The King's Last Song

by Geoff Ryman

  And why I know that mingling nationalism and socialism has produced deadly effects elsewhere.

  The representative of Siem Reap province leans back and lets the debate trail on.

  They are soft, fat, friendly, Paris-educated, and aggressive, thrusting everyone else out of their way. A Communist should have no other virtues save one: they fight for communism. What happens if they have no virtues and spend most of their time fighting for position?

  Rain starts to drum again on the roof. Pich begins to wish he'd used the toilet when he had the chance.

  "To work, comrades,” says Saloth Sar.

  He coughs, then smiles with a self-deprecation that may not be entirely feigned. “We are small in number. Our friends and colleagues from the days of Issark are dispersed or in Hanoi. We must assist our Vietnamese comrades in any way we can. Our situation is utterly perilous and so we masquerade as teachers or functionaries. What are we to do? Go home and give up?"

  Pich corrects him. “Some of us are rice farmers."

  Saloth Sar's eyes seem almost fond. “Some of us are rice farmers,” he says in a warm, gentle voice.

  Pich's turn to relent. “And no, we do not go home and give up."

  "No, Comrade,” says Saloth Sar in a low, warm voice that suggests he is near tears. “No. We do not give up.” He coughs. “So what is left to us?"

  Pich is surprised to hear this from Sar. That is indeed the question, the only question worth asking.

  Nuon Chea speaks. “We begin again. I propose that we here form a new movement that is more responsive to our unique situation."

  Saom Pich inwardly groans. How many names do we have to give ourselves? We will now spend two days writing a constitution and electing new members to give the new brotherhood power.

  And that is what they do for the next hour. They discuss a new name. Saloth Sar says, “I propose the foundation of the Workers Party of Kampuchea. Workers because we are socialists. Workers because we are teachers, functionaries, clerks, and rice farmers. Party because we are a united movement however small, comrades together.

  Saloth Sar glances about him with sadness and love at the tiny room, the tiny party. “And Kampuchea because we are also a nationalist, self-reliant movement of the Khmer people."

  Pich asks, “What are we going to do?"

  Nuon Chea chuckles, very heartily considering it is the middle of someone else's talk.

  Sar answers. “Be dedicated to socialism and to anti-imperialism and"—getting to what is different—"to the real people of Kampuchea."

  Pich says, “Me."

  Sar says with his slow warm voice. “Yes, Comrade."

  "Who else?"

  Nuon Chea chuckles.

  "Those who demonstrate by their actions that they recognize the Khmer people."

  "By doing what?” Pich is bored, fervent, and unfooled.

  Sar is doing a good job of not being annoyed. “That is for the party to decide. There must first be a party."

  Pich says, “So okay, we all risked prison by coming here, that is a party. What I want to hear, Comrade, is what we are going to do to help my brothers."

  Pich's poor eyes cannot see who speaks next. “I think we might say....in advance of discussion....that we will privilege them."

  Pich is hungry. “How?"

  The same voice. Pich peers. He finally sees a face that looks like a skull with the lightest covering of skin. He looks a bit like the skinny little librarian back home. “By giving them jobs. By making sure that all jobs are open to them. Perhaps....if only foreigners have a skill, by making sure that the foreign specialists work for them?"

  Pich says, “Through socialist revolution."

  The skinny librarian nods. “If the people think as you do, we have already won."

  Pich corrects him. “Socialism deals with class, not nationality."

  Sar is backed into a corner. “Perhaps...” He shrugs. He looks about him. “This would need debating. But. They are colonists. Perhaps we send them home."

  They? Pich checks to make sure he has understood. “The Chinese. The Vietnamese. The Chams. The ethnic minorities?"

  Sar sounds more firm. “It needs debate."

  Pich makes a sound like wind between his teeth. Why does this feel as if it has gone utterly off the rails? Why does it feel like the train has crashed into the station?

  "The Chinese kill pigs because we feel our religion forbids killing and so we eat pork. Many Vietnamese lead blameless lives fishing on boats."

