A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  “What is the meaning of the sudden shift into the past?” Emmett asked. “Was there a political intent involved?”

  The director scoffed. “You are familiar with the poetry of Fragi?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so. Do you know the poetry of Fragi?”

  “If you recite a few verses, maybe– ”

  “How can you appreciate my film if you are not familiar with Fragi? He is the man portrayed, Mahtumkuly. The title of the film is from one of Fragi’s most iconic poems. Did this make any sense to you?”

  “I thought –”

  “You know nothing of my country, how can you write about our art?”

  Emmett tried to steer the conversation his way. “Do you consider Turkmenistan your country? As a Russian?”

  “Ahah!” he exclaimed, coming to a complete halt. “Very clever, trying to trick me.”

  He paused.

  “I was trying to accomplish the same as Grigori Kozintsev. Hmmm? Does that help you?”

  “No sir, it does not.”

  If this arrogance passed for erudition on the international film festival circuit, then Emmett was proud of his ignorance.

  “Why has your paper sent you?” the director asked. “Kozintsev! Director of Russian films Hamlet, King Lear. Or don’t you know Shakespeare?”

  “Is the woman who played Irina here in Istanbul?” Emmett asked.

  The director shrugged.

  “I am sorry,” he said, “but no.”

  He began walking again, and Emmett didn’t follow.

  “How can I reach her?” Emmett called after him.

  “She is dead,” he replied, without much emotion. “Irina – that is her real name, you know – she committed suicide in Moscow one year ago.”

  He turned around and looked Emmett in the eyes.

  “She was not much of an actress,” he said, “nor a person.”

  Emmett didn’t believe him.

  “I know she’s here. Her real name is Sveta and you were with her at Hayal Kahvesi.”

  Rostislavsky shook his head.

  “Sveta is a true actress,” he said. “Not like Irina. Irina – I had to struggle to keep her from destroying my film. I had to call her ‘Irina’ in the film because she could not understand what it is to act, to inhabit another character. She had to be Irina, only Irina, only herself. So I call her Irina in film. She was lover of producer. There was nothing I could do.”

  “I think that she saved your film, that she gave it life. I will write that she lifted it above the self-indulgence and pretentiousness of the director’s vision.”

  “Perhaps that is how you feel,” Rostislavsky said, shrugging again, not acknowledging the insult. “She was very pretty, some people say.”

  That night, in the roof-top lounge at the Otel Marmara, Emmett drank and drank. A red-headed Englishman played the piano and sang songs from the 1970s. Did the lounge rotate? That’s how Emmett would always remember it, sitting at a table while the entire lounge rotated, looking out over the Sultan’s palaces, then the temples, then the slums, then the bridge gliding out toward Asia.

  Emmett had been gazing at the body of a dead woman, a sort of unknowing necrophilic fantasy. On the plane, returning to California, watching Beethoven (a film about a big funny-furry dog, not the composer) with Turkish subtitles on the airplane movie screen, Emmett could not stop thinking about Irina. She was with him at every moment. He would write about her, he decided, memorialize her in his article as a woman who would have been a movie star, a Russian Garbo. He was outdoing himself, his mind was racing. All to block out the uncomfortable reality that he had lusted for a corpse.

  Back on the Thai-Cambodia border.

  Solomon recognized “Office 87,” Pol Pot’s post-Cambodian home in a fortified camp, surrounded by armed guards. Solomon felt comfortable today, flanked by Khmer Rouge soldiers. He felt that he was visiting an old friend. One soldier gestured to the right. An elderly figure emerged from a small cabin, holding the hand of a young girl. He had a spring in his step. Solomon and the soldiers came closer, and the senator bowed. Pol Pot beamed. In old age, his gentleness had grown. “Senator Solomon,” he said in French. “I am so happy to see you again. I have appreciated your help over these last few years.” He sighed. “It looks as though we are losing the fight.”

  Solomon smiled down at the little girl. “Your granddaughter?”

  Pol Pot laughed, clapping his hands together. “You think I am so old!” he exclaimed. “But I have been born again. A new wife ... and my first child. I am like a man of twenty. Refreshed and ... I think, ready to lead my country back to a new greatness again. I hope. If it is my destiny.”

