Instead Kiry leant into the microphone. ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It would be most helpful if you could ask one question at a time.’ He sat back, waited for the voices to dull and then pointed at one man.
‘You: do you have a question?’
‘Do you think that the Cambodian people will accept the blanket amnesty that has been bestowed upon you? Do you think they should?’
‘As you know, Hun Sen, the very honourable prime minister of the royal government, has warmly welcomed me. I spent a most enjoyable time with the honourable prime minister yesterday and we agreed that the time for fighting is over. If you demand that I tell you who was wrong and who was right, if you carry on and on and on accusing particular people of this and that – and if you expect me to do it too – then we Cambodians will never be reconciled. If we keep talking like this the war will never end.’
‘Do you expect to see King Sihanouk while you are here?’
‘If he invites me to visit him then of course I will go: he is my king,’ Kiry said. ‘But I suspect he is a very busy king.’
‘He’s in Beijing,’ somebody called. ‘He’s been there for weeks.’
‘I’m deeply shocked to hear it,’ Kiry said.
‘You were a very senior member of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. Do you accept personal responsibility for the million or more deaths that occurred in the Democratic Kampuchea regime?’
Kiry stared at the table as he replied. ‘That story is old and stale. When you persist in asking these questions, when you dig up the past and turn it upside down and dissect it and examine it under a microscope, well, I cannot see any purpose. The way this country developed is so complicated ... too complicated for me to explain in a few words today. Please don’t keep stirring things up about the war.’
‘Will you at least tell the Cambodian people that you are sorry for all their suffering?’
Damned BBC, Kiry thought. But, given the sudden silence, there seemed no way to avoid the question. Kiry leaned close to the microphone and whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.’
‘Say it in Khmer.’
‘Yeah. Say it in Khmer.’
Kiry sensed his face contorting. He tried to maintain a mild expression, but the strain left him feeling as if the blood vessels were popping in his eyes. With a supreme effort he controlled himself. ‘K’nyom somtoah nah,’ he muttered.
‘Do you have a message for Ta Mok? Is it time he surrendered too?’
Kiry ignored the question, but he imagined Mok standing on the veranda of his garish villa, one arm snaked around a fake Roman pillar like it was a Thai prostitute, telling his followers that Kiry had betrayed them all.
‘Why should you go free when every single family in Cambodia has suffered because of what you did? Have you no shame?’
‘I know that some people talk about these things. I am not deaf. I read. I recently listened to a radio broadcast in which some of my countrymen were talking about the family members they lost. Even my own wife tells me such stories before she goes to work in the paddy fields each day. It is normal for people who have lost family over the years to feel grief and resentment. But I am sure that most of our fellow Cambodians have many more basic problems to resolve in the present and in the future. Let bygones be bygones: that is the only way for us to achieve peace and stability at last.’
‘Why should the Cambodian people put up with your defection?’ an American hollered from the back of the room. ‘Why should the world?’
‘The world? The world?’ Kiry began, but then paused long enough to rein in his indignation. ‘It is not for me to say, it is for others. But let me say this—’
‘No. Answer the question. Why should the world accept your defection? Why shouldn’t you face trial for crimes against humanity?’
‘I cannot answer that. I cannot judge myself. History will be my judge.’
‘Hasn’t history already judged you?’
‘It is far too soon to be talking about history. I’ll be dead and gone – and you too, my friend – long before everything will make proper sense. What’s good today will one day seem bad; and today’s criminals are destined to be the heroes of the future. But I will say this … No: that’s it. That’s all. I’ve got nothing else to say.’
The morning sun was mild as Kiry and his family left Phnom Penh for a few days’ holiday at the Seaside Hotel in Sihanoukville. The road was smooth. Kiry sank into the bucket seat of the late model Toyota minivan and was asleep before they passed Kompong Speu. Kunthea woke him ten kilometres out of Sihanoukville to show him a truck that had rolled off the road and was lying on its side. ‘It looks like a buffalo,’ Kiry said. Kunthea giggled.
