Answer their greetings with a friendly nod.
Now turn your head to the right, to the door that is swallowing your pupils. There is a man standing in the doorway. He is a young man and you recognize him but you don’t know his name. He is one of the older pupils at the school. You recognize him because you know he belongs to the Organization, although you know neither his name nor his role.
Let him see that you have noticed him.
When Punthea and Prasith have gone at last and the room is silent and empty, you tell the man to come in and close the door behind him. The closed door is of little practical significance since the windows are open, but closed doors lend meetings a certain formal dignity.
Respond to the man’s brief greeting and adopt a friendly listening expression.
The man steps up to your desk, leans forward confidentially and, in a subdued voice, passes on a message. He says that the house of one of Monsieur’s brothers is surrounded by the police because Monsieur’s other brother is thought to be hiding there.
Receive the message without showing any emotion. You may, however, assume that the man notices the tightening around your eyes, the way your presence becomes absolute.
Look out through the window at the groups of young people in short-sleeved white shirts, navy blue trousers, identical haircuts and bags crossing the open ground outside. See how some of them are walking slowly and discussing things whereas others are chasing after one another. Hear their loud voices and laughter while your own mind is running at a gallop. It is amazing how everything can be normal and all of a sudden it no longer is. Or how everything has seemed normal in spite of the fact that the change probably occurred a couple of hours ago.
Ask the young man if anyone has been hurt and hear him answer that he does not know. Then ask him if he has any more to say. When he answers that he hasn’t, turn to him with an expression full of goodwill and determination and thank him. He in turn bows quickly and leaves the room, leaving the door open.
Slow down and get a grip on your flustered thoughts.
For a long time now you have been ready to be tested. How or where or when has been uncertain but one thing has always been certain and that is that the time would come. Not once, not twice, but more times than it was worth speculating. You have been prepared for a long time and the most important thing now is not to do anything too hastily.
Sit down at your desk and think through the situation that has arisen. See what cards you are holding, assess your chances of acting—and the risks of not doing so.
The disturbing thing is not that the younger of your older brothers is going to have to spend the coming weeks or months raking salt under a baking sun out on the dirty-white flats at Kampot. The disturbing thing is that the police have not simply gone into the house and taken him out.
So the question to which there is no answer: what are they waiting for?
Two possible scenarios come to mind. The first is that the purpose is to teach your brother a lesson and the whole business has nothing to do with you. The second is that the fact they have not arrested him is actually some sort of act of provocation. To which you are expected to react.
You turn your head towards the line of windows, almost as if you were expecting Sam Sary to be standing out there watching you.
How you choose to use or not to use your limited political influence on your brother’s behalf will be noted. And irrespective of what you do or don’t do, it could still provide the security police with an excuse to remove you. The man closest to Vannsak. A suitable target now that Mumm is safely in France.
If that happens you will never see Somaly again.
If that happens it will be the end of both your public political career and your nocturnal revolutionary conspiracy. There is, moreover, a risk hanging over your head—the risk that if the first of those possibilities is their motive, they are bound to uncover the second. In which case you will drag a significant part of the Organization down with you. Assuming—and this is the unpleasant part—that it hasn’t already been uncovered. In which case the current deadlock has probably been engineered so that the security police can chart your activities.
If it is just about your brother, you are in no danger. If it is about you as Vannsak’s secretary, it will mean the salt fields. If it is about your role in the Organization, you can expect an unmarked grave on a rubbish tip.
So think slow thoughts. Don’t do anything hasty.
Should you behave like a loyal brother and hurry to join your brothers? Should you behave like a loyal brother with certain political contacts and hurry to speak to influential friends and acquaintances? Should you behave like a member of a secret revolutionary movement and hurry to give your comrades a discreet warning? Plans undoubtedly exist for dealing with this kind of dangerous change in the balance of things, but to activate them would mean movement in the Organization and movement brings with it the risk of discovery.
Or should you simply gather up your papers and prepare your next lesson?
TUESDAY, 30 AUGUST 1955
You are standing in front of your modest bookshelf. It holds a couple dozen volumes and you have read all but two or three. Despite all the many times you found yourself wandering past the dark-green book boxes of the bouquinistes along the Seine, you can still remember without any difficulty when you bought each and every one of them. You remember how you used to pick through all the old books, printed papers and picture postcards that had ended up in their boxes. How the seasons came and went, how sunshine turned to rain and then back to sunshine.
You still have several of the postcards, which now serve as bookmarks in the volumes in front of you. They are fragments of a correspondence in which an unknown French man is courting an unknown French woman. You came across them quite by chance in different book boxes. What connected them was the extremely fine and elegant handwriting, and you bought them with a vague sense of being on the track of something. You carried on looking for more on later occasions but never found any. And you only have his side of the story, since you never knew what her handwriting looked like and the postcards in the boxes ran into tens of thousands.