  “That’s what I’m here to talk about.”

  The old man patted his daughter on the head, whispered a few words to her, and she skipped off. Solomon and Pol Pot walked together into the office, a sparely furnished, rather gloomy room. Pol Pot offered Solomon a hollowed-out orange, filled with juice, which the senator accepted graciously.

  “I cannot sign the peace treaty,” Pol Pot said suddenly, immediately after sitting. “It has ended without a victory for the people. It is the great powers deciding the fate of Cambodians once again. I cannot sign it.”

  “Sir, let me – ”

  “Silence, one moment.” The old man sat, thinking. Finally, he reached out and touched Solomon’s wrist. His hands were soft and delicate. As Solomon stared at Pol Pot’s compassionate face, the old man’s features lost focus, began fading slowly away into the soft brown wood of the office walls until nothing was left but two eyes hanging in mid-air, staring. “Look into my soul,” his voice proclaimed from deep inside of Solomon’s head. “You see the eyes of Cambodia, something you will never understand.”

  The room began to dissolve, melting, as though washed away by a cleansing rain; Solomon was soon suspended, looking down from far above at the vast plains of the Mekong Delta, then flying past pines that clung to rocky mountain peaks and sugar palm trees hammered by shrapnel, through rain forests damp and humid, and beneath glassy Cambodian lakes; Solomon saw leopards and elephants thundering through the grasslands; and as he soared past one high rocky peak, he felt himself fall.

  And he was back in Office 87, with Brother Number One, who sat in his little chair holding an orange filled with juice, and rocking slowly in his chair.

  “In Cambodia,” Pol Pot said, “a country covered with forests, there have always been guardian spirits who live in the trees, known by local legend as neak ta prey. The people say that these spirits, who were born to watch over the men and women of Cambodia and to keep them from harm, might turn malevolent if not shown the proper respect.

  “One neak ta prey, one old, cantankerous and incorrigible spirit, has never had an interest in the goodness of life, and cares little for the respect shown him by humans. He is not a guardian, he is a demon, and he has always yearned to walk the Earth as a man. He is older than the human race. For millions of years, he was invisible in the darkness of the Cambodian forests; before that, he floated around the world, wafting in and out of the unevolved minds of lizards, dinosaurs, a cave man or two – creating a sense of foreboding in the rare brain that could grasp such a thing. The spirit does not desire death or destruction out of a misplaced sense of fun, but from self-preservation. He feeds on the world’s misery, on the unhappiness in the air. Without it, he will starve.

  “Remember,” said Pol Pot. “You have chosen your side. There is no turning back.” He patted Solomon’s hand, and he smiled again.

  Two decades earlier, after being thrown from the throne by an angry America, the deposed Prince Sihanouk wandered, spiritually lost, through the wilds of his home country, southwest down the Ho Chi Minh trail, all to meet in person a gentle man named Saloth Sar, a man who might help Sihanouk retake the nation.

  There were only a few things to say about Saloth Sar: he was a quiet, encouraging teacher; before that, a Cambodian exchange
student in Paris, an underachiever but a man who wanted to change the world for the better; even before that, a little boy raised by dancers in the royal court of the capital city, a privileged past he soon repudiated. In the 1950s, he married a woman eight years his senior and many times his intellectual superior, and his devotion to her was evidence, his friends insisted, of his humble nature, and his lack of ego. Overweight, and otherwise not a handsome man; but his slightly bucktoothed smile glowed with compassion, and most people liked him instantly.

  One other thing: upon his return to Cambodia, Saloth Sar joined a Chinese-funded Communist rebel army known as the Khmer Rouge, which he now commanded, an army which, during the years of the crown, had sworn to take the country by force from Sihanouk.

  One night in the jungle, Sihanouk and Princess Monique sat with Saloth Sar beneath towering trees in a makeshift wilderness theater, watching rebel soldiers, bathed in jungle floodlights, perform a hastily choreographed musical review. Folk dances, Saloth Sar explained to the Prince.

  Traditional Cambodian peasant dances, much different from what one might see, oh, in a royal court, for example.