After they arrived, Kiry sent his family to paddle in the Gulf of Thailand. ‘Don’t drown,’ he called after them cheerfully. ‘Take your time.’ Alone at last, he sat cross-legged on the floor of the room and ate a plate of crabs which the hotel had brought in live from nearby Kep. He twisted claws. He cracked shells open with a small hammer. He worked methodically and made a pile of meat before he began to eat. He sipped pineapple juice and looked for a football match on the television but had to make do with a breathless, mildly amusing Thai soap opera set in a hospital ward.
He slept. Ants streamed up from the floor and invaded the crab shells. Flies followed. A couple of geckos ran laps across the ceiling. A waiter came to remove the plate but Kiry slept through his polite knocks. Late in the afternoon, Kunthea leapt onto the bed: ‘I went into the water, all the way to my belly button.’
He stood under a cold shower with his arms raised and his eyes open. He was still sluggish when he emerged, so he ordered coffee. ‘Real coffee. Do you understand me?’ The hotel manager brought it himself, accompanied by a government official.
‘Your car is here,’ the government official said.
‘What car?’
‘Your car for touring Sihanoukville.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘It’s all organised. It’s on your itinerary. Hun Sen insisted. Please don’t worry, the driver is very friendly.’
Kiry drank his coffee slowly, changed his shirt, tidied his hair and stepped outside. A middle-aged man in a tuxedo grinned broadly and ushered Kiry into the back seat of a Toyota sedan. He stared out his window at the unremarkable streets as the driver wound to the top of a hill so they could look down on the port.
The driver then sped from beach to beach and finally stopped by a private patch of sand, halfway between two umbrella villages. Kiry stripped to his shorts and, like Kunthea, went in as far as his belly button. He stared at the flat sea and at the blurred horizon, where the light rubbed out the water. It amazed him that Europeans came here simply to go swimming.
The driver waded out, handed Kiry a banana and then turned away and dived head first into the water. Kiry peeled the banana, but it was brown and soft. He hurled it at a stick that floated by but missed.
The driver lit a cigarette. Kiry looked back at him, appalled: ‘Put that out. You can’t smoke in the ocean.’
He stayed floating in the water for hours. Finally, his government minder appeared on the shore. He took off his shoes, rolled up his pants and waded out to Kiry.
‘I’ve decided to go out for dinner,’ Kiry said.
‘It’s very difficult. Please reconsider. Too many people want to look at you. And there are still a few journalists hanging around.’
‘I am going. Only me. You can come if you insist, so long as you get your own table. But I am going.’
Accompanied by the government official and three bodyguards, Kiry went to a restaurant on the hill above Victory Beach. Ieng Sary had recommended it for the sunset as well as the food, but by the time Kiry arrived the view beyond the balcony was black. Still he chose an outside table, away from the red-faced tourists who were watching Rambo III, the sound turned up high. His minders took a table near the television and ordered beer.
Kiry sniffed the air, enjoying the mix of salt air
and the smoke from the mosquito coil burning in an empty Pepsi bottle at his feet. He ordered a gin and tonic and was delighted when it came with two triangles of lime, one drowning in the drink and the other on a small plate to squeeze over the ice.
His food came quickly. Kiry surmised that the restaurant owner hoped he wouldn’t stay too long. He wondered, while he poked at the soft white flesh of the fish and waited for a glass of sauvignon blanc, what his family was eating. Cheeseburgers again, probably.
A couple of well-to-do Cambodians sitting a few tables away glanced at Kiry and then took a longer look. They drew their heads together and whispered. Their faces turned sour. They ate in a rush. Kiry smiled at them as they left and thought to himself, So you’re the middle class.
He paid for his meal with a five-dollar greenback. The owner took the note and held it close to the candle on the table, checking for stains or creases or rips and making sure it wasn’t counterfeit. The procedure amused Kiry. ‘It’s American money,’ he told the owner. ‘It’s full of imperfections.’
