Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  The crowd had its first brief glimpse of the dancers when the Amiral-Kersaint loomed out of the fog shortly after nine and drew alongside the quay. A number of young women were spotted on the bridge and on the upper decks, flitting between portholes and clutching each other in what appeared to be surprise and astonishment.

  Within minutes a gangplank decorated with tricolored bunting had been thrown up to the ship. Soon the king himself appeared on deck, a good-humored, smiling man dressed in a tailcoat, a jewel-encrusted felt hat, and a dhotilike Cambodian sampot made of black silk. The king seemed alert, even jaunty, to those privileged to observe him at close range: a man of medium height, he had large, expressive eyes and a heavy-lipped mouth topped by a thin mustache.

  King Sisowath walked down the gangplank with three pages following close behind him; one bore a ceremonial gold cigarette case, another a gold lamp with a lighted wick, and a third a gold spittoon in the shape of an open lotus. The king was an instant favorite with the Marseillais crowd. The port resounded with claps and cheers as he was driven away in a ceremonial landau, and he was applauded all the way to his specially appointed apartments at the city's Préfecture.

  In the meanwhile, within minutes of the king's departure from the port, a section of the crowd rushed up the gangplank of the Amiral-Kersaint to see the dancers at first hand. For weeks now the Marseille newspapers had been full of tantalizing snippets of information: it was said that the dancers entered the palace as children and spent their lives in seclusion ever afterward; that their lives revolved entirely around the royal family; that several were the king's mistresses and had even borne him children; that some of them had never stepped out of the palace grounds until this trip to France. European travelers went to great lengths to procure invitations to see these fabulous recluses performing in the palace at Phnom Penh; now here they were in Marseille, visiting Europe for the very first time.

  The dancers were on the ship's first-class deck; they seemed to be everywhere, running about, hopping, skipping, playing excitedly, feet skimming across the polished wood. The whole deck was a blur of legs, girls' legs, women's legs, "fine, elegant legs," for all the dancers were dressed in colorful sampots which ended shortly below the knee.

  The onlookers were taken by surprise. They had expected perhaps a troupe of heavily veiled, voluptuous Salomes; they were not quite prepared for the lithe, athletic women they encountered on the Amiral-Kersaint. Nor indeed was the rest of Europe. An observer wrote later: "With their hard and close-cropped hair, their figures like those of striplings, their thin, muscular legs like those of young boys, their arms and hands like those of little girls, they seem to belong to no definite sex. They have something of the child about them, something of the young warrior of antiquity, and something of the woman."

  Sitting regally among the dancers, alternately stern and indulgent, affectionate and severe, was the slight, fine-boned figure of the king's eldest daughter, Princess Soumphady. Dressed in a gold-brown sampot and a tunic of mauve silk, this redoubtable woman had an electrifying effect on the Marseillais crowd. They drank in every aspect of her appearance: her betel-stained teeth, her chest-ful of medals, her close-cropped hair, her gold-embroidered shoes, her diamond brooches, and her black silk stockings. Her manner, remarked one journalist, was at once haughty and childlike, her gaze direct and good-natured; she was amused by everything and nothing; she crossed her legs and clasped her shins just like a man. Indeed, except for her dress she was very much like one man in particular—the romantic and whimsical Duke of Reichstadt, l'Aiglon, Napoleon's tubercular son.

  Suddenly, to the crowd's delight, the princess's composure dissolved. A group of local women appeared on deck, accompanied by a ten-year-old boy, and the princess and all the other dancers rushed over and crowded around them, admiring their clothes and exclaiming over the little boy.

  The journalists were quick to seize this opportunity. "Do you like French women?" they asked the princess.

  "Oh! Pretty, so pretty..." she replied.

  "And their clothes, their hats?"

  "Just as pretty as they are themselves."

  "Would Your Highness like to wear clothes like those?"

  "No!" the princess said after a moment's reflection. "No! I am not used to them and perhaps would not know how to wear them. But they are still pretty ... oh yes..."

  And with that she sank into what seemed to be an attitude of somber and melancholy longing.

  2

  I only once ever met someone who had known both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath. Her name was Chea Samy, and she was said to be one of the greatest dancers in Cambodia, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot's sister-in-law.

  She was first pointed out to me at the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, a rambling complex of buildings not far from the Wat Phnom, where the UN's twenty-thousand-strong peacekeeping force has its headquarters. It was January, only four months before countrywide elections were to be held under the auspices of UNTAC, as the UN's Transitional Authority in Cambodia is universally known. Phnom Penh had temporarily become one of the most cosmopolitan towns in the world, its streets a traffic nightmare, with UNTAC's white Land Cruisers cutting through shoals of careering scooters, mopeds, and cyclo-pousses like whales cruising through drifting plankton.

  The School of Fine Arts was hidden from this multinational traffic by piles of uncleared refuse and a string of shacks and shanties. Its cavernous halls and half-finished classrooms were oddly self-contained, their atmosphere the self-sustaining, honeycomb bustle of a huge television studio.