  Sar nods. “We are not talking about those."

  Pich realizes something. You have never even seen them. You have never been anywhere near them. You have not had to share the same bed with them. You have not had their sweat flicked into your mouth as you work together. You have not looked at their laughing beautiful daughters with delight.

  Pich considers. “So. We are talking about our oppressors in the cities."

  A murmuring of assent. But, thinks Pich, the oppressors in the cities are your own families.

  Pich asks again, “What actions are you suggesting?"

  Sar shakes his head. “We need your ideas, it is the discussion."

  "The yuon, the jeun, the Chams—they do not have homes to go back to. They have fished the lake from the time of their grandfathers. They came here as envoys from China in the time of Jayavarman. They are Chams, who have been in Indochina as long as we have, and became Muslim when they intermarried with Malays. What we have to do is welcome them instead."

  Sar's turn to say, “How?"

  And for this, Pich is ready, he has imagined this, dreamed this, for a long, long time. “We take them into our homes. We take them out of Phnom Penh, away from their cars and their bars and their lycées and their ballet. We take them away from their banks and their stalls and their sweatshops. We take them to our villages and say: work with us, live like us. If we do that, they will become us. We will all be home. We will all become Khmer."

  Nuon's downward mouth dips even lower. This may or may not be a smile. How would you know if this man is pleased? “Re-education."

  "No. A change of situation, leading to a change of heart. A stripping away of class. Not nationality. I don't need the Chams to be Khmer, I need them to be brothers. That's different."

  "A stripping away of class, not nation,” offers Ieng Sary. He approves.

  There is a kind of warm chuckling as if they are all toasting a colleague with warm white spirit.

  "This is just the kind of debate we need to be having,” says Sar. “Action, Comrades! Shall we vote? Shall we be a party? Shall we be called the Workers Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea? Hands up for yes."

  All hands go up together.

  Things get rapidly less interesting. They discuss governance. They discuss procedure. They talk about it all the next day. They get very excited about lines of reporting, independence of cells, and formulation of policy.

  We may be small, but we do have power over our own administration.

  The agenda of the meeting is fulfilled. They elect officers to carry out their administrative schemes of governance.

  Ieng Sary is elected Number Four. Saloth Sar is elected Number Three despite his speech. Even Nuon Chea is only elected Number Two. Tou Samouth is made Secretary-General.

  Someone is elected Number One, but this proceeds through a series of facial expressions that are a blur to Pich. There are shared smiles, raised eyebrows, and satisfied closings of eyes. Who was Number One? Something? A principle? They all seem to derive pleasure from it, and laugh out load when Pich asks, “So who is Number One?"

  * * * *

  At a secret meeting in the train station of Phnom Penh in 1960, Saom Pich was elected a showpiece Brother Number One, and did not even know it.

  The man with a librarian's face got him a pair of glasses.

  The glasses were the greatest thing the party ever did for him. He used those glasses to read the rumples around Saloth Sar's smile.

  Two years later
Secretary-General Tou Samouth vanished. That tended to happen to Saloth Sar's closest friends and allies. He later declared that he and Samouth loved each other.

  He destroyed the reputation of Nuon Chea, forcing him to resign. Saloth Sar then controlled the party.

  With his mentor gone, Pich adopted a policy of silent and effective administration. He cultivated the librarian Ta Mok and did nothing to attract the friendship of Saloth Sar.

  In 1963 Pol Pot and Ieng Sary fled for the maquis, and almost unnoticed the wars began.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  April 1152

  Jaya had not known that the sky could look like the inside of oyster shells.

  He had not known that in a country by the sea, the beaches would be polished hard by the water like wood. The sand here reflected the sky like mother of pearl. Sky, sea, and sand would merge.

  The wind would change, blowing one way in the morning and another way in the evening. In high winds, the sea would dance, as if churned by white horses.

  On dry days, blowing sand would sting his ankles like biting insects.

