I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  “Survived what?” Raksmey answered in French.

  “Sometimes the Khmer Rouge shoot at planes coming to land.” Tien switched to French.

  “No one told me this!” said Raksmey.

  “Better not to know,” Tien smiled. “How is life in Europe? You are a big man now?”

  Raksmey held up his arms. “Not so big.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Geneva,” said Raksmey. “Switzerland.”

  “Your father . . .” His voice caught. “He said you are working inside a tunnel. Like a rabbit.”

  “It’s a collider. A big tunnel, like a circle,” said Raksmey, tracing a loop with his finger. There were new lines beneath Tien’s eyes and across his forehead. “Things here are not good?”

  Tien shook his head. “Not so good. Maybe you should not come.”

  “I had to come.”

  Tien smiled, nodded. “Yes,” he said.

  “Rak,” said Raksmey.

  “Rak,” said Tien.

  • • •

  THEY WALKED OUT into the heat. Raksmey almost gasped as the heavy air strangled him. His pores flexed open, his breath shortened, his pupils dilated and then contracted with this sudden transfer of energy. The molecules in his skin began to sputter and churn, tuning themselves to the temperature of the world, and yet his body settled into an enduring weariness, his walk morphing into an improvised lean. It was out of this paradox—of quick molecules and slow bodies—that the great, beautiful sadness of the tropics arose, causing men and country alike to fall and rise and fall again. When Raksmey felt this familiar malaise, felt his skin both alive and dead, he knew he was finally home.

  Tien hailed a tuk-tuk. They wove through a quiet, sullen Phnom Penh. Women hanging up laundry eyed them warily as they passed.

  “You live here now?” asked Raksmey.

  “I’m having trouble,” said Tien. His voiced quavered.

  “I brought you something,” said Raksmey. From his pocket he produced a coin. He placed it in his friend’s palm. “Rak.”

  Tien stared at the little silver circle. His eyes grew moist.

  “The world is not so big,” he said.

  “Very small, in fact,” said Raksmey.

  They rode through the city, past a marketplace that had been bombed. Streaks of soot rising from broken windows.

  “Tell me, Tien, did he suffer?”

  Tien shook his head. “No. He did not.”

  “You saw?”

  “When he went, he went like this.” He clapped his hands around the coin.

  “Tell me, Tien. Tell me everything. I want to know.”

  • • •

  AND SO ENDS that slim little wonder that is Jeg er Raksmey. In a review of the novella in Vinduet, Røed-Larsen declares this ending “a curious failure of invention for a man whose only gift was an overactive imagination” (125). Other reviews complained about how such an ending left too much unexplained. Dagfinn Møller writes, in the final issue of Profil, that “this last line . . . a plea for information, for anything concrete . . . becomes the voice of a reader left in the lurch” (102).

  Tofte-Jebsen never responded publicly to these criticisms, but in a lecture at the Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek in 1983, he advanced this theory of fiction making:

  If you grow too comfortable with your book, I say dismantle it (“demontere det”). Put it into a paper bag and heave it out the window . . . no matter if it hits someone in the street. You have to clear the decks before you grow complacent. If you’ve lived with even one eye open you’ll know what I’m talking about—change is the only force that keeps us alive.

  He then, it is said, walked out in the middle of the lecture.

  Regardless of Tofte-Jebsen’s motives, if we are to discover anything more about Raksmey’s story, we must turn exclusively to Røed-Larsen’s account in Spesielle Partikler. Keep in mind that Røed-Larsen’s Raksmey is not Tofte-Jebsen’s Raksmey (and vice versa). We thus may sense a distinct break in character. To make matters worse, Røed-Larsen points to the nearly impossible challenge of establishing facts in post-independence Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea. After seizing power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime famously declared that time had been reset to “Year Zero,” effectively wiping the slate clean of all Western influence, including historical written records.

  Despite such formidable historiographical conditions, Røed-Larsen has done a remarkable job piecing together a crude timeline of Raksmey’s whereabouts from 1965 to 1979, which we may now summarize here.