  Unruffled by Saloth Sar’s mild condescension, Sihanouk and the Princess laughed and applauded. Saloth Sar took them on a tour of the countryside, to ancient temples, for nature hikes, and they all posed with Khmer Rouge soldiers for propaganda films that would someday be televised in China. At all times, Saloth Sar smiled and chatted amiably, the perfect host. Sihanouk, who had always yearned to drink in the beauty of life, quickly agreed to throw his support to this gray army of peasants, before flying to his palace in North Korea where he sat in his private movie theater, awaiting news of the impending Sihanouk revolution in the comfort to which he had always been entitled.

  When the Khmer Rouge took the nation, a victorious Sihanouk flew triumphantly back to the capital, expecting huge crowds and a return to the glory days of the 1950s, when European diplomats and tourists traveled to Cambodia to watch a people live without war, crime or fear, and to romance the night away surrounded by starlets and court dancers at the Prince’s palace. But the first day back in Cambodia, he was not permitted to leave his palace. Too dangerous, he was told. The second day as well. The second week as well. And weeks turned into months.

  With Saloth Sar center stage in the government, something changed within him. He looked the same, more or less – the same bucktoothed smile, the same round, fat face. But he was different now, a different person lived within him. For when Saloth Sar took control of Cambodia, an ancient Cambodian spirit named Pol Pot settled easily into his body, a spirit that had been waiting silently in the forest for aeons. Pol Pot had come into being in the Big Bang, had floated through the universe, through the clouds of gas and the empty space, waiting for man to evolve. But no human ears had ever before heard his name spoken, until that one day when Saloth Sar spoke the name – Pol Pot – for the very first time. He said it in a very quiet voice, hesitantly, but to his ears the name boomed like thunder. Within moments, the country fell to the whim of a dark spirit who thrived on mothers’ tears and the anguished cries of children. Saloth Sar’s soul disappeared, banished forever to some netherworld prison. “Call me Pol Pot,” Saloth Sar’s lips demanded. To the public, he would not admit that he had once been Saloth Sar; he would not admit that he had once been raised by court dancers. He would not admit that he was an aeons-old evil spirit inhabiting the body of a gentle, unremarkable man. He claimed instead to be an obscure rubber worker who now, through some happy quirk of fate, just happened to control the life and destiny of seven million people.

  Pol Pot took only moments to become used to the novelty of a physical body. He strutted about the room, talking out loud, making noise, touching his nose, his ears, marveling at these new sensations. Then he settled down at his desk, pen in hand. Pol Pot feared very little, but he did fear Cambodian bonzes, holy men who plodded from village to village in the hot sun offering spiritual counseling. A bonze knew the ritual exorcisms that could return a possessed body to its original owner. And so Pol Pot ordered his army to kill the bonzes, to shoot them by the roadside, to kill them in the field, to chase them and hunt them down if necessary.

  Pol Pot could feel a little release within him as each life was snuffed out, a little tinge of dark pride when a baby died at its mother’s shriveled, depleted breast. The demon’s aides boasted that Pol Pot would agonize over every detail of the regime’s policies until late into the night, and it was true. The country would be purged from its roots, Pol Pot announced, the impure sent to Tuol Sleng, an abandoned high school, to write their confessions and think about their sins. During their last days on earth, the prisoners of Tuol Sleng would work on paintings and sculptures glorifying Pol Pot, searching in confusion for unattainable political redemption. Court dancers, Pol Pot said, had always lived off the people like leeches. So with Pol Pot reigning triumphant, the Prince’s royal dancers were banished to Tuol Sleng. Within a few years, no one in Cambodia knew how to dance.