  On some mornings, mist clung to the shore, muting both light and sound. Sometimes rain would come and go and come again, all in the space of a day, trailing rainbows. Some evenings, mountains of clouds floated overhead, with sunsets of their own.

  The fish tasted different. The air tasted different, salty. Was it cooler? Were people happier here, more relaxed, laughing as they pushed the hulls of their flat-bottomed boats shushing over sand?

  Jayavarman, also called Buddhist-Khmer, would get up each morning from a bed of straw, and stretch and look out over the lines of palm trees. The sound of the wind blowing through them would mingle with the sound of surf.

  The hills rising up suddenly behind him were always green. The sky was always pregnant with rain; there was no dry season. The vivid lime of the fields and orchards hurt the eyes. There were no wild forests here, full of beasts. The land by the sea was crossed and crossed again with waterways, roads, pathways, temples, fields, and villages.

  The buildings were different too. The Chams built their temples out of brick, not stone. Their Buddhist shrines were made of wood.

  "Let the buildings die too,” said the monks. “Everything rises and then fades."

  Each morning, turning away from the pearly sunrise, Jaya would look at his family and feel the flower of love open up in his breast.

  On a bed of straw, as warm as the landscape, was his wife. Her face was delicate: a tiny jaw, wide cheekbones, a ridged nose. Enfolded in her arms, their first child slept. Cat always kept his body covered. Their son had twisted, undeveloped limbs and sparse hair. Their beautiful, angry little cripple rocked his head trying to move, tossing his legs that would never walk.

  He was the child of overwork and hunger. They had decided not to have children born into slavery; they had tried to withhold themselves but in the end the need for love was too strong for them.

  Jayavarman looked at their house, at the bare wooden floors, the straw bed, their few garments hanging from rafters, and their measures of rice in reed urns mixed with rat droppings. He heard the morning song of sea gulls, surf, and hissing sand.

  A kiss on the hollow cheeks of his wife, on her fine-boned temple, and on the fragile mouth. A loving, yearning groan from her. The sweet milky smell of the baby.

  Then to work.

  Love made his step light. Love of the trees, the broad beaches with their hushed surf, the pathway, his family, the birds, the sky, and the silhouette of the temple. Jayavarman's step was cat-like, prowling on perfectly placed legs, alert, and somehow predatory.

  His job was to sweep.

  Sweep and ensure the water vats were not only full but pure, no crust of leaves or insects.

  The crust was removed by scooping it out and pouring the water that came with it over himself, over his feet, drenching and washing his clothes as he wore them.

  He put straw on the brazier, breathing life into the fire. Then he set water to boil for the tea and the rice noodles and he swept the temple floors. After that, he sprinkled water over the swept ground, and by then the water was boiled.

  He served tea and noodles to his master, and massaged the old man's knotted shoulders and freckled flesh.

  "You have not yet clothed the images,” the Master said, slurping noodles. The Master was a tiny, embittered man, and Jaya had long ago given up expecting wisdom from him. All the Master had was scholarship. Jaya smiled as he massaged the old man, bowed from too much reading.

  Jaya no longer thought of himself as ignorant. Firstly, because he was quietly learning everything this scholar had to teach him, and secondly because he knew now that wisdom came from doing. This poor, frightened, wheedling little soul had done nothing all his life. Jaya beamed on him, as detached as the sun.

  "I will clothe the images as soon as you are happy that I have finished here."

  "I do not wish to have to take responsibility for everything,” said the Master. Jaya smiled. The man took responsibility for nothing. “I should not have to remind you. Have you looked at the water?"

  "Yes, Master."

  He's afraid of me, poor soul. He knows who I am, even though I have tried to disguise it, and he is terrified. He knows I remember everything he tells me. He knows from the questions I ask that I am his equal in mind. He knows from my smile that he has absolutely no power over me.

  He knows that his King comes to see me once a year, and treats me, within limits, as a person of rank.

  At times, I even think that Hari chose this man as my master deliberately, to teach me both knowledge and disrespect for it.

  "Master, repeat to me another jataka."

