You wonder if this is the beginning of madness. Is it? Or is it just your imagination? Or were those discreet hints always present and you failed to notice them until now? But isn’t it the case that heightened sensitivity of this kind is in itself an indication of madness?
Calm down. Feel the way the sentence is seeping down through your consciousness, the way your anxiety and agitation ease and are replaced by something that in this context might be called peace. And the way that in its turn is followed by the almost exalted notion that you must share this insightful sentence with her. As a sort of magnanimous act of forgiveness.
Open the drawer of your desk, take out your bundle of postcards. Untie the ribbon holding the thick white cards together. Unscrew the top of your fountain pen and hold its shining gold nib a fraction of a centimetre above the paper. Let the seconds pass, let them grow into minutes. Think out all the words before you place the nib on the white paper and form the blue curves of Chérie.
You come to a pause at the end of the incomplete circle of the e. Now you should place a punctuation mark to separate off what follows, but how can you bring yourself to make such a mark? You are stuck, confused by the thought that what you want to do is to unite, not to separate. That is what you want, isn’t it? Indeed, what do you really want?
A blue ink-blot spreads out. The paper slowly absorbs the letters you intended for her eyes.
The moth is hurling itself against the glass with muffled thuds.
Put the top back on your pen and tie a new bow in the silk ribbon. Place the card on top of the glass chimney of the oil lamp and watch how a dark circle quickly takes shape before it bursts into a hungry yellow flame. Throw the flame into the small tin bucket you keep on the floor to burn compromising notes in. Within a few seconds the paper turns to ash and the shadows of night have taken up their old positions in the room.
Go back to the novel. There is still half of it left to read and perhaps somewhere in it you will find a different sort of answer to the uninvited questions that persist in arising.
WEDNESDAY, 31 AUGUST 1955
You put aside the photograph of a young woman. There is real presence in the look she is giving the photographer, and in her smile. You don’t know who was standing on the other side of the camera, nor do you want to know.
You have begun to wonder at her ability to make someone who is no more than an observer of her portrait feel chosen. Is it because there is something about her that has nothing to do with a specific individual? The fact that, with all her charm, the object of her attention is herself? That her charisma and her charm are actually internal but she holds them up for the men around to mirror themselves in?
You remember how there seemed to be an almost shimmering quality about her in that beauty contest. The contest she had dismissed as a joke between friends when you wondered about it. Fifteen women on a stage, all them young, all of them beautiful. You remember their bare brown shoulders and the sheen of the silk as it shifted through every nuance of colour.
As you sat in the audience below the stage you saw her with the eyes of a stranger for the first time in a long time. The initial pride you felt in your fiancée turned into a sort of embarrassment you could not understand then and do not understand now. As if you weren’t her equal in that hall of cut-glass chandeliers and discreet red-coated waiters. You saw how easily she moved among the other women as they tried to arrange themselves into the formation they had practised. She seemed made of different stuff from them. And you could see that it wasn’t the admiration of the guests in evening dress that made her shimmer in that way. And it certainly wasn’t your admiration.
You pick up the photograph again and look at the black and white smile she is aiming at the photographer, the fingertips of her left hand resting on her collarbone. Her hair is dark and curly and you place that charming smile face down on the dark surface of the desk.
You count the easily counted weeks that have passed since the moment the mayor placed the coronet on her head and crowned her the Septième Quartier’s candidate for the title of Miss Cambodia. Then came her victory in the national contest. Confined to bed with a fever, you missed that. But you would have found some excuse not to be present anyway. Given the difficulty you had dealing with the distance between the two of you at the amateurish first-round, you would have found it quite impossible at the grand event, where you would have been relegated to a marginal position.
And now this long series of days of silence that makes it impossible for you not to assume some connection between the one thing and the other. You should have forbidden her to take part, shouldn’t you?
Is it really appropriate for an engaged woman to put herself on show like that?
Shouldn’t your fiancée, your future wife, remain at your side? Well, at your side, but one step behind, perhaps, as is customary?
Shut your eyes and open them again. Continue:
You take out a sheet of paper and sharpen a pencil. Keep going, you think, everything else is pain. And the pencil quickly fills the paper with handwriting.
You set out points, making them adhere to the rules you have worked out for the Organization. Your aim is to come up with something that can be both a moral and a practical guide. So the points must not be so visionary and abstract that they will be incomprehensible to illiterates out in the countryside. But nor should they be so simplistic that they could be dismissed by the well-educated café revolutionaries in the cities.
In short, you have set yourself the task of capturing the very soul of the struggle.
You have secretly sneaked a look at the Ten Commandments of the Christians. They are commendably comprehensible at the same time as being rather more than just an ordinary set of rules. You have even gone so far as to permit yourself a touch of irony in that the sixth commandment of the Organization forbids inappropriate behaviour towards women. You have twice as many commandments, however, in order to stress the superiority of the Organization.