Five picture postcards from a man who was becoming more and more unhappy. To a woman who became more and more silent. It is remarkable how the world around you is filling with more and more signs and reminders, all of which point to your own situation.
You have taken off your shirt and you are standing barefoot in your ready-made trousers. On an evening like tonight you are utterly sick of the magnetic attraction her silence exerts on your mental state.
Your body is covered with a thin layer of sweat. The city outside is falling silent.
You think Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday and Monday. And now it is Tuesday evening.
You have tests to mark. You have the drafts of two speeches to write for tomorrow. You need to report to the Organization. You have to come up with some response to the house arrest of your brothers.
You should not be counting the days of the week. Counting the days of the week was what you were doing.
A week now. It’s humiliating.
Take one of the unread books from the shelf of books you have read. It’s a novel in French by a French author. Its publication date was over twenty years ago but you feel it could not be more apposite and current. In spite of its lack of theoretical correctness it still matches the Organization’s demand for instructive literature. You turn the book over and read what is on the dust jacket, which bears the fingermarks of previous owners: The time is the end of the 1920s. The place is Shanghai, “a paradise garden of suffering”, where the motto is kill or be killed. The giant that is China is writhing in the grip of fever. The white masters are cold-bloodedly investing their capital in whichever one of the Chinese factions currently has the upper hand. The author focuses on a handful of men in order to bring alive the whole of the confusing and bloody epoch that saw the birth of the new China. It wo
uld be hard to improve on the author’s snapshots in terms of laconic authenticity and embittered commitment. It’s a book you have been meaning to read for a long time and you have been waiting for a suitable opportunity. This is not the right opportunity, which is perhaps why you are now about to read this novel about Chinese revolutionaries, all of whom are doomed. Perhaps the unsuitable opportunity is actually the only suitable one. You can still remember the conversation you had with the Algerian comrade who first mentioned the novel to you. How he—bespectacled, sharp, well read, dark-skinned—emphasized that the real subject of the story is man’s absolute responsibility to choose his own road. Not to duck that responsibility even when the consequences are the worst imaginable, even when the choice necessitates the ultimate sacrifices. If there is anything you need at this moment, it is the strength to come to a decision and to stick to it. So turn the book over, open it, inhale the odour of the dry pages, read the text in a rather old-fashioned font and allow yourself to be transported back to a half hour after midnight on 21 March 1927.
Lift your eyes from the book you are reading. Not because there is anything to see but because there is something to hear. It is half an hour after midnight and there are voices approaching along the alley. They come closer, but before they come so close that you are compelled to act, they come to a halt, remain at that distance and are then muffled by a door closing behind them.
Feel your pulse calming down to its normal rate while you look at the paraffin lamp, which can only just cast its light as far as the last line on the left-hand page before the letters begin to merge into shadow. The night sounds have now returned to normal. Crickets, sporadic and desultory barks. The engine of a moped splits the auditory backcloth and then disappears.
You know how things are. What those with power can do to people, what violence can achieve. You were told about a comrade who was careless/unlucky/the right man in the wrong place/the wrong man in the right place/found wanting in some negligent but decisive sense. You were told about the interrogation sessions in a bare room where the windows were sealed and the lamps always lit. The interrogations: brutal, going nowhere. So after a couple of days or a couple of weeks—the report had trouble deciding which—the chief interrogator said he needed to urinate.
Your comrade was sitting in front of him tied to a chair, arms fastened behind his back. The interrogator opened his fly and ordered him to open his mouth. He refused. The chair was kicked over backwards and a guard locked your comrade’s head between his knees. Then he held the prisoner’s nose and forced his jaws open by pushing his fingers hard into his cheeks. And the chief interrogator urinated a strong clear stream into your comrade’s mouth as he coughed, choked and thrashed about.
The interrogations continued for days and weeks, the report is quite certain about that, and every day the interrogator passed water in the same way.
After some months the questioning came to an end. But the interrogator rose from his desk every day, walked past the toilet door down to the room where your comrade was incarcerated, gently raised the scarred face and met the prisoner’s broken gaze before filling the unresisting mouth which, of its own accord, had opened just the right amount.
The voices in the alleyway have fallen silent. What noises there are now are just the usual ones. So go back to your book. It’s been a long time since you allowed yourself to read a novel. The floor and the table are covered with folders of material waiting to be edited and commented on and analysed. But you are sitting there with a fat little volume with yellowed pages and grease stains on the dust cover.
