indefinable half-smile
that floats across the stone lips of the Gods at Angkor and which one finds, replicated identically, on the lips of Cambodians today’ — served as a mask, ‘at the same time ambiguous and likeable, that one erects between oneself and others . . . [like] a screen hiding an emptiness that has been deliberately created as an ultimate defence against any who might wish to penetrate the secret of one’s innermost thoughts.’ Meyer never
met Saloth Sâr. But his words offer an uncanny glimpse into one aspect of his personality.
The morning after
the royal audience, Sâr’s group, twenty-one young men in all, set out before dawn for Saigon — not in a charcoal-fired bus this time but a modern, petrol-engined vehicle, which completed the 150-mile journey in less than seven hours. They were accommodated at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat, where ten years earlier Sihanouk and Thiounn Thioeunn had been classmates. The future South Vietnamese capital was a well-kept, elegant city, bigger than Phnom Penh. ‘We felt like bush-monkeys,’ Mann recalled. ‘We were rustics in from the countryside.’ But at the Buddhist
wat
and on the streets, they heard passersby speaking Khmer, ‘which gave the older ones among us, including ââr, a feeling that it was still a Cambodian city’.
Prey Nokor, as they called Saigon, and all the surrounding region, had been Cambodian territory until the mid-eighteenth century. In April 1949, a few months before their arrival, France had incorporated Cochin-China into the new state of Vietnam. Sihanouk had declined to recognise Vietnamese sovereignty.
After a week, their French visas were ready, and on the morning of August 31 they piled their baggage on to bicycle-drawn rickshaws and made their way to the port. Their ship, the SS
Jamaique,
was an elderly passenger liner which had been converted into a troopship for the French soldiers being brought, in ever greater numbers, to fight Ho Chi Minh’s communist armies in the north. Sâr and his companions were put with the ordinary ranks, the
marsouins,
travelling fourth-class in the hold, where they slept on narrow bunks, stacked in tiers of three. Many of them were seasick throughout the four-week-long voyage, Sâr, Chhopininto and Mey Mann being among the few exceptions. But though that meant there was food in abundance — since the sufferers had no appetite — none of them was yet used to French cooking, and Mann fanned their sense of deprivation by launching into mouth-watering descriptions of Cambodian dishes prepared with tamarind seeds and coconut milk. The ship stopped at Singapore and Colombo — where they bought ebony carvings of elephants — before heading for the Red Sea. By then Sâr had had enough of ship’s mutton — ‘cooked the French way, we thought it tasted terrible!’ Mann remembered — so at the next stopover, in Djibouti, the two of them went to the market and bought lemons, pepper and African spices. After that, he remembered, they were able to eat properly again. Sâr was in charge of the cooking. Mann and another student, who was training to become a vet, assisted.
Sâr’s talent as a cook was not the only surprise of the voyage. He struck up friendships with some of the French soldiers, who had a daily ration of red wine and used to give him a
pichet
to share with his friends. As they sailed through the tropics, he and Mann often slept on deck, partly to avoid the smell of vomit wafting up from their stricken colleagues below. ‘We talked about our studies,’ Mann remembered, ‘and we worried about how we would cope with the cold. Politics never came up. Not once. It was just a great adventure.’
2
City of Light
SINCE THE TIME
of Beaumarchais and Voltaire, Paris has called itself, with fine indifference to the intellectual claims of other European centres,
La Ville Lumi
è
re,
the source of light and of enlightenment for the rest of the civilised world. At times that has been a mixed blessing. It was in Paris, not in Moscow or Beijing, that in the early 1950s Sâr and his companions laid down the ideological foundations on which the Khmer Rouge nightmare would be built.
That this occurred was not — as Sihanouk and his French advisers liked to pretend — because their minds were warped by the Stalinist vision of the world then being propagated by the French communists, the country’s largest political party; nor was it due to the influence of Mao Zedong, whose writings the young Cambodians encountered in France for the first time. Stalin and Mao both had their part in the making of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. So did the Vietnamese and the Americans. But the foreign intellectual legacy which would underpin the Cambodian revolution was first and foremost French.