  In the mid-sixties, Raksmey spent three years at Collège Réne Descartes, in Saigon, under the personal tutelage of Rector Than; by all accounts, he excelled magnificently. When the American war in Vietnam began to accelerate, Rector Than had Raksmey graduate early, at age fifteen, while simultaneously convincing the admissions office at the École Polytechnique, in Paris, to admit him, despite his young age. Jean-Baptiste did not come to Saigon to see his son off. Instead, he sent him a letter, a copy of which apparently found its way into Per Røed-Larsen’s possession and was translated in Spesielle Partikler (640):

  10 August 1968

  Dearest Raksmey,

  You must forgive me. I have not been well & am only now recovering from my illnesses. Please do not see my absence as having any reflection on my feelings towards your departure, which I regard with utmost excitement & pride. I have been getting updates from Rector Than about the rapid progress of your application. Your acceptance to the Polytechnique comes as no surprise, though I must admit it does bring me into a certain state of rumination.

  You no doubt realized my great aspiration for you to become a physicist, an aspiration that guided the movement of my hand in nearly every choice I made while raising you. I recorded your progress in the volumes upon which I now gaze, volumes that seem lifeless without their subject. I now see this singular mind-set for what it is: a foolish defense which offered me shelter from myself. By sticking to my regime, I could deflect the fear I felt as my love for you grew. When we found you, you were so small, so sick, in the very borderlands of quietus. If only you could have seen the impossibility of your own existence! Your continued survival, against such odds, was extraordinary, & transformed us all—some for the better & some, like myself, I fear for the worse. My wife—whom in my head I still consider your mother—has never left me, & her legacy was alive & well when you floated by in your basket. My project was my way of rescuing you, but it was also my way of rescuing me.

  Please, Raksmey, my dearest Raksmey, I beg for your forgiveness & I urge you, as you depart on the biggest journey of your life, to forget all that I have taught you & to listen only to the voice inside your own heart, if such a feat is still possible, given all the damage I have wrought. I am a selfish old man, a jealous, vindictive fool, who had no business doing what he did. Know that whatever path you choose, I will love you no less or no more. I am sorry for what I have inflicted upon you & no doubt what I will continue to inflict with the legacy of my actions. Nothing would make me so happy, or serve me so justly, as to see you decide to take up the profession of a cobbler, a mechanic, or a composer. Anything but the methods of science that I so bound you to.

  Be well, my dear Raksmey, Raksmey. I have given you all & here I have nothing left to give.

  With highest admiration,

  your father,

  Jean-Baptiste de Broglie

  In the fall of 1968, Raksmey traveled to Paris to begin his studies at the École Polytechnique. He did not return home before this journey. Indeed, since that boat trip down the Mekong with his father and grandmother, Raksmey had not set foot in Cambodia.

  Save his impeccable school transcript, not much is known about his time in Paris, about how young Raksmey navigated the trials of a large urban university in the late sixties, about whether he experimented with drugs, sex, or le
rock and roll, or whether he simply stuck to his studies, as his prodigious academic record suggests. He took an average of eight classes per semester and graduated in four years, with a highly unusual dual master’s in quantum devices and applied particle physics. He also hosted a weekly classical music show on the university’s radio station, called La Vie Rallentando. What is most interesting is that Raksmey seemed intent on ignoring the advice of his father, which came either too late or too early. He would become Cambodia’s first (and only) particle physicist.

  Accordingly, Raksmey promptly began work on a doctoral degree in quantum electrodynamics at the Polytechnique. He was offered, after some testy political negotiation within the department, a coveted fellowship at CERN, the international particle physics laboratory straddling the border between France and Switzerland. Only twenty-one at the time, Raksmey was the youngest doctoral student in CERN’s history. Under the mentorship of the theorist Dr. Abdus Salam and the experimentalist André Rousset, Raksmey wrote his dissertation, “On the Electroweak Interaction of Neutrinos with Quarks via Z Boson Exchange,” utilizing experimental research from CERN’s newly constructed Gargamelle bubble chamber. Several key points of Raksmey’s dissertation would later contribute to Dr. Salam’s winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979.