As Kiry stood to leave he accidentally kicked the Pepsi bottle at his feet. The last curl of the mosquito coil, the stub still glowing, lodged in a crack. The bottle spun across the decking to a nearby table, where a Western couple in their thirties – tourists not expatriates, Kiry could tell by their beach clothes and their flushed looks – sat perusing the menu.
‘Please excuse me,’ Kiry said.
‘No worries, mate,’ the man said in an Australian twang, saluting him with a glistening bottle of Angkor Draught. ‘It was an accident.’
Epilogue
After illness delivered Ted Whittlemore to the Concertina Rest Home, Lea converted the granny flat at the back of her parents’ house into a darkroom and studio. She felt guilty about it; it was as though she were giving Ted’s eulogy while he was still propped up in bed, still breathing (sort of), still swearing to himself, still ogling those nursing assistants. But Ted had told Lea he was never going back home: ‘I’m stuck here, girl, and no pointless nobility on your part can change that. Take the bloody flat and do something useful with it.’
After Ted died, it was there that Lea began going through Ted’s papers. But she found it almost impossible to do. Every time she sat down at the tiny pine table in the kitchenette, she felt as if she was spying on him. Finally, she forced herself to skim through Ted’s Ho Chi Minh biography. She smiled as she remembered Ted ranting against the world’s publishers: ‘It’s mass censorship, pure and simple. Nobody wants me to get my Ho book into print. It’s a conspiracy funded at the highest levels.’ But the frayed and stained pages Lea sampled seemed to her to be a mix of hero worship and banal detail: who cares, she wondered, how strong Ho Chi Minh liked his tea? Her first act as Edward Whittlemore’s literary executor was to dump Ho Chi Minh: A New and True Biography, all 1009 pages of it, into a sink full of developing solution.
She put the rest of Ted’s papers in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe in his old bedroom. She made a decent fist of forgetting they were there until the day a couple of boxes arrived in the mail from Ted’s Vietnamese friend, Hieu. The boxes contained masses of drafts and notes: stray thoughts that Ted probably should have thrown out but which Lea now felt obliged to catalogue and archive. But there were also letters – it seemed to Lea that half the world wrote to Ted to tell him he was an asshole and the other half wanted to be his best friend – and bundles of photographs: jungles, cities, battle scenes and portraits of strangers, some dressed in rags and sitting in the dirt, some nursing horrific wounds, some weighed down by jewellery and superior looks. And there were snapshots of Ted with an array of politicians and celebrities, the cumulative effect of which was to show the growing prominence over the years of Ted’s balloon-shaped head.
Within a week of the boxes arriving from Vietnam, Lea retrieved the rest of Ted’s papers from the wardrobe. There she found The Confessions of Edward Whittlemore. She had been certain that Ted had abandoned his memoirs, but here was a stack of pages, unnumbered, some typed, some handwritten, a muddle of events and people and opinions and grumpiness. The order was so illogical that Lea wondered if Ted had dropped the manuscript and retrieved the pages at random, or if, day by day, he’d simply recorded whatever stray memories popped into his head.
She found Ted’s letter to Nhem Kiry inside an unmarked envelope lying between two pages of the memoirs. It was undated, but Lea suspected from the way the neat, small script intermittently gave way to a ragged scrawl that Ted had been in pain when he wrote it.
Dear Nhem Kiry,
I’m old and sick. I cannot begin to tell you how bored I am. I’ve got so much time to sit around and think, a curse I hope befalls you too. I don’t mean that in a nasty way – although Christ knows you deserve every bit of nastiness that comes your way. I just mean that after you’ve lived the sort of life you’ve lived, you might appreciate having a good long hard think about things before you die.
I’ve been reflecting on my life, and it’s annoying the shit out of me that I cannot stop thinking about you. Sometimes I find myself imagining I am you. I try to think like you think, rationalise like you rationalise. It drives me crazy: I wish I could banish you from my head forever.
I believed in you. Did you know that? I believed that you had some sort of key to unlocking the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Not just in Cambodia. I thought you might offer up some model for how to merge radicalism with compassion and decency. That’s why I was always trying to get you to loosen up and have some fun: because I wanted us to be friends. Allies.