  I had only recently arrived in Phnom Penh when I first met Chea Samy. She was sitting on a bench in the school's vast training hall—a small woman with the kind of poise that goes with the confidence of great beauty. She was dressed in an ankle-length skirt, and her gray hair was cut short. She was presiding over a class of about forty boys and girls, watching them go through their exercises, her gentle, rounded face tense with concentration. Occasionally she would spring off the bench and bend back a dancer's arm or push in a waist, working as a sculptor does, by touch, molding their limbs like clay.

  At the time I had no idea whether Chea Samy had known Princess Soumphady or not. I had become curious about the princess and her father, King Sisowath, after learning of their journey to Europe in 1906, and I wanted to know more about them.

  Chea Samy's eyes widened when I asked her about Princess Soumphady at the end of her class. She looked from me to the student who was interpreting for us as though she couldn't quite believe she had heard the name right. I reassured her: yes, I really did mean Princess Soumphady, Princess Sisowath Soumphady.

  She smiled in the indulgent, misty way in which people recall a favorite aunt. Yes, of course she had known Princess Soumphady, she said. As a little girl, when she first went into the palace to learn dance, it was Princess Soumphady who had been in charge of the dancers: for a while the princess had brought her up...

  The second time I met Chea Samy was at her house. She lives a few miles from Pochentong airport, on Phnom Penh's rapidly expanding frontier, in an area that is largely farmland, with a few houses strung along a dirt road. The friend whom I had persuaded to come along with me to translate took an immediate dislike to the place. It was already late afternoon, and she did not relish the thought of driving back on those roads in the dark.

  My friend, Molyka, was a midlevel civil servant, a poised, attractive woman in her early thirties, painfully soft-spoken, in the Khmer way. She had spent a short while studying in Australia on a government scholarship, and spoke English with a better feeling for nuance and idiom than any of the professional interpreters I had met. If I was to visit Chea Samy, I had decided, it would be with her. But Molyka proved hard to persuade: she had become frightened of venturing out of the center of the city.

  Not long before she had been driving with a friend of hers, the wife of an UNTAC official, when her car was stopped at a busy roundabout by a couple of soldiers. They we
re wearing the uniform of the "State of Cambodia," the faction that currently governs most of the country. "I work for the government too," she told them, "in an important ministry." They ignored her; they wanted money. She didn't have much, only a couple of thousand riels. They asked for cigarettes; she didn't have any. They told her to get out of the car and accompany them into a building. They were about to take her away when her friend interceded. They let her go eventually: they left UN people alone on the whole. But as she drove away they shouted after her, "We're going to be looking out for you—you won't always have an Untác in the car."

  Molyka was scared, and she had reason to be. The government's underpaid (often unpaid) soldiers and policemen were increasingly prone to banditry and bouts of inexplicable violence. Not long before, I had gone to visit a hospital in an area where there were frequent hostilities between State troops and the Khmer Rouge. I had expected that the patients in the casualty ward would be principally victims of mines and Khmer Rouge shellfire. Instead I found a group of half a dozen women, some with children, lying on grimy mats, their faces and bodies pitted and torn with black shrapnel wounds. They had been traveling in a pickup truck to sell vegetables at a nearby market when they were stopped by a couple of State soldiers. The soldiers asked for money; the women handed out some, but the soldiers wanted more. The women had no more to give and told them so. The soldiers let the truck pass but stopped it again that evening, on its way back. They didn't ask for anything this time; they simply detonated a fragmentation mine.

  Soon afterward I was traveling in a taxi with four Cambodians along a dusty, potholed road in a sparsely inhabited region in the northwest of the country. I had dozed off in the front seat when I was woken by the rattle of gunfire. I looked up and saw a State soldier standing in the middle of the dirt road, directly ahead. He was in his teens, like most uniformed Cambodians; he was wearing round, wire-rimmed sunglasses, and his pelvis was thrust out MTV-style. But instead of a guitar he had an AK-47 in his hands, and he was spraying the ground in front of us with bullets, creating a delicate tracery of dust.

  The taxi jolted to a halt; the driver thrust an arm out of the window and waved his wallet. The soldier did not seem to notice; he was grinning and swaying, probably drunk. But when I sat up in the front seat, the barrel of his gun rose slowly until it was pointing directly at my forehead. Looking into the unblinking eye of that AK-47, unaccountably, two slogans flashed through my mind; they were scrawled all over the walls of Calcutta when I was the same age as that soldier. One was "Power comes from the barrel of a gun," and the other "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." It turned out he had only the first in mind.

  Molyka had heard stories like these, but living in Phnom Penh, working as a civil servant, she had been relatively sheltered until that day when her car was stopped. The incident frightened her in ways she couldn't quite articulate; it reawakened a host of long-dormant fears. Molyka was only thirteen in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. She was evacuated with her whole extended family, fourteen people in all, to a labor camp in the province of Kompong Thom. A few months later she was separated from the others and sent to work in a fishing village on Cambodia's immense freshwater lake, the Tonlé Sap. For the next three years she worked as a servant and nursemaid for a family of fisher-folk.

  She saw her parents only once in that time. One day she was sent to a village near Kompong Thom with a group of girls. While sitting by the roadside, quite by chance, she happened to look up from her basket of fish and saw her mother walking toward her. Her first instinct was to turn away; she thought it was a dream. Every detail matched those of her most frequently recurring dream: the parched countryside, the ragged palms, her mother coming out of the red dust of the road, walking straight toward her...

  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?"

  3

  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.