Think about it. It could have been worse. It could have been significantly worse.
You go round a corner and now you have tarmac under your feet. You can see white fluorescent lights hanging over a modest open-air restaurant a block farther on.
Go there. Take a seat on one of the low wooden benches and wave for a waiter.
You are sitting on a low wooden bench on a dusty pavement in the Troisième Quartier. You have just finished a plate of fried noodles and pork. There is a small upturned Vietnamese coffee glass on a plate on the low table in front of you. Bright light and French pop music are streaming out of a gramophone shop. At the other tables there are groups of men with loud voices, their eyes dulled by alcohol. Their eyes sometimes settle on you, before moving unsteadily on and fixing instead on the mouths of their companions or on glasses of palm wine.
Take out the cigarettes you bought from the cigarette seller on the way here. Study his handiwork. In one single movement he took paper and tobacco and rolled it into what is now a perfect cigarette. And in exchange for that skill you paid him a trifling sum, hardly enough for him and his fellows to afford anything to eat other than rice porridge with no meat in it. In spite of the fact that society needs his services just as much as it needs yours. In the name of justice, you think, every function, every variety of work, should be given the same value and therefore receive the same remuneration.
Politely ask the man beside you whether you may take a match from the box he has tossed down on the table in front of him. Wait for his flushed face to turn towards you and for him to wave his hand rather aimlessly in a gesture that could be taken for a yes. Strike the match and light your perfect cigarette.
You are sitting there full of thought on a low wooden bench on a pavement at the other end of the city. You chin is resting in your hands and white smoke curls up from them into the still night air. The food and coffee have calmed the earlier surge of emotion.
The men at the neighbouring table are arguing about which brothel to go to. You imagine pink fluorescent lights and big rooms in which young women are sitting in a line waiting to be chosen. You play with the possibility of asking the party to let you accompany them.
For the same reason as you and your comrades will not use cyclos, you also refuse to use the poor girls enslaved in bordellos. The sessions of self-criticism, however, reveal that this is an edict that few are capable of sticking to. And you are no exception. But there was even less choice in Paris. There were fewer brothels than here and you were so poor that you could rarely choose your company. The thought of bedding the women of the colonizing race had undoubtedly been a tantalizing one, but in reality they were too big to be attractive and their pale skin felt coarse in comparison with what you were used to.
Since coming home you have controlled yourself, stayed away from the brothels, apart from a few lapses that weigh on your conscience. You do it for Somaly, because you assume that she disapproves of that kind of thing. And that, of course, is why you are tempted to go along with the drunks at the neighbouring table.
Not as revenge, for what is there to avenge? No, more as a way—as you see it—to re-establish the balance between you and your fiancée.
You know you would be deceiving yourself. But the feeling that the possibility exists is worth more than the imagined redress. Because the heat of redress would immediately be replaced by the chill of deception. Which would mean that the balance regained is overdone, so becoming an act drained of its content.
Stay where you are. Watch them leave.
Think instead, rather distractedly perhaps, of Mao, of Stalin, of the late lamented Lenin. How they succeeded in spite of the preconditions, because they had history on their side. As you do. The question is, when should the opportunity be grasped? You watch the drunken labourers depart. Are they ready? Will they follow you and your cautious friends? Are the signs there but you are incapable of interpreting them? Or is it all still too soon?
Mao marched through China. Ho Chi Minh conquered Vietnam. Everything was against them but they were victorious, thanks to their dedication and their patience.
Patience and dedication. Just as in love.
If only you could have been there. Just imagine yourself among the audience for Lenin’s speeches, imagine him catching your eye as you stand there in the crush of all those men wrapped against the cold. Imagine yourself as the adjutant who was with Stalin when he heard of Hitler’s suicide. Walk a few steps behind Mao across the endless plains.
Learn from them. Even though Somaly is moulding your thinking more than Marx at present.
Dedication. Patience.
So. Finish your coffee. Get up and say goodnight to the waiter. You are full up and you are tired and you are unsure whether to take the street or the alleyway.
Give a thought to luck. And give another to the importance of being careful.
Then take the alleyway. Put out your cigarette and disappear into the soft darkness.
MONDAY, 29 AUGUST 1955
You close your eyes and step back into memory. You are alone by the river. The mud is grey and oozy. Your bare feet and legs sink down into its soft depths. You have just been picking at a cut on your toe in order to check again whether it hurts or not. That is something new and you feel some degree of pride at this sign of growing up, but also a little unsure. The cut is covered with mud at the moment, but it shows every time you pull your foot free from the grip of the ooze and swill it off in the current. The sun makes glittering reflections in the swirling brown water of the river. Your job is to water the oxen, but they aren’t thirsty and are lying in the shade of a large tamarind tree.
That is all that’s left. You are not even sure it was really like that. Perhaps the glitter of the sun belongs to a different occasion or, indeed, perhaps the oxen do.
