by Reif Larsen
What happened next is covered in some detail by Røed-Larsen, who, as always, takes great pains to document every second of each of Kirkenesferda’s bevegelser. Kirkenesferda Tre was to be the troupe’s most complex creation to date, though the show would start ordinarily enough. When the curtain opened, traditional Khmer shadow puppets made from tanned buffalo hide appeared against a white screen. A scene from the epic Reamker play unfolded, in which the ten-headed monster Krong Reap, disguised as an old man, kidnaps the beautiful Neang Seda. The Reamker is a Buddhist adaptation of the Hindu Ramayana and a mainstay of Cambodian theater. As was custom, the play was accompanied by a live, but hidden, four-piece Khmer pinpeat band, even though this music had not been heard by many of those present in more than four years. At this point, one cannot help but wonder what the audience of fallen Khmer Rouge elites were thinking: here was a traditional Khmer art form, part of a rich cultural heritage that they had attempted to eradicate during their time in power, now being enacted for them. The play itself was amusing—“the hijinks of disguise [is a] universal wellspring of humor” (722)—and apparently soldiers were laughing at the antics of Krong Reap trying to behave like an old man.
Fig. 4.13. Traditional Khmer Lkhaon Nang Sbek, featuring a scene from the Reamker epic.
From Cohen, M., “Khmer Shadow Theatre,” p. 187
If this puppetry was vaguely confrontational in its very reenactment, this was by far the least controversial aspect of the show. The piece quickly veered off the rails: in the middle of the scene, metallic bird rod puppets came down from above and began to attack Krong Reap and Neang Seda, ripping off pieces of their arms and legs and gathering them into a nest. The birds sported antennae made from television radials, beautifully latticed rice paper wings, and flowing tails of magnetic cassette tape and pocket-watch gears, and they wielded “abnormally long and crooked beaks cut from shellac records and whalebone” (735). The Khmer shadow puppets, or what was left of them, fled the stage.
For those familiar with the Reamker epic, the performance of which could often stretch to twelve hours, this aerial attack by apocalyptic Frankenstein birds was an affront to the very form of Lkhaon Nang Sbek. Before the Khmer Rouge came to power, the Reamker was performed by a wide range of puppeteers, actors, and dancers, from regional groups on up to the Royal Cambodian Ballet. While each performer was allowed a certain personal flourish, it was also critical that they stayed within a strict, familiar framework. Every Cambodian knew the story by heart, so it was not uncommon for audience members to leave and return over the course of the day, instantly recognizing where they were in the story. Thus, the manner of Kirkenesferda’s narrative disruption was deeply forbidden. The group had painstakingly honored the form with their meticulous reenactment, only to completely disregard it with their experimental blitzkrieg.
Soon the birds returned with more items for their nest: tiny musical instruments, presumably taken from the pinpeat band, who had begun to stop playing one by one as the birds stole their instruments, until only a fiddle remained. Left alone, the fiddle started to play wild, chaotic strokes—an excerpt from John Cage’s Freeman Etudes.
Fig. 4.14. Notations from “Freeman Etude #18,” by John Cage
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 749
The birds brought still more things to the nest: numbers, pieces of mathematical equations, Greek symbols. When the nest had grown to tremendous proportions, it began to tremble and then exploded, sending the birds flying offstage. The fiddle music ceased. The stage went black except for a single red spotlight. A mist appeared, and then puppet figures, dressed in those same familiar black outfits of the Khmer Rouge, began to move around the stage, their faces masked by krama scarves. One by one, these scarves came off, revealing tiny television screens instead of faces. Each screen showed the curiously gentle visage of Pol Pot, smiling, nodding, on a loop. There were two dozen, then three dozen Pol Pot figurines wandering around the stage, smiling, nodding to one another.
Each of these puppets, designed by Kermin Radmanovic and Tor Bjerknes, was an astonishing work of art—the inner mechanics of their one-off design were complex beyond belief. But while exceedingly intricate, each puppet had also been carefully designed to withstand the rigorous environment of the humid jungle, for a single short circuit would have ruined the entire choreography of the show.
Fig. 4.15. Figure of Sequence 9a, 12: “Intermingling puppets, cascading, choreographed Brownian motion.”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 768
The fiddle music returned, amplified and warped, as if fed through a synthesizer. The lights shifted, flickering; the steam billowed toward the audience. The Pol Pot puppets started to vibrate with increasing violence, and when the boiling reached a certain point, they collapsed onto the stage. An 8mm projector began projecting video of marching troops from Maoist China, superimposed on diagrams from Henrik Bohr (Niels’s son) and H. B. Nielsen’s “Hadron Production from a Boiling Quark Soup” (Nuclear Physics, 1977), depicting the dissolution of quark soup bubbles and hadron decay immediately following the Big Bang.
As the smoke began to clear, the puppet bodies rose up again, but now their robes had come off, and the figures were revealed to be birdlike themselves—half avian and half humanoid, a circulatory system of electrical wires and twine intermingled within their skeletons. Yet by all accounts, what was astonishing about this part of the show, from both a technical and an emotional standpoint, was that the body parts of the figurines began to interchange: arms were traded between figures, heads were swapped. The stage, as Røed-Larsen writes, “had become an elaborate marketplace of beingness” (776).