How, indeed, could it have been otherwise? Language forms the building blocks of thought. The Cambodian students spoke French; they had attended French schools; and they had grown up in a French colony. French was the prism through which they viewed the outside world. And in the Paris of 1950, what an outside world it was! If Saigon had made Sâr and Mey Mann feel like country bumpkins, the French capital seemed to be on a different planet. The young Cambodians climbed the Eiffel Tower and marvelled at the ancient stonework of Notre-Dame and the He de la Cité; at the broad, tree-lined boulevards laid out by Baron Haussmann in the 1860s, with their elegant boutiques, classical façades and polished,
belle époque
department stores — ‘all the beauty of the structure of the city’, as one of them put it — a city, moreover, that had rebounded from wartime austerity and was now experiencing a cultural and social ferment not seen since the 1920s. In the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter, the heart of the student district, ‘bebop’ had arrived, scandalising the strait-laced with its ‘sensualism and immorality’. Sidney Bechet’s New Orleans Jazzband
played at the Vieux Colombier, just across from the rue St Sulpice, where Thiounn Mumm’s brother, Chum, now a law student, had rooms and the Khmer Student Association (1’Association des Etudiants Khmers or AEK), its headquarters. Mumm himself was at the Ecole Polytechnique, then also in the Latin Quarter not far from the rue de Carmes, where Claude Luter presided over all-night jam sessions at the Lorientais, sponsored by the Hot Club de France.
Existentialism was the rage and St Germain-des-Prés at its apogee. Juliette Greco had become the emblem of an introverted, self-indulgent generation, parodied by the young mime Marcel Marceau. Mey Mann recalled going late one night with a group of friends to a cellar club, where ‘everyone was dressed in black’. It was Le Tabou, on the rue Dauphine, where Albert Camus, Alberto Giacometti, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a certain Jean-Paul Sartre used to gather after the bigger bars closed. The Khmer Student Association’s magazine,
Khemara Nisut,
caught the mood of the times — as viewed by Cambodians, at least — in a sketch lampooning the plight of a new arrival from Phnom Penh, who found himself surrounded by ‘
policemen who gesticulate
like opera singers’, something called ‘autumn’ which made the leaves turn red and fall, and ‘strange places which deafen you with bawdy, syncopated music, [where] lithe young adonises dislocate themselves, each more frantically than the next, in a kind of collective hysteria . . . and a girl with pouting lips and upturned trousers takes you off to join a group of intense young men, wearing bow-ties and slicked-back hair, who are earnestly discussing whether “essence” precedes “existence” in the case of peas and gherkins, or should it be the other way round?’
Sâr and his companions disembarked into this glittering, chaotic, intimidating new world on the morning of October I 1949, having travelled up on the overnight train from Marseilles. They were met at the Gare de Lyon by an official of the French Education Ministry, responsible for ‘colonials’, and, more helpfully, by representatives of the Khmer Student Association.
It was a Saturday and it was raining. The temperature that afternoon was barely 15 degrees centigrade, colder than the worst winter day in Cambodia. None of them had winter outfits. Mey Mann remembered being taken to a second-hand clothes market beneath the iron railway bridge of La Motte-Picquet, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, where he discovered to his delight that they could haggle with the Jewish stallholders just as they did with Khmer traders at home. Then they all went to a student hostel in rue Monsieur-le-Prince, across the road from the Sorbonne, the oldest of the city’s universities. But that was only a temporary refuge. Finding permanent accommodation was a student’s biggest headache. In principle, the Cambodians were supposed to stay at the
Maison d’lndochine, a well-appointed hall of residence with white walls and fake Vietnamese eaves, supposedly reminiscent of Saigon, at the Cité Universitaire, a park-like campus for non-French students in the south of Paris. But there were never enough rooms to go round. Mey Mann, Nghet Chhopininto and their friends took lodgings in the suburb of Bourg La Reine. Others were happy to find a
chambre de bonne,
a servant’s room in a bourgeois apartment, usually a garret, eight floors up, within the city itself.