You are sitting on a veranda that overlooks a small well-kept garden. Vannsak is sitting beside you. He is talking to you, but when he is speaking in that particular tone he does not expect an answer. You just have to look interested and mumble an… mm… of agreement every so often.
A fan on the floor is buzzing away behind your rattan armchairs. Raindrops are falling from the leaves but the morning sun is already turning the moisture to steam.
The two of you are drinking coffee with fresh milk. You moved on from tins of unsophisticated condensed milk ages ago. You are men of the people, but your coffee habits come from Paris.
Look around you. What evoked the memory of being by the river? You can neither trace it to anything that has been said recently, nor to any taste, nor to anything visual. Perhaps there was something out in the garden that evoked it, two colours beside one another, perhaps? You haven’t thought of that cut close to your toenail for years. But just for a moment it broke into the cycle of your thoughts, which keep returning time after time to her silence.
Go back into your memory. Stand once again with your feet deep in the cool mud. See the wet black bodies of the oxen in the shade, see them go grey, patch by patch as they dry.
Permit yourself to slide forward in time to your first visit to your home village after France. Remember your uncle meeting you at the station with a cyclo—not sitting in it but as its driver. The man who had owned many oxen and employed whole families.
Do you remember how taken aback you were when you saw him in the saddle—he was pleased as punch that you had returned but also deeply ashamed of his own poverty. How he ran his hand through his cropped white hair time after time and laughed as he praised your suit, your pale skin, your shining pomaded hair.
And how he then wiped the passenger seat of the cyclo with his scarf even though it was already clean, not once but three times before you managed to stop him.
You are sitting in a cyclo pedalled by your father’s younger brother. You watch a familiar landscape rolling slowly past and you smell the sour smell of your uncle’s unwashed clothes. You have noticed that he has lost several teeth and they have not been replaced with gold ones.
Your uncle has the mouth of a poor man, his sunburnt skin is that of a manual labourer.
The road is a strip of red sand through the grass and your body sways in time with the swaying of the cyclo.
The oxen lying in the shade of the tamarind probably belonged to your uncle. He was the one you went to, anyway, to show the cut, which had stopped bleeding by that point. He examined your foot carefully—the little flap of skin had stuck down slightly crooked on the cut. He asked you if it was sore and you shook your head, showing off. He looked at you and said, now you’ve really become a man. Then he fetched a ladle of water from the rainwater pitcher to wash off the mud. You can remember the way both his tone of voice and his body language changed after he’d said you’d really become a man. And while your uncle was washing your foot, you started to cry anyway. When he saw that, he lifted you up onto his lap. The skin over his muscles warm and soft, the stubble on his chin coarse.
You were sitting in a cyclo and even then, twenty-five years later, tears ran down your cheeks. You were careful not to let your uncle see them as he chattered away happily behind you. Even going uphill his chatter showed virtually no sign of slowing down. You swallowed hard and shouted polite questions whenever he took a breath. He told you of events in the family and what had happened to neighbours and friends. Through the blinked back tears, you caught glimpses of the landscape you were trundling through, with people dressed in rags and abandoned rice fields.
You are sitting on the veranda in front of the elegant teachers’ residence attached to the city’s elite school. Your uncle’s cheerfulness gives way again to Vannsak’s impassioned earnestness. Listen to your friend. Listen to him talking about the conditions in which the rural population lives—they are very close to what was the norm a century ago. Two centuries ago.
Listen to him contrasting it to the way people in the cities live. The question is, how are you going to be able to bring this deep injustice alive to the people you talk to? How to make them capable of recognizing the obvious? Listen to him echoing your own thoughts of a few evenings ago when he asks how it will be possible to break through the rigid and intellectually stifling weight of religion. A religion that says that the disadvantaged are disadvantaged because they lived badly in their earlier lives, whereas the favoured are favoured because of their good deeds in some distant past. How can you slice religion so that the comforting element remains but the oppression vanishes? It is like trying to slice a coin, you think: however many times you slice it it will always have two sides.
Remember how you rode in a cyclo, its seat springs worn out, pedalled by the sinewy body of your uncle? Remember, too, how just a month or so before that you rode the Métro under the massed buildings of Paris. The cars flowed like cataracts of steel along the streets, the aeroplanes glinted in the sky. Remember the burning neon nights, the laughing food-filled mouths in restaurants, the stifling odour of the thousands upon thousands of perfumes pouring out through the doors of the Galeries Lafayette.
Remember how everything became clear to you as you sat there in the cyclo. How the whole world came together before your eyes—the world with all its fields and great forests and the minerals that gleam in the depths of the mountains. How human beings were not so numerous that it was impossible to count them; and how every single one of them had exactly the same birthright to whatever the fields and the forests and the mountains had to give. And how the good things in this world were so unfairly distributed that it was shameful.
The thought was far from new, but it was there in that cyclo on that dusty potholed road that the emotion struck home.