Fig. 4.16. “Revised Dock & Pulley System. Reverse Ball & Socket Joint Guywire v4.3.”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 777
While this flurry of exchange took hold of the puppets, the footage of Pol Pot’s face on the headscreens being passed back and forth was gradually replaced by images of prisoners from S-21, photographs that had been released only months before. The Khmer Rouge leaders were staring into the eyes of the very victims they had helped to execute. Yet these victims were not dead; they were performing in an act “of nostalgia-play, re-animation, re-appropriation . . . the executed dancing for the executioners” (828).
Slowly, the trading of body parts diminished and each figure became identifiable again. The music stopped. The figures collected toward the front of the stage and formed a line, facing the audience. Their screens flickered and then, as one, displayed a long equation:
An expression of the uncertainty principle in harmonic analysis.
One of the puppets in the middle of the equation’s head was not like the others. His screen still showed a cheerful Pol Pot—the puppet had in fact been displaying this image the entire time. In an unsettling act of coordinated scrutiny, all the other puppets turned their screen heads toward him. Then his screen went blank, except for a dot, which winked out the Morse code:
Curtain down.
“A terrible silence followed,” writes Røed-Larsen. “You could hear a sewing pin drop—if such a sewing pin had still existed in Cambodia” (788). Everyone turned to Pol Pot, the impromptu guest of honor, in order to read his response to such an audacious display of insubordination. The small man sat perfectly still, and then his face broke into a broad grin and he started to clap, vociferously, as the Khmer Rouge were prone to do during important ceremonies. A sigh of relief must have passed over Khieu Samphan and his comrades. Everyone stood, joining in the applause. The crucial moment had passed.
Under orders, the assembled Khmer Rouge soldiers dispersed, preparing to secure the camp for the night. The Kirkenesferda troupe quietly went about the mundane task of disassembling their lights and packing up their theater wagon, though their heads and hearts were no doubt buzzing with that unique post-show mixture of adrenaline,
sadness, hunger, and relief. Once they were finished, a Khmer Rouge cadre escorted them to their quarters.
Shortly after this (Røed-Larsen does not offer an exact amount of time), Ieng Sary approached Raksmey. His demeanor had changed drastically. He was now furious, and he accused the group of being CIA operatives.
“I have read my history,” Røed-Larsen reports Sary saying to Raksmey (801). “I know the puppeteers of Europe were also spies. They were the only ones who were allowed to cross over borders, because no one suspected them.” As evidence, he produced part of the telegraph wire that had been connected to the radio tower. Caught unaware, unsure whether such a wire was a fabrication, Raksmey did his best at damage control, assuring his hosts that if the wire had indeed existed, then certainly no message had been sent, and that their position had not been transmitted to a foreign entity (as Sary claimed). Raksmey promised a full report on the wire’s purpose. Sary, threatening imprisonment or worse, reluctantly retreated to discuss the situation with the senior Khmer Rouge officers, including Pol Pot, who presumably had been behind this sudden change in attitude.
Raksmey went directly to Dr. Christian-Holtsmark and informed him of the accusations. The troupe’s leader admitted that while the wire had been real, the transmission had been purely for dramatic purposes and had not contained any intelligence information. Tor Bjerknes was also alerted. He apologized for not asking permission before connecting the telegraph.
As they debated what to do, the group became aware of an intensifying light, at just the same time that young Lars Røed-Larsen raced into their guest hut and declared that the theater wagon was on fire. The entire troupe went outside to see that, sure enough, their wagon—the summation of years and years of labor—was now in flames, guarded by a ring of stiff-jawed Khmer Rouge guards. There would be no intervention. Their work was gone. Abandoning camp then and there was considered, but they discovered that their trucks had been moved to an unspecified location. The consensus was that they should wait until morning and then decide how to proceed.
The next few hours were restless ones. No longer was this regime a distant surrogate for reckless ideologism—“what was once theoretical had become intensely personal . . . their hosts had become their potential judge, jury, and executioner” (822).
Sometime during the night—Røed-Larsen places it at 2:20, though this is without supporting evidence—Raksmey was visiting the outhouse when he met up with a young and frightened Lars, who, like the others, could not sleep and was additionally suffering from an upset stomach due to the foreignness of Khmer food. Raksmey reassured Lars that everything would work out in the end. At that point, the two of them heard “a series of loud pops” coming from the direction of the guest quarters. Lars attempted to run toward where his family was sleeping, but, realizing the pops were in fact gunshots, Raksmey instinctively held him back, pulling the boy into the shelter of the forest. Knowing that the group had been ambushed, Raksmey made the decision to take the by now extremely distraught Lars out of the camp immediately. They snuck through the forest, around the guard post, and headed back in the direction of the border. Avoiding roads and buildings, they did not have an easy time of it, and suffered multiple lacerations from barbed wire, vines, and low-hanging branches.