  "Tooh! You have been told enough jatakas for a servant."

  "Nevertheless, Master, they are an inexhaustible fount of wisdom."

  And the old man, who had to do something with his time, told him another tale of the Buddha in one of his previous lives.

  "And what,” Jaya asked him, “are the duties of a king?"

  To be abundant in generosity, to show by example, to attain wisdom and compassion. To care for his people as if they were his own children, to know their anguish and their pain. To care and, having cared, act.

  It was an idea of kingship that touched Jaya deeply.

  He remembered Suryavarman, crazed by the desire to expand the boundaries of his kingdom. A wizened stick of man, as if he were a roasted chicken sucked dry by his own ambition. The old, dry bones had a marrow of love that no one had tasted.

  Jaya thought of the Cham King, all wise policy, his good kind heart always at war with the need for a king to be a warrior. A sword resting on his lap even when at peace, even when welcoming allies.

  He thought of Yashovarman, inflating himself to an enormous physical size to hide his bestilled heart. Yasho was like a ship on a lake without a breath of wind to fill its sails. He would be a king secretly consumed by fear and inactivity.

  Gradually, the thought had come, as he massaged the bookish, withering shoulders: I know how to be a king better than any of them.

  A king would be almost invisible, not out of fear, but in order to be powerful over a broad range of action. A king would need to be able to walk his kingdom in peace without pomp, so he could talk to people without causing fear. A king would gain power by listening, knowing what was actually happening in the temple fields, or in the village lofts. Having bathed his people in the glow of his attention, he could gently tell them stories, small quiet stories that would guide them onto the Dharma, the Path.

  Such a king would have no need of war to aggrandize his glory. Indeed, war would be the distracting, draining enemy of his task. War would destroy the wealth he had built up; it would take him and his mind away from the people he was getting to know. Such a king would gain his power from the love of his people. His people would love him and defend him. Inspired by him, they would work towards merit in this life and progress in the next.

  Who among
the people had loved distant, insect-like Suryavarman, when their sons had been killed in war? Who would love the swollen Yashovarman, occupied with rites and rituals and buying the favour of the Gods?

  A good king would content himself with a land no bigger than a day's walk.

  Such a king would live in happiness in a small palace, open to all, a place as tranquil and beautiful and holy as any temple, where visible virtue and kindness took the place of invisible gods and expensive images of them.

  Such a king would live in such a place as his family home, off in the low hills, by a small undistinguished river that yet provided fish and irrigation. Such a kingdom would be far away from the exhortations and rituals of the City. It would be safe in its humility: no threat to the Universal King.

  One day at dusk, having been beaten with a fly whisk for charring his master's grilled fish, Jayavarman squatted on the ground under his one-room house. He tickled the ears of the guard dog and looked at the plump and contented hens picking at the ground. His tiny world.

  His tiny wife was blue in the dusk, as if carved of turquoise. He smiled up at her with love. “Are you with child, Wife?"

  "No, no, why do you ask?"

  "Because we are going to walk home."

  Cat's eyes boggled, and then she went still. “Is that wise?"

  Jaya smiled and shrugged. “Of course not, no. But I have learned all I can here. And life is suddenly flowering within me."

  "How far is home?"

  He had no idea. “Many weeks’ walk? We have to go south, where there is a pass through the hills."

  "How will we eat?"

  "I will carry rice. We will fish and catch crickets. We will eat."

  "And,” Cat swallowed, “go home to your wife."

  "I have more than one wife. Many men do.” He pulled Cat to him, and kissed her.

  She looked sad, but ready. “A king cannot have a slave for a wife. People will say you broke the natural order. They will say"—she indicated their son and his shrivelled limbs—"that our son is what comes of intermarrying."

  "You are a slave no longer, Cat."

  She put a finger on his lips to silence him. “Then I have a choice. I can stay here, among these people, and let you go. I might be able to bear it. Or I could go with you and be"—she sighed—"whatever you think best for me to be. Once you return you will be a king."