You saw that it is possible to take stock of all the riches of the world and you saw that they are not limitless. You saw the world’s resources as a great vessel with many connecting chambers. For one person to become rich, someone else must become poor. For Europeans and Americans to be able to enjoy abundance, millions and thousands of millions of others must be left in poverty.
That is why they, like your uncle, are poverty-stricken. People like him, with their bare hands and aching bodies, lay the foundations of the affluence on the other side of the world. And he does not even understand how poor he is in comparison with people of his own age with French or British or American names.
Remember how painful it was when you realized that everything that you rejoiced in in Paris depended on the deplorable state of things here. That it was impossible for you to love the cinemas there at the same time as hating the hovels here.
And Vannsak’s voice breaks into your memories and says that everyone has a right to justice.
He is talking about the city you are in and the countryside that surrounds it. About this minor counterpart to the great system. About the fruit that is grown by the poor peasants but eaten by the nouveaux riches in the cities.
Look at him. At his earnestness and at the power in what he is saying. The suppressed rage, even now when all he is doing is practising his next speech. Like you, a man in his best years. It is people like him who will put a stop to the injustice.
People like him, and like you.
You are standing in front of a blackboard. You are holding a piece of white chalk in your hand. There is a moment of stillness when you stop moving your hand. The silence of the schoolyard fills the classroom, that and the chattering of the birds in the trees that shade the dusty yard. Thirty-eight students are sitting in straight rows behind you, transferring your words from the blackboard to their notebooks.
Carry on moving the chalk across the board. Write les maîtres d’école sont des jardiniers en intelligences humaines, followed by Victor HUGO.
Turn around to the class with a smile.
Ask them the meaning of the sentence.
Continue to smile encouragingly when they hesitate. Note which of them is pretending to be still busy copying down the words. Wait until they, too, have raised their eyes to you as if silently signalling their readiness to answer.
Repeat the question and then pass it over to Punthea.
Punthea’s round features light up with quiet pride when he becomes the centre of attention. You recognize the feeling of being picked out. Of being the one recognized as having the ability to see the grandeur in a brief quotation.
You feel a certain pride yourself in taking the role of the master gardener. And here, with the light slanting in from the left through the open windows and being reflected up from the floor onto thirty-eight concentrating faces, you can keep all your thoughts focused. They are no longer disturbed by the demand for strategic deliberation or by the silence that is drowning everything else. Here there is nothing but the beauty of pages waiting to be written on and of the coil and loop of words.
Listen to Punthea. Listen to him giving a literal interpretation of the words. Thank Punthea and ask the class whether anyone has anything to add. But don’t let the pause last so long that someone feels compelled to put up his hand. Connect back to the introductory lecture you heard in Paris instead.
Shut your eyes for a moment. Put yourself in the mood.
Imagine the low wooden benches that climbed the sides of the auditorium towards the enormous cut-glass chandeliers with their weak yellow bulbs. Remember the huge painting that formed the backdrop—a churning sea and an open boat in which white men in old-fashioned clothes are struggling against the waves.
Remember the short and corpulent professor far below and the way his dull voice carried all the way up to you and your fellows. The way he began by saying that there is one question that is more beautiful than any other. A question that captures the very essence not just of scholarship but of life itself. Do you remember how curiosity drew his listeners out of the sleepy torpor they had sunk into upon entering that warm, dark lecture hall after an unusually chilly morning walk?
Do you remember how you thought that the question would give you the answer to something of decisive significance?
Now do what the corpulent professor did. Raise their expectations. Stress the
importance of the question. Refer to Montaigne and other names you have taught them to respect.
Now do what that professor did no more than a decade ago.
Pause for effect.
Then say: Que sais-je?
Notice the way your pupils hesitate slightly before leaning forward over their notepads as one man and writing down your three words and the two punctuation marks.
You can remember how confused you were in that massive hall with the maritime motifs on the wall. So much excitement that it becomes a tremor. Is this supposed to be the question of questions?
But don’t mention your own confusion, nor that of the others in the lecture hall at the time. Instead, borrow the authoritative self-evident attitude of the corpulent professor. The question will stick in your pupils’ minds just as it has stuck in yours. They will come back to those three syllables, they will ponder them. Dismiss them as being far too simple, like the emperor’s clothes. But they will come back to them. And the question will come to glow with a mysterious light all of its own.
What do I know?
Indeed, what do you know?
Let the silence last a few moments more. Let it make the words even weightier. Then bring things to an elegant conclusion—that, my friends, that is all for today—before beginning to put your papers in order even though they don’t need ordering.
You hear your pupils gathering up their bits and pieces. You hear pencils being put in pencil cases, notepads rustling as they go into folders, books thudding as they go into cases. No one says anything because everything they now want to say must be said out of earshot.
As they leave the room they say goodbye in a friendly and spontaneous way. You are well liked. You know you are well liked. The quiet way you discuss things makes them respect you, as does your willingness to go back and explain things to those who haven’t understood.
You don’t lecture—you explain. That is how they would describe you.
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