In the novel you meet men who are how you would like to be. Indomitable, unsentimental, at a turning point in history when everything is clear-cut in a way that makes decisions possible. At first sight their uncompromising attitude might seem to be the result of an uncomplicated intellectual life, one in which simple answers have been given to difficult questions of right and wrong. But that is not the case. Their radical conclusions have been reached as a result of long and hard thinking, they have had doubts but have gone on to overcome any objections. You have underlined with a blunt pencil one of the statements made in a conversation: Marxism is not doctrine, it is will. For the proletariat and its supporters—for you—it is the will to learn to know themselves as proletarians, and to be victorious as such. You should not be Marxists in order to be right but in order to be victorious without betraying yourselves.
A moth, grey and dazzled, is fluttering against the glass of the lamp. It drops onto the page in the book but then crawls back towards the flame.
You can only wish you had more men of that sort in the Organization. But as you make progress bit by bit, adding experience to experience, you and those around you will also become more single-minded, more unified. Disciplined. Like clockwork, you think, and look at the watch you are wearing on the inside of your left wrist. Complex but nevertheless reliable.
You think again about the sacrifices the great revolutions have demanded. Of the importance of holding a steady course even when it proves costly in the short term. That it demands a will that has been tempered to steel and an ability to listen to history rather than to the pleading of individuals. For if there is to be any possibility of giving back to your uncle and all the other poor and oppressed people in the country the basic respectability they have been deprived of, sacrifices will be demanded of them too. They will have to pass through a harsh ordeal if all of you, collectively, are to be able to move the world on its axis. And you feel a paradoxical sense of tenderness for the people, for they will sacrifice themselves for the future in the same way as you stand ready to sacrifice yourself for them. The people: there is no doubt that they will suffer great privations, but in the end, purified and clear, they will be able to look the world in the eye with a steady gaze.
Return to the bustle of Shanghai, to the men who do not betray themselves even in defeat. Return there, for now the story has come to a section which drags you down into the slough of unhappiness you had hoped it would lift you clear of. A woman enters the story, a woman your thoughts will return to time after time after time. She joins in the struggle on the same conditions as the men, is described as intelligent and brave. Not outstandingly beautiful, but no more masculine than her revolutionary work compels her to be. The sort of woman that, deep in your heart, you wish you had at your side.
In the novel the woman is German but you can’t help seeing a woman from your own country, a woman you have met at political meetings both here and in Paris. She is called Ponnary and is a few years older than you. Short, pockmarked, she wears practical clothes, quite without finesse. No one would call her beautiful. But she has read the theoretical works the rest of you merely refer to. She sits in the front row at political seminars and she risked her life as a secret courier during the liberation struggle. She is utterly dedicated to the cause and is the sort of person you love in your mind but not in your heart.
And now your heart beats out Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Nothing. All this empty time. You break it down into hours. You break it down into minutes. And all that remains then is rage and self-pity.
You remember yet again that when you were about to finish your most recent telephone conversation she reminded you, quite out of the blue, how she had waited for you during your years in France.
What was she trying to tell you?
And with a sudden attack of bitterness, you think: as if you, too, hadn’t been waiting during those years! As if the whole long period hadn’t been one long “soon” for you too! She is incapable of seeing beyond herself.
Calm down. Stick with your train of thought instead, for France is not a suitable analogy. There was a concrete explanation for that absence, there were oceans and continents between you. And geographical distances are something you know all about. They can be managed. Now there are only two thousand paces between you. Even if it were twenty thousand paces you wouldn’t hesitate to put one foot in
front of another twenty thousand times. But the kind of distance that lies between you cannot be overcome by stubborn feet. So what is it? Has she been seriously ill? Has her brother had an accident? Has she given you up or left you for another? Is it some kind of childish test of your loyalty?
Resist the idea that is breaking over you like a wave in whose wake you are being sucked into action. You should, you shouldn’t, drive your car over to her house and see if her window is lit up or dark.
Avoid the abyss that opens up when you think that this time, this time she will not come back.
For the implication of that thought is that you will never again listen to your undisciplined heart, that you will have nothing but the struggle to devote your life to. And you know what that would imply. A permanent double life in which everything that really matters happens beyond and behind ordinary everyday existence. It might even be necessary to go underground. It might even be necessary for you to leave the city and rejoin the armed struggle in the most distant and disease-ridden jungles. There can be no doubt that you are ready to make that sort of sacrifice, but the fact that your numbers have become fewer and fewer recently, that support for and recruitment to the Organization has shrunk, means that a decision of that kind would have to be taken as a result of positions adopted in the past rather than as a self-evident and glorious step on the long road left before final victory is achieved.
Don’t think about it anymore just now. Escape back to the novel instead. The hour is late, but sharing a bed with these stubborn thoughts would be insufferable. Nothing is decided yet and you still have a variety of futures in front of you.
You start to read and another half hour has been added to the new day. You pause and read the last sentence again. To respect the freedom of another is to give it precedence over one’s own suffering.
You read the sentence again and feel astonished at the way it seems to have been written especially for you, especially at this time.
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