I had faith in you, and a person like me is not supposed to have faith. You let me down. You let a lot of other people down too: all those peasants who believed that you were their champion. Where was your unbending moral code when the people were dying by the millions? Did you have your eyes closed? Were you keeping yourself too busy to notice? Or were you up to your elbows in the murders yourself? And, in the end, what’s the difference?
And don’t tell me you were protecting your country’s sovereignty. Were there any more mass graves after Vietnam invaded? You know there weren’t.
And Bun Sody. You let Bun Sody down. He was a beautiful man. It’s not too late – it’ll never be too late – to tell me his fate. Maybe he just got sick. If you write and tell me in all honesty that he caught malaria and died, or that he had a heart attack or stepped on a landmine or got attacked by a feral pig, then I will believe you. It would comfort me to know that he died of natural causes or because of some ludicrous accident. I know these things happen. But if he got his throat slit or a bullet between the eyes, can’t you just tell me? What does the truth matter now?
You let Sihanouk down. I know he was a clown but you never made proper use of him. And you never gave him credit for trying. And he did try.
I wish I could see inside your head. I imagine it must be as well ordered as a library in there, every idea, every fact, filed in alphabetical order and written in duplicate in Khmer and French. There’s an index, no doubt, for ease of searching. There are summaries and footnotes.
But I don’t want the facts. I want to know what you think about when you’re tucked up in bed. Have you nutted out how the Khmer Rouge managed to kill all those people? Do you weigh up incompetence and malicious intent and xenophobia and megalomania and rotten animal instincts? Do you wonder which of those best describes you? Or are you just a garden variety psychopath? I wonder all of those things, and then I ask myself if communism is doomed to always be bloody. I answer ‘no,’ but that is never the end of the conversation: soon enough I find myself asking that same question again.
Do you ask yourself that question? Do you ask yourself anything?
Remember how I saved you and Sody back in ’67? You thanked me once – remember? Well, nothing comes for free. It’s time to pay up. Write me a letter. Tell me what’s going on behind that urbane mask you wear. Give me an explanation, an insight. Give me something. Anything.
AUTHOR’S
NOTE
Figurehead is not – and is not intended to be – historically accurate. Although inspired by recent Cambodian history, it is a work of imagination set in a familiar but imaginary world. The events and the political machinations were massively more complex and intricate than – and often just plain different from – the absurdist version of them I offer here.
In the characters of Ted Whittlemore and Nhem Kiry, some readers might recognise elements of two people: the Australian journalist/propagandist/agent of influence (depending on your viewpoint) Wilfred Burchett and the Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan. But neither Ted nor Kiry should be equated with the historical figure who inspired him, whether in relation to his public life or, of course, his private life and inner world. They are new, fictional men; the bond between them is likewise fictional. Nevertheless, I have co-opted many episodes from Khieu Samphan’s and Wilfred Burchett’s histories and made liberal use of their writings and public utterances.
Similarly, other secondary characters – including those who retain their own names, such as Pol Pot, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Henry Kissinger and others – are fictional creations even though they are often inspired and informed by actual people and by the historical record.
While I make no claim to historical fidelity, I nevertheless acknowledge my use of a collection of primary and secondary sources. I have made extensive use of such sources, sometimes directly and sometimes as the basis for my own interpretations and inventions. They include newspaper articles, opinion pieces, documentaries, motion pictures, photographs, memoirs, biographies, general histories, academic studies, novels, speeches and other documents.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote an earlier version of Figurehead as the major component of a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. There, I was fortunate to be supervised by the legendary Tom Shapcott and mentored by J.M. Coetzee. I’m grateful to both of them, and to all the academic and professional staff associated with the Creative Writing program and the Discipline of English. I also want to record my gratitude to my peers in the PhD program for their camaraderie and expertise: Anne Bartlett, Tony Bugeja, Jan Harrow, Sabina Hopfer, Christopher Lappas, Heather Taylor Johnson, Ray Tyndale and Malcolm Walker.
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