What you have almost managed to forget is that your starting point was a model provided by North Vietnamese comrades. It had, of course, to be adapted to suit local circumstances and to the fact that your struggle is more honest and superior to theirs. That’s what you say. That’s what you think. But in reality your changes represent yet another stubborn attempt to deny the influence of the Vietnamese.
It is simpler than saying no to their money, their weapons and the school of revolution they offer.
You consider the first point, with its command to love, honour and serve the working class. You have added: and the peasants.
You consider the points that follow: they demand correct behaviour, solidarity, humility and respect for those you are going to liberate, a readiness to support them in their work without any recompense, the prohibition of games of chance and so on through to the final one—You must be prepared to offer your life for the Organization without hesitation.
It is a fine set of rules. Everything is covered. By following them new recruits will get along well enough while waiting to be given further and more thorough instruction in matters of doctrine.
But it is not so good that it couldn’t be improved on. So you go through it once more, moving words back and forth. Adding bits here and erasing bits there.
If only, you think, if only you had cadres capable of investing local conditions with a sense of the overarching context of events. Cadres familiar with both the fine workings of successful revolutions throughout history and with the particular mentality of your nation. But now it is usually either/or. And those who do possess both tend to have their good qualities outweighed by enthusiasm for the Vietnamese, or for palm wine, or for brothels.
And the closer the future approaches, the more difficult it is to distinguish which elements are the decisive ones. Chance creeps into the machinery and existing assumptions are pushed aside. Carefully considered strategies don’t last long when new situations are constantly arising. You stick loyally to the Organization’
s line, but it becomes more and more difficult to get an overview of the consequences.
Take, for instance, the urgency of your own situation. Your brothers have been under siege in your older brother’s house for some days. And you, their little brother, have still not gone to them.
Night has fallen.
You and a night that seems to have nothing to do with the day that preceded it. As if it is quite detached from its calendrical context. Your throat is only letting through just the amount of oxygen your body demands, so there is no space left to exhale. Your heart is beating hard within its bony cage, but how regular is its beat? How regular is its beat? It’s irregular, isn’t it, as if your heart has gone astray and is beating haphazardly? More and more desperately?
As if it is going to burst?
Your breathing. You must get control of your breathing. Keep your breaths short so that the air can both enter and leave your body. You’ve never been so unreally real before, have you?
There is no possibility of your getting through all the hours between now and the morning. The night is going to grind you to dust.
Your heart misses beats and gallops to catch up. The darkness pressing down on your ribcage makes you gasp for breath. Your throat becomes more and more constricted. The stars in front of your eyes shrink to concentrated points before exploding.
There is a glass of water by your bed. Reach out under the mosquito net and grasp the glass with your right hand. Drink it in small regular sips. Bring the normality of water to your breathlessness, bring the normality of the glass to the arrhythmic beating of your heart.
Feel the water in your mouth.
Open your eyes. Open your eyes even though it makes no difference. The darkness is utterly impenetrable. But open your eyes anyway and look at the darkness. The fan hums as it spins and it wafts a weak draught of air back and forth across your body. It is the night between a Wednesday and a Thursday, the night between the last day of August and the first of September and you can’t breathe.
The nightly cloudburst will come soon. The air will be saturated with moisture and the odour of moisture. There will be the deafening noise of rain pounding on tin roofs and tiled roofs and palm-leaf roofs. You will lie there, a thin sheet covering your legs, and through the mosquito net you will feel the fan passing back and forth over you. You will look into the darkness, enclosed in the sound of the rain.
That is how your month of August will end and your month of September begin. And you can, if you like, take it as an omen. You can, if you like, see it as a simple symbol of the life you have chosen to live in the age in which you are living. Or you can just lie there and compare the darkness behind your eyelids with the darkness that is all around you.
You lie there and keep watch on your heart. It seems to be back in phase.
You have never experienced anything like this before. You look for reasons, but your thoughts seem locked tight in her silence.
That is where everything is.
Try to break these trains of thought that twist and turn in upon themselves, becoming intolerable, intractable. Try to break them by recalling the person you were half a lifetime ago: the fifteen-year-old whose sister danced for the old king. How you used to go after school to the house behind the palace where the dancers lived. To the rooms that men were not permitted to enter. But you weren’t a man then, were you? Or, at least, you weren’t considered to be one. Slim, pale-skinned, with a child’s round face. That did not stop the bored dancers.
Sink back into memories of the dancing girls. Remember how your initial embarrassment left you and you began to feel at home with the jargon and the annoying games. Remember how the strange smells of make-up and perfume became a private universe of scents that you entered at the end of the school day.
You could have shown off by telling all the stories to your school-mates. But this early experience taught you that keeping a secret brings many advantages.
Go into the rooms. Go into one and then on into another. Fill them with a mixture of ornamented dark wood, imported tubular steel furniture and the mild disorder created by twenty or so spoilt young women. Sit down with Vichea and try to stop her unbuttoning your shirt buttons. In the darkness of the room alongside you catch a glimpse of Mom’s nakedness, as she stands there facing away from you. Unaware that anyone is watching, her stance is unguarded.
