse left by refugees who were now filling the roads out of Phnom Penh.
‘It stinks,’ Sok said.
‘It’s the memory of the French.’
‘That’s what I said: it stinks.’
Discomforted by the silence, Sok quickly spoke again.
‘So, we’ve done it, comrade. We’ve won.’
‘So it seems.’
‘You doubt it? Is there something more to come?’
‘No. We are here.’
They sat for a time until Kiry grew tired of Sok’s fidgeting.
‘Did I tell you that I met Chou En-lai last month in Beijing?’ he asked
‘No, comrade, you never mentioned it,’ Sok lied.
‘He was propped up in his hospital bed. He tried to smile when I arrived but it only made him lose his breath. Do you know what he said to me?’
‘No, comrade.’
‘He told me to pursue a gentle revolution, a gradual revolution. Can you believe it?’
‘No, comrade.’
‘I was polite but I told him the truth. I promised him that our revolution would be pure as rain.’
‘How did he respond?’
‘He didn’t say anything. He sighed and one of the machines he was connected to lit up. He was so unwell; delirious, probably. I suppose I could have been gentler with him. But the truth is always best.’
‘I agree, comrade.’
Kiry peered through the gloom. ‘Oh, look, a miracle: that baptismal font has arms and legs.’
Sok followed Kiry’s gaze to where an old woman, despite abject thinness, failed to conceal herself.
‘Quickly, men, over here. Grab her.’ Sok’s eyes widened with excitement as the soldiers obeyed his commands. ‘The rest of you check the building. You, look there; you, check back there; you, through there.’
Kiry winced as Sok’s bellowing bounced from wall to wall. He craved silence – an hour, even a few minutes – to close his eyes and clear his mind. Instead, soldiers stormed the centre aisle in pursuit of an old woman incapable of flight. Above the beat of their footsteps on the floorboards Sok continued yelling. Kiry bowed his head and played deaf and dumb.
One of the soldiers approached the old woman, who cowered and continued to delude herself that she was invisible. She breathed heavily now, her chest poking out through the gaps between her ribs. Finally, submissively, she commenced a coughing fit. The soldier slung his rifle over his shoulder, lifted the baptismal font and threw it against the altar. Brackish water sprayed the woman. She attached herself to Sok’s legs, panting, clasping her hands together.
‘You must leave the city,’ Sok said. ‘You must go to your home district. Stand up and walk.’
The woman hauled herself upright by grabbing a tuft of Sok’s black shirt. ‘Look at me. I am lame,’ she said, swivelling in a tight circle anchored by her right leg. She finished where she had started and, unable to maintain her balance another moment, collapsed at Sok’s feet.
‘You are not special,’ Sok said. ‘Everybody must go.’
‘I cannot. Please, I cannot. The other soldiers I met earlier, by the river, they told me I could stay if I kept out of the way.’
‘The Americans are going to bomb the city. You can come back soon if you want to but now you must leave.’
Then the old woman saw Kiry.
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she stuttered and lost control of her breathing.
Several soldiers converged on the old woman as she scrambled towards Kiry. Her sarong unravelled and threatened to stay attached to a wide splinter that reared out of the floor, providing Kiry with an unexpurgated view of the opalised ulcer that ran from her calf to her thigh.