Sâr was lucky
. One of King Monivong’s nephews, Prince Sisowath Somonopong, had arrived in Paris a year earlier to study radio technology at the Ecole Française de Radio-Electricité, the same school that Sâr was to attend. Somonopong’s mother held a position comparable to that of Sâr’s sister, Roeung. It may well have been the young Prince’s example that led Sâr to choose the Radio-Electricity School in the first place, for it was not an obvious step for a boy who had been studying carpentry. In any event, Somonopong took Sâr under his wing and found him lodgings with two friends, the sons of the governor of Kratie, not far from the school workshops on the rue Amyot, just behind the Panthéon. Sâr never afterwards referred to this royal connection, saying merely that he had spent the year staying with ‘a cousin’.
Despite difficulties with the French language, in which he was never completely at ease, he seems to have had no difficulty settling in.
Encouraged by Somonopong and his two flatmates, Sâr joined the AEK and took part in many of its activities. The following spring, the association organised a memorial meeting for leu Koeuss, the leader of the radical wing of the Democratic Party, who had been killed in a grenade attack — allegedly ordered by right-wing opponents — in Phnom Penh in January. There were lavish celebrations in Versailles to mark the Cambodian New Year in April. These included traditional Khmer dances, a midnight ball, and what was termed ‘a Pantagruelian feast’. Part of the proceedings were broadcast by French radio. The next month the students held a Cambodian Soirée at the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, with an art exhibition, a play starring a young Khmer actor named Hang Thun Hak (later to become Cambodia’s Prime Minister), a poetry recital by Keng Vannsak and dancing until dawn. There was even talk of taking a Khmer play on tour in France and Germany that summer. Sâr’s friends regarded him as a ‘
bon vivant
’ whose purpose in life was to have a good time.
Shortly before leaving for France, he had acquired a
girlfriend
, Soeung Son Maly. Her mother was a royal princess, her father a schoolmaster and compulsive gambler who quickly squandered his wife’s fortune. Unlike Sâr’s adolescent liaisons with the young women of the palace, the relationship with Maly was serious and chaste. She was extremely pretty and was
nicknamed ‘the Beauty Queen’. It was a standing joke among the students in Paris that, whenever Sâr looked morose, he was pining for his lady-love. Whether or not that was so, there was a solitude about him which others sometimes interpreted as loneliness.
That first year in Paris, he applied himself to his studies and, by his own account, got ‘
quite good marks
’. He narrowly failed the year-end exam but, along with other borderline cases, was allowed to sit it again and passed, which meant he could go on to the second year.
But then, in the summer of 1950, a series of events occurred which would change the direction of Sâr’s life. Towards the end of June, the magazine
Khemara Nisut
announced that the Khmer Student Association was offering its members a choice of two trips abroad during the summer holidays. One was a month-long camping tour in Switzerland; the other, participation in an ‘international labour brigade’ to help with post-war reconstruction in Yugoslavia. The Swiss tour would cost 22,000 francs (about 70 US dollars); the trip to Yugoslavia was free. For Sâr, there was no contest: ‘I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t do as the others and go to Geneva, or to the sea or the mountains, and have a holiday there . . . A group of us poorer students went instead to . . . . Zagreb, [where] we worked building a motorway’
The train journey took forty-eight hours, with lengthy stops and no food to be had — a foretaste of the penury ahead. Nghet Chhopininto, who went with a brigade to Sarajevo a year later, remembered being hungry all the time they were there. The midday meal at the work-site was never enough. Sometimes they went to local restaurants and showed the cooks drawings of the food they wanted. But there was little to be had there either. On the other hand, it was exhilarating to be part of such a massive effort of national reconstruction. ‘Everywhere . . . resembles an enormous building site,’ one of Sâr’s companions wrote later. ‘This effort is even more estimable because the force and the faith of the people, united around their leaders . . . allow them to win successive victories, aware that this is a question of national independence.’ Foreign volunteers were expected to do manual labour three days a week, from 6 a.m. until noon, and could spend the rest of their time in cultural activities and sports. Chhopininto and a colleague ‘got lucky with the local girls’, as he put it, which also helped; and he left with happy memories of the camaraderie that came from working together with young people from many different countries.