Are you sinking now? Do you recognize the odour of the spacious rooms of the dancing girls? Do you recognize your niggling worry that your sister might catch you in the middle of doing something twice forbidden? Can you hear their voices?
Move farther into this calmness, move on through the next door, move on to another pleasing memory. Walk along the narrow rain-soaked pavement and see the silhouette of the Paris Opera over to your right when you cross the street. Allow yourself to be tempted for a moment by the smells coming first from the crêpe stall and then from the bakery. You are hungry. You are almost always hungry in this city. Take a deep breath of the cold dry air. Carry on along the street with your frozen hands tightly clenched in your coat pockets. You know exactly which way to go here. You even know the three men sleeping rough squashed in the doorway you will soon be passing. You have a smile and a shake of your head ready to respond to their demanding croaks and outstretched crooked fingers. Do you remember what it feels like to walk along that narrow pavement and to be wearing so many clothes, their weight on your body, the cold on your skin and the clouds over the rooftops?
But it is the wrong street to be walking down. One block farther on lies the post office from which you send your letters to her. In a flash everything disappears and you return to the surface.
You are lying in the dark and you no longer know whether your eyes are open or closed, and her silence is a storm roaring through your soul, a storm which tears loose everything you value and carries it along before hurling it out into meaninglessness. You get a sense of a smooth pond with greenery crowding right down to the edge of the water. That smooth water is her silence. Strong hands are pushing your face down beneath the surface and until now you have managed with increasing desperation to hold your breath, but tonight will see the unavoidable violent intake of breath. But it will only mean agonizing pain, without bringing an end to the breathlessness.
Sit up. The rain hasn’t arrived yet. There is still time to act. Sit up and feel your way out of the cube formed by the mosquito net. Feel the numbness reluctantly leaving your body and limbs. Let your fingers search the dusty surface of the bedside table. Strike a match. Put it to the wick of the oil lamp.
The darkness is banished in a flash, withdrawing into the corners as shadows.
You sit on the edge of your bed. You light the oil lamp. You see the way the yellow light shades over into shadow in the corners of the room.
There is a small altar in one corner, left behind by a previous tenant. You haven’t got round to throwing it out yet.
Take a couple of barefoot steps over to the altar. There is an empty small brass cup in front of this little spirit house. Fill it with fresh water and take out two incense sticks.
Do something that no amount of self-criticism in front of the Organization will ever be able to make undone.
Light the incense sticks. Blow out the flames.
White smoke curls up from the glowing tips of both of them.
Hold the sticks between the palms of your hands. It feels both familiar and unfamiliar. Then bring your hands to your forehead three times.
Place the sticks in the altar and pray to the spirit of the house that it will watch over your heart even though you have devoted years to denying everything supernatural. In spite of your constant destructive criticism of all superstitions, pray to it to give you sleep. It is the last day of a month, the first day of a new one. And if there is one thing you need it is the refreshment brought by dreamless sleep.
THURSDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 1955
You hear the sound of rain on a tiled roof. A short time ago you defied the rain an
d now you are sitting there as wet as if you had been swimming. Your shirt sticking to your skin, you are about to wring out your socks and hang them on the rail in front of you. But unlike French rain this is warm rain and you don’t feel cold.
Beyond the railings and the curtains of rain you can just make out Vannsak’s garden.
Vannsak is not here yet because this is not an arranged meeting.
You have still not done anything to support your brothers. That is going to arouse suspicion—if it hasn’t done so already. It is also going to be held against you by your very extended family, which forms a network too wide to survey, with influence at different levels.
But the passing days have done nothing to loosen the knot, to solve the dilemma. You are still at a loss as to what to do. Passive in the face of a situation that demands immediate action.
Which is why you took that quick walk in the rain. You could have taken your car, you could have taken your rain-cape or your umbrella, but it was more a matter of rushing away from somewhere than moving towards somewhere else. A pointless attempt to force the outer world to gain mastery over the inner.
Initially you thought of consulting Sok and Yan at tomorrow’s meeting. The situation is an urgent one with the potential to do a great deal of damage to the Organization. It would be sensible to seek guidance from the centre. But then you thought that if the Organization had wanted you to act in one way rather than another you would already have been informed of it. You can assume, then, that you enjoy their confidence, that you have permission to solve the problem on your own. Some sort of test of your judgement and your ability.
Or—you then thought, with the sweet warm rain streaming down your face—even the unknown men in the inner circle of the Organization don’t have any idea what to do.
So you are waiting for Vannsak, who should be arriving at any moment. To some extent your problem with the detention of your brothers is also his problem. You will ask him what he thinks you should do, and then you will attempt to fit his answer into the hidden whole that is known only to you.
Song for an Approaching Storm Page 9