  Fig. 4.8. “A neutral current event, as observed in the Gargamelle bubble chamber”

  Image from R. Raksmey’s 1974 dissertation, “On the Electroweak Interaction of Neutrinos with Quarks via Z Boson Exchange,” as reproduced in Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 651

  Raksmey was quite clearly an eager and brilliant disciple of Salam, but he also struggled with social interaction. He had a small collection of English poetry in his apartment, as well as “several novels by Latin American authors” (653), including Julio Cortázar, and he enjoyed listening to Bach, Debussy, Shostakovich, and Britten. When not doing lab work, he often went hiking alone in the Swiss Alps.

  In Spesielle Partikler, Røed-Larsen also cites rumors—although these remain unconfirmed—that Raksmey developed an intimate (possibly sexual) relationship with an older man, Dr. Alan Ferring, who was visiting the Gargamelle team from Berkeley, California. This relationship—if indeed it existed at all—must have been brief, for in September 1974 Ferring returned to his wife and family in California. Dr. Ferring apparently refused to be interviewed for Røed-Larsen’s book.

  Fig. 4.9. Manifest from AF 931, Bangkok–Phnom Penh, March 2, 1975

  From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 670

  This much we do know: on March 2, 1975, Raksmey flew back to Cambodia after hearing news of his father’s death. Raksmey was listed in the passenger manifests of the Air France flights from Paris to Bangkok and from Bangkok to Phnom Penh—Flight 931, one of the last commercial flights to land in Cambodia.

  Regarding the circumstances of Jean-Baptiste’s death, Røed-Larsen, lacking much concrete evidence, contends that a small squad of Khmer Rouge troops, possibly heading southwest from their camp in Ratanakiri, near the Vietnam border, came upon La Seule Vérité by accident. Their movement was in the context of a larger dry-season mobilization of Khmer Rouge troops to Kampong Thom before a final push toward Phnom Penh down Highway 5.

  According to Røed-Larsen, the encounter at La Seule Vérité was not without precedent. During the two years before, there had been plenty of fighting in the area between Khmer Rouge rebels and various divisions of Lon Nol’s woeful Khmer National Armed Forces. In 1973, an American B-52 had mistakenly dropped a payload of phosphorus bombs on the lycée, only three kilometers upriver, killing seventeen schoolchildren and the two missionaries from Texas. The school had burned for three days. Yet for the most part, La Seule Vérité had remained relatively unscathed by both the American war in Vietnam and the civil war raging in Cambodia. Rubber collection had completely ceased about five years earlier, following Capitaine Claude Renoit’s suicide, in 1969, and only a skeleton crew of five or six men remained with Jean-Baptiste at the time, maintaining the grounds, cooking, and ostensibly providing protection from hostile factions. On several occasions, representatives from the undermanned Cambodia National Army had recommended that Jean-Baptiste abandon his home and retreat to Phnom Penh, as they could no longer guarantee his safety. He had politely but firmly dismissed their counsel each time.

  What happened on the night in question is not known. Tien managed to escape, but the plantation was burned, and it is unclear what was rescued from the fire. One can assume that all of Jean-Baptiste’s notebooks on Raksmey’s development—numbering perhaps 750—were destroyed, though less certain is the fate of André’s and Henri’s ledgers, which presumably remained locked in the basement safes. And what of Jean-Baptiste’s wager with himself concerning the fate of his only son, squirreled away in a rosewood box beneath the floorboards? Or the Reamker masks on the mantel? Or the strange wooden puppet discovered in place of his mother, which had found a home next to the inkwell in his study?

  Fig. 4.10. Map showing movements of Northern Sector Khmer Rouge

  rebels from Ratanakiri to Phnom Penh (January–April 1975)

  From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 650

  In the years of conflict that followed, the plantation was used as a refuge for several Khmer Rouge divisions, vagrants, and prisoners of the regime, and then by the Vietnamese troops during their 1979 invasion. Over the course of this period, the grounds were apparently picked clean. Røed-Larsen recounts how, many years later, in 1995, the property was examined by a ministerial housing inspector and the resulting report made no mention of a safe in the basement or any miscellaneous scientific equipment. The property was valued at 290 million riel, or about $75,000, a prohibitive price to anyone but the most elite provincial ministers.