When they were only a hundred meters from the Thai border crossing, Raksmey stepped on a land mine. His left leg and part of his pelvis were liquefied by the explosion, and the left side of his face was partly sheared off. Hearing shots behind them, he waved for Lars to continue and leave him where he was. After attempting to drag Raksmey several meters, Lars finally gave up and, covered in blood, stumbled to the border crossing, where the stunned Thai officials took him into custody.
Buried at the end of a long footnote on page 845 of Røed-Larsen’s book, there is a subtle shift in perspective that is quite easy to overlook:
(Once across the border, Lars sat in the backseat of the government jeep and remained quiet, despite the barrage of questions coming from a Thai official, who was demanding to know exactly what had just transpired at Camp 808. At some point, a butterfly flew through the jeep’s window and alighted on his knee. The creature flexed its wings and shivered. It was an image I would never forget.)
Did you hear it? The sudden presence of that “jeg” haunts me. The rattle in the engine. Perhaps I am misreading what was only a minor typographical error, but the appearance of the first person is so unexpected and so out of place in the context of the book’s fifteen hundred pages that it calls into question nearly everything that has come before and everything that comes after. It was an image I would never forget. Who, may I ask, is the I here? Is it Per, the author? Is it Lars, the subject and stepbrother? Is it both author and subject? Or is it someone else entirely? That lone I, sounded like a trumpet at dusk, makes me long for a voice, a motive, a warm body beneath this ocean of words.
1
NEW JERSEY
August 10, 2010
All that night, Radar scoured the land. The blackout and the ensuing curfew lent an eerie post-apocalyptic backdrop to his searchings. He dodged police barricades and wove around checkpoints, using his recumbent’s low profile and the cover of darkness to glide through the abandoned streets undetected. He visited four local hospitals, all of them overrun with patients and non-patients simply seeking out the comforts of electricity’s embrace. His father was not among them.
How intimate, to trace a person’s geography. It was almost like looking through his father’s wallet. Though it was the middle of the night, Radar still followed the route of Kermin’s favorite constitutional along the industrial shores of the Passaic, searching for that familiar hunched profile. He rode past the ghostly rail bridge, permanently frozen in a raised salute, but did not see his father seated at any of his customary benches. He visited J&A Specialties Electrics, in Belleville, site of Kermin’s semi-frequent pilgrimages for obscure radio parts. He swung by the Arlington Diner, where his father would eat exactly three-quarters of a Reuben and half of his slaw before casually dismissing the plate with a swipe of his hand.
Everything was closed, shuttered, dark. Humanity a distant dream.
He even crossed the Passaic and headed south, to his grandfather’s gravesite in Elizabeth, on the off chance that Kermin had sought out his father’s resting place for guidance.
Radar’s flashlight illuminated the engraved letters of the headstone:
DOBROSLAV RADMANOVIC
1910–1947
A GOOD MAN.
Radar had always found this summary a touch dismissive, but Kermin had explained that this was the state’s default epitaph when little was known about the deceased.
“Your son has gone missing,” Radar said to the gravestone.
Dobroslav, the good man, offered no reply.
With each successive foray, it became increasingly clear that he was not going to find his father in any of these places—that his father would not be found simply by looking for him. And yet, in spite of this, he kept looking. Just the act of looking made Radar feel productive, even if he knew he would most likely come up empty-handed. It also gave him time to process all that he had learned in that strange little cottage beneath the mall.
Kermin—the international puppeteer. Kermin—the genius designer. His pride at learning these descriptors was tempered by a certain sadness that he massaged with his velocity. He could not help but feel cheated, as if he had never actually experienced the real Kermin. He had only known his father as his closeted, curmudgeonly progenitor—who had gambled on the tiny television and lost, who had built a monstrous antenna in their backyard so he could communicate only with those farthest away from him and in doing so had shut out those who loved him the most. But Radar had never known his father as this. As a doer. A maker. One who had changed the course of history.
“Oh, Tata,” he whispered to the moonless sky. “I could’ve helped you. We could’ve done it
together.”
• • •
FINALLY, EXHAUSTED, BLEARY-EYED, he returned home to Forest Street. He looked at his watch. It was just after 2:00 A.M.
He was almost at their driveway when he noticed the white van parked in front of their house. His system went cold and he swerved wildly, nearly crashing into his mother’s Olds.
The authorities. The authorities were here. He had left his mother all alone, and now she was being handcuffed and questioned by some secret terrorism task force. He only briefly considered the possibility of fleeing before he took a deep breath and surveyed the situation. No. He was the man of the house now. He couldn’t leave her. He would claim all responsibility for the blackout. He would take the fall for his family.
Radar hid his bicycle behind the viburnum and quietly unlocked the front door, readying himself to be tackled by a SWAT team.
All was quiet. The house was dark.
“Mom?” he called tentatively. “It’s me.”
There was no response.
Upstairs in her room, he found the bed empty. Or not exactly empty: his flashlight caught sight of the little wooden figure lying among the sheets.
“Mom?” he said again.
The flashlight’s beam searching the room. Sweeping past a sheeted bookshelf.
“Mom?” An edge of panic rising in his voice.
The record player silent on the rug. The burned-out stub of the candle on the bedside table, a thicket of wax spilling down the wood. The darkened hole in the floor.