  Pol Pot scribbled out his plans, page after page in an almost illegible scrawl. We will increase rice production, he told his smiling, faithfully nodding staff. We must correctly implement the revolutionary struggle. We will buy a DDT factory. We will produce toothpaste, hats, chairs, pots and pans. His staff told him that was a good idea. Toothpaste. Cambodia needed toothpaste. Cambodia was somewhat lacking in supplies of toothpaste, as a matter of fact, come to think of it. How are you, Saloth? an old friend wrote. I cannot help but recall the two of us together, in Paris, plotting revolution. Now, from this vantage point, I think often of you. Have you received my previous letters? Might you step in, let my jailers know that I can be trusted, that I am a friend of Saloth Sar? The letter went unanswered. Saloth Sar no longer walked the earth. On the road into the countryside, on a long march from Phnom Penh, surrounded by other enemies of the people and prodded by unforgiving Khmer Rouge soldiers, Saloth Sar’s brother fell into the dirt. If Saloth is alive, he whispered, almost with his last breath, he will make this all stop. In his quiet, righteous way, Saloth will teach Pol Pot that he is wrong, and he will make all this stop. A few months later, Pol Pot said, Let’s grow corn. And also coconuts and tobacco. His staff had been diminished and re-peopled several times over. But they nodded, smiling, in complete agreement, just as the old staff had done. Corn, they noted. Coconuts. A year later, Pol Pot’s wife disappeared. Rumors spread. She had gone mad, most people said. She had gone mad and was removed from view. Or killed. Or buried alive, in some distant spot, where her screams would not reach Pol Pot’s ears. Purge the factories, Pol Pot told his staff the next day. The factories are run by enemies of the people. Purge the men who run the factories.

  In his palace bedroom, Prince Sihanouk kept a diary. I can hear my children screaming, he wrote, as he looked out at the empty streets. Somewhere in the countryside, they are screaming. There is no one to console me but a little white dog, given to me by my captors. The little dog does not seem to understand what is happening. How many are dead? Three million, or perhaps two million. Perhaps one million. Perhaps no one will ever really know. So many Khmer whom I once watched from my palace window going to work, going out for an evening’s entertainment – even to see one of my films! – or a day in the park, Khmer who so recently laughed and frowned and cried and went about their ordinary lives and, perhaps, awaited the return of Prince Sihanouk with hopeful anticipation, so many of them now remembered by no living soul.

  The anonymous, almost faceless woman who brought Sihanouk dinner on a silver platter precisely ten years ago yesterday. Was there anyone still alive who knew her name?

  Sihanouk shut his diary and stared into the sun, hoping to blind himself.

  In Seattle, Joe was fast asleep in his big, warm bed, dreaming of an old romance, just a blissful sort of thing – they were back in their old neighborhood, walking up and down Broadway, arms wrapped around each other, a scene, incidentally, that they had never played out in life.

 
He woke up at three in the morning feeling vaguely contented, then disappointed, then at least happy to sleep another four hours.

  But at six that morning, Emmett called, then apologized when he heard Joe’s sleepy voice. Joe said, unconvincingly, that he’d been about to get up anyway. He flipped on the bedside light.

  “I’ll call back later,” Emmett said. “Calling New York all the time, I just forgot – ”

  “No. Look, I’ve even turned on the light, so I’m wide awake now.”

  Emmett explained: A friend of Katherine’s knew a woman who had recently moved out to Seattle. She had just completed her PhD. in mathematics and was now a junior professor. She was two years older than Joe, athletic and obviously intelligent. She would be waiting for him tomorrow night at a seafood place overlooking Puget Sound and surrounded by the mountains. Joe at first refused, and Emmett reacted with disbelief. This was Joe’s idea, he pointed out, being set up, and he and Katherine had “looked under every rock” in an attempt to find a suitable match out in Seattle. Emmett didn’t mention that Joe hadn’t had sex in – how long ago was it, anyway? – nor did he mention the worry of their widowed mother, living in Georgia of all places, who had made it a personal quest to see Joe married. “May I remind you,” Emmett said, “that the entire East Coast has been out searching for an eligible single woman in Seattle: not too foolish, not too plain, certainly not too pretty (so you won’t get all quiet and tongue-tied and moody the way you do around pretty-looking girls), not too fussy for God’s sake – and now here she is, dropped into your lap. I’m not canceling this either. She will be there tomorrow night, and if you’re not there you’ve stood her up. And she’ll hate you.”

  Joe said, “OK, fine already. Enough with the big speech.”

  “Don’t get nervous and start making terrible puns,” Emmett said. “Just be calm.”