  Not surprisingly, given the site’s obscure location and the country’s ongoing economic woes, the property was never redeveloped. The state attempted to seize the plantation on several occasions, but the estate’s legal status remained unresolved, particularly since Raksmey Raksmey de Broglie was never officially located. Many travelers on the Mekong have remarked at the unusual sight of the main house’s grand ruins, just visible from the river, surrounded by rows and rows of overgrown hevea trees. Locals pass along several competing stories about its onetime inhabitants, involving sorcerers, the CIA, and even Pol Pot himself. The name La Seule Vérité has been completely lost to time.

  After landing in Phnom Penh in March 1975, Raksmey attended a brief funeral ceremony for his father inside a small wat near the university, as it was no longer possible to travel back through Khmer Rouge territory to the plantation. The Mekong was now mined all the way up to the Laotian border. Days after this, flights out of the country were suspended, and Raksmey was prevented from returning to his lab in Switzerland. He and Tien shared a small flat in the Khan Chamkarmon district of Phnom Penh for a little over a month, waiting, with the rest of the city, for the imminent arrival of the Khmer Rouge. No one knew what this would mean, though many diplomatic organizations, including the U.S. embassy, took no chances and evacuated all of their members.

  Finally, on April 15, 1975, trucks and tanks full of battle-weary Khmer Rouge soldiers streamed into the city down Highway 5 and “liberated” Phnom Penh. They were met by a jubilant populace, who hoped that this signaled the end of the endless civil war. Peace could now prosper in a region that had not seen peace in many years. It was not long, however, before Cambodians came to terms with the reality of these liberators. Within days, the entire city—all two million inhabitants—was ordered to leave for the countryside. The Khmer Rouge had begun its surreal war against time.

  In pursuit of a total socialist order that eradicated the individual and shunned all Western influence, the Khmer Rouge bombed the national bank and symbolically burned its currency in the streets. They turned the National Library into a horse stable and pig farm, and nearly all of the
books—both Khmer and French—were indiscriminately destroyed or used for cooking fires, toilet paper, or rolling cigarettes. Røed-Larsen includes a famous photograph of three young Khmer Rouge cadres standing around a torn-up copy of Dante’s Inferno, smoking cigarettes rolled from its pages, a look of weary amazement in their eyes.

  Knowing that religious traditions could pose the most serious threat to their plan to socially engineer the populace, the Khmer Rouge forced the Buddhist monkhood, the spiritual backbone of Khmer society, to disband. Their sutras were seized and burned; their wats were turned into granaries or fish sauce factories, the altars pushed aside to make room for great barrels of fermenting anchovies. The Khmer Rouge leadership wisely co-opted several familiar Buddhist notions—such as selflessness and transcendence—for use in their extreme form of Marxist ideology, with spiritual nirvana replaced by the perfect embodiment of the state, Angkar.

  Yet monks were by no means the only targets of the Khmer Rouge. Intellectuals, academics, artists—anyone with a perceived connection to the West, including those spotted simply wearing spectacles—were all rounded up, tortured, and, in most cases, summarily executed. Eventually, in a sign that the system was rotting from within, the paranoid Khmer Rouge leadership began to turn on their own ranks, arresting hundreds of Khmer Rouge cadres suspected of being traitors to the Angkar cause. Those who did the arresting were then arrested, and so on.

  Røed-Larsen wonders (656) why, given their disdain for historical transcripts, the Khmer Rouge kept such comprehensive records at the Tuol Sleng, or “S-21,” security prison, a former Phnom Penh high school that had been converted into a torture camp. The place was run with astonishing efficiency by Comrade Duch, a former mathematician. Perhaps sensing the chasm left by the erasure of the written word, Comrade Duch began to forge a new history, a new kind of truth.